Schapiro Exhibit
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Schapiro Exhibit 195 Subject: Re: Vanity Fair/Sumner Redstone From: Robinson, Carole -:EX:/O=VIACOM/OU=MTVUSA/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN= ROBINSOC;: To: Freston, Tom Cc: Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:46:10 +0000 -----Original Message----- From: Freston, Tom To: Robinson, Carole Sent: Tue Oct 31 21:29:322006 Subject: Re: Vanity Fair/Sumner Redstone -----Original Message----- From: Robinson, Carole To: Freston, Tom Sent: Tue Oct 3121:16:032006 Subject: Re: Vanity Fair/Sumner Redstone -----Original Message----- From: Freston, Tom To: Robinson, Carole Sent: Tue Oct 31 18:58:592006 Subject: Re: Vanity Fair/Sumner Redstone -----Original Message----- Highly Confidential VIA09076933 From: Robinson, Carole To: Freston, Tom Sent: Tue Oct 3111:25:52 2006 Subject: Vanity Fair/Sumner Redstone The New Establishment Sumner Redstone and one of the saltwater fishtanks in his home in Beverly Park, California, on October 6. Photograph by Don Flood. Sleeping with the Fishes Happy at last, Sumner Redstone is still far from mellow-witness his public trashing of superstar Tom Cruise and firing of Viacom C.EO, Tom Freston. At home in Beverly Hills, the 83-year-old tycoon and his new wife, Paula, reveal their love story, her role in the Cruise decision, and what he claims was Freston's big mistake. by Bryan Burrough December 2006 High on the slopes above Beverly Hills, so high the clouds sometimes waft beneath it, one of the most exclusive enclaves in Southern California hides behind a pair of mammoth iron gates. If you're expected, a security guard will push a button and the gates will slowly open. Inside lies the cosseted world of Beverly Park, a collection of gargantuan mansions where the smallest homes, the few with floor space under 20,000 square feet, rarely sell for less than $10 milion. Most aren't within view. This is a gated community where every home seems to have a high gate of its own. Its long list of celebrity occupants includes Eddie Murphy, Sylvester Stallone, Barry Bonds, Reba McEntire, Rod Stewart, Martin Lawrence, Mike Medavoy, and a slew of Hollywood producers, and, oh yes, Denzel Washington, whose French-château-style mansion clocks in at 60,000 square feet. One of the cozier homes, among the few you can actually see from the street, belongs to Sumner Redstone, the 83-year-old billionaire who controls both CBS and Viacom, whose flagship assets include Paramount Pictures and MTV Networks, making Redstone the boss of everyone from Katie Couric and David Letterman to, technically at least, with Paramount's recent purchase of DreamWorks, David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. Redstone's home, tucked into a cul-de-sac next to Stallone's, is a long, low building of pale gold whose entry is flanked by pools teeming with koi and shoulder-high rushes. Down the hallway, to your left, is the indoor pool, where Redstone swims-in the nude-every afternoon. Also down the hall is the study where he spends much of each day on the phone, surrounded by tanks of his beloved saltwater fish. Out back, next to the infinity pool, with its 50-mile views over downtown, is the hot tub where Redstone likes to shave-in the nude, also. Right now there's a can of Gillette shaving cream beside it. This is the haven where, after spending most of the last two decades shuttling among hotel suites, Redstone has finally, until recently at least, found in his twilight years something approximating peace- and his happiness has much to do with the life he has built with his new, 44-year-old wife, a sinewy onetime Manhattan schoolteacher named Paula Fortunato, now Paula Redstone. A famous workaholic, Redstone withdrew here three years ago, turning over daily supervision of his empire to his 52-year- old daughter, Shari, Viacom c.E.O. Tom Freston, 60, and the man who runs CBS, Les Moonves, 57. Between games of tennis, scattering brine shrimp to his fish, and sessions on the treadmil-fully clothed, we're told-he runs everything now by telephone. Life in Beverly Park has its trials, however, even for a mogul of Redstone's heft. He had barely adapted to his new routines when the rumors began to fly: that he was out of touch, that he had lost his edge, that he was retiring. There were whispers about his health; down in Beverly Hills, everyone seems to have a story about Redstone walking into a restaurant walL. The perception that he was becoming irrelevant was reflected in the Vanity Fair New Establishment ran kings this fall, which saw him plunge from NO.3 in 2005 all the way to No. 30. Speculation about what would happen to his empire on his passing, from who would run it to