The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood [Hardcover]

Dennis McDougal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1998

Lew Wasserman's life story is the story of Hollywood, the "you scratch my back, I'll stab yours" Hollywood that movie fans may hear about but rarely see. As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA), Wasserman has been the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His story has remained largely unknown, until now. . . .
        
Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch: the men who run Hollywood today had the way paved for them by Lew Wasserman, the original Hollywood power broker. Intensely private and so low-profile that he wouldn't allow press photographers to take his picture for decades, Wasserman ran his beloved MCA with an iron fist. His story has never been told before for one overriding reason: fear. For more than fifty years, he has been one of a handful of Hollywood giants who could say, "You'll never work in this town again," and make it stick.
        
His career spans the entire history of the movies, from the silent era, through the age of Louis B. Mayer and the studio moguls, to the dawn of television, and up to present-day Hollywood, where money, microchips, drugs, and multinational politics dominate the corporate power struggles for control of the American entertainment industry. He was guru to such legends as Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, as well as a whole new generation of film magicians, beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Confidant to presidents and popes, Wasserman also had ties to the underworld. Even today, at eighty-five, he remains the Godfather of Hollywood.
        
The Last Mogul is the probing, thorough, and dramatic chronicle of the life of Hollywood's last living studio titan, the man who has come to personify show business in the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I run all the studios," 38-year-old Lew Wasserman boasted in 1951 when turning down an offer to run MGM. Indeed, he did. As president of MCA, the most powerful talent agency of its time, Wasserman gained unprecedented artistic and financial clout for Hollywood's top stars, hastening the end of the studio system. Not that he did it out of the goodness of his heart. The canny, ruthless Wasserman was famous for inventing new ways to increase MCA's percentage, most notably by bundling clients into packages the agency produced for the burgeoning television market--a glaring conflict of interest that finally prompted a Justice Department investigation. Veteran movie journalist Dennis McDougal (author of Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount) uses Wasserman's career as a case study in how the entertainment industry has changed over the course of the 20th century. He chronicles MCA's evolution from a band-booking business in wide-open Jazz Age Chicago (where persistent rumors about the company's Mob ties began) to a postwar movie and TV powerhouse to a Japanese-owned subsidiary in the 1990s. Seamlessly blending biography, business reporting, and juicy celebrity anecdotes, this is first-rate showbiz muckraking. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Originally founded as a talent agency in 1924 by Jules Stein, an erstwhile Chicago ophthalmologist, the Music Corporation of America reached the pinnacle of its power from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, when it perfected the art of delivering complete "packages" to film and television companies. These pictures were not only produced by MCA but also featured stars repped by the "Octopus," as the company came to be known. MCA's market domination was so complete that in 1962, the U.S. Justice Department made the company to choose between the talent agency and its production facilities. It chose the latter. Lew Wasserman, named MCA president in 1946, often played bad cop to Stein's good cop by trying to milk every cent from any negotiation, while Stein excelled at soothing a star's or studio exec's bruised feelings. McDougal (Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business) had no access to Wasserman, but here puts hundreds of interviews and secondary sources to good use, combining crack business reporting with plenty of Hollywood gossip. As MCA becomes a "rapacious behemoth," McDougal focuses on the dark side of its business dealings (e.g., its alleged ties to organized crime), at times veering into innuendo, as when speculating that MCA had a hand in the death of Marilyn Monroe. Although the company remained a force in the movie and TV business, its strength was never the same after the 1960s, and Wasserman's days as a true Hollywood power broker faded after he sold the company in 1990 to the Japanese electronics firm Matsushita. McDougal has produced a feisty behind-the-scenes account of the multimedia empire MCA was in its glory days?a status no Hollywood studio has attainedenjoyed since. Pictures not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (October 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517704641
• ISBN-13: 978-0517704646
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.7 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #954,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

With the recent publication of "Five Easy Decades" (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), Dennis McDougal has authored a total of nine books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles in a career that has spanned over 40 years. Currently, he is working on "The Acid Chronicles," a documentary film about the history and renaissance of LSD as a powerful tool in the treatment of mental illness.

Before he began covering movies and media for the Los Angeles Times in 1983 and, more recently, the New York Times, McDougal was a staff writer at the Riverside Press-Enterprise (1973-1977) and the Long Beach Press-Telegram (1977-1981). A UCLA graduate, McDougal holds a Bachelor's in English and a Master's in Journalism.

In 1981, he was awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University and spent a year teaching and studying in Japan and Canada, as well as at the Palo Alto campus. Over the years, his journalism has won over 50 honors, including the National Headliners Award and several Associated Press awards.

