Booknotes

CONNIE BRUCK, AUTHOR, "WHEN HOLLYWOOD HAD A KING": It`s actually about two people. The king is Lew Wasserman. And I say two people because Jules Stein was the person who gave him his chance and really set up the business, the platform from which he was launched. But it`s Lew Wasserman.

BRUCK: Jules Stein started the Music Corporation of America, a band-booking agency, in Chicago in 1924, in Al Capone`s Chicago. And it was from that company that, eventually, Wasserman was launched.

BRUCK: Is Jules Stein`s granddaughter, yes.

BRUCK: Right.

BRUCK: A right-wing Republican.

BRUCK: Well, Jules had two daughters, Jean and Susan. And Jean Stein is the mother of Katrina. And Jean was always -- her politics were always different than her father`s, and it was a source of great friction between then. And -- I mean, Jules was very proud of her. She was a very accomplished person. But their politics were just polar opposites, really. And Katrina followed in her mother`s footsteps.

BRUCK: It was a band-booking agency in Chicago, in the days when Chicago was controlled by Al Capone. And Stein basically turned the band-booking business into a business. It had never really been a business before. Bands were usually booked for one-night stands, and Stein came up with the idea that if they traveled, then they would need an agent to arrange all these travels. And so it was a simple idea, but quite brilliant. And he put it into effect, and within less than 10 years, he controlled 90 percent of the bands in America.

He then decided that bands were actually going to -- dance bands were on the decline, although you couldn`t see it yet in the figures. But he saw that it wasn`t going to be a thriving business for too much longer. And so he decided to move MCA, Music Corporation of America, which now he called MCA, to Hollywood and move into the talent agency business, booking stars for movies. And so he did that in 1936, and really, that`s where Wasserman`s story begins.

BRUCK: Lew Wasserman was a really poor kid from Cleveland who had to work through from junior high school on as an usher in movie theaters. And he then was a publicist for nightclubs in Cleveland. He wanted to go to college. He couldn`t afford to. He was a publicist for nightclubs, and as a publicist, he would get some advertising circulars from the Music Corporation of America. And he didn`t think they were very good, so he would redo them for his nightclubs. His nightclubs would be booking MCA`s bands. And Jules Stein`s brother, Bill, heard about this guy, Lew, who never thought their advertising was good enough, and he got to meet him. And he brought him to Chicago eventually to meet Jules Stein. He was 23 at the time.

BRUCK: I got interested, really, in Wasserman because I interviewed him in `91, when MCA was sold to Matsushita. I did a long piece for "The New Yorker" about that transaction and the personalities involved in it. And at that time, I came to realize that Wasserman was a fascinating figure and immensely powerful. For around 50 years, he was clearly the most powerful man in Hollywood. He influenced virtually everything that happened in that community.

And it went beyond Hollywood because it was -- since he wanted to control that world, it meant that he had to be able to control labor situations. He had to have a strong influence in national politics. He had to have kind of a liaison with the Mob. So it was a way of telling, through one person, a much larger story that reached into all these areas. And I thought it would be really fascinating, and I didn`t really know another -- I always have wanted to tell a much larger story through an individual, and I couldn`t think of any other individual through whom I could tell a story of this scope. And also -- I mean, the fact that the arc went from -- for Wasserman, from the `30s until just when he died a year ago.

BRUCK: He lived to be 85. He died in 1981.

BRUCK: Sidney Korshak was the Chicago Mob`s man in Hollywood. He started out in life, in his professional life, as a lawyer -- it`s pretty clear, as a lawyer for Capone. That`s what he told friends of his, in any event. And he got involved with the Chicago outfit at that time. This is about 1931 or so. And he then went on eventually to move to Hollywood, where he was the Mob`s man. And he had enormous influence on labor unions, the Teamsters especially.

So for Wasserman, it was a relationship that mirrored the one Stein had established earlier. In Chicago, Stein had had a relationship with Petrillo, who was the head of the musicians` union, and also connected to Al Capone. And then Wasserman in Hollywood had Korshak, who, among many other things, enabled him to have great relationships with the Teamsters.

