When Hollywood Had a King Read online

  “So I said to my assistant, ‘Who is that tall, skinny guy?’

  “ ‘It’s Lew Wasserman. He’s a PR guy for Kay Kyser.’

  “There were a lot of fellows ahead of him,” Sidney concluded, “but he was just faster and sharper.”

  Stories about just how fast and sharp Wasserman was began to make the rounds of the tight Hollywood circles. He was not only so fast with numbers that, as one associate said, “he was a walking computer before there were computers,” but he was creative; he could invent deals that did something for everyone. He began to study tax law, and eventually came up with suggestions about deferred compensation and structuring of transactions that neither Stein nor the company’s lawyers had thought of. He was not a loquacious person, certainly not given to small talk—and yet, when the need arose to win over an actor or a radio sponsor, he could exhibit great charm. He seemed never to tire; the more he worked, the more energized he became. And though he was a young, untried newcomer in this fabled industry, he was not afraid to go his own way. Wasserman recalled that not long after he arrived, N. Joseph Ross, who was Stein’s lawyer, took him to lunch at Hillcrest. “He said, ‘To be successful here, you have to join.’ (It cost $3,500 to join, and $250 a month.) Jack Warner and Harry Cohn belonged.” Wasserman said he took some materials home, read them, and—realizing that one had to be a Jew to join—told Ross, “ ‘I’m not joining. It’s restricted.’ And Joe Ross said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s for Jews.’ ” According to Wasserman, he declined because he disagreed with the policy.

  The enterprising young agent even came to the attention of L. B. Mayer, the head of MGM, who—with the legendary Irving Thalberg, as supervisor of production—had made MGM into Hollywood’s most prestigious and glamorous studio in the thirties. “I looked up tremendously to L. B. Mayer, because I watched his operation,” Wasserman told director Steven Spielberg in the course of an oral history interview. “Mayer’s theory was very simple . . . he bought the best. If he thought you were talented, he bought you.” Wasserman recalled his first meeting with Mayer. Wasserman had become fast friends with Eddie Mannix, a former bouncer who was general manager of MGM. After they had lunch one day, Mannix told Wasserman to come with him, and they walked down a corridor at MGM and entered an office. “We were in L.B.’s office—a fairly large office,” Wasserman recounted. “He sat on a platform behind the desk so he could look down at you. He was a short man. Mannix said, ‘This is the young man I’ve been telling you about.’ ” Mayer told Wasserman to sit down, and handed him a yellow pad. “He said, ‘Write this down.’ I took out my pen. I turned around, and Mannix was gone. I’m all alone! L. B. Mayer, I’d never met him.

  “And he said, ‘A firm seven-year contract.’ I was thinking, Jesus, are they going to do a sequel to Gone With the Wind for Hattie? We don’t have anybody that’s worth a seven-year contract.

  “ ‘Five thousand dollars a week.’ Now I know it’s got to be Hattie.

  “ ‘Vice president in charge of marketing.’ That was the third thing. And he stopped. He said, ‘Well?’

  “I said, ‘Well, what, Mr. Mayer?’

  “ ‘That’s what I’m offering you to come to work here next Monday.’

  “I said, ‘Why would you do that? I only get $350 a week at MCA.’ I told him the absolute truth.

  “He said, ‘I don’t care what you get. That’s a firm offer to start Monday.’

  “I said, ‘Thank you, I’m not interested.’ He didn’t talk to me for two years. But then we became very friendly.”

  Wasserman turned down Mayer, he said, because “I liked what I was doing. They let me alone at MCA, let me do what I wanted.” And the kind of freedom Wasserman was describing at MCA—which would become far greater before long—was not something he would have found at a studio. At MCA, Wasserman really had only to answer to Stein. But the autonomy that the most powerful studio heads, including Mayer, seemed to have in Hollywood was illusory. They had bosses in their corporations’ New York headquarters (for Mayer, it was Nicholas Schenck); and ultimately it was those executives, and the banks and other entities that financed the film corporations, that controlled their destinies. Wasserman also said, “I never cared about the money—I know it sounds like I’m saying it because it’s the thing to say, but it’s true. Mayer couldn’t believe I didn’t have a contract at MCA—but I didn’t! I never had a contract, from 1936 to 1976. I had a strange relationship with Jules, one that’s hard to explain.”

