Unscripted, page 5
Their disputes threatened Shari’s status as Sumner’s designated successor as chair. In a 2007 letter to trustees, Sumner stated bluntly that “Shari does not have the requisite business judgment and abilities to serve as chairman,” and he took his disparaging views public in a letter to Forbes in July: “While my daughter talks of good governance, she apparently ignores the cardinal rule of good governance that the boards of the two public companies, Viacom and CBS, should select my successor.” But in Sumner’s view, good governance apparently did not include the exercise of any independent judgment by those directors. “If she insists on trying to succeed me, there’s no question the boards will do what I ask them,” Sumner continued. “They’ve never gone against my wishes.”
In a final slap at his children, he asserted, “It must be remembered that I gave my children their stock” (although it was Shari’s grandfather who had established the trust, not Sumner) and “it is I, with little or no contribution on their part, who built these great media companies with the help of the boards of both companies.”
When Shari read her father’s letter in the magazine she burst into tears. All her life she’d struggled to gain her father’s respect, but in return she’d been publicly humiliated.
Dauman soon reached out to negotiate her exit from the family enterprise, or at least persuade her to accept a much-reduced role. Shari could barely bring herself to speak to him. She was convinced he’d orchestrated the Forbes attack, since a letter like that to a national publication would never have been issued without being vetted and approved by Dauman. And despite his combative reputation, Sumner did not like conflict with his daughter, let alone a public one. And once she and Dauman were in contact, it felt to her like Dauman could barely contain his satisfaction at the prospect of getting rid of his chief family rival.
(Dauman always maintained that he had nothing to do with the letter and was as surprised by it as anyone else. Sumner had his assistant type and fax the letter directly to Forbes, bypassing both Carl Folta, the head of public relations, and Dauman.)
Shari agreed to sell her stake but wanted $1.6 billion, a sum that valued the entire company at $8 billion. Instead Dauman offered her ownership of the national theater chain.
They were nowhere near agreement when, in October 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial crisis began. Shares of Viacom and CBS plunged in value. With $1.6 billion in bank debt that had to be repaid, National Amusements teetered on insolvency. It was forced to sell $1 billion in CBS and Viacom stock and a large part of its theater chain, including Shari’s upscale cinema in Los Angeles.
Forbes estimated that Sumner’s net worth had plunged from $6.8 billion in 2008 to just $1 billion in 2009—barely enough to keep him on the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. There was no further talk of buying out Shari’s interest. She threw herself into efforts to repay debt and renegotiate loans. Shari also took advantage of Sumner’s sudden financial vulnerability, demonstrating that she could be every bit as tough as her father. She had her lawyers draw up an eighty-page legal complaint that detailed, among other allegations, Sumner’s self-dealing in the Midway fiasco, and threatened to file it the next day.
Viacom and CBS employees, well aware of the growing father-daughter tensions, joked that the Redstones would be giving each other “subpoenas for Christmas.”
Sumner had to make concessions to stave off Shari’s complaint: Shari got to keep her 20 percent stake and was granted a lifetime employment contract at National Amusements, ensuring she would remain involved in the company for the foreseeable future. She would continue to be a director, but while she retained the title of president, it was largely ceremonial and she gave up any day-to-day management of the theater chain. She also got full ownership of the Russian theater chain—which she later sold for $190 million—and received $5 million to start her own venture capital fund.
Father and daughter entered into an uneasy truce. Shari never discussed the Forbes letter with her father or told him how much it had hurt her.
EPISODE 3
Sumner Will Live Forever
In 2008 Malia Andelin, a twenty-six-year-old makeup artist living in Laguna Beach, was, like so many Americans at the time, supplementing her income by buying and flipping real estate using borrowed money. Then the financial crisis struck, credit abruptly evaporated, and that was the end of that. Andelin was looking for another source of income when a friend recommended she try working as a flight attendant on a private jet. Part of her training was a self-defense course, where she met two pilots who recommended she work with them at the aviation company that staffed the CBS and Viacom planes.
Slim and blond, Andelin had grown up in Utah, the youngest of eight children in a straitlaced Mormon family. She’d never flown professionally, but she was willing to give it a try. On her first outing one of her passengers was the movie star Robert Downey Jr.
Andelin liked the work and seemed to have an aptitude for it. Inevitably the day came when Sumner was on board. In late November, little more than a month after he filed for divorce from Paula, Sumner was flying from New York back to Van Nuys Airport outside Los Angeles with his friend Arnold Kopelson, a producer and CBS board member, and his wife, Anne. While waiting for takeoff, Andelin went into the passenger cabin and asked Sumner if she could help him with his seat belt.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
“Sumner, stop,” Anne Kopelson interjected.
Andelin hardly knew how to respond. “I’m Malia,” she said. “I work on the plane.” She reminded him she’d flown with him once before.
“I’d remember a pretty face like yours,” he replied.
That angered her. “Who the fuck are you?” she said, and left the cabin.
That she could give as good as she got seemed to drive Sumner wild. He buzzed for her constantly once they were in the air.
“I hear women like to be spanked,” Sumner told her at one point. “Do you like to be spanked?”
