From afar there would be many who questioned Wasserman's close friendship with Sidney Korshak, a lawyer with close ties to organized crime. But from within the context of When
Hollywood Had a King, Wasserman appears savvy, realistic, utterly business-obsessed and quick to recognize relationships that might prove helpful.
Although When Hollywood Had a King is more concerned with business dealings than personalities (this is a book where the investment tax credit looms larger than some of its human subjects), Bruck ably captures Wasserman's personal mystique.
"The defining characteristics of the persona he had created were that he never lost in a deal, never made a mistake, could see around corners into tomorrow, and that his reach, from the underworld to the White House, gave him a matchless control," she writes.
She also captures the qualities that were most awe-inspiring among his colleagues, and would be most imitated by younger managers (most notably Michael Ovitz). Insisting that his staff dress with all the sartorial flair of CIA agents, keep as few notes as possible, return all phone calls and always do the necessary homework, he cultivated an absolutism as fearsome as it was admired.
A Wasserman secretary tells Bruck (who talked to her subject, who died last year, only late in his life and did not have access to his widow, Edie Wasserman) of being instructed to accept no busy signals on the telephone; if someone was busy, she would break into the call on an emergency basis. She also describes seeing men leave her boss' office in tears.
But the central figure found in this book is a tremendously impressive one.
Through her study of one exceptionally tough and talented individual, Bruck pulls off a coup of her own: locating history, politics, cultural shifts and business brilliance all in the inner workings of "a shark you almost had to admire as he circled you." Her portrait of that dapper, bespectacled shark is the stuff of wheeler-dealer legen.
RSS