When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  When the Seagram acquisition of MCA was announced, a Los Angeles Times reporter called Tanen and asked what he thought of the fact that the company had been sold without Wasserman’s knowledge. “I think it’s disgraceful and stupid on their part,” Tanen was quoted as saying. “I certainly wouldn’t have dealt in Mr. Wasserman’s company without discussing it with him. . . . Obviously the Japanese have a totally different way of operating. . . . I was under the impression that they venerated their elders.” A couple nights later, he was meeting a friend for dinner at Drai’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant popular with the entertainment crowd. “I got there, my friend was late as usual, and I heard this voice, saying, ‘The only goddamn man in the place! I always told him—the rest were piss-ants! They were all piss-ants!’ There is Edie, across the room, saying all this at the top of her voice. A relative from Cleveland was with them, and their granddaughter. Lew was sitting with his back to me. And she came across, and pulled me over there, still carrying on. Lew stood up, and he said, ‘Thank you for what you said [in the newspaper]. You never should’ve retired. You were the best movie executive I ever worked with.’

  “I started to laugh, almost hysterically. I said, I worked for you for twenty-eight years, and you never told me once!” Tanen added that not long before he left MCA, a trade publication had compiled a list of the one hundred highest-grossing films ever. He sent Wasserman a memo with the list enclosed, saying that he thought Wasserman might be interested to see that sixteen or so of the hundred were MCA/Universal’s films. “I must have had twenty people tell me he carried that damn memo around and showed it to them. But he never said a word to me—and twelve or thirteen of those movies were mine.” Tanen paused, and then said, “It was very tough for him to acknowledge anyone else—especially in the movie business.” In any event, after the exchange at Drai’s, Tanen would sometimes go to Universal to have lunch with Wasserman.

  Even in this period of relative clemency, however, some violations were not forgiven. Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, had been a good friend of Wasserman’s for many years. In 1984, Lowell Bergman, a highly regarded investigative reporter and 60 Minutes producer, was working on a piece about Senator Paul Laxalt, who was chairman of the Committee for the Re-election of the President. A major figure in the piece was Wasserman’s old friend Moe Dalitz; he and his business associates had been important backers of Laxalt from the early days of Laxalt’s political career. About a week before the show was to air, Bergman recalled, Hewitt told him he had had dinner with Wasserman the night before and that Wasserman had insisted that Dalitz was not part of the mob—as Bergman was asserting—but, rather, had been a legitimate businessman ever since Prohibition. The piece did not air, for reasons that Bergman said were complicated, but he was upset with Hewitt for divulging the facts of a show in progress to an outsider—and one, moreover, with close ties to one of the program’s subjects.

  Five years later, Hewitt and Wasserman had an exchange about another upcoming piece. Once again Bergman was the producer, but this time it was about Hollywood and the mob, and Hewitt, at Bergman’s request, was calling Wasserman to ask him if he would cooperate. The piece focused on two recent Justice Department–FBI investigations of MCA, involving its record and home video divisions. These investigations had resulted in very bad publicity for MCA—the record division had been in business with someone in the mob, and the vice president of the home video division had boasted of his mob ties on FBI wiretaps. Prosecutors, however, had not succeeded in proving that more senior MCA executives were aware of these activities and associations. Marvin Rudnick, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who had been trying to prove it, had been targeted by MCA’s battalion of well-connected lawyers and, ultimately, fired by the Justice Department.

  Hewitt said that he called Wasserman. “I said, ‘Lew, Ed Bradley [the on-camera producer] is doing this story about mob influence in Hollywood. Do you want to participate?’

  “He said, ‘No.’

  “Then he said, ‘You’re not going to do it, are you?’

  “I said, ‘Yes, we’re going to do it. I can’t tell our producer not to do a story.’ Well, the minute the show aired, our friendship ended abruptly. Edie, especially, was apoplectic. I was at the Four Seasons one day and Nick Dunne was at the next table, waiting for his guest, who turned out to be Edie. She turned her back, wouldn’t even say hello. And Lew and I never talked to each other again.”

  For a number of years after MCA was sold to Matsushita, the political world had remained Wasserman’s proud bailiwick. In 1992, Bill Clinton—who knew Wasserman only casually—called him from his campaign bus and asked him to do a fund-raiser for him; Wasserman was happy to comply. He liked to point out later that the $10,000-a-couple dinner at his home raised $1.7 million—“the most successful dinner in a private home in American political history,” he said. And it was the start of an extremely warm relationship between Clinton and Wasserman (“I am crazy about him,” Wasserman once remarked. “If you get me going on the subject of Bill Clinton, I’ll sound like a love-struck teenager.”) Active as he was, though, there seemed to be a subtle shift in his political life. When he had started out, he had been the industry lobbyist, while his East Coast counterpart, Arthur Krim, forswore lobbying, at least in his relationship with Johnson. Over the years, however, Wasserman had become far more polished and urbane, customarily expressing his concerns to politicians about issues unrelated to Hollywood; and he only operated as the overt industry lobbyist in matters of the greatest moment—for example, the investment tax credit, and the fin-syn rules. In December 1993, he was placed in a position where he had to choose—industry lobbyist or statesman—and he made the quite predictable choice.

