Wasserman: The Power of Silence

Lew Wasserman died last month with his legend intact, which is more than you’ll be able to say for most of today’s superstar CEOs. The reason was simple: He kept his mouth shut. In an era when you couldn’t walk past a newsstand without seeing a smug winner’s smile from some entertainment tycoon, Wasserman kept a Godfather-like code of silence, going to his grave without penning a memoir or even talking to Vanity Fair.

I cajoled a friend into taking me to lunch with Wasserman a couple of years ago at the Universal commissary, where he still had a corner table, even though he’d been unceremoniously shunted aside by Edgar Bronfman Jr. after Seagram’s bought Universal in 1997. Though I’d agreed to his ground rules--no pen, no paper, no quotes--Lew eyed me suspiciously for the first 20 minutes.

Then he relaxed. Speaking in a hoarse rumble, he told stories about his old cronies: Alfred Hitchcock, Ronald Reagan, Cary Grant and Howard Hughes. I would’ve made a dash for the men’s room and scribbled them all down except I was afraid of what I’d miss while I was gone.

Wasserman’s Olympian silence came naturally. He was an agent before he became an empire builder, and he decided early on to stay out of the spotlight. He might have maneuvered the levers of power, but it was the client who basked in the limelight.

Of course, Wasserman’s very remoteness bred mystique.

In a town that has little regard for its elders, the memorial service held for Wasserman on Monday at the Universal Amphitheater was the hottest ticket in town, with Bill Clinton scheduled to close the show. When Wasserman died, this newspaper, like every other, couldn’t print enough accolades.

That’s not the kind of treatment superstar CEOs are getting now.

In the 1990s, as the stock market boomed, entertainment and Internet moguls were venerated as Masters of the Universe. It would be hard to say who was on more magazine covers over the past decade--Bill Gates or Tom Cruise. Barry Diller and Ted Turner were mainstays in the New York gossip columns. The annual Davos business conference and Herb Allen’s Sun Valley mogul retreat were given breathless media coverage. Sumner Redstone and Michael Eisner wrote autobiographies. AOL Time Warner chief Gerald Levin gave regal interviews, not just to Larry King but also to Architectural Digest, when he quoted Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

But, oh, how the worm has turned. Since the collapse of the bull market in 2000, it’s been open season on media moguls of all stripes and sizes.

We’ve seen the downfall of Vivendi Universal’s Jean-Marie Messier, the not-so-voluntary departure of Levin and the ignominious disintegration of Mike Ovitz’s AMG empire--made complete earlier this month by his disastrous “gay mafia” interview in Vanity Fair. Even Martha Stewart is licking her wounds after giving a “let me get back to my salad” response to charges of insider stock trading. In short, the glory days are over.

Obviously the collapse of the stock market--and the recent Enron and WorldCom scandals--has hastened the abrupt reversal of fortune. But rampant arrogance and indulgence have played an equal role. AOL Time Warner’s Bob Pittman is widely disliked even inside his own company, where he is viewed as a slick salesman and a rabid control freak. Redstone, who told Fortune, “Viacom is me, I’m Viacom, that marriage is eternal,” often acts like a schoolyard bully, picking a fight with his presumptive successor, Mel Karmazin, forcing the Viacom board to pull the two combatants apart like a mother on the playground.

Karmazin is no shrinking violet himself. When his sales executives complained that it was physically exhausting trying to sell ads during an economic slump, the charmless Karmazin replied, “I haven’t heard of anyone having a heart attack yet!”

In 1999, with a flood of top executives leaving the company and the stock in a downward spiral, Disney czar Michael Eisner waged a nasty legal battle against Jeffrey Katzenberg, his former second-in-command, which found Eisner in court, having to deny that he’d once said of Katzenberg, “I think I hate the little midget.”

No one today seems able to check his or her ego at the door. For me, the most stunningly dumb move made by Ovitz wasn’t his “gay mafia” remarks but believing that just when his business had collapsed would be the right time to sit down and dish with Vanity Fair.

“It’s ironic that Ovitz self-destructed by spilling his guts, Oprah-style, which was the opposite of what created his mystique in the first place,” says Allan Mayer, a former business reporter and magazine editor who runs the entertainment practice for Sitrick & Co., a communications publicity firm that specializes in handling crises. “In the ‘80s, Ovitz was the ultimate behind-the-scenes operator. He knew that by being cryptic and operating by indirection, that it only increased his profile.”

Mayer argues that in the 1990s, when the press was lionizing every corporate chieftain in sight, “a lot of these guys got seduced by the attention; they craved the limelight. The smart executives, like Lew Wasserman or Warren Buffet, realized a little mystery goes a long way. When the Internet bubble burst, people were rooting for the self-promoting executives to get their comeuppance.”

But there’s another huge difference between Wasserman and today’s moguls, one that has nothing to do with executive style or ego. Beneath his cool but toned-down exterior, Wasserman was a ruthless riverboat gambler. In the early 1950s, when everyone else scoffed at television, Wasserman embraced the new medium and established MCA as a major player. In 1958, before anyone knew there was a market for movies on TV, he snapped up the Paramount film library for a song. In 1962, with the Justice Department breathing down his neck, Wasserman completely reinvented his company, buying Decca Records and its subsidiary, Universal Pictures, abandoning his lucrative talent agency overnight.

He was one of the pioneers of today’s franchise mania, using Alfred Hitchcock’s success as a filmmaker to launch the successful TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” He did get more conservative in later years, grumbling about production costs and passing up a chance to make “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” believing George Lucas’ deal was too rich. But even in the 1970s, it was Wasserman who urged MCA to corner the market on patents for compact discs, which soon became the preferred format for recorded music.

Today’s moguls loathe rolling the dice; they want to take the risk out of a notoriously unpredictable business. Viacom’s business is built around establishing market dominance and collecting ad revenue. When asked last year about the most exciting trends in entertainment programming, Karmazin replied: “The most exciting trend is the cash flow we make.”

AOL Time Warner has tried to turn each division of the company into a giant cross-promotional machine, with its movie divisions geared toward churning out easily digestible brands like “Harry Potter,” “Austin Powers,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Terminator 3.” Just last week the studio announced it was moving ahead with “Batman vs. Superman.”

Wasserman made his share of mistakes--and plenty of bad movies--but he didn’t live quarter to quarter, like today’s CEOs. As Sam Goldwyn Jr. once put it: “Lew thought of where things are going.” Perhaps that’s why he was so fascinated by Howard Hughes, the daredevil-pilot-turned-movie-tycoon who was as nutty as any movie star but whose entrepreneurial vision helped shape America’s aerospace industry.

“Howard was friends with Cary Grant,” Wasserman told me over lunch. “And when he heard Cary was going to New York for a week, he asked if he could stay at his house. But when Cary came back, Howard wouldn’t leave. He told Grant to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay your bill.’ Grant stayed there for nine months.

“Finally, he called me and said, ‘Will you get Howard out? I want my house back.’ So I called Howard, but he wouldn’t budge. ‘Tell Cary to calm down,’ he said. ‘After all, what are friends for?’ ”

Wasserman clearly got a kick out of bigger-than-life characters like Hughes. In his own unflashy way, he was one himself, in a way today’s CEOs will never be, because he knew that the less you try to show off, the more imposing you become.

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