King Lew the elusive

It’s fitting that the most candid revelation from the late Hollywood mogul Lew R. Wasserman in Connie Bruck’s new biography, “When Hollywood Had a King,” is Wasserman’s admission that the dumbest thing he ever did was selling his beloved MCA Inc. to a Japanese electronics company in 1990.

As someone who throughout his life was Hollywood’s sphinx, Wasserman’s confession is significant. He became one of the industry’s most powerful figures in part because he never let his guard down and didn’t second-guess himself, especially in public.

But up until he died a year ago last week, from a stroke at age 89, Wasserman remained one of the industry’s most perceptive minds. He couldn’t help but agonize watching what once was one of Hollywood’s most stable institutions suffer under a series of inept corporate parents that succeeded him.

Starting with Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial, the company was passed to liquor giant Seagram Co. and finally to France’s Vivendi Universal, which today is a financial shambles. Within a few months, Universal Studios, its theme parks and music group will likely be sold to their fourth owners since Wasserman made his fateful decision 13 years ago.

Against this backdrop comes Bruck’s biography of a towering figure who even in death casts a shadow over the industry. Wasserman built the forerunner of today’s media giants. His studio released some of Hollywood’s classic films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and “The Birds,” and gambled on young talent such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Bruck’s book is about as close to an authorized biography as anyone will ever get. Wasserman sat for eight one- to two-hour interviews with Bruck, on the condition that the subject be limited to MCA, although Bruck says he eventually tiptoed into personal matters. He also put out the word to friends and associates that it was OK to talk to Bruck. Still, Bruck says, Wasserman was cautious, telling stories that it was obvious he had told numerous times before.

“He never liked the idea of being questioned,” Bruck said in an interview at a cafe near her Brentwood home. “He was just so used to ruling that he wouldn’t subject himself to it.” A staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, Bruck made Wasserman the subject of her second biography of a major mogul, the first being her 1994 book “Master of the Game” about the late Time Warner Chairman Steve Ross. She also wrote the 1989 bestseller “The Predators’ Ball,” about junk-bond czar Michael Milken and the takeover artists of the 1980s.

Bruck interviewed Wasserman briefly for a New Yorker piece when he sold the company to Matsushita and thought he might make a good subject for a biography. She launched into it after moving in 1997 to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, former Congressman Mel Levine.

That Wasserman would offer any cooperation was unusual. He almost never granted formal interviews. What contacts he did have with reporters, even after he retired to a patriarchal role in the business, came with the strict understanding that even the most innocuous tales were off the record.

For years, Wasserman resisted suggestions to write his memoirs, preferring to take his secrets to the grave. That included reportedly turning down Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who wanted to publish them when she worked for Doubleday. In characteristic competitive zeal, Wasserman reportedly told her that if he were going to publish a book, he’d do it through his own company.

Blair Westlake, a former top Universal TV executive, traces Wasserman’s reluctance to talk publicly to his early days as a Hollywood agent. Wasserman’s lifelong code, Westlake said, was stay in the background, let his stars take credit and don’t share their secrets.

“He could have filled volumes but chose not to,” Westlake said. “Lew lived to his very last day by the principle that he wasn’t going to tell tales out of school. Even the stories he told were stories that were not in any way revealing or embarrassing.”

Bruck said her take on Wasserman was of a brilliant man who saw Hollywood’s big picture like no other mogul did. When his fellow executives wanted to squash television, fearing it would keep people from theaters, Wasserman embraced it and proved studios could make a fortune in the medium. He recognized after a bruising antitrust fight with the Kennedy administration that Hollywood couldn’t isolate itself from politics, and that its money and celebrities could speak volumes in Washington.

Controversial associates

But he also was a ruthless executive with a notorious temper who often associated with questionable figures, notably alleged mob lawyer Sidney Korshak and reputed mob chief Moe Dalitz. That part of Bruck’s book is likely to prove most controversial to Wasserman’s admirers.

Bruck devotes considerable space to profiling Korshak, once identified by the FBI as organized crime’s main conduit to Hollywood. The Wasserman-Korshak link is no secret: The subject was plowed thoroughly in previous books, notably Dan E. Moldea’s “Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob” as well as Dennis McDougal’s “The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood.” Bruck said she devoted so much space to the subject because Korshak, who died in 1996, came up repeatedly in interviews.

“I was told by a number of people that Korshak was Lew Wasserman’s closest friend,” Bruck said. “They talked several times a day and saw each other often.”

