When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  Operating without the engine of its agency business for the first time, MCA joined the fierce competition being waged among the major television producers in early 1963. The studios had long since overcome their aversion to producing for television, and they now depended heavily on that output; but there wasn’t enough space in prime time to accommodate the volume the producers needed to thrive. Even MCA felt the press of the crowd. “Thanks to its Wasserman-Werblin-Schreiber combo, considered perhaps the hottest and shrewdest in the business, Revue again goes into ’63–’64 preeminent among all the vidfilm producers,” stated an article in Variety in April 1963. “But even so it’s a far cry from the 14- or 15-show status it once enjoyed and which, by virtue of its expensive facilities, are necessary to meet that kind of overhead.” Just two months later, however, Wasserman and Kintner struck a deal that reestablished MCA’s accustomed primacy. Remarkable in both its content and its process, it was described at the time as “the biggest and perhaps most significant deal in TV annals.” MCA would produce a full season of two-hour feature films for weekly showing on NBC during the 1964–65 season; simultaneously, these films would be shown in movie theaters abroad, and later it was planned that they would have a second run, in U.S. movie theaters. It was a novel approach—it reversed the usual order, in which full feature films only made their way to television after their theater showings. And its genesis at NBC was unorthodox as well. Programming decisions were customarily made by a network’s head of programming and then passed on to the president for approval; here, however, the deal had been negotiated between Kintner and Wasserman. It remained to be seen how successful this idea of the made-for-TV movie might be, but the immediate impact of the deal was unequivocal: it made Universal Hollywood’s largest movie producer.

  Others sought to follow MCA’s example. In September 1965, ABC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made an $8.4 million deal in which ABC was to acquire fifteen existing feature films and finance the production of six new two-hour films. CBS, too, was reported to be negotiating a similar deal with Columbia Pictures. In these deals, the networks paid less than the actual production costs of the films; the producers hoped to realize profits from distribution of the films overseas. “The appeal of the feature-length film on TV is that motion pictures have established a track record of being ‘idiot proof,’ ” wrote television critic Jack Gould in the New York Times in August 1965. “A blockbuster film can register a huge rating and even an indifferent motion picture will attract enough viewers to assure the economic viability of an advertiser’s investment in spot announcements, something that cannot be said for the TV show that fails to catch on.”

  Wasserman’s earlier deal with Kintner had only been a test run. Now that the formula seemed to be working, he decided to apply it on a far larger scale—so large, in fact, that it would dwarf everything that had come before, and its true size would be kept secret. In October 1965, an NBC spokesman announced that NBC had made a deal with Universal for fifteen existing motion pictures, and “six or more” of its made-for-TV movies—thus, it seemed a virtual replica of the $8.4 million deal recently announced between ABC and MGM. No price was mentioned. Just a few days later, however, reports appeared in the trade press that MCA and NBC had actually consummated the largest single film deal in the history of television, estimated to approach $60 million. It was thought to include not fifteen but sixty Universal films for network showing at about $500,000 each; forty for showing on the network’s owned-and-operated stations at about $100,000 each; and an uncertain number of made-for-TV feature films for an estimated subtotal of $15 million. Now, an MCA official responded that the press reports of a $60 million agreement were “essentially correct.”

  Years later, however, Wasserman said that it had been not a $60 million, but a $200 million agreement—one that included sixty first-runs, as had been reported in the later press accounts, and two hundred made-for-TV movies. Astronomical as this deal was, it had been negotiated directly between Kintner and Wasserman; their subordinates met later to draft the papers. The form of these two-hour TV movies was not new, but Wasserman provided a kind of inaugural fillip by coining the term “World Premiere” movies; and while the concept was not revolutionary, the deal was. “This deal was really the basis for our being able to dominate TV production,” declared Frank Price, a TV executive at MCA during the years this deal was in effect. “With that contract, you could get the most important writers, directors, producers in town. That’s how we were able to acquire this stable of talent. One of the things that eliminated the contract system in the old Hollywood was that no one could afford to carry all those people. So this was, in TV, a return to the old contract system. It gave you a way to pick up people whose series weren’t yet on the air and carry them. No one else was able to do what MCA was, then. Because no one had gotten that kind of order before—and no one has since.”

