by Connie Bruck
For Wasserman, the standard of excellence against which he measured his company remained MGM, as he had known it in the late thirties and early forties. Commenting on Universal’s success in the interview with the Los Angeles Times Calendar in September 1973, Wasserman invoked his touchstone, saying, “In its heyday, MGM—which was then probably the biggest and best of the studios—produced 100 hours of film per year. Today, the hours are, well, precious few. But here, we made 300 hours of film last year and spent more than any two or three studios spent in those heydays combined.” (To arrive at his three-hundred-hour figure, however, Wasserman was combining feature films for theatrical release with TV films—a product twice the volume of the feature films.)
The Home Magazine piece was actually the most revealing, because the interviewer, Marshall Berges, attempted to get Wasserman to talk not only about the business but, also, himself, and the format was Q&A. It was a distinctly friendly piece. There was no mention here, as there had been in the Wall Street Journal, of the fact that Wasserman slept in a couch outside his wife’s bedroom so as not to disturb her with his early morning rising. Here, Edie and he were photographed seated on either side of a two-seater desk that the accompanying text pointed out, “enables the Wassermans to face each other while they keep up with correspondence.” Wasserman was wearing the large, dark-rimmed glasses that were so distinctive they had in the last few years become a kind of trademark—though he was not generally photographed with them on. He described his routine. Seven days a week, he would rise at 5:00 a.m. to begin his series of calls (“During high school, I worked full-time as a theatre usher, so the habit of very little sleep—maybe five hours a night—has been with me for a long time”). He would call associates to learn the previous day’s grosses from the tour and MCA movies worldwide, as well as the ratings of the previous night’s TV shows. By 9:00 a.m., he would arrive at his office (having driven himself there in his white Mercedes roadster, with the license plate MCA1). Throughout the day, he would meet with other MCA executives, and he would periodically receive slips of paper showing updated box office figures. In the evening, he would have dinner with his wife, and screen feature films and TV shows. Berges asked whether there was any phase of the business in which he would like to be involved if he had more time, and Wasserman replied, “I don’t think so. I’ve been fortunate in disciplining myself so that I can focus my attention without distraction. I just blank out whatever else there might be, to achieve the benefit of concentration.”
Was he ever a foolish young man? “Can I answer that?” Edie responded. “He was very mature and thoughtful at 22. He never did anything foolish. The reason, I think, was that he had to go to work at a very early age.”
And what standards does he set for his executives, to help them choose stars and stories? “Rarely do I have to tell them anything,” Wasserman replied. “They know I’m a very curious fellow. That I have an insatiable appetite for knowledge. That I expect them to have the answers to questions that might be asked.”
Such as? “Some basic ones are Why? What? Where? How?”
Would he amplify? “Why that subject? What’s the logic behind it? What are you attempting to achieve? What’s your point of view? Where is the pre-production planning? How will it be executed?”
Was he a hard and ruthless man, as some of his critics said? “If negotiating in an attempt to arrive at a favorable deal comes under the heading of being hard, I would stipulate that I’m hard. I believe all of MCA’s management is ruthless in its zealousness to protect the corporation.” But then, Wasserman must have recalibrated. “Actually, I don’t believe the word ‘ruthless’ fits our time. It is outmoded. It’s a carryover from robber baron days. I don’t think our society today permits people to be ruthless. But as for being hard, I guess I’m guilty.”
The real sticklers, however, came toward the end of the interview, when Berges’s questions became more personal.
What did he do for relaxation? “Sit in the hot sun and do absolutely nothing,” said the man who avoided leisure (vacations, cultural pastimes, recreation) like a scourge. “If it’s a miserable weekend and there’s no sun to sit in, I’m miserable.”
And what did he not find time to do that he would really like to do? “I’d like to take a tour. . . . Drive across the U.S. I have flown across America more than a thousand times, but I’ve never seen it. I’d like to take a slow, casual, relaxing tour by auto. Just poking along and seeing the sights.”