According to Bruck, Korshak was useful to Lew Wasserman mostly in helping keep labor peace in Hollywood and, secondarily, as “this all-around fixer.” She quotes one unidentified MCA executive telling a story in which an unnamed Universal film shooting in Boston and set in the 1920s needed a panoramic shot of a neighborhood, but the homes all had TV antennas. Wasserman, Bruck said, called Korshak, who used his influence to have the antennas removed long enough to get the shot.

Bruck said that during her chats with Wasserman, she didn’t push him on the subject of Korshak and regrets it now.

“I was a year away from finishing the book when he died,” Bruck said. “I was thinking I would have plenty of time to go back and really question him on things.... I should have pressed him more. I was deferential to him. He was old and frail.”

Korshak was not a major part of Wasserman’s life, insist former Wasserman lieutenants, among them his longtime second in command, Sidney J. Sheinberg.

“There’s no question Lew Wasserman considered Sidney Korshak to be a friend of his, and that he publicly noted Korshak was never charged with anything, was never indicted and was never convicted of a crime,” Sheinberg said.

That said, Sheinberg disputes suggestions that Korshak had clout at the company.

“Having spent more waking moments with Lew Wasserman than any other human being with the possible exception of his wife, Edie, and having had more lunches with him than anyone else, I can tell you Sidney Korshak was not someone who was on his mind. Any suggestion that this man was influential at MCA is simply not accurate,” Sheinberg said.

A judgment call

Another area likely to be controversial is Bruck’s suggestion that Wasserman’s widow, Edie, was unfaithful to him. Such a suggestion is almost sacrilegious in Hollywood (although McDougal in his book wrote that she was in love with Nicholas Ray, director of such films as “Rebel Without a Cause” and “King of Kings”). The Wassermans were Hollywood royalty, the premier political fund-raisers and philanthropists in town.

Bruck confines the subject to a single page, doesn’t name names and bases it on interviews with people who volunteered it to her. She says that of everything in her book, “it’s the judgment call that I weighed most deliberately.” In the end, she included it because a personal life Wasserman couldn’t control was in such sharp contrast to business, where Wasserman nearly always got his way.

“I wrestled with it myself,” Bruck said. “I felt it was just too important an element of the whole picture I was trying to draw. If I had left it out, it would be like a hole in the manuscript. Everyone who told me about it would think, ‘Well, why isn’t it there?’ ”

Edie Wasserman didn’t cooperate with the book. Bruck said she sent her a note after Wasserman died asking to see her but received no response. “It wasn’t any mystery: The family wasn’t cooperating,” she said.

The Wasserman family, through Universal, declined to comment on Bruck’s book.

Bruck also directly challenges as myth one of the most repeated stories about Wasserman: that then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 offered him a Cabinet post as secretary of Commerce. Bruck calls it “the keystone in Wasserman’s rendition of his political life.”

Bruck bases her debunking on a 1973 oral history Wasserman made for the Johnson library that was sealed until Wasserman’s death. In it, she said, Wasserman said he never considered taking any government post; he asked Johnson shortly after Kennedy was assassinated to promise him “that I never have to work for the government.”

Bruck adds that the offer also was unlikely because Johnson was too astute a politician to risk a confirmation hearing that could dig into Wasserman’s relationship with Korshak. Bruck believes the story was perpetuated after Johnson’s death by both Wasserman and Motion Picture Assn. of America Chairman Jack Valenti, a former top Johnson aide who owes his career as the movie industry’s lobbyist to Wasserman.

But in an interview, Valenti adamantly disputed Bruck’s theory, saying that Johnson very much wanted Wasserman in his Cabinet.

“The president didn’t like to offer anything to anybody unless he knew they would accept,” Valenti said. “So he asked me to sound out Lew to see if he would like to come into the Cabinet as secretary of Commerce. Lew said he was flattered but said he couldn’t leave the company at that time. There were only three people who knew about it: the president, Lew and me.”

Last month, Wasserman’s former executives, among them Sheinberg and former TV chief Tom Wertheimer, gathered like Army veterans from a long-ago war at an annual MCA reunion. Held at the Sheraton Universal Hotel, the gathering looked out over what remains of the empire they built: the theme park, the movie studio, CityWalk and the charcoal office tower now named for Wasserman. Wasserman used to be a fixture at the reunions, which celebrated his birthday. His widow, Edie, attended this one.

Bruck doesn’t find it unusual that they still gather. Despite his flaws, Wasserman inspired devotion among his executives and employees.

“He gave people the feeling they were part of something that was important and bigger than themselves,” Bruck said. “He was a real leader as much as a corporate executive.”