When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Wasserman had also instituted a system, unique to MCA, in which agents covered not only their clients but a particular studio; so there would be, for example, an MCA agent who covered Warner Bros., and was responsible for everything that happened there that affected an MCA client. Lazar, who was friendly with Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, was assigned to Fox.

  “My first day on the lot, an actor hailed me. ‘Are you the new MCA guy?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘My name’s Bob Sterling. I don’t like the color of my dressing room. It’s green. I want yellow.’

  “ ‘I don’t handle dressing room colors,’ I replied.

  “ ‘But you’re my agent.’

  “ ‘I handle contract matters, or any disputes you might have with the director or your co-stars,’ I told him, ‘but I don’t handle paint.’ ”

  Wasserman reprimanded him, but, as Lazar said, “I wasn’t accustomed to the lengths to which an agent was obliged to go to help his client.” It was, however, Wasserman’s insistence on regimentation and his hunger for information that Lazar found most invasive. “Lew wanted to know everything his agents did, so he required us to write a daily report on all our clients and activities. These reports were distributed to MCA executives at the end of the day. At a weekly meeting, Lew would choose highlights from these memos for discussion.

  “ ‘What were you talking to Norman Krasna about?’ he asked me one day.

  “I thought for a moment, and then, just to be ornery, I said, ‘I didn’t tell him to go to the Morris office, I know that.’

  “ ‘The Morris office? Why would he go to the Morris office?’

  “ ‘I don’t think he will. I told him not to.’

  “Lew failed to see the humor. ‘I wish you would remember your conversations,’ he said. ‘The way I run this office, I need all the information.’

  “. . . When the meeting was over, I explained to Lew that I couldn’t possibly do it his way. ‘You have a Mafia-type routine here with all these guys reporting to you,’ I told him. ‘I’m no robot. I do my own thing.’ ”

  That, of course, was the ultimate heresy. Wasserman wanted him out; and before long—with a noncompete contract whose terms were rich, because Lazar was already an agent of considerable standing—he left MCA for the second, and last, time. Life inside MCA under Wasserman may have had more and more of the oppressiveness of a totalitarian regime; but it was halcyon compared to life outside as a competitor. Sam Jaffe, who wanted to emulate Leland Hayward, had opened his own agency in the mid-thirties. William Morris at that time was the largest agency, but Jaffe did not feel threatened by them. They did not raid other agencies for clients, for example. “The raiding was done by MCA,” Jaffe said in an oral history. “They were new, so they had to get a stronghold and they were very successful. . . . They offered everything to a client in those days. An automobile, a painting, insurance. They had no hesitancy about taking your clients away. . . . I remember driving by MCA at night, I’d see the lights on in the MCA building, and I’d say, I’m sure somebody up there is trying to figure out how to entice my clients. In the days that MCA came in, I think every client I had was contacted almost daily, trying to entice them. They had a mass talent. They had many people working, and they were eager beavers. You know, eager beavers scurrying on the ground, trying to take . . .” Jaffe broke off. “I hated that part. I did it, but it was different. It was competition, it was different. When MCA came in the business, they became a real force. I’m not condemning them, that’s what they wanted to do, and what they started out to do, they did. But they were merciless, they were cruel.

  “Some people create, and will do anything to destroy you,” Jaffe continued. “I often told Wasserman and Stein, ‘You can put me out of business. You’re very strong. I can’t compete with you in that way.’ I mean, they could take one of my people and offer all kinds of advantages [long contracts, bonuses, insurance] that we couldn’t as a young company. We had to depend on a personal relationship or effect. That was our only hope.”

  The subject of competition was a sensitive one at MCA. Exclusives, for example—whereby an amusement operator agreed to get all his entertainment attractions through MCA and, in return, got first option on the most desirable talent in his area—had been a cardinal building block of the business. These arrangements were not committed to paper, but they were common knowledge in the industry. One amusement operator, Larry Finley, had finally raised the issue in a court case, which was tried in federal court in Los Angeles in February 1946. Finley charged that MCA refused to offer him talent because it had an exclusive with a rival operator—and that even when he offered to pay more for certain attractions, MCA would book them with his competitor instead. His amusement park and ballroom lost money, he alleged, because he had been denied access to MCA clients—which included a majority of the best talent on the West Coast. The jury had found in his favor and awarded him substantial damages; the judge cut out the damages, agreeing with the contention of MCA lawyers that it was impossible to calculate Finley’s loss; but he also ruled that there was “ample and substantial evidence to support and sustain the implied findings of the jury to the defendants having conspired to . . . monopolize interstate commerce.” Indeed, he likened MCA to an “Octopus,” its “tentacles reaching out . . . and grasping everything in show business.” (Apt as the image was, it was not original; it had been used to describe Music Corporation by a lawyer in a Chicago trial back in 1935.)

