This Day in Business History (Birth of Sumner Redstone, ‘Relentless' Media Empire-Builder)

May 27, 1923— Sumner Redstone, who used his brilliant intellect and self-described “passion to win” to become an envied, feared, often toxic media-entertainment mogul, was born in humble origins in Boston.

Just as Orson Welles and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz interspersed episodes in the lives of Samuel Insull and Joseph Pulitzer to augment their thinly veiled portrayal of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, so have the creators of Succession used tales surrounding Redstone and Donald Trump to bolster their Rupert Murdoch-based depiction of Logan Roy.

Unlike Murdoch or Trump, but like Logan Roy, Redstone not only grew up in a lower-class neighborhood but briefly lived in a house with no inside bathroom.

Like Murdoch and the fictional Roy, Redstone had seemingly groomed younger people (including his children) to take over from him, only, in his 70s and even 80s, to dismiss them with little to no warning.

Far more than Trump and even Murdoch, he left rivals alternately worried and fuming about his next negotiating gambit, leading Barry Reardon, a distribution executive at rival studio Warner Brothers, to moan to Premiere Magazine in 1994: "Being a competitor of Sumner Redstone’s is a fate worse than death. He never lets up. He’s relentless.”

Redstone's corporate buccaneering amassed a fortune that enabled him to control, at one time or another, CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

And, in a way it has not yet become painfully obvious for Trump or Murdoch, debility at the end of his life exposed Redstone’s troubled relationship with a daughter he had teased with the prospect of succeeding him.

The driving force behind Succession might be the same joke used by Murdoch and Redstone as octogenarians: that they had no intention of ever dying. That disbelief in the iron law of mortality underlies the power struggle in both the series and the lives of Sumner and Shari Redstone.

In his appearance and conversation, Redstone worked overtime to counter any impression that the years had diminished his faculties. He dyed his hair red, bragged to talk-show host Larry King in 2009 that he had “the vital statistics of a 20-year-old,” and even lied about his age (lopping off 20 years).

Perhaps as much to persuade himself as King’s millions of viewers, Redstone continued: “Even 20-year-old men get older. Not me. My doctor says I’m the only man who’s reversed it. I eat and drink every antioxidant known to man. I exercise 50 minutes every day.”

At the time of the King interview, it was already apparent to Daily Beast editor at large Lloyd Grove, that Redstone was less like a 20-year-old than like King Lear: “With his empire crumbling, his family fractured, his legacy in doubt, and his grasp of the true nature of his predicament not immediately evident, Redstone resembles a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s tragic hero.”

By the middle of the next decade, charges that Redstone was no longer competent to run his affairs—let alone his company’s—had burst into public view, courtesy of litigation by Shari—though Sumner would hang on, a hideous husk of his former self, until he was 97.

At the time of Redstone’s death in August 2020, his story as a self-made man led many, even among the overwhelmingly liberal reading audience of The New York Times, to overlook the gamier aspects of his life.

And indeed, there is much to admire in a man who took the modest perch provided by his father (who himself rose from linoleum peddler to owner of a small chain of drive-in theaters) and graduated first in his class at Boston Latin, the city’s leading public school; went to Harvard on a scholarship; cracked Japanese military and diplomatic codes as part of a team of cryptographers in WWII; became partner in a leading DC law firm after the war; then abandoned all that to begin building a series of holdings that would eventually be valued at more than $80 billion.

But the window that began to open up in the last decade of Redstone’s life revealed after his death “an astonishing saga of sex, lies, and betrayal,” according to Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, by New York Times journalists James Stewart and Rachel Abrams.

