When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1: The Two Caesars

  CHAPTER 2: Monopoly Power

  CHAPTER 3: Political Might

  CHAPTER 4: Dominion

  CHAPTER 5: Wasserman & Son

  CHAPTER 6: Lost Empire

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Connie Bruck

  Copyright

  To Ari Schlossberg

  and

  Mel Levine

  WHEN HOLLYWOOD

  HAD A KING

  Introduction

  For the better part of the last fifty years, aspirants to great power in Hollywood imagined themselves in the chair of one man. It was not just that Lew Wasserman ran MCA—“the largest talent agency the world has ever known,” as its founder, Jules Stein, liked to say—and the biggest television production company. Or, later, that Wasserman headed one of the first diversified entertainment companies, which included the world’s largest motion picture studio, Universal, and the country’s leading supplier of television programs. These were only the facts on his résumé, and they did not begin to convey the scope of Wasserman’s power. Like other pioneering businessmen with an appetite for dominion, Wasserman shaped his world, ruled it with a free hand, and tried to control whatever forces impinged upon it.

  From the start, he prized disciplined troops, and he succeeded in creating legions of followers within his enterprise who were willing to live by his dictates, generally regarding him with both fear and awe. As an agent, he engineered changes within the industry that contributed to the fall of the studio system, a demise from which he benefited—and later, when he found himself on the studio side, he sought to re-create his own version of that system. Labor struggles had ravaged Hollywood in the thirties and forties, and studio heads such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer regarded the unions as their bitter enemies. Wasserman, however, established strong relationships with labor leaders, from Jimmy Hoffa on down, and with the underworld that controlled some of them; Sidney Korshak, the Chicago mob’s representative in Hollywood, was probably Wasserman’s closest friend.

  Wasserman also developed a healthy respect for the government’s power to intrude on his domain. He had watched as the major studios were forced to sell their cinema chains under the so-called Paramount Decree, a Supreme Court decision issued in May 1948. And he experienced the impact of antitrust enforcement firsthand in 1962, when the Justice Department sued MCA. He decided, therefore, to make Hollywood a political force far more potent than it had ever been, so that it could help thwart governmental attacks and bring about regulatory help and legislation that could mean billions of dollars to the entertainment industry. Wasserman built a machine for political contributions, conscripted Hollywood stars to appear at fund-raisers, and became an indefatigable presence on Capitol Hill. He took pride in his closeness to presidents, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton; Wasserman didn’t care for Richard Nixon, but he gave the assignment of courting Nixon to another MCA executive, and Nixon probably did more for the industry than any other president, with the possible exception of Reagan. In Hollywood it was widely known that Wasserman’s reach extended from the White House to the underworld, which added to his aura of invincibility.

  For decades, Wasserman did more to affect the course of the entertainment industry than any other individual. It was a historically fractious community; moguls such as Warner and Mayer had ruled their fiefdoms and treasured their prerogatives, refusing to yield to one another, and there had been no recognized industry leader. But that was what Wasserman became, through his deft maneuvering. He maintained that position for so long that by the time he surrendered it, the role he had created for himself was an anachronism. By the mid-nineties, a trend that had begun with the creation of diversified entertainment companies such as MCA had led to media entertainment behemoths far larger and more all-encompassing than even Wasserman might have predicted. The Hollywood studios, subsidiaries of these giant conglomerates with varying agendas, had to defer to their respective parent companies—not to someone from their own ranks. For years, people in Hollywood had wondered who “the next Lew Wasserman” would be. The answer, now, was no one.

  Despite his extraordinary ambit, Wasserman managed over the years to maintain a surprisingly low profile outside his Hollywood and Washington circles, his name barely recognized by the general public. He had been schooled by Jules Stein, who believed that talent agents should cultivate visibility for their clients and anonymity for themselves. It was a business principle, and also a deep personal proclivity; both Stein and Wasserman were congenitally secretive men. However, Wasserman eventually bent the rule somewhat. He realized that public relations, like political clout, would be another weapon in his armament; although he spoke to the press infrequently, he did talk to select reporters when it served his purposes. The consummate Hollywood agent, Wasserman was well aware, too, that his elusiveness—a rare commodity in the hot center of the celebrity culture—strengthened his mystique.