  It was a relationship that would remain largely opaque to others, and perhaps even to the two men themselves. What was already plain, however, was their extreme compatibility—not in the customary sense of enjoying each other’s company, for neither of them had much of an instinct for that generally—but in the ability each had to further the other’s goals: a virtual paradigm of utilitarianism. Stein offered Wasserman a vehicle for the full exercise of his talents; and Wasserman, Stein had begun to believe, offered him the chance to expand his empire. Neither, moreover, would really conflict with the other; for Stein, while he was highly secretive and distrustful of nearly everyone, did not need to exercise hands-on control over every aspect of his business. Indeed—inasmuch as it would involve establishing the kinds of relationships with union representatives that he earlier had with Petrillo—he did not want to. Within a year of Wasserman’s arriving in Hollywood, therefore, Stein gave him essentially free rein.

  Wasserman did not believe in trying to build their movie talent business from scratch. MCA was cash-rich. And if they had to buy stars in order to sell them, they would; they were merchants, after all. “The Selznicks [pioneering agents] wouldn’t buy contracts. They felt they didn’t need to, they were king,” Wasserman said. “William Morris wouldn’t either. They felt it was beneath them.” Wasserman had no such compunction. If he had his way, MCA would become the agency analogue to MGM, with most of Hollywood’s top talent under its control. Shortly after Stein persuaded Bette Davis to sign on, Wasserman bought up a slew of contracts, bringing in Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, Basil Rathbone, and Paulette Goddard. But Wasserman also told Stein he believed it made even more sense to buy existing agencies, and the bigger the better. “I was more acquisition-minded than Jules, but he let me. I acquired a lot of agencies, here and around the world.” In the early forties, they merged a number of agencies into MCA, including Alan Miller; Casting Consultants; Liebling-Wood; Alexander and Silman; Martonplay; Myron Selznick, Ltd.; William Meiklejohn; and Linnit & Dunfee, Ltd. It was surprising, in a way, that there were so many willing sellers; some may have felt it was an offer they couldn’t refuse. For as Martin Baum commented, recalling this period, “MCA was saying, ‘Take this money, come with us, you’ll be part of the biggest agency—and if you don’t, we’ll take away your clients. You’ll have nothing!’ ” MCA, everyone knew, was the juggernaut. In 1943, when Leland Hayward, one of the very small group of elite Hollywood agents, was recuperating in the hospital, he received a note from another member of that fraternity, Charles Feldman, which read: “Relax—don’t give business a single thought, for in a few months Jules Stein will have all your clients, anyway.”

  Leland Hayward was even more antithetical to the stereotype of an agent than Jules Stein. Hayward, who came from an aristocratic New York family and had been educated at Eastern private schools and, for a year, at Princeton, was one of those rare people who seemed to carry out everything, in business and in life, with a kind of effortless grace. He was partial to white flannels and yachting sneakers. As his daughter Brooke Hayward later wrote in Haywire, he had what Stein described as “that radiant effervescent smile—rarely ever saw him when his face wasn’t shining—ready to tell you something or sell you something.” Both he and his partner, Nat Deverich, had started out at the Myron Selznick agency and then had gone off on their own. Hayward-Deverich’s client list was appropriately sterling. It held three hundred established performers—including Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Margaret Sullavan (Hayward’s wife)
, Fred Astaire, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Oscar Levant, and Fredric March; producers and directors such as Billy Wilder and Joshua Logan; and writers including Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Dashiell Hammett, Walter de la Mare, and Arthur Koestler. Billy Wilder, also in Haywire, said of Hayward, “In my opinion, his enormous success in this town, beyond his being very bright and knowing it inside out, was due to the fact that the wives of the moguls were crazy about him. I do not mean to imply that he had an affair with Mrs. Goldwyn, but Mrs. Goldwyn was just crazy about him. So was Mrs. Warner. All the wives were crazy about him and kept talking about him, because he was a very attractive, handsome, dashing man. He should have been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army—something like that. He was certainly miscast as an agent. If I were to make a picture about an agent, a very successful agent, and my casting director brought in Leland Hayward, I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind! This is not the way an agent looks!’ That was part of his success. Just charmed the birds off the trees, the money out of the coffers, and ladies into their beds.”

