When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Dealing with Wall Street was a new experience for Wasserman, and not one he cared for. He was so secretive that the analysts’ questions seemed invasive, and there were some subjects in particular that he felt were none of their business. His relationship with Jimmy Hoffa was one. Hoffa had been the power behind Teamsters leader Dave Beck for years, and had become the head of the union in 1957 after Beck went to prison for corruption. Hoffa’s dealings with members of organized crime were well known, and by this time, Robert F. Kennedy, as chief counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, had come to regard Hoffa and the Teamsters as “a conspiracy of evil”; he believed that they were guilty of corruption, thuggery, and murder, and yet somehow managed to elude effective prosecution. About Hoffa, Kennedy would comment, “I think it is an extremely dangerous situation at the present time, this man who has a background of corruption and dishonesty, has misused hundreds of thousands of dollars of union funds, betrayed the union membership, sold out the membership, put gangsters and racketeers in positions of power, and still heads the Teamsters Union.” Not surprisingly, Wall Street analysts considered a Hoffa connection unsavory.

  “I had lunch with these specialists, if that’s what you call them,” Wasserman said, recounting a story he had told many times. “One said, ‘I understand that you know Jimmy Hoffa.’ I said, ‘Yes, and I’m glad I know him. We hire about fifteen thousand of his members a week. I’d rather be hiring them from someone I know than someone I don’t.’ ”

  The arrangement between Stein and Wasserman was working well. Stein could mingle with society on an ever more rarefied plane, while Wasserman—a tougher type than Stein had been, even when he was a young man in Chicago consorting with Petrillo—cultivated Jimmy Hoffa and his compatriots. It was not a bargain that really cost Wasserman, at least not at this point in his life. He was more comfortable with Moe Dalitz and Sidney Korshak, say, than he would have been at Stein’s parties at Misty Mountain. Wasserman surely knew, too, that in the movie colony—in contrast to Wall Street—his associations with such men not only served a business purpose but also enhanced his aura of power. And the more power he was seen to hold, the more actually was his to wield. Power leads to more power, Mike Dann had observed about MCA, and for Wasserman that proverbial factoring was sublime. It was, in fact, all there was. Stein was a rapacious man with few outside interests, but he was a collector, and he would spend days driving with Doris through the English countryside to some remote hamlet in search of antiques at a steal. It was unimaginable that Wasserman would have so lent himself to an activity that did not serve to augment his reach.

  But he was fully occupied, in his twenty-hour days, with those that did. Wasserman had been very much in charge of MCA’s Los Angeles office, even in the early forties; but once he became president, the entire organization was in his grasp. And what he established was a more or less benevolent dictatorship. Little that involved MCA escaped him. Swifty Lazar, of course, had found this “Mafia-like” system where the soldiers were to report everything to the capo so intolerable that he had quit, but most MCA agents readily accepted Wasserman’s rule. It was quite remarkable. In the space of about fifteen years, he had transformed himself from a spindly, intellectually insecure young nightclub publicist into a calibrated, coldly charismatic leader, regarded by his followers with fear and awe. His “muscle,” noted by Frank Stanton, was certainly a part of his mystique, but it was derivative; it was his mental force that enabled him to devise the system in which the muscle came into play.

  Information was a critical element in that system. Indeed, Wasserman had become the very personification of the maxim that information is power. His appetite was insatiable, ranging from quotas and currency restrictions and tax provisions in the overseas market to the latest merchandising revenues on Laramie; and to his men his retentive capacity seemed preternatural. “He had a truly photographic memory,” marveled MCA agent Freddie Fields. “Therefore, he always knew where every man in the company was, what his deal was, who his clients were. He’d read lists of all this on the plane going back and forth between New York and L.A., and he’d retain it all. He was a dominant figure, I don’t know how to explain it.”

  He continued, “Everybody dressed like him—”

  But wasn’t the uniform mandatory?

  “You had to wear a white shirt and a dark tie, you didn’t have to wear a black knit tie! You didn’t have to wear loafers—” Fields broke off and, decades after having left MCA and its dress code behind, swung his loafer-clad foot out from beneath the table. Referring to an executive trained by Wasserman, Fields continued, “I saw him walking at the studio not long ago, and I thought at first it was Lew. He had that specific shuffle, that duck walk!

