The King of Content Read online

  But if Sumner was playing the persuasive populist, trying to keep admission prices low and trash from the movie screen, he also had another reason to be incensed about the film companies’ increasing restrictions on giving exhibitors advanced screenings of films. By the mid-1970s, Sumner had begun to invest in the film companies themselves, based on his own growing confidence in his ability to predict which films would perform well. Back then, most movie studios were independent public companies, not yet sucked up into the media behemoths that own them today, and their fortunes were tied directly to the box office. If Sumner saw a winner in previews, he’d call up his stockbroker, Madeline Sweetwood, and invest. (Sweetwood had taken over her late husband Ira’s clients when he died of cancer in his thirties in order to support her three children and would go on years later to marry Eddie after he was widowed.) As with everything else in his life, he was obsessive. “I was on the phone with him from nine thirty a.m. until the markets closed,” she said. “I had to have someone answer when I went to the ladies’ room and everything.” She remembers clearly the day in early 1977 that Sumner, just out of the Star Wars screening, called wanting to make a big play on Fox. In Star Wars, he saw instantly that “it was totally different than any movie that has ever been made. Everybody could go see this movie. It was the first film that was for everybody.”

  Under Sumner’s direction, National Amusements eventually built up a 5 percent stake in Fox and made a killing on it, buying at $8 a share and selling at $60 when oilman Marvin Davis bought the company in 1981, resulting in a profit of at least $20 million.25 Sumner fared similarly well with Columbia Pictures,26 and positions in Warner Bros., Disney, Loews, and, later MGM/UA Home Entertainment Group.27 But in the late 1970s, as he was going around the country fighting blind bidding, none of those bets had yet paid off. All he had was his confidence in his ability to spot a great story.

  * * *

  No one is sure exactly when Sumner began his affair with the fiction writer Delsa Winer, but by the time she divorced her husband and the father of her four children in 1974, it was well under way.28 Delsa—who in the early years of their relationship went by her married last name, Weiner—was almost literally the girl next door, a doctor’s wife who lived about four lawns away from the Redstones’ hilltop home in Newton. According to Delsa’s son, Winn Wittman, they met at the neighborhood social club, the Dudley Road Club.

  Delsa was just a couple of years younger than Phyllis and arguably no more beautiful. But there was a sparkle to her brown eyes, a lack of apology in her close-cropped hair, an energy to her compact, tomboyish body. The protagonist of the novel she would later write described her dying mother’s face with words that could have been written about Delsa’s own mother, whom she closely resembled: “The aristocratic, slightly aquiline nose, a vertical crease above the bridge; high forehead; mischievous eyes. An almost feline quality. . . . A definitive face, only a scant trace of femininity. Density in the Russian-Jewish bones. Yet it is an elusive face.”29 Delsa’s own face was slimmer, infused with a kind of otherworldly, elfin beauty, but no less elusive.

  While the Weiners’ upper-middle-class suburban Jewish life resembled the Redstones’ in many ways, Delsa’s approach to it did not. She was a feminist and a free spirit, uninterested in convention or the roles that society had assigned her. She made few rules for her own children and encouraged all of them—even the girls—to put their own careers ahead of marriage or family, horrified that she had failed to earn a master’s degree herself or find a way to make a proper living through her writing. She was ambitious, opinionated, intellectual, and brutally self-critical, not an object for Sumner so much as a foil. “They complemented each other,” Wittman said. “I think some of Sumner’s confidence wore off on my mother, who was an only child and naturally somewhat introverted.” She, in turn, exposed him to culture. A passionate collector of art and books, Delsa sparred with Sumner over his taste in movies, which tended to run toward the blockbusters, and politics, particularly as his liberal views grew more conservative in his later years. Most important, as his profile rose over the decades they were together, she refused to flatter him. “She definitely stood up to him,” Wittman said.

  Delsa grew up the only child of a couple of Eastern European immigrants without college degrees who founded pharmacies and later nursing homes that made them a comfortable living in Brooklyn. “Self-educated, my mother made a million dollars investing in bonds, and at the same time prepared me for life as Emma Wodehouse was prepared—piano lessons, ballet, and horseback in Prospect Park,” Delsa wrote in a biographical sketch in 1999. She spent summers at the iconic Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills, one of the inspirations for the movie Dirty Dancing, performing excerpts from plays and self-written monologues and dating heartthrobs like the singer Eddie Fisher, who later married Elizabeth Taylor at the resort. Fisher was soon eclipsed by Albert Weiner, a handsome, Harvard-trained doctor and army captain just back from the war. After graduating from Syracuse University,30 where she studied drama, Delsa married Weiner and settled into the life of a 1950s suburban housewife. “For fifteen years or so I led a useful life like a pot holder, surreptitiously making words, nights while everyone slept,” she wrote. “As the years passed my children noticed what was going on more than I thought they did. Each of them exploded in turn like wedding champagne left standing upright in the closet. I managed my problems alone until I acquired an ideal lover. My lover is faithful, busy and rich. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