Anne Kopelson tried in vain to silence him. Arnold said nothing.
“Please don’t sue me for sexual harassment,” Sumner told Andelin, and then laughed.
Sumner pelted Andelin with inappropriate comments for the rest of the flight, and she grew increasingly upset. He asked repeatedly for her address and phone number. She refused.
The pilots were aghast but not surprised—Sumner had made a habit of harassing women on the corporate jets and then getting them fired. After the plane landed, one of the pilots pulled Andelin aside.
“I’m probably not going to see you again,” he said. “I know how he is. We all know how he is.”
Despite her refusal, Sumner had no trouble getting Andelin’s phone number, presumably from the aviation company. He called incessantly—so often she turned off her phone. He left messages proposing they have dinner to discuss the menu on the corporate plane. She ignored him. Meanwhile, she wasn’t getting any assignments despite her persistent requests for more work. Sumner seemed to be dangling the prospect of getting her job back if she’d join him for dinner.
“Some say I created Mission: Impossible, and some say that this mission is impossible,” Sumner told her in one voice message. “But I made this mission possible. And I know that you’re risk averse and you wouldn’t talk to me on the plane, but I know that if you called me back and you were a risk-taker, this call could perhaps change your life.”
The message infuriated Andelin. How dare he leave her suggestive voice mails after she’d refused to give him her number and he’d blacklisted her from working on the plane? She called him and left a message. “Who do you think you are? This is not okay. I just want to know when I can have my job back.”
Sumner responded by sending her a gift—a Judith Leiber crystal-encrusted handbag in the shape of a panther (current versions retail for over $5,000). “I’m a panther and I’m going to pounce,” the accompanying note read.
Sumner’s driver finally showed up at her house. Would she have dinner with Sumner? Just once?
Nothing Andelin had done or said had deterred Sumner. She worried: given his enormous wealth and power, to what lengths might he go? Perhaps it would be easier to accept his invitation, at least once. Maybe she’d get her job back.
She eventually agreed to have dinner with Sumner. Something told her she’d come to regret it.
* * *
—
From the Zagat guide Sumner picked a restaurant in Newport Beach, not far from where Andelin lived. When the day arrived, Sumner picked Andelin up and had his driver take them there. She rarely drank alcohol, but that evening she sipped a glass of wine to calm her nerves.
After they left the restaurant, Andelin got in the back seat and Sumner slid in next to her. But instead of taking his seat in front, the driver lingered outside, leaving them alone in the car. Suddenly Sumner lunged at her and tried to get his hand under her blouse. Andelin pushed him away and managed to open the door and get out. She was in shock. She later didn’t remember how she got home.
The next day Sumner called and sent Andelin an email, which she ignored. Then his driver showed up and told her Sumner wanted to apologize in person. Various thoughts crossed her mind. Her first reaction was that she never wanted to see him again. But as she wrote in her journal at the time, Sumner had so much money and power he’d crush her eventually. She didn’t really feel she had a choice.
She reluctantly agreed to see him again.
Carlos Martinez, Sumner’s house manager for over ten years, greeted her when she arrived at Sumner’s mansion. He tried to reassure her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “I’m here. You’re not alone. You’re going to be okay. He just wants to give you the world.” But while Sumner was showing her his fish tank, she felt sick and thought she might faint.
Somehow she got through the evening. The next time Sumner invited her, she accepted. After one of her subsequent visits, Martinez gave her a check for $20,000, the amount, he said, she would have been paid had she worked on the jet that month. “Sumner wants you to know that,” he said.
She didn’t get any more work as a flight attendant. After about a month, Sumner told her there was no need for her to work on the plane. Instead, she could accompany him to dinners and join him on the red carpet at the many Hollywood premieres, galas, and benefits he attended.
Soon Andelin was a fixture at Sumner’s mansion, usually having dinner with him every week. As he did with others, Sumner often disparaged his children, Brent and Shari, when confiding in Andelin. Occasionally she had to sit through father-daughter visits, which she found awkward and tense. After a dinner with Sumner and Shari, Andelin shared a car with Shari, who cried during the trip.
One day Andelin was at the mansion when Shari brought Sumner some homemade biscotti. As Shari was leaving, she pulled Andelin aside. “You’re so sweet,” Shari told her. “I don’t know what your relationship is with my dad, but one thing you need to know: always speak your mind to him. Never back down, and always say how you feel.”
Andelin felt Shari was one of the few people around Sumner who was nice to her.
* * *
—
At its annual global conference in April 2009, the Milken Institute paired celebrity CNN host and interviewer Larry King with eighty-five-year-old (about to turn eighty-six) Sumner. King titled his “conversation” with Sumner “If You Could Live Forever . . .”
After all, Sumner had survived the hotel fire and a serious bout of prostate cancer in the mid-2000s (thanks in part to Milken, a prostate cancer survivor as well, who referred Sumner to a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center).
The room at the Beverly Hilton was packed; Moonves quietly took a seat in the back row. Clad in a navy suit and an open-necked blue shirt, Sumner began by asserting, “I have the vital statistics of a twenty-year-old,” a claim somewhat belied by the substantial paunch visible at his waist. “Even twenty-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 fifty minutes every day.” (Sumner told Andelin that he inspired the 2008 Paramount film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Brad Pitt plays a man who ages in reverse.)
