When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Diller set the tone. “At a time when the general image of business executives is not sterling, Lew Wasserman is the gold standard. No one who worked for Lew ever thought any decision was made on any basis other than what was right and honest and in the best and safe interest of them or the company. . . . He was the one who invented a profit-sharing trust that made secretaries and senior executives alike very wealthy if they gave the same loyalty and trust to the company that it was prepared to give to them.

  “He was tough and spare except when there was need, and then he was neither. I remember when calling him he didn’t say hello—he didn’t do ‘how ya doing’—he answered the phone with courteous impatience. ‘Yes, Barry.’ But when I asked for something charitable, he never failed to simply say, ‘You have my proxy.’

  “I never worked in his company until he was chairman emeritus,” Diller continued. “But along my own way, I learned so many lessons from him. I was this twenty-four-year-old executive at ABC when I first approached him in some close to adult position. I was purchasing films for ABC from Universal, and I went to his office, and I asked him—I said, given that we were buying sixty-four units at $600,000 each, couldn’t you just cut one little unit from that sixty-four? Two beats. He stared. He said, ‘No.’ Nothing more. Just, no. Silence. The stare. And I folded like the cheapest tent.” The audience laughed, hard. “But as I got up to go, dejectedly, knowing the fool that I was, he walked me out, and in that very quiet voice of his, he said, ‘Next time you try this, be prepared to call it off if you don’t get what you want. Because, otherwise, you never will.’ And the door closed behind him.”

  Steven Spielberg—who said that when he first met Wasserman, he thought his glasses looked like two giant movie screens—pointed out that while it is well known that Sid Sheinberg gave him his first directing job, it is not so well known that Wasserman saved him from being fired on that job. The television pilot was Night Gallery, and its star was Joan Crawford. “I could tell from the very first day we met that the minute the meeting was over, Joan was going to get on the telephone and raise hell. Lew had been her manager, he was the one who got the call. And she said, ‘Who’s this kid they have directing me?’ Lew replied, ‘Joan, if you’re unhappy, don’t mention it because they won’t replace him, they’ll replace you.’ From that day on, Joan Crawford treated me like King Vidor.” That was the beginning of his long friendship with Wasserman, Spielberg said; he had been his “guardian angel.”

  Bill Clinton described how he first met Wasserman. It was the mid-eighties, he was governor, and Arkansas’s economy was in the doldrums. He had the idea of trying to attract Hollywood to make movies in Arkansas, and asked to make an appointment with Wasserman. To his surprise, he said, Wasserman agreed. “At that time, only my mother thought I would ever become president, so there was nothing in it for Lew to spend forty-five minutes talking to a politician from a state which for all I know he had never even visited—but he did. Furthermore, he was brutally honest with me. When I asked what I could do to get more movies made in Arkansas, he said in very elegant and brief language, ‘Not much.’ And to compound the irony, he actually made me like it—I mean, I actually enjoyed this meeting. So from time to time our paths would cross. He helped me become president, he helped me stay president, he helped me be a better president. When I left the White House, he helped me build a library and a foundation, so I could continue my public service—as he had helped other presidents, of both parties. He never asked me for anything. Not anything.”

  Several speakers made it plain how thoroughly they idolized Wasserman. Sid Sheinberg said that his heroes when he was a boy were the Knights of the Round Table, and he had fantasized being a page, training to be a knight, becoming a knight himself. Well, it had come true. “It is said that in those days of King Arthur, knights lived by the old code, the code of honor. My dear friend Lew Wasserman lived his life by the code. I was privileged to ride close beside him for some thirty years, and observe and learn from him for over forty years. We who aspired to sit at his Round Table were expected to know the code and live by it.” In closing, Sheinberg said, “I loved my king and I miss him. And I will miss him forever.” Suzanne Pleshette, a close friend of Edie’s and Lew’s, talked about how uncomfortable Lew was around women, all women, except of course Edie—“This was not an arrangement,” she said emphatically. “This was a love story!” She said that Lew had loved talent, and always looked after their interests. She recounted the story about his having been barred from the Warner lot and taken the stars to lunch—a longer and longer lunch, with Bette Davis leading the mutiny. In closing, she declared, “Lew should have been president—but he didn’t want to give up his day job.” And Valenti—speaking without notes, choking up at times, striding about the stage, microphone in hand, more like an evangelical preacher than a lobbyist for the motion picture industry—acknowledged as he had many times before that “whatever I am and whatever role I play in this industry, I owe it all to Lew.” And he repeated what he had told a journalist earlier. “If Hollywood was Mount Olympus, Lew Wasserman is Zeus.”

