The King of Content Page 6

  But in the final weeks before the election, Curley, that old associate of Sagansky’s, quietly approved the permits, setting off a firestorm of criticism from the local councilmen representing those neighborhoods. They threatened to work against his reelection.49

  In any other year, it would have been hot air, but in 1949, Bostonians were growing uneasy about their city’s slipping stature. The port that had been the engine of industry for Boston was moribund, downtown was in seemingly permanent decline, the city’s taxes were high, and its finances were a mess. Curley’s strategy of “doing little things for little people” had helped him consolidate political power and votes among the city’s downtrodden, but it had also kept the business community stagnant. Add to this that Curley had served part of his fourth mayoral term from prison for mail fraud, and the conditions were ripe for a city hall bureaucrat named John Hynes to pull off one of the great upsets in Boston political history by promising a “clean, honest and efficient administration.”50

  Curley was not one to let an electoral loss keep him from doing a favor for a friend. The seventy-five-year-old spent the final hours of his mayoralty in a footrace with a female deputy sheriff who was trying to serve him with an injunction to restrain him from signing permits for the Dorchester and West Roxbury drive-ins. At five thirty p.m., he charged out of city hall with the deputy close on his heels, followed by what the Globe described as a “horde of angry taxpayers.” Curley “managed to elude the deputy by racing down two flights of stairs and speeding off in his limousine,” according to the Globe, but she caught up with him at his Jamaicaway home and served it to his maid.51

  On January 1, 1950, Hynes wrote Mickey, pledging to revoke all construction permits for the theaters, despite Redstone already having a bulldozer clearing the properties and a sign reading “New Drive-In Theatre Will Be Erected Here Soon.” For weeks, the city council continued to rail about it. But when Hynes was sworn in, his corporation counsel informed him that he did not in fact have the authority to revoke the permits.52,53 The corrupt Curley era ended, but not before giving one last leg up to Mickey and Sagansky.

  Still, Hynes had promised a “New Boston,” and he was true to his word. In one of the most controversial acts in the history of American urban renewal, he set about wiping the West End from the face of the earth, bulldozing its tenements to make way for gleaming high-rises. The narrow streets were a fire hazard, he argued, the empty storefronts were blighted, and the new buildings and the upper-middle-class tenants that would inhabit them would bring more tax revenue to the city. But it was more than just that. The poor immigrants of the largely Italian and Jewish West End had voted for Curley. And, like New York’s Lower East Side, the neighborhood’s crowded streets had nurtured, in addition to artists and entrepreneurs and hardworking immigrants climbing into the middle class, generations of hustlers, gangsters, bookies, and prostitutes.54 By the time it was over, the streets where Mickey and Sagansky grew up no longer existed.

  * * *

  The 1950s brought a new era for Mickey and Sagansky, too. By 1949, Mickey’s businesses were successful enough that he no longer needed to rely so heavily on his old partner. He headed into the new decade with a new partner: his son.

  Chapter 4

  The Next Generation

  It should have been a victory lap.

  By April 1950, Mickey Redstone had largely prevailed in his closely watched fight to build the first drive-ins within Boston city limits. And so, for the first time, the middle-aged theater impresario sent his son out into the trade press to deliver the good news.

  Edward Redstone was twenty-one years old, a year out of college, a taller, brown-eyed spitting image of his father. Since graduating from Colgate, he had been working part-time for his father while he waited for an acceptance letter from Harvard Business School, the credential that would finally put him on the same level of educational prestige as his elder brother, Sumner. An eager student who, unlike his brother, had always wanted to go into business, Eddie, as everyone called him, started out admirably enough, touting the beginning of construction of the controversial drive-ins at Neponset Circle in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood and along the VFW Parkway to the southwest in West Roxbury, and plans for further expansion to Natick, Massachusetts, and Bay Shore, Long Island.

