When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  As the negotiations intensified, Barron continued, MGM took the position that CIC should take not just their theatrical films but also their television series for distribution. CIC, however, was structured to distribute theatrical films and, then, videocassettes—but not TV series. “It was 11:30 at night. I said to George Smith, we’ve gotta call Lew. George made the call. Lew got on, and George said, ‘Lew, Art has something to tell you,’ and passed the phone to me! I told him that MGM wanted us to take their TV series. He said, ‘Art, I’m sure you’ll know what to do,’ and he hung up. I thought, this is worse than before! If I take them, he’ll say, why did you do something so stupid? And if I don’t, and the deal falls through, he’ll blame me. I got out my Korshak number. I said, ‘Sidney, this is where we’re at.’ He said, ‘Hold your ground.’ That was it. A half hour later, MGM took it off the table,” Barron said, referring to MGM’s retraction of its earlier demand. “I never knew what happened.

  “I remember we got a bill,” Barron concluded. “It was a piece of stationery that had ‘Sidney Korshak, Counselor-at-Law’ at the top. ‘Fees—$50,000.’ We always made attorneys give us hourly fees. I showed it to Charlie. He said, what’s this? He got on the phone to Lew. ‘Lew, I got this bill from Sidney Korshak, it says fees, $50,000. What should I do?’ And Lew said, ‘I’d pay it, because you’re not getting anything else.’ ”

  Korshak had other connections in the corporate world, but none had the stature of Wasserman. And the fact of their friendship served to legitimize Korshak to a degree, and to make him more palatable in some business circles. It also may have helped to immunize him from prosecution; while he was investigated by federal agents for many years, no criminal charges were ever brought—perhaps because of influence brought to bear, or, too, because of the difficulty of piercing his well-fortified shield. A. O. Richards, a retired FBI official who was chief of the organized crime section in Los Angeles for many years, commented on Korshak’s closeness to Wasserman, saying, “He was almost an untouchable. You couldn’t go after him, he was too well protected. Who would dare to wiretap Korshak?”

  In this singularly complaisant community, money and power tended to make almost anything acceptable; but the Wasserman-Korshak relationship still provoked comment, if not censure. “It was always the question,” said veteran labor lawyer Leo Geffner. “What is Lew, a leader of the industry, powerful, so respected, doing as the intimate of someone known to be a fixer, in league with the mob?” Paradoxically, though, Wasserman’s continuing to extend his mantle to Korshak—even now, when Wasserman was at the apex of his corporate life—served only to underscore his sovereignty. Both Jules Stein and Don Rosenfeld are said to have warned him repeatedly about his very public relationship with Korshak—but Wasserman did not alter it. He deemed it appropriate, so it was.

  Even Wasserman would have been unable to consort with Korshak if Korshak had a criminal conviction, or if his mob associations were fully exposed in the press. The reason Korshak was such an effective emissary was that those in the legitimate world who dealt with him could pretend not to know whose interests he represented. Ever since Lester Velie’s 1950 article in Collier’s, which asserted that Korshak had mob ties, Korshak had led a charmed life, press-wise. In his hometown of Chicago, the newspapers were not interested in a piece that took a hard look at Korshak; veteran investigative journalist Sandy Smith, who worked for the Chicago Tribune and then the Chicago Sun-Times in the sixties, recalled that editors at both newspapers refused to run a Korshak piece (“I was always bucking a tide that was carrying him away from me,” Smith said). Irving Kupcinet, the Sun-Times columnist who was something of a Chicago celebrity, was a loyal friend and booster of Korshak. And in his adopted town, Los Angeles, Korshak was given similarly deferential treatment. For years, he was mentioned only in the social columns of the Los Angeles Times. “If you’re not invited to Sidney Korshak’s Christmas party, it’s a disaster,” wrote his friend the columnist Joyce Haber. In 1969, the Los Angeles Times finally ran a feature piece on Korshak, by reporter Paul Steiger. It did mention some of the controversial elements of the Korshak biography, but the headline of the page-one story conveyed the overall tone and thrust of the piece: “Sidney Korshak: Man Who Makes Things Happen—Millionaire Lawyer’s Influence and Contacts Range Over Many Fields.” Korshak was said to have considered it a useful advertisement.

