The Dispatch Podcast - The Twisted World of Media Tycoons

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

The worlds of media tycoons are often so strange and twisted, it's hard to believe the stories aren't fiction. In Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, authors James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams chronicle the dramatic story of one of the most powerful media dynasties in history. Join Steve Hayes as he interviews Stewart and Abrams on the history of the Redstone family and their rise to power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rachel Abrams about their new book, Unscripted, a story of Hollywood and media intrigue involving Sumner Redstone, Les Moonvez, CBS, and Viacom. James Stewart is author of Deep State, Tangled Webs, Heart of a Soldier, Blind Eye, Bloodsport, and the blockbuster book, Den of Thieves. He's currently a columnist for The New York Times at a professor at Columbia Journalism School and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading. Rachel Abrams was a media reporter for the New York Times and is now a senior producer and reporter for the television series, The New York Times Presents. In 2018, she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting that exposed sexual

harassment and misconduct. I hope you'll stick around for a great conversation about an absolutely fascinating book. Welcome Jim and Rachel to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, I'm excited to jump into this book. And to talk about it, it will be the case that most regular listeners to the Dispatch podcast will be surprised that I'm hosting a conversation about a book that is as much about Hollywood as it is about journalism. I am sort of, at least in our small corner of the world, famously ignorant about pop culture and have this strong aversion to everything Hollywood. But the book was so fascinating on so many levels. I'd read your reporting in The Times and

elsewhere on a wide variety of topics, including this one, so I was very eager to get you on and eager to dive into the book. I think the best place to start is how your reporting came to be this book. How did you decide to take the stories that you had come to learn through your reporting at the Times and elsewhere and turn this into a book? Well, Jim and I did not even know each other before we partnered on our very first story at the New York Times about CBS and Les Moonvest and all of this that ultimately inspired the book. But basically, Jim had gotten a tip involving the investigation CBS was conducting into its corporate culture and Les Moonvests and, you know, just some of the bad behavior. And I had gotten a tip

simultaneously that also had to do with that investigation. And an editor suggested the two of us touch base and see if we were working on parallel tracks and should team up. And Jim, as your listeners, of course, know, is, you know, one of our, one of the preeminent journalists working today. And I was a little bit nervous. And I might not have talked to him, or at least not quickly, but Jim had the benefit of sitting on the outside aisle seat in his row at the times. And so, you know, all the foot traffic coming and going to work, you know, would pass by his desk. So I had my code. on. I was leaving one day and I decided, well, you know, I'll just stop and see if he wants to talk to me.

So I stopped. I think I had to introduce myself. And I, you know, said, I had gotten this tip. And Jim said, well, you know, that actually sounds like something. I can't remember exactly what he said, but we realized we were actually working on parallel tracks and that Jim was getting some incredible information from his source. And I was in a position to talk to my source and get a treasure trove of documents and emails and text messages and all this stuff. And that's really what got started with the time story. And that time story, I mean, Jim recognized almost immediately that there was enough here to put into a book. There was more than just a story. Yeah, my rule of thumb, after even a long story like that, is I'm still filled with questions that we couldn't get to the bottom

of, then it's worth thinking about whether this is, is there something bigger here? So that that was part of it. And then also the themes that emerged in there were deeper. You know, you mentioned you're not all that interested in Hollywood. Well, honestly, I'm not a Hollywood reporter either at all. I'm more kind of basic business. And to me, it's almost incidental that it's in Hollywood. Of course, that is the setting and that adds some, you know, some glamour to it all. But it's really about a much broader story about human nature. And so that to me is always what makes a good book. Yeah, Rachel, I'm glad to hear you mention. that you are nervous to talk to Jim about it at first. I cannot imagine the idea of collaborating

on a story with Jim, much less a book. So I'm glad you said that. Just a little background for our listeners, the staff at the dispatch will know this and laugh at me because they mocked me about this to my face. I make everybody buy and read one book when they join the dispatch on the editorial side. And it's a book that Jim wrote. and years ago called Follow the Story. And it changed the way I think about journalism. And, you know, Jim, to follow up on your point, talk about wanting to continue to ask the questions until you have the answers to the questions.

