Synopsis
The biography of American businessman Steve Ross, who declares to have learned his greatest business lessons while working in a funeral home. Ross later engineered the merger of Warner Communications and Time Inc. into the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Reviews
This account of the man who began his career as a funeral director and rose to become the chairman of the largest media company in the world is as fast-paced as the life it depicts. Through interviews with some 250 people, including Ross himself, Bruck ( The Predators' Ball ) chronicles Ross's rapid transformation from an unknown, if ambitious, businessman to a media tycoon that began with his purchase of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in 1969, a company that would eventually become Warner Communications. Bruck does not shy away from describing Ross's character flaws and business mistakes, and she notes that allegations of questionable business practices dogged him much of his business life. Indeed, one of the longest sections of the book deals with the Westchester Premiere Theatre kickback scandal of the late '70s and early '80s in which several of Ross's top aides were convicted of fraud and perjury, although he himself avoided prosecution. Another lengthy chapter examines the Atari disaster, in which the rapid rise and fall of the video game company--a Warner subsidiary--nearly bankrupted Warner. For all his shortcomings, Ross, who died in 1992 at the age of 65, is depicted here as a charming, shrewd and visionary man who loved entertainers and the entertainment business. He emerges as better qualified to lead Time Warner than Gerald Levin who succeeded him, and who is portrayed by Bruck as a brilliant but uninspiring man who, the author suggests, will find it difficult to fully integrate Time Warner for the multimedia age. Although Bruck's book is riveting, one nevertheless wonders if there isn't more to Ross's story waiting to be told. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This much ballyhooed book starts out slowly and seems derivative. Much of the information throughout the text is derived from the newspaper and magazine reportage of other journalists; and another author, Richard M. Clurman, beat Bruck to quite a bit of the drama two years ago in To the End of Time (1992). But despite these obstacles, Bruck manages to compose an interesting book, even though her subject is inherently less interesting than Michael Milken, the key player in Bruck's previous book, The Predator's Ball (1988). Milken was involved in high- stakes criminal conduct; Ross (who by the book's publication will have been dead nearly a year and a half) was pretty much just one more in a long line of greedy, unintrospective tycoons. He was a born dealmaker, a one-time traveling salesman who parlayed his in- laws' lucrative funeral-home business into a diversified company, which he took public in 1962. In 1969, Ross made a surprise bid for Warner-Seven Arts and found himself hobnobbing with the likes of Frank Sinatra. Two decades later, in 1990, Ross helped engineer the megadeal of his life--the merger of Warner with Time Inc. to create the largest communications/entertainment company in the world. Bruck's quotation from opera star Beverly Sills, who spoke at Ross's funeral, sums up the life neatly: ``He was like an opera singer. He was larger than life; he knew how to make grand entrances; he knew he didn't have to yell at the top of his lungs to keep an audience's attention; he was always on a diet; and he knew how to share curtain calls.'' In an age of biographers acting as pathographers, Bruck is refreshingly generous in spirit. The book is not a valentine, but Bruck explains Ross's good qualities as well as his bad. By retaining her mental balance about her subject, Bruck allows the reader to enjoy mental balance as well. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Bruck, famous for her muckraking book about Michael Milken (Predator's Ball, LJ 3/15/89), unveils another power person's reckless spending habits and questionable management actions. Bruck uncovers details about Ross and the Time-Warner merger that are not in Richard Clurman's To the End of Time (LJ 2/1/92). Unfortunately, the abundant detail loses the reader at times, and Bruck is so focused on the wrongdoings of Ross and those at Time, Inc., that she offers little insight about the future of the company. Nonetheless, academics and business people will probably demand this book. Weakly recommended.
--Rebecca A. Smith, Harvard Business Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Bruck wrote the best-selling, hard-hitting, and controversial Predators' Ball (1988), which exposed the excesses of Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken. Now she profiles the charismatic, manipulative Steve Ross, who successfully engineered the last big buy-out of the 1980s in the bitter takeover battle between Time, Inc. and Warner Communications, which Ross headed. While Richard Clurman has already written To the End of Time: Seduction Conquest of the Media Empire (1992), a well-regarded account of the takeover battle from Time's point of view, Bruck offers an engrossing biographical and psychological portrait of Ross himself. Based on extensive interviews with more than 250 sources, including Ross himself before his death, she deftly chronicles Ross' rise to power and fortune. This likely best-seller grew out of two pieces Bruck originally did in 1990 and 1992 for the New Yorker. David Rouse
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