Making a Home for Hollywood

Edie Wasserman wants to make one thing perfectly clear: Lew is the one who does most of the work on charities. It’s Lew who should get the credit.

Her husband, Lew Wasserman, gets a lot of credit, mostly for his unprecedented reign as one of Hollywood’s most powerful men.

But it’s Edie Wasserman who’s been named one of Los Angeles magazine’s 100 most powerful people in Southern California for her philanthropy.

Of course, Edie thought the article to be ridiculously fawning.

She hates the limelight and says she’s a terrible public speaker, but today she’s willing to sit down and talk about her pet project, the Motion Picture and Television Fund--the health care and retirement organization for the entertainment industry.

Lew and Edie Wasserman have been friends to presidents, movie stars, producers, and not necessarily in that order. Their philanthropy includes the Jules Stein Eye Institute, the Geffen Playhouse, the Music Center, many state universities and several lesser known organizations. Since JFK--they were Kennedy fund-raisers--they’ve been political players in the Democratic Party. Lady Bird Johnson remains one of Edie’s devoted friends.

Edie, who turns 83 on Wednesday, has slowed down somewhat. “This is the only thing I ‘do’ anymore,” she says referring to the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

But slowing down is a relative term.

Says longtime friend, producer and director Gil Cates: “You’re dealing with a woman who’s very smart and very direct. And there’s no game-playing. . . . You ask a question, you’re going to get an answer.”

Adds actress Sharon Stone, considered by Edie to be one of her heirs apparent in the fund: “I think that she is the matriarch of the business in this town. She epitomizes all that is regale, elegant and fun.”

On Saturday, the Wassermans were honored for their joint work when the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s Woodland Hills campus was renamed the Wasserman Campus.

Campus residents mixed with Kirk Douglas, Aaron Spelling, Suzanne Pleshette and Robert Townsend as about 300 people turned out to honor the couple. The ceremony presenters were Hollywood who’s who list--Wasserman goddaughter Jamie Lee Curtis, protege Steven Spielberg, Jack Valenti, Jeffrey Katzenberg and fund President Roger Mayer. “Didn’t I tell you I had a future when I married you 62 years ago?” Lew asked Edie at the ceremony.

Privately, Edie had already told the board: “If you find somebody to give more money than I’m giving, then change the name.”

She remains active on the board, taking people on tours and checking on the retirement home from time to time. Says the fund’s CEO William Haug, “Edie is on campus, everyone stands up a little taller. Even the people who don’t know who she is know who she is.”

Passing the Torch to the Next Generation

A few weeks ago Edie sat down for a rare interview. She’s worried, she says, worried that “people look at me and see an old lady.” She is mortified that they see the fund as just a quaint old-age home for long-forgotten starlets and penniless stuntmen. Today, it serves a good portion of the industry’s 500,000 workers and their families in Southern California.

The foundation was started in 1921 by the celebs of the day--Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Charlie Chaplin--as a relief fund for people in the entertainment industry. Since then, it’s had many transformations, growing into an organization that offers health insurance, residential care, Alzheimer’s care, child care and hospital care.

The fund’s unofficial slogan--”We take care of our own”--has provided a model for such groups as the NFL and auto workers also wanting to take care of their own.

“Our only problem is getting younger people helping,” Wasserman says. “It’s very hard to convince them they will need it.”

She spends a lot of time lobbying people like Jodie Foster and Sharon Stone to step up to the plate. Stone, who just recently extended her commitment with AmFAR, the AIDS research fund, says she looks forward to a time when she can take over for Wasserman.

She Was a Rich Girl; He Was a Poor Boy

If Edie Wasserman is comfortable with show people, it may be because she’s been around them all her life. Her father, Henry Beckerman, was a lawyer who represented many entertainment people--Sophie Tucker and Guy Lombardo, among them. Edie wanted to be a dancer, but no “good Jewish girl” would ever be allowed do that, she says.

She grew up in a tony section of Cleveland. She likes to tell people that Lew came from the wrong side of the tracks, and she came from the right side. “We met in the middle because my father was broke.”

As a preteen, she had a checkbook and a weekly allowance of $125. “That lasted till the Crash.”

