COVER STORY : THE REBIRTH OF HOLLYWOOD’S POLITICAL CLOUT

Last week, MCA Chairman Lew R. Wasserman capped his 50-year-career in Hollywood by arranging the company’s sale to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Wasserman has become a Hollywood legend not only for his business skill but for his ties to powerful politicians. In “The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection,” which will be published in January by Pantheon, Los Angeles Times national political correspondent Ronald Brownstein examines the history of the mutual fascination between politics and show business from the 1920s to the present. In an introduction to today’s excerpt, Brownstein summarizes the evolution of Hollywood’s political ties through the ‘50s, and in the excerpt, examines how Wasserman and Arthur Krim of United Artists established the mold for the modern Hollywood power broker.

From the dawn of the relationship between Hollywood and Washington in the 1920s, politicians had always come to the film capital in search of both glamour and money.

The glamour came from stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles and Melvyn Douglas, who campaigned with verve and style for Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace and Harry Truman.

Through the 1950s, the money came from the handful of men who, incredibly, had ruled the movie industry since its founding--among them MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner of Warner Bros. and Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox.

These men ruled Hollywood with autocratic flair. And yet, as immigrant Jews and showmen, they remained outsiders, unaware of their own enormous cultural influence and unable to win the acceptance of the Los Angeles elite. As powerful as they were on the back lots, “Their hunger for social recognition (was) pathetic,” wrote one contemporary.

It was this nagging urge for status, more than a clearly defined political agenda, that first attracted Mayer and the other moguls to politics. What better way to announce arrival than to win the friendship of a senator, a Cabinet officer, even a President? It would not be uncommon for a movie executive who hated everything about the New Deal to proudly display a signed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in his office, or, like Mayer, angle for invitations to the White House when he was in Washington.

Gradually, these personal considerations were leavened with the hard-headed business imperative of winning powerful friends for an industry that found itself increasingly subject to federal rules and regulations. But, with the exception of Mayer, who firmly anchored himself in the Republican Party, the first generation of Hollywood executives careened between the parties, driven as much by emotion as calculation.

Their style of politics reached its apogee in the 1952 presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower. On Eisenhower’s behalf, the moguls leveraged all of their influence--and raised unprecedented sums, simply by making lists of the most well-paid employees at the studios and systematically pressuring them to give.

But the 1952 campaign marked the last triumph for their brand of autocratic politics, and economic change undermined their approach. Through the 1950s, power in Hollywood decentralized. After the Justice Department won a consent decree severing the studios from their massive theater chains, dozens of new independent producers emerged. Unable to rely on a captive chain of theaters to exhibit as many movies as they could produce, the studios found it less profitable to hold stars, writers and directors under binding contract.

Once they achieved their independence, these people became less susceptible to the demands through which the studio heads had built their political power. In the wreckage of the old system, a new generation of studio leaders would be forced to find new ways to accumulate influence.

More than any of their contemporaries, two men would carve those paths and create the modern Hollywood fund-raising system that has now become an indispensable piece of the national political money hunt.

Each of them showed great facility for the game, not only for the collection of checks but for the cultivation of the politicians who ultimately cashed them. Each achieved more political influence than any of their predecessors at the pinnacle of Hollywood.

Lew R. Wasserman of Beverly Hills and Arthur B. Krim of Manhattan lived a coast apart but were in many ways much alike. It was common in Hollywood to say that if Lew Wasserman wasn’t the smartest man in Hollywood, Arthur Krim was. In New York the order might be reversed.

Wasserman at MCA Inc. and Krim at United Artists Corp. were part of the first generation that succeeded the industry’s founding moguls, and among that first generation the only ones who inherited the founders’ stubborn durability. Both were considered brilliant deal makers, wizards with numbers, more at home behind an adding machine than in a cutting room. Both expected and gave loyalty; yet both were considered somewhat cold and reserved.

Both had interests that extended beyond the screen. Like the moguls they supplanted, they coveted the company of powerful men. But they entered that company with a shrewdness and subtlety their predecessors lacked. Both Jews, they built lasting alliances to Gentile centers of power that had rejected their predecessors, or at best only tolerated them.

