Another Life (57 page)

He let go of me and pinched my cheek, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I do not know if he had acquired this habit by reading about Napoleon, who often singled out one of his veterans on parade by pinching his cheek, but I could see that Bluhdorn was in fact Napoleonic in other ways. He had the same piercing eyes, the visible energy, the total self-confidence, together with the absolute certainty that he was your master and that you would do anything for him.

It was not a type likely to frighten me, having grown up in the wake of my Uncle Alex. Like Alex, Bluhdorn could radiate charm when he wanted to; also like him, Bluhdorn was an expert at telling people what they wanted to hear, then doing the opposite. He had, in fact, persuaded Shimkin to sell S&S by offering him an honored place on the G+W board, where he could serve as an elder statesman, only to pull the seat out from under Shimkin the moment his company had been bought, thus plunging Shimkin into well-heeled, but gloomy, retirement.

Bluhdorn was Napoleonic in more ways than one. He had the reputation of disliking anybody who was taller than he was, and certainly short people seemed to do better at G+W than the tall, which I took as
a good augury for Dick and myself, who were about the same height as Bluhdorn. Unlike the emperor, however, Bluhdorn did not surround himself with a praetorian guard of very tall men to show his contempt for their height; on the contrary, Bluhdorn’s bodyguard of assistants and PR flacks were short, nervous, and sweaty. Clearly kept on a tight leash by their master, they laughed when he did and cringed when he didn’t, and clung close to him like remora around a shark.

Bluhdorn released my cheek, and made his way off through the crowd, embracing everyone he passed like a politician on the make. He had the gift, I could not help noticing, of remembering people’s names, which in a company of G+W’s size and diversity cannot have been easy.

I was seated at the dinner table next to the tallest man in the room, Michael Burke, former president of the New York Yankees, now president of Madison Square Garden, who had been shanghaied into the G+W family when Bluhdorn bought the Garden. I knew Burke slightly—he was a fellow equestrian—and he was what the Irish call “a lovely man,” funny, brave (he had been a spy behind the German lines in Rome in 1944), and engagingly cynical about authority figures, including Bluhdorn, who suspected, correctly, that Burke made fun of him behind his back. Unfortunately for Bluhdorn, Burke was the darling of the New York press, and a beloved figure in the world of sports, so it was almost impossible to fire him.

Beside each place setting was a thin black box wrapped with a gold ribbon. We had been advised not to open our presents before Bluhdorn’s speech, and the rumor was that each box contained a Christmas bonus check. Burke and I talked horses and hunting through the meal. There was a certain queasiness in the air, partly caused by proximity to power—most of the executives around the table were from out of town, and only saw Bluhdorn once a year, so they were like officials from the far corners of the Roman Empire invited to dinner by the emperor, and not sure whether the meal would end with dessert or their beheading—partly because the G+W tower was notorious for swaying in a high wind, producing a sensation not unlike seasickness in those who had delicate stomachs. If you looked at your glass closely enough, you could actually see the water moving.

As dessert was served Bluhdorn rose to speak. His voice was high-pitched and rasping, something between quacking and an angry bark, and his way of encouraging the troops was to single them out one at a time to be “roasted” with fierce humor. It was, in fact, an amazing sight:
thirty or so middle-aged men in blue suits (there were almost no women present), nervous smiles fixed on their faces, waiting to see who Bluhdorn would pounce on next. They didn’t even know what to pray for—the natural thing was to pray that he would skip over you, but then again, being skipped over might mean that he didn’t care about you because he’d already decided to fire you. Michael Burke sat through this remarkable performance with stony indifference—Bluhdorn apparently knew better than to give Burke the treatment—then, clearly bored with the proceedings, he took the ribbon off his gift package and peeked inside. A smile came over his face, as he pulled out of the box a pair of one-size-fits-all stretch black gloves—Bluhdorn had bought a clothing company that manufactured them. Burke pulled them on, then held up one black-gloved hand. A deadly silence fell over the room, and Bluhdorn, momentarily silenced, stared at Michael Burke suspiciously. “Yes?” he asked. “You have a question?” Burke nodded cheerfully. “I just wanted to know which one of these guys I’m supposed to strangle,” he said.