  By the seventies, Korshak’s record was not unblemished, but it seemed to carry little stigma. He did pay thousands in civil penalties to the Internal Revenue Service. And he also entered into a consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1970, stemming from allegations of stock manipulation and fraud, in connection with the Parvin-Dohrmann company in Beverly Hills. Parvin-Dohrmann was another sixties conglomerate, and its chairman was Delbert Coleman, a wealthy Chicago businessman who had been friendly with Korshak for years. Coleman and his partner, Herbert Siegel, had owned Seeburg, the Chicago-based vending machine and jukebox company, where they had hired Korshak to handle their labor problems (and paid him, in one instance, with a Cadillac). Here, Coleman wanted to buy the Stardust Hotel and Casino from Moe Dalitz (who had earlier acquired it from Jake Factor, with Korshak’s help), and Korshak introduced Coleman to Dalitz. The SEC said that Coleman authorized a secret fee of $500,000 to Korshak, which was not disclosed to shareholders, in violation of SEC rules; and, moreover, that Coleman, aided by Korshak and others, manipulated the price of Parvin-Dohrmann stock. (Among those who profited were Korshak’s brother, Marshall, and the actress Jill St. John.) In the end, Korshak had to disgorge most of his profit, and both he and Coleman had to sever their ties with Parvin-Dohrmann. It evidently caused a strain in their friendship as well. The SEC case triggered a Justice Department inquiry, and Korshak may have worried about what Coleman was willing to say to the investigators to protect himself. Herbert Siegel recalled that during this period, “Sidney came up to me at ‘21,’ and he said, ‘If your ex-partner isn’t careful, he’s going to be wearing cement shoes.’ ”

  It probably did not sound like an empty threat, coming from someone with Korshak’s bona fides. Many remembered that years after Willie Bioff had testified that Korshak was a mob affiliate—testimony that dogged Korshak always—Bioff finally received his comeuppance. Korshak had a view of informants that was catholic in his particular world. A friend of Korshak’s recalled a conversation the two had one day in the seventies. Korshak told him that a man whom the mob considered a “rat fink,” and whom they had been searching for, had finally been located. “That’s great,” this friend said. “Where is he?”

  “In Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico,” Korshak replied.

  It was not a persona that most of his Hollywood friends ever saw. By the seventies, Korshak, a graying man in his signature Pucci dark silk suits, had become a fixture in this community, with many of the trappings of respectability. The Hillcrest Country Club prided itself on its selectivity. Yet Korshak was a long-standing member, and he frequently lunched there, often in the company of a prominent lawyer or a judge. Leo Geffner, who became very friendly with Korshak during their racetrack negotiations in the early seventies, recalled meeting him for lunch one day at the Luau, a Beverly Hills restaurant. “This guy sits down with us—I didn’t catch his name. He was very friendly with Sid. After he left, I asked who he was. The Beverly Hills chief of police!” Geffner exclaimed. Reagan was governor at this time. (Korshak had been a major contributor to his campaign, according to Korshak’s friend Tony Martin.) Korshak told Geffner that he and Reagan had been friends for a very long time. “Sidney would say, ‘Ronnie says he’s so pure, he’s really phony with this big moralistic platform—he and I used to be with hookers in the same bedroom!’ He said they went out screwing together in between Reagan’s two marriages.” Their relationship, in any event, was still strong, according to Korshak. “Sid would often say, ‘I talked to Ron last night’—not bragging, just factual,” Geffner said. And Korshak had acquired an extensive art collecti
on. “You’d go to the bathroom in his house, and you’d see a small Degas—a Cézanne—a Matisse! He didn’t know anything about art—I think it was more, this is what you do when you’re rich, you have art. He had a curator for the collection in his house.”

  At the same time, there was no pretense about his other life. “He was the fixer, the moneyman, the consigliere to the real big boys,” Geffner declared. “I can’t tell you how many times I’d be sitting at the racetrack with him, and someone would bring him a note, and he’d say, I’m sorry, I have to go—and later I’d find out that there had been a private plane waiting for him to take him to Las Vegas, or Chicago, or Miami.” And Korshak’s view of the mobsters who summoned him, Geffner added, was “that they were great guys, getting a bum rap.”

