When Hollywood Had a King Page 17

  It seems to have been Stein’s preoccupation with estate planning that eventually led him to think about taking the company public. The idea of MCA as a public company was almost an oxymoron; Stein had made secrecy the company credo, and Wasserman was, remarkably, even more secretive than Stein. (Stein, at least, would write letters; Wasserman made it his practice to commit almost nothing to paper personally—he would return correspondence with “O.K.” or “No” scrawled in the margin.) Indeed, Wasserman was said to have opposed the idea of going public, for this very reason; but the prerogative was Stein’s. It would establish a market for estate tax purposes—and it would also mean a further step toward legitimacy, and away from the shadowed past. As a prelude to this projected undertaking, Stein made the company’s stock available to nine key executives in the spring of 1954, to be followed by distributions to others over the next few years. He may have felt some pressure to distribute the stock at long last—one former MCA agent, Herbert Rosenthal, who was one of the first nine executives to receive the stock, insisted that “Jules had to do it. He knew we would have left if there was no stock distribution.” But it also suited his larger purpose.

  Certainly the event Stein created for the distribution of the stock gave no hint of his having been pressured to do so; it seemed, more, almost feudal, a ceremony for the lordly bestowal of patronage. Wasserman was the only one whom Stein had taken into his confidence beforehand. It would become one of Wasserman’s vintage anecdotes—how Stein had walked into Wasserman’s office one day and said, “I’m going to distribute the stock. I’m keeping 40 percent, you take 20 percent, and you decide how to divide up the rest.” Except that, according to Stein’s account, Stein had kept control of not 40 but 53 percent, and he and Wasserman together had decided what percentages the other men should receive. Furthermore, the stock was nonvoting; only when MCA eventually went public would the executives, Wasserman included, receive voting stock. In later years, Wasserman would always insist, as a seeming point of pride, that from the time he became president Stein gave him a completely free hand, and never challenged his decisions. But that was, evidently, an idealized version of the relationship between the two men and the balance of power they struck. Looking back on this period, Stein commented in his blunt way, “I was not going to let anyone else run the company.”

  The day before the event, Stein had summoned each executive into his office and asked them to come to his home the following afternoon. No one but Wasserman had any idea why, and it was rare for these executives to go to Misty Mountain; Stein did not socialize with them. Upon driving through the blue iron gates, high on Angelo Drive, higher even than Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon’s Lair, they were led into the library by the Steins’ longtime butler, Charles, who had worked at Hearst’s San Simeon. The bookcases were lined with masses of Stein’s leather-bound books, and some of the Queen Anne tables, opened, had vertical extensions—reminiscent, in a way, of the ladders that used to run on wheels along the shelves in the dry goods store in South Bend. Before him, Stein had a stack of ten thin books, which he distributed to each executive. They were covered in blue leather with a gold border, and the MCA seal—the music-bound globe—in the center; the covers were lined in blue silk; the pages were thick, like parchment; and the type was an elaborate calligraphy, such as might be used in a medieval book of hours. Stein had written the text in longhand, and he had had the books privately printed in New York. Opening his own copy, Stein began reading aloud: “This is perhaps the most eventful day in my life, and I believe one long to be remembered by each of you.”

  After reading about the distribution itself—each executive would be allotted a certain amount of stock to purchase at a price below book value—Stein called each one into the dining room to sign the papers that would make him an MCA stockholder. No one was to know what the others received. (Taft Schreiber’s holding, for example, was the next highest after Wasserman’s—but there was a huge gap between the two.) Following the signings, Stein continued reading from his book. He described his having formed his own orchestra in South Bend when he was twelve, and reminisced about the early years of Music Corporation. He offered homilies about the agency business, which he described as “a twenty-four-hour business.” (“Unfortunately, it is not a business in which the executive can relax for any long periods of time; for while you relax, your competitor will steal your artist from you.”) He held Wasserman up as a model—someone who lived on so little sleep and worked with such concentration that even the driven Stein had, on occasion, “admonished” him to ease up a little (but to no avail). Stein had included columns of numbers to illustrate MCA’s consistent growth. And he detailed how he had set up the profit-sharing trust within fifteen months after such entities were authorized by Congress, and how the change in the federal tax laws in 1947 had led him to conceive of this stock distribution plan. “May I dream for a few moments,” Stein had written near the end of the book. “In my humble opinion MCA is today at the threshold of its greatest development and future. We will someday—and soon—be larger and greater than any institution ever to rise in the amusement world.”

