Sumner

"By this point both sides were stretched to the max. Sumner was quoted as saying that I was his great friend who’d betrayed him and that little “crummy” QVC was no match for the great Viacom. I responded, “This is about the future of Paramount—which I led for seven straight years when it was number one in the industry. So do you want this fifty-year-old person or this seventy-year-old? I’m young, I’m vigorous, and he’s old.” Oh, do I now rue trashing a seventy-year-old for his age."

"Our investor group began falling apart. Donald Newhouse, the head of Advance, called and said his family was uncomfortable the price was getting this high and wanted out. I argued with him, saying that if he did so, we’d be finished. I assured him that if he stayed in and we won, we’d take him out and pay him off after it closed. He finally agreed, but said he wouldn’t do “one penny more.” We were still the high bid when Tom Sherak, my old head of distribution at Fox, called—as a “friend”—to say, “I just talked to Sumner, and I think he’s really finished. You’ve won. You’ve driven him crazy.” Of course, Sumner had put him up to it; he just wanted to fake weakness."

"In the middle of dinner, I decided to call the office and see if there was any news. I found a pay phone and was told that Redstone’s primary adviser at Bear Stearns had come up with the idea of adding a CVR, a contingent value right, to the pot. The CVR was a new Wall Street invention. It meant that if Viacom stock didn’t rise within a year after purchasing Paramount to a certain price, then the shareholders would get a stock dividend to make up the difference. This was valued at $2 a share higher than our offer. It was a gimmick, but theoretically had dangerous consequences I didn’t want to risk. What we didn’t know was that Ace Greenberg, head of Bear Stearns, had guaranteed to Sumner that he could manipulate the stock during that one-year period so that there would never be a loss—it would never go below a certain level, so there would be no risk. And eventually that is what happened. It wasn’t entirely legal, but I was too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to even know about, much less consider, such a manipulation."

"For the umpteenth time I was so in over my head—I had zero experience in big-game dealmaking and was only months into running a publicly held company. I was also embarrassingly naive about what drove investors. I had lunch with a group of twenty or so institutional shareholders of Paramount. I was doing my passionate sell about why we were the better buyer—why I’d do a better job running the company than old Sumner. I was going on and on and could tell I was losing my audience as they dolefully picked at their food. Leon Cooperman, a legendary stock picker who had a big position in Paramount, interrupted my monologue. “I don’t care about how you’re going to run this better than him—just pay me a dollar more so I can go home.”"