  “Everyone in the company who stayed either admired or feared him. A guy like Sonny Werblin, for example. He was smart-ass, tough, competitive—but he was scared to death of Lew. He would never take him on. No one would. You might disagree about a deal or something—but you’d never take him on.

  “He had an aura,” Fields concluded. “He was my god.”

  Awestruck as some of his subordinates were, Wasserman remained down-to-earth, laconic, seemingly indifferent to the extravagant, if inchoate, feelings he inspired. Virtually everything about him was spare. He never exercised, but remained thin. He did not often exert himself to smile; while he possessed a dry sense of humor, he tended to stay poker-faced as he delivered his sallies. His clothes were so uniform he could don them thoughtlessly—dark suit, dark tie, dark raincoat, even dark bathrobe. Fueled by his work, he seemed to be otherwise self-sustaining; he appeared to require little respite, little sleep, little human connection. Though he could be very charming when necessary, he tended to mete out his words, and certainly his emotion. With those who worked for him, he was famous for never admitting that he had made a mistake—never—and for not dispensing praise. Sometimes, employees would think they could detect a hidden compliment in something he said, but it was so obscure they could never be sure. Hungry for any sign, they became grateful for a gesture. (“He was always cool, aloof, but he knew how to handle people—he’d put his arm on your shoulder,” recalled Al Rush. “Guys lived for a pat on the back.”) Wasserman’s rules for his employees, too, evinced economy: tend to the client, dress appropriately, divulge no information about MCA, commit very little to paper, never leave the office without returning every call, always do your homework. Doing one’s homework meant, among other things, paying close attention to detail. When advertising executives, sponsors of an MCA television series, were about to arrive for a cocktail party at Wasserman’s home, Wasserman asked the MCA publicist working on the event whether he had checked which cigarette accounts the company had. He had not! Fortunately for him, he was able to find out and to change all the cigarettes in the cigarette holders in the moments before the guests arrived.

  But the most important commandment by far that Wasserman gave his employees was never to attempt to mislead him. Those who did found that the only aspect of Wasserman that was not spare was his rage. His explosive tirades were legend—his removing his watch was a sure sign the storm was coming; at its peak he would scream, shake, even froth at the mouth as though he were having a seizure; some of his victims burst into tears or fainted. It was such a wild, eccentric display that one might assume it was beyond his control. That, however, seems unlikely, for these rages—like virtually everything he did—served a purpose. Discipline was enforced, certain executives were made into object lessons, and fear was kept fresh.

  As Lazar had observed earlier, the culture of MCA bore no small resemblance to the Mafia’s, and this likeness had become only more pronounced once Wasserman was fully in charge. Loyalty to the MCA family was a supreme value, and it was duly rewarded. An executive might be eviscerated by Wasserman time and again, but if he died while in the employ of MCA, his family would be quietly taken care of. If an agent could not afford to buy the private shares of
MCA stock that were allotted to him, the company might advance the money. Mort Viner, a young agent who had started in the mailroom in 1951 and worked his way up, recalled that he told Wasserman he didn’t have enough money to buy the shares available to him. It was a considerable disadvantage—while the shares might have cost, say, $700 at the time, a few months later they might be worth as much as $7,000. “Lew said, just sign this check for the amount. And at the end of the year, when I got my bonus, there was more than enough to cover the check, and he said he was finally depositing it.” If someone wronged one of Wasserman’s people, Wasserman would exact retribution. An MCA agent recalled a situation involving two of his then colleagues. One was only a middling employee—he worked in the nightclub area, which by the late fifties was becoming a less important venue for MCA, and he had a gambling problem besides; the other was a crackerjack TV agent. “The first agent walked into his apartment and found the TV guy screwing his wife. Lew called the TV guy and said, ‘I want you out of the building today.’ Despite the fact that he was a major piece of manpower. That was Lew,” this agent declared. “His loyalty to loyalty was incredible.”