What they shared was an awareness that the new political era--the era of television and multimillion-dollar campaigns--ran on rules fundamentally different from the old. When the moguls had raised their tribute for politicians, they had squeezed and muscled every dollar out of their own domains, marshaling all of their implied power to force their employees into line. Wasserman and Krim both understood that time had passed by that approach. Modern campaigns needed so much money that the most successful fund-raisers--and thus the most influential men--were those who could reach beyond their own dominion and extract money from other local powers. That required not only clout, but tact, the ability to persuade other proud and wealthy men and women to join their cause to yours. Later, the federal campaign finance reforms that limited the size of contributions imposed an even higher premium on those skills.

Over time, these changes provided opportunities for other Hollywood players who would rival the influence of Wasserman and Krim. But they would operate in a mold cast--in a style trademarked--by the first of the new moguls.

Wasserman’s Beginnings

Lew Wasserman was born in Cleveland in 1913, the son of Orthodox Jews. The most powerful man in modern Hollywood began his movie career as a theater usher; later he handled promotion for a Cleveland nightclub called the Mayfair Casino.

The Mayfair often booked bands from a Chicago-based talent agency called the Music Corp. of America, or MCA. Wasserman impressed MCA’s founder, Jules C. Stein, and in December, 1936, Wasserman joined the company to which he would devote his life.

From his powerful base in the music industry, Stein aimed at Hollywood. In 1937, he opened a Beverly Hills office under the direction of Taft B. Schreiber, a young agent. But the point man for the invasion became Wasserman, who arrived in California in 1938 and within two years was named vice president of the company’s fledgling motion picture division.

Tall, thin and taciturn, Wasserman fused his life with his company; he was monastic in his total dedication to MCA. No one in Hollywood worked harder or schemed more creatively. Soon, MCA spoke for so much talent, not only in the movie business but also in the music business, that it came to be known as the Octopus, its tentacles stretching into every corner of entertainment. In 1946, Stein promoted himself to chairman of the board and rewarded Wasserman for his precocious success by naming him president.

With operating control in his hands, Wasserman expanded MCA even more aggressively than its founder. He worked nearly all the time, and expected as much from the men around him. Soft-spoken and icily self-controlled in public, he could be ferocious behind closed doors. His temper was legendary; stories percolated through the company of men who fainted under a tongue-lashing from Wasserman, or who rushed from his office, dazed and humiliated, and promptly threw up. But he paid his men well and inspired them with a sense of mission lacking on the dispirited studio lots.

Like Stein before him, Wasserman was not content to passively deliver the performers whom producers demanded. He constantly probed for fresh advantage. During the 1930s, the agency had used its relationships to establish itself as a producer, packaging radio programs featuring acts it represented. Two decades later, Wasserman saw the upheaval racking the studios in the wake of the consent decree as an opportunity to emulate that role in Hollywood.

The initial opportunity to move across the table--where MCA would buy talent as a producer, not just sell it as an agent--came not in feature films but in the production of television programming, which most of the studios initially derided. In 1952, the company aggressively lobbied for and won a blanket waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, freeing it from the union’s prohibition against agents acting simultaneously as producers. Through the 1950s, MCA became the dominant force in television production.

As Hollywood lurched into the 1960s, MCA was still its most powerful talent agency, but to think of it in those terms was anachronistic. Through a series of deft maneuvers, Wasserman had transformed it into a new sort of studio, one that spoke the modern corporate language of diversifying its assets and rationalizing the “manufacture” of its product. “MCA,” acknowledged one critic in 1961, “has been the leader in bringing big-business methods to the entertainment industry.”

Pressure From the Top in ’52

Throughout this period of explosive growth, MCA kept a remarkably low political profile. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Stein (though an ideological conservative) was among the few Hollywood powers who resisted the enormous pressure from Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn and Darryl Zanuck to fall in behind Dwight Eisenhower. Despite personal pleas from both Zanuck and Warner, Stein tersely insisted that his policy was to stay away from any political activity.

Eventually MCA apparently decided that intransigent defiance of three such powerful men was itself impolitic, and in the general election, Wasserman lent his name to the board of directors of the Entertainment Industry Joint Committee for Eisenhower-Nixon. But that was an exception. “Stein was firm on it,” said Edd Henry, a longtime MCA vice president. “I don’t know of anyone who talked to a client about politics.”