Before turning his attention full-time to writing books in 1993, McDougal reported on the glamorous and occasionally corrupt aspects of Hollywood as a staff writer for ten years at the Los Angeles Times. As a Times investigative reporter concentrating on movies, television and pop music, McDougal took readers behind the scenes of pop star Michael Jackson's troubled career, beginning with his "Victory" tour in the early 1980s; exposed the waste and mismanagement of Band Aid, USA for Africa, Farm Aid, and other "pop charities" of the 1980s; and followed celebrity courtroom dramas, such as the so-called "Cotton Club" murder trial, which featured former Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans in a major supporting role. He was a producer for CNN during the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

McDougal's reporting has taken him to the top of San Francisco's Mt. Tamalpais at sunrise with Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama, Rodney King's rap music debut, Ethiopia with Harry Belafonte, Tokyo with former U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer's Washington Heights bedroom for a discussion of the elements of good sex. He has interviewed dozens of celebrated men and women who have influenced our lives: pop stars, politicians, moguls and cultural icons.

A contributing writer with TV Guide through the 1990s, his last story for the magazine was the murderous saga of actor Robert Blake and his late porn queen wife Bonny Lee Bakley. McDougal and co-author Mary Murphy turned that story into the book "Blood Cold" (Putnam, 2002), which Mark Sennet Productions optioned for a motion picture. McDougal is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has also written for Los Angeles Magazine, Brill's Content, Premiere, and the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine.

McDougal has been a lecturer in journalism and creative writing at UCLA, the University of Memphis, and the California State Universities at Fullerton and Long Beach. He and his wife, Sharon, live near Memphis, Tennessee, have five children, and ten grandchildren.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read, January 24, 1999

By 

"rspvdan" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood (Hardcover)

My library is filled with books about the inner workings of the entertainment industry, but none of them have even hinted at the massive power and influence of MCA, Dr. Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman. For over thirty years they controlled what Americans were entertained by. As agents, they handled the vast majority of important actors, musician, singers and writers. And you couldn't hire an MCA talent without agreeing to hire others. In addition, they had insider deals with the unions that no other talent agency or television production company enjoyed. In addition, MCA invented the dubious practice of setting up production companies for entertainers so that they could avoid paying taxes. Of course later, when the star's career started to fade, that same production company became an ever-hungry money pit. I don't think it is possible to truly understand why entertainment is what it is in the twentieth century without reading this book. Despite being published by a major house and receiving rave reviews, you are unlikely to see this author on your local talk shows or to find his book in any of the major chain stores, because so many still fear the subject of this book. Do yourself a favor and order the book from Amazon. It is a must-read for any fan of entertainment books.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Agents Not So Nice Humanbeings, January 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood (Hardcover)

To many of us outside of Hollywood, Juluis Stein and Lew Wasserman resemble the sharp shrewd amoral quickbuck artists typically cast in movies and TV as " Hollywood Movie Agents." That they are extremely zealous and very bright is clear from this excellent biography. That they are not above any sort of misrepresentation or other form of deceptive yet quasi-legal business practice is also apparent. These are men who are vain, superficial and abundently successful. They are miles ahead of both their competition and studio heads. Are they decent men? Well if you consider that they spent their professional careers deceiving one another, misrepresenting or withholding facts from their peers and clients and sharply navigating thru numerous shady and questionable practices and relatioinships you have your answer. Top it off with avoidance(legal if you will) of taxes and wartime service to their nation and you have a couple of well dressed thinly venired operators who always seem to get the best of their competitors. The author here does and excellent job, without suggesting any personal bias, of layering one either shady or morally questionable practice over another. I conculded that this is simply how one gets business done in Hollywood and that furthermore it hasn't gotten any worse in recent years since it always a nasty and unforgiving eniormnment to make a buck. There are many minor factual errors in the book but they are more then overcome by the writers assertion of details that are without doubt accurate and important in describing the business and moral, or lack thereof, climate inherit in the movie trade.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A history book of Hollywood, December 29, 2001

By 

R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood (Paperback)

If you enjoy reading about the history of Hollywood, this is the book for you. But be forewarned, it reads like a history book and takes a real time commitment to finish. The author goes back to the beginning career of Jules Stein and booking of bands through the sale of Universal to the Bronfman's. Clearly the focus of the book is Lew Wasserman who led MCA from agency to studio with significant influences in politics.

Probably the most entertaining part of the book is the unique stories of the stars of the 40s and 50s since Wasserman was at his peak making careers. Stories are presented about Tony Curtis, Jimmy Stewart and Marilyn Monroe to name a few and are quite entertaining as well as showing Wasserman's power to destroy or make a career.

This book tries to intertwine politics, entertainment and the mafia, and while there may be a connection, sometimes he seems to reach too far and lose focus on the principals who grew MCA into the behemoth that it was. I recommend this book to anyone with an in-depth interest in Hollywood history and what it was like from mid-century.