  Larry White, an NBC programming executive who arrived at the network shortly after the deal was consummated, agreed that it had given MCA a hold on talent—much as it had had with the agency business—and that that was the key to its dominance in TV production. But for NBC, White said, this deal was far less salutary. Not so much because of the quality of the movies MCA delivered (“some were lousy, some were good,” he said), but because of NBC’s enforced dependence on MCA. “The deal was too favorable to MCA, and they had too much of a lock on NBC’s time. It froze out other producers. . . . It gave MCA a semimonopoly in Hollywood.”

  There was considerable grousing at NBC about MCA’s coup, but the man who was responsible for it wasn’t there to hear the criticism. In December 1965, roughly six weeks after the NBC-MCA deal was announced, Kintner was fired. The announcement of his resignation was particularly stunning, since Kintner had been slated in late December to assume the additional post of chairman of NBC. Press reports gave no hint of the cause of his fall. But a column by the New York Times’s Jack Gould suggested, however obliquely, that the strains of life at the top of a TV network might have taken a strong personal toll. Television, after all, was the epicenter. As Gould wrote, “At the center of all this activity is power without a precise parallel in American life. Words can never fully describe the intoxicating sensation felt by the individual who decides that something or somebody should be seen by millions from coast to coast and then watches it happen.” That had been Kintner’s experience—and, thanks to Kintner, it had been Wasserman’s to a degree, too.

  Kintner’s fate at NBC had been presaged by his firing from ABC; it was surprising in a way that the reprieve Sonny Werblin had won him at NBC had lasted so long. General Sarnoff had warned him repeatedly about his drinking; and, according to Alan Livingston, an NBC executive during the Kintner regime, it was only the intervention of Bobby Sarnoff that had prevented the General from firing Kintner earlier. Don Durgin recalled that Kintner and he were at an NBC affiliates’ meeting in Acapulco in the fall of 1965. “When he was off the reservation, he would just drink as you would not believe. And at this meeting, one of the affiliates said that NBC news went on too long—it was like ABC plus thirty minutes, CBS plus forty. The affiliates wanted to cut it back for the ratings. Because of Kintner’s mania for news, we knew it was a tender moment. He went into a harangue. Fifty minutes later, he was still going. He never wore undershirts, just these really expensive shirts—and the perspiration started, first the size of a dime and then bigger and bigger. He spoke intelligently, but you knew he was under the influence.” Furthermore, Durgin continued, it had recently been announced that Bob Sarnoff was being moved from the chairmanship of NBC to RCA, and that Kintner would be both president and chairman of NBC—and Kintner felt free now to vent his contempt for Bob. “Kintner got this idea, born of drink, that he would no longer speak to Bob Sarnoff. There was a blackout in New York. Bob called Acapulco to say, what do we do? And Kintner refused to talk to him.” Soon afterward, Kintner was fired.

  It was a sad fate for Kintner, but he had utterly fulfilled his purpose for Wass
erman, whose timing was impeccable; had there been a delay of even a few weeks in his negotiation with Kintner, Wasserman would have missed the deal of a lifetime. With that deal in hand, Wasserman was able to create his own version of the contract system he had once helped destroy. It was not really paradoxical. Before, he’d been on the other side, so with his innate aggression he had driven stars’ incomes beyond all generally imaginable limits. When he left the agency business to become a producer, many wondered how he would deal with the soaring production expenses he had helped create, which were crippling other studios. One way was by running Universal like a factory—the most thoroughly computerized in show business—prizing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and fully utilized facilities. His deal with Kintner helped accomplish that, with its guaranteed stream of production. These TV movies, moreover, had budgets that were said to average only about $1 million. The top twenty box office stars, therefore, who demanded the kinds of incomes Wasserman had engendered, were out of reach. But Universal was building a roster of youthful, affordable contract players and, also, loaning them out to other studios—as Wasserman’s predecessors had once done in the heyday of the studio system.

