by Connie Bruck
Ziontz became very close to Rosenfeld, who admired Wasserman enormously. Rosenfeld would tell and retell the story of how, during the attempted coup in 1969, he had paid a visit to his longtime client Jules Stein. “Don told Jules he was making a big mistake in getting rid of Lew, and Lew never forgot that,” Ziontz said. Rosenfeld also said that Wasserman had bailed him out financially when he became overextended in the stock market. So there was a bond between the two men that went far beyond normal business ties, and endured over decades. Nonetheless, Rosenfeld quaked before Wasserman. “Don had this big bottle of Maalox near his desk, and when he got a call from Wasserman, he’d quickly pop ten Maalox in his mouth,” Ziontz said. “The first time I saw it, I asked what he was doing. And he said, ‘My stomach gets so upset. It’s preventative.’ ” And, much to his chagrin, Ziontz found himself responding as Rosenfeld did. “When Wasserman called, I got so tense—it was irrational to be so unnerved, just hearing that someone was on the line! But I did.” Phones were installed in the bathrooms of the Rosenfeld firm (an anomaly in those days), so that Wasserman would never have to wait to reach a lawyer. “He wanted you to act like he was the only person in the world,” Ziontz said.
Ziontz came to recognize the signal Wasserman traits—intellect, judgment, self-assurance, prodigious memory. But these qualities in themselves, he thought, did not account for what was almost a cult of idolatry that had grown up around Wasserman. Ziontz decided that Wasserman was able to encourage that worship, however subtly, because he was “a tremendous politician, and a great manipulator of people.” “He would pay attention to you in small ways, to make you feel like you were important. He would remember some little thing about me; put it away in his memory bank; and toss it out to me to show he remembered my transactions. It was two-edged: I know everything about you, I’m watching you—but also, I know who you are, I recognize you as a person. He ran the gamut from being the most gracious person I dealt with at MCA to being the most severe.”
For more than twenty years, Ziontz would represent MCA, dealing closely with Wasserman—who remained the firm’s most important client by far. After a while, he learned how to stay on Wasserman’s good side, most of the time. An extremely voluble person, master of the extended monologue, Ziontz had to suppress those instincts entirely and, instead, distill information to its essence, and convey it in a few words. He would prepare a summary of no more than one page for a meeting with Wasserman—but he suspected Wasserman only glanced at it, and threw it away. “He never took notes. He listened to what was being said, and he got it.” Nor did Ziontz recall ever having received a memo from Wasserman. “He didn’t deal with the written word.” Wasserman’s expectations were so high and unremitting that the job came to feel a little like a high-wire performance that had no end. “It was not just a question of conveying facts or advice. There was this whole other thing going on—you had to be at your best. I always thought that he wasn’t getting the best advice, actually, because there was this aspect of being mortified, lest you say the wrong thing.” In contentious moments, Ziontz tried to strike just the right balance—conveying that he knew his place, and yet holding his ground; Wasserman did not like weakness. And Ziontz knew he should never, but never, violate one of the rules Wasserman had laid down.
That was what David Wexler did. Wexler, a securities lawyer at Rosenfeld, worked on MCA matters for about twenty years, beginning in 1965. He was well aware of Wasserman’s prohibition against MCA’s agreeing to indemnify another party; there had been an indemnification provision in some contracts involving the savings and loans MCA had acquired, and MCA eventually had to make good on those indemnification clauses, which were costly. “Wasserman said, ‘I never will sign an indemnification!’ He was mad and he issued a rule—and once he issued a rule, that was it. I am not aware of his ever changing a rule, though some rules may have just disappeared,” Wexler said. In the early eighties, he was negotiating a contract between MCA and the Bass brothers, who wanted an indemnification. “They were in their rights,” Wexler said. “I recommended the indemnification. I drafted the most watered-down provision I possibly could. I consulted with Don Rosenfeld and [MCA executive] Al Dorskind, who told me to go forward. Lew went ballistic! He fired me—which meant I could no longer work on MCA matters, which was three fourths of my business. It was a scary time. Now, as it happened, it changed my life for the better—I would always have been dependent on that Black Tower.” Instead, he began doing securities work for a whole range of clients.
At the time, though, Wexler said, it was devastating. “I had never been angrier in my life—I’d done tender offers for them; handled their subsidiaries; wrote the scripts for their board meetings; done corporate minutes for years. Then, Lew fired me. I was expendable. I was an object lesson. It was a lesson to those around him that his orders were to be obeyed.” He paused, and added, “Decent people don’t do things like that.”
It was one thing to strive to establish such control in one’s immediate environment, and quite another in the outside world. Even there, though, Wasserman saw fit to punish a challenge to his authority.