MCA’s reluctance to join in political causes fit Stein’s and Wasserman’s shared conception of the company. As a defense against the agent’s historic image as disreputable and pushy--thinly veiled synonyms for Jewish--Stein and Wasserman built MCA around an ideal of Gentile respectability. “Everything was designed to give you the feeling that you were dealing with Ivy League WASPs,” said one former agent. Wasserman set an austere dress code--dark suit (preferably black), white shirt and black tie--and policed it. Blue suits or even blue blazers with gray slacks might be acceptable, but agents with more sartorial daring risked Wasserman’s incendiary temper.

If all this seemed uncharacteristically ascetic for the garish and gaudy playground of Louis Mayer and Jack Warner, that was itself the point. Wasserman saw himself as more than the successor to the original moguls; he seemed to view himself as an improvement over them, as a streamlined and modernized version of the crude and willful studio executives who ruled the Hollywood of his youth. If anything, the key to Wasserman was his singular refusal to do anything as they had done it; his style, his manner, his priorities, all could not have contrasted more with Hollywood’s fathers if he set out to design himself as their inverse.

The moguls were men who understood and relished the parts they played; they were bright, preening, huge in their appetites. Wasserman chose a different role: modern, distant, precise, as hard and inscrutable as the featureless black tower in which he headquartered his empire. His predecessors were mostly Jews who sought desperately to assimilate and betrayed their background by the very tenacity of their attempts to deny it. Without any apparent effort Wasserman genuinely assimilated: He was even more anonymous in his simple black suit than the Protestant corporate climber in gray flannel.

For Wasserman, avoiding political entanglements was just another way of keeping his head down. In 1959, Jack Warner tried to recruit his fellow Eisenhower man for Vice President Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, but Wasserman passed, reminding Warner that he was a registered Democrat. Wasserman apparently supported Lyndon Johnson’s last-minute attempt to win the Democratic nomination. But he played no significant role in the 1960 general election for the Democrats.

MCA’s enormous success made Wasserman’s reclusiveness increasingly untenable. With the moguls finally gone, someone had to speak for the movie business in its new era. The industry’s most powerful man, Wasserman was the logical choice. Inside the industry his profile inexorably increased. Using his considerable negotiating skills, Wasserman quietly stepped in to craft a compromise that ended a 1960 writers strike against the television producers. From that point on, he routinely took a leading role in Hollywood labor negotiations. His preeminent position was formalized a few years later when he was named chairman of the Assn. of Motion Picture and Television Producers Inc., the producers’ collective bargaining organization.

The last barriers to Wasserman’s involvement in political affairs came down shortly after John F. Kennedy’s election as president. Internal Hollywood politics set the change in motion. In late 1961, the Screen Actors Guild withdrew the 1952 waiver that allowed MCA to both represent talent and produce programming; MCA could no longer straddle its two worlds. By then, the talent agency provided only a small portion of the company’s revenues. In June, 1962, MCA declared its intentions by acquiring Decca Records Inc., the parent company of Universal Pictures. With its acquisition of Universal, MCA finalized its reconstitution as a studio; it was now in a position to produce not only for television but for the screen. Because of the SAG decision, the acquisition meant that the company had to abandon its talent business. It announced plans to spin off the agency to its employees.

But this arrangement failed to satisfy the Justice Department, which had been investigating the company since the waning days of the Eisenhower Administration. In July, 1962, the Kennedy Justice Department, citing antitrust concerns, filed suit to prevent the Decca merger and the agency divestiture. After weeks of acrimonious negotiations, MCA was allowed to acquire Decca, but the agency--which the government feared would remain under the company’s de facto control after the divestiture--was completely dissolved.

A Traumatic Event

For Wasserman, the government’s intervention was a traumatic event. Years later, he sanctimoniously described it as “the major surprise of my life . . . a useless, unwarranted act.” By company legend, it was the act that inspired Wasserman to shed his political passivity and begin acquiring the powerful allies that could prevent a recurrence. “He said,” recalled Jerry Gershwin, his former executive assistant, “if you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em.” Wasserman started to cultivate Democratic friends, while Taft Schreiber built alliances in the Republican Party. The activity from the normally reclusive executives turned heads across Hollywood. Not long after the decision, actor George Murphy ran into Schreiber and asked him about Wasserman’s sudden interest in the welfare of Democratic politicians.