BRUCK: Well, Wasserman decided that he wanted Hollywood to be a more potent political force than it had ever been before. He, in part, came to that decision because in 1962, the Justice Department, Bobby Kennedy`s Justice Department, brought an anti-trust action against MCA -- the settlement of which caused them to go out of the talent agency business and only be in the production business.

And while Wasserman actually didn`t mind that -- it kind of suited his -- what he wanted to do -- still, he didn`t like being forced to do it, as he was. And he decided that he never wanted to be in a position where the government could have that kind of impact on him again, or he wanted to try not to be in such a position. So he decided to make Hollywood a really potent force in Washington, and he built a fund-raising machine such as had not existed in Hollywood before. And he became really -- he was somebody who could call any president on the phone.

His relationship -- he began by raising money for JFK, but he was never close to JFK. But then with Johnson, he found somebody whom he really admired enormously and felt close to. And after that, it continued. I mean, Nixon he wasn`t so close to, but there was a Republican at MCA who had the relationship with Nixon. And then Reagan -- well, Wasserman had been his agent back starting in 1939, so they had a relationship over decades of great reciprocity. And Clinton, Wasserman was crazy about. I remember he said to me, you know, Don`t get me started on Bill Clinton. I`ll sound like a lovesick teenager.

BRUCK: Well, I`ve always, in my adult life, lived in New York. My professional life, I`ve lived there, basically, forever -- in California briefly when I was really young, but then New York. I started out as a reporter at the "American Lawyer" magazine. And then I wrote a book about Michael Milken, called "The Predators` Ball", and with that, Bob Gottlieb hired me at "The New Yorker" to be their business writer.

BRUCK: I think it was 1988. And I really -- I didn`t know too much about business. I mean, I knew what I wrote about Milken, but I wasn`t really a business writer, per se. But Gottlieb thought that I was, based on that book. He didn`t know much about business, either. And so he brought me in as "The New Yorker`s" business writer. And then when Tina Brown came in, she freed me to write about other subjects, as well. I wrote about politics more under Tina.

BRUCK: Right.

BRUCK: Well, the book on Ross, I guess -- I mean, that was "Master of the Game," which came out in 1994. And I had written pieces about Time Warner at "The New Yorker." That was how I got interested in Ross. And at the same time -- and then in the early `90s, I wrote the piece about Hillary and then about Gingrich. And then after that, I wrote about the Middle East. So Tina was the one who let me sort of just have a broader ambit.

BRUCK: It`s Mel Levine.

BRUCK: Just two years ago. But I had been living in California with him more or less sort of the last five years. And it was in that period of time that I was working on this book.

BRUCK: I wouldn`t say part of the Mob. I mean, I think that they lived in a time when -- well, certainly, Jules lived in a time when in order to be in the business he was in, he really had to have good relations with the Mob. And he was -- I mean, it was more than that. He was their partner.

I was fortunate to meet Judge Marovitz, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, in Chicago, who was alive and active in that time, the same period as Jules. And he knew Jules. He knew Capone. He knew Petrillo, who was the head of the musicians union. And it was he who told me that Jules had had an interest in the Chez Paris, which was a nightclub run by the Mob. And so Jules was partners with the Mob. But as I say, at that time, I don`t think he -- he couldn`t have been as successful in the business he was in, and maybe he couldn`t even have been in the business he was in if he didn`t have these relationships.

For Wasserman, I don`t know whether he had to, but it was certainly uniquely useful to have the relationship with Sidney Korshak, who, as I said, helped him in his relationship with the unions. And the unions are totally key to the movie business. And he also was a kind of all-around fixer in Hollywood.

BRUCK: Well, because they can kill it. If you -- you know, if you have a strike and you have a movie and the -- they just stop the business. And also, in the TV business, which was Wasserman -- what he moved into -- even before he got into the movie business, he was in TV production. He was even more dependent on the unions because of the short lead time. I mean, they could be even more destructive. So he -- and Wasserman -- he understood that. He had come into the business at a time when relations between the studio heads and the unions were terrible. There were horrible strikes in the mid-`30s, and then -- and then a very bad strike in 1946. So he fully appreciated what bad labor relations could do to him, as a studio head. And he went about making sure every way he could that he would have labor peace.