One of the things that you wrote about in that book, what was that, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, something like that. I've lost count. But you wrote about this embrace of questions that you couldn't get answers to. And it just fundamentally changed the way that I looked at journalism. I thought my job was always to provide definitive answers. And as often as not, it's to ask the questions and just follow the story as the title of the book would have it. Yeah, I tell my students now that the question is more important than the answer.

The answer, of course, is interesting, but the key is the question. Right, right. Well, starting with the most basic question about the book and about this story, Rachel, who was Sumner Redstone? and how did he become a leading American media magnet? So Sumner, in the heyday of his companies, which included Paramount, CBS, Viacom, which, of course, included brands like MTV and Nickelodeon, at the heyday of these companies,

they were not only minting money, but they were shaping a lot of American culture. They were creating shows and movies that we are all very familiar with. And so basically, Sumner Redstone is one of the most important figures in Hollywood, in media in the last in the last century and and he uh started out very humbly with a couple theater chains in the Boston area and through a mix of I would say of course shrewd business

acumen but also sheer dint of will and we can talk about you know some of the forces that shaped his personality if you like um but he you know eventually became to be he and he ended up being a full-fledged media mogul in what Jim he was 71 I think at the time he was seven he was Well, it was 76 when he moved to Hollywood. Yeah. But he, you know, very scrappy, hard scrabble personality. Jim can talk a little bit about actually, you know, some of the forces that led him to, you know,

to basically run all of these companies. Yeah, what were those forces? I mean, the thing that comes through in the book again and again and again, mostly by the details you provide, is this irrepressible drive to win. I mean, you know, and, you know, this is, of course, common. among business leaders of all kinds, but it was almost at a caricature level

with Sumner Redstone, I would say. Where did that come from and what else shaped his rise? Well, as Rachel said, he started out with two drive-in movie theaters outside of Boston and built it into a multi-billion dollar empire. A lot of people have compared this story to Succession, the HBO series,

and I deliberately did not watch Succession until this book was done, but I have watched it since. And you could see the main character in that is clearly, to some extent, modeled on Sumner Redstone, particularly his will to win. And he was fanatically competitive. Now, where did exactly that come from? He talked a lot about his mother and how demanding she was. Nothing was ever good enough, even though he was top of his class in high school.

He got a scholarship to Harvard. He learned Japanese. He graduated from Harvard in three years. I mean, he had an astonishingly successful career, but his mother was. never satisfied. So I'm not a psychologist, but you could probably see a lot of drive going in there. And then he had this, you know, incredible incident where he was in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston when it caught fire. And he had to escape out the window and he hung from the window ledge as his fingers and hand were being burned. His hand was disfigured for the rest of his life. Not reported

at the time. He also had a mistress in the room with him when the fire broke out. He was incredibly promiscuous throughout his life. But that steely will, you know, it's interesting from business perspective that it was like he didn't really care if he overpaid. The important thing was beating somebody. So one of the great triumphs of his life was beating Barry Diller, you know, the famous Hollywood entertainment mogul to buy the Paramount Studio. And I noticed in, you know, kind of recreating that, there's very little financial analysis there. He just he wanted to win. And he was rescued by a phenomenon in the media, which was basically the cable system, which thrived throughout this era. So he ended up making a lot of money on these

deals. Yeah, the coffee hotel incident was so telling for so many reasons, both because of so the grit and determination he showed to sort of come out of it the way that he did and what it taught him. But also, as you noted in the book, he didn't often include. the detail that he had the mistress in the room in his retelling? No, he never included that. It took, I think it took 20 years for that detail to emerge. And she escaped unharmed. And they had a relationship for many years, many years after that.

But it gave him this sense of invincibility. I mean, you can imagine hanging from one hand from a window as the fire is burning your hand and not letting go. He thought he was invincible. He liked to say he would always live forever. he had to have known that was not true, but he did keep making that point. And it kept him going, you know, well up to his 90s. As we mentioned, he was a full-blown mogul only in the 70s.

