A New Kind of King

Hollywood, which seemed moribund a couple of years ago, has always been salvageable. All the movie men had to do was to embrace television. But with a will surprising among the supposedly spineless masters of the picture business, Hollywood for a long time refused. One studio -20th Century-Fox-actually closed its gates for a while, and other studios moved vacantly forward with skeletal staffs.

Now, however, the place is busier than it has been since World War II. All studios are not only open but packed with working crews. Television has become Hollywood's principal staple, and the new outpouring of filmed TV series is fueling the studios in much the same substantial way that B pictures once did.

Unusual Door. Tallest and most obvious symbol of all this rejuvenation is a newly constructed, 14-story, $8,500,000 office building that rises above Universal City, the 425-acre home lot of Universal Pictures and Universal Television-and of MCA Inc., which owns both. Two years ago, at the insistence of the U.S. Department of Justice, MCA ceased to be the world's largest talent agency, preferring to concentrate on its efforts as a film studio, and it has since become the world's largest motion picture and television company. More than any other studio, MCA has led the latter-day renaissance of Hollywood, and the man who has done the leading is MCA's president, Lew R. Wasserman. 51.

He is a new kind of cinema king. He doesn't wear smoked glasses, carry a bull whip and snap orders over his manicurist's shoulder like the major bosses of old. And of course he is not one of the modern independents who incubate their eggs in other people's nests. Wasserman is a corporate president in show business, a modified First National City banker who has wandered through an unusual door, and he has shaped MCA into a trimly efficient manufacturing corporation, ample in size, and self-sufficient, whose net earnings have risen without setback from $7,200,000 in 1959 to $13.6 million in 1963-and 1964 is well ahead of last year.

Suited Skyscraper.The product is film, and MCA's Universal TV has more shows in network prime time-nine hours in all-than any other producer. The Munsters, The Bob Hope Chrysler Theater, and The Virginian are all in the top 20. NBC will on Jan. 30 add another MCA show called Big Three Golf, a weekly continuing match between Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player. MCA also presents Jack Benny, Alfred Hitchcock, Wagon Train, The Kraft Suspense Theater, Broadside, 90 Bristol Court and McHale's Navy. At least 22 TV programs are now being shot on the Universal lot. Nor has all this activity crowded out the company's commitments to theatrical motion pictures. On the contrary, TV takes care of the overhead and expands the budgetary possibilities for big films. In its short existence as a major producer, MCA has made an impressive number of profitable pictures. Father Goose, Gary Grant's new one, is doing well at Radio City Music Hall. Freud, Cape Fear, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pillow Talk, That Touch of Mink, Operation Petticoat, Spartacus, The Chalk Garden and Charade are all MCA-Universal movies too. The company's next major release will be Strange Bedfellows.

The evolvement of MCA from stars' agent to stars' employer has not materially affected the way in which Wasserman runs the company. It begins with personality. He is an austere man, tall and gaunt, with a pale complexion and large, deep-set eyes. He never makes a public speech, and his considerable sense of showmanship never manifests itself in flamboyance on his own part. He wears black suits, black ties, and a white shirt. It is no real accident that MCA's new skyscraper is black, its interior walls are white and, by decree, unadorned with pictures. MCA executives are advised against wearing sport jackets and instructed never to remove their suit coats, most of which are black, like the boss's. Wasserman has often told unwary young employees that their color-stripe ties are handsome enough but not suitable to wear to the office. MCA people should be plain-color is for actors.

Great Future. "As long as I've known Lew," says his friend Tony Curtis, "everybody's been frightened of him." Not everyone has reason to be. He liberally delegates authority and even more liberally disperses the credit for MCA achievements. "I don't believe that one man ever runs anything," he says. He insists on the spirit of "we." As one MCA sales executive explains it: "I think Mr. Wasserman would be very upset if anyone used the word 'I'-if someone were to walk into his office and say, 'I just sold a program.' We always use the pronoun 'we.' "

Yet Wasserman works as if he were doing it all by himself. He averages 60 hours a week in the office. He is always available by phone to anyone-except possibly reporters. He limits phone calls to 30 seconds, will not read a memo of more than two paragraphs. He is never unfair but he keeps most of his subalterns jumping. And he hates nepotism. When one of his employees married his only daughter, Wasserman gave the girl away and simultaneously demanded, and got, the groom's resignation.

Throughout his career, Wasserman has enjoyed a viewpoint nicely balanced between business and show business. He bridges the large gulf between the accountant and the tousled genius. He can figure a budget within 5%, and when he gets it figured, he knows what the money is being spent on. He began learning his business during his boyhood as a movie theater usher in C'eveland, and at 21 he became vice president for advertising and promotion at a nightclub called the Mayfair Casino. The bands who played there were booked in by MCA, which then literally was the Music Corporation of America, run by Jules Stein, who is now the chairman of the board. Stein, who was then 40, offered Wasserman a position with MCA. "I think I'll take the job because there is a great future in it," Wasserman told his bride of six months. "What's so great about it?" she said. "Stein is an old man," said Wasserman.