BRUCK: Well, it was pretty clear because the Teamsters union from the `50s on was headed by Jimmy Hoffa, and he was definitely -- I mean, it`s been established that he was closely related -- was controlled by the Mob, really. And Sidney Korshak, who was the Chicago Mob`s guy, was very close to Jimmy Hoffa. So there wasn`t any question, really, that the Mob controlled the Teamsters in that period of time.

BRUCK: Well, the Mob was an organization that -- I mean, it had different parts. The part that I concentrated on in this book was the Chicago Mob because that was where Jules Stein started and that was where his relationships were. And then it was the Chicago Mob that sent Korshak to Hollywood. And also earlier, Bioff and Brown, they were sent from the Chicago Mob. And basically, it was a scheme in the `30s to try to take over or have a large interest in the studios.

So the Chicago Mob was one distinct entity. And then there were the New York families. But those didn`t have so much to do with the story that I tell.

BRUCK: "Jaws," "ET," "Back to the Future." Those are Spielberg -- I mean, Spielberg was by far their greatest director, and really, the driving force of their movie business, I would say.

BRUCK: Right.

BRUCK: It was due, I think, to a considerable degree because Bobby Kennedy was going after -- he was very focused on Las Vegas. And Vegas was a place where MCA did a lot of business and where Wasserman had personal relationships, as well -- Moe Dalitz, Wasserman had known from Cleveland. He was very close to him. And Moe Dalitz was really the -- he was called the "Godfather of Las Vegas." He had the Desert Inn. So -- and Dalitz was on Bobby Kennedy`s top 40 hoodlums list. I mean, Dalitz hated Kennedy. So I think it`s true that Wasserman didn`t like the Kennedys because -- in part, at least, because Bobby Kennedy was going after people like Dalitz, and also Sidney Korshak.

BRUCK: Oh, well, that picture -- I love that picture because Wasserman was really crazy about LBJ, and definitely was closer to him than to any other president. And Wasserman is right there at his left. And Wasserman always said that Johnson had offered him the position of secretary of commerce. Ultimately, I came to believe that that was not true that he had actually offered it to him. I think there was some suggestion about it, but I don`t believe that it was ever offered.

But that became part of Wasserman`s -- it was very important to Wasserman, first of all, to have this political influence as a reality, and also to be able to sort of trade on it. I mean, it enhanced his aura, the fact that he was friends with presidents. And the fact that he could say also that Johnson had -- was not only someone whom he could get on the phone and whom he saw and was invited to the White House many times, but that Johnson had offered him a cabinet position just elevated him, obviously, even more.

BRUCK: It was Valenti who first said it in a public context and was quoted in "Variety" or "Hollywood Reporter" in 1974. And then after that, both Valenti and Wasserman made reference to it many, many, many times. Wasserman always said that he had been offered it. He told me many times he`d been offered the job. He didn`t do it because his wife didn`t want to move to Washington. And Valenti also said that Johnson had offered it to him. Valenti told me that a number of times.

BRUCK: But they both said it after LBJ had died.

BRUCK: Well, the presidential candidates wanted money, not surprisingly. And there was a lot of it to be gotten. And it was not -- I mean, it was money, but it was also, even more than that, I mean, it was the power -- it was star power. They could have celebrities come to Washington and testify, if there were things that they wanted to -- basically, fund-raisers out in Hollywood, celebrities there. That was what -- it was an enormous amount of money that was available for them to tap.

And for Hollywood, naturally, they wanted legislation that would be useful to them and that would make the business more profitable, which they were able to obtain -- most notably, Nixon really paved the way for the investment tax credit, which was worth billions to the industry. And it`s not -- I mean, it`s little known that Nixon was such a friend to Hollywood, but he was the -- except for Reagan, he might have been the greatest friend to Hollywood, with the possible exception of Reagan.

Reagan -- when the financial interest syndication rules were going to be repealed in the early `80s, rules which restricted TV networks` ability to have ownership of their programming, and therefore were a bonanza for the movie studios, which did have the ownership, those rules were going to be repealed. And basically, Wasserman talked to Reagan and Reagan called off his chairman of the FCC, and the whole move to repeal them was stopped in its tracks.

BRUCK: It`s true that Fowler denied that that had happened.

