It wasn’t about cinematic art

“Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Last Tycoon.” Like some of his other well-known apercus, this one requires a couple of asterisks. For one thing, the equation is not mathematically fixed; it changes all the time as the market for commercialized dream work shifts. Can we imagine Darryl F. Zanuck putting “Dumb and Dumberer” on Fox’s schedule? This suggests the need for a second asterisk; Fitzgerald’s “half a dozen men” are ever in a state of flux. Overpaid and over-worshiped geniuses one minute, off to the land of indie-prod and unreturned phone calls the next.

Eventually even Lew Wasserman, whose reign as Hollywood’s “king” was longer and more absolute than anyone’s, was shuffled off too. But that was only at the end of a very long career, when age had slightly rusted the springs of his steel-trap mind. Before that, he had not just mastered Fitzgerald’s “equation,” he had completely rewritten it, in a language that no else could speak with so perfect a mastery of accent and nuance.

He was of a different breed than the legendary moguls in that he seems not to have cared even slightly about the content of the movies and television shows his company made. It was OK with Lew if, sometimes, they were good -- “American Graffiti,” “The Sting,” “Jaws” -- but it was equally all right if they were schlock, which they mostly were. At no point in Connie Bruck’s engagingly written, richly reported and endlessly fascinating study of the man and his works does he express either satisfaction or dissatisfaction with his company’s products.

His genius lay elsewhere. It was for structure. Or should we say restructuring? He was born in 1913 and came out of Cleveland, where his skill at publicizing bands and nightclub acts brought him to the attention of Jules Stein, founder of Music Corp. of America, the slightly weird eye doctor, antiques collector and stock market investor who in a few years had made MCA the dominant agency in its field. He sent Wasserman to Los Angeles in 1939 to see if MCA could break into the movies. In another few years, its secretive, black-clad agents (none of whom ever saw a complete list of MCA’s clients) were all-powerful in that arena too.

Next came the creative part, with Wasserman, in the early ‘50s, imagining a new form of compensation for his clients: Instead of salaries, they would take a percentage of their pictures’ grosses, which made many of them, beginning with Jimmy Stewart, rich, powerful and independent in ways undreamed of when they were bound to the studios by oppressive long-term contracts.

This was more or less fine with the studios. Their bosses, the Mayers, Cohns and Warners, were aging, incapable of dealing with television, which had robbed them of two-thirds of their audience. Hard-pressed financially, they were happy to rid themselves of starry overhead. They also hated and refused to do business with the new medium. Not Lew. He saw that television, with its endless demand for cost-controlled product, could restabilize the business. He bought a TV production company (Revue) from Decca Records and got a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild (whose pliable president, Ronald Reagan, was an old friend and client), which enabled MCA to go on representing the very actors Revue sometimes employed. Since labor peace was essential to the smooth functioning of his embryonic machine, he agreed (again with Reagan) to pay residuals when their work was rebroadcast. This was not idle generosity; it drove out less-well-financed production entities. And it did not include payments on material made prior to 1948, which, not entirely by happenstance, included the entire pre-’48 Paramount library, which Wasserman picked up at a fire sale price.

Now he bought out the rest of Decca, including its film production arm, Universal, though Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department thought it not entirely right that MCA should be in both talent and production and forced Wasserman to choose between the two. He gave up agenting for the more profitable production business. Soon Universal’s movies of the week and dramatic hours almost completely dominated NBC’s schedule. The network’s president, Sylvester Weaver, had idealistic, educational dreams for TV, but he was quickly brushed aside. MCA’s cowboys and gumshoes were much more predictably profitable than the aspiring “Omnibus.”

Wasserman was a sleek, taciturn man, except when people gave him answers he didn’t want to hear. Then he became a screaming tyrant, capable of reducing grown men to tears. He would not take “no” for an answer. Or, for that matter, a busy signal. His secretary was obliged to fake emergencies so Lew could break right through to his next victim. Since power begets power, he became the man Washington listened to on all sorts of matters. There’s no doubt that all his libidinal energy went into the business. He and his wife had separate bedrooms, and, according to Bruck, she had a number of discreet affairs, which her husband tolerated. Why not? He knew no stud, however adorable, could match the potency of his power.

Was some of that power derived from organized crime? MCA in its band-booking days had a rich web of connections with Chicago’s gangland, and the mobsters moved west about the time MCA did. Bruck, like Kennedy before her, labors hard to link Wasserman and his company to the “outfit.” We do not for a moment doubt that link. After all, his best friend for 50 years was Sidney Korshak, whose position as mouthpiece for the Chicago syndicate was a matter of long-standing suspicion. But no more than Kennedy can she document a connection. That’s the way these things work -- a nod, a smile, a frown, and useful outcomes occur. It may be that ultimate power resides in the ability to make underlings anticipate its desires.

What no one anticipated was that there would come a time when the game would change again and that Lew Wasserman would not be able to follow the bouncing ball. He was never entirely comfortable in the new world of mergers and acquisitions. He knew that if he did not acquire other companies, MCA-Universal would itself be liable to takeover. He tried. He made some good deals and some bad ones and failed to make some he probably should have consummated. He was hindered by the abruptness of his manner: He was famous for his ability to just get up and walk out of a negotiation. So Michael Ovitz brokered the deal by which, finally, the Japanese electronic giant Matsushita swallowed MCA-Universal, snookering him, perhaps, in part, because Wasserman was used to dealing with rougher-hewn men than the slippery Ovitz. Technically, he continued to run MCA-Universal. But he was not informed until the deal was done, when Matsushita, in its turn, sold the company to Edgar Bronfman.

By the time he died last year, Wasserman had become, as most powerful men do, a ghost at a banquet he did not plan, prepare or serve. Until his death, he had his office, with its famously paper-free desk, in Universal’s black tower, with nothing much to do except to talk wryly, even winningly, to Bruck when she came calling. She obviously liked and sympathized with him, not because he was the last of a breed but because he was sui generis. This Last Tycoon -- no one will ever wield such concentrated power in Hollywood again -- knew what had hit him and gamely accepted his fate. Bruck has written the sort of elegy the old man would probably have liked -- not a swooning romantic portrait in Fitzgerald’s starstruck manner, but a neatly totaled, double-entry ledger, in which Wasserman’s executive assets and liabilities achieve a perfect balance and the morality of his tale a perfect ambiguity.