by Connie Bruck
But Korshak had to pay his dues, too. “On Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, he’d have to go to Chicago to see the boys. I always understood it was something he had to do, to go meet with the boys, as a way of expressing his loyalty. If he had said, ‘No, I have something else to do’—well, that would not have been what they expected of him.”
When Anderson became head of the Western Conference, Korshak introduced him to Wasserman. Wasserman was friendly, attentive, solicitous. Anderson recalled that Wasserman asked him where his favorite lunch place was—the Cove, at the Ambassador Hotel—and whether they might go there together. “I said, ‘I’d love to show you off!’ ” Anderson replied. After that, Wasserman suggested that they make it an annual tradition to have lunch together at the Cove, just before Christmas. When Wasserman had a fund-raiser for Edmund “Jerry” Brown, son of former Governor Pat Brown, who was now running for governor himself, Korshak invited Anderson and his wife as his guests. “And Lew took my wife and showed her the whole house. There were a hundred people there, but he took the time to do that himself.”
Wasserman and he established a smooth working relationship, but Korshak was always the connector. “Whenever there was a problem, Sid would call me. ‘Come to my house.’ And Lew would come there. I would meet with them, then I would meet with the local. We were never that far apart.” In these sessions, he said, “Lew never wrote any note—he told me never to take any notes. Sidney wouldn’t either. Or, if he had to write something, he would write on the back of a matchbook cover, and then throw it away.” Anderson remembered that once, in the mid-seventies, the union was having a lot of problems at the studios (he refused to be more specific) and Korshak and he agreed on a resolution. Korshak told him to come to his house. “Lew was there. Sid said, ‘I told Lew what you said, but he wants to hear it from you directly. So I told him, and Lew said, ‘You’re my friend forever.’ ” Wasserman was the only studio head with whom Korshak had such a close relationship, Anderson added—but he was the only one that mattered. “Lew would tell the other studios, ‘Guys, this is how it is.’ ”
Wasserman could dictate to his fellows because he had made labor relations his metier, in a way that no other studio head ever had. “In the early seventies, Lew was first among equals, the leader in labor relations,” Leo Geffner said. “He was a strong Democrat, very pro-labor, very close to the unions.” Contrasting Wasserman with men like Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, who had fought the unions bitterly, Geffner said, “With Lew, it was different. He knew that he could work with them and still make a lot of money.” And Wasserman’s relations were as strong with the above-the-line unions (the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, and the Directors Guild of America), as the Teamsters and the IA. “The stories are legion of hard times, an impasse reached, and Lew being called in. Often, he’d be there all night. The unions trusted him. They knew that when Lew came, the hard-liners would take a back seat,” Geffner said.
Moreover, though Wasserman’s meetings with Korshak and Anderson were secret—Korshak never appeared in negotiating sessions with the MPAA, or played any visible part—it was an open secret that Wasserman, through Korshak, could insure labor peace with the Teamsters. And the Teamsters were the most powerful union by far, as well as the most feared. Anderson emphasized that other unions’ picket lines might be crossed without incurring mortal peril, but not the Teamsters’. Also, the IA negotiated jointly with the Teamsters in this period; so there was general unity among all the below-the-line unions. While Korshak was key to Wasserman’s success, however, Wasserman did not rely solely on him. Just as Wasserman courted Anderson in the seventies, so he had others for many years. Among his close associates were those union men who had enormously benefited the studios in the 1946 strike, and helped in the destruction of the CSU—the IA’s Roy Brewer and Dick Walsh, and the Teamsters’ Ralph Clare. Wasserman said that when MCA took over the Universal back lot in 1962, he fired the existing security guards and put in his own. “The Teamsters didn’t like it and they were going to strike,” Wasserman recalled. “But they didn’t.” This he attributed to his friendship with Clare. When Clare retired in 1971, Wasserman threw him a big party on a stage set at Universal; Clare was said to have received a new Cadillac, too. And it was fitting, in a way, that the emcee of the party for Clare was the actor Walter Pidgeon—someone who, at the most critical moment in Wasserman’s labor relations history, had tipped the scales in Wasserman’s favor by urging his fellow SAG board members to vote to give MCA the all-important waiver in 1952.
