The reviewer of theBoston Globesaid point blank: Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top.
As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) until the 1990s, Lew Wasserman was the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His career spanned the entire history of the movies, from the silent era to the present, and he was guru to Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, and to a new generation of filmmakers beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. For more than four years, Dennis McDougal interviewed over 350 people who knew the man with the giant dark horn-rimmed glasses--colleagues, relatives, rivals--and drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents to produce this extraordinary and first-ever portrait of a legend and his times, a book that theNew York Times Book Reviewcalled thoroughly reported and engrossing and that theDaily Newscalled, simply, a bombshell.
Dennis McDougal,an investigative reporter for the
Los Angeles Timesfor more than a decade, has won scores of journalistic honors, including the National Headliners Award and several Associated Press awards. He lives in Long Beach, California.