  After her divorce, she threw herself into writing fiction full-time, and by the late 1970s her sophisticated short stories had begun to appear in publications like the Boston Globe, Fiction, and Virginia Quarterly Review and to win literary awards. Her protagonists were sometimes fiercely independent Boston women divorced from their doctor husbands and having affairs with high-powered corporate executives living in New York who couldn’t ever quite manage to divorce their own wives.31

  Phyllis knew about it, of course, as did both Delsa’s and Sumner’s kids. In the difficult final years of Delsa’s marriage, Albert had even known, at one point lashing out at Delsa that Wittman, their youngest child, born in 1964, might not even be his. (For years rumors circulated that Wittman was Sumner’s, though his strong resemblance to Albert rebuts the argument.) The affair was the cause of domestic battles in both Newton homes, made all the more awkward because Shari and Brent were roughly the same ages as Delsa’s elder children, and all of the children knew each other socially. Still, Sumner was not about to follow Delsa to divorce court. As much as Delsa was the love of Sumner’s life, he was still emotionally bound to Phyllis, family friends say, in much the same way he had been emotionally bound to his own mother. Soon after Delsa’s divorce, she and Sumner began to talk about getting a house together where they could live, essentially, as husband and wife, though it would be many years before they followed through. Delsa had no desire to get remarried—which made Sumner’s own marital status less important—so they simply agreed that they would build a life together.

  And so, since there were no outward signs beyond Delsa’s divorce that anything was going on, Phyllis put up with it. Philandering was, to a certain extent, accepted and expected behavior. Mickey did it. Doc Sagansky did it. Why would Sumner be any different? “He always struck me as the guy who is going to cheat no matter what relationship he’s in,” Wittman said. The relationship was tolerated in part because it was private.

  But that was about to change.

  Chapter 8

  Forged in Fire

  Early on the morning of March 28, 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor just south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, partially melted down, causing the worst nuclear disaster in American history and sewing panic in a nation already on edge from a decade of inflation and oil shocks. President Jimmy Carter would attempt to calm the country by touring the reactor, his feet swathed in yellow plastic booties, and a few months later dia
gnose its spiritual ills in a speech decrying America’s “crisis of confidence.”

  But, amid the timeless limestone grandeur of Boston’s old hotels, things proceeded very much the same way that they had for a generation. The Variety Club of New England, that same klatch of exhibitors that Mickey Redstone had led in the days of his first drive-ins, was hosting a luncheon at the Park Plaza Hotel to welcome the newest crop of distribution executives that the biggest Hollywood studios had sent to service the region. One of them was a rising, twenty-nine-year-old Warner Bros. branch manager named Roger Hill, who had been transferred to Boston from Jacksonville, Florida, the previous year.1 The purpose of such gatherings was clear enough: exhibitors lived and died by being able to get the best films into their theaters, so even as they were often suing distributors or complaining about them to the Justice Department, they were more often plying them with steak and martinis.

  Nobody was better at this game than Sumner. As the day wore on, the festivities progressed two blocks down the street to the Copley Plaza Hotel, Mickey and Sumner’s former residence, where Sumner was on hand to fete Hill a second time, this time at a Warner Bros. movie premiere.2 Sumner seemed determined to show Hill a good time. He and Delsa decided to stay overnight in the hotel after the party, and they reserved a corner suite on the third floor that, according to one witness, adjoined the room where Hill was staying. Like Sumner, Hill was married. And like Sumner, the woman in the room with him that night was not his wife.

  A little after midnight, they woke up to find smoke pouring under the door. In Sumner’s telling in his autobiography, he said it was the smell of smoke that woke him up. But Wittman said his mother told him just before she died in 2013 that “they got a call in the room that there was a fire in the hotel.” Delsa, naked, went for the window, but Sumner ran for the door. “Sumner, Sumner, don’t go to the door!” she cried. But it was too late. He opened it, and flames engulfed him.

  Delsa, being younger and more athletic, was able to climb out the window and onto a ledge, where she was rescued, suffering only smoke inhalation and minor injuries. “Only her right thumb was burned black,” Wittman said. Sumner, meanwhile, was enveloped in flames. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing. I was being burned alive,” he wrote.3 In Sumner’s version, which makes no mention of another person in the room, he opened a window and climbed out onto a tiny ledge, holding on to the window as the flames burned through his right hand and arm. By the time the fire department rescued him, he had burns on 45 percent of his body. Both were taken to Boston City Hospital. Delsa was listed in stable condition while Sumner was put on the “danger list.”4

  The guest of honor that evening was not so lucky. Roger Hill’s body was found in the hallway, along with the body of twenty-eight-year-old Patricia Mulcahy, a recent transfer to Boston from Warner Brothers’ Minneapolis distribution office. Mulcahy had just quit her Warner Bros. job the week before for a better one traveling overseas but had been at the hotel that night because friends had called her and encouraged her to come to the premiere party. “I talked to her that evening, before she went the party, and she was so excited,” said her mother, Virginia Mulcahy. “She said, ‘Mom, I can’t talk to you any longer because I’m going to this big party and the taxicab is going to come and pick me up.’”