“Taft,” Murphy said, “last night I had a dream. I dreamed Bobby Kennedy called Lew and said, ‘Lew, I’ve got about 12 or 14 antitrust suits here against your company, and I think it’s about time you became a Democratic fund-raiser. . . .’ ”

“Let me stop you right there,” Schreiber said. “It was tougher than that.”

In all likelihood, though, by the early 1960s no one had to push Wasserman very hard into the political arena. It was a logical step. Once he completed his evolution from agent to studio head, he was ready to take his place at the head of the table. “Once we took over the studio he was a different kind of person,” said Gershwin, who was so close to Wasserman that he inherited his boss’ old house when he moved into larger quarters. “He was kind of restricted as an agent, he didn’t want the limelight, he felt that all that belonged to the client. As a studio executive he could be more free. He moved from one house to another. He started to display his wealth a little more.”

From a purely business perspective, the logic for an expanded political role was no less compelling. As a studio, as a diversified entertainment conglomerate, as the public company it became in 1959, MCA simply had more interests affected by the government than it did as a privately owned talent agency. If the Justice Department hadn’t sued the company in 1962 and taught Wasserman the importance of powerful friends, something else would have come along to impress the lesson on him. Wasserman had Hollywood wired; but that was no longer enough to protect his interests. His ambitions left him vulnerable to larger forces. “Having a dynamic company he knew he had to get into politics,” said Jere Henshaw, a former MCA executive. “He knew he had to get into politics to have juice. They had to have juice.”

All this Wasserman understood. So he was more than gracious, more than receptive, when an emissary from the Democratic Party flew out to meet with him in early 1963 and suggested it was time for Hollywood’s most powerful man to stand up and be counted for the President who had severed his empire.

‘Calculated Flexibility’

Physically, the man who called on Lew Wasserman could not have differed more from the MCA chief: Arthur Krim was short and stocky, with a tendency toward roundness. But the two men shared a mental toughness, an unsentimental facility for calmly measuring their options behind eyes that revealed nothing. “There was a great resemblance in the way their brains operated,” said Max Youngstein, a former United Artists executive. “It’s what I call calculated flexibility.”

In contrast to Wasserman’s world, Krim grew up comfortably in Mt. Vernon, N.Y.; his father owned a prosperous chain of cafeterias. From an early age he was a precocious academic achiever.

Graduating from Columbia Law School in the Depression year of 1932, Krim joined the New York law firm of Phillips, Nizer. There he met another talented young attorney named Robert S. Benjamin, who had worked his way through City College and Fordham Law School and joined the firm one year before Krim.

Their rapid ascent in the firm neither consumed their energies nor sated their ambitions. Phillips, Nizer represented a number of movie companies, and both of the firm’s rising young men were drawn to that world. Maintaining his partnership at the law firm, Krim eventually became president of Eagle-Lion Films Inc., a distinctive but low-budget production company formed by British film maker J. Arthur Rank and financier Robert R. Young. Benjamin, meanwhile, became president of the J. Arthur Rank Organization Inc. and simultaneously assumed positions at Eagle-Lion and Universal.

Krim’s first foray into the film business ended unhappily. After constant quarrels with Young, he resigned his post in 1949. He was looking for a new opportunity when a friend suggested an unlikely one: the management of United Artists. By 1950, when Krim began examining the prospect, United Artists was one of the industry’s most venerable names and decrepit studios.

It had been formed in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith--four artists united in their determination to control their own fates against studios they believed were leaching the profits from their films with inflated overhead and distribution fees.

Through the 1940s, United Artists attracted an array of talented producers and released some memorable films. But the founders held onto control of the company long after their increasingly rare contributions justified it, and they gradually but inexorably ran it into the ground. By 1951, with Pickford and Chaplin locked in a bitter feud, the company tottered on the edge of bankruptcy. Krim told Pickford as much and proffered a nervy deal: If he and Benjamin could return the company to profitability within three years, they would be given half the stock for a nominal fee.

The gamble paid off. The two men showed a profit within a year and pocketed their half of United Artists. Within a few years they had bought out Chaplin and Pickford, taken the company public and become very wealthy.

Krim, who took the title of president, and Benjamin, who became chairman of the board, worked together like interchangeable parts. Their personalities were, in fact, quite different--Benjamin warmer, more open to enthusiasms, less abrasive and intense than his fastidious partner--but they had worked together for so long that their thoughts seemed intertwined.