Bright Men. Becoming a first-rate talent agent, he guided names like Jean Arthur, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn to stardom. With Jimmy Stewart he started the phenomenon of stars getting a percentage of the profits. He signed 24-year-old Frank Sinatra with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He began yo-yoing Dore Schary, an obscure writer, around Hollywood and eventually installed him as head of MGM.

In 1946 Stein evacuated the MCA presidency and gave it to Wasserman, then 33, over a number of men who outranked him. As president, Wasserman moved forward on sensible creeds such as "It's better to have 10% of something than 100% of nothing," and "Planning ahead is the one advantage a businessman has." He was criticized for assembling packages of MCA clients-stars, writer, producer, director -and unit-ramming them down customers' throats on an all-or-nothing basis; but, as one of those customers admits, "there was never any question of getting an indigestible deal from Lew. If people didn't like him, it was simply that he was dealing from a position of strength."

Bell Helicopter. When the television scare came, Wasserman reacted early. He established Revue Productions, MCA's TV producing subdivision, which has now become Universal Television. He felt that TV should go to film and helped prove it with Armour's Stars Over Hollywood (1950-51), one of TV's first filmed series. When independent movie producers led the flight from Hollywood that nearly killed off the industry there, Wasserman sensed that the advantages abroad of cheap labor and low taxes would only be temporary; so he stayed in Hollywood, bought Universal Pictures, and began to build in a supposed economic desert. The runaways are returning to find him booming.

MCA goes first class all the way, but it budgets the trip. Wasserman is the sort of man who will not, for example, use 20 helicopters when one would do. He will not use one helicopter if a telephone call would be good enough. He will pay a writer like Rod Serling $15,000 for a single one-hour script, and his Bob Hope Chrysler Theater frequently exceeds $200,000 a show, but this does not imply that he thinks money can write or act. "He has a genius for what people like," says Tony Curtis. "He wouldn't make a boring picture, like what I call Breakfast at Nuremberg."

Wasserman also has a conviction that MCA, as a company, will be healthier the more it diversifies-in fact, only 25% of its total income, he thinks, should derive from TV and feature movies. The new look of Universal City reflects this. MCA is not only in the film business, it is also in the tourist business. Wasserman reasons that when people come to Hollywood they first want to see a film studio, then they want to go to Disneyland. So he is giving them a Disneyland of a film studio. He is spending $50 million on tourist facilities alone, including a projected 1,800-room "hotel of the stars." Visitors ride around in a three-car surrey-topped tram, getting near views of miscellaneous Munsters and other TV personalities. Under glass in the office tower they can see the computer which Wasserman uses in order to complete cost control and time factor studies, and run his studio like a good machine tool factory.

Sliding Roof. Most studios look like collections of local airport hangars. Universal City is full of ivy-covered cottages and real grass. Visitors can go through Doris Day's dressing room and peek into her closet, which contains everything but a sign saying Do Not Disturb the Skeletons. Along the tour, they can buy souvenir miniature rubber boulders, which, they are told, are similar to the 5,000,000 standard props in use in the studio complex. They also learn that 800 vehicles are required just to transport people among the 35 sound stages, and the office building, the post office, the bank-it really is a city.

Wasserman is worth more than $30 million in MCA stock, but he lives-frugally by some neighbors' standards-in a $400,000 one-bedroom house in Beverly Hills designed by Harold Lezitt. There is a Henry Moore beside the driveway, a Soutine on the dining-room wall, and a Bernard Buffet portrait of Wasserman himself, a gift from Alfred Hitchcock, in the foyer. Mrs. Wasserman sleeps in the bedroom. Wasserman sleeps on a couch in the study, where he gets up at 5 each morning and starts making phone calls to breakfasting subordinates in New York.

In what may be an ultimate even in Hollywood home projection facilities, Wasserman's movie-screening room is actually a separate building-with a sliding aluminum roof and enough couch-side buttons to thrill General Sarnoff-one for controlling stereo, others for tape machines, radio, and the movie sound-track volume. As he sits in this room and judges all he has done in the past few years, he has a great deal more in mind than the simple Hollywood formula: "If it makes money, it's good."

Neither a sentimental showman nor a tightwad, he has shown that Hollywood can still make competent movies that are bids for quality within their own form and stay in the black, and that, as he puts it, "if you are going to manufacture anything, you ought to have the finest plant and facilities." But the heavy financial investments needed to create such an entity would be for nought without a special flair for sensing what is acceptable to the public-for that, ultimately, accounts for success in the entertainment world. This Lew Wasser man has to a unique degree, and it has helped him bring Hollywood back from the margin of extinction.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.