The Survival of the Fittest

It was March 12, 1979 when a fire broke out in the Copley Hotel in Boston. Set by a disgruntled employee, the fire killed two people while others screamed for their lives, and a solitary man desperately clung from a third-floor ledge of a window while fire consumed his hand and much of his body. Despite all odds, after 60 hours of surgery and five operations, Sumner Redstone survived.
Sumner Redstone always survives.

“After the third operation, the doctors came in and took the bandages off to see if the skin graft took, and it did,” recalls Sumner. “The doctor said, ‘Congratulations,’ and I said, ‘Wait a minute, you guys saved my life and you’re congratulating me?’ And the doctor said to me, ‘Everything we know about burn surgeries is on your body: skin grafts, bone grafts, your toes were nailed to your foot. The reason you are alive is because of you and your will to win.’ I’ll tell you, there is no bigger win than your life. I think today, that no matter what the disease, if people have an obsessive desire to win they will have a better chance of surviving.”

And an obsessive desire to win is the essence of Sumner.

Sumner Murray Rothstein was born May 27, 1923 in a Boston tenement. (Seventeen years later his father changed their last name to Redstone.) Most of his childhood was spent in a small apartment without the luxury of a bathroom. His father struggled to make a living. Some of Sumner’s earliest memories of his father are of his work as a linoleum salesman with linoleum strapped to his back. Sumner recalls his mother being a “tyrant” who constantly drove him to succeed, with education at the top of the list. Eventually the family found better times. They acquired a piano, and what Sumner remembers is that his mother requiring him to practice an hour every day.

“My mother used to sneak into the room and turn the clock back so I had to practice an extra half-hour, but I really enjoyed the piano. Before I got injured I was a great classic pianist, concert pianist, and jazz player. Now it’s difficult to play with my hand, but back then my teacher actually wanted me to be a professional musician. He used to send me out with big bands, and at Harvard I had my own band. I really enjoyed music.”

Sumner’s father eventually broke into the nightclub business, buying Boston’s Latin Quarter from Lou Walters, father of Barbara Walters. He also opened a drive-in theater business, which he expanded into a small chain that flourished after the war.

The Redstones’ wealth was slowly growing. His parents sent him to Boston Latin School, which is the oldest and, at that time, toughest, public school in the U.S.

“In those days, it was the best school in the country,” remarks Sumner. “It beat schools like Andover and Exeter in terms of the kids that got into Harvard. I wanted to be number one. I didn’t go out, no dates, no girls. I studied, studied, studied, and ended-up being number one in my class with the best record the school had in its 350-year history.”

It was the first of many wins for Sumner Redstone.

Sumner got into Harvard at the age of 17 and finished in less than three years, studying languages and the classics. During his time at Harvard, he was a member of an elite group recruited by the U.S. government to crack the Japanese military code during WWII. Having a language background in Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and Japanese, his Professor Reischauer, who later became the ambassador to Japan, took Sumner and another student to Washington. Their mission was to help break the high-level military and diplomatic codes of the Japanese, something that had never been done. Using a combination of language and mathematics, they succeeded. This extraordinary accomplishment might be enough to satisfy most men’s desire to leave their mark. But for Sumner it was a just one step in a long journey to achieve greatness in the media world.

First, he went back to Harvard to study law.

He excelled, of course, and to make extra money he purchased surplus military items at reduced rates offered to veterans. In a preview of his deal-making prowess, he took these boxes of tools and sold them for $10,000, a sum that would translate into about $90,000 today. Not bad for a young man still in his 20s.

Upon graduation and with some money in his pocket, he got a position as a clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, making about $43 a week. Then in 1951, at the ripe young age of 28, he became partner in the Washington law firm of Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland & Redstone, earning an astounding $100,000 a year back when six-figure incomes seemed more like rumor than reality. It was during this time that Sumner made one of his first risk-taking decisions—he left his prestigious high-paying job to work for his father for just $5,000 a year.