  On the last page of the book was a paragraph that Stein read aloud with special emphasis. “This material and information presented to you are highly confidential. It is expected that you will keep it so and will not divulge any of these facts or figures or your individual holdings in the companies. . . . Until now MCA has proven it can keep secrets, and I am confident you as individuals will continue to help MCA justify this reputation.”

  Except that, at the last moment, Stein realized he was not confident enough. The idea of leaving these books in anyone else’s hands proved too much, and he collected all of them before the executives left Misty Mountain that day. Even Wasserman was not allowed to keep his book; Stein only turned it over to him years later.

  While this ceremony was strictly an in-house event, Stein did distribute stock to select outsiders—among them, Harry Berman, the accountant who had worked for Stein since about 1930. Berman was not an MCA employee, but he was in some ways more of an insider than anyone. He had been working out of a small office in lower Manhattan when he offered his services to Stein, for free, for a three-month period. He passed muster so well that he became Stein’s personal accountant, and Music Corporation’s, and also the accountant of many of Music Corporation’s clients. In the early thirties, after MCA moved its New York offices from the Paramount building to a more elegant location, the Squibb building on Fifth Avenue, Berman took over the two-story MCA penthouse office (still furnished with Stein’s antiques) in the Paramount building. He prospered. He drove a red convertible Cadillac, and divided his time between his apartment a few doors off Fifth Avenue on East 67th Street, his estate in Mount Vernon, and, a little later, his horse farm in Ocala, Florida. For someone of such demonstrable affluence—and an accountant—it was a little strange that he was known to keep many thousands of dollars in cash in a safe-deposit box in a New York bank. In any case, Berman was (with the possible exception of Stein’s sister Ruth, whom Stein brought into the company in 1946, and who handled his personal financial matters) the single person most privy to Stein’s secrets from Music Corporation’s early years. And Stein—who trusted virtually no one, and kept an emotional distance even from those family members closest to him—was remarkably open with Berman, confiding the most intimate matters.

  For in April 1950, when Stein and his wife, Doris, were spending Easter in Zermatt, Switzerland, Stein had typed out a note to Berman.

  Dear Harry,

  I know how interested and concerned you are with my personal problems and therefor[e] this short message to you. Unfortunately I cannot ask you to write me since there is a chance she might open some of my mail as she often does from the offices and then I am a dead duck.

  The situation is no good—in fact much worse. I plan returning around May first—Doris is remaining several weeks longer—she says two—I’ll settle now for three. He is meeting he
r in Paris and they will spend their time together there and throughout France. To me it is most brazen—but she is really in love with this fellow and there are moments in which her mind wanders off into space and her eyes are full of tears. She has tenderness for me but little or no affection and while she is concerned about family etc. she feels many others have made the adjustments and we can as well.

  She promises to come home for the summer—and hopes maybe during that time she will adjust herself but the great love she had for me these past 22 years is gone. . . .

  She has lost all interest in Hollywood or the business—and seemingly is living in a new world of her own. . . . I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to adjust myself. My whole world has revolved around her and I know of no other one I desire.

  I hold on to my slim hopes—but am fearful my mental and physical condition will not be able to hold on much longer. I dread the approach of May first when we separate.

