Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [203]
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,