So this was late in life when he came upon the stage at his peak. And he kept going, you know, well into his 90s. This, the proclivity that you hint at in that story with the mistress, ends up really shaping the major points in his life, as you tell the story throughout the book. I mean, the women he invites into his life. He, in many ways, is aggressive, maybe even exploitative in many regards. And they, in some ways, create problems that stick with him forever. Was that, is that sort of the, the defining part of his, of his life and his eventual problems that you document in the book?

How important was that to understanding Sumner Redstone? Well, I think people often think of business stories as being about strictly business, but so many business stories, this one included, it's inherently about people, very flawed people, making flawed decisions based on greed or, or sexual. appetites or the or the need to not be lonely and want companionship. And with Sumner, as he gets older, he becomes increasingly vulnerable to people who are looking to just take advantage of him. And it does affect his business. You know, one of one of the women he was courting, he gives what critics call an unwatchable television show to the electric barborella is basically about this girl band or on MTV and all the critics panned it. And, you know, he is giving away millions of dollars to various women in stock and in cash. And everybody around him, by the way,

knows about this. And people who worked for him that arguably should have had been born some responsibility for intervening in some way, do nothing. I mean, there's this great story in the book where Sumner is at an event and he stands next to him as a woman wearing a very revealing dress and loose sight stilettos. And a reporter asks Viacom's head of communications, who is that? And he responds, oh, that's his home health aid. So the idea that people were not aware of what was going on in Sumner's personal life and how it may or may not be affecting his business decisions or acumen, I think that's a little bit of a stretch. Yeah, they were, they were aware. And as we will discuss with Les MoonVes later, they were aware, and they often made exceptions. They went

out of the way to accommodate these behaviors. Well, you know, these women, they hosted CBS board meetings at the mansion. They hosted his 90th birthday party. But really, our saga begins pretty much when the women move into the house, because they started slowly but surely taking over his life, his money, his trust accounts. They came incredibly close to taking over his business empire. And that's what forced his daughter, Sherry, back into the family affairs, the business affairs. She's a reluctant protagonist here, but the presence of these women, and then the nurses and the staff were secretly recording to her what was going on, that was the catalyst that brought her back into the story. And all the events unfold from that. So yes, it's very true, as Rachel pointed out, that his, whatever you want to call it, his late-in-life infatuation with these women, his desire not to be alone. He'd alienated his family members already. was a serious issue both for him personally and for these businesses. And by the way, these are publicly traded companies. These are major companies with large staffs, thousands and thousands

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You mentioned, Jim, you mentioned earlier, succession. I was late to the show. I didn't watch it until it was a few seasons. in and then binged it with my wife. And I will say that after the third season, maybe,

I sort of grew tired of it. And I grew tired of it because the characters in some ways struck me as flat. Like, nobody is really this immoral. Nobody behaves this way in real life, right? This is too hard to believe. And it turns out actually people do really behave this way in real life, and maybe even worse than in the show. Two of the women who figure most prominently book, I mean, you go into great detail on a number of different of his escapades, but two of the women who really figure most prominently are Manuela Herzer and Sidney Holland. Can you just describe who they were, how they came into his life,

and you can get into the great difficulties they cost him? him as he grew older? You know, this is where a fact is stranger than fiction. I don't even know where to begin, but Sumner was dating wildly all over the place after I moved to Hollywood, including his grandson's

girlfriends. He would go out with his grandson and his grandson's girlfriend, and then he'd start hitting on the girlfriend. I mean, right there, can you believe it? Anyway, so the grandson went to this very, this celebrity matchmaker, Patty Stanger, known as the millionaire matchmaker from reality TV. She arranged for him to go out with Sidney Holland, and they supported Sidney Holland.