  Much of what was said in the Amphitheater that day was true, as far as it went. In Hollywood, certainly, Lew Wasserman was the gold standard, and it is unimaginable that he would have defrauded what he thought of as his company, robbing employees and shareholders, in the way that has become almost commonplace in today’s corporate world. Indeed, his secretary, Melody Sherwood, said that when the company’s profit-sharing trust converted to a 401(k), he worried a great deal that employees might make unwise decisions about their investment allocations and lose their retirement funds. “He was very paternalistic,” she commented. The profit-sharing trust did make employees richer than they might have imagined—MCA events coordinator Herb Steinberg said that when he retired and saw that he was worth over a million dollars, he could hardly believe his eyes. Wasserman clearly did live by a code, and expected his associates to adhere to it as well. It is almost certainly true, as Clinton said, that Wasserman never asked him for anything. And—inflated as Valenti’s verbiage is—it is also true that if Hollywood were Mount Olympus, Wasserman was indeed Zeus.

  But getting to be “Zeus” had entailed a course of conduct rather different from anything that was evoked that afternoon. Wasserman was Hollywood’s gold standard—but he had extended his mantle to Sidney Korshak, who was the mob’s proxy in the industry Wasserman ruled, and who, when displeased, credibly threatened that someone might soon be “wearing cement shoes.” The profit-sharing trust was a boon to employees, but it was devised, initially, as a means of restraining valuable executives from leaving, in a way that a contract could not legally do. Wasserman probably did not ask Clinton for anything, but he certainly did ask—and receive—from Reagan. Wasserman did live by a code; in doing so, he provided his own, unique interpretations of the culture’s most fundamental concepts. “Loyalty,” which was central to his code, meant that he would always protect those who were loyal to him—unless they decided to leave MCA, in which case they ceased to exist. “Integrity” meant that when he gave his word, especially in a labor context, it was all one needed. But it was somehow not inconsistent with his creating a monopoly through the use of illegal tactics and what Larry White called “scare power,” or using Korshak as a fixer, or threatening a reluctant seller that his business would be destroyed, or stealing clients with all kinds of lucre, or destroying someone’s career out of personal pique.

  Jules Stein, of course, had set the pattern. There was little Wasserman carried out that did not have an antecedent in some practice of Stein’s in the earlier era. But Stein was less ambitious than Wasserman. Stein was so intent on building his financial empire that he was willing to do whatever it required; then, he wanted to erase that unsavory past and enjoy legitimacy (and the fruits of empire). Wasserman did not care as much about building a financial empire—his net worth after the Matsushita sale was estimated at about $500 million, which was not that remarkable in an ag
e that was spawning billionaires. But his appetite for power was far, far greater. It was actually fortuitous for Wasserman that he clashed with Billy Goodheart in MCA’s New York office, because if he had remained in New York he could not have become the ruling figure he did. When he arrived in Hollywood, he found a small, insular community, insubstantial, built on fiction, trafficking in illusion, dominated by a single enterprise—and populated with many who, like him, had come from places they wanted to leave behind, to reinvent themselves. Far from Cleveland’s Woodland Avenue, Wasserman did reinvent himself, developing a persona that was utterly commanding, glacial, charming when necessary, expert, ruthless, frightening, charismatic—in sum, one fit for a ruler. Unlike Stein, he did not attempt to erase his past or, more, disguise his present. In Hollywood, his ties to the underworld only served to augment his standing. And it was the juxtaposition of high and low, White House and Korshak, that elevated him even higher.