Their like-mindedness extended to politics. It was Benjamin who first brought Krim into the national arena. An ardent liberal whose heroes were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Benjamin participated enthusiastically in the 1956 Adlai Stevenson campaign and then plunged into New York reform politics, aligning with Mrs. Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman against party boss Carmine G. DeSapio.

Krim, whose political views mirrored his partner’s, first joined Benjamin during the effort to win a third nomination for Stevenson in 1960. Once Kennedy won the nomination, Benjamin assumed a major role in the nominee’s New York state fund-raising. Once again, he brought along his partner. Krim had previously raised money only for charitable causes, but he served as chairman for the campaign’s final event, an election night fund-raiser that broke up at 3 a.m. uncertain if Kennedy had won.

At first, Benjamin was closer to Kennedy’s team. But his involvement in the United Nations Assn., formed to promote support for the institution, moved him away from partisan politics. That allowed Krim’s own talents to emerge. Kennedy’s men--who did not have the senior executives of many American companies beseeching them for opportunities to assist the President--realized that Krim, too, was an unusual asset and they systematically brought him into Kennedy’s orbit. Drawn to the larger stage, Krim responded without much prodding. The White House arranged for Krim to attend an Army-Navy football game with Kennedy; that gave the movie executive his first chance to talk privately with the President. Kennedy had his usual effect: Krim went home to New York entranced.

Soon thereafter, using pollster Louis Harris as the intermediary, the White House asked Krim to co-chair a fund-raiser for the President the next spring in New York. Krim enthusiastically agreed and helped to organize a full day of activities built around the President’s birthday: a lunch at Krim’s East Side townhouse for 50 major fund-raisers; dinner with nearly 400 individual $1,000 contributors at the Four Seasons restaurant, and finally a huge rally at Madison Square Garden, where the President sat puffing a cigar in an overstuffed chair while a thunderstorm lashed the city outside and Marilyn Monroe, wearing a dress so tight she was literally sewn into it, stunned the crowd with a throaty rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Later that evening, the donors and the President and the President’s men and the stars who had assembled to honor him all retreated to Krim’s home for a party that lasted until the sun rose the next morning. When the receipts from the day’s activities were counted, the White House realized that a star was rising too: Krim’s labors produced an eye-opening $1 million.

This lucrative success inspired the President’s advisers to grander ambitions. Krim emerged in their eyes as the tool for a larger political purpose--strengthening the President’s hand over the unruly assemblage of fiefdoms that characterized the party he ostensibly headed. While recruiting Krim for the New York events, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and party fund-raiser Richard Maguire explained to him the problem. In 1960, they told Krim, the Kennedy campaign, following tradition, depended largely on local fund-raising by Democratic organizations around the country. But, as was traditional, the local organizations, with their own agendas and priorities, diverted much of the money toward their own ends.

To end that dependence, Kennedy’s advisers hoped to establish an independent fund-raising operation controlled by the White House that would provide Kennedy with the resources to make contributions to members of Congress who supported his program. The remarkable results in New York convinced them that such an operation could be organized on a national basis, and that the very eager, very talented Arthur Krim was the logical choice to direct it. Krim jumped at the assignment. Thus was born the President’s Club.

It was, by intent, an ostentatiously exclusive club. Membership cost $1,000. Details of the club’s operations were kept hidden from the press. Its events were closed to the public. For their contributions, members received special briefings from Cabinet members, a gold-engraved membership card, an opportunity to briefly meet the President at fund-raising dinners, and above all, through those momentary flashes of artificial intimacy with power, a chance to declare themselves part of their community’s political elite, to casually drop into conversation at the office what the secretary of state or the President himself had casually told them the night before.

Krim began his operations in his home base of New York. Almost immediately, he expanded his efforts to California. For the pillar of his California Club, Krim needed someone diligent enough to search out new money and strong enough to work with the contentious local Democratic Establishment while maintaining his independence from it. Arthur Krim knew one man in Los Angeles who matched that description, and in Lew Wasserman he found an eager recruit for his new enterprise.

1963 Emergence

Wasserman emerged as a national political force on the evening of June 7, 1963, when he co-sponsored a $1,000-a-plate President’s Club dinner for John F. Kennedy at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Wasserman’s arrival in turn heralded an even larger political development: the concurrent awakening of Southern California as a major source of money for Democratic causes.

