Lew Wasserman

"In the early eighties, I’d begun collecting relationships. For instance, I reached out to Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères banker who had almost single-handedly rescued New York City from bankruptcy in the seventies, and who was on the board of MCA and had Lew Wasserman’s ear. I called and asked to see him, saying, “I need no more than ten minutes of your time.” On my next trip to New York, I went to his office, shook hands, and placed my watch on his desk. Then I said, “I’d love to talk to you about how you saved New York, and also how you advise Lew—to learn from the Dean. And I’d love to be helpful to you in L.A. in any way I can.” All to get him talking and to show that I knew what he’d done and that I admired it and wanted to learn from it. After ten minutes, I said, “Thanks so much,” and stood to pick up my watch. Felix—and everyone else I used this stratagem on—asked me to sit back down. In this way I got to know Herb Allen, the head of Allen & Co., and Bob Greenhill at Morgan Stanley, and I’d always drop in on them when I was in New York—as well as on Mort Janklow and fifteen other book agents, a number of figures in the art world, and our clients Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, Bob De Niro, and Marty Scorsese. The relationships outside entertainment would prove useful to CAA in the plans I was beginning to develop. They’d be our bridges to a wider world."

"All the foul-mouthed magnates who founded the modern film business were fascinating: Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, William Fox. But the one who interested me most, in part because I worked at his studio and in part because he had the most far-reaching ideas, was Lew Wasserman."

"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."

"The one person I never got my way with was the über-powerful chairman of MCA, the wildly feared then “king” of Hollywood, Lew Wasserman. I’d known him since I was eleven years old as the father of my schoolmate Lynne. He’d intimidated me then and forever since. The only time I ever tried to negotiate with him, he wouldn’t give an inch, not even a fraction of an inch."