  “MGM owned this town—they had all the best actors, writers, directors,” Wasserman, recalling his early years in Hollywood, once remarked, with a discernible note of admiration in his voice. Much as he had fueled the forces that had undermined MGM, it was that studio, at its height, which had long been his icon, and which he was now set to try to emulate, to a greater degree than ever before. But he would fashion his model with the financial sophistication that had always set him apart from the old moguls. For while NBC had paid $200 million for these movies, Universal retained the rights for syndication sales, foreign television, foreign theaters, and, conceivably, domestic theaters. In 1966, upon the debut of the first of these movies, Fame Is the Name of the Game, starring Tony Franciosa and Jill St. John, Wasserman spoke to Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times. He acknowledged that not all the World Premiere movies would be suitable for all these markets. But he was convinced the potential revenue was great. He had reason to trust his instincts; they had brought him to this high place, where, gazing out through the black glass windows of his fifteenth-story office, he could survey his four-hundred-acre domain—the humming soundstages, and the trams of the Universal City tours wending their way through the vast lot, and the places where a second black tower and two hotels were to be built. This was the city within a city that Wasserman had envisioned; MCA was spending about $110 million on a modernization program. (About a decade later, looking back on this expenditure, Wasserman would comment, “Very few companies in the industry had spent money on capital improvement programs. The theory had been don’t spend any money you can’t charge off to a film. I’m not going to say we can walk on water, but we were defying conventional thinking.”) And the concept that had given Wasserman the confidence to go against the tide and build this elaborate landscape sounded disarmingly simple: Universal, he said, would create sources of supply in all areas of entertainment. “Every new medium has brought predictions of the death of every other,” he was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times in 1966. “Radio was said to be all washed up, but stations are selling for higher prices than ever. When television came along, the studios were prepared to sell all their product, fire their people, and fold up.

  “But we’re only at the beginning of the beginning.”

  President Lyndon B. Johnson (with his back to the camera) hosting a lunch for members of the motion-picture industry on June 26, 1968. Seated at the president’s left is Lew Wasserman; others at the table are Robert Benjamin, David Brown, Leo Jaffe, Arthur Krim, Benjamin Melniker, Louis Nizer, Arnold Picker, Milton Rackmil, Abraham Schneider, Jack Valenti, Edwin Weisl, and Richard Zanuck, along with White House deputy press secretary Tom Johnson. Courtesy of the LBJ Library

  Chapter 3

  POLITICAL MIGHT

  On a summer morning in 1965, a young assistant to President Lyndon Johnson named Larry Levinson was passing through the gated corridor that led from the Executive Office Building to the White House. It was a private entrance, one often used by Johnson for important visitors he wanted to shield from the press. There in the waiting area was a tall, rail-thin man seated in an armchair, very upright, wearing a dark suit, dark tie. Levinson had noticed many visitors there before, but something about this one piqued his curiosity. “He was sitting there, not reading a book or a newspaper—just so composed,” Levinson recalled. “I said to the guard, Sergeant Mazzoli, with whom I was friendly, ‘Who’s that?’