  The Finley judge did not know the half of it. Starting in the early thirties, Stein had started accumulating so much Paramount stock that he had become its major shareholder, second only to his friend Balaban in his holdings. While Stein’s owning both a talent agency and such a substantial share of a studio to which he sold talent was not illegal, it could be compellingly presented as part of a larger, anti-competitive picture. That picture could also include his relationships with his purported competitors—relationships that Stein, concerned about his vulnerability to antitrust enforcement, had gone to some lengths to disguise. By the mid-forties, MCA, William Morris, Associated Booking Company, and General Artists Corporation (GAC) were among the biggest agencies in the country. Of the four, only William Morris was truly unaffiliated.

  Associated Booking was headed by Joe Glaser. A rough character who kept his considerable wealth in a safe-deposit box, Glaser had grown up in a bordello in Chicago, promoted fights for the Capone mob, and managed a nightclub, the Sunset Café. He hardly projected the desired image of an MCA agent. But in the early thirties he had, oddly enough, been employed by MCA; and, even more, when he started Associated in 1940 he had done so with a loan from Stein, who thus acquired an interest in the company (this was subsequently noted in the trade press). Personal style aside, it was perfectly complementary. Talent agencies at this time tended to book either black or white clients, not both; MCA’s clients were white, while Glaser specialized in booking black jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. “Joe Glaser was very powerful,” recalled Bob Carruthers, who worked for Petrillo for a number of years. Petrillo and Glaser were good friends, he said. “He tried to buy his way in everywhere. I remember once he came to me—there was some problem with one of his clients and the union. He said, ‘How much would it take to fix this? One thousand? Twenty-five hundred?’ I said, ‘Forget it, Joe—and vamoose outa here!’ ” What made the Stein-Associated connection ironic was the identity of another person with an interest (probably the controlling interest) in Associated: Sidney Korshak. Korshak was close to Glaser personally, and—since even after he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles he never opened a law office there—he often worked out of the Associated office in Beverly Hills. So while Stein loudly refused to attend the same party as Korshak, he nonetheless was his secret partner.

  GAC was also rumored to be linked to Stein; he was said to have bailed out GAC when it was on the verge of going out of business in the early forties. Stein denied
the persistent rumor. But, in Swifty, Lazar wrote about that period, “I heard an amazing rumor that turned out to be true: Jules Stein was secretly keeping his rival afloat with MCA money, in order to create the appearance of competition and not bring the government down on MCA for being monopolistic. Long after the dust had settled, I asked Stein about it. A bit sheepishly, he admitted it had been true.” In his memoir, Karl Kramer confirmed Lazar’s assertion, saying that while the “tie-up” of the two companies was never made public, Stein had taken Petrillo into his confidence. “The role Jules Stein played was so powerful, behind-the-scenes—he was funding his competitors,” said Herbert Siegel, who would acquire GAC in 1960. “He loaned GAC the money, the controlling stock was placed in a vault.” And, Siegel continued, a senior MCA agent “would get all the information on GAC’s clients and numbers every week. He did the same thing with Joe Glaser,” Siegel added, noting that he had gotten to know Glaser and examined his books because he had at one point considered buying Glaser’s company. “I don’t think it was legal—but Jules knew he had better be sure to have some competitors around, to be able to point to.”