  Stein’s demeanor might have led one to suspect that he was a person of shallow emotions, but the surface only appeared imperturbable because he was so utterly contained. On one occasion, when he and his older daughter, Jean, had not been speaking to each other for an extended period, she received in the mail from him an envelope containing no note, just three postcards he had had made, evocative photographs of the house on Lake Arrowhead where they had spent many summers when she was a child—and, wordless as this message was, she knew that the silence between them was broken. That the taciturn Stein would have exposed his suffering to Berman so volubly was very unusual. But however much he valued Berman’s friendship, aptitude (he referred to him on at least one occasion as “my brilliant tax advisor”), and longtime service, Stein did not hesitate to leave Berman behind, now that it had become more practical to do so. As the company prepared to go public, the corporate structures that Berman had helped to devise were the very ones that were to be buried; and MCA’s accountants would be Price Waterhouse & Co., not Harry Berman. So Stein allotted Berman 2 percent of the company’s stock, and he drew up an agreement that would phase Berman out over the next several years. Berman felt badly treated; he thought he was entitled to something more like 14 percent of the stock. “I did so many things for Jules,” he would say repeatedly to his wife. “I made a multimillionaire out of Jules Stein.”

  In the meantime, Stein’s crisis with Doris had passed. Richard Gully, Doris’s confidant, said that he was aware of Doris’s “fling” at the time, and that he was fairly certain that her lover was Count de Polignac, the father of Prince Rainier of Monaco. “He was very hot in Paris,” Gully said. “There was a great glamour to Europe for Americans after the war, and there were a lot of playboys going after American women, but the only playboys that had money were Agnelli and Rothschild. Polignac didn’t have money.

  “Doris never would have left Jules, I feel certain—and definitely not for a man who couldn’t support her,” Gully added.

  Stein had never fully shared his wife’s social ambitions, but he seemed happy enough to indulge them. Apparently linked to Doris’s ambitions was her desire not to be identified as a Jew, and not to have their children raised as Jews. Stein, for his part, made no secret of his being Jewish, but he avoided the places where most of the Jewish moguls gathered, like Temple Israel and the Hillcrest Country Club. He did contribute to Jewish charities, but he seemed almost to resent the obligation to do so. (As he wrote to his friend Charles Wrightsman, “Because I am considered an important American Jew . . . I find myself going overboard . . . in contributions to Palestine, United Jewish Welfare Fund, Federation for Jewish Charities, Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and, thereby, leaving me very little, if any, monies for the institutions and organizations I would really like to help.”) When Doris had first resolved to become the premier hostess in the movie colony, her goal had carried some business purpose; for Hollywood was a one-industry community, where social life and business tended to blend into one another. She had carved out her territory very deliberately, and was extremely proprietary. “Edie Wasserman wanted to be a hostess in her own right, but she was never allowed to by Doris,” Gully said. “There was to be only one king and queen. It really was a court like Louis XIV.” By the late forties, however, Hollywood had become too provincial for Doris, and she set out to conquer the world. Socializing with the Aly Khan, Prince von Thurn und Taxis of Germany, and the Duchess of Argyll did little for MCA’s business, and it may have been this purposelessness that led Jules to balk. In Buenos Aires, during the reign of Evita and Juan Perón, Jules staged what Doris would later refer to, in a Schumach interview, as his “sit-down strike.” It was customary in Buenos Aires society for cocktails to be served at ten in the evening, dinner at midnight. “Jules did it for a while,” Doris recalled. “Finally, he said, ‘I’ve had it.’ After that he would leave after the cocktails and go home and eat alone. I’d go on to dinner and nightclubs and have a wonderful time.”

