https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...-was-97-622455


He bested business rivals throughout his long career as he engineered deals for Viacom, Paramount and CBS and displayed an unwavering passion to win.
Sumner Redstone, the hard-charging mogul who parlayed his father?s New England drive-in theater business into a media empire that now flows into virtually every avenue of entertainment, has died. He was 97.

Redstone was the controlling shareholder of the recently merged ViacomCBS ? and previously CBS Corp. and Viacom ? who made famous the mantra ?content is king.?

His daughter and ViacomCBS chair Shari Redstone said: ?My father led an extraordinary life that not only shaped entertainment as we know it today but created an incredible family legacy. Through it all, we shared a great love for one another and he was a wonderful father, grandfather and great-grandfather. I am so proud to be his daughter and I will miss him always.?

National Amusements, through which the Redstones control ViacomCBS, said that he died Tuesday. It is understood that he was at his 15,300-square-foot Beverly Park mansion. A cause of death was not provided, but sources said it was not related to COVID-19.

Redstone had been in declining health for some time amid questions whether he was mentally capable of running his businesses.

A Harvard-trained lawyer who worked as a Japanese code-breaker during World War II and survived a near-fatal hotel fire in 1979, the single-minded Redstone was both respected and reviled for his acrimonious, litigious battles that won him Viacom in 1987 and then Paramount in 1994. He filed suit in the 1950s to break the Hollywood studios? grip on theatrical distribution and went to court decades later to thwart a cable TV monopoly.

Like William Randolph Hearst before him, Redstone ruled like a king, his companies and employees subject to his whims. In 2006, he famously fired Mission: Impossible star Tom Cruise after the actor jumped on Oprah Winfrey?s couch during an interview. ?His behavior was terrible,? Redstone said while also acknowledging that Cruise was ?getting paid $10 million, on the lot, for doing nothing.?

Six years later, he reconciled with Cruise and said he and the star were "best friends."

Redstone?s net worth was recently estimated by Forbes at $4.3 billion. He and his family, through National Amusements, controlled about 80 percent of the voting shares of Viacom and CBS, which announced in August 2019 that they were reuniting. He owned 80 percent of National Amusements shares; Shari held the rest.

Redstone did not go quietly. In August 2016, he and Shari orchestrated the removal of Philippe Dauman as Viacom CEO, ending a long and bitter legal fight.

Months earlier, Redstone's longtime girlfriends, Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer, were banished from living in his home (Holland was said to be involved with another man). Herzer then filed a lawsuit claiming Redstone was not mentally competent when she was removed from making medical decisions on his behalf.

But after Redstone had testified on video, a Los Angeles judge concluded that the mogul was in command of his faculties and dismissed the suit. He then sued Holland and Herzer to reclaim $150 million in gifts he had given them. A settlement with Herzer was announced in January 2019.

 From left: Manuela Herzer, Sumner Redstone and Sydney Holland at a gala in March 2013 honoring Al Gore.
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Sumner Murray Rothstein was born on May 27, 1923, and raised in a lower-class section of Boston, where his father worked as a linoleum salesman. Redstone said he grew up in poverty, writing in his 2001 autobiography, A Passion to Win, that his apartment had no toilet. "We had to walk down the corridor to use the pull-chain commode in the water closet we shared with the neighbors. That sort of living was all I knew, and I never felt less privileged than anyone else."

The tenement areas in which he grew up, though, were full of striving, achieving immigrants, including his father, Michael ?Mickey? Rothstein, a keen businessman who bought a used truck and turned it into a profitable ?carting? business. His acumen attracted the interest of bookie Harry ?Doc? Sagansky, whose betting syndicate rivaled Meyer Lansky?s. With hundreds of thousands of dollars from Sagansky pouring in, Rothstein began acquiring nightclubs and theaters and opened his first drive-in theater on New York?s Long Island in 1934.

As his business thrived, Rothstein changed the family name to Redstone, in part to avoid the anti-Semitism in certain Boston business circles and also to negate any conjecture that he was associated with New York mobster Arnold Rothstein, who allegedly conspired to fix the 1919 World Series.

"Redstone sounded so solidly American, so ecumenical, so Christian. I thought my father was trying to walk away from our being Jewish," Redstone wrote in his autobiography. "It troubled me a lot."

Redstone studied at the prestigious Boston Latin School where, he later wrote, "I was first exposed to the idea that thinking, educated and disciplined people have the power within themselves to create a new and better world."

Afterward, he attended Harvard, where he was tapped by professor Edwin Reischauer to be among a select group of students charged with cracking Japan?s military codes, learning the culture and language largely through watching Japanese movies. Following the war, he attended Harvard Law School, making money by playing piano in his own dance band and using his veteran status to purchase army surplus goods at a discount and sell them for a profit to Boston-area stores.