Connie Bruck - Master of the Game

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for my mother,
Edith Bruck

S teve Ross would have loved his funeral, his friends and family later agreed. Its planning, however, had provoked the usual dissension. His grown children, Mark Ross and Toni Ross, wanted to have a private family ceremony, and a memorial service later for that other family of thousands: all the friends Ross had made in his years of building Warner Communications Inc. which was now Time Warner, Inc.; his current associates at that mammoth company; the Hollywood celebrities whom hed cultivated; and more. But Rosss wife, Courtney, had insisted that they hold a private ceremony for a select group of several hundred, including the celebrities, some of whom she wanted to ask to eulogize Ross, and some to perform. Its what Steve would want, she is said to have told Mark Ross.

But Steve isnt going to be there, Ross reportedly rejoined.

Courtney Ross, however, had had her way. And she, the producer of a couple of documentary films, had thrown herself into planning this event with a producers zeal. Ross had died in the early hours of Sunday, December 20, 1992, in Los Angeles, where he had gone, after a years agonizing battle against prostate cancer, to undergo radical surgery. It had been a kind of Hail Mary play, to halt the cancer; and, after further weeks of suffering, it had failed. Courtney Ross returned from Los Angeles to New York, and set the funeral for Wednesday morning, at the Guild Hall, in East Hampton.

The auditorium of Guild Hall was too austere, she decided; she preferred the Guilds art gallery. The pictures were taken down, and in the next two days the space was completely renovated: the room was repainted; a carpet was run up the center aisle; a stage was built; the lighting was adjusted. On the back wall, facing the room, Courtney Ross hung a huge, brilliantly colored Willem de Kooning paintingone of her husbands favorites.

The funeral was scheduled to begin at 11:00 A.M .; by 10:30, the small drive in front of Guild Hall was choked with limousines. Since it was two days before Christmas, many people had been away on holiday; Guy Salvadore, who had started working for Ross in the Kinney days, and after Kinneys acquisition of Warner-Seven Arts had become head of transportationoverseeing the companys growing fleet of limousines, helicopters, and planeshad been working furiously for the past several days, flying people in from all over the country. Rosss bodyguard, Tony Battisti, who had been at his side perpetually for over ten years, stood at the door, surveying each person who entered. The cold was too bitter to stand outside, so people pressed into the vestibule area to wait.

It was not an altogether congenial group to be in such close quarters. In the days immediately preceding Rosss death, Gerald Levin, Rosss co-CEO, had carried out a restructuring of the board of directors, forcing off several of the strongest Ross loyalists. Although Levin had not known Ross was dying, he had known that Ross was weakened and incommunicadoand he had seized the moment.

The family viewed it as an assault on Steve, asserted one close to them, and Courtney did not want to invite Levin to the funeral. But Arthur [Liman] persuaded her that she should, because otherwise it would be a cause clbre and would create even more dissension. (She had held fast, however, on the issue of inviting J. Richard Munro, the former chairman of Time Inc. and current director of Time Warner, who had been Levins agentand a particularly combative onein this maneuver. Although the rest of the board was invited, Munro was not.)

Crowded into this uncomfortably small space, therefore, were Levin, on the one hand, and those he had so recently deposed, and their allies, on the other. Martin Payson, WCIs long-time general counsel, and, more recently, the vice-chairman of Time Warner, who had been ejected from the board and, in the ensuing battle, resigned not only from the board but the companyhis home of twenty-two yearsstared straight ahead, stony-faced. Not far away was Arthur Liman, who for more than twenty years had been Rosss lawyer, close friend, booster, and protectorand who within the past week, attempting to protect him to the last, had engaged in a furious scene with Levin.

If, knowing Rosss history, one had tried to guess who from the past would be present on this day and who would not, one would surely have been surprised to see, standing on the periphery of the crowd, Herbert Siegel, the chairman and president of Chris-Craft Industries, who was a veteran of a different corporate battlethe most protracted and bitter one Ross had ever waged. Siegel had been called and told that Courtney Ross wanted him to come, but the antipathy that he and Ross had felt for each other was so well known that many seemed taken aback to find him there. Not surprisingly, Jay Emmett, who had pled guilty in the Westchester Premier Theatre scandal in 1981and who was the closest friend Ross ever hadwas not invited. Nor was it surprising, all things considered, that Solomon Weiss, the WCI assistant treasurer who had refused to cooperate with the government and had been convicted in the same scandal, was there.

There were Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw; Chevy Chase; Lisa and Dustin Hoffman; Quincy Jones and Nastassja Kinski; Paul Simon; Barbra Streisand; and Anouk Aime. Ross had made the stars his intimate circle in the last decade, but there were some here who still recalled his former life. Caesar Kimmel, who had run Kinney Parkingand was now the manager of a gambling casino in Moscowhad first met Ross in the late fifties, when Ross was working for his father-in-law, Edward Rosenthal, at the Riverside funeral home. (Rosss daughter, Toni, would smile when she mentioned how her fathers occupation was described on her birth certificate: undertaker.) The investment banker Felix Rohatyn always liked to tell people that he and Ross had made their first deal on the backstairs of the Campbell funeral home (owned by Riverside), while a funeral was being conducted inside.

Now, waiting for this funeral to begin, Rohatyn was commiserating with Albert Sarnoff, Rosss former brother-in-law, who had thrown in his lot with Ross when Ross was taking Kinney Service Corporation public, in 1962. Rohatyn, in a philosophic and somewhat morose frame of mind, was commenting that it was what the Greeks call fate that Ross should have been allowed to engineer his consummate design, the Time-Warner mergerthus bringing into being the worlds largest media and entertainment companybut had then been denied the time he needed to try to make it work.

Although it may have been undoable, continued Rohatyn, who had had a hand in that merger. As I get older, I am struck more and more at how, in these things, it is the intangibles that matter mostpersonality, culture, ego.

Did Ross, perhaps, after effecting the merger, come to think thatthat it was, in the end, undoable? Both Rohatyn and Sarnoff exclaimed that that was impossible. Steve would never have thought that, Sarnoff declared. He was the eternal optimist.

But now, Rohatyn concluded, its like Schuberts Unfinished Symphony.

With that, the doors opened, and everyone filed in.

As a pianist playedand a cameraman filmedRosss nine-year-old daughter, Nicole, and several of her schoolmates placed flowers in a large vase that had stood, empty, near Rosss casket. The casket itself lay beneath a mountain of lavender Sterling Silver roses, Steve Rosss favorite. (I never saw a casket with so many roses on itthat was fitting, Rosss long-time lawyer and friend, Milton (Mickey) Rudin, would comment later.)