  Negotiations for a world trade agreement—known as the Uruguay Round, to modify the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)—had gotten close to the deadline in Geneva, without reaching any agreement from the Europeans to allow greater access for American films, television programs, and music. What the Europeans were arguing for was the “cultural exception”: excluding audiovisual products from the agreement. After three days of intense, round-the-clock negotiations, U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor recalled that if the U.S. agreed to the cultural exception, “it was clear we could get impressive trade-offs, benefits for the U.S. I called the president and I explained the situation. He said, ‘My tendency is to say, make the deal—but you’ve gotta call Lew Wasserman, and see what he says.’ I called Lew in California, told him what had been going on, and explained what I thought the choices were. He wanted me to confirm that this was the largest trade deal in history—which it was. He said, ‘Our industry is just fine. We have a huge percentage of the European market and we always will. New technology will overrun whatever they try to do to us. You do what’s right for the country.’ ” It was not a response that drew universal acclaim in Hollywood; Valenti, who was blamed for the defeat, was said to have expressed the view privately that if Wasserman had advised Clinton differently, Hollywood might well have prevailed.

  Kantor was pleased that Wasserman had risen above parochial interests. But he also meant to underscore just how singular Wasserman’s authority was. “When it came down to crunch time, the president of the United States knew who to call. There was no debate about who it should be, it was only Wasserman. And President Clinton understood that if Lew Wasserman was satisfied with what we thought we had to do, it was okay,” Kantor said. “It wasn’t just that he had power and was the head of a major studio and was shrewd and smart. He was a very thoughtful, impressive human being. You know, sometimes you ask big contributors for advice to feed their egos. But people actually wanted to hear from Lew.” In 1995, President Clinton awarded Wasserman the Presidential Medal of Freedom; after that, Wasserman wore its small pin on his lapel.

  By the late nineties, Wasserman was limiting his political activities. He would still host an occasional event, or talk to a particular senator at Valenti’s reque
st, but he had withdrawn from the fund-raising apparatus that he had created. Valenti tried manfully to run the machine, but the drastic consolidation in the entertainment world meant that the MPAA was radically changed, too. Many of the studios were now small parts of giant conglomerates, all with diverse interests and agendas—and all with their own Washington lobbying offices. The straight lines that once delineated MPAA member interests now looked like a crazy grid; the studios’ common enemy, for example, used to be the networks, but now some studios (or their parent companies) owned the networks. Indeed, in this reconfigured world, the only “enemies” that all MPAA members had in common were piracy and copyright infringement. Some entertainment executives wondered aloud if the lobbying organization that had been founded in the early days of the motion picture industry—and transformed by Wasserman—had outlived its usefulness. And there was considerable speculation that whenever Valenti finally retired, yielding the post he had held on to tenaciously for more than three decades, the MPAA might cease to exist.

  As the MPAA seemed to have become an anachronism, so did the role that Wasserman had created for himself. “Even Lew couldn’t be Lew today,” commented Jonathan Dolgen, the chairman of the Viacom Entertainment Group, pointing out that contemporary studio heads, small players in giant corporations, could not simply follow the lead of one of their studio peers. The way they relate to one another is a throwback, Dolgen continued. “In the early days, none of the moguls deferred to any other. Then came Lew’s era, when all of them deferred to him. And now it is, again, the way it was in earlier times.”

  All the constructs Wasserman had so painstakingly built—his company, his role as industry leader, his political machine—were being either dismantled or transmuted. His persona, no less a construct, had been bound up with the rest; now it had lost its purpose. He still wanted to adhere to the rules he’d lived by—he seemed to feel it was a weakness not to—but he was pulled by other impulses. He had generally refused testimonial dinners in his honor; now, he sometimes accepted—allowing himself the pleasure of being feted. “I must be slipping,” he remarked about having agreed to be honored at an AFL-CIO dinner. He had, of course, forsworn revealing how he felt about anything, certainly in a public context. However, after MCA (now Universal) had changed hands a third time, Wasserman volunteered, “It’s sad for me.” For in 2000, following Bronfman’s failed tenure, Universal and Seagram were bought by Vivendi, a French water utility whose CEO, Jean-Marie Messier, aimed to transform it into a global media giant. (Only two years later, Messier was fired and the company began trying to sell off assets, making Universal’s future uncertain yet again.) And Wasserman had always insisted that he would not cooperate with any book written about him, at least in part because he would not betray the confidences of the stars that were his former clients. But, like Stein toward the end of his life, Wasserman was not immune to the appeal of having his story told. And as he saw it, he was not fully “cooperating”—his parameters were that he would talk mainly about the business, not himself, and would certainly divulge no client secrets.