  To his friends in the show business world, Korshak continued to be a magnanimous patron. And the fact that these people saw only beneficence from someone who they knew had a darker side made his generosity seem all the more noteworthy, if not positively redemptive. Korshak no doubt enjoyed helping his friends, but he also plainly relished each opportunity to demonstrate his clout and, perhaps, insure a sense of indebtedness in his friends. He disdained the small favor. Warren Beatty, who knew Korshak quite well, recalled that he wanted to go to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, but he had waited too long to make reservations. He was told that every hotel in the city was fully booked. “I called Sidney. ‘Can you find me a room?’

  “ ‘Where would you like to stay, Warren?’

  “ ‘The Ambassador East would be nice—but, really, anywhere.’

  “ ‘How many suites would you like?’

  “ ‘A room, Sidney—I really don’t need a suite. A room would be great.’

  “Three minutes later, the phone rang,” Beatty continued. “ ‘You have three suites at the Ambassador East.’ ”

  Korshak negotiated contracts for many of his friends—among them, Frank Yablans and Robert Evans—for free. “I’d say I wanted to pay him, and he’d say, ‘Give me $1 million’—or, ‘Buy me a hot dog,’ ” Yablans recalled. Yablans, a street-wise, tough-talking type from Brooklyn, who described some of the CIC negotiations in which he was involved as “sit-downs,” was quite impressed with his friend’s credentials. “Sidney was in the mob, but the way a Jew is in the mob. They wanted him to handle Hollywood, the Teamsters, Las Vegas—but not to kill people in Hollywood.” Korshak’s primary allegiance, however, resulted in his having some strange habits for someone who was now dealing at the level of major corporations like MCA and Gulf & Western. “I’d get a call at the Gulf & Western Building, in New York. ‘Francis, meet me on the corner.’ I’d come down there, and we’d start talking. I remember once I said, ‘Sidney, why are you making me walk to the corner and stand on Columbus Circle, on this cold day, to tell me something that could be taped, and it would not matter?’ But that was Sidney,” Yablans said fondly. “It was so ingrained in him.”

  No one in this show business circle, though, was more infatuated with Korshak than Evans, and Korshak seems to have been very fond of Evans, too (Evans reminded Korshak of Bugsy Siegel, according to Yablans). Evans and Korshak were close companions for many years, and the older man was the godfather of Evans’s son with actress Ali MacGraw. “He said he was my godfather, too,” Evans declared. Korshak had told him that he had indeed started out as Capone’s lawyer, Evans said, and that by the mid-thirties he was fully ensconced in the mob. He had proceeded to move up from there. For Evans, proximity to Korshak was a heady thing; every swagger seemed to thrill him. “We were at ‘21’ one night,” he recounted. “Sidney used to stay at the Carlyle, and he said, ‘Let’s walk.’ He had two hundred thousand-dollar bills in his pocket. I said, ‘Are you crazy? How can you walk with all that money?’ And he said, ‘Who’s gonna take it?’ ”

  Korshak’s long run of scant press attention finally ended in June 1976, when the New York Times published a four-part series about him by Seymour Hersh, in collaboration with Jeff Gerth, which appeared each day on the newspaper’s front page. “To his associates in Los Angeles, Sidney R. Korshak is a highly successful labor lawyer, an astute business adviser to major corporations, a multi-millionaire with immense influence and many connections, a friend of top Hollywood stars and executives,” Hersh wrote. Among those, he continued, were Wasserman and Bluhdorn. “But Sidney Korshak leads a double life. To scores of Federal, state and local law enforcement officials, Mr. Korshak is the most important link between organized crime and legitimate business.” Those officials contended that he had been involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion, fraud, and labor racketeering, and had also given illegal advice to members of organized crime—but, by and large, they said they had been unable to mount successful prosecutions because of the reluctance of witnesses to testify.

  Hersh described Korshak’s role as a “mediator” in the CIC transaction, and wrote that all three participants—Wasserman, Bluhdorn, and Kerkorian—“said they knew of no evidence linking Mr. Korshak to organized crime and labor racketeering.” Wasserman was quoted, saying that Korshak was a “very good personal friend . . . a very well-respected lawyer . . . a man of his word and good company.”

