74 new york | july 8–21, 2019overwhelming stench of greed.”)
The battery of lawsuits dragged into
public the question of whether Sumner
had had his wits about him—was it when
he promised the world to the women, or
when he threw them out? Investors had
already been wondering whether Sumner
had the capacity to be the well-paid chair-
man of the board of Viacom, which by then
had become genuinely troubled, and who
was calling the shots if he wasn’t. (If it
sounds like the first season of Succession,
that’s not a coincidence.) Friends spun
dark stories in the press of the mansion as
Weekend at Bernie’s.
At an extraordinary one-day trial for Her-
zer’s suit in May 2016, a judge watched a
deposition video in which Sumner, strug-
gling to speak with the help of a speech
therapist, repeatedly called Herzer “a fuck-
ing bitch.” But what would lead to the judge’s
throwing out the case was what Sumner said
when asked whom he wanted to make deci-
sions for him. “Shar ...” he managed. “Shari.”T
here is no question who is in
charge now, though it won’t neces-
sarily buy Redstone respect. It will,
however, get a lot of men in corpo-
rate America to sound like they’re about to
join a Lean In circle. “Any woman who is
forthright and direct and driven, even if only
to the extent of her male counterpart, is
going to be characterized as a kind of pushy
broad,” says Parsons. “You say ‘sharp-
elbowed’ about a man, people are yawning,”
says interim chairman of CBS’s board
Strauss Zelnick.
Even Sumner had asked his daughter,
newly restored to his home in 2016, why
everyone hated her. It wasn’t everyone, she
replied, just the Viacom board members
and executives she’d challenged. She told
her father that Dauman had run the com-
pany into the ground, letting talent like
Jon Stewart walk away and relying on
financial engineering to pump up the stock
price. Sumner stuck by Dauman anyway,
until, according to his court filings, he
found out Dauman intended to sell a
major chunk of Sumner’s beloved Para-
mount. Dauman put up a legal fight, but
he too was pacified with a settlement. Ittook until this year to make the women go
away; according to a person familiar with
the arrangement, they were allowed to
keep around $75 million apiece in “gifts”
because Redstone wanted them out of the
family’s life. Moonves, though he had been
paid $650 million over 23 years, left with
no golden parachute, after the board heard
from two law firms that had looked into
allegations that he had used his position to
sexually harass and assault women and
that he’d fostered an environment at CBS
in which other men freely harassed.
Privately, Redstone has begun to talk
about Moonves’s desire to push her out
and concentrate his corporate power and
his abuse of subordinates as intercon-
nected. She has learned to replace the
word diversity with inclusion. She asked
Parsons to help her choose qualified
female board members, including Susan
Schuman, whose specialty is female-
friendly culture change and who has
worked with Facebook, Starbucks, and
GE. CBS now has a “chief people officer”
and a “chief business ethics and compli-
ance officer.” The entertainment division,
once Moonves’s hunting ground, now has
an HR officer on every show and in every
department and a way to report com-
plaints to an outside line. The news divi-
sion, where Charlie Rose and 60 Minutes
executive producer Jeff Fager once alleg-
edly groped subordinates, now has its first
female president, Susan Zirinsky, a morn-
ing show with Gayle King firmly in charge,
and Norah O’Donnell as only the second-
ever female nightly news anchor. (The first
was Katie Couric, who called the previous
regime a boys’ club.)
The possible merger of Viacom and CBS,
once portrayed as the singular and unrea-
sonable obsession of Shari Redstone, looks
different in 2019. The two companies have
come closer together: Viacom is slowly
being turned around by Dauman’s succes-
sor, Bob Bakish, who welcomes Shari and
her late-night emails; Paramount is no lon-
ger losing a half-billion dollars a year and
has a decent hit with Rocketman; MTV has
lured former HBO documentary queen
Sheila Nevins and is spinning off Daria with
Tracee Ellis Ross; Nickelodeon is reviving
Blue’s Clues. Trevor Noah is finding his foot-
ing. Industrywide, “scale” has replaced “syn-
ergy” as a survival mantra in the face of tech-
nological change. AT&T gobbled up Time
Warner last year; in March, Rupert Mur-
doch, Sumner’s more famous rival, sold
most of his assets to Disney. “Do I think we
should get scale? Do I want to grow? Do I
want to be a bigger player in this new media
world? Of course I do,” she told Bakish in a
fireside chat in January.
“I call it the march of the penguins,” saysBTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield, long
a fan of the merger plan. “They’re all hud-
dling together to survive winter ... I think
Shari understood the importance of scale to
survive that coming storm.”
The thinking goes that legacy media
might put up a fight against the Netflixes
and Apples of the world with their own
direct-to-consumer streaming options. CBS
All Access is already a modest success, and
Viacom has purchased the digital-TV plat-
form PlutoTV; if its pay service included
Viacom’s and Paramount’s content along-
side CBS’s and Showtime’s, executives hope,
more users would sign on. (Are you ready to
pay for another subscription service?) The
merger is just the beginning, Redstone said
at the June event: “I’ve always said I think if
these companies come together, we would
probably want to look at something after
that. And to develop scale and be transfor-
mative as we move forward.”
If the merger does happen, it’s generally
understood that it will be run by Bakish—an
affable human PowerPoint presentation, the
opposite of drama. It doesn’t make for good
headlines, but it works for Redstone. Per-
haps the days of swashbuckling media titans
like her father dominating the attention of
the business press are over. “That whole gen-
eration of old moguls,” says a longtime
media banker, “I’m sure they’ll continue to
be invited to parties.”
Some people close to Redstone believe
the ultimate goal is to cash out, divesting
her family of the properties to an overseas
buyer, or a tech company, or another
telecom. But considering how hard she
has fought to get to this point, and how
immersed in the companies she’s already
been, it’s difficult to imagine her just walk-
ing away. “Part of it is a woman’s thing,” says
Parsons. “It’s important to her that this
whole thing be seen not only as a trial but a
rallying cry for women. She’s got to make
sure that they’re in the forefront of every-
thing she does.” Another motivation, says
Parsons, is legacy. “The number of times
she’ll say, ‘My dad said this,’ ‘My dad had
this reaction to that,’ or ‘My dad was close to
this guy,’ or ‘My dad hated this guy,’ is kind
of remarkable.”
Last year at the upfronts, where net-
works hawk their wares to advertisers,
Moonves got a standing ovation in Carn-
egie Hall. He was in the thick of litigation
against Redstone. “So. How’s your week
been?” he joked. “For years, I have told
you that I will only be out here for a short
time. This year, for the first time, I might
mean it.” He was right about that. At this
year’s upfronts, Redstone came to the
CBS party for the first time in three years.
This time, everyone wanted to take a
photo with her. ■Shari
RedstoneCONTINUED FROM PAGE 33