  But he couldn’t quite stop at simple boasts about the company’s growing footprint. Instead, he confessed to Billboard that box office revenue for the four-theater chain was down 15 percent in 1949, and that the Dedham and Revere drive-ins, which reopened in March, were “off in receipts.” “This will be the year that will tell the tale in drive-ins,” Eddie told Billboard. “It looks like the year of decision.”1

  He was right. For all the frenzied building in the drive-in sector, the broader film industry was two years into a protracted slump that would cut theater attendance in half over a decade. Leading up to 1950, the industry was in free fall, with average weekly attendance dropping from ninety million per week in 1948 to sixty million per week by 1950.2 The decline would continue until the 1970s, when the first modern blockbusters (The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars) revived attendance somewhat,3 although as a percentage of population, moviegoing would never recover its postwar peak.4

  The cause was a perfect storm of demographic, technological, and regulatory change. Though television is often blamed, the decline began even before then, with the radical demographic shifts wrought by the post–World War II baby boom. Returning servicemen were starting families, buying houses, and signing up for college in record numbers thanks to programs like the G.I. Bill, leaving little time or money left over for leisure activities. And the houses that they were buying were increasingly located in far-flung suburbs, making traditional downtown movie houses inconvenient for a growing middle class.5

  Television then exacerbated the trend, beginning its definitive commercial expansion in 1948, when the number of television sets hit 172,000, up from 14,000 the previous year. By 1949, there were one million, and by the end of the 1950s, 90 percent of American households had one.6 Forgoing the movie theater for an evening on the couch, even if the fare was somewhat less entertaining, would prove to be an enduring temptation, particularly for families with young children.

  Also, in May 1948, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark antitrust decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which would ultimately force the major studios to sell off their theaters, marking the beginning of the end of the golden age of Hollywood. For decades leading up to the Paramount decision, the film industry was controlled by eight major studios, of which the most powerful Big Five—Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., RKO, and Loews, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios—were fully vertically integrated, making the movies, distributing them, and showing them in chains of theaters that they owned, often in plum downtown locations. (The Little Three—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists—were not meaningfully in the exhibition business but helped their larger brethren pad out their double features with cheaper fare.)

  The majors operated as a cartel, giving preferential treatment to each other’s movies at their best theaters, and forced independent theaters to buy large blocks of often mediocre films up front, sight unseen, in order to get access to the films with the biggest stars, practices called “block booking” and “blind bidding.” With such a guaranteed pipeline to audiences, each of the majors (except for UA, which was only a distributor) produced between forty and sixty films a year—vastly more than their successors make today, when slates can be as small as a dozen films a year. Largely thanks to their ownership of prime first-run movie houses, by the mid-’40s the Big Five were sucking up roughly 70 percent of the country’s box office receipts, even though they only owned or had interest in about a quarter of the country’s movie theaters. In Paramount, the Supreme Court ruled that the Big Five were conspiring to monopolize exhibition. The decision put immediate limits on practices like block booking. Over the next s
everal years, the Big Five sold off their movie theaters, which, combined with the rise of television, drastically reduced the number of films and the profits that the majors made.7 In the decade after Paramount, national film distributors cut the number of films they released annually from 448 to 352.8 Profits at the ten biggest companies dropped 74 percent to $32 million in the decade leading up to 1956. More than four thousand traditional indoor movie theaters shut down during this period.9

  Many of these trends, like the shift to the suburbs, were good for drive-ins. By 1951, 60 percent of American families owned a car, helping drive-ins to become, during these years, what second-generation drive-in operator Richard Smith called “a bright little spark [in an] otherwise terrible industry.” Between 1948 and 1951, the number of indoor theaters contracted from eighteen thousand to fifteen thousand, but the number of drive-ins more than tripled from fewer than a thousand to thirty-six hundred.10