  In 1944, Frank Sinatra—who had recently emerged as one of the country’s hottest performers—moved his agency representation from GAC to MCA. His switch sparked quite a flurry in the trade press, where it was portrayed as an example of client theft by MCA. Considering MCA’s general pattern, it was a fair enough extrapolation—but, apparently, mistaken. The story began with the contract Sinatra had signed with band leader Tommy Dorsey in the late thirties—a contract that gave Dorsey an exorbitant share of Sinatra’s earnings. In 1942, Sinatra succeeded in terminating the contract. “Sinatra went to the mob, and the mob got him out of the Dorsey contract,” said agent Martin Baum, “and he retained his relationship with the mob for the rest of his life.” According to an unpublished biography of Manie Sacks, a onetime MCA agent and a close friend of Sinatra’s, Sinatra extricated himself from that contract by paying $60,000—much of which Jules Stein provided. Then—in a move that would seem almost inexplicable but for the story’s subtext—Sinatra went not to his benefactor MCA, but to GAC. It was about two years later that he made his much reported move from GAC to MCA; most likely, because Sinatra had become such a star by that time, Stein preferred to have him under MCA’s own roof, not that of its covertly controlled subsidiary. “That whole story about how MCA ‘stole’ Frank Sinatra from GAC—I thought Jules must have had a good laugh. It was all part of the deal!” Siegel said.

  Orchestrating from the wings was nothing new for Stein, but by the forties his stage had grown much larger. His instinct for secrecy, too, had grown apace. MCA’s corporate structure was positively byzantine, with interlocking companies incorporated in many different states; in addition, there were Stein’s myriad companies, also far-flung; and it was almost certain that no one but Stein and an accountant in New York named Harry Berman, who had started working for Stein in 1930, were familiar with all of it. None of the standard business references, such as Moody’s or Poor’s, offered any information on MCA. Dun & Bradstreet could not glean enough to compile a credit rating on the company. Stein, unlike most of his peers in show business, shunned publicity (by 1946, he was not listed in Who’s Who, or even Who’s Who in the Motion Picture Industry), and he demanded that his employees at MCA cultivate anonymity as well. Complete client lists were guarded as though they were state secrets.

  There were of course plenty of secrets to protect, including Stein’s interest in the Chez Paree and other Chicago nightclubs. Frank Sinatra was lambasted in the press when, in January 1947, he went to Havana in the company of Joey Fischetti to perform at the Hotel Nacionál (there was also a rumor that the small valise Sinatra was carrying when he and Fischetti got off the plane held $2 million in cash, which Sinatra was delivering to the mob). Sinatra would be forced to try to explain this trip and his association with Fischetti for years afterward. And while Sinatra was a star, he was just an entertainer after all; for Jules Stein, one of America’s most successful businessmen, to be exposed as a partner of the Fischettis would have caused a furor.

  Nor did Stein’s partnerships with the mob end with the nightclubs. In the forties, Stein held in a trust account shares of various private companies he controlled—and one that he didn’t. That one, a private company named Kirkeby Hotels, Inc., was controlled by Meyer Lansky. Its nominal head was A. S. Kirkeby, who in the mid-thirties had been a used car dealer and then, within a few years, was transfigured into the president of a hotel chain that included the Blackstone and Drake hotels in Chicago; the Gotham in New York; the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, and the Hotel Nacionál in Cuba. (Stein would often bemoan how he had missed a chance to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel—but he would never mention that he owned, through Kirkeby, a piece of the Beverly Wilshire.) Kirkeby had lived in Chicago in the late thirties; then he moved to Beverly Hills where he built an estate in the style of Versailles, and amassed a fabulous collection of Impressionist art. Stein, too, had constructed an elaborate facade by this time, and the extent of the artifice made his secrets all the more perilous. Stein, after all, was not Harry Cohn, going to the racetracks with Johnny Roselli, or even Lew Wasserman, social chum of Korshak’s. Stein and his family lived at the top of a high canyon in Beverly Hills, behind blue iron gates and a long drive lined with cypresses, in a Spanish-style, semicircular villa, Misty Mountain, which had been designed by Wallace Neff, a California architect with a select clientele that included Mary Pickford, Darryl Zanuck, Cary Grant, and Barbara Hutton. Doris—who was named one of America’s Ten Best-Dressed Women in 1946—had achieved her aim of becoming the town’s preeminent hostess. In their home, filled with exquisite seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English furniture, Doris and Jules gave parties that were famous—seated dinners of fifty to a hundred, where the guests were an eclectic mix, including Mary Lasker, Jack Benny, Sam Goldwyn, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Stewart, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Artur Rubinstein, Diana Vreeland, the Reagans, Mae West, Maurice Chevalier, Armand Hammer, Lady Fairfax. Only the cream of Hollywood society was invited, and that did not, as a rule, include MCA employees.