According to this account, Redstone:

* spent $500,000 promoting the Electric Barbarellas, a talentless all-girl band;

* amended his trust more than 40 times to add or remove beneficiaries;

* dated women who became increasingly younger as he aged;

* sent a flight attendant he was pursuing a crystal‑encrusted handbag in the shape of a panther, along with the (surely redundant) note, “I’m a panther and I’m going to pounce”;

* reportedly tried to date grandson Brandon Korff’s girlfriends, annoying the 25-year-old so much that he sought out TV’s “Millionaire Matchmaker” Patti Stanger to find a companion for the lecherous old man—a move that backfired when that companion, Sydney Holland, and another Redstone girlfriend siphoned off $150 million from the increasingly senile businessman before being ushered out of his life at last;

* badmouthed Shari for so long that she was ignored when she warned about the perilous course set by Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman, and wrestled with CBS CEO Leslie Moonves for control of National Amusements, the entity owned by Sumner and Shari.

If Sumner Redstone’s empire had been built by his personal tenacity (he survived a Boston hotel fire by hanging off a window ledge, leaving a hand maimed for the remaining 40 years of his life), it teetered at the end of his long life because of his toxicity. 

His wealth and position couldn’t disguise the fact that he had degenerated into a dirty old man, endangering the sprawling conglomerate he had built over a lifetime through his personal caprice and the maddeningly complex corporate structure that had allowed him to operate for so long without contradiction by those who worked for him.

(That structure was analyzed in 2018, at the height of the Redstone family litigation over CBS and Viacom, by Eduardo Gentil, on the Website of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group.)

The attached image of Sumner Redstone is from Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA; © copyright John Mathew Smith 2001.

Quote of the Day (Jill Lepore, on Epidemics and Their Coverage)

“Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die. Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren’t often deadly but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore, “It’s Spreading: Outbreaks, Media Scares, and the Parrot Panic of 1930,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Consequences of Declining Hometown Journalism)

“Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings. You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a Costco. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.

“That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades — neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.”—Crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, in his last column for The Miami Herald, “With or Without Me, Florida Will Always Be Wonderfully, Unrelentingly Weird,” The Miami Herald, Mar. 12, 2021

(The attached photo of Carl Hiassen, originally appearing on the author’s Web site, was taken by Joe Rimkus Jr.)

Quote of the Day (John Lewis, on the Press and the Civil-Rights Movement)

“If it hadn’t been for the press, the civil-rights movement, the whole struggle would have been like a bird without wings…. For the press, it was very dangerous, especially in the American South, to be a reporter, to be there with a pen and a pad, with a camera. I saw members of the Klan and racists turning on the media, beating people, leaving them bloody, and then turning on us.”—John Lewis (1940-2020), civil rights activist and Congressman (D-GA), quoted in Jamil Smith, “‘We Cannot Lose Hope’: John Lewis Looks Forward,” Rolling Stone, May 2019

In the last four years, the media faced new dangers, including crowds egged on by a President who called reporters “enemies of the people.” His undermining of those who dared to tell the truth culminated on January 6 with a mob aiming to overthrow the legitimate electoral victory of a multi-racial coalition.

One image lingering with me from that infamous day is of an African-American Capitol Police officer standing against an overwhelmingly white mob ready to breach the building. His presence would have been impossible without the similar courage shown decades before by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and, as the latter noted, the media that covered them.

Like many people, I have had my beefs with reporters from different outlets. But without media coverage—most crucially, during January 6 and its aftermath—most Americans would not have grasped the extent of the relentless assault on liberty occurring in the last four years.

For a long time, I have seen in local libraries a Library of America anthology, Reporting Civil Rights, containing roughly 200 eyewitness accounts of the movement from 1941 to 1973. Recent events have made it more imperative than ever, I think, that I read these two volumes.

(The image accompanying this post was Lewis’ official congressional photo, taken Feb. 13, 2006.)

Tweet of the Day (Jeff Greenfield, on the Tan Suit 'Scandal' of 5 Years Ago)

“Funny how journalists love to ridicule pols for obsessing over their dress—then go nuts when the President shows up in a tan suit.”—Political commentator Jeff Greenfield, Aug. 28, 2014 tweet

We’re now “celebrating”—if that’s the right verb—the fifth anniversary of the contrived uproar over Barack Obama’s late-summer tan suit.