  Because Wasserman had been able to operate so commandingly for so long, while revealing so little of either his modus operandi or himself, I found him an alluring subject. Moreover, he was absolutely singular: if there was any person through whom the larger story of Hollywood in the past five decades could be told, it was Wasserman. I met him only at the end of his remarkable run, in early 1991, when MCA had just been sold to the Japanese consumer-electronics giant Matsushita, and I was interviewing him for a piece I was writing for The New Yorker about that transaction. About seven years later, when I called to tell Wasserman that I was writing this book about MCA, he agreed to see me, and over the course of the next four and a half years I had a series of interviews with him. He was plainly ambivalent about the process. He had always sworn, very publicly, that he would never write a book, nor would he cooperate with one. But there we were. In the beginning he said he would talk to me only about Jules Stein, not himself. Then he said he would talk to me about the company, not himself. Inevitably, though, he did talk about himself, and though much of what he said had a distinctly prerecorded quality, stories told and retold, there were surprisingly spontaneous, candid moments. Once, when I had seen him a number of times and called to set up another appointment, he declined; he said he had realized he was “cooperating sideways”—and that was something he didn’t want to do. But after several months I called again, his secretary made the appointment, and when I arrived at his office he greeted me warmly as usual, and never referred to his earlier refusal. I assumed he had decided that he wanted his story told (though probably only parts of it), and that he would take his chances. He was extremely frail—but I succumbed to the popular illusion that Lew Wasserman was bound to endure indefinitely. So I was caught painfully off guard when he suffered a stroke in May 2002 and died a few weeks later. I was left with the regret that I had not seen him more often—and that he would never read the book that I believe he would have felt, on balance, gave him his due.

  I did not have the opportunity to meet Jules Stein, who died in 1981. But I was fortunate to have access to hundreds of pages of a rough draft of a Stein memoir, written by former New York Times reporter Murray Schumach, and drawn from many hours of interviews with Stein near the end of his life (he would not have contemplated such a thing earlier). So Stein’s idiosyncratic voice can be heard, along with Wasserman’s, in the pages of this book. Stein said he realized early on that Wasserman was a “pupil who was surpassing his teacher.” His statement was accurate; Stein did not mince words, or flatter. But it was Stein who had imprinted the Music Corporation of A
merica, the band-booking agency he founded in Chicago in 1924, with the characteristics that powered its remarkable trajectory—and who provided Wasserman the platform from which to launch his own.

  Jules Caesar Stein seated at his desk in the office of the Music Corporation of America—just opened for business, in 1924. Courtesy of Jean Stein

  Chapter 1

  THE TWO CAESARS

  On a spring day in Chicago in 1922, two young men stood deep in conversation on the sidewalk outside the headquarters of Local 10, a branch of the American Federation of Musicians union. They might have conferred inside the building instead—one of them, James Caesar Petrillo, was the local’s vice president—but he thought the walls had ears, and the message he wanted to deliver was confidential. He had sent word to his companion, Jules Caesar Stein, that he wanted to see him. Stein was a recent medical school graduate who booked bands on the side, and, in his relatively short career, he had already run afoul of the musicians union, and gotten caught in the crossfire of Chicago’s ongoing, internecine labor wars. It seemed, moreover, to be Petrillo’s fire that had caught Stein; the bombs that had recently exploded at several Chinese restaurants where Stein was booking bands were Petrillo’s handiwork, Stein was convinced. At one of them, the Canton Tea Garden on Wabash, the damage had been especially severe. But the nature of the band-booking business—and more, of the city itself—was such that Stein had little recourse. If he wanted to continue in this business, he had to make his peace with this, the dominant musicians union. So he was eager to hear what Petrillo had to say.