It was a romantic courtship, and soon they were, quote-unquote, engaged. She had a nine-carat diamond ring, and then she moved into the mansion. So that's how they met. He met Manuel Herz or before this. They had an affair. He met her at the notorious Hollywood producer Robert Evans' house, a notorious for being a womanizer in Sibberite. He introduced her to Manuela, this glamorous blonde from Argentina, with some checkered, you know, marital history behind her. And her house is being renovated. So

she had stayed friends with him. And so she just moved in, too. So one ex-lover and one current lover were living with Sumner in his Beverly Park mansion. And you would think that this might spark a real rivalry. And while there are hints of that, they eventually become serious allies as they try to take advantage of him and basically steal a lot of his money. How did they come to team up? And maybe if you could just describe what it was that they did. The dollar figures here are just so jaw-dropping.

I kept having to stop, as I was both reading and listening to the book, I kept having to stop to make sure that I'm hearing this, right? Wait, $45 million each. It's truly remarkable. Can you talk about their relationship a little bit and how it came to be this bizarre partnership? Well, these two women basically form some kind of alliance. And it's sort of unclear, like, you know, they would probably argue that they're his caretakers. You know, I think other people would say, well, they made off with at least $150 million. So caretaker is probably not the right word. And they really commit, they isolate him from his family. They commit some what can only be described, I think, in some cases,

is, you know, it looks like elder abuse. They're isolating him from his daughter. They're telling him that his family doesn't love him. They're, and they're basically just warming their way into his life. You know, they are taking away his money. They are getting very close to taking over the companies. I don't think people really realize how close they came to actually. controlling this media empire. And as Jim said, the book starts with Sherry's, with their,

Sherry's attempts, or sorry, Sherry's efforts to get them out of the mansion so that the readers understand the emotional stakes that Sherry, the daughter of this man that she has been cut off from by his living companions, finally gets back into her father's life, regains control of the family business, and then turns around to face a coup by a man less moon by who she considered to friend, we wanted readers to be able to understand kind of what that must have felt like at that moment. Yeah, and I think the relationship between the women, you can see, is very succession. Like, they really immediately see they have a common interest that they share.

Like, as you point out, one afternoon, they cut him off. He transferred, he did a wire transfer of $90 million, $45 million to each of them in one afternoon. And as Rachel pointed out, they ended up walking away with at least $150 million from this whole affair. But later in the story, this sort of alliance of convenience, the minute there is trouble between, in this case, Sydney and Sumner, Manuel Pounces, she sees her opportunity to seize full control, and she grabs it. So that's, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, incredible to see it unfold in the dramatic fashion that it did. And what struck me is how brazen they were in their attempts to do this.

I mean, they're texting each other about what they're doing. They're openly, at least openly with one another, rooting for his demise. There were hints in the book, and you're welcome to jump in on whether I'm over-reading or reading accurately, suggest. that maybe there were moments where they might have wanted to take some action to hurry him along towards his eventual demise. I figured you probably stopped just short of making that accusation and let people with imaginations like mine come to our own conclusions about that, but it certainly was in there. It was the kind of thing as you're reading it, you had to just

stop again and again and say, who does this? What kind of people, are these? Did you have moments in the reporting of the book where you called each other and said, you're never going to believe this? Like, get a load of this. Or no, was it just because it was because you were sort of living in it, swimming in it for years? It didn't strike you as that crazy. Jim, Jim has been saying, we've been saying in interviews that like, you know, we wrote this book during the pandemic and we often really only had each other to talk to because there wasn't a lot going on. And we were constantly calling each other up to be like, can you believe this? This is incredible. You know, there's one scene in there where, speaking of Sydney and

Manuela, Sumner has choked and is in serious medical condition, has been rushed to the hospital where he's in intensive care. And Sydney is going to go visit him in the hospital. And she calls, makes a video call to her, then her boyfriend, who she's having a secret affair with. And films herself. So we got a copy of the video. We actually reviewed this. Her fiancé, supposedly, her billionaire fiancé is in intensive care, and she's twirling around in front of the camera in a gauzy top with giant sunglasses, asking her paramour if he thinks she looks chic. All she's worried about is how she's going to look at the hospital. I mean, it's, And we have the video.

