Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 21
His handshake was his contract, but given his connection to Sidney Korshak, you knew it came with mob enforcement. When honouring Lew at Universal Studio’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration, Johnny Carson had quipped, “We’re here tonight for one reason only: fear.” That got a big laugh, as dangerous truths wrapped in a smile always do. Lew ran Hollywood on fear. You didn’t fuck with Lew Wasserman. Even though I trod softly and tried to keep my interviews clandestine, his friends and colleagues soon alerted his family. “This guy Avrich is trying to make a film about Lew.”
Once word was out, I wrote to Casey Wasserman, Lew’s grandson, requesting an interview. He replied, also by letter. “I am going to respect the wishes of my grandfather, who never gave interviews. I will not participate, and I’m going to ask you not to make this film.” I took an ad in the Hollywood Reporter and in Variety by way of answer: “Dear Casey, I loved your grandfather and his immeasurable contribution to Hollywood. You’ll love the film.”
There was no response.
Instead, Casey sent out word that no one was to participate in the making of the film. I knew I was being watched. When I pulled up to L.A.’s Sunset Marquis Hotel, where I usually stay, the same car would be there, as if waiting. I felt lucky to have a few significant interviews already in the can. One was with Jack Valenti.
After Bobby Kennedy hit MCA with the civil antitrust suit, Wasserman understood that he needed to develop clout in Washington. What better way than to become a serious political fundraiser? He hosted a hugely successful $1,000-a-plate dinner for President John F. Kennedy at the Beverly Hilton in June 1963. Later, Wasserman raised money for the new president, Lyndon Johnson. As Johnson’s press chief, Jack Valenti was such an important Washington player that he was on Air Force One, standing over JFK’s bloody corpse, when Lyndon Johnson was sworn into office. Later, Wasserman convinced Johnson to make Valenti head of the Motion Picture Association of America, where he could function as Wasserman’s Washington puppet. Valenti kept MCA rolling in billions of TV syndication dollars by keeping a restrictive Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule in place that prevented networks from producing TV shows.
My Valenti interview was a killer. “If Hollywood was Mount Olympus,” he told me, “then Wasserman was Zeus. As an agent, he knew that it was the client who should get the publicity. You could call it the Greta Garbo Syndrome, which was part of his mystique. Some people used the word ‘questionable’ when talking about Lew’s friendship with Sidney Korshak, who was the attorney for the mob, but Korshak was never charged, and in this country you’re innocent until proven guilty. Lew had what Mr. Churchill called ‘the seeing eye,’ which is the ability to see beneath the surface and through walls into what for others is a vapoury future. While other movie moguls tried to exile TV, Lew saw it correctly as the most pervasive force ever. I think he paid about fifty million dollars for Paramount Pictures’ pre-1950s library, then sold it to content-hungry TV stations for about a billion dollars in revenue.”
Valenti confirmed that Wasserman had unusual clout with a succession of presidents. “Ronald Reagan was never a class-A star, but he had a good career. When that faded, Lew got him the host job on General Electric Theater. That not only gave Reagan a mass audience, it also allowed him to go around the country giving speeches at GE plants, making his views known. Without Lew, who knew where his career would have gone?”
As for Lyndon Johnson, “When he was elected president, he was indebted to Wasserman for the money Lew had raised. When Johnson asked me for a list of people he might want to bring into his administration, Lew’s name was on it, and the president thought that a jolly good idea. When Lyndon made Lew an offer, Lew said he was flattered, but that he had recently bought Universal so he couldn’t accept.”
Reagan always understood his debt to Wasserman. “Everyone knew I was a comrade-in-arms with Lew,” said Valenti, “and anyone who attacked Lew was attacking me. When Reagan was president, I gathered lobbyists and lawyers and we were able to put in place the FCC restrictive ruling that prevented networks from producing TV shows. After that, we managed to keep it in place until 1995, when it was overturned.”
Though I tried for an interview with Ronald Reagan, he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and Nancy declined to be in my film. Bill Clinton, who was also deeply indebted to Wasserman as a fundraiser, agreed to an interview, but then suffered heart problems leading to bypass surgery. He had to cancel.
