Haim Saban still hadn’t decided whether or not to help Senator Barack Obama get elected president when he picked up the phone this summer and began planning an imaginary event.
The Hollywood billionaire—America’s top political-campaign contributor—was still heartbroken over Senator Hillary Clinton’s defeat. As one of her national finance chairs, he had single-handedly raised more than $1 million from his friends and associates, and her departure from the race had left him so bereft that he considered backing John McCain. When that idea met with opposition from Saban’s wife, Cheryl, and their four children (”Are you kidding? We pounced on him,” she recalled), the self-described “cartoon schlepper” (he made his first millions in kiddie TV) was left with two options.
“Option No. 1 is to vote for Obama, send him a $2,300 check, and sayonara—hope he wins,” Saban said, citing the maximum donation allowed by an individual. “Option No. 2 is, Go big. If I’m going to go big, I have to go biggest. I have zero interest in being big. Biggest, I have an interest.”
Nattily dressed in a blue blazer with gold buttons and a white open-collared shirt, the 63-year-old grandfather was sitting at the head of a gleaming table in the 26th-floor conference room of Saban Capital Group, the firm he founded in 2001 to manage his own $3.4 billion fortune. Running Saban Capital isn’t his only job; he also owns several music-publishing companies and serves as chairman of Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States, which he and a group of private equity partners took over in 2007.
An assistant buzzed on the phone. Saban had asked her to call his friend, the record producer David Foster, who was now holding.
“He’s going to yell at me,” Saban predicted, before picking up and yelling first: “Bubbe!” Then he got to the point: If he decided to “go big” for Obama, he wanted Foster to help him plan a fundraiser to eclipse all fundraisers, an event Saban was already calling “the concert of the year.”
“I want to do something huge. I want Lionel Richie. I want Shakira. Of course we’ll have Oprah. We’ll have all that,” he barked into the phone, describing what he imagined as a mid-September, $25,000-a-ticket event to be thrown in his “backyard”—the lush grounds, modeled on the gardens of Versailles, of his six-acre Beverly Hills estate. Foster said something that made Saban laugh. “No, I’m not working too hard. I’m enjoying myself!” he said, running a hand over his mane of thick black hair, which appeared to be held in place with shellac. “Are you in?”
Foster was in. But was Saban? “It depends first of all that I commit to myself that this is what I want to do,” he told me after the call. “And I haven’t yet.”
Rainmakers like Haim Saban have always played a key role in politics. But this summer, when Senator Obama became the first major-party candidate to decline public financing since the system was created in 1976, über-fundraisers became even more essential.
That made Saban’s indecision newsworthy. In late June, Obama—girding himself for a tough battle with McCain—began wooing Senator Clinton’s top fundraisers in earnest. Clinton helped, asking more than 100 of her most persuasive money gatherers to meet Obama at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Most agreed to come, but some, including Saban, “pointedly rejected the request,” reported the British weekly the Observer.
A few days earlier, John B. Emerson, a former White House official under Bill Clinton and a major supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, helped organize a $28,500-a-couple event in Los Angeles that raised $5 million for Obama (much of it from those in the entertainment industry). Saban did not attend; soon, Daily Variety had singled him out as a “fervent” Hillraiser who had yet to endorse a candidate.
As Mike Medavoy, the former studio chief and mainstay of the Hollywood-Washington nexus, told me in July, “I think Haim has deliberately backed off.”
Why such focus on a man best known for transforming a Japanese TV series into the ’90s children’s action show Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers? Because, in addition to being an unstoppable “bundler”—the polite term for those who are willing to wring cash out of their friends and colleagues—Saban has given more of his own money, nearly $13 million, than any other American to support candidates, political-action committees, and campaign committees since 1999, according to the Federal Election Commission. (The second-largest giver in the same period, Stephen Bing, trails Saban by more than $3 million.)
Moreover, because of Saban’s vocal support of Israel, he is seen as something of a bellwether for other influential Jewish Americans. An endorsement from Saban, a self-described “right-wing crazy” when it comes to national security, would send a loud message to others who question Obama’s determination to aggressively protect the Jewish state.
Saban admitted he’d been worried about Obama’s commitment to Israel. But when the presumptive Democratic nominee ended his June speech to the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee by noting that Jewish Americans and African Americans had long stood “shoulder to shoulder” in periods of great social upheaval, Saban was moved.
“Him being aware of that, acknowledging that, shows that he may have a visceral commitment, as opposed to a logical or strategic one,” Saban said. “That visceral affinity was a question mark for a lot of people. Well, it’s no longer a question mark for me.”