  Wasserman made it a habit to give credit to his troops, rather than claiming it himself; this made them more devoted to him, and also—inasmuch as it bolstered their standing with clients—freed him to do other things. “He wanted to build manpower—if he felt you were capable of representing someone he was involved with, he would gladly let you do it,” declared Jay Kanter, who had started working in the MCA mailroom when he was twenty-one and eventually became a full-fledged agent, representing stars like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. “I’d hear him on the phone with studio heads—‘I don’t know, Marlon won’t answer my phone calls, you have to call Jay Kanter.’

  “We were going out to Universal one day,” Kanter continued. “Lew was going to make a deal for Jimmy Stewart to do Winchester 73, and he was meeting with Leo Spitz and Bill Goetz, head of Universal at the time. After discussing this deal, Lew said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think it is going to work out.’ And we left. I said, ‘Lew, why? That’s a great deal!’ He said, ‘You call them back in a few hours and tell them you worked it out—and you’ll never have trouble getting them on the phone again.’ ”

  Kanter was a Wasserman favorite. Mild, courteous, cautious, he had a temperate demeanor more like that of a corporate lawyer than a Hollywood agent. Wasserman no doubt liked him personally, and felt he was someone that could be trusted and would never embarrass him. That last, in any event, turned out to be wrong, in an incident that nearly derailed Kanter’s career. Kanter became friendly with an older MCA agent named Jennings Lang. Lang had worked for Sam Jaffe (the agent who lamented how MCA had stolen his clients and his employees, offering them all the sweeteners that he could not) until, in 1949, Wasserman had persuaded Lang to join MCA. A big, robust character, with a keen mind and an irrepressibly amorous streak, Lang broke one of the cardinal MCA rules and had an affair with a client—the actress Joan Bennett, who was married to Walter Wanger, a serious-minded, well-regarded independent producer. One day in the fall of 1951, in the MCA parking lot in the center of Beverly Hills, Walter Wanger shot Lang in the offending part of his anatomy. Tragedy was averted—Lang recovered, and Wanger served only a four-month sentence. But it quickly emerged that the apartment used for Lang and Bennett’s afternoon trysts was Jay Kanter’s. Jules Stein was said to have been so infuriated by the scandal that he wanted Kanter fired on the spot, but Wasserman defended him. In the end, both Lang and Kanter were deemed too valuable to fire.

  There were always a handful of young men who, encouraged by Wasserman, believed they were in line to become his successor, but in the mid-fifties Kanter seemed the most likely. He had married a spirited girl, Judy Balaban, the daughter of Stein’s old friend Barney Balaban, the Paramount chief. Judy had known Doris and Jules from the time she was a little girl. Her parents had frequently invited the Steins to formal dinners in their palatial Fifth Avenue residence in New York; she was so accustomed to seeing Jules take out his violin and play with the musicians that one day she had asked her father, “Why don’t the other musicians get to eat with the guests?” Now, Judy and Edie Wasserman had become fast friends, too, meeting for cocktails on weekday afternoons, organizing poolside Sunday barbecues at the Wassermans’. Edie was a tough, tightly wound, irascible woman; she took quick dislikes to people, cut them to shreds, was wont to brutalize even those she liked. Lew, it was often said, was a pussycat next to Edie, and the Cleveland connections they both had seemed more palpable in her. But she did not abuse Judy Kanter—perhaps, Judy surmised later, because Edie was impressed by her social standing as Balaban’s daughter. In any event, Judy felt that this regent was grooming her, too, for Jay’s eventual succession. But all the bonhomie disappeared when Jay discovered his wife with her lover, the actor Tony Franciosa. Edie exhorted Judy to stay with Kanter, but she left him for Franciosa, whom she eventually married. Wasserman reacted in his signature way; for a period of time, Franciosa is said to have had trouble finding work in Hollywood. And Edie behaved as she always did when someone valued chose to leave the MCA family; she refused to speak to Judy for years. Loyalty was rewarded, disloyalty treated as a capital crime; Edie severed connections to her former friends decisively and cleanly. (Mort Viner, trying to put the best face on Edie’s absolutism, stressed what he saw as its positive side. “Edie is a real friend—the kind of friend where if you commit murder, then the other person deserved it,” he declared.) When Wasserman encountered people who had left MCA, he would be more civil than his wife; but they knew that, for him, too, they had ceased to exist in any meaningful way.