When I wrote to the Carter Center, I was told that Jimmy Carter would love to talk to me about Lew Wasserman, so I flew my crew to Atlanta.
The Carter Center, a compound on the University of Georgia campus, looked like a horrible gift shop in a third-world airport. Displayed here was all the stuff given to Carter as president—plates, cups, paintings, local artisan-made souvenirs. When I walked in, I expected to see a sign saying, “Everything Must Go.”
Someone took me through the protocol. What do I call him? Mr. President. I had been nervous about meeting John Kenneth Galbraith, but not Jimmy Carter. I hadn’t respected him as president because of his stance on Israel. I knew him as the peanut president, with a drinking brother named Billy. True, Carter was better at foreign relations after he retired.
My crew and I entered a room decorated with the presidential seal and flags and all the paraphernalia one might expect. After introductions, I launched my conversation about power and Hollywood. “Mr. President, if you were still in office and Lew Wasserman was phoning you at the same time as some major head of state, which call would you take first?”
“Oh, Lew Wasserman’s.”
When I asked him to elaborate, he continued. “I was more removed from the Hollywood scene than some of my compatriots who served in the White House. No doubt, Ronald Reagan was intimately involved, and Bill Clinton deliberately cast his political life with movie stars. I looked on Lew as an entree for me into that mysterious realm of very famous, very influential and very wealthy people. If he had accepted the invitation to join Johnson’s administration it would have been a step down for him. I can perfectly understand why Johnson made that offer, and why Lew refused it.”
I was so involved in the frankness of our discussion that I leaned in and said, “Jimmy, did you think that . . .” I stopped myself. “Oh, Mr. President, I just called you Jimmy.”
He was reassuring. “That’s alright. Where are you from again?”
“Canada.”
As soon as I made that reply, Carter lost interest. I was reminded of a roundtable discussion in which I had participated years ago with Henry Kissinger. Someone at the table had asked, “Dr. Kissinger, where does Canada sit on the stage of international politics?” He replied, “I don’t want to embarrass and offend you with my answer.”
“No, tell us where.” He replied, “Irrelevant.”
When Jimmy Carter heard I was from Canada, I became irrelevant. He didn’t have much to say after that. Fade to black.
Having Suzanne Pleshette, best known as the co-star on The Bob Newhart Show, agree to be interviewed was a tremendous coup: she was Lew and Edie Wasserman’s closest friend. She too was a tough broad, who hung out with a few rounders. Why did Suzanne agree? Probably as an Edie plant sent to kick the tires and find out what questions I was asking. Suzanne was particularly keen on seeing that Edie received credit for all she had contributed to her husband’s success.
Suzanne insisted that I fly her makeup people in from New York and that I supply her with a driver and a limousine. The joke was this: The chauffeur ushered Suzanne into the limousine at her West Hollywood condo, drove about three feet, then let her out at the Sunset Marquis Hotel where I was filming.
When she walked into the room, she exclaimed, “You’re looking at my fucking hair, aren’t you, Barry?”
I denied it, though I probably was. She had been transformed from a sultry brunette to a platinum blonde.
“I know my hair is fucked up but it is what it is.”
Whatever Suzanne’s reasons for turning up, she was astonishingly frank and forthright. “Before Lew, agents were subhuman guys in plaid jackets. They were scum. Lew thought it was a respectable business so he insisted on dressing up in a suit and tie. He had an incredible temper. Anyone who behaved stupidly or jeopardized a deal would get violently ill before facing Lew. If Lew was pissed off with someone it was often Edie who cut them off. She would take the flak and the person would never know it was Lew. Edie also had her own wars, to which she was entitled, if people didn’t pay her the proper respect.”
Suzanne confirmed what others had told me: Unlike so many lascivious Hollywood power brokers, Lew was asexual. He slept alone so he could get up early to call England and Japan to hear the movie grosses. Suzanne said that if she wanted to freak him out when they were driving somewhere together, all she had to say was, “You know, Lew, I just got my period.” He would tell the chauffeur to stop the car, then get out and walk.
