SUNSET AT 97 FOR CBS MOGUL SUMNER
Death of a media titan with an insatiable desire for money, power, ‘steak and sex’
SUMNER Redstone, the billionaire media magnate whose family company controls CBS and Viacom — and whose career spilled from boardrooms to gossip sheets — died Tuesday. He was 97.
“Sumner played a critical role in shaping the landscape of the modern media and entertainment industry,” National Amusements, the media holding company he controlled, said in a statement Wednesday.
Although buffeted in the past decade by physical decline, succession battles and warring exgirlfriends, Redstone was a business juggernaut and once the richest man in media. He had an insatiable desire for power, money, and — a girlfriend once claimed — “steak and sex.”
Through his prescient confidence in the future of cable TV, Redstone built Viacom — and himself — into a powerhouse.
“Viacom is me, and I am Viacom,” he was famous for saying.
Redstone took a small chain of drive-in theaters started by his father and, through bareknuckle takeover battles and sheer determination, became a dominant force in entertainment.
As the chairman and controlling shareholder of CBS and Viacom, he presided over an array of media businesses that included CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Simon & Schuster, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.
In 1999 he added the Tiffany Network to his holdings. The $37 billion merger with CBS catapulted Redstone from the business pages onto the public stage at age 76 — making him the 10th-wealthiest man in America, worth $14 billion, according to Forbes.
“What I’m proudest of is taking a bunch of drive-in movie theaters and building them up into two of the best media companies in the world,” he told Forbes in October 2007.
Redstone claimed credit for coining the phrase, “Content is king” — a mantra he would repeat when asked about emerging threats to his empire.
And Redstone himself supplied a steady stream of “content” — the often-tawdry details of his life — to gossip pages through a series of court battles over his family, his colleagues and his women.
“Sumner Redstone was one of the great media moguls of the 21st century,” said his biographer, Keach Hagey.
“His point was that in any battle between distribution and content, content wins,” she said. “Distribution is nothing if you have nothing to distribute.”
Redstone made no secret of his desire to outlast his rivals and retain his grip on his empire — and his sexual appetite, too, seemed insatiable even in his old age.
Despite his fading health, he refused to talk about his succession plans, declaring that he intended to live forever.
Redstone was born Sumner
Murray Rothstein in 1923, and raised by his homemaker mother and linoleum-peddler father in a Boston West End tenement.
He attended Harvard and Harvard Law School. As an undergraduate, he was tapped by a Japanese history professor to help break Japan’s military codes.
In 1954, he joined his father’s Dedham, Mass., business, Northeast Theater Corp.
Redstone went to work alongside his younger brother, Edward, and Sumner’s arrival would spawn the first of several family feuds that spanned decades and several court battles.
Redstone eventually took over the company from his father, built it into one of the largest theater chains in the country and changed its name to National Amusements Inc. His iron will was legendary. In 1979, at age 56, the movietheater mogul barely survived a deadly fire at Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel by clinging to a tiny, third-story window ledge by his fingertips, waiting for rescue.
Redstone insisted he was not galvanized by this close encounter with death.
“I hadn’t changed,” he wrote. “I have always been driven. I have a passion to win, and the will to win is the will to survive.”
At the age of 64, a time when most CEOs are thinking about retiring, Redstone seized the opportunity to become a bigger player in the entertainment world.
In 1987 he borrowed billions to fund a bruising takeover battle for Viacom, then the owner of MTV and Showtime, and shrugged off criticism that he vastly overpaid. He went on to wage a similar takeover battle for Paramount Communications, beating fellow media moguls Barry Diller and John Malone with a nearly $10 billion bid, and then bought movie-rental giant Blockbuster Entertainment for $8 billion.
In 2000 Redstone pulled off what was then the largest media
marriage ever, when Viacom acquired its former corporate parent, CBS, for $35 billion.
It was soon after the CBS purchase that Redstone’s notoriety spilled out of the boardroom, when Phyllis, his wife of 52 years, sought a divorce and a $3 billion chunk of his fortune.
The impetus was a front-page New York Post photograph — snapped by Phyllis’ private investigators — that showed Redstone “strolling down a Paris street with a beautiful woman,” as he wrote in his memoir.
He spent $1.6 billion divorcing Phyllis, and then millions more in 2007 divorcing his second wife, Paula Fortunato, a public-school teacher who had been introduced
JUST two years before his second divorce, Redstone had also seemed headed for a split with his empire.
Redstone anointed daughter Shari his heir apparent. But the two repeatedly warred and reconciled, only to war again.
As he entered his 90s, his health deteriorated.
By 2014 he could barely speak and reportedly dozed during a company board meeting he attended in person. Still he continued to cling to power, just as he had clung to the window ledge of his burning Boston hotel room.
“Your grandfather says I will be chair over his dead body,” Shari told her son, Tyler Korff, in a July 2015 e-mail that became evidence in a lawsuit.
By 2016, things began falling apart. In February of that year, Shari staged a company takeover attempt after a contentious court battle over his mental competency.
That same year, Redstone became embroiled in salacious lawsuits and countersuits with two former longtime live-in girlfriends.
The women were kicked out of his $20 million Beverly Hills mansion shortly after a Vanity Fair article suggested that in his twilight years they became more controlling of the mogul and his fortune.
One, Argentina-born peroxide blonde Manuela Herzer, dragged Redstone to court in protest after being booted from his home — and written out of his will.
In court papers, she claimed Redstone could barely speak — nothing more than “brief grunt responses” — or scrawl his name, let alone run a multibillion-dollar media empire.
But that didn’t mean he had lost his hunger for steak, or sex.
According to the court filings, Redstone “demands, to the extent he can be understood, to engage in sexual activity every day, even though [primary-care physician] Dr. [Richard] Gold has repeatedly recommended that he abstain from daily sexual activity.”
The other gal pal, brunette Sydney Holland, sued after Redstone dumped her when she admitted to an infidelity.
Their X-rated court battle included claims that Redstone had given $18 million to a flight attendant on the CBS corporate jet — and then slept with the woman’s sister, handing her $6 million.
Other allegations against the naughty nonagenarian included that he bedded 11 other women — showering them with tens of millions of dollars — after proposing to Holland.
And Redstone liked his favors freaky, Holland intimated, claiming there were “uncomfortable requests made of Sydney that will not be detailed here.” Both suits were eventually settled.
MEANWHILE, Redstone’s personal eccentricities appeared to multiply with age. The meticulous mogul demanded that his barber, “Joe,” cut his hair every day. During plane trips, he’d offer a flight attendant money to clip his toenails.
“He told me how he wanted to have it done, and it wasn’t your typical pedicure,” flight attendant Betsy Dwyer Loomis told The Post of working aboard the Paramount Pictures corporate jet.
“I never did it,” she added, explaining that the mogul’s toenails “were like ancient sea scrolls.”
Redstone remained a wealthy man, worth an estimated $3 billion. But he was left holding just one seat on NAI’s board, eviscerating his once-considerable decision-making power.
But clearly he wished to be heard until the end.
The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2018 that he communicated through an iPad loaded with important commands and phrases recorded in his own voice.
Those phrases included “Yes,” “No” and “F--k you.”