Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [204]
Bluhdorn’s impatience, his histrionics, his boasting, his kinetic hyperactivity, and monumental chutzpah—in brief, all the things that made him a distrusted figure on Wall Street and in the financial press—were assets in Tinseltown. It was sheer chutzpah to pick Robert Evans, then best known as a smooth and handsome young suit-and-cloaker who became an actor and Hollywood man-about-town, to be Paramount’s version of Irving Thalberg, a move that confounded everybody in the industry, including Evans himself, but with his usual shrewdness, Bluhdorn made sure that Evans was surrounded by tough businessmen with good heads for numbers, like Martin S. Davis. The mixture was enormously successful: Paramount’s run of box office disasters was replaced by pictures like Catch-22, The Godfather, and Love Story. Bluhdorn’s talent for knocking people’s heads together and persuading them to do what they didn’t want to do was a godsend for Paramount, whether it was getting a reluctant Walter Matthau to star in the movie of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple or talking Irving Lazar into accepting an offer for the screen rights to Funny Girl. Profane, tireless, crackling with nervous energy, it was as if Bluhdorn always got what he wanted, and since success breeds success, it was soon the case.
He loved Hollywood, and the glamour that went with it, the private jet whisking him off to L.A., the discreet bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the atmosphere of luxurious decadence combined with hard-headed deal-making and unbridled competition, the opportunity to spar with egos that were even bigger than his own. These were the late sixties, too, before the fear of AIDS and the abuse of cocaine took their toll of people’s private lives in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. It was the time of Hugh Hefner’s West Coast Playboy mansion, of nonstop partying at the home of disgraced financier Bernie Cornfeld, of parties at Bob Evans’s home where there were always beautiful girls, dozens of them, some of them swimming tirelessly back and forth in the floodlit pool, hour after hour, just to give the guests something to look at. Whatever else Bluhdorn got out of his acquisition of Paramount, one of them was a reputation as a man who liked women, and expected to be provided with them—no big deal in the movie business, which has always been run in the spirit of a sultan’s harem.
Stories were told about Bluhdorn’s blossoming into a full-blown man of the world, one of them being that when Bluhdorn swept into the Plaza Hotel on his way to the Oak Room (then his favorite place for lunch, before he started using his own dining room at the top of the G+W tower), followed by his entourage, he saw a very beautiful young woman sitting on a taboret, and gave her the once-over. Turning to one of his PR men, he told him to invite the woman to lunch, then swept on.
A few minutes later, the PR man returned from his mission empty-handed. It wasn’t his fault, he explained—she was waiting, in fact, for her husband, so there was no way he could have persuaded her to accept the invitation. Bluhdorn ignored the man and glanced at the table setting in front of where the PR man was to sit. “Take all that away,” Bluhdorn told the maître d’. “He won’t be eating with us.”
Stories of abrupt dismissals like this were rife, but most of the people at the core of G+W were fanatically loyal to Bluhdorn and he to them. Once he had decided that you were “my boy” or “a genius” or both, he was endlessly supportive, though you had to be able to withstand his ferocious attempts to persuade you to accept his point of view. In truth, the quickest way to gain his respect was to disagree with him, if you had your facts