  It was one thing to have been a guest at the White House, and another to have been offered—and declined—a cabinet position. That offer, by President Johnson, became the keystone in Wasserman’s rendition of his political life. Wasserman’s surrogate, Valenti, only “let the secret out” in 1974, after Johnson had died. From then on, Wasserman referred to it freely, and often. Wasserman had been interviewed for an oral history at the LBJ Library in December 1973—an interview that he stipulated was to remain sealed until after his death.

  At one point during the fairly lengthy interview, Wasserman was asked, “Did you ever consider taking any post with the government?”

  “No. No,” Wasserman replied. “As a matter of fact, in, I think it was, December of 1963, Ed Weisl and I went up to the Hotel Carlyle to visit the president. It was after Dallas, and we sat around for a few hours. . . . At the end of the discussion, I turned to him and said, ‘I’d like to ask you a very important favor.’ I had the feeling that the president bristled at the remark, and said, ‘Yes, Lew, what is it?’ And I said, ‘I want you to promise me that I never have to work for the government.’ He laughed, and he promised it to me; and that was the end of it.”

  Wasserman went on to say that he subsequently asked not to be appointed to any commissions either. But this request, he said, was not heeded. Because one day he got a call from Roger Stevens, who was founding chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, saying that he was appointing Wasserman to the Kennedy Center’s executive committee. Wasserman said he replied that he was not a director of the Kennedy Center—at which point Stevens read him an article in that day’s Washington Post, which mentioned his appointment. Wasserman said he called Johnson to object—but Johnson, essentially, would have none of it. Wasserman’s claimed protestations ring a little hollow, considering that both Valenti and Krim had lobbied for his appointment. In any event, Wasserman remained on the board of the Kennedy Center for many years.

  There was no mention of the cabinet post. Surely, had it been offered, Wasserman would have said so then—and described how it was done despite his protests, as he did in the instance of the Kennedy Center appointment. Instead, he said, Johnson promised he wouldn’t have to serve—“and that was the end of it.”

  It seems virtually certain that that was the end of it. Valenti did include Wasserman’s name, with many others, in a memo to President Johnson. But, as several friends of Johnson’s suggested, he would not have taken the risk of a Wasserman confirmation proceeding—where Wasserman could be interrogated about his association with Korshak, Hoffa, and Dalitz; not to mention the very recent settlement of the government’s mammoth antitrust case against MCA, in which Wasserman was a named defendant. It was an odd résumé for a secretary of commerce. And, on another level, it was fanciful, really, to think that this intensely secretive man—who prided himself on keeping almost no files, who rarely took a note, and who counseled others, like Andy Anderson, to take no notes—could have functioned within the government bureaucracy.

  Some who knew Wasserman well believed that quite a few of his famous stories were concoctions, heady brews that started with some truth and added half-truth and a dose of fiction. Like virtually everything else in Wasserman’s life, his stories served a purpose. They established him as one of the cognoscenti, enhanced his aura, and enabled him to control the moment—for he didn’t freely converse with people so much as tell stories. They were part of the elaborate facade Wasserman constructed, which kept others from glimpsing what was within and projected what he chose. Like anyone from hardscrabble beginnings who came to enjoy such an iron-fisted dominion, Wasserman probably was afraid, sometimes, that it might all be taken away—but that was not something that those who worked closely with him for decades ever saw. Instead, in a movie colony roiled with insecurity, where one day’s success foretold nothing about the next, where nearly everything was transient and chimerical, Wasserman was a countervailing force—supremely confident, professedly infallible, rock-solid, enduring.