I’m glad I had stopped paying attention to Fox News at that point, because they chose that point to have a major snit over this apparel, which to them signified not that it was late the dog days of summer but that it “confirms he’s a Marxist”—something having to do with a dark suit emphasizing he was serious about the office.

This, from the same cable channel that, in this past week, had on-air personality Katie Pavlich proclaim, without irony, that she was “still on Team Manifest Destiny Greenland”—confirming that there’s a clown car doing an express run from Mar a Lago to the Fox News studio in Rockefeller Center.

Quote of the Day (Mary McGrory, on DC and Trump, Nearly 3 Decades Ago)

“The defense budget is the closest we come to the sums being talked of in the divorce settlement between Ivana and Donald….We in the capital are into greed, of course, and we do a lot of lying…. Viewing Wall Street, watching the Trumps, Washington thinks of itself as wholesome.”— Political columnist Mary McGrory (1918-2004), “What Cards Those Trumps Are,” Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1990, reprinted in The Best of Mary McGrory: A Half-Century of Washington Commentary, edited by Phil Gailey (2006)

Twenty-five years ago today, Donald Trump wed Marla Maples, the Southern blonde who broke up his marriage to his first wife, Ivana, another blonde. (The latter would not be the last check--oops, I mean Czech--he would bounce.) The celebration, befitting someone of his ego and love of wretched excess, took place in New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Mary McGrory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the Washington Post, could never have imagined that the randy real estate tycoon who diverted D.C. from weightier matters would one day obsess the capital—let alone that he would be in charge of the defense budget, and everything else related to national security. 

But, long before he was the Twitter King, Trump was the next best thing for the media: the Tabloid King. At the height of the love-triangle craze involving him, Ivana and Marla, New York area residents were exposed to a near-daily barrage of headlines from the New York Post about their tussles in the sack and the court: “Don Juan,” “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” (which, that paper’s editor later crowed, was libel-proof because what would Trump say—he wasn’t the best sex Maples ever had?), “Safe Sex” (about a brief separation agreement between Donald and Ivana allowing them to date partners), and “Unsafe Sex” (the collapse of said agreement).

The Donald so reveled in his “Don Juan” image that he even tried to get Playboy magazine to run a "Girls of Trump" spread featuring his employees, according to an early biographer, journalist Wayne Barrett.

Trump has been tabloid executives’ delight for so long, in fact, that suspicions were bound to arise about why The National Enquirer has treated him with kid gloves for so long. The supermarket-aisle fixture, after all, made hay over John Edwards' rumored liaison, correctly surmising that readers would be offended at the prospect of a candidate fooling around behind the back of a wife who had been stricken with cancer. 

Now, we know that the Enquirer’s owner, American Media Inc. head David Pecker, a longtime friend of The Donald, bought the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, then quashed their stories so they couldn’t damage Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.

Fooling around on one's pregnant wife--the circumstances that existed regarding Donald and Melania over a decade ago--is not, to my way of thinking, a significant improvement over pulling the wood over a wife who's dealt with cancer. But the recent situational ethics of GOP voters invites the same type of excited discovery that Europeans must have felt 150 years ago in pursuing the source of the Nile.

Nearly three decades ago, as McGrory observed, Trump’s greed and lying were already on such a colossal scale that they made Capitol Hill grandees feel virtuous by comparison. These days, on the GOP side, no such assurance exists. 

Terrified as much by the President’s tweets as being “primaried” by far-right wingnuts even before facing a Democratic opponent in the fall, they have either cooed about what a great President he’s been or maintained a skittish silence. 

Now comes the reckoning for their complicity. The capital was astonished by the spectacle of greed and lying swirling around the Clintons in the 1990s, but in its constant movement, the Trumps exceed even that tawdry tabloid standard. 

But we’re now learning the consequences of it all: routine violations of the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, manipulation of the press to invent scandals about opponents while hiding real ones about the President, and a Russian leader with a background in the KGB who knew these secrets—and, perhaps, far more than we can ever imagine right now.

