Are there any good guys in this intermittently juicy tale? Well, actually, some might say Ross himself is the only candidate. Bruck struggles mightily to get a fix on Ross, who died of prostate cancer in December 1992. Ambivalent at times, she wisely admits that Ross, with his considerable business and social skills, defies “facile” analysis. But in the end she believes that Ross not only abrogated legal, ethical and moral standards but-more amazing-was even perceived as the “very exemplar” of those standards by his hordes of fans.
At first blush it’s hard to knock something as uplifting as Ross’s rise from the funeral-home business (albeit his wealthy in-laws’) to head of a media giant, Time Warner, created in the 1990 merger. Raised in Brooklyn, Ross abounded with a charm and charisma that enveloped everyone from Wall Street to Hollywood; Warren Beatty was so taken after his first meeting that he joked, “Maybe I could marry him!” A so-so student and a lover of old movies-never books-Ross was smart; he was among the first, for instance, to understand cable TV’s potential. Spielberg said Ross reminded him of Oskar Schindler, the manipulative, carefree German who saves Jews from the Nazis in “Schindler’s List”; he even had Liam Neeson, who played Schindler, study home movies of Ross.
But before we get too misty-eyed, Bruck tells us that Ross was “no heroic figure,” that his reputation for generosity and loyalty was an inflated myth he used to help build the business. He comes oh-so-close to getting indicted for a kickback scheme in the 1970s involving financing the now defunct Westchester Premier Theater. He betrays and uses his friends, like Jay Emmett who took the rap in the Westchester case. He is dogged by rumors of mob ties, starting with the early days in the parking-lot business. He alienates his children and, for good measure, tells white lies. He told so many people that he had played football for the Cleveland Browns that The New York Times printed it.
If Ross is well known as the master of the extravagant gesture, well, it’s easy to be generous with other people’s money-something that seemed to elude his enamored Hollywood buddies. When he, his wife and two other couples flew to Mexico for Christmas it required one corporate plane for the people and one for gifts. He sent a company plane to California to bring Spielberg’s dogs to New York’s Long Island. Ross’s third wife, Courtney, was no slacker, once commanding staff to serve her daughter only in Baccarat crystal (she denied this).
This excess might be defended as business as usual in Hollywood, but it made the notion of a merger with the white-shoe Time Inc. almost laughable. One director reportedly said of the Time board’s merger approval: “Mafia, 12; Whiffenpoofs, O.” Ross is at his Machiavellian best here, while Time Inc.’s bosses, who thwart a better takeover bid by Paramount to save their jobs, look “venal.” Bruck savages Levin as a Ross “supplicant” who helps engineer a double-cross coup of co-CEO Nicholas Nicholas; Nicholas receives more sympathetic treatment.
Bruck concludes that history will judge Ross largely on the success of the Time Warner merger, which she thinks is open to question. (Talk of a hostile bid by Seagram remains strong.) But that judgment on his business acumen implies that if the merger succeeds all is forgiven. That’s surely not the verdict that Bruck has in mind.
ALL I KNOW IS THAT I GO where I find the most fascinating characters," says Connie Bruck, 47, of her reporting career. She covered the counterculture for a San Diego weekly, worked for The American Lawyer and then in 1984, she profiled Ivan Boesky for The Atlantic. “I got to know all these people on Wall Street,” she recalls. “I thought, God, they’re much more interesting than the lawyers.” Her eye-opening book about junk-bond king Michael Milken, “The Predator’s Ball” (1988), cemented her reputation as a business journalist.
Bruck got to know Steve Ross while covering the Time Warner merger for The New Yorker, but they Id only talked “a handful of times” for “Master of the Game” before it was announced he had cancer. “I wrote him a note,” she says. “I told him I was rooting for him. Courtney, his wife, called to say he was touched by the note, and maybe if the chemotherapy wasn’t too devastating I could come visit.” Bruck never saw Ross again.
“I’m no visionary,” she insists. “I move by instinct.” Maybe that’s why she’s now working on a New Yorker profile of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