I’m indebted to Suzanne for one of the all-time great lines about show business. When I asked her how she had survived so long in the industry, she said, “I don’t have a gag reflex.”
When Suzanne talked about Lew’s funeral, she had me crying right along with her. “I think Lew would have been pleased with the choice of people, both those who were important to him and the movers and shakers of today. I wanted the world to understand that, with all of the triumphs credited to Lew, Edie had his back, and how much theirs was really a love story. Since I still have Edie, that’s like still having Lew, because we talk about him, and he’s always there in the house. When I lose Edie, I will have lost both of them.”
A year after The Last Mogul came out, I walked passed Suzanne’s table in L.A.’s famous Palm Steakhouse. She yelled to me, “Hey, Barry, where’s the fucking DVD you promised me?”
I confess that I was flattered. I sent her the DVD that evening. Suzanne died on January 19, 2008, twelve days before her seventy-first birthday. Edie Wasserman survived her by three years, dying at a ripe ninety-five.
Janet de Cordova, a former starlet and wife of Fred de Cordova, Johnny Carson’s sparring partner and producer of The Tonight Show, was another member of Edie Wasserman’s Hollywood Wives Club. She was also a high-spending, party-giving A-lister in her own right. After Fred died in 2001, leaving her bankrupt, she moved in with her devoted maid—not such a bad life, since her maid, who was far better at handling money than the De Cordovas, had built a duplicate of their Beverly Hills mansion in New Mexico, complete with high ceilings, a grand staircase and glass walls.
Janet de Cordova was classic Hollywood. She showed up for her interview at 10 a.m., looking wonderful in a Chanel suit but dead drunk. She handed her pricey crocodile purse to one of my cameramen and said, “Can I trust you with this?” He was Black. I was offended. He wasn’t.
After she had shakily taken her seat, I asked, “May we get you a coffee?”
She replied, “I’ll have a double vodka.”
She made two memorable remarks. On Wasserman’s connection with Sidney Korshak: “Lew was a big friend of Sidney’s, but not the only one in town.” About Lew’s fall from power, in which she could have been talking about herself: “Strange how the minute something changes, everything changes.”
Signs that Wasserman might be losing his golden touch began appearing in the late ’60s. By then, the bombs produced by MCA’s movie division, Universal Pictures, had chalked up a debt of $90 million, resulting in the incredible rumour that Jules Stein might fire Lew Wasserman. Smaller pictures, like Easy Rider and The Graduate, were then in vogue, attracting more publicity, more prestige and more money. Wasserman had the box-office hit he needed in 1970 with Airport, the first of the disaster movies, which cost $10 million to make, then grossed $50 million. It also earned ten Oscar nominations. He followed that with American Graffiti and The Sting, which won seven Oscars.
You win some, you lose some. Universal Pictures was riding high with revenues of $62 million, but Wasserman turned down both Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark after producer George Lucas asked for 50 per cent of the profits. Another costly mistake was keeping MCA out of cable TV, which let Time Inc. reap billions from HBO, which they created in 1976 for only $7.5 million.
It took the combined efforts of producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck, who had recently been turfed from 20th Century Fox, to prevent Wasserman from making yet another major blunder. As Brown explained, “Wasserman invited us to MCA mere seconds after Richard and I knew we were no longer wanted at 20th Century. When we offered him Jaws, Lew felt Steven Spielberg was too young and inexperienced to direct, but we prevailed. I think the only time Lew ever had an orgasm was at the Jaws opening, when he saw the audience’s reaction. After that, he would tell us what the movie was doing in every theatre in the U.S. and Canada, and everywhere in the world. He knew how many seats were in each theatre, and how Jaws compared with other films. He was a human computer.”
Jaws cost $7 million to make and grossed more than $470 million.
Brown added, “Lew’s authority was unbelievable, like Genghis Khan. If he was angry, he could foam at the mouth—literally, I’ve seen that—even though he was otherwise courteous. He didn’t want anything on paper.”
Jules Stein passed away in 1981. His funeral was scored by Henry Mancini, and featured seventy-six pallbearers, including Cary Grant, Sam Goldwyn and alleged mobbed-up union chief James Petrillo. Bearing in mind how close Stein had come to firing her husband, Edie Wasserman was rumoured to have said at the funeral, “It’s about time.”