It was, perhaps, an attempt to normalize himself, to seem to be—for just this quick moment—a more regular person, who could savor life’s small pleasures. But to the people who worked for him, no image could have been more incongruous. How could the man who considered his time too valuable to waste it on “hello” or “goodbye” in a phone conversation, who cut each exchange to the bone, lend himself to “just poking along”? Wasserman’s mystique had only deepened with the years, his ever increasing power further enhancing his personal stature; and his associates, more than ever, were held in a thrall of reverence and fear. Perhaps no one was more acutely aware of this than Sheinberg, who was in the disconcerting position of having been uniquely elevated as heir apparent—and who felt, at the same time, diminished, because now he was always measured against Wasserman. “It was very difficult,” Sheinberg said. “I had become president—but I can assure you that to convince people that anyone but Lew had authority was not easy. He was king of the world.”
Within his domain, Wasserman was more austere and remote than ever. Few had as much opportunity to observe him up close (albeit from a narrow perspective) as his secretary, Melody Sherwood. Sherwood had joined MCA as a “floater” in the secretarial pool in the spring of 1962, when the company was still in the colonial-style mansion Stein had built. Even then, Wasserman had seemed an almost mythical presence. “A secretary would whisper, ‘There goes Mr. Wasserman!’ I’d run to get a look, but all I’d see was a door closing, or a shadow,” Sherwood recalled. Wasserman always had two secretaries, and in 1967, his longtime secretary, Kim Bryan, was looking for a replacement for the junior secretary who had just left. “Everyone was afraid,” Sherwood said; but she liked Bryan and was not so easily cowed, so she decided to apply for the job, and got it. Except for a two-year hiatus, she would work for him for the next thirty-one years.
She was trained by Bryan—a rigid taskmaster, who dealt with Wasserman’s subordinates in a stern and intimidating way, as though she were an extension of her boss. It was not an easy induction. When Sherwood first started working for Wasserman, he would often leave the office in the early evening to drive to downtown Los Angeles for meetings connected with the Center Theatre Group. Since she had the late shift, it was her duty to relay messages to him when he phoned from his car. “Kim was training me as to how I was to give him these messages. ‘He has no patience. Give him only the important ones. And remember, this is not a conversation!’ I was primed. I had the messages. He called in. ‘What have you got?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said—and hung up the phone!” Wasserman ate in the commissary nearly every day (ordering either tuna salad or fruit salad, year after year), and he wanted to be called at the phone at his table at 1:15 sharp, to be told the stock market closings. “I was nervous—it seemed rude to interrupt him at lunch, and I would blurt them out as fast as I could. In the first or second week I was there, he was having lunch with someone, and this time he did not want to be interrupted. He said, ‘Don’t call me with the closings. Don’t call unless the place is burning down.’ Well, fifteen minutes later, I saw smoke—the back lot was burning! I called security, and they said, yes, we know, call Mr. Wasserman. He answered the phone in this voice—‘Yes?’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, sir, but the place is burning down!’ ”
Gradually, she learned what was expected, and how to do it without buckling from the strain. Her shift started at 10:00 a.m., but since she could not risk an unforeseeable traffic jam making her even a minute late, she planned to arrive at MCA
by 8:30. And since her lunch break was from one to two, she was religious about being at her desk at two—never at, say, thirty seconds after two—even if Wasserman were at other MCA offices in New York or Europe, because he was likely to call then. “He was very aware of numbers—and time was a number.” She of course had to have a clean desk (she would hide papers under her typewriter cover). Either she or Bryan was to pick up his phone on the first ring, and no one was ever to be left on hold. She read his mail, underlining the sentences that were important, and was prepared to tell him in few words what was the bottom line of any communication. She answered his mail, too, and perfected his signature (actually, Bryan’s version of it). He never asked to see the letters she wrote for him before they went out, but she was careful to write and file every one, because it was too terrible to think of his reaction if he happened to ask to see such a letter sometime later and it did not exist. He did not like to give speeches, and would not say more than a few sentences at an event; these, too, she would generally write for him. She learned never to say, “I don’t know,” but rather, “I will find out.” She learned, too, never to tell him, as she did only once, that the line was busy on a call he had asked her to place but that she would keep trying. “He yelled, ‘Godammit, I don’t want excuses, I want results!’ ” So she learned always to call the operator and ask her to break in, as it was an emergency.
