Martin Davis

"My eyes zeroed in on the last call—it was from another Davis, Marvin Davis, no relation to Martin. This Davis was the Denver oil tycoon who had recently bought 20th Century Fox. Marvin Davis had never before called me. But I knew, just intuitively knew, when I saw that name that this was going to be the key to my getting out of Paramount with more than my tail intact. I’m not conflating the timing of events here. It happened just this way: deciding once and for all that I had to leave and getting that phone call five minutes later. Somehow the gods must have decreed that I deserved a savior from *Martin* Davis, and he would be named *Marvin* Davis. In a lifetime filled with inexplicably serendipitous moments, this one topped them all."

"It was early evening after the court victory when I got a call from our lawyers; they were finalizing the agreement and wanted me to come down to their offices to sign it. I walked down Second Avenue, shaking my head in amazement that it was almost ten years earlier when I’d left Paramount for Fox, then left Fox to go off on my little own. Now here I was returning to the movies, but this time as a principal, actually *owning* Paramount. When I arrived, all the lawyers were scrambling about, papers flying between different floors of the building. I was put in an office to wait for Martin Davis to arrive, because we had to cosign the agreement."

"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."

"With the nerve of a cat burglar, I told Marvin, “Since I don’t know you very well, you would have to agree never to speak to a single person in the company other than me. And while I’ll surely be in touch with you informally about the state of the company, I will formally agree to meet with you once a year.” I had been so scarred by Martin Davis’s behavior that I wanted these extreme protections, particularly with someone who had already interfered willy-nilly with the people at Fox. He wasn’t happy about such distancing, but he did agree."

"Martin Davis asked me to come straight to his office as soon as I landed. It was around ten p.m. when I got there. He shocked me by saying that Charlie had been secretly sick for the last three years. They never discussed it, but he’d found out. Not much of a surprise, because Martin had a detective agency on the side that did all sorts of nefarious things and provided him with god-knows-what information. He didn’t know when Charlie was going to die, but he knew he was seriously unwell. He’d used those years to systematically ingratiate himself with the outside directors, waiting for the inevitable opportunity. No one else ever bothered much with the directors because Charlie was so dominant and thought to be indestructible."