  Stein had entered this business at a young age—he was only seventeen when he began assembling and booking bands as a means of putting himself through school—but he had grasped the power of the union from the start. In the first few years, he had booked bands mainly in summer resort areas, always employing members of the Federation (AFM). But one summer, unable to fill an orchestra for a resort engagement at Lake Okoboji in Iowa, he had engaged a nonunion musician, hoping his transgression would remain secret. The information, predictably, leaked out; he was brought before the board of Local 10, then headed by its president, Joseph Winkler, fined $1,500 (a sum he could not hope to pay), and expelled from the union. So Stein had joined a rival union, an independent group called the American Musicians Union (AMU), which was far less powerful than the AFM. And he began to book Chinese restaurants with AMU musicians. To Petrillo, this was tantamount to a declaration of war; he considered the Chinese restaurants his personal fiefdom. When he had joined Local 10 in 1919, he had been assigned the task of organizing the musicians in these restaurants. Other union members had been trying to do this, off and on, for nearly two decades; Petrillo had it wrapped up in about one month. According to one story, perhaps apocryphal, Petrillo had walked into one of these restaurants, placed a time bomb on the table, and demanded that the owner sign a contract before the device exploded.

  Now, the very capable Petrillo was offering Stein a truce. He said he would cancel Stein’s expulsion and allow him to pay a reduced fine, $500, over a period of months, to rejoin the AFM. If Stein felt any anger at Petrillo for his violent acts, he was too pragmatic to let it show. He promptly agreed to Petrillo’s proposition, and thanked him. How Petrillo had the authority to lift Stein’s punishment—inasmuch as Winkler, who had levied it, was still the president—is not clear. But not long after this exchange, a series of dramatic events took place at Local 10. Winkler, while presiding over a board meeting, was attacked by the union’s business agent, who hit him over the head repeatedly, apparently with metal knuckles, fracturing his skull, while all the assembled directors watched; and about six weeks later, as Winkler was slowly recovering, a bomb exploded in Local 10’s offices. Shortly after the bombing, a union member wrote a letter to the editor of the International Musician, in which he declared that the violence was due to a faction within the union opposed to Winkler, which “seemingly had but one desire, namely, to advance their own selfish individual interests”—and he implied that this faction included Petrillo. Stein, moreover, would recall years later that, after he and Petrillo had had their rapprochement, Petrillo “ousted” Winkler. In December 1922, Petrillo was duly elected president of the local.

  The alliance that had been forged between Stein and Petrillo on the sidewalk that day would last the rest of their lives. To a casual observer, they were the strangest of consorts. Stein, who was very conscious of his professional status, cultivated a rather formal, even courtly mien, and a gentleman’s image—dressing in dark, double-breasted suits, parting his hair in the middle, sporting a pince-nez; and he was singularly self-contained, betraying little emotion, choosing his words as warily as though he had to pay for them. Petrillo, on the other hand, a rough type who looked very much the saloon-keeper he’d been until he decided to make his way in what he called “the union business,” had devoted nine years to school but never could get beyond the fourth grade—something suggested in his signature, which always remained an exemplar of beginning penmanship, and, most noticeably, in his speech. He was a stubby volcano of a man, erupting at the slightest provocation in streams of tortured syntax peppered with profanity, and delivered, raspingly, out of the corner of his mouth. But the two men did share other characteristics, less immediately evident: shrewdness in their judgments about people, organizational skills, and (as suggested by their middle names) a taste for empire building. Though they were both instinctively suspicious, distrusting virtually everyone, they knew at least some of each other’s secrets. And, in these critical, early years, each would do more to pave the way for the other’s steep ascent than any other individual. Much later, when Stein was a world-famous businessman and philanthropist, he would attempt to distance himself from some of his early Chicago connections, and he would substantially revise that history. But he would never turn his back on Petrillo.