  For roughly fifty years, his legend grew. Wasserman benefited most of all, but his community did, too, in many ways. He helped to free stars from the studios’ bonds, and made them much wealthier than they had been before. He may have helped to keep television from fulfilling the potential that Pat Weaver envisioned for that medium—but he did provide myriad job opportunities to the men and women who worked in it. He helped to keep general labor peace in the industry for decades, and he was someone who had a bond with the unions that was unique on the producers’ side. He established the standard for charitable and political giving and civic participation in an industry that had not had such a model—and he enforced it. He made Hollywood more powerful in Washington than it had ever been, and achieved benefits worth billions of dollars—good things to have done from a parochial standpoint, though not for the public at large. But, despite his having assumed the role of a statesman in his last years, Wasserman was profoundly parochial. He had found a place—the only place, really—where he could be king, and his allegiance was always there.

  At Wasserman’s memorial service, a drawing on a huge screen faced the audience. It showed a bleak, desert landscape, with “Hollywood” written across the background in small letters, nothing but a pair of oversize black-rimmed glasses on the sandy ground—and, alongside them, a small figure, dwarfed by the giant glasses, gazing at them. As though centuries from now, when all else has been swept away, those glasses—indestructible—will be the telltale artifact, clue to the singular time when Hollywood was his.

  Source Notes

  Because this story spanned most of the last century, the nature of my research changed as the book’s chronological narrative progressed. For the early years, I was able to cull a great deal of material from oral histories, memoirs, private letters, confidential company records, and personal financial records, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, court filings, and transcripts of court testimony and congressional hearings. I tried hard to locate people to interview who had known Jules Stein in the company’s early days, and who were familiar with the Chicago scene in the twenties and thirties; I was lucky to find a few. For the middle and later years, there was a multitude of articles about MCA in the trade and general press, as well as many thousands of pages of relevant government documents; but the backbone of my research for this, the largest portion of the book, was the interviewing process. I was fortunate that Lew Wasserman not only agreed to talk to me but also told many friends who called to ask whether or not they should see me that it was all right with him if they did. I interviewed about 250 people; many of them had worked for MCA over the years, or had been MCA clients, or were Wasserman’s business partners, or his competitors. I spoke, too, with those who were knowledgeable about the parallel universes in which Wasserman operated—labor, politics, Las Vegas.

  The following is a list of those whom I interviewed. In addition, I spoke with dozens of people who agreed to be interviewed only on a basis of confidentiality.

  Robert Abboud

  Berle Adams


  Gene Allen

  Andy Anderson

  Edward Anhalt

  Ted Ashley

  John Baity

  Bill Baker

  Judy Balaban

  Art Barron

  Martin Baum

  Warren Beatty

  Lowell Bergman

  Alice Berman

  Betty Breithaupt

  Roy Brewer

  Frank Brill

  Charles Bronfman

  Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

  Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

  David Brown

  Helen Gurley Brown

  Harry Busch

  Alexander Butterfield

  Liz Carpenter

  Bob Carruthers

  Joe Cerrell

  Edwin Cohen

  Jim Corman

  Pierre Cossette

  Nick Counter

  Kenneth Cox

  Jack Dales

  Robert Daly

  Sean Daniel

  Michael Dann

  Gordon Davidson

  Martin Davis

  Michael Deaver

  Irene Diamond

  Barry Diller

  Jonathan Dolgen

  Albert Dorskind

  Kirk Douglas

  Corydon Dunham

  Don Durgin

  Ed Edelman

  Robert Evans

  Irving Fein

  Charles Ferris

  Freddy Fields

  Jack Findlater

  Arthur Fleischer

  Bill Fleming

  Mike Franklin

  George French

  Michael Fuchs

  George Gallantz

  Michael Gardner

  Leonard Garment

  David Geffen

  Leo Geffner

  Henry Geller

  Robert Gilbert

  Brian Grazer

  Richard Gully

  Ed Guthman