“People misuse the word power,” Wasserman commented once. “They think it implies an abuse. I don’t consider I have power. I have relationships.”
By the time Wasserman assumed full title to MCA, his political influence had grown enormously. It had been roughly a decade since he had decided to extend his reach to Washington, and he had come a long way from the Hollywood heavyweight who managed to make the star’s dressing room available to Lyndon Johnson. Since then, he had become the president’s friend, if not his intimate, and had been his guest quite a few times at the White House. It evidently meant a great deal to Wasserman, who never forgot his meager beginnings. In his oral history interview at the LBJ Library, Wasserman—a man who seemed generally to forswear emotion—remarked, “I have yet to enter the White House where I don’t tear up.” He was proud of the fact that he was one of the participants in the earliest planning meeting for the LBJ Library, and he was a major donor. In the final days of the 1968 campaign, when the Republicans were spending what was, at the time, the largest sum ever to elect a president, the Democrats were borrowing frantically. The two largest loans came from Wasserman and Jake Factor, each of whom lent the party $240,000. Wasserman commented later that he believed it was the shortage of cash, caused by diminished contributions after the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, that probably cost Hubert Humphrey that election. “It’s my personal belief that, to this day, if Senator Humphrey had been on NBC television the night before the election instead of ABC—ABC being the least expensive of the networks, which is the only reason Senator Humphrey bought it—it could have made a difference in the election.”
Wasserman had standing as a major Democratic contributor and, also, a savvy observer of the political scene, particularly regarding television, that powerful new campaign medium. But what really set him apart was that he had harnessed everything Hollywood had to offer—money, stars, glamour—to create a smoothly functioning, high-powered apparatus, the likes of which had not existed before. And while it was unquestionably of his design and under his control, Wasserman’s vehicle was the MPAA, headed by Valenti. That provided the illusion of an independent entity that represented the entire industry—though Wasserman’s peers knew the reality. Regarding Valenti’s role at the MPAA, Frank Yablans of Paramount remarked, “We were all his bosses, but Lew was his chief boss.” And Valenti was proving to be an extremely capable functionary, someone who grasped the power of Hollywood celebrity in Washington (perhaps because he was so affected by it himself) and was adept at manipulating it. While every lobbyist tries to court the congressmen and senators whose votes he covets, Valenti, a born courtier, raised it to an art.
In its old headquarters, the MPAA had a modest screening room; now, a large new building had been constructed, featuring a massive office for Valenti, an underground parking garage, and a state-of-the-art screening room with red carpet, red velvet curtains, and well-cushioned, reclining leather seats. This screening room became a Washington institution. Valenti would regularly invite an assortment of power brokers, senators, congressmen, other government officials, lawyers, and journalists for dinner and a movie. Not surprisingly, great care was taken to cater to the sensibilities of the guests. Wasserman said, “Jack had the pick of the pictures, and he’d match the guests to the pictures. He wouldn’t invite far-right congressmen to see half-naked women.” These invitations soon became among the most sought after in town. It
was a bit of Hollywood transplanted in Washington—or, as Jim Jones, who had worked in the Johnson White House and later was elected to Congress, put it, “It was the pizzazz of coming down there, being treated so royally, seeing movies before everyone else.” Larry Levinson thought Valenti was tapping into something more fundamental. “Movies and power in this town go together,” he declared. And that axiom was nowhere truer than at the apex of power. “One thing all presidents love is screening movies. Nixon would sit alone and watch Patton again and again. He watched it the night before they bombed Cambodia,” Levinson continued. “Jack was able to use the power and glamour and mystique of Hollywood—a new president came in, and he’d put himself in the center of the process of getting movies to the president. He’d get so excited. He’d call Sid Sheinberg and say, ‘Sid! The president is going to Camp David! We’ve got to get him Jaws!”