“When I was a lawyer I enjoyed practicing law because I thought I would make the world better,” explains Sumner. “It may sound jargonistic today, but a lot of kids, particularly in Washington, thought they were going to make a dent by being lawyers. And when I realized that the law was just another business, I decided I had enough and went to work for my father’s company.”

Sumner’s father and younger brother Edward ran Redstone Management, the family’s small chain of drive-in theaters in the Northeast. They were small fish in a large pond trying to stay competitive against the big Hollywood studios that owned theaters and wouldn’t give them first-run on new movies. Sumner took Hollywood to court and won.

Not long after, Sumner started to see the bigger picture, so to speak.

Sumner gradually took control of the business and later changed the company name to National Amusements, Inc. The business grew from a regional chain with 59 screens in 1964, to 129 screens in 1974, to where it stands today as a major international circuit with more than 1,500 motion picture screens in the U.S., the U.K., Latin America, and Russia, as well as a portfolio of real estate assets and a partnership in MovieTickets.com, an online ticketing service.

In addition to growing his chain, Sumner also changed the way exhibition companies presented films with the invention of the multiplex theater. The first of these was built in Worcester, Massachusetts, when Sumner purchased a single-screen theater and divided it into two.

“What I realized was that people used to go to drive-ins because it was the only way to see a movie if you lived outside the city. I also realized that the land the drive-ins were on was a lot more valuable than the drive-in operation would warrant, so that is when I started to think about building theaters in the suburbs,” explains Sumner.

Throughout his career, Sumner proved to be a shrewd investor. Most importantly, he has demonstrated a savant-like gift for predicting trends. In 1977, he went to a screening of Star Wars. Recognizing its potential, he immediately purchased stock in Twentieth Century Fox. He bought it at $8 a share and later sold it for $60 a share, making at least $20 million on the investment. Three years, later he began purchasing Columbia Pictures stock, which Coca-Cola later bought, resulting in a $25 million profit. Sumner also made about $15 million selling his MGM stock to Kirk Kerkorian.

Sumner seemed to be on a roll. Then the fire.

“I came out with the same character I had before the fire,” he says.  “My priorities didn’t change, my values didn’t change, nothing changed. People think that this kind of event is a seminal moment that changes your life, but I stayed the same.”

Whether true or not, the fact remains that Sumner’s public life seemed to be accelerated from that day forward. Not only would his career become a how-to book for aspiring billionaires, but he would also become a prominent philanthropist, even helping finance the development of artificial skin for burn patients. (In April 2007, he announced a commitment of $105 million in charitable grants to fund research and patient care advancements in burn recovery and cancer to several non-profit organizations.)

Next stop, Viacom.

It was a company that by common wisdom looked to have a limited future without much growth potential. Sumner saw what others did not. National Amusements borrowed $240 million for the purchase of Viacom, leaving his company in debt.

“I was content to be a passive investor at Viacom, owning stocks,” explains Sumner, “but when Viacom’s management at the time decided to buy the company on the cheap, I thought that it was not in my interest or the company’s interest, and I decided to go for it. I knew nothing about the business. In fact, they called me the peasant from Boston but I had a brain in my head, which is all it really takes. You don’t have to know a particular business if you have a sense of commitment and drive and some intellectual capacity.”

With the purchase of Viacom, Sumner secured his position as a leader in the global media explosion to come. Now he possessed a company with television production and network assets. Most notably, Viacom owned MTV and Nickelodeon, two fledgling networks his advisors told him he would be crazy to keep. MTV was being labeled as a fad and Nickelodeon was being put down as just a kids network.

“I’ve learned to trust my instincts, which is important in every acquisition,” Sumner explains. “My judgment told me MTV wasn’t just a music channel, it’s a generational channel and a billion people today are watching that fad. Nickelodeon is the number one channel in the United States. You have to follow your own instincts and your own judgment.”

Thus began a series of hard-won battles.

Sumner soon would find himself in a bitter fight with Barry Diller for Paramount Communications Inc. Sumner won, but the fight was gruesome and Sumner recalls the media was favoring the charismatic Diller.

