New York Magazine – July 08, 2019

july 8–21, 2019 | new york 31

his daughter will have asserted her role as

one of the most powerful individuals shap-

ing what we watch and stream in the

decades to come—assuming, that is, she’s as

cunning and lucky as her father. “It’s kind of

an empire thing,” Parsons says. “You know,

her father built this thing. It would be a

shame to let it all sort of fall apart.”

redstone has often said she didn’t

want to be part of the media business until

her father wanted her to. But Sumner’s love

was never unconditional; what he wanted

for his daughter was always in the service of

what he wanted for himself. He treated his

two children, Brent and Shari, the way he

treated the executives who ran the compa-

nies he gobbled up: golden until they chal-

lenged him, disposable when they did.

Shari was said to be his favorite. “We have a

very loving relationship—she has been the

love of my life,” Sumner told Lloyd Grove

for a profile in Portfolio in 2009. “When she

was a baby, I was the only one she would let

feed her.” In the same interview, to dispel

the suggestion that there was any tension

between him and his daughter, Sumner

produced a months-old fax from her, tersely

rescheduling plans, signed “love,” but with

and a year later, when the first of their three

children was born, Shari decided to stay

home full time. She wanted stability for her

children and homemade cookies and the

undivided attention she never got. By the

mid-’80s, with Shari focused on the kids and

Sumner having decided his son Brent was

too weak-willed for the job, he recruited Ira

into the theater business while Sumner

thought big.

Viacom, which had split from CBS in 1971

to comply with new regulations on media

ownership, had caught Sumner’s attention

in the mid-’80s. His ambitions being loftier

than owning a regional theater company,

he’d begun buying and selling stock in the

studios with which he was negotiating to

show their pictures, culminating in a hostile

takeover of Viacom. The company, which

included MTV Networks and Showtime,

was known then as VEE-a-com. Sumner

didn’t like the name. “To me that sounded

weak, like newborn birds clamoring for

worms. The word almost tweeted,” he wrote

in his memoir. He decreed that thenceforth,

it would be known as VIE-a-com, which

“sounded strong, something worth fighting

for.” He was 63. Eventually, having tired of

the hired help, he dumped the CEO and

crowned himself, declaring in 1999, “Via-

com is me. I’m Viacom. That marriage is

eternal, forever.”

His actual marriages, not so much. A core

story of the Sumner legend is his surviving

being burned in a hotel fire in 1979, which

left him with a gnarled claw of a hand and

renewed determination; less discussed is

that his longtime girlfriend was in the hotel

with him. She was one of many; Phyllis,

Shari wrote in an email in 2014, was “ver-

bally and physically and financially abused

by him every day of her life.” Phyllis

attempted to divorce him in 1984, and again

in 1993, but Sumner, terrified of losing half

his assets, persuaded her to stay.

By the early ’90s, Shari’s own marriage

had unraveled. When Sumner heard the

news, his first question to his daughter was

whether his son-in-law was going to have to

leave the company. He did, eventually,

though, according to Hagey, Shari was furi-

ous that it took years for her father to stop

working with her ex.

Not so furious that she wouldn’t take

Ira’s place. In 1994, Shari joined the

National Amusements board and started

familiarizing herself with the theater busi-

ness. But her father wanted her to remem-

ber who was boss. In a Forbes profile in

1994, Shari described how, for a change,

she had beaten him at tennis. “I said, ‘Dad,

doesn’t it make you feel good that here I

am, your daughter, and we played tennis

together, and I did really well?’ He looked

at me and said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ ”

Shari’s name scrawled by her secretary.

The son of a nightclub owner in Boston

with underworld connections, Sumner was

undeniably brilliant, reading lyric poetry

in ancient Greek at Boston Latin and Japa-

nese at Harvard, breaking codes during

World War II, winning a tax case before the

Supreme Court. Shari was the second

child born to Sumner and his wife Phyllis,

the same year Sumner decided to take over

his father’s business. The nightclubs had

already given way to a drive-in movie

theater, which eventually became an indoor-

movie-theater chain named National

Amusements. Shari attended public schools

in suburban Newton, as Sumner began to

edge out his father and brother for control.

Shari, for the most part, went her own

way. After Tufts and law school at Boston

University, she said in June, “I practiced

criminal law. I was the only woman in an

all-male law firm. I had to be before all-male

judges, I had to figure out how much of the

game am I going to play to keep my job.” She

soon drifted back into business to get a mas-

ter’s in tax law. There, she met Ira Korff, a

direct descendant of the founder of Hasidic

Judaism who was working on his sixth or

seventh degree. The two married in 1980,

PHOTOGRAPHS: PREVIOUS SPREAD, © BILLY BENNIGHT/UPPA/ZUMAPRESS.COM (SUMNER); ROB LATOUR/SHUTTERSTOCK (SHARI). THIS SPREAD, CLINT

SPAULDING/VARIETY/SHUTTERSTOCK (SHARI, PHYLLIS); DAVID CROTTY/PMC (SUMNER);

© BILLY BENNIGHT/UPPA/ZUMAPRESS.COM (HOLLAND, HERZER); OFFICE OF THE ZVHIL-MEZBUZ REBBE, BOSTON—15 SCHOOL ST., BOSTON, MA/WIKIC

OMMONS (IRA); PRESLEY ANN/PMC (SHARI); JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC (BRANDON);

MICHAEL TRAN/FILMMAGIC (TYLER); ALEX J. BERLINER/ABIMAGES/AP IMAGES (KIMBERLEE); PAUL ZIMMERMAN/GETTY IMAGES FOR AWXI (JASON).

FOLLOWING SPREAD, DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (SHARI).

The Family Business: Part I

Michael Redstone

Started the theater company that would

launch his son Sumner’s empire.

Brent Redstone

Received a $240 million

settlement and left the

companies. Lives on a ranch

in Colorado.

Shari Redstone

Herzer sued her,

and her son Tyler,

for alleged

racketeering.

Brandon

Korff

Tyler Korff

Jason Ostheimer

Kimberlee’s

husband founded

Advancit with

Shari.

Divorced

Divorced

Phyllis Gloria Raphael

Repeatedly attempted to

divorce Sumner,

but he persuaded her to

stay to protect his

control. They eventually

split in 1999.

Ira A. Korff

Worked with his

father-in-law,

including after

his divorce

from Shari.

Kimberlee

Korff

Courtroom foes

In-law collaborators

Sydney Holland,

Manuela Herzer

Went from Sumner’s

live-in companions

to defendants in

his elder-abuse

suit. Reportedly

walked away with

$75 million each.

Sumner Redstone

Acquired

controlling stakes

in Viacom, CBS,

and Paramount.