“Lew didn’t lose anything,” she says, because he didn’t have anything. His mother ran a modest restaurant in Cleveland.

When they met, she was working at the May Co. for $18 a week and he was hiring bands for a restaurant nightclub. She had no idea, she says, he was going to be such a force in the entertainment industry. (Lew Wasserman, whom Variety dubbed as Showman of the Century, became president and then CEO of MCA, spawning an empire of movies, music, Universal Studios, theme parks, syndication rights and then some.) “I just knew he was going to be,” she says.

Soon after their 1936 wedding, in a story that has reached legendary status, Lew went to Chicago to interview with Jules Stein, who had a big-band agency called the Music Corp. of America. Before Wasserman got his coat off, Stein hired him to be head of advertising.

The newlyweds spent a year in Chicago and then New York, where Edie chafed at the complicated intrigues of high society. “I hated New York. I felt closed in.”

The next year, they moved to Los Angeles, where Lew became the town’s first super-agent and president of MCA. Edie had found a home.

“I never felt so open and free in my life,” she says.

“Beverly Hills was a wonderful one-horse town,” she says. They lived in a Beverly Hills-adjacent apartment. Soon after, she gave birth to their daughter, Lynne. She didn’t get involved with many charities, except the Hollywood Canteen, which served servicemen during World War II.

“We didn’t have any money [to give] in those days,” she says.

Their first highly public involvement came when Dorothy Chandler recruited Lew to help raise money for downtown’s Music Center. Chandler, who was married to the owner of The Los Angeles Times, could bring in old money from Pasadena and Hancock Park. “She couldn’t draw in the Jewish community,” Edie says. So that was left to Lew, who also brought in the new money from Hollywood.

On the heels of their success, Norman Chandler--Dorothy’s husband--asked Lew to be on the board of directors at Caltech.

And when rich people are asked to be on boards, Edie says, eventually, they are asked to give money. So came their first donation to a university: $1 million for scholarships to Caltech students.

Soon, she was on the board at CalArts, and a $1-million scholarship fund followed. Eventually, the couple gave money for scholarships at Brandeis University, UCLA and New York University film schools, Georgetown University and the LBJ School of Law at the University of Texas.

This year, she and Lew gave $10 million to UCLA, enough to guarantee 100 full scholarships to students for as long as there is a UCLA.

“Neither of them had a college education. They feel very deeply about providing,” says producer-director Cates.

He recently stepped down as dean of the motion picture and television department at UCLA. But before he did, Cates nominated Edie for a Chancellor’s Medal, the equivalent of an honorary degree. Lew received the same medal in 1996.

Cates joined the school nine years ago, and one of his first duties was fund-raising.

He likes to tell this story:

He took the couple out to lunch, and in the middle of a somewhat painful pitch, Edie looked at Lew, who looked at Cates and asked, “If I give you $1 million, will you stop?”

Lew said: “Just send me a little memo, and I’ll send you a check.”

Years later, Cates says, “There are so many people who give you money and make you go through the hoops to do it.”

Says Edie of Lew: “He’s much more charitable than I am.”

Giving Becomes a Family Tradition

The Wassermans’ daughter, Lynne, and her children, Casey Wasserman and stand-up comic Carol Leif, are carrying on the family tradition of charity. Through the Wasserman Foundation, started about 40 years ago, the five family members give to a large number of charities and causes of their choosing.

Casey Wasserman, at 24, is also involved in an organization to help build school libraries and has joined forces with Andrew Shue, previously of “Melrose Place,” to start “Do Something,” a mentoring program in various cities.

Edie says she has no idea how, in the middle of Hollywood, her daughter managed to raise such giving children. Lynne Wasserman says it was by example from her parents. “I’m so lucky to have them still around and to have had them as role models. I tried to pass that on to my kids.”

Her parents, she says, talked about things they cared about. “I’m happy that they showed me how to care.”

Edie says you raise your kids the way your mother raised you.

Which brings us to her mom, and Edie’s early interest in the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

A Visit Turns Into a Lifetime’s Work

When Tillie Beckerman was 82, she told her daughter, “If you have to put me away, put me in the Motion Picture Home.” She had heard so much about the home, she thought it would be a nice place to retire.