  Like Sumner, Hill had opened the door of his room and been overcome by flames. There was evidence that he had initially retreated to the bathroom to protect himself but was not able to get to a window, and so he was forced back out into the hallway, where he and Mulcahy succumbed to both the flames and smoke inhalation. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with “serious burns” on more than 60 percent of his body, while she was taken to New England Medical Center and listed in serious condition.5 According to her mother, she had burns on over 40 percent of her body. She died five days later. Hill held on for nearly two months, seeming to improve shortly before he, too, succumbed to his injuries, on May 17, 1979.6

  The night Sumner arrived in the hospital, it looked like he was headed in the same direction. Sumner’s doctors told his family that he wasn’t expected to live through the night.7 His right wrist was sliced almost completely through, and his legs were so severely burned that the doctors assumed he would never walk again. But he was transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital’s burn center, where he endured dozens of hours of painful surgery as doctors stripped skin from the healthy sections of his body and grafted it over the burns. By early June, the prognosis was good enough that Mickey sent a letter to the head of NATO, updating all of the people who had been flooding National Amusements’ offices with letters and phone calls that Sumner was “already walking the corridors of the hospital.” In his version of the fire story, traumatic amnesia papers over Delsa’s presence. What happened between Sumner smelling smoke and opening the door was “unclear in his mind.”8

  The fire roaring outside Sumner’s room had been one of about a dozen set that night at both the Copley Plaza and nearby Sheraton Boston Hotels by a drunken eighteen-year-old who was angry about not being able to get his hotel dishwashing job back. The man, Julio Rodrigues, who later pleaded guilty to arson and manslaughter charges,9 had set fire to a couch in the third-floor hallway near Sumner’s room—the presence of which Sumner argued “violates every fire law that exists.”10 Nearly two thousand people were evacuated and sixty-nine were treated for injuries, and the Copley Plaza’s manager estimated that there was more than a million dollars’ worth of damage.11 Boston’s fire commissioner, George Paul, called it “potentially the most tragic fire situation in the City since the Cocoanut Grove fire.”12

  Sumner and Phyllis jointly sued three corporations connected to the hotel for $12 million, alleging that Sumner suffered “great pain of body and anguish of mind” from his severe burns, and “his earning capacity has been impaired for a long period of time.” Phyllis was asking for damages because “as a result of injuries sustained by her husband, she has been and will be deprived of her husband’s services, society and comfort, companionship, relations, affection and consortium,” according to the court documents.13 The fact that Sumner had been busy consorting with another woman that night—and in fact for the better part of the last decade—was immaterial. It would not be the last time that Phyllis had to look the other way from her husband’s philandering, or that Delsa had to erase herself from her own life’s story, for the sake of the millions that hung in the balance.

  For a moment, it seemed like the fire might destroy the precarious balance between Sumner’s two worlds. Sumner and Delsa’s names appeared in the Boston Globe’s report of the injured the day after the fire, and local news footage showed them both climbing down the fireman’s ladder. But Sumner’s family barred Delsa from visiting him in the hospital, and within a few weeks, Mickey’s version of Sumner waking alone to the smell of smoke had hardened into industry legend. The Redstones were so successful in writing Delsa out of the story that, more than two decades later, Sumner thought nothing of opening his autobiography with this partially fictional account. Her presence in the hotel room that night would not begin to come to light until a 2000 Boston magazine story, which assigned her a fake name, and would not fully emerge until after her death.14 Yet her debut novel, published in 2000, would leave little doubt that she had been involved. In it, her protagonist is burned beyond recognition in an accident that leaves her hand a gnarled claw—just like Sumner’s.15 “There was still a lot of shame in the family” about the relationship in the wake of the fire, Wittman said. “Later on, everybody got over it.”

  For years afterward, Sumner rejected the easy narrative that the fire had transformed him, forging his iron will into a steel weapon of corporate conquest. But the fire did change him. His belief in his own abilities, always strong, became unshakable. “Determination, physical or any other kind, is the key to survival,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If I hadn’t learned that lesson before, I knew it well now.”16 As soon as he could stand, he
strapped a tennis racquet onto his mangled arm and got back on the tennis court. And almost as soon as he could speak, he flew to Los Angeles, against his doctor’s recommendation, to deliver a blistering keynote address at NATO’s annual October convention denouncing the “morally reprehensible and economically disastrous policy” of blind bidding. “If they won’t terminate the practice, then I say fight!” he said. “I say fight in the courts—fight in the state and federal legislative bodies—and fight in the Department of Justice.”17 NATO presented him an honorary award for his “inspiring courage,” and the two thousand exhibitors crowded into the ballroom of the gleaming Bonaventure Hotel gave him a standing ovation.18