George Stevens, Jr., had known Wasserman casually from the time Stevens started out in the movie business. In the mid-fifties, he had gone to work for Jack Webb, when Webb was on the Revue lot, acting in movies and, also, the immensely successful TV show Dragnet, which Webb produced as well. “I vividly remember Lew—lean, young, smiling—coming with Jay Kanter to see Jack,” Stevens said. “He came over regularly. That was when not everyone came to Lew, he came to people. He was still on the pavement then. And I knew him around town, too.” In 1967, Stevens founded the American Film Institute (AFI), which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and contributions from the movie companies. One of its first projects was dedicated to film preservation. “We found that half of the films that had been made were either missing, had been destroyed, or were deteriorating. The film companies had had no interest in preserving films because they were thinking about tomorrow.” So AFI started a film rescue operation; its investigators canvassed collectors, looking for lost films, and they told the collectors that if they would turn over the film so it could be preserved, they would be given a print. And their identities would be kept confidential. Soon, ten thousand films had been recovered and were deposited in the Library of Congress.
One was The King of Jazz, the old movie about the former MCA client Paul Whiteman, which an AFI investigator recovered from a collector in London. It was owned by Universal. “Lew called. He was, shall I say, intense. ‘What’s this, you have this movie of ours, The King of Jazz?’ I didn’t know, I said, let me check. I called back and said, yes, good thing we found it. Lew took off. I’d never heard an adult speak that loudly. ‘This is our movie! I want the name of the guy in London. I am going to get that print!’ Now, we were sending a print to Universal, it wasn’t that they didn’t have it. But I guess Lew must have felt this guy was a pirate, and he was outraged. We had an understanding with these collectors, though, that we would give them a print, and would keep their identities private, and I wasn’t going to turn the guy in. I was a young guy—maybe thirty-two—and it was just very clear to me that I should do what I thought was right.
“That was the end of Universal’s support of AFI. It never contributed from then on. That made it more difficult to build AFI—but we did.” Wasserman, who was a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, would always attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony (of which Stevens was executive producer). “He was always very pleasant, avuncular—but Edie was always looking for trouble,” Stevens said. “She was not happy with how she was seated, or something.
“He never bad-mouthed me, or bad-mouthed AFI,” Stevens continued. “I never heard of him telling other companies not to support us. It wasn’t like a scorched-earth policy. It was just that for him, it would always be this way. I never did fully understand it—how do you stay mad for that long?
And he never referred to it except once, many years later. He said to me. ‘You had your view, we had ours. It just wasn’t an institution we wanted to deal with.’ ”
As Wasserman presided majestically over a world he had been shaping for decades, there were many things that were pleasing to him, but one seemed to outshine all the rest. For he appeared at this moment to have a good chance of attaining the only major goal that had most painfully eluded him—joining the ranks of the legendary movie producers. “Not since the heyday of Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and Darryl F. Zanuck has Hollywood seen anything like the creative tumult of Universal City or the business success of MCA,” wrote Peter Schuyten in a Fortune article in November 1976. Wasserman’s original formula—combining inevitably volatile movie production with a stable and highly lucrative TV business—was now empirically proven. And, even more important, Wasserman had demonstrated that under his aegis, Universal—always the major studios’ weak sister, prolific producer of B movies—could produce not only commercially successful movies like Airport, but, also, movies that made money and were acclaimed.
Wasserman’s chief movie executive during this period was Ned Tanen, who had started out in the MCA mailroom in 1955, and was an iconoclastic, rebellious personality for the regimental MCA. Wasserman evidently liked him; for many years, Tanen was assigned the office next to Wasserman’s, and Wasserman sometimes introduced him as his illegitimate son. On occasion, Tanen even stood up to Wasserman—and survived. Tanen thought that Wasserman tolerated his willfulness because he had a track record of moneymaking ideas. In the late sixties, he had started a record company, UNI, which was highly successful for a time, until it was folded into MCA Records. He also had come up with the idea of building the Universal Amphitheater, as a site for holding outdoor concerts. Apparently as a sign of his favor, Wasserman had a bust made of Tanen’s head, beneath which was engraved, “The Father of the Amphitheater.” There was some precedent for this at the company; a bust of Jules Stein, for example, graced the lobby of the Black Tower. But Tanen thought it was gauche. He took the small sculpture and used it as a coatrack in his office, throwing his jacket over his marble head.
Tanen’s entry to the movie business came in 1969. At the time, Universal’s movies were so anachronistic and mediocre that they had almost cost Wasserman his job. But the phenomenal success of Columbia Pictures’ Easy Rider seemed to point a way to salvation. Easy Rider reflected the ethos of the prevailing counterculture in both its substance and costs (less than $400,000), but it was gratifyingly materialistic in its profits ($40 million in worldwide box office grosses). Wasserman put Tanen in charge of a youth movie division. His mandate was to produce films for under $1 million, offering talent a meaningful piece of the back end and even final cut—in an attempt to capture the spirit of the times with very little risk. As Tanen tells the story, Jules Stein summoned him shortly after he’d been given this assignment, and informed him that he had spent the previous evening at a dinner party with Dennis Hopper—the co-writer, co-star, and director of Easy Rider—and had told Hopper to come see Tanen, because Universal would do his next movie. Tanen knew how (in a word) crazy Hopper could be, and was filled with apprehension. His worst fears were realized when Hopper—after filming in Peru, and cutting the movie over an extended, binge-filled period in Taos, New Mexico—completed The Last Movie. Aptly titled, it was a box office failure, so panned by most critics that it sent Hopper into a decade-long retreat from directing. (Once, when Wasserman was asked if he had made any mistakes, he pointed to The Last Movie, saying, “At a press preview the first and last reels were mixed up. The end of the film was shown first and the beginning was shown at the end, but the film was so confusing anyway that the audience didn’t know the difference.”)
