Sumner's Discontent

A few seconds after I park my rental car on the concrete apron, an olive-skinned brunette wearing a black T-shirt and formfitting black jeans-ornamented by a massive skull-and-crossbones belt buckle encrusted with hip-hop bling-emerges from the front door. She bounds down the steps, between twin pools filled with koi, and offers her hand.

"I'm Paula," the future ex-Mrs. Redstone introduces herself. Her pending divorce had been splashed in the tabloids less than two weeks earlier, but she and Redstone are still living under the same roof.

She leads me into the high-ceilinged entry hall, where her husband-for-the-moment is standing and waiting, wearing an antic plaid sport coat. After I shake his gnarled right hand-nearly 30 years ago, Redstone barely survived a hotel fire that left his body badly scarred-he directs the Viacom public relations man to give me a quick tour of his adjoining study. "Why don't you show him the aquariums," he orders.

Redstone's lavish collection of exotic fish is a P.R. staple of any audience with the magnate. Massive tanks line the walls of the study from which he oversees his companies, the sea life floating languidly in eerie contrast to the manic energy of Redstone's daily telephone marathons with Moonves, Dauman, and his stockbroker in New York.

After the tour, I find the aging titan in his living room, poised against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows with a commanding view of his money-green lawn and the canyons beyond. He sits in a straight-backed chair, uncannily alert, seemingly ready to pounce. "When you stop talking, I'll answer you," he says by way of interrupting a wandering question. Over the course of an afternoon-and subsequent conversations-he mounts a furious defense of his businesses and decisions. "National Amusements is in great shape," Redstone declares. He says his company's theater chain-which, unlike most competitors, owns rather than leases the majority of its real estate-is worth far more than the widely estimated $500 million to $700 million, despite depressed real-estate values.

When it comes to Viacom and CBS, he insists there's "nothing wrong" with the companies-or at least nothing wrong with them that a resurgent economy can't fix. "When the market crashed, we crashed with it," he says, "so I have confidence that when the market and the economy turn around, you'll see Viacom back at $45-and higher!" When his big selloff of Viacom and CBS stock-worth an eye-popping $233 million-was first announced, Redstone vowed repeatedly in the press that he had "no intention" of selling a single additional share of Viacom or CBS. But "no intention" was a phrase that Wall Street interpreted as leaving more than a little wiggle room. To me, he puts it this way: "I'd like to say, 'I won't!' But these are public companies, and I have to be careful." And then, unable to stop himself, he makes a grandiose promise that it's by no means clear he can keep. "We won't sell CBS or Viacom! We don't have to!"

Redstone's visions of immortality for his vast business domain seem parallel to those he harbors for himself. And it's true that he has survived a series of personal crises that might easily have killed him. He nearly perished in Boston's terrible Copley Plaza Hotel fire in 1979, hanging from a third-floor windowsill as the inferno blistered 45 percent of his body. After enduring months of excruciating skin grafts, he went on to turn a chain of theaters started by his father, Mickey (who changed the family name from Rothstein), into a worldwide colossus comprising such enterprises as MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, Simon & Schuster, an outdoor-advertising company, and hundreds of radio and television stations, not to mention the CBS broadcasting network and Paramount Pictures. Redstone accomplished this beginning in 1987 with National Amusements' highly leveraged hostile takeover of Viacom; a little more than a decade later, Viacom swallowed up CBS. (Redstone split Viacom and CBS into separate companies in 2006 in a vain attempt to "unleash value.")

Four years ago, Redstone was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He now claims to have "made medical history" by becoming cancer-free, crediting a daily regime of 60 to 70 minutes of exercise-and all those antioxidants.

Along the way, Wall Street cheered Redstone's acquisitions. Some of them, with the benefit of hindsight, now look like losers, CBS chief among them. The broadcasting behemoth, despite boasting the TV network that won the latest ratings sweeps, is starving just like its brethren from falling advertising revenue in a souring economy; in the third quarter of 2008, it was forced to take a $14 billion write-down on the reduced value of its television and radio stations. As he sits in his living room, his P.R. man scribbling notes, Redstone takes a swipe at Moonves. He tells me that Moonves, a hard-charging, universally respected television programmer, "overpaid" for CNET, a group of internet sites that CBS acquired last summer for $1.8 billion. While that's a commonly held view on Wall Street, it's more than a little alarming to hear it endorsed by Redstone, who, as executive chairman of CBS's board, signed off on the CNET purchase price. He airily brushes off responsibility. "You have to understand the way I operate. I'm extremely nonintrusive," he says with no apparent irony. "I told Les that I and many investors did feel that the price he paid was too high," Redstone adds. "I made no bones about it."

Moonves declines to be drawn into a public spat with his boss. "You'll have to get that from him," he says. "I've talked to him a number of times about [CNET] and went through it." He adds, "There's not a major move I make without checking with him and making sure he's okay with it."

Redstone is still second-guessing another business decision-the failure of Viacom to purchase the social-�networking site MySpace, snapped up by Murdoch's News Corp. in 2005. Redstone blamed the popular Tom Freston, then chief operating officer of Viacom. Freston was credited with much of the company's success in building MTV into a hugely profitable global brand. Redstone, who had promoted Freston to Viacom C.E.O. even after the MySpace debacle, summarily fired him in September 2006. A new book about the deal, Stealing MySpace, by Julia Angwin, argues, however, that it was Freston who pushed Redstone to keep bidding against Murdoch and that Redstone and Dauman-who was then a Viacom board member and is now the company's C.E.O.-shut Freston down. Redstone, always ready to justify his positions and relitigate ancient conflicts, offers his version of events. "Nobody, certainly not I, stood in the way of Tom [Freston] making that deal," he says. "Actually, I pushed Tom to make the deal. I pushed him."

And then Redstone goes off on his rival in the deal. "The fact is that Murdoch will pay anything. Just look at the Wall Street Journal-he paid at least $5 billion, he had no competition," Redstone says. "Murdoch is known to make deals without due diligence." He adds, "I don't want to attack him, because I like him a lot....?I'm not criticizing him. He has his style; I have mine." A Murdoch spokesman declined to comment.