“I’ve said and have always believed that optimism is the only philosophy in life that is compatible with sanity,” says Sumner. “Therefore, I never conceive I could lose a battle. I might, but I will never conceive of it.”

Purchasing DreamWorks SKG from Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen in 2005 for a mere $600 million made him the owner of two Hollywood Studios. Last year, however, Spielberg left the Paramount family to purchase another film studio venture with Indian-backed financing.

2005 was also the year Sumner ushered out the era of the conglomerate. Viacom announced it would split all of its assets into two separate publicly held companies: Viacom and CBS Corporation.

“It was a revolutionary move and we were the first to do it,” states Sumner.

In 2006, Sumner made headlines again for publicly firing Tom Cruise, a decision he has never regretted. He cited Cruise’s poor box-office receipts and his controversial wacky behavior for his decision, though most believe it was strictly for financial reasons. Cruise and his partner were getting a cushy $10 million a year for keeping their office on the lot, and Sumner has always been a firm believer that script is the most important element of a film. “Without a good script,” says Sumner, “you don’t have a good movie, no matter what star is in the role.” This coming from the man that coined the phrase “content is king.”

For the last decade, Sumner has been splitting his time between New York and Los Angeles, though in recent years he’s finding himself more at home on the West Coast. If a home is indicative of the owner, in comparison to his wealth and the homes of his neighbors, Sumner’s is modest. Nestled in a gated community and perched on the hillside of a cul-de-sac, this four-bedroom manor boasts a large koi pond, home theater, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a tennis court, and fitness room—just the basic essentials. Sumner finds relaxation competing on the tennis court. Legendary film producer and former head of Paramount, Robert Evans, once said, “I’ve played with every tennis pro including Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. Sumner’s more competitive. He screams and argues about every point. He’s the single most competitive tennis player I’ve ever seen. And this coming from a guy who has to strap a racket to a glove because of his burn injury.”

Competitive: yes. Materialistic: surprisingly not. Sumner has always said he has never been driven by money, just the desire to win. In fact, he claims the only thing of material value that he owns is his house.

“That’s true,” says Sumner. “In fact, I used to buy my suits off the rack from Filene’s Basement in Boston until my associates at Viacom told me I needed to stop that. I used to just travel by cab and my associates said it’s not safe and I needed to get a car and driver. So yes, I have never had a real interest in anything material.

The house is more than a home to Sumner, “It’s paradise,” he says. He knew he had to buy it when he walked out back, looked at the infinity pool and Jacuzzi with sprawling views of the trees and bushes that were peppered along the peaks and valleys of Beverly Hills. His favorite room of the house is what he refers to as the fish room. It’s a cozy den with floor-to-ceiling windows and striking fish tanks built into surrounding walls. Not surprisingly, Sumner boasts he has the largest private collection for saltwater fish in the world, which he keeps in seven tanks. He even has a hospital tank in the garage to nurse the sick and weak.

“I find it mesmerizing,” explains Sumner. “When I’m working, I love to sit and look at such beautiful fish and I understand that by doing this it lowers your blood pressure, to be caught-up by such beauty.”

Sumner knows the names, characteristics, and behaviors of each one. Perhaps it’s this acute sense of observation that enables him to tune into the zeitgeist, or perhaps he was just born at the right time, but every move he makes seems to be the right one. Upon mentioning the word legacy, he’s quick to say that he’s going to live forever and no matter where he is in 100 years he will still control Viacom. Though softness emerged from the media mogul as he smiled and said, “I make it my business to look when I’m driving to see the foliage, to see the trees, to see the houses, and I think that is very advantageous, to spend time looking at what’s around you, the beautiful things around you.”

If, by chance, Sumner has a legacy to leave behind, besides the obvious groundbreaking, worldwide media revolution, it’s that we can all learn to take our time to smell the roses.

Looking for expert legal representation? connect with vetted lawyers on Haute Lawyer.