She knew he wanted the tour count—the number of visitors who had entered the Universal tour—each hour. “If I hadn’t given it to him at eleven, he’d buzz me at 11:05 and say, ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ and I’d have to call over and find out why we didn’t have it—maybe the machine had jammed.” He kept a weekly tour count (every hour of each day, written on long graph paper) in his desk drawer. Each count was accompanied by a description of the weather, including the temperature range. In a typical exchange, she continued, “He’d say, ‘What’s the count?’ ‘1412.’ ‘What was it last year?’ ‘Only 970, but there was a thunderstorm.’ ” Sherwood added, “It was a game. He loved numbers. And I guess if it was 10 percent over the previous year, he liked that.” Wasserman kept his appointment calendar in a box on his desk, and at the end of each day she was to lock the calendar in his desk drawer; it was very important to him that no one be able to see his appointment schedule. Sometimes, Sherwood would be driving over the canyon from the San Fernando Valley to her home on the Westside, and she would suddenly wonder whether she had indeed locked away his calendar, or she would think of some other task (like writing a letter) that she had left undone. “I’d think, Omigod! I’d turn around and go back to the office and do it. I would never take the risk of leaving something for the next day.”
Even as Wasserman’s idiosyncrasies became familiar, the job was, still, peculiarly demanding. “You had to be on your toes every minute. He did not want to waste a moment. If he wanted something, he wanted it immediately. You had to know how to get it, and even if he misspoke, and said he wanted it from the wrong person, you were to know enough to realize what he really meant, and get it right. Kim took all this very, very seriously. It was her life; it consumed her. She would go home at the end of the day with migraine headaches.”
Sherwood was a different personality—diligent, eminently capable, but also fun-loving, with an infectious laugh. It might be heresy, but she saw herself not as an acolyte but an employee in what was, after all, an entertainment company. After she had worked for Wasserman for some time, she made an effort to lighten the atmosphere slightly. She felt she had to—“otherwise it was just, ‘Good morning,’ ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Good night.’ ” So one day, she remarked to Wasserman, “ ‘That’s a nice tie.’ And he said, ‘Don’t get personal.’ ” She noticed that he was not that comfortable with women, and was particularly careful never to allow himself to be placed in what might be a compromising situation. When a woman was in his office, Sherwood said, there was almost always another executive there with them. “I think he didn’t want to give anyone the chance to say, you know, ‘Wasserman chased me around his desk.’ He was very old-fashioned, the straightest person in the world—the last one to have an affair!” The door between his office and her desk was always closed, and when she entered, she would typically leave the door open. On occasion, though, if she wanted to tell him something that she did not want overheard, she would shut the door behind her as she entered. “His eyes would pop—either because he was thinking, what would people think—or what is she going to say?”
Over the years, as she got to know him a little, she became braver, and took it as her challenge to make him laugh. “I had to, to make him seem more real, or I couldn’t have worked in that atmosphere. He’d get in the elevator and everyone would stiffen up in silence. I thought it must be very uncomfortable for him. . . . I always wanted to do something that you wouldn’t think you could do with him—literally, to humanize him.” For his sixty-fifth birthday, she invited about three hundred of the mid-level and lower-level executives, who would rarely have any chance to be with Wasserman, to congregate outside his office, as a surprise; she recited a poem she had written, and Ruth Cogen, Stein’s sister, accompanied her on the violin. “And I would joke with the executives. Someone would be waiting to see him, and his screams would be coming out of the office, and I’d say, maybe you don’t want to ask for that raise today.” It was not unusual for men to emerge from his office in tears, she recalled.
