Lew

"The next morning I went to Hirata’s hotel for the magic number. If the offer was in the fifties, I feared Lew would walk. After our good mornings, Hirata made a brief, expressionless statement. I swiveled to the translator. “We will make an offer,” he said, “of sixty dollars a share.” I pushed for more: “This will close much faster if we go in at sixty-five dollars and hold our ground.” Early on, I’d warned Hirata that in dealmaking I represented both sides—which is how deals get done—and that I’d squeeze him if necessary. I was squeezing now. Hirata shook his head. “We would like to offer sixty dollars,” the translator said. I pushed no further. Every offer had some give to it, and any deal could close if the bid-ask spread was within 10 percent. Lew would be hard-pressed to reject sixty-six dollars a share, nearly double the stock’s price before the Journal leak. Throw in five dollars for WOR, and we were close to the floor Herb and I had submitted two months earlier. A sixty-dollar bid was a savvy calibration, the lowest figure that would safely keep things moving."

"After moving to Los Angeles from Chicago in the late 1930s, Lew built the town’s paramount talent agency. His rules were simple: tend to the client, dress appropriately, divulge no information about MCA, do your homework, never leave the office without returning every phone call. He insisted on dark suits, white shirts, and a dark blue or dark gray tie, and he’d sweep papers left on people’s desks into the wastebasket at the end of the day. His credo was “Messy desk, messy mind.” On the one occasion I saw Lew’s office as a tour guide, his desktop held only a phone, a clock, and a handsome desk set. Not one scrap of paper that could yield a secret."

"Charlie yelled at me to come into the room and put me on the phone with Lew, who was also rather startled at the news about the new statehood of his daughter’s childhood friend. I was hardly someone he took seriously, but like everyone else in Hollywood, he didn’t much like Yablans, so he congratulated me heartily. The ever-charming Wasserman told me he always knew I’d go places when, as a twelve-year-old, I’d beaten his wife at gin rummy at their Palm Springs house."