His personal tale mirrors the Horatio Alger–like beginnings of the great studio moguls. “I knew, on a very intimate basis, a lot of Hollywood housekeepers,” he cracks. Every Christmas, the stars would invite him in for punch and cookies. “One thing I learned very early on: Never bet against Merv Adelson.”Īs Adelson tells it, his entree into show business came when, as a teen, he delivered groceries for his father’s Beverly Hills store to the likes of Gary Cooper and Bette Davis. “He has always maintained his dignity, being a first-class sort of guy,” says Leslie Moonves, co-chief operating officer and co-president of Viacom, who worked with Adelson as a young Lorimar exec in the 1980s. If he’s reluctant to talk much about the past, it’s because it steals thunder from “these kids, who are the future,” he says. He passionately promotes his project like a showman. It might sound unusually small scale for Adelson - after all, the former chairman of Lorimar once owned an entire video division - but he could not care less. “I’d like to end my career by doing something for kids,” he says. He’s producing children’s entertainment based on a group of multiethnic performers called the JammX Kids, designed to get children moving in a time of endemic obesity. Two years after closing his bankruptcy case, Adelson is staging what could be called a comeback, less intent on reaping huge returns than on leaving a worthwhile legacy.
“I don’t get discouraged easily.” Then, he adds with a faint smile, “I’ve had a lot of ups and downs, haven’t I?” “You do what you’ve got to do, you know?” he says, sitting behind a polished table. Today, surrounded in his office by small dogs and darting children, Adelson, 76, is tanned and fit - and philosophical about it all. Then, to the shock of his friends, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect his assets. When the stock market bubble burst in 2000, he lost $112 million. Gone, too, is a chunk of Adelson’s fortune.ĭuring the 1990s, Adelson placed his considerable wealth in dotcoms, parlaying dozens of investments into a huge portfolio. Lorimar is gone, and the storied suite at MGM has been replaced by a modest office in a Santa Monica business park. Nearly two decades later, Adelson’s marriage to Walters is long over, although they still talk regularly. “It was,” says Wendy Goldberg, “a fabulous night.” Mayer.įinally, after sundown, the couple exchanged vows under a chuppah of lilacs, while most of the town’s power brokers looked on. The next month, Adelson’s company Lorimar Entertainment would make public a deal to buy the fabled MGM lot, and Adelson would soon occupy the office of its legendary chairman, Louis B. This was the season’s main event: Walters was one of the most famous journalists in the world, and her silver-haired groom one of the most powerful men in TV, whose hit shows “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest” dominated primetime, and whose influence in the entertainment industry was growing. It didn’t matter that the rabbi was late or that co-hostess Edie Wasserman fretted about the interminable wait or that Wendy Goldberg finally served nachos and highballs to the famished guests. But by the time Merv Adelson and Barbara Walters said their vows on that day in May 1986, more than 100 people had gathered in the living room of producer Leonard Goldberg and his wife, Wendy. The Bel-Air wedding was to be a small, traditional ceremony with about 30 guests - an intimate affair for a couple in midlife. Now he’s back, living the many lives of a mogul. He married the country’s most famous female journalist, befriended presidents and once led on e of TV’s most prolific production houses. Merv Adelson was one of the richest men in the industry.