Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [205]
On occasions, it sometimes seemed as if G+W really was the heartless and monstrous mega-conglomerate trying to take over the studio in Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie, in which the corporate motto was “Engulf and devour,” and the inscription chiseled into the marble wall of the corporate bathroom read, “Our bathrooms are nicer than other people’s homes.” I remember a whole day spent in the Paramount movie theater (apparently sited below the G+W tower so that you could hear the rumble of the subway trains, by the same architect who put the sway into the building) in which each division’s numbers were projected onto a screen, while the head of the division was spotlit in his seat so that Bluhdorn could praise or excoriate him, as the case might be, and another, at a time when he was incensed by a series of muckraking articles about G+W in The New York Times, written by Seymour Hersh, when Bluhdorn tore a copy of the Times into pieces and flung them out at the audience of G+W executives, the climax of a speech of self-justification so violent, frenzied, and incoherent that everybody was in a state of shock by the end of it.
That was the public man, of course, who rather cherished his reputation for tantrums and high drama. At closer range, he could be far more subtle.
I WAS drawn into Bluhdorn’s circle of interest when in 1980 I published The Fifth Horseman, a novel by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre that foretold a terrorist attack on New York City by Palestinians using a smuggled atomic bomb. Collins and Lapierre were journalists, graduates of Newsweek and Paris-Match, respectively, and they therefore managed to give the book a certain scary realism. I do not know whether he had actually read The Fifth Horseman, but something in the book sparked him off in the spirit of Paul Revere. Over and over, with mounting passion, he held up meetings by explaining to startled and terrified financial managers how New York City could be blown to pieces—all of it, even the G+W tower, for chrissakes—by terrorists, and (his voice rising in pitch like an air-raid siren) NOBODY IN AUTHORITY WOULD LISTEN, NOBODY WAS PREPARED, NOBODY WAS TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY! It could be happening, he cried, at this very minute!
The only way to make people aware of the danger, Bluhdorn finally decided, was to make The Fifth Horseman into a movie, a big movie, which he figured would be a huge international box-office hit. It became his mission to get the movie made.
Unfortunately, there was one obstacle, even after Bluhdorn had managed to buy the rights from the authors’ agent, Irving Lazar: Barry Diller, who was then running Paramount (and doing a brilliant job of it), didn’t want to make it. Bluhdorn never stopped arguing with Diller about The Fifth Horseman (and the more Bluhdorn argued, the more Diller dug his heels in), but he would not, under any circumstances, order Diller to make the picture. Whenever things got out of hand, Diller, whose ability to handle his mercurial boss smoothly was legendary, would simply remind Bluhdorn that all he had to do was send a memo ordering him to make The Fifth Horseman and sign it. The picture would then be made.
But of course that was the one thing Bluhdorn couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. He believed in delegating authority. Besides, if the project failed, he wanted to be able to say to Diller that it was his decision, not Bluhdorn’s, that if he wasn’t man enough to stand up to Bluhdorn, he wasn’t man enough to run the studio. Diller was secure in the knowledge that however much Bluhdorn might rant and rave at him, his boss would never send that memo. The only people who didn’t understand that were the authors, who assumed that when Bluhdorn wanted something done, it happened.
As the editor of the book, I was dragged into this imbroglio because of my knowledge of the story—I was, after all, the one person who could be certified as having actually read the book, unlike