Universal Studios was just a small, money-losing business on a 367-acre site when Lew Wasserman got hold of it for only $11.25 million in 1958.

But in a short time, he built it into a $375-billion-a-year entertainment empire that went beyond movies to include a television production subsidiary, books, magazines, music labels, theme parks and more.

He couldn't have done it without the support of his equally ambitious and influential wife, Edie, says author Kathleen Sharp. Edie was highly involved in charity and political work (with strong connections to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton), and threw lavish parties where she strong-armed friends into making sizable donations to her causes. She also served as "muse and patroness to big-screen talents" (often with the sheets turned down).

Others have written stories on the Wassermans' rise to fame, including Lew himself, but Sharp claims to offer fresh revelations with this hefty 573-page account of the Hollywood power couple, largely because she was granted exclusive interviews with the arrogant and cavalier Lew Wasserman before he died in 2002.

She shares, for example, that Edie's father, a wealthy German-American Jew and a well-known lawyer in Cleveland, was a front man for the national Jewish Mafia. As for the well-publicized riggings on the Quiz Show, Lew and his fellow executives not only knew about them, they orchestrated them. She also sneaks in the scoop behind a secret real estate deal that Lew made with Ronald Reagan.

There's a lot of dishing and drama in this book. It's easy to be shocked and appalled, too, at the conniving, the humiliations and the enemy-building that went on. Sharp explores the Wassermans' early childhoods in an attempt to explain their motivations and actions as they seated themselves as king and queen of Hollywood.

Lew Wasserman started his career at the bottom rung of the ladder, after growing up poor in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family where Dad was a failure. "Fear of failure fueled Wasserman's drive as surely as his ambitions did," says Sharp.

The author describes in some detail his romance with Edie in Cleveland and their elopement to Chicago, where Lew took an entry-level job at Music Corporation of America (MCA). She also discusses their early mob connections - Lew's came from booking acts into mob-owned nightclubs.

Though he had only a high school education, Lew proved successful because of his strong understanding of finance, law and tax codes. He quickly moved up the rungs to chairman of MCA within 10 years, and ran the business in a manner similar to those linked to organized crime, says Sharp. He had a rigid code of discipline, he spied on his enemies and rivals, and he hired agents primarily from children of Jewish immigrants (no Italians allowed). He also exerted economic and political forces to overwhelm and wipe out rivals.

By 1959, the FBI learned that MCA represented about 75 percent of the top talent from the television, motion picture and radio industries, most of whom were obtained through "predatory practices." During the 60 years that Lew ruled, MCA would be investigated 10 times by the feds.

Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood gives insight into the Wassermans' hand in the career development of many stars and directors, such as Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. It also shows drugs run amok among musicians, crew members and actors, including pot smoking, cocaine snorting and heroin use. One Hollywood therapist prescribed LSD three times a week to stars such as Cary Grant and Esther Williams.

In addition, Sharp contends that the successful The Blues Brothers movie almost missed its screen debut because production costs spiraled out of control as John Belushi "sat in his trailer, drenched in urine, drinking Courvoisier, a pile of coke on the table."

Infidelity became a Wasserman routine as well. Sharp highlights Edie's romps with actors Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra, as well as unknown cowboys who worked as movie extras. She did so, says Sharp, "as a way to exert her strength and independence, while masking her own heartbreak and unhappiness" stemming from Lew's workaholism and his own dalliances with young girls. The author claims male chauvinism ran rampant at MCA.

It routinely hired sexy young office girls, considered affairs both common and expected, yet virtually shut women out when it came to the roles of producer, director and company executive.

While a lot of this story has been previously reported, Sharp does a credible job of getting to the heart of what made the Wassermans work so hard for fame and acceptance. Lew is revealed as a man bent on controlling the slippery facts surrounding his life, even to the end of his days. Edie accomplished great deeds, but also was obsessed with her social standing after having been embarrassed early by her father's indictment for forgery and embezzlement. In short, the book is a business success story with gossip as its glue.



Verna Noel Jones is a free-lance writer living in Aurora.