  “Told of some of Mr. Korshak’s connections with organized crime,” Hersh continued, “Mr. Wasserman said: ‘I don’t believe them. I’ve never seen him with so-called syndicate members or organization members.’ ”

  Korshak did not cast this article as a good advertisement. Over the years, his friends would tend to minimize it, as a piece that tried hard to indict Korshak but did not prove a case. Still, it drew a picture of the man in a way that had not been done before—and that would make it impossible, from then on, for the business executives with whom he dealt to claim they knew nothing about his ties. In Korshak’s life, it was a defining moment. It was certainly far less onerous for Wasserman, but he must have been mightily displeased—and it was Wasserman who had a good deal of sway with the Chandler family, publishers of the Los Angeles Times. It was the practice of that newspaper to publish syndicated articles of interest that appeared in the New York Times, particularly if the articles were about Los Angeles. Ruth Hirschman, the program director of KPFK, a public radio station in Los Angeles, recalled that that Sunday in late June, she read the article in the New York Times—and was amazed not to see it in the Los Angeles Times. “A front-page story, the first of four parts, about this man who was so influential in Los Angeles—and they weren’t running it?” She immediately called Hersh and asked for permission to have the piece read aloud on KPFK each day, as the next three installments appeared in the New York Times. He agreed. Her show caused a sensation, she said.

  At the time, she was reminded of something that had occurred in about 1962, when KPFK was just starting out, in offices on the street across from where the new Universal tower was being built. She was told that Wasserman had offered the new station space in the tower. “I thought, ‘Wow!’ But our manager said, ‘Uh-uh. The day will come when Wasserman does not like what we put on the air, and you know what? We will come to work the next morning, and we will not be able to get on the elevator.’ ”

  The CIC negotiations were unusual in many respects, but none more so than that Korshak was openly representing MCA. For despite the fact that dozens of people who dealt with Wasserman over the years attested to his closeness to Korshak—and Wasserman himself acknowledged it, as a relationship that had begun in 1939, when Wasserman first arrived in Los Angeles—the specifics of Korshak’s role vis-à-vis MCA had always been veiled. It is true, of course, that what Korshak as the consummate fixer did for Wasserman in some areas would of necessity be secret. But his much surmised role in labor relations at MCA could have been public, as it was at other companies. The 1969 Los Angeles Times profile of Korshak listed various clients that employed him as a labor consultant, for example, including Schenley Industries, the Dodgers, the California horse-racing association—but not MCA. Participants in the labor negotiations held bet
ween the studios and the unions—where Wasserman played a storied role—said that Korshak never appeared. Invisible though he was, however, he was a critical player. The critical player, according to Andy Anderson, who was head of the Western Conference of Teamsters for ten years, beginning in 1974. “The Teamsters never struck Lew,” Anderson declared. “And it was because of Sidney.”

  Anderson, a big, burly man from Oregon, had come to Southern California to organize workers for the Teamsters in 1954. He had known Dave Beck, Hoffa’s predecessor, and grasped early the potential for mutuality that existed between the Hollywood studios and the Teamsters leadership. “When Dave Beck retired in Seattle,” Anderson said, “he had a screening room built in his house, and the studios used to send him movies before they were released.” As Anderson rose in the Teamsters hierarchy, Korshak became his ubiquitous contact. “We’d negotiate with Sidney on the parking lot at the baseball stadium, the racetracks, the liquor industry, the breweries, the food industry, the motion picture industry.” They had lunch together at Hillcrest dozens of times, and at the Bistro, the Beverly Hills restaurant in which Korshak owned an interest, and where he held court at his special table in the back. Anderson said that until Hoffa went to prison in 1967, he was always in close touch with Korshak (“he checked with Sidney on everything he did, and he still got in trouble”). Korshak evidently felt he could trust Anderson. When they were together, Anderson said, they would sometimes be joined by “these characters. Sidney would introduce me, and he’d say about me, ‘He’s okay, we can talk in front of him.’ Then, after they left, he’d say, ‘You never met them.’ ” Korshak took his precautions, Anderson noted. “Sidney always used new money, usually hundred-dollar bills, fresh from the bank, so the money from the boys couldn’t be traced to him.” Anderson was awed at how much money Korshak was able to collect from clients who bought labor peace from him. “By February of each year, he told me he’d have more than $1 million in retainers, already paid up,” Anderson said. (The IRS investigation of Korshak found no more than $50,000 a year in retainers.) He recalled a meeting between Korshak and Mickey Rudin, where Rudin was representing his major client, Frank Sinatra, who owned a large beer company. “Sidney said, ‘Mickey, I get $10,000 for this, $20,000 for this, $40,000 for this.’ ”