  Secrecy, of course, is double-edged; if one cultivates it too assiduously, one attracts the very attention one is seeking to avoid. And that is what was happening to Stein. He was becoming famous for his secretiveness. In the spring of 1946, David Wittels, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, set out to shine some light on the shadowy businessman. Stein, as usual, refused to grant any interviews. But then, according to Wasserman, Stein became concerned about the scope of the article, and reports coming back to him about questions Wittels was asking. It was, moreover, to be an in-depth, four-part series. And Stein was also well aware that the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department was conducting an investigation of MCA, and anything damning that was published would lend heat to that investigation; indeed, an internal Justice Department memorandum noted that the article was soon to appear, and that it should be significant because the reporter, Wittels, had interviewed over one hundred people. So a few days before the first piece was to appear, Stein flew to Philadelphia to meet with Wittels, to whom he spoke on the condition that he not be quoted. From Stein’s perspective, the results could not have been better. Regarding Sinatra’s move from GAC to MCA, Wittels wrote, “There is a legend on Broadway—which always believes there’s a hidden ball somewhere—that MCA secretly owns half of General Amusement, ostensibly its bitter rival, and that at the proper moment MCA merely took over what it already half owned [Sinatra]. The legend has no foundation in fact.” Wittels mentioned Stein’s standing up to the mob in Chicago, and his taking out an insurance policy in the face of the kidnapping threat. He mentioned an interest through corporate setups in hotels and other real estate, but divulged no names. And, in a section with a subhead entitled, “The Secretive but Stainless Mr. Stein,” Wittels wrote, “The natural result of this studied secrecy has been a hair-raising motley of rumors and conjectures, som
e of them downright libelous, as to Stein’s origin and early career. No obvious reason for such secrecy reveals itself, however, when his history is laboriously dug out and pieced together.”

  This piece functioned as something of an amulet with which to ward off suspicion; more than fifty years later, Wasserman was still pointing to it as the best extensive piece ever written on MCA (though he cautioned that the numbers were not right, implying that they were low). Certainly, it was salt in the wounds of its rivals. It estimated MCA’s annual profit, before taxes, at $4 million a year, and declared Stein one of the richest men in America. It did mention that competitors referred to MCA as the Octopus—but it softened that appellation by suggesting that, given the glamour of its talent list, MCA should be seen, instead, as “a star-spangled octopus” (the title of the series). “No movie company, no producer, no radio chain, no other agency, no impresario of any sort has such a galaxy of stars.” After acquiring Hayward-Deverich, with its three hundred established stars, MCA had a movie list with nearly seven hundred on it—including, in addition to those mentioned earlier on the Hayward-Deverich roster, Betty Grable, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Jane Wyman, Boris Karloff, Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, Maureen O’Hara, Dick Powell, Frank Sinatra, Joan Fontaine, John Garfield, Abbott and Costello, Eddie Cantor, and Marlene Dietrich. MCA was a force in theater, too. Fredric March starred in A Bell for Adano, Carol Bruce and Buddy Ebsen in Show Boat, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Maurice Evans in Hamlet. There were hundreds of MCA clients working on Broadway and in road shows, as performers and also directors, playwrights, scene designers. MCA also backed plays, and Leland Hayward, now producing plays, functioned both as agent and employer. And MCA was still dominant in radio, and in bands. Conveying a sense of just how ubiquitous MCA had become in the entertainment world, Wittels wrote that “the odds are rather good that any time you go to the movies or theater, tune in a major radio program, visit a night club or cocktail lounge, listen to a famous dance-band or attend a large-scale lodge benefit, MCA either put the show together or had a hand in it somehow.” No matter how vast the enterprise, however, it was Hollywood that was now “the mainspring of MCA activities.” There, Wittels pointed out, MCA controlled more than one third of the important stars—“far more than any of the highly publicized producers such as Darryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, and perhaps more than the three of them together.”