  Once Doris gave up her lover and returned to Jules, however, he seemed to sublimate his desires to hers; and their social life, particularly in Europe, became even more expansive. If Jules resented its demands, he gave almost no sign, other than the occasional trenchant observation. (“Doris,” he once commented, “would go to the opening of a door.”) But, complaisant as he was in his wife’s single-minded courtship of the titled class, Jules remained his intensely mercantile self—which, on occasion, created a fissure in their facade. Doris was a committed Anglophile, and for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the Steins decided to throw a party at the new MCA offices in London. The townhouse, at 139 Piccadilly, had an impressive lineage—it had once been owned by the Marquis of Queensberry, and Lord Byron had lived there, too. Connected to the townhouse was a mews apartment, which Doris turned into exquisite living quarters. (When the Steins first occupied it, Jules’s sister Ruth sent a telegram to him that read: “Congratulations. Moved right back next to the store.”) Most important for the coronation party, however, the MCA building would offer a perfect view of the route of the royal procession. Stein had a scaffold erected, with seating stretching across the front of 139 Piccadilly. And then an idea occurred to him. “We had all these people clamoring for seats in the stands attached to the building. . . . And the people we invited we were going to wine and dine. I decided we ought to charge for these seats. We charged, as I recall it, as much as $100 a seat. And that,” Stein summed up, “paid for everything.”

  The apogee of the Steins’ social life in this period, however, was the wedding of their elder daughter, Jean, to William vanden Heuvel, in December 1958. It was held in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and followed by a party at the St. Regis, where socialites from around the world danced to the music of Guy Lombardo and his orchestra. (Lombardo performed for free, as he and other entertainers had, also, for Jean’s coming-out party seven years earlier.) To Doris and Jules, this spectacular event represented no small triumph, for Jean had seemed intent for years on defying her parents, and, certainly, denying them an occasion as much to their taste as this. Jean and her sister, Susan, had endured a bruising childhood, raised by a dour governess while Jules and Doris were abroad for extended periods. Doris was a trial as a mother—cold, alcoholic, ashamed of her origins, obsessed with her social climb, devout in her worship of style. Jules, at least, was a person of more substance, and he did seem to love his daughters, particularly Jean, his clear favorite. But he, too, was at once remote and demanding, wanting to control his daughters as fully as he did everything in his business life. He and Jean were locked in a perpetual struggle. Jules’s politics were extremely conservative (during the McCarthy years, he would grow quite heated about the “Commies”), and anathema to Jean. She was repelled when his good friend Ed Weisl once took her to a courthouse in downtown Manhattan to introduce her to a young lawyer he said he was sure she’d like—and who turned out to be Roy Cohn. Jean dropped out of Wellesley College, went to live in Paris (where she became friendly with Alberto Giacometti, who paint
ed her portrait), and had an affair with William Faulkner, who was more than thirty years her senior. Her interview with Faulkner was published in the Paris Review, and with that, she became features editor at the age of twenty-two. (When the journal’s editor, George Plimpton, went to see Jules to ask him to invest in it, Jules asked how much money it made; upon being told that it was in the red, Jules brusquely showed Plimpton the door, saying that no one had ever before had the temerity to ask him to invest in a money-losing venture.) And so this battle of wills had gone. Until now, remarkably enough, Jean had decided to marry someone to whom her parents had introduced her—a lawyer who had gone to Cornell University on scholarship but had an aristocratic-sounding name—and to do it their way.

  Nearly a year later, in October 1959, Stein achieved another milestone, one he had been planning for many years. MCA became a public company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its first stock offering was highly successful—only 400,000 common shares were offered, at a price of $17.50, and the stock, heavily oversubscribed, quickly ran up to a high of $38. The chief underwriter was Lehman Brothers, the top-tier Wall Street firm where Ed Weisl, though he was a lawyer at Simpson Thacher, was so omnipresent that he was viewed as a kind of informal member. The months before the offering had been busy with preparations—first a new company, MCA, Inc., had been incorporated in Delaware, and then the entire MCA-related empire had been reorganized. It was Stein who had intended to direct all these activities; he was the one with the seat on the New York Stock Exchange and with the Wall Street relationships. But during this period he had a bout with prostate cancer, and underwent extensive surgery. Asked whether Stein, facing cancer, had thought he would die, Wasserman replied, “Jules was a pessimist. He knew he was going to die.” As it turned out, Stein’s prognosis was good. Needing time to recuperate, however, he put Wasserman in charge of the transaction.