The combination of movies and power was pleasing, no doubt, but the real glue in this Hollywood-Washington nexus that Wasserman was soldering was, of course, money. The President’s Club had been Wasserman’s apprenticeship; by the seventies, he had made fund-raising into a science. He organized dinners at hotels, as he had begun doing in the early sixties, but now these events were for a thousand guests, or more. When too much time had passed without a response after invitations had been sent, Wasserman’s social affairs assistant, Ann O’Connor, would call the foot-draggers. “She’d say, ‘Are you taking a table? May I report to Mr. Wasserman that you will be doing so?’ ” recalled Levinson. Wasserman and his wife, Edie, had also begun hosting frequent fund-raisers at their home—for the president, for the Democratic National Committee, for senators and congressmen (particularly if they were on committees important to Hollywood, like Finance, Commerce, or Judiciary). Wasserman devoted almost as much attention to cultivating politicians as he once had his stars. “Lew worked at it carefully, day in and day out,” said George Smith, who worked closely with Wasserman on legislative affairs. “He would send a note or make a phone call, if there was bad news or good news, people would get calls out of nowhere from Lew. He helped people on the way up when they couldn’t get arrested—and, ten years later, they’d be on an important committee, and they’d remember.”
The events at Wasserman’s home were a great prize for the beneficiary. “In Hollywood, an invitation to Lew’s house was like an invitation to the president’s house—a command performance,” declared Lloyd Hand, a lawyer from Texas, active in Johnson’s 1964 campaign in California, who became his chief of protocol. But Wasserman’s rules were strict. He would brook no interference; the Democratic National Committee people might have their ideas about a guest list, but only those approved by Wasserman would be invited. Wasserman’s friend Bob Strauss, the former chairman of the DNC, came to refer to Wasserman’s events as “turnkey” operations—because all the recipient had to do was show up and collect the precise amount Wasserman had said would be raised. MCA had developed a computerized list of contributors, as closely guarded as Music Corporation of America’s list of band-booking locales had once been. “It was gold,” declared Smith. And Wasserman brought his characteristic fixation on detail to these events—reminiscent of the dinner at his home for advertising executives years earlier, when he’d ordered that the cigarettes from a competitor be replaced by those made by his guests’ client. “Lew watched every detail,” Smith continued. “He would do the table seating himself—because he knew who hated whom, who would be outraged at not being near the honored guest, how to handle the fifteen egomaniacs who all had to be at the main table for ten.” He always added a sprinkling of stars, too—like Jill St. John and Angie Dickinson—to lend events the requisite glamour.
It was probably futile to try to sabotage a Wasserman political event. The Jewish Federation Council tried to do just that, at a huge, $1,000-a-plate dinner Wasserman organized for President Jimmy Carter at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1978. Angered by the joint U.S.-Soviet declaration on the Mideast, and the president’s support for a Palestinian homeland, the federation sponsored a demonstration outside the hotel. To no avail—Wasserman later told Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer that the event was the most successful fund-raiser in California history. Wasserman also told Scheer that he supported Carter completely in his peace initiatives, and felt it was necessary to include the Palestinians in the negotiation process. “How you gonna convince anyone without talking to them? I never made a deal with an empty chair. I made deals with Harry Cohn and Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer; I could give you thousands of people. Billions of dollars worth of contracts I made. Never made one with an empty chair. . . . Well, there are a million Palestinian people, aren’t there? You gonna pretend they’re not there?”
It was a somewhat belligerent-sounding outburst from the smooth Wasserman. He evidently wanted to make it clear that he took marching orders from no one—including, and perhaps most particularly, the Jewish organizations that wanted to claim him as a giant political asset. When Scheer, who was writing a story about the Los Angeles Jewish community, told Wasserman that scores of people had identified him as the most powerful Jew in Los Angeles, Wasserman took umbrage at this narrow description. He responded that MCA was not in any way a “Jewish company,” and he also said, “I feel first I’m an American.” He pointed out that MCA had produced the movie Jesus Christ Superstar—incurring the wrath of the American Jewish Committee, which protested the movie’s suggestion that the Jews had killed Christ. Referring to the AJC, Wasserman said, “They’re not in my life. Period.” He objected to the notion, even, that there was a Jewish community. “I must tell you in all candor, in my judgment, under oath, pentothal—whatever you like—I would testify with my last breath that I don’t know of a Jewish community if you’re talking about a structured community. It is nonexistent. Are there Jews who share the same concerns? Yes. There are also many Irish. . . . And this bugaboo about the American Jewish Committee speaking for all the Jews in America, well, I know one Jew they don’t speak for—they don’t speak for Lew Wasserman.”
