When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence

Connie Bruck, When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence. New York: Random House, 2003. xiv + 514 pp. $29.95.

Lew Wasserman played an enormous role in Alfred Hitchcock's life. Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, was a walk-on in Lew Wasserman's, or so one infers from reading Connie Bruck's When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence. The index contains only five page-references to Hitchcock-a sixth, overlooked, occurs on page 240-none of which leads to insights into Hitchcock and Wasserman's personal or professional relationship. The book likewise offers little about the psychology of its putative subject, "putative" because Bruck focuses almost as much on Wasserman's mentor and predecessor, Jules Stein, the founder of Music Corporation of America, as Wasserman himself. More on that momentarily.

Here are the times When Hollywood Had a King mentions Hitchcock, one of MCA's most prominent and wealthy clients. When Hitchcock and Alma traveled to Havana with the Wassermans in 1956, they met Meyer Lansky at dinner. The gangster asked Edie Wasserman, Is that the real Hitchcock? And the director asked Lew, Is that the real Lansky? (163-64). Later, in 1967, Hitchcock not only spoke at UCLA when the university gave Jules Stein an honorary doctorate (248), he was among the guests at a Wasserman-hosted black-tie dinner for Jack Valenti (240). Equally ceremonial is one of the book's few photographs (322), "Alfred Hitchcock and Lew Wasserman at the Academy Awards ceremony in...