Still, something held Saban back. He blamed “logistics,” his term for the scheduling problems that had thus far prevented him from sitting down with Obama before fully committing himself. But it was easy to wonder whether Saban’s hesitation partly stemmed from the fact that he likes to be first, to be prescient, to see what others do not. He will never be able to say of Obama, as he could of Clinton, that he was there at the beginning. Financially and emotionally, it may be impossible for him to ever be Obama’s “biggest.”
A former Clinton fundraiser remembers coming upon an agitated Saban in February 2007, just weeks before an event to be held at the Beverly Hills home of supermarket magnate Ron Burkle. Saban, who’d been working day and night to boost attendance, had corralled Jonathan Mantz, Clinton’s national finance director. “If I’m not No. 1,” he said, meaning the evening’s top fundraiser, “I’m going to cut my balls off.”
Saban raised $800,000 that night—more than anyone else.
“Son of a bitch! Another three-pointer!” Saban is kvetching at his very large flat-screen TV as we sit down for our first interview. Game 2 of the N.B.A. finals is being played on the East Coast, so we’re watching the Boston Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers from the family room of Saban’s 26,000-square-foot home in a gated neighborhood in Beverly Hills. Saban doesn’t have season tickets, though when the Lakers play at home, he always wheedles a floor seat.
“I call this one, that one—’Hey, you want a date?’” he says, munching nuts served by a crisply dressed British “house manager” named Justin. Among Saban’s recent conquests: Avi Lerner, the B-movie mogul who, like Saban, grew up in Israel, and Jim Wiatt, C.E.O. of the William Morris Agency—twice. “For the three games that are coming up, I schnorred,” Saban boasts. “Tickets are $15,000 to $20,000. But I didn’t have to buy anything. Think about it: a $60,000 savings!”
When I observe that this confirms his reputation as a tough dealmaker, he feigns hurt feelings. “Tough? Look at me!” he commands. “Do you see toughness? I’m a huggable little lamb! What are you talking?” He smiles a smile more crocodilian than sheepish and reaches for my tape recorder.
“You have a man in your life?” he asks, pushing the off button.
Saban is relentless. Ask anybody.
“Indefatigable. Overwhelming. Undeterrable,” says Steve Rattner, the managing principal of Quadrangle Group, an investment firm.
“He’s constantly focusing on ‘Where am I going with this? What’s the next move?’” says Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corp., who’s been on both sides of the negotiating table with Saban. “When he has something he’s trying to build, Haim is like a dog with a bone.”
A classic Hollywood story involves Gene Simmons of Kiss. In the late ’90s, as co-owner of the Fox Family Channel, Saban was developing shows for children. Simmons, the fire-breathing, blood-spitting frontman of a rock band in costumes and face paint, pitched Saban an idea for a new Saturday-morning cartoon: Kiss meets X-Men, the Marvel comics superhero team. Saban liked the concept well enough to convene a meeting with Avi Arad, then C.E.O. of Marvel’s toy division.
At the appointed time, Saban, Arad, and Simmons sat down. The meeting was going well, and the three began to haggle over numbers. Then Saban turned to Arad and, referring to Simmons, confided in Hebrew, “Now we gut him like a fish.” Without missing a beat, Simmons—who, unbeknownst to Saban, was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel—replied in Hebrew, “You asshole. I’m one of you.”
When asked about this story, Simmons laughs and says he “vaguely” remembers “something along those lines.”
Saban says he has no memory of the conversation but acknowledges it “may have” taken place. “People I deal with, for the most part, are very smart people,” he adds. “I mean, sometimes I gut them like a fish, and sometimes they gut me like a fish, you know?”
In business as well as in politics, Saban plays the mensch, but his charm fails to hide an all-consuming drive to succeed. He is generous but also ruthless; aggressive yet patient enough to wait for the best moment to strike; poker-faced but at times utterly transparent; analytical and strategic with moments of startling self-contradiction.
Saban’s memories of growing up poor in Alexandria, Egypt, have prompted him to make huge gifts to Los Angeles-area educational institutions, hospitals, and free clinics, particularly those that serve children. In that way, indisputably, Saban and his wife are champions of the underprivileged.
Yet when rules designed to protect the public’s access to the Pacific Ocean interfered with his privacy at his stucco-and-stone Malibu beach house, he was quick to join his neighbors on so-called Billionaire’s Beach to seek—and win—an exemption to keep outsiders off that stretch. Philanthropist Eli Broad took the lead, Saban says, in asking the California Coastal Commission to allow them to buy an 80-foot section of beach a mile away and turn it into a public park.
