by Connie Bruck - The New Yorker May 10,
2010
Haim
Saban
One afternoon in late October, Haim Saban,
seated in his wood-panelled library, contemplated the results of a
fourteen-month renovation of his estate. It consists of a main house
and two smaller buildings—one for guests and entertaining, one for
his wife’s parents. He lives in Beverly Park, a gated community
above Beverly Hills that is popular among Hollywood celebrities and
moguls for its security and its exclusivity. With the help of an
architectural firm, Saban’s wife, Cheryl, had transformed the
interior of the twenty-three-thousand-square-foot French-style
country manor house. “Only the outer walls were left—it looked like
an airplane hangar!” Saban told me. The large foyer opened into a
vast space comprising a living and a dining area, with minimalist
modern furniture. Near the white upholstered sofas was a
floor-to-ceiling display case filled with antiquities from Israel,
and large Chagall paintings hung on the walls. “We have only
Chagalls,” he said.
Saban enjoys playing the part of a man
exasperated by his wife’s extravagance. “She left only the Jerusalem
tile in the guest bathroom, and she left this room, but she made the
wood darker, and she put leather on the ceiling,” he told me. He
pointed at the ceiling high above us. “I said, ‘Why do we have
frigging leather on the ceiling? You can’t even see that it is
leather!’ But then I stopped myself. Marriages break up over
renovating a house. Really, they do. So I decided, I will not say a
word.” Minutes later, he heard music blaring from the outdoor sound
system. “What is this, a bar mitzvah?” he declared, and went to
investigate. “New speakers?” he said to the technicians. “What was
the matter with the old speakers?” He shrugged, and gestured toward
the “back yard,” which had been his project—an expanse of emerald
lawn adorned with nine hedges, many trimmed in the shapes of
life-size animals (a horse, a hippo, an elephant). He murmured, “My
Versailles.”
Saban is not given to modest ambitions.
Sixty-five years old, with a broad, dynamic countenance and
slicked-down wavy black hair, he is known in Los Angeles as the man
who brought the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Japan to America;
the chairman and part owner of Univision, the nation’s leading
Spanish-language media company; a staunch supporter of Israel (he
has dual citizenship); and one of the largest individual donors to
the Democratic Party. “Haim is a force of nature,” his friend Barry
Meyer, the chairman and C.E.O. of Warner Bros., said. As a youth in
Israel, Saban attended an agricultural boarding school where, he
says, immigrants like his parents sent children they could not
afford to feed. When he was expelled for being a troublemaker, he
began attending a night school, where the principal told him,
“You’re not cut out for academic studies; you’re cut out for making
money.” The prediction seemed to come true in 2001, when Rupert
Murdoch and Saban sold their joint venture, Fox Family Worldwide, to
Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney: Saban made one and a half
billion dollars. It was—and still is, he points out—the biggest cash
transaction by an individual in the history of Hollywood. In March,
Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.3 billion.
Perhaps
Saban’s greatest asset over the years has been his remarkable
ability to cultivate, charm, and manipulate people. “Being charming
and analytical is quite a combination,” said Shimon Peres, the
President of Israel, who has been a close friend of Saban’s for more
than twenty years. “Charmers from time to time get lost.” But Saban,
he continued, “isn’t floating in the air.” As a way of disguising
his shrewdness and his mental agility, Saban is often
self-deprecating; he describes himself as a “former cartoon
schlepper.” English is one of his six languages, and his adversaries
are sometimes disarmed by his linguistic stumbles, but he uses words
very skillfully.
Although Saban has lived in the United
States for nearly thirty years, he remains deeply connected to
Israel. He watches Israeli news shows, via satellite, throughout the
day, and is a devout fan of the Ha’gashash Ha’chiver (Pale
Pathfinder), a popular Israeli comedy troupe that performed for
decades. “He knows every sketch of theirs by heart, and he uses
their language very often when he speaks Hebrew,” his friend Dan
Gillerman, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations,
said. His hundred-year-old mother and his brother live in Israel,
and Saban travels there frequently. Through the years, one of his
closest advisers has always been an Israeli and, in business
meetings with others on his team, the two would occasionally slip
into a side conversation in Hebrew.
He remains keenly
interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his
role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to
protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel
relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described
his formula. His “three ways to be influential in American
politics,” he said, were: make donations to political parties,
establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he
contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building
for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known
donations ever made to an American political party. That year, he
also founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He considered buying The
New Republic, but decided it wasn’t for him. He also tried to buy
Time and Newsweek, but neither was available. He and his
private-equity partners acquired Univision in 2007, and he has made
repeated bids for the Los Angeles Times.
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/10/100510fa_fact_bruck
Also see:
Jewish
control of the media is preventing free Holocaust debate
Oliver
Stone Apologizes for Telling the Truth
Last updated 30/07/2010
Homepage