Perhaps the strangest, most resented merger of the 1980s was the one consummated between Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc. Time, the nation’s largest magazine publisher and owner of HBO, was a staid, blue-blooded company dedicated to informing the world. Warner, whose entertainment holdings made it home to the country’s biggest stars, was devoted to amassing huge income off pop fads and having a glitzy good time. The stated reason for the merger was gauzy ,‘synergy" and a leg up on global competition. The unstated reason was to make the dealmakers, especially Warner’s Steve Ross, rich as sin. In “To the End of Time,” Richard M. Clurman, a retired Time executive, carefully pokes through the wreckage of the biggest corporate cultural clash of Henry Luce’s American century.
As a veteran of an older news-gathering tradition, Clurman skips the omniscient tone of recent popular business books. The result is less fly-on-the-wall drama than Connie Bruck is likely to bring to her forthcoming book on Ross, Time Warner’s ailing chairman. But Clurman is a fair, sharp reporter and his peerlike relationship with the Time Inc. principals reaps rare candor. He reprints, for instance, a devastating letter from Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, wife of former Time board chairman Andrew Heiskell, complaining to Time CEO Dick Munro about the shabby way in which her husband was treated. Clurman doesn’t directly savage Munro and Nick Nicholas (Ross’s likely successor); he lets their fecklessness do it for him, which stings even more.
All of the back-stabbing within Time makes juicy reading, but the real fun comes whenever Ross steps onstage. It goes beyond the Westchester Theatre case, in which some of Ross’s closest associates were implicated in a fraudulent, mobbed up scheme hatched practically under his nose in the 1970s. At that time, Ross kept more than $60,000 in cash in an office closet, which he doled out on behalf of an unidentified woman. Ross told the U.S. attorney that the money came from his gambling winnings, but he never reported any of it on tax returns because “I felt at the end of the year that I netted out. I was neither a winner or a loser with all of my gambling.” How convenient.
Clurman dug such intriguing details out of something called the Armstrong Report, which was prepared for the Warner board by an independent investigator. But when the time came to approve the merger, members of the Time board didn’t have enough curiosity to read the report-or inform themselves about the background of the man who would soon swallow their company. Ross turned out to be not just greedy ($39 million in compensation and stock options in 1990) but rather more gracious than expected about Time’s traditions. Still, Clurman concludes, “there are people in Time Warner who believe and act as if the purpose of business is only business.” Even on those terms, the company is a debtridden mess. This book is a good place to find out how it got that way.