  It was an unforgiving system, but it served Wasserman’s ends because it imposed discipline, increased efficiency, and established, in an odd way, considerable esprit de corps. Many employees felt that being part of MCA was very special; not just a job, but a sign of distinction; an elevated kind of association, to which they had consecrated themselves. What made it all work, of course, was the power of their patron—who had the wherewithal to favor or to punish, and on a large scale. But there was in this all-encompassing model one element that seemed to defy the logic of the rest—and that was the conduct of the patron’s wife. Numerous people who were interviewed spoke about Edie Wasserman’s philandering, something, they all maintained, that was a well-recognized if bewildering fact of life in this community. Why the most powerful man in Hollywood, who controlled so much of what transpired there, could not—or would not—control his wife was a matter of fervid speculation. Some suggested that he preferred that Edie be diverted so he was free to work. That seemed implausible; Hollywood was a very macho society, in which husbands might routinely cheat on their wives but could not be cuckolded themselves without considerable loss of face. The reason for Wasserman’s forbearance, in any event, remained mysterious. He did seem to want to make a statement, in a quasi-public way, about a line drawn between them. An MCA employee recalled one occasion when Lew was showing guests around the Beverly Hills home he and Edie had bought in 1960 for $400,000. Built by the architect Harold Levitt, it was a spacious, one-story, one-bedroom home, ideal for entertaining, and situated at the top of a very long, climbing driveway. The Wassermans added a separate projection room, also designed by Levitt, which they called “the theater,” and, later, a fish pond filled with koi, amid beautifully landscaped gardens, and a large Henry Moore sculpture opposite the entrance to the house. As Wasserman and his guests reached the master bedroom, Wasserman announced, “Edie sleeps here,” and when they came to the den, with its three TV sets, which he watched nightly, each tuned to a different network, he declared, “And I sleep here.” It was, in any event, something that also found its way into the press; a 1965 Time magazine profile of Wasserman mentioned the Wassermans’ separate sleeping arrangements.

  Wasserman’s only apparent vice was a fondness for gambling, which persisted into the fifties. The combination of his extraordinarily retentive me
mory and his numerical wizardry made him a formidable card player, and in his early years in L.A. he had played a great deal. Many of the moguls did. Sam Goldwyn was an obsessive gambler, given to cheating—and famous for his losses (in one session, $150,000, which would be worth about $2 million today). Wasserman found it was not a bad way to test himself against these men. “There used to be big card games,” Wasserman said. “It started with pinochle, then moved to bridge (that was too complicated for some people), then gin rummy, and poker. The first time I met Sam Goldwyn, it was at his house, four of us playing gin rummy for money. The next time I was there, he wanted me to play. I said, ‘No, Sam, I will not play you for money, I’m going to beat you and I don’t want to take your money.’ He was furious, yelling. When he stopped, Frances [Goldwyn’s wife] said to him, ‘Listen to Lew, Sam. He’s the only one who’s your friend.’ ”

  Wasserman said that in the early forties he began to visit Las Vegas, then little more than a dusty Old West desert town; Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo had not yet been built, and Wasserman gambled at the Last Frontier or the El Rancho, which by 1947 was owned by his friend Beldon Katleman. But the stakes there were smaller than in some of the Sunset Boulevard clubs—like the Clover Club, a Hollywood institution—where illegal gambling flourished. “There were very high stakes in these clubs—$100,000 in a pot, or even a half million,” Wasserman said. Some of Wasserman’s associates believed that it was his gambling debts that caused him to remain in such a modest house in Beverly Hills long after he was named president of the company. Harry Berman’s wife, Alice, recalled his having told her in the early fifties that Wasserman had “lost big” in Las Vegas, as much as $200,000—and that Stein had had to loan him the money. Stein was surely disapproving of this weakness of Wasserman’s; though Stein would play gin rummy on occasion, he limited himself to no more than 5 cents a point.