Mr. Big
Dennis McDougal’s exhaustively researched but frustrating book (frustrating for both reader and author, it would seem) today carries an aura of melancholy irrelevance. At 85, Lew R. Wasserman is indubitably the last of his generation of moguls, the final link to the founding, shaping fathers of Hollywood, all of whom he knew and dealt with: Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Darryl F. Zanuck, the defiantly independent Sam Goldwyn.
But moguls you always have with you, though the word itself is out of vogue today, and “power broker” and “studio boss” convey a similar if slightly less awesome might. The most potent of the new generation of true moguls is surely Rupert Murdoch, striding the globe. Michael Eisner, mogul-rich, has built a multibillion-dollar hegemony atop Walt Disney’s creative foundations. At Universal, now the successor entity to the MCA where Wasserman reigned for so long, young Edgar Bronfman Jr. is testing his mogul wings, with results yet to be determined.
New power names--Michael Ovitz, Ron Meyer, Jeff Berg and Jim Wiatt at ICM, the DreamWorks trio of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg--are creating their own histories. Most studio heads in power are fundamentally corporate employees, reimbursed like gods but answerable to even higher powers, the stockholders. This is nothing new; Mayer was answerable to Loews Inc., which ultimately fired him from the studio his vision had built. Lesser moguls fought the bottom-line power of the money men, who were most often in New York. (Warner’s fights were all in the family.)
Meanwhile, the last mogul, the man who at his acme probably wielded more power than any of his contemporaries in the industry, economically and through the force of his commanding personality, continues to have an office on the 15th floor of the building at Universal that is named for him. He is supremely rich, but he has neither job nor title. MCA, where he was sole boss from the 1970s until it was bought by Matsushita (for just over $6 billion in 1990), no longer exists as a corporate title. Sold by Matsushita to the Seagram Co. in 1995, it is now simply Universal.
McDougal, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, describes Wasserman as a blend of “generous tolerance and grim confidence,” adding, “In another time and place he could have been a general, a prince, or a spy. . . . He combines the cool magnetism of the courtier with the awful justice of the executioner.”
But the author begins his preface by noting, “Lew Wasserman did not want this book published.” No one who knows Wasserman will doubt that for a minute. Although he began as a publicist, planting column items in Cleveland, where he was born in 1912, Wasserman at MCA began avoiding all personal or corporate publicity except of the most innocuous (and helpful) kind. The lesson was from his mentor, MCA’s founder, the ophthalmologist Dr. Jules Stein, who believed fervently that his business was nobody’s business but his own.
At that, as his subtitle makes clear, McDougal’s interest was not simply Lew Wasserman but Stein, MCA and particularly the dark charges of unfair if not corrupt practices, mob ties and undue political influence that kept surfacing over the years and led the agency to be nicknamed “The Octopus.”
Stein, who worked as a musician to pay his way through medical school, found himself by accident in the band-booking business. Soon he devised a kind of tie-in system, in which ballrooms and other venues had to hire his lesser bands as the price for getting his hot bands (King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Guy Lombardo in the early days). According to McDougal, Stein’s friend James C. Petrillo of the American Federation of Musicians turned a blind eye to some of MCA’s practices that may not have been in his members’ best interests. Expanding aggressively to embrace all kinds of talent, MCA in time became the largest agency in the world.
Wasserman, born to Russian immigrant parents, sold candy in a burlesque house when he was still in 8th grade. He worked as a movie usher, was soon a theater manager and then joined an ad agency, handling local movies. His skillful work caught the eye of the MCA man in Cleveland, and Stein brought Wasserman to Chicago in 1937, where his first assignment was booking acts at the Michigan State Fair. He did well and, getting by on four or five hours sleep a night and revealing a rare gift for calculating and remembering figures, he did ever better.
McDougal spent four hard years researching his book. He lists a nine-page bibliography, a two-page citing of magazine pieces, the titles of 31 relevant court cases. He thanks more than 200 interviewees by name plus “the dozens who spoke to me anonymously” and acknowledges the staffs of more than three dozen libraries and institutions. His interviewees, including butlers, a former Wasserman son-in-law, present and former clients and competitors, have juicy things to say. The portraits of Wasserman’s and Stein’s wives are unflattering, despite their charitable good works.
The author chronicles several grand jury and Justice Department investigations of MCA. Early on, a Cook County, Ill., grand jury looking into corrupt labor practices called Stein to testify, but no indictments resulted. Marvin Rudnick, a federal prosecutor, conducted a long investigation of MCA but was first suspended and then fired for his efforts. Another prosecutor, Richard Slavin, quit the Justice Department when the results of his four-year investigation of labor racketeering, touching on MCA, were ignored.
The name of the Chicago lawyer and labor dispute fixer Sidney Korshak, a personal friend of the Wassermans until his death, runs through the book. Yet whether, with his reported links to mob figures, he was a helpful friend or simply a friend, is not clear and likely not now knowable.
The tone of the book is journalistic, tough and adversarial. Despite McDougal’s admiring words for Wasserman as an industry leader whose reputation for fairness settled several serious Hollywood labor disputes, the author leaves no doubt that he believes the accusations against MCA over the years were not unfounded; there was fire where the smoke arose. The glimpses of fire are distant and were in legal terms mostly unproved. The investigations did not lead to indictments--probably, as the author implies, because of high-level pressure. Wasserman and Stein, who died in 1981, were benefactors of both political parties.
That MCA in its prime was a tough, ruthless, even merciless competitor is beyond doubt--”a Machiavellian barrel of barracudas,” McDougal calls it. The lines between sharp practice and illegal practice are sometimes dimmer than they ought to be. But at least the reader is right to be uneasy about the stifled investigations, frustrated by the ambiguity of some of the evidence and doubtful the whole truth can ever be known.
MCA is history. The last mogul still studies the grosses, donates lavishly to what is now called the Wasserman Campus of the Motion Picture Television Fund and keeps his memories to himself.