BRUCK: Right. Well, actually, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency, but I`m told by enough people that I believe that it`s true that Fowler was talked to by Reagan and that he did reverse his position. There`s no question that he reversed his position because he had made his position public, and then he reversed it. And I guess he would say he did it on the merits.

BRUCK: Well, I don`t.

BRUCK: Walter Pidgeon was an actor who was very, very successful. Maybe many of our watchers remember him. But very successful in the `40s, `50s, `60s. And he was important in this story because when Wasserman wanted to go into the TV production business, he was already -- MCA was the most powerful agency, by far. They represented, oh, just 80 percent of the big stars. You name them -- Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, on and on.

He wanted to go into the TV production business, as well, and he saw -- while the studio heads were afraid of television because they felt that it was just going to threaten their business, Wasserman saw that it was an opportunity. But he needed a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild in order to be able to be both a producer and a talent agent. Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at that time, and Walter Pidgeon was on the board. And there was a critical meeting where the issue came up of whether this waiver would be given to MCA or not.

And Pidgeon made an impassioned speech about how it should be done because it would just give them more jobs, and why shouldn`t they do it, and so forth. And Pidgeon was somebody whom everybody loved and respected. Many, many of the people in the Screen Actors Guild board did. So the resolution passed. But really, I`ve been told and people believe, really, it was Reagan who engineered it, even though it was Pidgeon who gave the speech.

BRUCK: He did. He had a good relationship with Lew Wasserman, who was an important supporter of his.

BRUCK: There`s nothing illegal that -- no, there`s nothing illegal. I mean...

BRUCK: Well, I mean, it didn`t really surprise me that people who are really massive contributors can get Congress to pass legislation that benefits them. I don`t think -- I mean, obviously, it`s never supposed to be a quid pro quo, but Wasserman had such power that -- I mean, John Tunney told me a story about when he was raising money for -- I guess this was in `76...

BRUCK: Former senator from California.

BRUCK: Right. And Wasserman had -- he had known Wasserman. They had had a good relationship. Wasserman had helped him in his first run. Wasserman never asked anything of him. They would have breakfast. They would have meals together. Wasserman wanted to discuss things like education and different -- you know, domestic policy and never asked anything of him.

But Tunney got a call from Wasserman one day in the fall of `76, saying that he needed him -- Tunney was in California for a dinner, which was very important, some big fund-raising dinner in San Francisco. Wasserman said he needed him, that he had to go back to Washington because there was a critical moment in the vote on the investment tax credit. And Tunney said, I can`t. I have this dinner, and said he wouldn`t. And then he thought about it for, I don`t know, three minutes, and he called Wasserman back and he said, OK, I`m going. And he turned around and didn`t go to his dinner and went back to Washington. And as he recounted the story to me later, he said, Really, I had no choice.

BRUCK: Because he couldn`t have risked engaging the wrath of Wasserman. I mean, Wasserman would have not supported him and would have blocked other people from supporting him, and he needed -- he couldn`t afford to lose Hollywood`s support in his fund-raising for his campaign.

BRUCK: All the time. And he also made it a uniform. There was a dress code at MCA. They wanted to -- Jules Stein started this before Wasserman, but they believed that it was important -- they wanted to sort of elevate the image of talent agents and make them seem more professional. And so -- and Jules was, actually, an ophthalmologist by training, so he wanted to sort of upgrade the image. And so it was a strict dress code. In the early days at MCA, everybody had to wear a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. In later years, it eased up slightly. Maybe you could wear, you know, a blue shirt. But that was the dress code.

And also, Wasserman always dressed that way, and even if there hadn`t been a dress code, his people were so kind of imbued with his stature as a leader that they tended to mimic him, even to the slightest thing. As somebody pointed out to me -- at MCA pointed out to me years later, he pointed to his black loafers, and he said, you know, they didn`t have to wear black loafers! But Lew did, and the rest of them followed suit.

BRUCK: Well, I didn`t, I have to say, because when I spoke to him -- first time I interviewed him was in `91, and then for this book, I interviewed him over the course of the last -- oh, you know, `98 to the time he died, basically, in 2002. So I didn`t see a photographic memory. His memory was still quite good and amazing for someone who was in his, you know, mid to late 80s, but I didn`t see the photographic memory.