  Petrillo was given the name Caesar at birth, but Stein took it for himself when he was a teenager. Later, he would regret this adolescent gesture as too flamboyant and, worse, revealing. But at the time, it was his declaration that he was impatient to put the torpor of life in South Bend, Indiana, behind him, and to conquer the world. He was born on April 26, 1896, to Rosa and Louis Stein. Louis (whose family name was changed from Seimenski) had emigrated from Lithuania; initially he made his way as a peddler, carrying a heavy pack of goods on his back, and ultimately he opened a dry goods store in South Bend; and Jules’s mother, Rosa Cohen, also from Lithuania, was sent here by her parents to be Louis’s bride. Orthodox Jews, Rosa and Louis had five children; Jules was the second son. The family lived in a run-down neighborhood with vestiges of past elegance; their two-story house adjoined Louis’s general store, where all the children worked. The value of money was inculcated in them early. Stein would learn much later that one of his grandfathers had been a rabbi, and a great-grandfather a scholar of some renown (and so devout that when he was told, during a Sabbath service, that his daughter had just died, he displayed no emotion and simply continued with his prayers); but this came as a surprise to Jules, who had believed that he was the first of his family to be well educated. In his parents’ household, it was not scholarship but business acumen that was prized; Jews from Lithuania, who were called Litvaks, were known for their financial prowess. As Shalom Aleichem, whose sayings reflected the sentiments of many Middle European Jews, wrote: “If you have money, you are not only clever, but handsome too, and can sing like a nightingale.”

  The store where Jules spent much of his childhood was a narrow, cluttered space—twenty-five by one hundred feet—overflowing with merchandise. In the long showcases, and on the shelves that lined the walls from the floor to the ceiling (a ladder on wheels ran on a railing along the shelves, so even the children could reach the high items) were piles of men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, dress patterns, cloth, balls of wool. In a cage in the center stood the cash register. The customers were workers and farmers; barter was common, negotiation constant. Always vigilant for
theft, the family developed secret codes in order to communicate. Spotting a possible shoplifter, one family member would call out the name of another, closest to the suspect, and shout, “21!” They also devised what they called the GOLDBERKS code, in which G stood for 1, O for 2, and so forth; P or X stood for 0. (Many years later, when Jules would make his younger sister, Ruth, his financial assistant—the only person he trusted in this capacity—he would use this code to send her messages from abroad.) They used the code to mark merchandise so that, when the inevitable negotiations ensued, they would know what they had paid for it but the customers would not. It was almost scriptural that one must never be taken advantage of, but, rather, must get the better end of the deal. And it followed, too, that money so hard-earned was to be spent frugally; thus, since the bus to school cost a nickel, Jules and his siblings often chose to walk rather than spend the five cents.

  It was not lost upon Jules that, hardworking as his father was, the family remained poor; if business acumen was the measure of a man, his father fell short. Perhaps Louis Stein knew his son viewed him critically. Louis was adept with his hands, and had wrought an iron fence that stood in front of their house; he liked to make constructions out of pipes, which Rosa viewed as a vulgar hobby. Jules, who also enjoyed crafts and gadgetry, sent away for a kit for making an English antique-style desk; when he brought it home from carpentry class, his father ridiculed it, declaring it should be thrown out, but his mother placed it in the center of the living room, where it remained for many years. Jules, in any event, felt an affinity for his mother—a warm, open-faced woman with a clear gaze—but not his father. He was a child who never seemed childlike; he never learned to swim because his mother warned him the water was dangerous, he trudged to school in the company of his thoughts, alone, and from an early age he seemed to feel responsible for his siblings. “Jules was like a father,” his sister Ruth said, recalling how her older brother would reward her with money for excellent report cards. He was intent on making money; when he was about eleven, he began playing the violin, and within a couple years he had found a way to make that pastime pay. He formed an orchestra with four or five other youngsters, and they performed for small parties—their favorite number was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Jules also accompanied a pianist in a nickelodeon movie theater, for which he received seven passes per week. Soon, he added the saxophone to his repertoire to increase his marketability.