California played only a marginal role in national political fund-raising through the 1950s, despite the state’s exploding population and enormous wealth. For Democrats, the situation was particularly bleak. At least President Eisenhower squeezed some cash out of Republican Hollywood and the downtown Los Angeles business Establishment. But almost immediately upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death, California reverted into a financial desert for Democrats.

To the extent a California Democratic financial organization existed, it was in the north, centered around a group of wealthy San Francisco businessmen. In Southern California, the situation, in the terse summation of Stanley Mosk, then the Democratic attorney general, was “chaos.” To serious Democrats--those in the north--Southern California was a lushly appointed playpen, the preserve of undeniably wealthy but fatally idiosyncratic liberals who preferred feuding with one other and fantasizing about an ideal world over the hard business of electing officials. There was money in Southern California, but through the 1950s it was overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, venerable Chandler money, burgeoning aerospace money, musty Pasadena money.

Once Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown won the Statehouse in 1958 and Kennedy took the White House two years later, the Democrats felt the first drops at drought’s end. Now the California Democrats had something more than promises to offer donors: access to power. What the party still needed was someone who could systematically work that asset.

It found the man in 1962 when Brown engineered the election as state Democratic Party chairman of a young, relatively unknown Beverly Hills lawyer named Eugene L. Wyman. In Wyman, the husband of Democratic activist and Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman, the state Democrats had an ambitious, ingenious and dogged fund raiser willing to deal more aggressively than any chairman before him. People always wanted something from the governor: a savings and loan charter, a job, an invitation to the inaugural ball. It was Wyman’s genius to transmute those ephemeral desires into spendable political cash. His fund-raising approach was later summarized straightforwardly in an internal White House memo as “going to individuals and corporations who had something of interest in the state government.” For California Democrats, with their traditions of genteel ineptitude and noble failure, it was a new hardball world.

Wasserman, Hollywood’s toughest operator, eased into this rugged environment as though he had been born to it. Krim was a man he could understand, Wyman was a man he could understand. Both had strong personal ties to the entertainment industry, but both, in turn, understood their limitations. From Wasserman, each wanted the same thing: access to the riches that he could unlock in Hollywood. And from each of them, Wasserman sought access, a chance to plug into the currents of political power they had already tapped. These were relationships that could, and would, endure, for they were built on an understanding deeper than friendship.

A ‘Key Guy’ in ’64

The cultivation of Lew Wasserman bore its first full fruit in the 1964 Johnson campaign. Wyman ran the overall California fund-raising effort, but Wasserman was the powerful new ingredient. “He was not, in the early 1960s, the principal fund-raiser . . . but starting in 1964 Lew became the key guy,” said former Johnson aide Lloyd Hand, who had settled in Los Angeles and joined the state campaign’s inner circle.

Together Wasserman and Wyman collected huge sums, more than California had ever produced for a Democrat. California provided more than 500 members of the President’s Club, more than the President’s home state of Texas, and second only to Krim’s fecund New York operation.

Suddenly, distant California was not only covering its own needs but channeling rivers of money back East; on one day in August, 1964, Wasserman’s President’s Club operation sent a check for $155,000 to the campaign headquarters. Wasserman reached down deeply himself: by election day he had personally contributed at least $28,000 to Democratic campaigns--more than Krim, more than Benjamin, more than all but 14 other donors to either party.

This was as splashy a debut as Hollywood had seen since David O. Selznick commandeered downtown Atlanta to unveil “Gone With the Wind.” Still, Johnson’s White House didn’t realize immediately how useful an ally it had unearthed. At first, Wasserman was hardly an intimate of the President: After he co-sponsored a successful June, 1964, fund-raiser for Johnson, the White House letter of thanks was returned because it was sent to the wrong address. But Wasserman’s skill was apparent to the men who worked most closely with him.

After the campaign, Hand sought him out for a larger role. Since returning to California in 1961, Hand had functioned as Johnson’s unofficial political ambassador, passing on news, representing his interests in the local struggles. Now, with the campaign completed, Hand planned to move back to Washington to join the Administration. He asked Wasserman to succeed him as Johnson’s eyes in California. Wasserman said, “I’d like that,” and so the two men flew back to Washington to allow the new President to size up his new ambassador to the coast. Wasserman liked what he saw, and so did Johnson. “He really did then become kind of the key contact,” said Hand.