Edie called Lew at work and asked, “What’s the Motion Picture Home?”

He told her that they contributed through payroll deduction at work. Then he suggested she go out there and check it out.

“I fell in love with the place,” she says. “I flipped over the place, and I’ve been flipping ever since.”

Her mother, who died some 20 years later, in 1983, never did go to the home. Instead, she got round-the-clock care and attention from the Wassermans and their extended family. That didn’t prevent Edie from becoming involved with the fund.

Sixty years at Lew’s side have taught her a lot about the ups and downs of the entertainment industry.

“Anyone can still take a fall, and how,” she says.

She imagines what kind of life Mae Clarke must have had between her heyday as the blond bombshell who got grapefruit shoved in her face by James Cagney and some 50 years later when she moved into the Motion Picture Home. “Between stardom and coming out there, she had a very hard time.”

The Motion Picture Home has changed a lot during her 18 years of service.

Ten years ago, the fund’s board decided that the corporation had grown so much that a health care administrator was needed to run it instead of a movie person. Haug, then president of the California Medical Center, was recruited. Since then, with an active board, the corporation has grown three to four times in size.

“Edie was, even in that period of time, a clear standout to me,” Haug says.

Most board members are involved in governing the organization. But “Edie takes it one step further and participates in a lot of the programs and services we provide,” Haug says. “She doesn’t have to be asked. That’s so vitally important.”

Haug knew very little about the entertainment industry when he came on board. Since then, he’s had a front-row seat.

In most charities, he says, “there appears to be a great deal of quid pro quo.” For the most part, people give money and time to the fund without expecting much in return.

“I do believe there’s a sense of togetherness that exists in the entertainment industry I haven’t seen anywhere else.”

Perhaps, he says, it’s the work schedule of 16- to 17-hour days, seven-day weeks, often on location that creates such a rallying force.

A few committed people are poised to carry the Wasserman tradition, Haug says, including DreamWorks co-founder Katzenberg, who has given personally and is the committee chairman of the Foundation Board.

“We are considered a part of a very big family, and that family is the entertainment industry in Southern California. When you’re part of a family, you behave differently,” Haug says.

And Edie is one of the family’s matriarchs, he says. She visits the center and brings along others who might want to get involved. “Many people feel very comfortable coming up to her,’ he says.

“There’s something about Edie that’s very open, very warm, especially her on the campus. . . . She’s extremely sincere when she tells you she’s in the world she loves.”

A decade ago, the Wassermans helped with a campaign that raised $50 million for the fund. It took two years, and Edie says they should have kept on fund-raising.

Because today there is a four- to five-year waiting list to get into the retirement home. They are now trying to raise $250 million to build on. With initial contributions from Ray Stark and Kirk Douglas and their families, construction will start on two new buildings.

“A lot of people have money that I don’t know how to get to,” says Edie.

Persuading a Star to Help Out

Ten years ago, in the middle of the first fund-raising effort, Edie Wasserman was going on “house calls” to celebrities. A friend of her daughter knew Michael Landon’s secretary, who booked a noon meeting with the popular TV star. (It was a few years before his death in 1991.) The meeting was with Edie and her “boys”--actually two Hollywood heavyweights she had recruited for this drive.

Wasserman explained to Landon that even his secretary of 20 years could live at the home. Landon turned away and stared out the window. Wasserman rolled her eyes at the other men as if to say, “Well, we lost him.”

The actor then turned around and told her a story:

Many years before, he had been at a party and was seated next to this very nice man. The man seemed interested in how Landon’s show was produced, so Landon invited him to call when the show was back in production. Oscar-winning screenwriter Howard Koch saw this exchange and gave Landon a thumbs-up.

Landon, the star of “Bonanza,” “Little House on the Prairie” and “Highway to Heaven,” later asked Koch why the thumbs-up. Because, Koch said, that was pretty smart to invite Lew Wasserman to watch your show being filmed.

Flabbergasted that he hadn’t recognized one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, Landon asked Koch, “If that was Lew Wasserman, who was that lady picking at his salad?”

It was Edie, picking cucumbers out of Lew’s salad because they make him sick.

Landon pledged $50,000 a year for every year he had a show in production.