  Even Hayward, however, must have felt the hot breath of MCA’s—especially Wasserman’s—competition. Thus, one day in the early spring of 1945, Deverich told Wasserman that he should make an appointment with Hayward. “I went over to see Hayward,” Wasserman began, seeming still to relish a story he had told associates countless times. “He had an office four times the size of mine today. He was lying on a couch without a tie and with no shoes on. He said, ‘Hi. I haven’t got a lot of time. My partner thinks you’re a genius. Why don’t you join us? We’ll give you one third of the business.’ I asked why, and he said he was not happy in the business and wanted to do less of it. I said, I’ll buy your company. He wanted to know if I had the authority—I was pretty young. It was a very large business. It was done in an hour.” The basic terms of the agreement were that Hayward and Deverich would each have ten-year contracts at MCA at roughly $100,000 a year, and they would also receive 50 percent of the commissions on the clients they brought with them, as well as sharing in MCA’s bonus system on future business. With a single stroke, MCA had become not only the most important and largest agency in the world, but also the most powerful organization in the motion picture business.

  The transfer of Hayward-Deverich’s superb talent was not done painlessly, according to Larry White, who was Hayward’s young assistant. “Getting some of the artists to go there was hell—Leland said, send them flowers, candy, do whatever you have to do,” White recalled. “Generally speaking, you had an agent like Leland, he took 10 percent. But with MCA, you didn’t know what they would take. And the artists were afraid of them. They let you know they could destroy your career.” However, White continued, “I would say that many of the artists did better with Lew than they’d done with Leland.”

  Once the merger was completed, Hayward moved into the MCA building. Wasserman, who was too practical to care much about the conventional signs of station, said, “I told Hayward he could have any office at MCA he wanted, including mine—just not Jules’s or Taft Schreiber’s [Schreiber was very senior to Wasserman, and close to Stein].” Hayward, however, did not take Wasserman’s. “He picked out an office with French wallpaper—real wallpaper—but he didn’t want it. So I had it torn off. He wanted it to be maroon (he had very modern furniture). Jules was angry—maroon? Then, Jules told me, ‘I’ve worked it all out with Leland. I’m going to panel his whole office.’ ”

  Jules Stein (center), shown with (left to right) Leland Hayward, Lew Wasserman, Nat Deverich, and Taft Schreiber, after the merger with Hayward-Deverich made MCA the largest and most powerful talent agency in the world. Gene Lester Collection/Screen Actors Guild

  Stein gave Wasserman all the credit for having achieved this remarkable deal, and he felt it confirmed his judgment about Wasserman’s talents. It was at this point, Stein later said, that he realized he had a “pupil who was surpassing his teacher.” Stein was not alone in this assessment. Within the organization of MCA, Stein had already begun to recede somewhat; it was Wasserman, after all, who pulled off the master deal that catapulted them to preeminence, and Stein who was distressed about Hayward’s maroon walls. Stein had begun to focus more of his attention on investing, applying the tenets of the Dow theory not only to his portfolio but to operating MCA; when he saw signs of an impending bear market, for example, he would exhort his executives to firm up their commitments. Stein’s work was still his life—he would comment once that “Saturdays and Sundays were always my worst days”—but the force that was driving MCA, certainly in Hollywood, was Wasserman.

  All the heat emanated from Wasserman’s office; so, too, did the dictates about how life within the company was to be lived. It was a very tightly controlled environment. The dress code had become rigid: dark suits, white shirts, dark blue or gray ties. Wasserman had needed instruction in dress when he had first come to MCA, but he was a fast learner. Now MCA agents, in their dark uniforms, were commonly referred to as the “MCA Mafia.” Desks were to be left clear at night; if Wasserman and Stein, patrolling, found papers on them, they would sweep them into the wastebasket. “Messy desk, messy mind,” was the credo. There were strict rules for the agents’ secretaries. They went up the back stairs, while the agents ascended the winding staircases in the front of the building. And there was a prohibition on fraternization. Helen Gurley (Brown) went to work at MCA as a secretary in 1942. She recalled how frustrated she and her colleagues were at not being able to date the agents. “I remember for Valentine’s Day, we decided to wear pink and red—we were a flower house of color in the secretarial pool. Still, we couldn’t attract any attention. The agents were all business.” Wasserman provided an example for his troops. “Lew was very attractive, and he could have had anyone,” Gurley said, “but that didn’t seem to interest him.” Lew’s wife, Edie, had given birth to their only child, a daughter, Lynne, in 1940; but he seemed almost as uninterested in home life as he did in office dalliances. Gurley added, too, that the temper that would become notorious was already in evidence; the screams coming from his office could be heard down the hall. Eventually, Gurley did manage to attract some attention, and she began having a clandestine affair with Herman Citron, whose clients included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis; when her relationship with Citron was discovered, she was fired.