Wasserman actually displayed little interest in the traditional perquisites of such a position. He had relatively little contact with Lyndon Johnson, though White House aides insist Johnson greatly respected him. According to close Johnson aide Jack Valenti, Johnson offered Wasserman the position of commerce secretary, not a first-tier job, perhaps, but still a respected place at the Cabinet table; Wasserman preferred to stay at MCA.

Political operatives around Johnson saw Wasserman as the rare man who didn’t want to ride in the President’s limousine--he was satisfied to know that the President recognized his contributions; and he understood that the subtle power that derived from the perception of friendship with the President did not depend on showy public displays of affection.

Everything about Wasserman’s relationship with the Johnson White House was carefully calibrated. Wasserman was a source of political intelligence to the White House, particularly Valenti, who courted Wasserman, even as Wasserman courted him. Wasserman corresponded regularly with Valenti and offered him the use of his home in Palm Springs as early as July, 1964. (Two years later, Wasserman, Krim and New York attorney Ed Weisl persuaded Valenti to leave the White House and become president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.)

And Wasserman maintained firm control of the President’s Club in Southern California, which provided a steady stream of revenue for the national operation. By 1967, an internal White House assessment of the California political scene counted as the major accomplishment of the past several years “the development of a substantial base for political contributions in Southern California.” No one except Wyman could claim more of that credit than Wasserman.

In the disorienting maelstrom of California politics, Wasserman kept his balance. Loyal to the President, he played the role Krim intended, both close to the state Democratic Establishment and apart from it. Though the press often referred to Wasserman as part of Wyman’s fund-raising network, insiders understood that he retained his independence. “Wasserman was not just (L.A. Democratic leader) Paul Ziffren’s guy, or later Wyman’s guy,” said Fred Dutton, a veteran Democratic operative. “Wasserman was always his own guy, from the very beginning.” In the lengthy internal White House political assessment of the state prepared in 1967, Wasserman was treated as one of California’s few “lone wolves” not controlled by any of the local party’s querulous factions.

Politicians came to respect Wasserman as a man who could raise money smoothly and reliably. Unlike a Jack Warner, who hectored and commanded, Wasserman didn’t pressure his own employees to give--though he certainly made those of like mind aware of impending fund-raisers. He managed the details of fund-raising affairs, looking after the food, the entertainment, the program. At a Wasserman event, all the small touches were right.

“If it was supposed to be $200,000 for a fund-raiser you’d show up and it wouldn’t be $203,000 or $197,000, it was $200,000,” said Washington attorney Robert S. Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and now a member of the MCA board. Wasserman’s control over events was so complete, his organization so meticulous, that politicians called them “turnkey” affairs. Once when Wasserman was organizing a fund-raising dinner for the DNC, party chairman John White came to see him at his home. “What do you want me to do?” White asked. “Just show up,” Wasserman said.

Wasserman could not only command money from every cranny of Hollywood but could effectively reach beyond the gilded ghetto. That was crucial because Hollywood itself, with such exceptions as the final Franklin Roosevelt race and the 1952 Eisenhower campaign, did not routinely provide very large sums for candidates until the 1970s. (Even as Southern California greatly increased its contributions in 1964, the White House still considered the film business relatively barren terrain; national Republicans through the 1960s looked less to the studios than to the conservative downtown business Establishment.)

“At a typical fund raiser at Lew’s there would be an enormous cross section of powerful Southern Californians: aircraft industry people, retailers, writers, entertainers to be sure . . . heads of other studios, people who had some inherited wealth,” said one former MCA executive. “Lew’s grasp of who’s who in California and his friendships with them are quite extraordinary, quite far-reaching. It was precisely the opposite of the old days, totally, totally the opposite.”

Wasserman’s work for Lyndon Johnson put his name on the lips of the men who ran the Democratic Party; even more telling was its impact in Hollywood. Wasserman became the political role model for the men and women who succeeded the moguls, and the men and women who succeeded them.

Krim demonstrated many of the same political skills. But he was in New York, removed from daily Hollywood life. It was Wasserman, more than any other individual in modern Hollywood, who both established the expectation that movie executives would cultivate friendships with politicians, and demonstrated how to do so.