  The Paramount decision also theoretically opened doors to independent exhibitors like drive-ins by loosening the major studios’ stranglehold on the exhibition business. But drive-ins would have to launch many more lawsuits before they got their hands on first-run product with any regularity. In the meantime, the Paramount decision’s immediate fallout meant fewer decent movies to go around. And it was this dearth of product that Eddie Redstone was complaining about to Billboard. “Our problem,” Eddie said, “is that drive-ins are being overtaxed by the distributor for the grade picture he is giving us.” He went on to complain about the drive-in expansion he saw all around him, even though his own company was a major driver of it. “Everywhere I go, I see drive-ins,” he said. “Some operators seem to forget that it is location that counts in this business.”11

  It was an accurate diagnosis of the ills of the industry but utterly lacked the showman’s boosterism that had so successfully marked Mickey’s interactions with the press. While Mickey thought nothing of declaring his screens the world’s largest or his neon signs Long Island’s brightest, Eddie liked to tell the truth, at times to a fault.

  “He wore his heart on his sleeve,” said his widow, Madeline Redstone. “He wasn’t a killer.”

  * * *

  The reason that Sumner Redstone turned out to be “a killer” and Eddie did not can be partly explained by the five years that separate their births, five years that turned out to be a lifetime in terms of the Redstone family’s socioeconomic ascent.

  In his speeches, interviews, and writings later in life, Sumner frequently described himself as having grown up in poverty. “Our apartment in Charlesbank Homes in Boston’s West End had no toilet; we had to walk down the corridor to use the pull-chain commode in the water closet we shared with the neighbors,” he wrote in his autobiography. “That sort of living was all I knew and I never felt less privileged than anyone else.”

  Later, after the family had moved to Brighton, he described being beaten up by anti-Semitic Irish bullies on the way to school at the age of twelve. “The level of violence was not nearly as high then as it is now and I saw no knives, but I would get smacked around, and along with my bruises I’d hear a lot of threats and name-calling,” he wrote.

  Even after he tested into the prestigious, free public Boston Latin School, which he started in seventh grade—around the same time that Mickey and Sagansky opened their first drive-in—Sumner’s memories are of poverty. “All I had going for me was an education. We certainly didn’t have any money,” he wrote. “The ten cents a day I spent on round-trip streetcar fare was a significant sacrifice for my family and I had to justify that sacrifice.”12

  These reminiscences hit the Horatio Alger note a bit harder than the facts can support, given that his father started investing in real estate in Brighton by the time Sumner was two years old13 and his grandfather was running a successful bakery supply company and living in the fashionable suburb of Brookline before he turned ten.14 But the broad outlines of Sumner’s conception of himself as having come up from the West End still held.

  In contrast, by the time Eddie was born in 1928, the family had already bought property in Brighton, and the West End was a memory. “Eddie did not feel that he grew up poor,” Madeline said. “The bathroom was not outside.” Nor did he feel he experienced anti-Semitism as a child. “He had no childhood scars.”

  By the time Eddie was in high school, Mickey owned both the Sunrise Drive-In and the Mayfair and was living in the Copley Plaza Hotel. Rather than the hardscrabble Boston Latin, he went to Kimball Union Academy, one of the oldest private boarding schools in the country, nestled amid leafy splendor on a hilltop New Hampshire campus just down the road from Dartmouth College. He was the youngest student in his class. By most accounts, he was no less intelligent than Sumner, and he was accepted to Dartmouth. But because he was only sixteen, Dartmouth recommended that he go to Colgate for a year before matriculating. “He loved Colgate so much he stayed,” Madeline said.

  Upon graduating from Colgate in 1949, he went to work part-time for his father, doing what he described as “everything from fixing septic fields to selling hot dogs, the whole gamut,” with an eye toward a career in the family business.15

  The acceptance letter to Harvard Business School did eventually arrive, and in the fall of 1950, he enrolled. The next year, he got engaged to a striking, raven-haired beauty from a wealthy New York family named Leila Warren.16 The only child of the president of the Society Girl Corset Company,17 with homes in Manhattan and Westport, Connecticut, Leila was tall, fashionable, headstrong, and, ultimately, deeply troubled.