Quote of the Day (Lewis Lapham, on Journalism as ‘Sculpture in Snow’)

“Journalism is sculpture in snow. To have the expectation that it's somehow cast in stone —that it will reveal the truth to us—is to load it down with a burden it can't carry.” —Editor Lewis Lapham, moderating a forum on “Can the Press Tell the Truth? On the Varieties of Acceptable Reality,” printed in Harper’s Magazine, January 1985

This is cold comfort indeed in the midst of a lengthy winter cold snap. But I do worry that journalists are becoming too self-congratulatory in the Age of Trump. Their ideology blinded them to the widespread support he enjoyed, and the very real menace that his victory might spell to this republic. 

Moreover, I fear that some, in an excess of zeal, might, even now, make errors that might lead the President to give unwanted credence to the notion that they are engaging in “fake news.”

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on the ‘Immemorial Sacredness’ of Print)

“Now, print enjoys a strange and almost invincible prestige. A man must be an extremely hardened, cynical, and skeptical reader before he can quite ignore that prestige. The great majority of human beings are simple-hearted, trustful and unsuspecting folk for whom the printed word still has (in spite of newspapers, in spite of hyperbolic advertisements) a certain mystical and almost sacred authority. They start with a predisposition to be impressed by the written word, to believe in it, to obey its suggestions. If they met the author of the printed word and he tried to ‘put it over them’ by word of mouth, their natural instinct would be to resist, to be skeptical, to reject his claims to exercise authority. But then the author is only a man; whereas the printed word still preserves something of that talismanic and supernatural quality which letters and symbols, hieroglyphs and formulas have possessed from the remotest beginnings of civilizations….Universal education has made us all readers. But familiarity with words has not bred contempt. Even for newspaper readers words retain something of their immemorial sacredness.”—British novelist-essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “Print and the Man,” in Complete Essays, Vol. 2: 1926-1929, edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (2000)

In this year in which real life has confirmed many of the worst fears of dystopian fiction, Brave New World has found a new rapt readership. It’s been years since I read the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, but I have to confess that it never made the kind of impression on me that 1984, by Huxley’s student at Eton, George Orwell, did. 

But I was interested enough in Huxley to take out a book of his essays from a local library. From what I’ve seen in this thick volume from only a short period in his life, I think that the novelist missed his natural genre: essayist. (You could say that the form was practically in his blood: his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a biologist and essayist of such immense rhetorical skill that his defense of evolution earned him the nickname "Darwin's bulldog.")

Several months ago, I was intrigued by Aldous Huxley’s thoughts, in “Political Democracy,” on the dangers of demagogues. Late the other night, I turned to his thoughts on print. The almost anthropological tone noticeable here (see, for instance, his observation about print’s “talismanic and supernatural quality”) goes down far more easily than it should have because of Huxley’s lightly ironic, almost crystalline, prose.

There is another quality on display here: Huxley’s love-hate relationship with his subject. During the 1920s, as he tried to carve out the necessary time to work on the novels he cared about, Huxley couldn’t resist the short-term but certain and lucrative lure of literary journalism presented by British press baron Max Beaverbrook: “I so resent the pressure these swine put on one with their beastly money,” he wrote his lover, Bloomsbury hostess Mary Hutchinson. “At the same time it's almost a duty to milk them of as much of it as one can. So I remain torn between a desire to send him to the devil and a desire to haggle for the highest price.”

“The voice of the linotype is the voice of God,” Huxley wrote sardonically. But, considering the reputation he developed as a 20^th-century Cassandra in Brave New World, Huxley—at least in the quote above—cannot imagine a future without print. Nor does it appear that he anticipated the possibility that the Internet might create the exact opposite of the kind of unquestioning faith in authority that he dreaded—i.e., the discounting of any news that does not comport with the reader’s preconceived notions.

He does present one idea here worth putting into practice, however: that all newspapers "must publish extensive and truthful biographies of their proprietors, editors and writers." It would certainly go a long way toward detailing not only the vested interests of those in the media business, but of making clear the assumptions that underlie any claims to publishing "all the news that's fit to print" or conveying a point of view that proclaims as its motto, "We report, you decide."