BRUCK: People never took him on.

BRUCK: Right. Right. That was what I was told again and again, that no one who worked for him would take him on. They were tough guys. Sonny Werblin in the MCA office in New York was a tough, tough guy, smart. But nobody would take Wasserman on. He was apparently just too intimidating, too formidable and too intimidating.

BRUCK: Well...

BRUCK: Right. He returned all his calls the same day, which was pretty remarkable. He never -- he didn`t believe in committing things to paper. And that was something which -- you know, somebody -- Swifty Lazar once commented that MCA was a lot like the Mafia. And in that regard, Wasserman was very similar to his friends, Sidney Korshak and others. Those guys always knew that you didn`t commit anything to paper. Korshak would write on the back of a matchbook cover sometimes, if he really had to remember, you know, some deal he`d just struck. And Wasserman believed in that, too. He told me he was very proud when the government sued MCA in 1962 that he only had four folder files in his office.

BRUCK: That`s true. I was told that men would leave his office in tears. Apparently, it was unlike anything that -- I spoke to many people who said they had worked for tough bosses or they had seen -- they knew screamers and they knew -- but this was different than that. The sign that it was coming, Wasserman would take his watch off. And then it was almost like a kind of a fit, I`m told. His voice would go to a higher pitch than you could imagine, and he would just scream, and grown men, you know, left his office crying, or fainting on occasion, fainting. It`s hard to imagine having never seen it. But I know that has occurred.

BRUCK: Right. His secretary said to me he didn`t want anybody ever to be able to say, you know, Lew Wasserman chased me around his desk. And he was -- I mean, Hollywood, where obviously many people had dalliances, that wasn`t for him. He was an ascetic kind of personality, and really, his focus was the business. And I don`t think other things -- I mean, as far as I know, that sort of thing really didn`t interest him.

BRUCK: Edie.

BRUCK: Well, I was told this by many, many people, and that was the reason that I included it in the book, even though one could -- I mean, I hesitated about including it.

But the reason I did is because so many people, dozens of people told me that it was so, and that not only was it so, but it was something that was just sort of baffling and endlessly commented on in the Hollywood community, because people could not understand how it was that the most powerful man in Hollywood who inspired such fear could not or would not control his wife, when he seemed to control virtually everything else that happened in that community. And they also questioned how anybody would have the temerity to have an affair with Wasserman`s wife when he was such a fearsome figure.

So it was something that was just -- it was bewildering and I never found an answer to it. And none of the people I spoke to knew an answer to it. People had their theories. You know, he was so involved with the business that he didn`t care, because it just freed him, so he didn`t have to think about anything but the business. But I mean, people had theories, but nobody obviously knew what the reason was.

But it was just this mysterious thing that no one really could make out.

BRUCK: I`m not able to -- I don`t -- asked Lew that, actually. Because I said look, with Nixon you got so much, and LBJ you were so much closer to. And what did you get from LBJ? And he said well, you know, if we didn`t get anything, then I must not have asked him for anything, because I could have.

BRUCK: He did get Jack Valenti. Valenti was obviously was so close to Johnson. And when the Motion Picture Association of America was looking for a new head in 1966, Wasserman went to Johnson and said that he wanted Valenti for it. And there are different versions about whether Johnson was furious at the idea, or whether really he kind of liked the idea, but in any event, Wasserman got Valenti, and Valenti became the head of the MPAA, a position that he retains to this day.

BRUCK: Well, there was some consideration that Johnson wanted to place Sorensen -- Sorensen was going to leave the White House, and Johnson wanted to place Sorensen in the MPAA, because he felt that he would be useful to him. He would still write speeches for him, but on the other hand, he`d be in this organization which Johnson recognized could be very important to him.

But some people talked to Sorensen and they said that they would expect that he would also be -- his first allegiance would be to the president, sort of be on call to Johnson. And Sorensen, as far as -- didn`t want to do that. In any event, Sorensen rejected the offer.

BRUCK: I don`t know if that`s true. In fact, I remember somebody telling me that they felt that Valenti wasn`t paid enough. Frank Yablans, who was the head of Paramount in the early `70s, said that he thought that Valenti should have been paid more. And -- but you know, I mean, all these guys were paid so much. So I guess their, you know, their expectations are just higher for what someone ought to be. And then he was very important to them. So I think they thought he deserved whatever he was getting.

