Charlie Bluhdorn

"Kerkorian had very few words for anyone about anything, and what words he used were monosyllabic. He was always direct and clear, and could be counted on to live up to his word. While he was extremely charitable, his contributions were always anonymous. He was an economic adventurer, the true essence of a high-wire industrial gambler. At that time, he had recently opened the biggest hotel in the history of Las Vegas, the MGM Grand, which had gone violently over budget. Everything was going wrong for him when he walked into Bob Evans’s house to meet with Charlie Bluhdorn and Lew Wasserman and… um… me. Kerkorian’s hope of making a deal with Paramount and Universal was his last gasp at averting bankruptcy. MGM owned lots of assets outside the United States and had a first-rate worldwide distribution company, but like Paramount it didn’t have enough pictures to support it. Some years earlier, Charlie had persuaded Wasserman to combine the separate international distribution operations of Paramount and Universal into one company serving both. The idea pitched to Kerkorian was to join the distribution venture and sell some of the theaters MGM owned to raise cash for his hotel."

"Because I also still had responsibility for buying the big feature movies at ABC, my area of programming was now the most successful on the network. As my reward, and when the title “vice president” still had currency, I was appointed one—the youngest VP in network-television history. As Leonard Goldberg had once said about me when he saw me holding my own with that industrial magnate Charlie Bluhdorn, “Who knew?”"

"It was a dramatic story: me and my Paramount history and upstart QVC buying that fabled old studio. I was twenty-four years old when Charlie Bluhdorn barged into my office to save his recent acquisition of Paramount from going bust, and here I was twenty-five years later bidding to buy the whole company. The afternoon we made the offer, I called Martin Davis to tell him an official letter would soon arrive on his desk."

"After Charlie had spent thirty-four years building up Gulf + Western, it owned dozens of companies with twenty-one separate business units and one hundred thousand employees. It was one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Charlie Bluhdorn had become one of the world’s greatest industrialists. He didn’t have his own country, but he came pretty damn close. Charlie had bought a company called South Puerto Rico Sugar in 1967 and had been adding millions of acres to its holdings, which now included 10 percent of the land in the Dominican Republic. It had become one of the largest sugar refineries in the world."

"A package arrived for me from the forty-second floor. Charlie Bluhdorn had the article encased in a silver frame. On it, he had handwritten the message “No one but no one deserves this more than you.” I still keep it close."

"When I got to the Waldorf, I called Marty Starger, the person to whom I reported, and told him I’d just been offered the chairmanship of Paramount. There was a long pause; he was astounded that his underling had been offered such a job—a Houdini-like escape from his poor performance running series television. I ended the silence by saying, “I don’t think I’m going to accept it.” At that point, I still hadn’t been able to think coherently. I just wanted it to go away. It was way too much, way too soon. Like Charlie, Starger thought my response was inane. I had to tell Marty right away about the offer, because Charlie had said he was going to call Leonard Goldenson first thing the next morning to ask permission to make me a formal offer. I had told Charlie not to do so until I decided what I wanted, but I knew that Charlie Bluhdorn had a will not governed by what anyone else wanted. The next morning I was summoned to Mr. Goldenson’s office. For Goldenson, the idea that I had been offered the chairmanship of Paramount was equally astounding. In his kindly old crocodile way, he told me gently, “You can’t turn this down.” He probably would have fired me as an acknowledged dolt if I had stayed."