His position of influence, hard-earned, was not to be appropriated by anyone else. Moreover, it was increasingly important to Wasserman that he not be viewed merely as someone beholden to parochial interests, but, rather as someone whose only agenda was the commonweal as he, and he alone, saw it. This was the image that Wasserman sought to create, as he flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Washington in the seventies and eighties, paying social calls, consulting with politicians on issues that were important to them. Thus, over an extended period of time, he came to seem a rarity in political life, a major, powerful benefactor who wanted nothing in return for his financial support, and political acumen, and friendship. Bob Daly, the former co-head of Warner Bros. movie studio, referring to Wasserman’s peripatetic Washington schedule, commented, “He built up a lot of goodwill with these people, and was not just there with his hand out. But when it counted,” Daly added, “he put his hand out strongly.”
The investment tax credit was one instance where it counted—where, by Wasserman’s estimate, it meant billions in tax savings to the motion picture industry, and about a billion to MCA alone. This was the legislation that had been passed in 1962, allowing American companies to write off 7 percent of any investment in machinery and equipment—“tangible” property—which had a useful life of eight years or more. According to Treasury regulations, film was not a “tangible” property. Although it was Disney that had sued the government, arguing that it was entitled to the tax credit for the full cost of films, Wasserman had been behind that suit, according to Valenti. “It was Lew’s idea,” Valenti said, “and Lew’s idea that Disney should be the plaintiff. Disney was the perfect plaintiff.” Indeed, according to George Smith, MCA considered contributing to Disney’s legal expenses, but then decided that if its support were to become known that would compromise Disney’s position as a lone plaintiff. “We figured Disney was the best-qualified plaintiff, because its product had such longevity, more than any co
mpany’s,” said John Baity, the lawyer at the firm of Donovan, Leisure, who represented Disney in the suit. “I asked the other studios to stand down, and they were happy to do it.” MCA and Disney, too, had been close historically. Jules Stein and Walt Disney were good friends. MCA had been the agent for Disney’s TV shows and, although it was little known, MCA had helped to fund Disneyland at its inception in the mid-fifties.
In May 1971, Disney won, before Federal District Court Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles. It evidently came as something of a surprise to the winning side. “Many of us thought there were some defects to our argument,” acknowledged George Smith. But the victory was so important that it was almost the sine qua non for the MCA-driven strategy that followed. For with that court decision in hand, Wasserman was able to give Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills a rationale for the position Wasserman was urging him to take. Mills did so in the House debate, and his committee report stated, “Questions have arisen . . . whether motion picture and television films are tangible . . . personal property eligible for the credit. A court case decided the question in favor of the taxpayer. The committee agrees with the court that motion picture and TV films are tangible personal property eligible for the investment credit.” That was another major advance for MCA’s case, but Smith and his associates thought the chances of that critical district court decision’s being reversed on appeal in the Ninth Circuit were high—because of the weaknesses in their argument, combined with the reputation of the judge who had decided in their favor. “The Ninth Circuit had overturned Manny Real many, many times. We got this sentence in the committee report, hoping it would help—figuring maybe it would make them think Manny was not that wrong this time. Committee reports,” Smith added, “are loaded with oddities.” And then, amazingly, it worked! “In its decision, the Ninth Circuit said the committee report showed what Congress had intended [in the original statute]. For the Ninth Circuit to rely on a committee report and not on a trial court was really a bootstrap. It was kind of crazy,” Smith concluded, shaking his head.
