Sumner Redstone's extraordinary life

Description

Sumner Redstone in 1988, after he took over Viacom and while he was making a play for Paramount Pictures Sumner Redstone’s death on Tuesday comes after a colorful life that began humbly in Boston and saw him rise bombastically through the TV and movie world, collecting film studios and cable conglomerates all while juggling two marriages, a string of messy affairs, family feuds and mammoth business deals.   The ViacomCBS giant died aged 97, his family revealed on Tuesday, after a sad existence in recent years. After being hospitalized in 2014 with pneumonia and having ingested food in his lungs, he spent much of the last six years unable to speak. He communicated through an iPad and was cared for round-the-clock by nurses who have claimed he was often reduced to tears and screaming by an ex-girlfriend, Sydney Holland, who they say tried to keep him from his family. That life in his final days is a far cry from the trail he blazed in the world of entertainment over the last 50 years. Born Sumner Rothstein in Boston in 1923, his father Max sold linoleum from the back of a truck and his mother was a housekeeper. When he was a teenager, his father changed the family name to Redstone.  Redstone was dismayed and thought his father was trying to abandon their Jewish heritage.

Friends close to the family have since suggested that Max did not want the family to be associated with the famous gangster, Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the world series. After high school, he enrolled at Harvard, on a scholarship, and graduated within three years. He was so skilled in languages that he was invited to Washington during World War II to work as an army cryptographer to decipher Japanese military codes. In 1947, Redstone married his first wife, Phyllis.

They welcomed their children Shari and Brent and the family lived for a time in San Francisco, where he worked in a law firm and later teaching at a university. Redstone’s first foray into the world of TV and movies came in 1954, when he abandoned his law career to join his father who had saved enough money to buy a drive-in movie theater. Together and with the contribution of Sumner’s brother, they bought 11 more. Redstone married his passion for movies with his legal expertise to sue film studios which, at the time, didn’t allow drive-ins to lease first-run films.In the early 1960s, as the appetite for drive-in theaters declined, he tore them down and started building multiplexes in their places.Redstone became CEO of his father’s company – National Amusements Inc – in 1964. For the next several years, he invested on he side in studios but his quickly ascending career was brutally halted in 1979 in a hotel fire.   In 1979, Redstone was staying at The Boston Copley Plaza when a fire tore through the hotel.

He was staying with his mistress and escaped by clinging on to a window ledge as flames burned his hands Redstone was rescued from the hotel on a ladder.

He later wrote in his autobiography: ‘The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing. I was being burned alive’ Redstone was in the hotel fire with his then mistress, Desla Winer (together, right).

She escaped with fewer injuries. The pair remained friends for years. He was married at the time to his first wife, Phyllis (together, left in 1997). The pair were married for 52 years, during which time he had several affairs, before they divorced in 1999 Redstone circa 1981, in another portrait shot by The Boston Globe (left) and in 1986 (right).

By then, he’d recovered from the fire injuries and was quickly charging ahead with buying up movie studios  Sumner (center) with Shari (second from right) and Phyllis (far right) along with children believed to be Shari’s kids and TomF Freston and Michael Stipe in 1993Redstone was staying at The Copley Plaza with his mistress, Delsa Winer, when a fire tore through the building.

He was 55 at the time.   ‘The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing. I was being burned alive,’  Redstone in his autobiography, describing surviving the 1979 fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel where he was spending the night with a mistress when flames engulfed his room  He climbed out through the window and clung to the window ledge as flames burned his hand and 45 percent of his body until he was rescued by fire fighters. ‘The fire shot up my legs.

The pain was searing. I was being burned alive,’ he wrote in his autobiography. Redstone had to undergo five surgeries but nothing could correct the damage to one of his hands. He would later say that he felt lucky to be alive. In 1987, he went after Viacom, his biggest business play to date.
He bought it was $3.4billion. Next, he bought Paramount in 1993 for $8.2billion. CBS was folded into Viacom in 1999 through a stock merger worth $37billion – the largest deal in media history at the time. He separated the pair in 2006 and put Les Moonves in charge of CBS