We saw the video. And, of course, we describe it in the books. I mean, that's, Rachel got that video and then, like, sent it to me. So the minute we saw this thing, you know, like, we're on the phone. Like, can you believe this? This was one of those moments that I just circled it again and again and again in the book. Because, again, who does this? Who acts like this?

Well, you know, fortunately, again, get into the journalism. It's a little bit. I've written numerous nonfiction books, but the key to a good book is the reporting and the level of material that you get the level of detail. And I've never had an opportunity like this. I mean, we had a incredible trove of original material, the actual text, the emails from, you know, videos, video calls. I mean, technology has been God's gift to journalism. And we had multiple sources, and many of them confidential, but people who didn't want to see this all covered up

and swept under the rug. But I have to say, I don't think any of these sources had any idea what we were getting from other people. So since the book has come out, even some of these sources have called to say, I can't believe what you guys uncovered here. But again, it's that raw material

that made it possible to tell such a dramatic and vivid story. Yeah, I thought about that a lot. As I read the book, I thought about the reporting process quite a bit. Some of this stuff came through legal documents. I mean, you go into great detail about the various legal battles over the money, with the family, with the paramours, with sort of everybody. And I imagine that was a rich vein.

But I did wonder, were you able to convince people to give you interviews, to go back and revisit some of the actual sort of firsthand, primary resource and just talk to you through what was happening and put that into context? Were people willing to cooperate now that a lot of this, some of this anyway, had been aired and they were willing to fill in details? There were a lot of people that talked to us off the record. And, you know, one thing that's, I think, really important to remember is that I think people might have a misconception that ever since Harvey Weinstein, people are just eager to tell

their stories of sexual misconduct or abuse to reporters calling up out of the blue. And as we discovered with this, that is just not the case. You know, anybody that thinks that I will call up a woman who has a story that she's never told anybody that it's very painful. And she'll just be like, oh, yes, now is my moment. I'm so happy you called. I mean, that is just not true. And, you know, we're really grateful that all these people talked us on or off the record. But it really does make you think, like, this is such an incredible window into one company and a behind-the-scenes look, but it really does make you wonder what's going on elsewhere. That's one of the big questions I had actually coming out of the book was, on the one hand,

this is an extraordinary tale. As I've said, I find it unbelievable in many respects, but totally believable in your rendering. Is this closer to the exception or closer to the rule in your? We obviously took a really close look at this particular company. And what I think is kind of remarkable about it is that we've all become really accustomed to seeing these very manicured PR statements that come out from companies that are dealing with crises. But what we have here is this is the only example I can think of where you're actually seeing in real time the executives panicking and melting down and like how they're dealing with a Me Too crisis. This is truly Me Too meets the corporate boardroom. and we took a very close dive into this company, and there's no reason to think that similar behind-the-scenes antics aren't going on elsewhere. And this is just one really good case study. I mean, I think, as I said, since it's really about human nature,

I don't think the fact that it's set in Hollywood makes it particularly unique. Again, we can't speak to every company. But just to give one example, McDonald's has been struggling with a big sexual assault kind of scandal in the CEO office. And, you know, that's about as heartland an American company as you're going to find. Well, I just my own experience. I mean, I worked at Fox News for 12 years.

And in that time, didn't have many one-on-one face-to-face meetings with Roger Ailes. But the one that I did have was in his office in New York City. And I remember it for a number of reasons. But I was very excited about, I'd just gotten my hands on a cache of documents that the U.S. military and intelligence community had taken from Osama bin Laden's compound, or I'd gotten my hands on a bunch of them. So I was very excited to tell Roger about this thing and the reporting that I was going to be doing for the weekly standard at the time and maybe Fox could use some of it. And, you know, he invited me in and I was nervous and I talked to mile a minute and I was a little crazy.