  Eddie got his MBA in the spring of 1952, and by July, Variety was reporting that he had joined his father’s theater company “in charge of daily operations of six ozoners,” as the trade magazine called drive-ins.18 At Eddie and Leila’s wedding in October at the Plaza Hotel in New York—the sister hotel to Boston’s Copley Plaza—Sumner was the best man.19 Despite their differences in temperament, the brothers had always been close,20 in part because they had always been on such divergent paths. Eddie was his father’s heir apparent, and Sumner was going to save the world.

  * * *

  For the first quarter of his life, through his marriage, early career, and the birth of his two children, Sumner Redstone betrayed no hint of interest in the media business. Though he worked at his father’s theaters in the summers like a dutiful son, he had higher aspirations than the then-still-somewhat-déclassé world of theaters—a world that, from the earliest movie moguls, was what corporate historian Bettye Pruitt calls a “quintessential ethnic business” dominated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who saw opportunity in technological change and often faced obstacles accessing more traditional enterprises.21 Sumner did not want to compete as a subset of anything. As Doc Sagansky’s daughter, Marilyn Riseman, once put it to Vanity Fair: “You know what my father used to say about Sumner? ‘If that man weren’t Jewish, he’d have been president.’”22

  In his autobiography, Sumner wrote that his rather grandiose sense of his own destiny was instilled in him by his mother, who was obsessed with his achievement.

  To be the national best at any- and everything was my mother’s goal for me. Second best was not an option as far as Belle was concerned. She was a very good-looking woman but I’m not sure how much fun she got out of life. There was only one number one and that had to be me. My brother, while he was smart and did extremely well in school, was not the target of her passion; I was. I was her pride and her focus.23

  One of Sumner’s most-repeated stories is of his mother turning the clock back to trick him into practicing the piano or studying a half an hour longer. Eddie remembered her as cold and anxious. “I probably got along with her as well as anyone else got along with her,” he said. “She was a nervous wreck.” He added that “she didn’t give of herself” to her children, and “probably didn’t know how.”24

  “My aunt Belle was a profoundly brittle, insecure woman,” said Gary Snyder. “No doubt having a womanizing, magnetic husband with a presence tha
t bounded beyond his skin did not help.”

  Sumner credits his mother’s obsessive drive for propelling him into, and, more importantly through, Boston Latin School, which he called “the most rigorous and competitive experience I have ever had, and that includes business.”25

  More than poverty, more than his mother’s focused attention, it was Boston Latin School that shaped both Sumner’s combativeness and his transcendent sense of his own potential—that made him, in essence, a killer. Even today, it is impossible to walk into the wood-paneled auditorium of the school without feeling a sense of awe, of history as a close and malleable thing, and, as many students of past generations would say, of dread. Founded in 1635, Boston Latin School is the oldest school in the United States—a year older than Harvard, nearly a century and a half older than the country itself. Five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were its students, and today their iconic names—among them John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, along with a host of governors, senators, congressmen, theologians, Nobel laureates, and cultural luminaries from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Leonard Bernstein—are engraved in gold lettering atop the auditorium’s upper frieze, reserved for its most illustrious deceased alumni.26 The not-so-subtle message to students is that they ought to be gunning to get their own names up on that wall.

  But the more direct message delivered to students of Sumner’s generation is that they could expect the fight of their lives to make it to graduation. Students sitting in the auditorium on their first day were told, “Look to your left, look to your right, two of you are not going to make it,” said Michael Contompasis, the former longtime headmaster of the school who said he barely graduated in 1957. “It was a survival issue. Half my class didn’t graduate. It was probably worse when Sumner was here. . . . When I graduated this place and walked out the front door with my diploma, I vowed never to set foot in this place again.”