Nobody laughed harder than Bluhdorn, but although the big teeth were clenched in a grin, there was nothing humorous about the way he looked at Burke. Right then and there I decided that Charles G. Bluhdorn was not a man to cross.

B
LUHDORN
’
S LIFE
was not exactly an open book, and the few facts tended to contradict each other, even in his “official” biographies, but it seems certain that he was born in Vienna, in 1926, of middle-class Czech parents. Whether or not he was Jewish was a question that was often asked, but never answered. The fact that his family moved from Austria to England in 1936, and that Bluhdorn was relocated to the United States as a refugee in 1942 certainly makes it seem likely that he was—not to speak of the fact that his speech, rapid, staccato, and sputtering as it was, was laden with colloquial Yiddish insults like
putz, schmuck
, and
nebbish
. Still, a lot of New Yorkers affect a familiarity with Yiddish, if only to make themselves sound like tough guys. All one can say is that Bluhdorn seemed to tread a careful line on the subject, allowing some people to believe he was Jewish, and others not.

His business career was in the Horatio Alger tradition. Having arrived in New York as a refugee, he went to work for a cotton broker at
a salary of fifteen dollars a week, then switched to the commodities import/export business—a lifelong preoccupation with Bluhdorn, who bought and sold sugar futures the way other men play golf. By the time he was twenty-one, Bluhdorn had cornered the market in malt—his trading in that substance was, in fact, so hyperactive that it attracted the attention of the U.S. government, and brought about his first brush with Washington, though by no means the last. At twenty-three he was in business for himself, already a millionaire and something of a legend, but while he traded in almost everything from lard to pasta, he dreamed of something more stable, of an empire.

Bluhdorn’s epiphany—his equivalent of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus—came in 1957, when he bought Michigan Bumper, a decrepit manufacturer of stamped replacement bumpers. It was not just that he saw his future in a more solid business than commodities, with their notorious fluctuations, nor even that he believed (wrongly) that the automobile spare parts business was the wave of the future and would survive every vicissitude of the economy—it was that with the purchase of Michigan Bumper he worked out the simple formula that would take him far beyond malt, lard, sugar, and bumpers into the financial stratosphere.

Michigan Bumper was an unglamorous, low-rent, rust-belt corporation, whose stock (and industrial expertise) was at the bottom of the barrel, but once Bluhdorn owned it, it did not take him long to discover that bankers were happy to lend him money to acquire another corporation. However decrepit Michigan Bumper might be, it
existed
—unlike most commodity deals. Somewhere in the wasteland of the industrial Midwest there was a real-life, Dickensian factory, belching smoke and turning out replacement bumpers for 1948 Fords and Chevrolets for sale to people who couldn’t afford factory parts. Bankers, Bluhdorn discovered, love bricks and mortar, and in no time he was able to merge his new acquisition with Beard & Stone Electric Co., of Houston, another unglamorous manufacturer of replacement auto parts.

Since Houston is near the Gulf of Mexico and Michigan is in the Midwest, some clever soul came up with the idea of calling the merged corporations the Gulf & Western Industries (the idea of replacing the ampersand with a plus sign was to come later, as a symbol of the synergy that Bluhdorn sought, but never achieved, the idea being that the whole of the company was worth more than the sum of its parts).

From these grimy and humble beginnings, Bluhdorn set out on a bank-financed spending spree in 1960.

Each acquisition opened up possibilities for another; each acquisition financed the next. It was a recipe for rapid growth, and while it dazzled investors, it failed to enchant Wall Street, where Bluhdorn was regarded with deep skepticism, partly because of the helter-skelter nature of his acquisitions, partly because Bluhdorn himself never inspired the confidence of major Wall Street figures. There was something about him that set their teeth on edge, a demonic energy, a quality of bluster, a habit of superheated exaggeration and crazed enthusiasm—a simple inability, perhaps, to shut up and stop talking. He remained an outsider and a renegade, and resented the fact bitterly.