Saban’s stance on social issues is liberal. He’s pro-choice, pro-nationalized health care, even pro-taxes. “Higher taxes for people like me to help others who are less fortunate—that’s okay by me,” he’ll say. But just last year, he settled with the Internal Revenue Service after admitting to using offshore tax shelters in 2001 to avoid paying at least $300 million on the $1.5 billion he pocketed when Disney bought his share of Fox Family Worldwide. In his testimony, he told Senate investigators that he had received bad advice: “You have before you a very disappointed person, who feels misled, lied to, cheated.”
Saban’s family fled Egypt for Tel Aviv during the Suez Crisis in 1956. He was 12, old enough to understand the shame his father, a toy salesman, endured as he struggled, selling pencils and erasers door-to-door. For years, Saban says, he lived with his grandmother, parents, and younger brother in one room and shared a bathroom with prostitutes and their pimp. At 15 or 16, around the time he started playing bass—”badly,” he says—in a Beatles cover band called the Lions, Saban would lie in bed and imagine being rich.
“Before I went to sleep, I’d close my eyes and think about it,” he recalls, “which for me meant I would own a car—the biggest car! American! I wanted to own a Chevrolet Impala.”
He would own that Impala, but not until after the 1973 Yom Kippur War wiped out a business he’d started that promoted concerts and managed bands. In 1975, he moved to Paris, where he got the chance to record one of his clients singing the theme song for a cartoon called Goldorak. He was miffed when he had to foot the $2,000 bill for the recording session, but later, he’d be grateful. Because he’d paid to produce it, he owned the master, so when Goldorak became a huge hit and its theme song started selling, Saban made a gigantic profit. He realized he’d found his niche.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1983. Around that time, he discovered that the music accompanying cartoons was the mother lode.
“It’s really simple to understand,” he explains. “If you watch a half-hour sitcom, you hear a little music at the beginning, a little at the end. But cartoons open with music, have music all along and music at the end. I’m still making money on those cartoons.” He pauses, then whispers, “Millions!”
He pursued his fortune with typical single-mindedness. According to the performing rights agency BMI, Saban is the composer or co-author of a staggering 3,700 musical themes, song cues, and other works. That achievement came into question in 1998, when several composers alleged that they had written much of the music for which Saban and others took credit. That year, the Hollywood Reporter launched an investigation into Saban’s music-publishing empire, stating that composers were paid by the hour to write music that Saban then claimed he had authored.
One of the composers, Ron Wasserman, said that he wrote the original Power Rangers theme as well as hundreds of hours of other music, but for years got no writing credit. It was no secret; the no-credit clause was clearly set forth in his and other writers’ contracts with Saban, Wasserman tells me. “It was paid college, that’s really what it was,” he says. The system wasn’t fair, he adds, “but had I not had that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I certainly have no hard feelings.” Wasserman has gone on to write (and receive credit for) music for America’s Next Top Model, among other shows.
According to Saban, 10 composers threatened to sue him for $1 million each. “Yeah,” he tells me, “and we settled for $10,000 a pop. They knew they had zero case. They were totally wrong.”
By the mid-’80s, Saban had begun dabbling not just in music but in the cartoons themselves. While in Tokyo on business, he saw a children’s TV show called Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. He paid $500,000 for the rights to air the program outside Asia and would spend the next eight years trying to persuade an American network to remake it, calling it Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Later, he bought the TV rights to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the comic book’s creators.
“When I first met him, the license plate on his car, a brown Rolls-Royce, was rsktkr1,” recalls Cheryl. An author of self-help books, she remains, at 57, one of the greatest-looking women in Los Angeles. She married Saban in 1987, a year after becoming his assistant (though you might say she has married him three times—they renew their vows every 10 years).
In the summer of 1993, Saban finally persuaded the Fox network to put Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers on the air. The campy live-action show, about five spandex-wearing teenagers who defend Earth from evildoers, was no Sesame Street. But it was an overnight success. Within weeks, it was the top-rated kids’ program.
Saban quickly used his new leverage to forge a joint venture with Fox. By that point, he had bought up 3,500 half-hour episodes of children’s TV, while Fox had the distribution channel, reaching 98 million homes. Saban, who ran the venture, called it “a natural marriage.” Believing (rightly) that 24-hour cable channels aimed at children were going to have the advantage over networks that only showed kiddie fare on weekday afternoons and Saturdays, he helped persuade Fox’s corporate parent, News Corp. to buy Pat Robertson’s Family Channel. The deal gave Saban a 50 percent stake in the new entity, called Fox Family Channel.
In 2006, once Saban had become a billionaire, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz dubbed him “a kind of Great Gatsby. Our Great Gatsby.”
But poverty would never be far enough away. Today, Saban keeps 10 percent of his total investment portfolio “protected—it generates the minimum interest that money can generate. It’s very secure.” Saban jokes that he’s created a new asset class known as N.P.A.
“What do you think N.P.A. stands for?” he asks. “Never Poor Again.”
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