BRUCK: He was immensely important as the Republican side of politics at MCA. Wasserman was the Democrat, and Taft Schreiber was the Republican. And people said actually there was a sort of -- there was a considerable view that it wasn`t that Wasserman was such a true Democrat and that really Wasserman and Schreiber could have switched positions, that they were just such pragmatists they could have just changed sides and done it the other way.

But in any event, Taft Schreiber was the Republican, and when Nixon became president, Schreiber was the one who took over the relationship with the president and was the organizing person in Hollywood for the political machine.

Wasserman was always there and working hard, but he was more in the background. At that point, he let Schreiber take the lead. And Schreiber organized this meeting at San Clemente in 1971 with the people involved, with all the heads of the motion picture studios and with Nixon. And out of that meeting came great things for Hollywood. So Schreiber was immensely important at that point.

BRUCK: Right. Well, I mean, they really, I mean, they did what Wasserman told them to. I mean, there wasn`t any question that they weren`t going to give money. I don`t think -- I mean, there was...

BRUCK: Well, I mean, principle in that...

BRUCK: I think that was it. I think it came down to that.

BRUCK: I know, I mean, none of these Democrats refused to give. I mean...

BRUCK: I was told that he absolutely gave, though not in his name. But I mean the thing is, too, the studios gave. You know?

BRUCK: Right.

BRUCK: It got there because actually because Taft Schreiber and Len Garment were friends of Hirshhorn, and they lobbied Nixon to be able to -- that it should be in that place on the Mall. And Hirshhorn gave quite a bit of money to Nixon.

BRUCK: I believe he was a Democrat, although I remember there were some conversations where they told Nixon that if they cultivated him enough, he thought that he could perhaps become a Republican.

BRUCK: Right.

BRUCK: In the National Archives.

BRUCK: I did. I listened to them a lot.

BRUCK: I transcribed them myself.

BRUCK: Well, I found these really interesting conversations between Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The thing about Nixon and Jews is that he was very -- it came up in Hollywood, because he saw Hollywood as mainly Jewish, and he was -- it was for him a sort of -- just a difficult mix. He resented Jews because he felt they were mainly liberal, and it was a rant with him about how few -- how little Jewish support he got. He was just endlessly about that and so filled with resentment.

On the other hand, he had -- he appreciated that Hollywood could give him a lot of money. And he also felt a kind of affinity for Hollywood. He actually, even though he was this graceless guy, he obviously kind of liked Hollywood and was a little bit mesmerized by its glamour. So it was a mix for him. And it never really -- I mean, those tapes show a lot of things that sound really anti-Semitic, and, you know, Len Garment would defend him and say that it was just that he was always so resentful because he got such little Jewish support.

BRUCK: He did. He did. And I think his view seemed, you know, worse than Nixon`s actually, because Nixon at one point started to say -- Nixon was good on Israel. In 1973, in the Yom Kippur War, Nixon sent the planes and armaments that were vital for Israel. So and I remember Nixon saying to either Haldeman or Ehrlichman, you know, he was talking about Kissinger, and how Kissinger was so pro-Israel. And he said, you know, all these Jews, they, you know, that`s the way they are about Israel, you know, that`s just the way they are, I`ve never seen a Jew who isn`t. But he wasn`t -- he was saying it in a way as though as a means of understanding how people felt, whereas Haldeman`s statements just sound frankly anti-Semitic.

BRUCK: Oh, yes.

BRUCK: According to Haldeman.

BRUCK: Yes.

BRUCK: I did, kind of.

BRUCK: I don`t know. I don`t know. I mean, that was actually -- it wasn`t...

BRUCK: Well, no. No. No. But I don`t know what the relationship was between Bradlee and Kissinger.

BRUCK: Right. Right. And those tapes were at the National Archives. Haldeman hasn`t released those.

BRUCK: No.

BRUCK: Oh, she was some starlet and Kissinger -- Kissinger liked going to Hollywood and dating these women. He also had an affair with Jill St. John in the same period.