  He permitted himself, though, to reminisce. He had met Grace Kelly when she was eighteen, “the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” He told MCA’s head theatrical agent, Edith Van Cleve, to put her in a play. What can she do? Van Cleve wanted to know. “She can’t do anything, I just want her to walk across the stage!” Wasserman said. They put her in a play, Stanley Kramer saw her, and he hired her for High Noon, opposite Gary Cooper. When she decided to marry Prince Rainier, Wasserman continued, he asked her why she was giving up her career. “She said, ‘Lew, I’ve never been a princess.’ I kissed her on the forehead and wished her well. She gave up the biggest female acting career—I think she could have been bigger than Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Betty Grable, Joan Crawford.”

  Hitchcock, he said, was a genius, and also a great practical joker. There was a party at Chasen’s, and when the waiter brought Wasserman his drink (vodka), it was blue. “I said, ‘This must be somebody else’s drink.’ And then we sat down to eat, and everything was blue! The potatoes were blue! Hitch says, ‘I’m in a blue mood.’ ”

  Jimmy Stewart, he said, was a good friend. In 1949, when Stewart was getting married, Wasserman suggested that the two of them have a quiet dinner at Chasen’s the night before his wedding. He agreed—his fiancée had been nervous about his having some wild Hollywood stag party. As Wasserman and Stewart drove up together to Chasen’s, Spencer Tracy, Jack Benny, and Dave Chasen were sitting on the curb, and a fifty-foot sign was hung across the entrance of the distinctive green and white building: “James Stewart’s Final Performance Tonight.” “I had life-size cutouts made of all his roles in movies that were failures, and covered the front of Chasen’s with them,” Wasserman recalled. He had employed a liveried British manservant to wait on Stewart—every time Stewart took a drink, the servant wiped his mouth. And when they sat down to dinner, Wasserman continued, “Chasen’s had this enormous serving platter. People lifted the giant top off and inside were two midgets, with syringes, squirting yellow liquid at him. He thought it was urine!” Wasserman also recalled that in 1962, when the Justice Department brought its antitrust charges against MCA (and Wasserman’s picture was in the New York Times), Stewart had immediately come to see him. “Jimmy Stewart came in to my office, threw his checkbook down on my desk, and said, ‘Take as much as you want.’ He had no idea what was going to happen to me.”

  Wasserman was most comfortable, though, talking about his business exploits—and, especially, the deals that had become Hollywood legend. The purchase of the Paramount film library was a favorite. It had the elements he found gratifying—he had seen the future, he had acted upon his conviction, critics had said he’d overpaid, and hinted gleefully that it might be his undoing. But he had proven them oh so wrong—by more than a billion dollars, over the years. Content, he had understood then, long before the word was in vogue, would have incalculable value in the expanding universe of television. There were other profitable aspects to the deal, though they were much smaller; he had realized there was money to be made in releasing the old movies theatrically as well—For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example. “We took in $5 million just in Spain, post-Franco,” he recalled.

  “I knew I could do well with the Paramount pictures, I just didn’t know how well,” Wasserman continued. He paused. The silence grew. Seated at his perfectly clear desk, peering from behind his giant black-rimmed glasses, he grimaced slightly. Then he said, “Those are the smart things. Now, do you want to know the dumb thing I did?”

  Those were not words that Lew Wasserman was ever supposed to utter, and his visitor tried to demur, but he went on. “Sold the company to the Japanese,” he said, with some force. “It wasn’t the price that was wrong, but the sale itself.”

  In death, Wasserman’s mythic personality was brought back to life. He died at home on the morning of June 3, 2002—he was eighty-nine—after having suffered a stroke about two weeks earlier; and, in accordance with his directive, he was buried in a private family ceremony that very afternoon, before many people even knew he had died. Jules Stein had choreographed his funeral, but Wasserman was intent on escaping the major event that his would have been. Still, at Universal—where Wasserman had continued to go to his office each day until he had his stroke—some executives were said to be fearful of being criticized if they did nothing to mark his death. Moreover, Barry Diller—who had become the head of Vivendi Universal Entertainment—had known Wasserman nearly all his life, admired him, and wanted to hold a memorial service. After some initial hesitation—Wasserman’s family was unhappy with the way he had been treated at Universal—they agreed.

  The service was held on the afternoon of July 15 at the Universal Amphitheater. VIP guests left their cars at the entrance, but everyone else—including busloads of Universal employees, who were given the afternoon off—made their way through the Universal City street of shops and restaurants known as CityWalk. It was a surre
al approach to a memorial service—music blaring from Sam Goody’s, a huge King Kong suspended overhead, crowds of tourists, and occasional signs that said, “Memorial,” with arrows pointing in the right direction. But Wasserman probably would have liked it. He had been very proud of CityWalk; built in the early nineties, it was hugely successful, earning about $100 million a year—and just as Wasserman often used to pull box office figures out of his pocket for a visitor, so he would, too, tallies of the lunches and dinners served at CityWalk restaurants. Inside the Amphitheater, as people settled in their seats, “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)” and songs from the soundtrack of Pillow Talk were playing. There were hundreds of Hollywood people, of course, and quite a few politicians—among them, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, California Governor Gray Davis, and Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn.