A bland mogul and his queen

There have been since 1998 three major books about Lew Wasserman, totaling, exclusive of end matter, 1,421 pages. Kathleen Sharp’s contribution to this pile of not entirely scintillating reading matter is novel in that it purports to be a dual biography of the man and his wife, Edie, who, the writer argues (not entirely persuasively), was his equal in Hollywood power. Sharp also makes somewhat more of Edie’s extramarital affairs -- and Lew’s rather grim philanderings -- than Dennis McDougal did in “The Last Mogul” or Connie Bruck did in “When Hollywood Had a King.”

Why, one is obliged to wonder, all this subliterary fuss? It is perfectly true that Wasserman masterminded the transformation of Music Corp. of America from a band-booking agency into the most powerful representative of movie talent, then acquired moribund Universal Studios, which he transformed into the richest, and certainly the most stable, motion picture and television production entity in the world. In the process, he made himself into the industry’s leading mogul, its go-to guy when labor disputes or political troubles in Washington threatened its always fragile tranquillity. These are by no means modest achievements, especially for a man who had no more than a high school education and whose first show-biz job was as a movie theater usher.

But the fact is that Wasserman was, like so many great entrepreneurs, an intelligent man without being a particularly interesting one. Essentially, he was a bean counter writ large, monomaniacally bringing his iron will, computer-like brain and relentless energy to the task of building his company. Shy in public, secretive with the press and prone to sudden, towering rages against his underlings, whom he was capable of reducing to tears, he possessed a temperament that was immune to wit and a stranger to irony. The man was as austere as the black suits he wore and insisted all his associates wear.

Since it is nearly impossible to “humanize” such a figure, his biographers have no choice but to fall back in awe at his power. If all a man has going for him is ruthlessness, it must, finally, be seen as a virtue, something the writer and readers are bound to admire even as they shake their heads over its excesses. As early as page 7 of “Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood,” Sharp is describing “his coiled, feral energy sucking up space and stealing attention.”

Her prose does not rise much beyond that level, and her historical sense -- the book is chronologically incoherent and studded with annoying factual errors -- is, at best, stunted. You do not gain a picture of the Hollywood in which MCA competed or the nation it sought to entertain. What you get are endless details about largely forgettable television shows (which were the studio’s strength because they were products that Wasserman could cost-control), movies, record and real estate deals that were or were not made. Eventually this becomes tiresome.

That’s the problem with reportorial books; they are full of facts and shy on insight. Sharp proudly claims to have conducted 450 interviews, of which about 50 seem to me illuminating; the rest merely grind axes and pad out her page count. The other problem with reporters is that they are always looking for scandalous explanations of institutional behavior. Like her predecessors, Sharp is eager to prove the many rumors of mob connections that always swirled around Universal in Lew’s days. That’s partly because of its Chicago roots, when founder Jules Stein booked bands for Al Capone’s nightclubs, partly because Wasserman’s best pal was lawyer Sidney Korshack (who many believed was a mob fixer) and partly because a variety of underlings, from whose thick necks many gold chains dangled, lumber in and out of the story. But, like those who went before her, Sharp can’t prove anything definite about the most serious rumors.

Sharp does better with Edie’s one provable love affair with Nicholas Ray, the bisexual and self-destructive (drink, drugs, gambling) director. He was the anti-Lew, though not exactly a fun guy, either. She’s also tediously dogged about the Wassermans’ political connections. They were, unlikely as it may seem, Democrats, and eventually supported Bill Clinton, who spoke at Lew’s memorial service -- but they also played their parts in the mega-fiction Ronald and Nancy Reagan created out of their Hollywood years. None of this, however, makes Edie Wasserman a fearsome power player; she’s just a Jackie Collins character. Or possibly a model for one.

Sharp is also pretty good -- though perhaps without quite knowing it -- when it comes to defining the corporate culture Wasserman created. She quotes producer Michael Phillips on life at Universal: “It was a stern and forbidding place.... Its lot felt suppressed and fearful. It’s ironic, because Universal didn’t have tremendous turnover and the others did. But you could feel the fear and heavy atmosphere on that lot. And fear constrains creativity.” A lot of that stemmed from Wasserman’s black tower, where he played rival executives against one another, making sure no one challenged his iron grasp.

More of it stemmed from Lew Wasserman’s greatest creation -- “creative” accounting -- whereby no matter how many markets a TV show played, how big a movie’s grosses were, no one ever saw the profits their contracts guaranteed them unless they sued. Which, eventually, many did. Meantime, though, they toiled to produce their shows and films on impossibly cheap budgets and tight schedules, while company spies reported directors who dared make an extra take or two. For a long time, this parsimony fed a splendid bottom line. But eventually it cost the studio, among many others, George Lucas and his “Star Wars” franchise, Steven Bochco and his hit TV shows, Clint Eastwood and his directorial powers and endless stardom.

On a more cosmic scale, Wasserman’s tightfisted ways cost Universal profitable acquisitions and mergers (notably one with NBC that might have made it unassailable in the highflying ‘90s). Instead, Wasserman endured a short-lived marriage with the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita, which in turn sold the company to Edgar Bronfman and Seagrams, who in turn merged it with the French water company Vivendi. Wasserman was left with his black suit, his show office in the tower and, of course, great wealth. He also had a fish pond, filled with koi, one of which Sharp says was worth $100,000.

It was, I suppose, a sad end. But it is hard to feel the sadness in it. Wasserman was a cold, calculating man, who drove away most of his best executives and most of his best talent (the notable exception was Steven Spielberg) and went to his grave still thinking “Sweet Charity” was a good movie. The innovations that took place on his lot -- the Sensurround sound system, Discovison (a home entertainment system), the TV movies of the week and the miniseries, seem if not quaint, then tired, routine, and in the case of the television formats, something someone else would eventually have invented.

More to our immediate point, when the first-generation movie moguls -- the Jack Warners and Harry Cohns -- passed, they left a piratical, even occasionally rollicking, legacy. And more good movies than Wasserman ever dreamed of. They were not exactly nice guys, either, but they flew by the seat of their pants, which rarely matched their jackets. Yet in their excesses and sometimes childlike passions they were fun to read about. No matter how many people try -- and surely enough of them have -- no one will ever say that about Lew R. Wasserman.