By 1983, both the media and federal agencies were investigating MCA because of its rumoured mob connections. Wasserman allegedly pulled in a big favour from a former actor who, since 1981, had been living at Washington’s most prestigious address. In record time, an apparently solid FBI case against MCA was dropped. It was the third federal investigation the company had survived in sixty years. As Jack Valenti told me, “I’m sure there had to have been some conversation between Lew and President Reagan, but I never asked about it.”
The stock market crash in 1987 sent MCA stock spiralling downwards, leaving MCA vulnerable. Enter Michael Ovitz, the cofounder with Ron Meyer of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), representing such actors as Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Barbra Streisand and directors like Steven Spielberg. As a corporate consultant, Ovitz also negotiated international business mergers, which is how he came to play a key role in the Lew Wasserman story.
In 1989, Ovitz brokered a deal that at first appeared to rescue MCA with an infusion of capital. With Ovitz acting as intermediary, Wasserman sold MCA to Matsushita of Japan for $6.6 billion. Wasserman’s personal payday was in excess of $350 million, but his new Japanese bosses didn’t know who he was, and they didn’t care. Wasserman lost his power.
In 1995, Ovitz brokered a second deal. This time, Edgar Bronfman Jr. of the Seagram dynasty purchased controlling interest in MCA from the Japanese for $5.7 billion. Though Wasserman might have hoped this would restore him to his rightful position, Edgar Bronfman—who did know who Wasserman was and did care—had a different idea. Bronfman sold off MCA assets, changed the company’s name to Universal and invited Wasserman to leave the board.
I was excited when Michael Ovitz, the power broker who had sold Wasserman twice, agreed to an interview, but it came with conditions: I had to sign a forty-page agreement detailing what I could and couldn’t ask. I then had to spend hours with Ovitz’s art curator while she decided which painting from Ovitz’s world-class contemporary collection should hang behind him while he was on camera. Should it be Picasso, Jasper Johns or Willem de Kooning? I would have happily shot Ovitz in front of a fridge. Curiously, after she had judged painting after painting from different angles, the final selection turned out to be photographs by Gregory Crewdson, who had shot stills for the hit HBO series, Six Feet Under. Was this perhaps a comment on Lew Wasserman’s current whereabouts? In any event, the shots of Ovitz in the film are so tight you can’t see the backdrop.
When Ovitz finally showed up, he was wearing a black suit and tie. He said, “This is what Lew would want me to wear.”
His first comment, once he had settled in, was a surprise: “You’re from Toronto? I’m not going to talk about Garth Drabinsky.” This was a reference to the negative fallout from Ovitz’s investment in Livent, with its fraudulant bookkeeping. Though always of interest to me, it wasn’t currently on my mind.
Ovitz and I talked for three hours in an interview that treated Wasserman reverently. “Lew was tough as nails, but he was a gentleman when you got to know him, unless of course you crossed him. He earned his MBA working from the bottom up, making bookings and learning the nitty-gritty of the business. He knew how to start something, and, most of all, he knew how to close it. He worked to get the best from his client, always coming up with new strategies that would benefit them, and, of course, he got a percentage of the profit.”
Ovitz first had business dealings with the Wasserman empire early in his career. “When I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school, I found that Universal City was starting studio tours. I applied, and was lucky enough to be one of the first ten guides hired.”
By the time Ovitz had brokered the MCA deal with the Japanese, he probably knew Lew’s time was up. “The Japanese hired me to recommend to them companies in which they might invest. I recommended two. Both Lew and I knew he had a weakening stock, and the Japanese brought a solution that allowed MCA and Lew to stay in control for five years. If Lew had had a vision for MCA, and could have pumped money into the stock and taken it forward, then maybe he shouldn’t have merged. I love the Asian culture, but they do things differently than we do, and I spent quite a bit of time explaining this to Lew. Since he had spent so long as a sole controlling proprietor, I don’t think it crossed his mind to deal with these people as partners. The reality was that he had sold the company.”
