The Burning Passion of Sumner Redstone
His most valuable asset was self-confidence. When they took that away, he nearly lost everything.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” — William Shakespeare, King Henry IV
Rothstein was a genius. He wasn’t shy about letting you in on this secret, which is how I found out. By genius, not your run-of-the-mill kind who takes calculus II in high school. Rothstein had an IQ of 180, which he also told me. He enjoyed using his brain to get his way. Finding a more suitable name was his “coup” after graduating from Boston Latin high school (first in his class, of course). He approached his father. Maybe it was more of a directive than a dialogue. The elder Rothstein built up a tidy business called National Amusements that would become the foundation of the son’s international entertainment conglomerate. The elder Rothstein asked, “so what name did you have in mind?” Shakespeare once said roses by another name smell just as sweet, and Rothstein became Redstone (the English translation). Sumner Rothstein the genius became Sumner Redstone the tycoon.
From that running start, Redstone enters Harvard and graduates at age nineteen. Then the U.S. War Department Encryption Corps, where he works on complicated Japanese cipher codes during WWII. Then Harvard Law School. Like he said, genius.
Before you could say superstar, Redstone wafted a magic wand over Hollywood and New York, bullying and reshaping the entertainment industry, turning his platform into a content and digital colossus. When I met him, he owned 70% of Viacom and CBS. Redstone might just as well have changed his name to Sumner Midas. His net worth was over $5 billion. At the time, I was the publisher of Forbes Magazine. We had spent time together on the slopes at Davos a few months earlier. When he invited me to lunch, I wondered what could he possibly want?
I was escorted into a small dining room adjacent to his office. Shrimp the size of lobsters were on the table. I stared to see if they were still alive. I thought you needed a license to kill things that size. Redstone didn’t touch a bite; I ate ravenously like a boxer preparing for a bout. He was upset, which was a surprise. As he would note, “I give ulcers, I don’t get them.”
Ask anyone who worked closely with Sumner Redstone, and they’ll say they knew they would be fired, just not precisely when. The distinguished club that worked and was dismissed by Redstone includes CEOs of Viacom and CBS. They oversaw Paramount Studios, CBS Network, MTV, SKG Dreamworks, Comedy Central, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. On the plus side, he paid well. Suppose you can call it a managerial style, Redstone’s required shuffling chief executives like discarded tires. He didn’t bother to set them on fire when he was done. Perhaps there was a good reason.
He looked at me with those light green eyes that gave the distinct impression they know what you are thinking and have the answer. Then he popped a question with a half-smile, “Jeff, why does BusinessWeek hate me?”
I wasn’t sure where to start. “Sumner, they don’t hate you. Business Week wants you to tell them your secrets as we do.”
Redstone answered, “They say I lied about the fire.”
On March 29, 1979, the fifty-six-year-old Redstone was at the Boston Copley Plaza Hotel when it burst into flames. A disgruntled teenage busboy had lit the fire. As it made its way to the upper floors, Redstone climbed out on the window, hung on by his arm as fire trucks made their way to his bed while he took turns burning one arm and the other. By the time they brought him down, over two-thirds of his body was burned. Surgeons predicted Redstone would never be able to use his arms. Like many of his adversaries, including the fire, the doctors underestimated him.
The surgical team took 30 hours at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the burn unit is named after him. It took Redstone 8 years and multiple more surgeries before he recovered. By the time they were finished, Redstone was playing competitive tennis (with a racquet taped to his hand). Most of us would be pleased to survive; Redstone had to show he could be better than before. That was about the time he launched a hostile takeover of Paramount. Redstone’s near-death experience turned into a realization that he could survive anything and anyone. There was one exception.
BusinessWeek had done a hatchet job. “They said I lied about the fire. That I was not so badly hurt. They got a fireman to dispute my version. He said I was in no real danger.” It was an existential moment for a titan who lost no battles and took few prisoners. Sumner Redstone knew how to compete, but he liked holding the right cards and did not know how to deal with a joker called shame.
Redstone began to cry. As my iced shrimp was beginning to wilt, tears ran down his face, and he wiped them with his right hand, more of a claw after the burn surgeries, as if to prove a point. He looked at me with fear in his eyes, “I am so depressed. I don’t know what to do.” The challenge to his integrity, on top of the suffering, was too much. He was like a child beaten for something he didn’t do. He wanted help.
Business Week wasn’t a typical gossipmonger. So the fireman’s story was true, or a lie? It turned out to be the latter. But why? Media falsehoods, what we call fake news these days, are usually unintentional. Most often, it is sloppy fact-checking. Warren Buffett once told me, “a bad story has a lot of momentum. People with an ax to grind feed the reporter with confirmatory evidence.”
In Redstone’s case, in the heat of the night, no one was thinking about injuries, just saving lives. Who would know that this guy hanging outside the window was a media tycoon? He was just another critical victim to a fireman.
Firefighters risk their lives every day, so trauma isn’t a big deal. It might be after learning it was Redstone that he saved, the fireman felt he was due some recognition, even a reward. He may have filed a grudge away for years. We can never know.
Redstone looked at me and asked, “Should I sue?”
War with the media reminds everyone of Mark Twain’s dictum, “don’t get into a letter-writing contest with people who buy ink by the barrel.” He was right. But that didn’t mean you had to sit on your hands.
I replied, “Sumner, if you sue, you will draw attention to the negative part of the story. It’s called the Streisand Effect when the famous singer did her best to kill a story but only made it more famous. BusinessWeek will follow up on your rebuttal, and I assure you that people will line up to say things against you. There are enemies, and we both know you have a few. These stories have a life of their own, and this one is about to die if you let it.”
“So what should I do?”
“Go dark.”
“What does that mean?”
“Shut down the Redstone news machine. By next month the story will be history. The fireman will go back to his beery retirement at a local tavern. Then give an exclusive to The Wall Street Journal.”
“What will BusinessWeek do?” Redstone asked, looking puzzled.
“They’ll be too busy trying to figure out why their reporters are missing the story. Your power is access. Deny it.”
He asked, almost wistfully, “What then?”
“One year later, as you are talking about a deal, bring the Copley Plaza fire story up again and mention in passing the BusinessWeek article that didn’t check the facts. The world will remember your version of the story.”
Eventually, BusinessWeek sold itself to Bloomberg for peanuts. They forgot the most important secret about Sumner Redstone. Despite all his schooling, he never learned how to lose.
