Lord of the Black Tower
SHEPPARD, RON
Lord of the Black Tower When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman By Connie Bruck Random. 512 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Ron Sheppard Freelance writer and critic Admirers of...
...you sell the company for billions of dollars, take hundreds of millions for yourself, and then expect to be making all the decisions...
...Almost all of Brack's sources (including Wasserman, who granted the author some legend-burnishing interviews) agreed that MCA's president could see the future more clearly than most entertainment executives...
...But this time she meets stiffer resistance than usual...
...Both men were exceptionally adept with figures, highly secretive and masters of the low profile...
...And they'd say, let's go to the projection room...
...Samuel Goldwyn was caricatured mercilessly for his loopy, immigrant English...
...Although the takeover has made him richer by nearly $330 million, he was regretful about his loss of control to a foreign owner...
...True, but don't tell that to the famous friends who spoke at his memorial service...
...He still seemed bulletproof in the '80s when both the press and Congressional investigators tried unsuccessfully to tie him to illegal activities...
...Wasserman followed the dress code but passed on the tchotchkes...
...Fornearly 50years, until his death last June at age 89, Wasserman was not only Hollywood's power behind the scenery but a national force as well...
...and Ronald Reagan, one of Wasserman's first clients, got a career change that would shortly provide invaluable national exposure as host of the General Electric Theater...
...The Guild's president at the time was an actor with a stalled career named Ronald Reagan...
...He then took a calculated risk by moving to Chicago to work for Jules Stein, founder of MC A. Stein paid only $60 a week, but Wassermann gamble paid off when the agency relocated to Los Angeles for the more lucrative business of representing screen talent...
...Ovitz, a Wasserman admirer who modeled his own company on MCA, did not have to look far...
...By all accounts, he was a martinet who oversaw an unambiguous system of rewards and punishments: Cadillacs at Christmas for winners...
...He wanted to be a lawyer but had to give up that ambition to support his parents, Orthodox European Jews who settled in the Middle West...
...He also imposed strict work rules, such as NO papers left on desks at the end of the day and NO dipping in the secretarial pool...
...about junk bond trader Michael Milken, and The Master of the Game, about Steve Ross and Time Warner) know how well she follows not only the money but also the deep pockets...
...Wasserman was different...
...Wasserman used his union contacts and incited actors' walkouts to subdue the studios...
...Wasserman lived so long that he outlasted his myth," Brück writes...
...Though some readers may get antsy waiting for Wasserman, Stein's story is worth the space...
...Jack Warner, said to have referred to his scriptwriters as "schmucks with Underwoods," became a stereotype of loutish power in the film colony...
...Brack's closing act finds Wasserman still in his MCA office...
...Without absolute control of MCA, he could not participate in the consolidations of entertainment and media companies that were taking shape without him...
...The new Wassermans would have names like Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch...
...At one point negotiations between the 77-year-old champion and the youthful contender appeared headed for a draw, but Wasserman folded in the last round...
...Robert S. Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, only half-joked when he said, "Lew is the only person I know who had one foot in the movie business, one foot in the business and financial community, and one foot in the political community...
...The process was so traceless, writes Brack, "that even the FBI and grand jury investigations undertaken later would be unable to fully reconstruct it...
...I'd say don't you understand it's goingtobein your home...
...one-way tickets on Greyhounds for losers...
...Predictably, his grumbling about having Japanese overseers drew little sympathy...
...By 1936, the slough of the Depression, he was making a lofty $ 100 a week handling advertising for Cleveland's Mayfair Casino...
...The Japanese electronics manufacturer hired Ovitz to find and broker the acquisition of an American entertainment conglomerate...
...She does so again in When Hollywood Had a King...
...Nearly four years after the deal, Japan's economy began to slide and cashshort Matsushita was loath to finance the ambitions of its American subsidiary...
...He preferred to cultivate the heads of labor unions and buy up rival agencies...
...He was a medical school graduate who chose the entertainment business over an internship...
...The uniform was mandatory for all MC A agents...
...Guild actors found expanded opportunities in a new medium...
...He did not keep notes, never wrote a memoir and, as Bruck discovered, his interviews were shaped by courteous evasion...
...One occupant liked to say that MCA stood for Muscle, Cash and Attorneys...
...Eulogist Barry Diller declared his mentor "the gold standard" for the nation's business leaders...
...If Hollywood was Mount Olympus," he declared, "Lew Wasserman is Zeus...
