At 85, Sumner Redstone is still going strong

Sumner Murray Rothstein grew up in a tenement in Boston, the son of a linoleum salesman with a family to support.

“The apartment didn't even have a toilet,” he said. “My mother was a very tough woman to live with because she was driving me to education.”

His father changed the family name to Redstone while Sumner was a senior at the prestigious Boston Latin School, where he graduated with the highest GPA in school history.

“The most competitive experience I had was early in my life as I fought to be number one at Boston Latin School,” he said.

After receiving a scholarship to Harvard University, Sumner completed his degree in just two and a half years. In 1943, he was recruited by the Army to be a code breaker during World War II, becoming fluent in Japanese. After the war, he returned to Harvard to get a law degree and would ultimately join his father's movie theater company.

The Northeast Theater Corporation started with just two drive-ins and began to thrive under Redstone's leadership, changing its name to National Amusements. It would become his first successful business venture, but Redstone says it was never about the money.

“I think most really successful people, if they're going to succeed, they can't be motivated only by the desire for money,” he said. “They got to have that passion to be the best and to win.”

It was that same passion that helped save his life in 1979. While a guest at Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, a fire broke out in the early morning hours. Many of the 430 guests had to be evacuated down by ladder.

“I remember trying to get to a window, and I was burning, from my legs up,” he said. “ And I try to open one window, couldn't. Finally go out to another window, and I hung on with this arm.”

With his right hand permanently disfigured and severe burns over 45 percent of his body, Redstone spent months in the burn unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“They said, ‘Everything we know about burn surgery is on you,’” he said. “’Your toes are nailed to your foot,’ which they were at the time. ‘Every kind of graft, bone graft, skin graft, is on you. The reason you're alive is you.’ And the desire — to win and not give up, I think, plays a big role in saving the lives of any person, whatever they're inflicted with.”

By the late 1980's, Redstone had built a powerful chain of 400 movie theaters. He even created the modern day multiplex. But then he set his sights on a bigger prize: Viacom, a company that had a television syndication unit, and two fledgling cable networks, MTV and Nickelodeon. Redstone risked his entire fortune with a $3.4 billion dollar bid — beating back Viacom's management, which was trying to buy the company itself.

“If I listened to Wall Street, I'd still be operating three drive-ins,” he said. “ They said I paid too much. They said MTV was a fad, Nickelodeon wouldn't make it. Nickelodeon, MTV now, this fad, reaches a billion people around the world. And Nickelodeon is the number one channel in the United States. So I was right, fortunately. “

Never one to rest on his laurels, Redstone made another big play in 1993, acquiring Paramount — but not before an epic battle against media mogul Barry Diller forced Redstone into a bidding war for the prized movie studio.

“What happened with us is at a certain point, we just said, ‘We're not making the next bid,’” said Diller. “And he won. Now it's not that we ran out of money, because we didn't. We ran out of conviction for the deal. By the way, I think we were probably wrong.”

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