Other movies that came out of Tanen’s unit, however, were interesting, imaginative films, notably different from Universal’s conventional fare—among them, Diary of a Mad Housewife, directed by Frank Perry, Taking Off, by Milos Forman, Minnie and Moskowitz, by John Cassavetes. None, however, were commercial successes. Tanen argued that that was the fault of Universal’s marketing and distribution people. “All they understood was Ross Hunter movies,” he said. “They didn’t have any idea what they were looking at in these movies—so they buried them.” In any event, Tanen’s unit was nearly written off as a failure. But then came the big payoff with George Lucas’s American Graffiti—a nostalgic feature about the innocence of adolescent life on the West Coast in the early sixties, before the trauma of Vietnam. Tanen recalled that some of his fellow executives at Universal so hated the movie that they thought it should not be released; someone suggested that it might be suitable as a movie for television. Ultimately, the movie was released in 1973—and to the amazement of many at Universal, it was nominated for five Academy Awards. Moreover, while it cost only about $700,000, it ultimately earned about $120 million—making it one of the most profitable films in history.
As pleasant a surprise as the nominations of American Graffiti were, it was The Sting—which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1974—that gave Wasserman his first real movie-making triumph. “It was the first time Universal had gotten an Academy Award [for best picture] since All Quiet on the Western Front, and they were euphoric,” declared Dick Zanuck, who co-produced The Sting with his partner, David Brown. “There was a big celebration.”
Zanuck explained that like many others who had grown up in Hollywood’s small-town community, he had known Wasserman since he was a youth. And when he was just starting out in the business and faced a serious crisis, he had instinctively turned to Wasserman for advice. Darryl, the longtime chief of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, had been elected president of the company in 1962, and he had made twenty-eight-year-old Dick vice president in charge of production. Since Darryl was spending nearly all his time in Paris, however, Dick was effectively running the company. And it was a failing company, reeling from the debacle of Cleopatra, on the verge of bankruptcy. Dick went to visit Wasserman at the Universal lot, where the Black Tower was under construction. “I told him the state of affairs at Fox. He said, “If I were you—you see this tower we’re building? Why don’t we make that the Twentieth Century-Fox Tower?”
Confused, Zanuck asked what he meant. Wasserman pointed out that Twentieth Century occupied immensely valuable land in West Los Angeles. “ ‘Get rid of that real estate and you come here. You take the tower. We’ll build another tower.’
“Now, he didn’t say he was proposing a merger, but he had to have been thinking that that would happen, down the line, and he would have wanted our film library, which was incredible,” Zanuck continued. “I said, ‘We wouldn’t want to lose our identity,’ and he said, ‘You won’t—and we could keep this big lot alive between the two of us.’ ” Zanuck said that he called his father in Paris, although he did not believe they should seriously consider Wasserman’s proposal. “I knew it was an idea that would be great for Lew—and probably emasculate us. . . . I called him the next day. He was fine. He said, ‘Well, it’s always open.’ ”
Four years later, it would be Dick Zanuck who would make the deal for Twentieth Century to buy Reagan’s Malibu ranch property. When Dick was fired in a nasty proxy fight in 1970, Wasserman offered him and David Brown a production deal at Universal. Instead, the two men went to Warner Bros. as executives, but after a year and a half there, they asked their agent, Herman Citron (formerly a longtime MCA agent) to see if Wasserman’s offer was still good. That offer was $1 million for three years, to be divided between the two of them, Brown said. “Herman said it was, and that Lew and he were determined to do something on one sheet of paper,” Zanuck recalled. “We’d fight out all the points of a contract later. Within a week, we were in Lew’s office. He said, ‘I want to take you to your office.’ There was this bungalow, filled with Jules Stein’s antiques, and a huge tree in the yard. And there was a little sign out front, stuck in the grass: Zanuck and Brown Company.”
Zanuck and Br
own immediately pitched two projects to Wasserman: The Sting, and Sugarland Express, which had been brought to them by a young director, Steven Spielberg, who was one of Universal’s stable, maintained with long-term deals. Spielberg had a seven-year contract—just like in the old studio system days—and was directing TV shows. “I told Lew, ‘This script, Sugarland Express, with Steven Spielberg—you’ve put it in turnaround,’ ” Zanuck recalled, referring to the decision not to go forward with a project. “He said, ‘The kid is great. But this picture will play to empty houses.’ I said, ‘I think you’re wrong about that. I really like it. But read The Sting and let me know what you think. I’ve got the kid down in the commissary—I’ll tell him.’ I turned to leave. He said, ‘You really think that picture has a chance?’ ‘I think it has a great chance.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you’re totally wrong, but go ahead and make it. I didn’t bring you over here to tell you what pictures to make.’