...He owned an experimental television set as far back as 1940...
...A stealth mode became harder to maintain after MCA went public...
...Harvey was a slow earner but Winchester 73 soon pulled in $900,000, making Stewart the highest paid movie star of that time...
...The offending swain, Frank Sinatra's agent, was too valuable to boot...
...Diversification gave him an even larger role in the company—indeed, practically complete control—as the aging Stein began spending more of his days with his antiques...
...Actually, the god who emerges reluctantly from Bruck's pages looks and acts more like Hades, the CEO of the underworld who was, to quote Robert Graves' The Greek Myths, "fierce and jealous of his rights and seldom visits the upper air, except on business...
...By the time he took MCA to Hollywood, he was well into his mission to change the image of the talent agent from raffish (code: Jewish) into respectable (read: WASPish...
...He exceeded his responsibility...
...MCA headquarters moved from the founding father's mansion to a 15-story building the color of black ink...
...Brack's account of the Matsushita buyout of MCA is as ineluctable as the end of King Lear...
...Under Wasserman's command MCA grew steadily into the largest talent agency in the country...
...Strauss diplomatically overlooked a fourth foot that padded quietly in the shady world of men like Meyer Lansky, Moe Dalitz and Sidney Korshak, a mob lawyer who was Wassermann close friend and fixer...
...Wasserman was a whiz with numbers, which leads one to speculate that ifhe had chosen an overt life of crime, he would resemble most closely his acquaintance Meyer Lansky...
...In the '40s ayoungMCA amanuensis on the make named Helen Gurley (Brown) was fired for having an office fling...
...But on the evidence that Brack has amassed, it is clear that success would have been less likely without the intelligence and vision of MCA's de facto boss...
...By any industry's standard, the onetime Cleveland theatrical publicist enjoyed a marathon run...
...Wasserman opened a new gold mine...
...Lew Wasserman, who built a band booking agency known as the Music Corporation of America (MCA) into a conglomerate that included Universal Studios, was famous for his secrecy and aversion to the limelight...
...Variously known as the Black Tower, the Tower of Fear or The Factory, the intimidating structure reflected Wassermann utilitarian tastes and ominous influence...
...But not before Wasserman quashed a Screen Actors Guild regulation that prohibited agencies from producing movies if they represented talent...
...Steven Spielberg called the force behind his extraordinary career his "guardian angel...
...As one associate observed tartly, "Only in the entertainment industry could...
...Wasserman was stymied...
...Nearly 10 years later MCA's men in black were churning out filmed shows for TV...
...All parties except J. Edgar Hoover got what they wanted...
...Jack Valenti, whom Wasserman had salvaged from the wreckage of the John F. Kennedy Administration and ensured a sinecure as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, went over the top...
...I would take people up to my office to see this box and all that was on it was a cartoon, Aesop's Fables, " he told Brack...
...Bruck donates the first 60 pages of her opus to Stein...
...The ailing 401 [k] crowd might like to know that Wassermann cost average for his insider stock was 3 cents a share...
...It was the Dream Factory, Tinsel Town, a place of insecure hierarchies and self-made men who clashed with the glamorous images they produced on the screen...
...He helped Wasserman deftly maneuver the organization's membership into removing the ban, originally established to prevent conflicts of interest and monopolies...
...By 1946, the company had corralled most of movieland's leading actors...
...Readers of the business pages may recall that the mixed marriage did not succeed...
...Reviewed by Ron Sheppard Freelance writer and critic Admirers of Connie Brack's earlier stock-operas (The Predators' Ball...
...He conducted business from a faux colonial mansion, collected English antiques and always showed up for work in a black suit, white shirt and dark tie...
...In 1950 he negotiated a twopicture deal with Warner Bros, that gave Jimmy Stewart $200,000 or one half the profits...
...After MCA's takeover of Universal in 1959, Wasserman had a virtual lock on made-for-TV movies...
...But eventually Wasserman was seriously challenged by younger, hungrier men like Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists...
...The near monopoly enabled it to undermine a studio system that suppressed actors' work opportunities and incomes with long-term contracts not unlike those in big league baseball before players became free agents...
...It was time for a new look...
...Before Wasserman, few outside the film industry took Hollywood too seriously...
...The sale of MCA for less than Hollywood and Wall Street anticipated led to whisperings that the old master had been outmaneuvered by his former student...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