However amusing the audience may have found Sumner’s claim to immortality, it reflected something more than just vanity. Even though he sometimes dismissed notions of an afterlife—quoting the passage from Genesis “From dust you are and to dust you will return”—Sumner had also confided in Andelin that the prospect of death terrified him because he’d face judgment and punishment for his many sins—a reckoning that thus far he’d escaped in life.
“How old are you?” King asked.
“Sixty-five,” Sumner replied. The audience laughed.
“Realistically,” King pressed him, “how old are you?”
“Sixty-five,” he insisted.
Sumner said he felt better than he had at age twenty.
“You have not slowed down sexually?” King asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
If anything, that appeared to be an understatement. Even as he courted Andelin with money, gifts, and attention, he was dating Rohini Singh, who at age nineteen had been the subject of an embarrassingly detailed 2001 Los Angeles Magazine cover story: “Hooking Up: Sex, Status and the Tribal Rituals of Young Hollywood.” (“A lot of guys say I have a reputation for sleeping around,” she’d told the reporter.) At Sumner’s insistence, CBS’s Showtime hired Singh that summer despite a hiring freeze at the cable network. As a job candidate Singh rotated through several departments at Showtime before picking public relations, a field in which she had no professional experience. Sumner showered her with Viacom stock, as well as a reported $18 million in payments.
The same year Sumner also started seeing Terry Holbrook, a brunette former Ford model and Houston Oilers cheerleader. Sumner bought her a $2.5 million house and paid for her stable of show horses. He also gave substantial amounts to RainCatcher, a Malibu-based charity she supported that focused on clean drinking water. Herzer maintained that Sumner paid Holbrook $4,500 a month in cash and those and other payments eventually amounted to $7 million. He also made Holbrook a beneficiary of his trust.
Over the years Sumner amended his trust more than forty times to add and remove numerous beneficiaries, many of them women he dated. Dauman, who as a cotrustee of Sumner’s trust was aware of many of the gifts, acknowledged that “several” women received over $20 million each, “a lot” of women received over $10 million, and “many, many” women received over $1 million.
In the spring of 2010 The Daily Beast’s Peter Lauria reported Sumner was dining with Moonves and Chen at Dan Tana’s with a “tall, tan, fembot-like blonde, young enough to be his granddaughter.” The “fembot” was Heather Naylor, Sumner’s latest fixation and the lead singer of a largely unknown girl group called the Electric Barbarellas. Sumner was pushing a reluctant Viacom-owned MTV to develop a reality series featuring the group’s quest for stardom, and he also wanted CBS to promote them.
Moonves dreaded these requests, but Sumner was his boss. Clad in satin hot pants and singing wildly off pitch, the Barbarellas made their CBS network debut on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on March 27, 2011. The operative word was late: their appearance came close to the end of the show at 1:30 a.m., when Moonves could only hope few people would be watching.
Lauria reported that Sumner spent half a million dollars flying the Barbarellas to New York for MTV auditions and had pushed the reality series into development over MTV executives’ strident objections. They told Lauria the show was “unwatchable and the music just as bad.”
Even Dauman tried to kill the project, but “I won’t be defied,” Sumner insisted.
The mildly embarrassing episode might have remained largely confined to Hollywood insiders, had Sumner not picked up the phone and called Lauria—not to deny the story but to try to unmask Lauria’s Viacom source, who Sumner speculated was a “young, male executive” who worked for MTV.
“You will be thoroughly protected,” Sumner assured Lauria in the call, which Lauria taped in its entirety and the Beast made available to the public. “We’re not going to hurt this guy. We just want to sit him down and find out why he did what he did. You will not in any way be revealed. You will be well-rewarded and well-protected.”
Lauria refused to disclose his source and instead turned the encounter into another story, which, thanks to Sumner’s direct involvement, got even more media attention. New York Times media columnist David Carr called the tape “a classic, a must-hear document of mogul prerogative in full cry.”
When Viacom’s Carl Folta saw the story, he told Dauman, “You’re not going to believe this.”
Folta asked Sumner about it, and Sumner denied making any such call.
“Sumner, they’ve got it on tape!” Folta exclaimed.
“Then fix it,” Sumner said.
The Electric Barbarellas debuted in MTV’s 2011 lineup and, thanks in part to the publicity surrounding Sumner, attracted nearly a million viewers. The “premiere was the #1 original cable series across all TV,” according to an email from an MTV executive to Naylor. But the show attracted some scathing reviews—a “hypercontrived, superstaged, and hair-extensioned mess,” as a New York magazine critic put it.
Ratings rapidly fell off, despite a classic reality show ending: a record executive calls and, to judge by the excited shrieks from the band members, a big recording contract seems imminent. But MTV canceled the show.
Redstone stayed in touch with Naylor, speaking with her by phone three to five times a week, according to Naylor. He encouraged her Hollywood aspirations and gave her career advice. Sumner also showered Naylor with Viacom stock and other payments that totaled over $20 million, according to Herzer.