  “ ‘That’s Mr. Wasserman,’ Mazzoli replied. ‘He’s very powerful. And, by the way, the reason he’s so powerful is, he’s Hollywood.’ ”

  Commanding as Wasserman had been in the forties and fifties, those decades had been a mere prologue. He had transformed the agency business, and he had appropriated TV production; but in the Hollywood hierarchy, these were still substrata. Once he joined the ranks of the old moguls as chief of Universal Pictures, however, he was positioned to become industry leader. It was a new, imperial role, of his design. There had never been one individual who spoke for this industry, and who navigated its course singlehandedly. Wasserman’s predecessors—L. B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner, and the rest—had reigned supreme over their own fiefdoms, but none of them had wielded authority over all of Hollywood. Wasserman was determined to do just that. In fact, he could tolerate nothing less. He had after all felt compelled to exert utter control over all aspects of his agency (though answering, ultimately, to Stein)—and the talent business had not been nearly as vulnerable to a complex array of political, social, and economic forces as this giant production business would be. And even there, at the old MCA, he had been caught momentarily off guard when the government filed its antitrust suit, and he had felt, for a brief time, at the mercy of the regulators. In the end the suit had been resolved most idyllically for Wasserman, but he had nonetheless taken a lesson from that experience: he meant never again to find himself without protection in Washington that was both broad and deep. So—several years before his leadership of the industry was formalized in any way—he began laying the groundwork for a Hollywood political machine that would be far more sophisticated, far richer, and far more high-powered than any that had existed before.

  At the start, Wasserman worked closely with New Yorker Arthur Krim, the formidable president of United Artists. In May 1962, Krim had orchestrated the spectacular, all-star birthday gala for President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden where he was serenaded by Marilyn Monroe, then went on to a dinner at the Four Seasons and an all-night party at Krim’s stately Upper East Side townhouse. The event was so successful (netting $1 million, an extraordinary sum at the time) that Krim wanted to devise some way to keep these contributors engaged. In the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had gotten relatively little money from New York because it had been held back by the head of the state committee, according to Krim; most of the money Kennedy received from New York came through a citizens committee led, in part, by Robert Benjamin, Krim’s partner at United Artists. Now, Krim wanted to create a money flow that would circumvent local party organizations. He decided to form something called the President’s Club, which would raise money that would go not to the party but directly to the president for his political use. For a membership fee of $1,000, one could join the President’s Club and attend “seminars” with top people in the cabinet, as well as fund-raising dinners for the president. Of the rewards that came with membership in the President’s Club, Krim said in an oral history interview for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library “it didn’t get you a favor with the government, but it got you an awful lot of fun for yourself and a feeling of being close to the charisma of power.” Initially, the President’s Club was based only in New York, but within a year or so Krim had enlisted Wasserman to start one in California, and soon there were branches nationwide.

  Wasserman became a close ally of Eugene Wyman,
the California Democratic party chairman. Wyman, a lawyer from Chicago, had founded a well-regarded, prosperous law firm in Beverly Hills; he was also the husband of City Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman, who played an important part in bringing the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. “Gene had lived in the shadow of his prominent political wife,” recalled Joe Cerrell, who was Wyman’s political assistant. “But once he became chairman in 1961, he was like a kid in a candy store! The law firm was developed by then, so he could spend almost full-time on politics. And he was willing to raise big bucks—something previous party chairmen had not done.” Wyman had a coterie of friends and clients—many were movers and shakers on the Westside—whom he tapped for large sums. Among them were Eugene Klein, CEO of National General Corporation, owner of the Chargers football team and Wasserman’s close colleague in the President’s Club; Mark Taper, head of the American Savings & Loan Association; Luis and Mark Boyar, real estate developers; Alfred Hart, founder and chairman of City National Bank in Beverly Hills—and, also, a business associate of Joseph Fusco, a liquor distributor who was an apprentice in the Capone mob; and John “Jake the Barber” Factor. “Jake the Barber was an easy touch for Wyman. He gave a lot of money,” Cerrell said. “I remember once Wyman saying, ‘Get me Jake the Barber.’ And his secretary (she must’ve been new) came back and said, ‘I’ve looked all through the directory, there is no barber named Jake.’ ” Sidney Korshak was a close friend of Wyman’s, and was often present at the political get-togethers at the Wyman home in Bel Air. Korshak was said to be a generous contributor (“He had to do something with all that cash!” one friend of his commented), but often not in his own name.