BRUCK: Who was involved with Sidney Korshak, which made it kind of much more dicey. And Kissinger seemed I thought naive about that at the time, that he would be having an affair with the woman who was at the same time Korshak`s mistress, I thought showed a certain degree of naiveté .

BRUCK: I actually was supposed to see Kissinger. I ended up not being able to.

BRUCK: It goes unrebutted.

BRUCK: Well, Hollywood was just really, really -- one of the things they wanted more than anything else was for the Justice Department to prevent -- to sue the networks. And Nixon wanted to sue the networks because he hated them, because he felt that they had this -- were so against him. And so...

BRUCK: Yes. Right.

BRUCK: Right. Right. And so, and ultimately he did bring a suit against the networks, and there was some investigation by the Justice Department about whether there was some appearance that perhaps he had brought it because of these contributions that were coming in from Hollywood. But ultimately that was never proven.

BRUCK: Oh, I don`t remember the exact amount.

BRUCK: Oh, for sure. For sure.

BRUCK: Right. Right.

BRUCK: Well, they got the network suit and they got ultimately the investment tax credit, which was a huge thing, which did mean billions to the industry. So I mean, those are the most important things that they got.

BRUCK: Wasserman wasn`t close to Carter. He told me that, you know, Carter wasn`t his kind of a guy. And I`m not aware of anything great that Hollywood got in the Carter years. Really, it was when Reagan came in that, you know, Hollywood again got this huge thing, which was the (UNINTELLIGIBLE), and that was one of the biggest things that Hollywood could get from Washington. Carter was -- I mean, Wasserman supported Carter, but he wasn`t really close to him.

BRUCK: Well, it was ironic, really, because Wasserman in his younger days had been great at acquisitions. He had built MCA as a talent agency in the 40s by acquiring other agencies. And once the merger and acquisition boom started in the mid-1970s, Wasserman was -- you would think that he would have been a great acquirer, and there was -- he should have been an acquirer at that time, because MCA was a strong company and it could have grown.

But it was a public company then. It had been a private company earlier. He was just able to make these deals in very controlled environments. And now somehow in the public arena, he wasn`t as good at it. He didn`t like to -- you know, he wouldn`t really negotiate. If he made an offer, he wasn`t then going to raise his offer. He just wasn`t nearly as adept as a public company in making acquisitions.

And it may be too -- some people have suggested that it was because the deals he had made earlier were such incredible deals, when he had bought the Paramount film library in 1958 for $50 million, which was then worth billions, he told me. Or when he acquired the Universal lot for $10 million or $11 million. I mean, he had done deals that were so spectacular some people thought that maybe he couldn`t bring himself to do these sort of much lesser deals later on.

In any event, MCA did not make the acquisitions that it could have, should have, say, in the 80s. Considered Disney. Came close to acquiring Disney. Had he done that, everything would have been different, but didn`t.

And so ultimately MCA became a target, because it was just, you know, something that somebody else could swallow. And also MCA was getting -- I mean, Wasserman was getting older. And it wasn`t clear -- it was sort of seen by the late 80s when he died the company would be really vulnerable and could be quickly acquired and broken up.

So eventually, `91, Wasserman decided, and the board went along, to sell the company to Matsushita. This became something that was a disaster for Wasserman and for MCA. The Matsushita management didn`t get along with Wasserman. Even though the company had been sold, Wasserman thought that he would still rule, which was kind of naive. Somebody said to me only in Hollywood would you think you could sell your company and still have the autonomy that you had before.

So he clashed with Matsushita, and eventually Matsushita sold it to Seagram, without even telling Wasserman that the deal was in the works, which was almost an unimaginable thing. People in Hollywood could not believe that OK, he had sold the company, but he was still there, he was still running it. They could not believe that his company, because they still thought it was his company, had been sold out from under him without his knowing it.

BRUCK: Well, that picture, I`m not sure, but I mean, I would say it was like `96 or so, `97. It was after the Seagram acquisition. Wasserman does not look very happy in that picture.

BRUCK: He`s with Edgar Bronfman Jr.

BRUCK: Well, he was the person who had engineered the acquisition of MCA by Seagram. And he and Wasserman never did have any kind of a relationship.