He did not generally subject Bryan or Sherwood to this treatment. He must have realized how seriously Bryan took her job, and he evidently wanted to please her; at a labor relations dinner honoring him in 1974, Wasserman remarked, “There’s a rumor around that Sid is president and I’m chairman. That’s not true. There’s only one person that runs MCA, fellows. It’s Kim Bryan. All I hear about the company is what she tells me, and that’s not a hell of a lot.” One day in 1975, however, Wasserman became furious at Bryan, and eviscerated her in front of another employee—something that Bryan found particularly humiliating, Sherwood said. “Mr. Wasserman had asked her to get something from an executive, and she thought it would be easier to get it from a different person. He asked her if she’d gotten it, and she said yes, but from this other one—and he had not wanted that person to know. He screamed. She walked out of his office, picked up her purse, said to me, ‘It’s all yours’—and left.”
Sherwood kept in touch with Bryan over the years, but Wasserman did not. His employees were not supposed to leave MCA; he viewed it as a kind of violation. “I’m sure her leaving upset him, but he never said a word about it,” Sherwood recalled. “Once she walked out, it was as if she’d never been there.”
Wasserman’s imperial regime extended beyond the immediate confines of MCA, too, to the lawyers at the Beverly Hills firm of Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman. This was the firm that Larry Beilenson had started in the early fifties with Jules Stein’s encouragement and, in short order, his clients. For just as Stein had passed along many of his musician clients to his accountant, Harry Berman, so he referred his Hollywood talent to this law firm. It was, of course, a patent conflict of interest for the law firm to be representing both MCA and MCA’s clients. (But, as Rosenfeld partner David Wexler commented, “Conflicts of interest don’t exist here—this is show biz!”) From Stein’s standpoint, the arrangement was ideal; the law firm was MCA’s outside counsel, so it appeared to be independent—but, in reality, it was utterly beholden to MCA. Initially, therefore, the firm’s practice was mainly in entertainment law; as MCA grew into a major corporation, the firm’s practice expanded, too.
Mel Ziontz, a corporate lawyer who joined the Rosenfeld firm as a young associate in 1969, recalled the first time he was summoned to a meeting with the executive his colleagues referred to, usually in hushed tones, as “LRW.” Donald Rosenfeld, a tax attorney who for many years had done work for Jules Stein as well as MCA, informed Ziontz that he could not simply go to Wasserman’s office; Rosenfeld would accompany him, to introduce him. “So I went there. It was ful
l of people. Don introduced me, and I said, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ Wasserman said, ‘I hope you still feel that way at the end of this meeting.’ ” A junior MCA executive began his presentation, proposing that they acquire a small company that made audio consoles. “There was a project, like a jukebox; it had blank eight-tracks, and you picked a tune, and paid for your eight-track. Essentially, you could customize your own album,” Ziontz continued. “Wasserman said, ‘Let me get this straight. You want to manufacture equipment that would enable people to steal our copyrights?’ ” The executive committed the cardinal error of trying to defend himself, which only enraged Wasserman further. He had seen other “screamers and yellers,” Ziontz said, “but they were all rank amateurs. No one else could carry it off the same way. When he was doing it, there was no profanity. It was like an out-of-body experience. His voice got very high, higher than you could imagine it could. It was so terrible. I think the guy would have jumped out the window if he could have—he was trembling, he couldn’t speak. Wasserman came around his desk, screaming at him. Then, he turned to go back behind the desk—and it was, evidently, a signal! Everyone stood up. The meeting was over. Hal Haas [the MCA treasurer], put his arm around me, saying, ‘You look a little shaken. By the way, you’d better get used to it. That was an hors d’oeuvre. Wait till you see the main course!’ ”
