In 1950, while arranging for his client James Stewart to appear in Harvey and Winchester '73, the wizardly Lew Wasserman had a novel idea: to reward the star with part of the movies' profits instead of a salary. This was only one of countless innovations devised by Wasserman as president of MCA, then Hollywood's most powerful talent agency. As we know, the idea of profit participation for actors would have huge consequences and drastically affect the way that films were made.
But one of the astonishing testaments to Wasserman's business acumen was his ability to work both sides of this equation. As MCA became an ever more imaginatively tentacled octopus, acquiring Universal Studios and moving presciently into television production, its role as a talent agency began to interest the Justice Department. To avoid antitrust issues, the talent agency had to go.
As Connie Bruck fascinatingly reports in When Hollywood Had a King, a deal-by-deal analysis of the Wasserman executive style and the business climate in which it thrived, Wasserman's having to get out of the talent business looked like a form of poetic justice. Here, after all, was the visionary who had driven stars' salaries sky high and set them up as producers. And now here he was, on the other side of the negotiating table, having to hire those same stars on those same studio-punishing terms.
It will surprise no one who reads Bruck's complex business history and character study that Wasserman, while heeding the Justice Department's warnings, found a way out of that trap. "The outcome," she writes, "was so sublimely advantageous that many who knew Wasserman would remain forever convinced that the government ended up doing for him what he could not do himself," turning the talent agency into a much weaker entity.
Machinations like that had a way of happening around Wasserman. He had a genius for appearing to be acted upon while managing to get exactly what he wanted, time and again. He also had an immensely effective and pragmatic approach to dealing with the tough realities of the entertainment industry, from the intricacies of labor union issues to the inevitable interest of organized crime. He liked to tell a story about being grilled about his acquaintance with Jimmy Hoffa, then head of the Teamsters' Union. "I said: 'Yes, and I'm glad I know him. We hire about 15,000 of his members a week. I'd rather be hiring them from someone I know than someone I don't."
Bruck, with the same dogged reportorial finesse she brought to The Predators' Ball and Master of the Game, delves far back into the history of MCA to unravel these connections. Her book begins with Jules Stein, the agency's founder, and its pioneering practitioner of vertical integration. Stein began in Chicago by managing dance bands, then became involved with the hotels that booked them and the radio stations that played them, then even began supplying those hotels with liquor, party hats, ashtrays and confetti. As Bruck illustrates, it would not be a surprise in this atmosphere to learn that Rose of Picardy was Al Capone's favorite song.
Bruck does not so much implicate MCA in mob-related activities as explore what was the price of doing business at that time. And as she moves on from Stein -- who never fully gave up control of MCA, although he became something of an executive emeritus -- to Wasserman, her approach remains frank and essentially admiring.
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