Wasserman became chairman of Meredith. He still went to work every day. Nobody consulted him. Bronfman set about sort of just trying to change the company completely. He wanted to do everything different than the way Wasserman had done it. He was a newcomer in Hollywood and seemed very arrogant, actually, to think that he, who was a young man and a newcomer, he had disparaged everything that Wasserman had done. It was not a good attitude. And eventually, he failed and the company was sold to Vivendi.

And Wasserman was just -- I mean, for Wasserman, who had built this, you know, giant really, to be there, because he still came to work every day through all these transitions, and just see the thing sort of being taken apart, piece by piece, was extraordinarily painful. He was famous, part of his legend that he had created or his persona was that he was somebody who never made a mistake. And I was very surprised when I was talking to him one day and he was recounting the things he loved to recount, his acquisition of the Paramount film library, how great that was, his acquisition of Universal.

And then there was a pause and he said, now, do you want to know the dumb thing I did? Which really took my breath away, because Wasserman was never supposed to say he`d done anything dumb. He said, "I sold the company to the Japanese." And...

BRUCK: Well, today it`s Vivendi. And they are trying to...

BRUCK: Well, let`s see. Messier was fired, so I don`t even remember who the chairman of Vivendi is today. Barry Diller has been at the helm at Universal. And they are trying to -- Vivendi is trying to sell it off. And it will be in pieces, it seems like, pretty sure. Edgar Bronfman actually has reappeared, trying to maybe make a bid for some parts of it.

BRUCK: Five years.

BRUCK: The hardest part really was the historic part, because I had -- in my previous books, I was dealing with things that were pretty much contemporary. And here, trying to find out what had happened in Chicago in the `20s and `30s, where there were very, very few people left who were alive then, and in positions that they would have known anything.

That was the hardest part. But I was fortunate to find some people who were alive and also to find some, you know, oral history and archival material about Capone`s Chicago. So that -- actually, that became one of my favorite parts of the book.

BRUCK: In New Jersey, in a small town, Kearney.

BRUCK: I grew up in that town. Well, in, then West Orange. My parents moved to West Orange.

BRUCK: My father was a real estate person and my mother a schoolteacher.

BRUCK: I went to Wellesley my first two years, and then I left and went to Barnard, finished up there, and Columbia Journalism School.

BRUCK: Well, after Columbia journalism, I moved to California and I started writing for the "San Diego Reader," which paid me $10 for a story. And then eventually I graduated to things like "Human Behavior" magazine, which I remember paid me $500 for a story on which I`d worked for about six months. My husband was supporting me at that time, obviously, or I couldn`t have worked for $10 for a story.

And then I moved back to New York, and went to work. Freelanced for a year, and then went to work for Steve Brill at "The American Lawyer." He had just started "The American Lawyer."

BRUCK: I was there for about -- from about `80 to `88, when I went to "The New Yorker."

BRUCK: Well, the Milken book was the most...

BRUCK: ... controversial. "Predator`s Ball" was the most controversial, because Milken was still very powerful at the time that I wrote it. He hadn`t been indicted yet. And I said that he should be indicted. He didn`t appreciate that. He and his people, his lawyers tried to stop the book from being published. That was the most controversial.

BRUCK: I`m back at "The New Yorker," halfway writing stories there. I am doing the profile of Elliott Abrams at the moment.

BRUCK: I think he is a really interesting person, a really interesting person, in an incredibly powerful position at this moment. His portfolio at the NSC is the Middle East, and it`s quite a moment to have the Middle East portfolio.

BRUCK: I don`t think so. I mean, I do have this -- I do like to try to tell a story, a larger story through an individual if I can. And like so many of my colleagues, I try to write narratives. You know, I`m a frustrated fiction writer. If I could write fiction, I`d write fiction. Since I can`t write fiction, I look for characters whom a novelist would covet.

BRUCK: At the end of this book? Well, Hollywood, I mean, there can never be -- for years in Hollywood, people would say who`s going to be the next Lew Wasserman? Because he -- there was no one to aspire to power in Hollywood who imagined being anyone other than Lew Wasserman. And by the time Wasserman died, or even a few years before it, it was clear that there would never be at least in the foreseeable future, there will not be another Lew Wasserman, because Hollywood has changed so much. And the way it is today, no one could exert the kind of power that Wasserman did.