In 1966, however, Bluhdorn’s fortunes took a turn for the better that was to turn him, from Wall Street’s point of view—and perhaps the rest of the world’s—from a frog into a prince. Paramount Pictures had been declining for years, its famous name weighted down with expensive failed pictures and a board of directors that consisted of timid old men. Although Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount, was still alive, approaching his centenary, and although the studio had once been Hollywood’s greatest, the company had slipped far behind its rivals and was in danger of disintegrating. Always quick to recognize a company in distress, Bluhdorn snapped Paramount up.

There are a lot of reasons why wealthy businessmen choose to go into the movie business. One of them is that it can be enormously profitable (of course it is also possible to lose your shirt, as Joseph P. Kennedy and Kirk Kerkorian discovered); a more potent reason is social. By the 1960s Bluhdorn was a rich man, but how many people want to invite the owner of New Jersey Zinc to dinner parties, and how many attractive women want to hear about the automobile spare parts business from the man sitting beside them at the dinner table? Money is not everything, as Bluhdorn—like Marvin Davis and Rupert Murdoch, after him—discovered.

The purchase of Paramount transformed Bluhdorn overnight, however, as he must have guessed it would, from a megalomaniacal acquirer of rather dull companies, most of them on the verge of collapse, into a figure of mystery and power, a financier straight out of a Harold Robbins novel. The owner of a major studio is welcome everywhere; attractive women who aren’t even slightly interested in the zinc business
are as breathlessly fascinated by movie gossip as anyone else (or, if they’re very beautiful, may even be looking for a way
into
the movie business). Bluhdorn suddenly became a
glamorous
person, rather than being merely rich.

What is more, despite the suspicion and hostility Bluhdorn’s acquisition of Paramount caused in Hollywood, where it is an axiom that no outsider can understand the movie business or succeed at it, he was, in fact, made for the movie business, and it for him. To begin with, he loved taking risks; then too, although he constantly challenged and fought with the people around him, he recognized talent when he saw it, and was willing to back it—more, much more, than can be said of the proprietors of most movie studios. That he was a monumental pain in the ass, a full-time kibitzer, a tyrant, and totally involved in the process almost goes without saying, but these are just the qualities that are lacking in most studios, and that the old studio heads—Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Jack Warner, to name a few—had in superabundance.

Bluhdorn’s impatience, his histrionics, his boasting, his kinetic hyperactivity, and monumental chutzpah—in brief, all the things that made him a distrusted figure on Wall Street and in the financial press—were assets in Tinseltown. It was sheer chutzpah to pick Robert Evans, then best known as a smooth and handsome young suit-and-cloaker who became an actor and Hollywood man-about-town, to be Paramount’s version of Irving Thalberg, a move that confounded everybody in the industry, including Evans himself, but with his usual shrewdness, Bluhdorn made sure that Evans was surrounded by tough businessmen with good heads for numbers, like Martin S. Davis. The mixture was enormously successful: Paramount’s run of box office disasters was replaced by pictures like
Catch-22, The Godfather
, and
Love Story
. Bluhdorn’s talent for knocking people’s heads together and persuading them to do what they didn’t want to do was a godsend for Paramount, whether it was getting a reluctant Walter Matthau to star in the movie of Neil Simon’s
The Odd Couple
or talking Irving Lazar into accepting an offer for the screen rights to
Funny Girl
. Profane, tireless, crackling with nervous energy, it was as if Bluhdorn always got what he wanted, and since success breeds success, it was soon the case.

He loved Hollywood, and the glamour that went with it, the private jet whisking him off to L.A., the discreet bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the atmosphere of luxurious decadence combined with hard-headed
deal-making and unbridled competition, the opportunity to spar with egos that were even bigger than his own. These were the late sixties, too, before the fear of AIDS and the abuse of cocaine took their toll of people’s private lives in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. It was the time of Hugh Hefner’s West Coast Playboy mansion, of nonstop partying at the home of disgraced financier Bernie Cornfeld, of parties at Bob Evans’s home where there were always beautiful girls, dozens of them, some of them swimming tirelessly back and forth in the floodlit pool, hour after hour, just to give the guests something to look at. Whatever else Bluhdorn got out of his acquisition of Paramount, one of them was a reputation as a man who liked women, and expected to be provided with them—no big deal in the movie business, which has always been run in the spirit of a sultan’s harem.