  It was Edie Wasserman who had spotted Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, according to longtime MCA executive Herbert Steinberg. But it would appear, from Steinberg’s account, that Edie was stepping outside her prescribed role and realized it was best to approach her husband obliquely with regard to her talent scouting.

  “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were being handled by Abby Greshler, and they were booked into the Copacabana,” Steinberg said. “Edie went to their opening night. She realized this was a great talent team. She started to bring people in every night. Then, Lew came to New York. ‘Where do you want to go tonight?’ She’d been there every night for two weeks—but she was careful in the way she suggested things to Lew. So she said, ‘I hear there’s a good act at the Copacabana.’ Jack Entratter, who was later co-owner and general manager of the Sands, was managing the Copacabana. When Edie and Lew came in, he said, ‘Oh, hi, Mrs. Wasserman. You’re here again!’ Lew bought out their contract with Greshler,” Steinberg concluded.

  In these days, the term “corporate culture” had not yet become part of the lexicon, but MCA’s was, unmistakably, survival of the fittest. And this was true company-wide. Shelly Schultz recalled his indoctrination in MCA’s Chicago office. “There were two guys in adjacent offices. They were both selling to nightclubs, and were given the same territory. And you’d hear one of them, on the phone, talking to a customer and saying, about the guy in the next office, ‘Don’t buy from him! I can give them to you $200 cheaper!’ ” It was a brutal arrangement, but it successfully weeded out those who were hampered by personal ethics, or friendship with their colleagues, or the lack of a killer instinct. Thus, MCA agents, by and large, were
trained to be as ruthless with one another as they were with outside competitors. They would display their mettle in gladiatorial combat—shouting and going for each other’s throats at company meetings, while Stein, presiding, listened quietly, and in the end ruled up or down. The premium placed on aggressiveness—and, of course, productivity—was institutionalized through the compensation system. Sliding scale bonuses were calculated according to a formula that included the amount of business brought in by the agent, the gross done by each department and each branch office, and some other esoteric factor employed by Stein. In many cases, these bonuses constituted the lion’s share of an agent’s income. In 1943, for example, Sonny Werblin, kingpin of the New York office and its highest-paid member, received a salary of $5,200 and a bonus of $49,300. Second to Werblin was Harold Hackett, vice president in charge of radio, who received a salary of $5,200 and a bonus of $37,300. According to Harry Sosnik, of course, Hackett had considerable under-the-table income as well. Sosnik’s informing Stein of Hackett’s conduct had obviously not hurt his career at MCA; indeed, Hackett had prospered dramatically since that time.

  Irving “Swifty” Lazar, who had worked in MCA’s New York office in the thirties under Goodheart, left the agency but decided he would like to return in 1945. Stein had a general rule that no one who left could be rehired, but he thought so highly of Lazar’s talents (he had been given his nickname by Humphrey Bogart, after he made three deals for Bogart in an afternoon) that Stein gave him special dispensation. As Lazar described in his autobiography, Swifty, he asked Wasserman, who headed the Hollywood office, if he could work there, and Wasserman agreed. Lazar quickly learned how MCA had changed under Wasserman’s aegis. Since Wasserman “was answerable only to Jules Stein, he could run the agency pretty much any way he pleased. The way that pleased Lew was very different than anything ever seen in Hollywood. MCA was more like the Central Intelligence Agency than a talent business.” First, there was the uniform. Second, there was the code of secrecy; MCA agents were instructed to be strictly close-mouthed, on the grounds that whatever information they had related to their clients’ business.