Connie Bruck - When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence

Contents

To Ari Schlossberg
and
Mel Levine

WHEN HOLLYWOOD
HAD A KING

Introduction

For the better part of the last fifty years, aspirants to great power in Hollywood imagined themselves in the chair of one man. It was not just that Lew Wasserman ran MCAthe largest talent agency the world has ever known, as its founder, Jules Stein, liked to sayand the biggest television production company. Or, later, that Wasserman headed one of the first diversified entertainment companies, which included the worlds largest motion picture studio, Universal, and the countrys leading supplier of television programs. These were only the facts on his rsum, and they did not begin to convey the scope of Wassermans power. Like other pioneering businessmen with an appetite for dominion, Wasserman shaped his world, ruled it with a free hand, and tried to control whatever forces impinged upon it.

From the start, he prized disciplined troops, and he succeeded in creating legions of followers within his enterprise who were willing to live by his dictates, generally regarding him with both fear and awe. As an agent, he engineered changes within the industry that contributed to the fall of the studio system, a demise from which he benefitedand later, when he found himself on the studio side, he sought to re-create his own version of that system. Labor struggles had ravaged Hollywood in the thirties and forties, and studio heads such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer regarded the unions as their bitter enemies. Wasserman, however, established strong relationships with labor leaders, from Jimmy Hoffa on down, and with the underworld that controlled some of them; Sidney Korshak, the Chicago mobs representative in Hollywood, was probably Wassermans closest friend.

Wasserman also developed a healthy respect for the governments power to intrude on his domain. He had watched as the major studios were forced to sell their cinema chains under the so-called Paramount Decree, a Supreme Court decision issued in May 1948. And he experienced the impact of antitrust enforcement firsthand in 1962, when the Justice Department sued MCA. He decided, therefore, to make Hollywood a political force far more potent than it had ever been, so that it could help thwart governmental attacks and bring about regulatory help and legislation that could mean billions of dollars to the entertainment industry. Wasserman built a machine for political contributions, conscripted Hollywood stars to appear at fund-raisers, and became an indefatigable presence on Capitol Hill. He took pride in his closeness to presidents, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton; Wasserman didnt care for Richard Nixon, but he gave the assignment of courting Nixon to another MCA executive, and Nixon probably did more for the industry than any other president, with the possible exception of Reagan. In Hollywood it was widely known that Wassermans reach extended from the White House to the underworld, which added to his aura of invincibility.

For decades, Wasserman did more to affect the course of the entertainment industry than any other individual. It was a historically fractious community; moguls such as Warner and Mayer had ruled their fiefdoms and treasured their prerogatives, refusing to yield to one another, and there had been no recognized industry leader. But that was what Wasserman became, through his deft maneuvering. He maintained that position for so long that by the time he surrendered it, the role he had created for himself was an anachronism. By the mid-nineties, a trend that had begun with the creation of diversified entertainment companies such as MCA had led to media entertainment behemoths far larger and more all-encompassing than even Wasserman might have predicted. The Hollywood studios, subsidiaries of these giant conglomerates with varying agendas, had to defer to their respective parent companiesnot to someone from their own ranks. For years, people in Hollywood had wondered who the next Lew Wasserman would be. The answer, now, was no one.

Despite his extraordinary ambit, Wasserman managed over the years to maintain a surprisingly low profile outside his Hollywood and Washington circles, his name barely recognized by the general public. He had been schooled by Jules Stein, who believed that talent agents should cultivate visibility for their clients and anonymity for themselves. It was a business principle, and also a deep personal proclivity; both Stein and Wasserman were congenitally secretive men. However, Wasserman eventually bent the rule somewhat. He realized that public relations, like political clout, would be another weapon in his armament; although he spoke to the press infrequently, he did talk to select reporters when it served his purposes. The consummate Hollywood agent, Wasserman was well aware, too, that his elusivenessa rare commodity in the hot center of the celebrity culturestrengthened his mystique.

Because Wasserman had been able to operate so commandingly for so long, while revealing so little of either his modus operandi or himself, I found him an alluring subject. Moreover, he was absolutely singular: if there was any person through whom the larger story of Hollywood in the past five decades could be told, it was Wasserman. I met him only at the end of his remarkable run, in early 1991, when MCA had just been sold to the Japanese consumer-electronics giant Matsushita, and I was interviewing him for a piece I was writing for The New Yorker about that transaction. About seven years later, when I called to tell Wasserman that I was writing this book about MCA, he agreed to see me, and over the course of the next four and a half years I had a series of interviews with him. He was plainly ambivalent about the process. He had always sworn, very publicly, that he would never write a book, nor would he cooperate with one. But there we were. In the beginning he said he would talk to me only about Jules Stein, not himself. Then he said he would talk to me about the company, not himself. Inevitably, though, he did talk about himself, and though much of what he said had a distinctly prerecorded quality, stories told and retold, there were surprisingly spontaneous, candid moments. Once, when I had seen him a number of times and called to set up another appointment, he declined; he said he had realized he was cooperating sidewaysand that was something he didnt want to do. But after several months I called again, his secretary made the appointment, and when I arrived at his office he greeted me warmly as usual, and never referred to his earlier refusal. I assumed he had decided that he wanted his story told (though probably only parts of it), and that he would take his chances. He was extremely frailbut I succumbed to the popular illusion that Lew Wasserman was bound to endure indefinitely. So I was caught painfully off guard when he suffered a stroke in May 2002 and died a few weeks later. I was left with the regret that I had not seen him more oftenand that he would never read the book that I believe he would have felt, on balance, gave him his due.

I did not have the opportunity to meet Jules Stein, who died in 1981. But I was fortunate to have access to hundreds of pages of a rough draft of a Stein memoir, written by former New York Times reporter Murray Schumach, and drawn from many hours of interviews with Stein near the end of his life (he would not have contemplated such a thing earlier). So Steins idiosyncratic voice can be heard, along with Wassermans, in the pages of this book. Stein said he realized early on that Wasserman was a pupil who was surpassing his teacher. His statement was accurate; Stein did not mince words, or flatter. But it was Stein who had imprinted the Music Corporation of America, the band-booking agency he founded in Chicago in 1924, with the characteristics that powered its remarkable trajectoryand who provided Wasserman the platform from which to launch his own.