and he got a phone call in the middle of the meeting and let me sit in the room as he was having this phone call and I could only hear his side of the conversation. But it was plainly, I learned within a matter of seconds about Bill O'Reilly and a number of the problems that Bill O'Reilly had caused. And Ailes was talking about it rather openly in a sort of we must dispense with this kind of fashion. And I did not at the time, of course, know what we would learn about Roger Hales eventually. And it was, you know, I don't have enough of a window into sort of how the world works at those levels. But in the limited windows that I do have and in your telling of this

story suggests to me that it's far more pervasive than people thought for years and years and years unless they were personally affected by this. I want to be very careful of the time I'm asking you to spend with us. Maybe we can end with a couple of questions picking up on exactly this point about Les MoonVez and what happened there. Incredible detail in your reporting. I'd read the Times story that you published in 2018 with incredible detail there about his attempts to keep people silent.

And reading the account in the book. His attempts to avoid this accountability for what he had done, I was struck by the behavior. I was struck by the incredible damage it did to the women involved. But I was also struck by the people who kind of came out of the woodwork to keep him from this accountability, who volunteered one after another after another from the cop to the agent. I forget his last name, Dauer, is that his name? Dower. Just like incredible, one after another, after another, these people who sought to keep him from accountability.

How, first of all, with respect specifically to Les Moonvez, how did that play out? How did we, how long did that keep him from this sort of measure of public accountability? as you all were reporting this, like trying to figure this out. Well, that's an astonishing part of the story. Even after the Harvey Weinstein affair and the Me Too movement, the willingness of the CBS board to circle the wagons and protect him, of the staff of the company that worked for him to protect him,

and then outsiders trying to take advantage of the situation and cover it all up, was shocking, was shocking to us. Again, I think it showed the provision. sexism and misogyny that existed, I suspect, not just certainly there, but in, at many of the upper level ranks of corporate America. I mean, you know, Sherry Redstone, the daughter of Sumner and, you know, the Redstones were the largest shareholder. And directors are supposed to represent the shareholders. There is scant evidence of that in this book. Anything Les Moonvest told them and they believed, and anything she said, they disbelieved and were suspicious and thought

she was just trying to bring him down. And you see that over and over again. I think the, you know, the popular perception is that Ronan Farrow's reporting in The New Yorker, he brought forward 12 women who claimed to have been assaulted by Les Moonbezz was the reason that he was ultimately fired. And, you know, Ronan Farrow deserves tremendous credit for that reporting. But there were this a parallel. story. And the staunch support of the board, I think he could have survived those New Yorker

stories if he hadn't at the same time succumbed to this effort to silence another victim by trying to give her a job and a part in a CBS show. So that's, and that's really that and a couple of other incidents that were not in a New Yorker were really what ultimately did him in. But again, we were just shocked to see the degree to which to the board was willing to support him in the face of credible allegations of serious misconduct. They treated, Jim has been saying

that the cover-up was worse than the crime to the board. It was the cover-up and his attempts to hide what he had been doing to keep this woman silent that ultimately got him kicked out of CBS. It was not what he had actually done to these women. What are the long-term ramifications of this on the companies themselves?

I mean, given what you document in the book, given what you just were talking about there, Jim, Are there consequences for the companies having done what they did to avoid this accountability? Well, I think things have changed in the Paramount Empire. Certainly, I mean, Sherry Redstone, having emerged, you know, sort of victorious against all these forces by the end of our story, has really taken concrete steps to make sure there's more diversity in management. There's more diversity on the board. I don't think you're going to find an employee at CBS whose job was to give the CEO oral sex at the end of the day, as there was with Les Moon Invest.

So the more extreme examples of that, I think, certainly are gone. But, you know, this culture is not changing overnight. Again, as Rachel pointed out, we were still struck, for example, at how fearful many women were to tell us their stories. This long after the Me Too movement started for fear. that it would be held against them. It would hurt their careers. They would be seen as troublemakers. This runs very deep in corporate culture and certainly in the entertainment industry. So I don't think we can declare a victory and move on. Well, thank you both for taking

the time to talk to us on the Dispatch podcast. And absolutely fascinating read. I hope people will go out and pick up the book. Thank you. Thank you so much having us. Thank you, time. You know,