what would be sold, rose by the month. But then, in a span of less than two weeks, Redstone re-emerged this summer to fling two thunderbolts that rocked the media world: the "firing" of Tom Cruise from his lucrative production deal at Paramount-he actually let Cruise's deal lapse-and the actual firing of his longtime confidant Freston, MTV's co-founder, after barely eight months at Viacom's helm. In the media firestorms that ensued, Redstone thrust himself front and center, granting interview after interview in which he savaged Cruise as an overpaid, ill-behaved symbol of a Hollywood star system gone mad, and dismissed the popular Freston as an emperor who, he claims, fiddled while the company's stock price Highly Confidential VIA09076934 burned. Both moves left veteran media-watchers scratching their heads, until all the chattering coalesced into a single overarching theory: that Redstone fired Cruise and Freston merely to prove his own continuing relevance-to prove he was still The Man. "I think Sumner will do anything for attention. It's what started all this," says Sue Mengers, the Hollywood doyenne and onetime superagent. "The consensus in the community is that what he did to Tom Cruise, and to Freston, was outrageous, you know, just to prove he's still alive." Mengers compares Redstone to another magnate who once owned Paramount, the late Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, an East Coast emperor who, she feels, never understood the way Hollywood truly works, An afternoon spent at the Redstone home doesn't entirely dispel the theory. Sitting in a straight- backed chair in the living room, attired in an unfortunate blue plaid jacket and black shoes, Redstone comes across as feisty as he did when he burst onto the financial scene, 20 years ago. But he looks frail and has a senior moment or three, losing his train of thought, repeating stories, and asking that a question or two be repeated. Still, he appears in total command, roundly attacking Cruise and, while emphasizing how much he admires Freston, trashing him nonetheless. He appears in command, that is, until the very end, when he stands to shake my hand and, to my horror, suddenly lurches to one side and begins to falL. Sumner of Love In every man's life there is business and there is pleasure, Until the last few years, however, Redstone's only pleasure was business. He is famously focused on his work; by his own admission, every conversation, every dinner, every social outing had at least something to do with Viacom or CBS. He is equally renowned for his crankiness, suing rivals, and warring with his estranged son, Brent, 56, a Colorado attorney who has filed a lawsuit against his father seeking to dissolve the family holding company, so he can take his share-estimated to be worth more than $1 bilion-out of it. In person Redstone can be impatient and curt, snapping at waiters and subordinates. During our interview, when his P.R, man tried to correct him, Redstone barked, "Quiet!" "He's not a man who has many friends," another Hollywood mogul told me, "and you know, I see him a lot, and he doesn't know what a real friend is, He has no sense of other people. It's all about him, and it always has been. He has a tremendous ego. But he has no grace. No charm. Really, he's not loyal to anyone but himself, Before Paula came along, he was really all alone." Whatever Redstone lacks in charm he makes up for in intellect and sheer willpower; no one doubts he is a very, very smart man. It was brains and will alone that drove Redstone from relatively humble beginnings as head of his family's chain of more than 1,500 movie theaters, National Amusements, which his father had started as a single Long Island drive-in with money supplied mostly, as Judith Newman reported in a 1999 Vanity Fair profile, by an infamous Boston bookie. By now almost everyone knows Redstone's backstory, how, after narrowly surviving a 1979 fire at Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel that left his right hand a gnarled claw and his legs severely burned, he re-dedicated himself to business, a commitment that in 1986 led to his out-of-the-blue, all-or-nothing takeover of Viacom, then to the massive 1993-94 battle in which he bested Barry Diller and half the moguls in Hollywood for control of Paramount, then to the 2000 merger with CBS, then to the decision last year, enacted in the face of Viacom's sagging stock price, to split the operations of Viacom and CBS into separate companies. Through it all Redstone remained cantankerous and combative, a C.EO. who viewed his stock price as a barometer measuring his self-worth and, above all, a tireless worker who spent every waking hour in his Times Square office because ..