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James T. Aubrey, Jr.

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Producers, directors and
media figures

   James Thomas Aubrey, Jr. ( December 14, 1918 – September 3, 1994) was
   an American television and film executive. President of the CBS
   television network during the early 1960s, he put some of television's
   most enduring series on the air, including Gilligan's Island and The
   Beverly Hillbillies. Under Aubrey, CBS dominated American television
   the way General Motors and General Electric dominated their industries.
   The New York Times Magazine in 1964 called Aubrey "a master of
   programming whose divinations led to successes that are breathtaking."

   Despite his successes in television, Aubrey's abrasive personality and
   oversized ego — "Picture Machiavelli and Karl Rove at a University of
   Colorado football recruiting party" wrote Variety in 2004 — led to his
   firing from CBS amid charges of improprieties. "The circumstances
   rivaled the best of CBS adventure or mystery shows," declared The New
   York Times in its front-page story on his firing, which came on "the
   sunniest Sunday in February" 1965. After four years as an independent
   producer, Aubrey was hired by financier Kirk Kerkorian to preside over
   Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's near-total shutdown in the 1970s, during which he
   slashed the budget and alienated producers and directors but brought
   profits to a company that had suffered huge losses. Aubrey resigned
   from MGM after four years, declaring his job was done, and then
   vanished into almost total obscurity for the last two decades of his
   life.

   Hollywood executive Sherry Lansing, a close friend of Aubrey's for two
   decades, told the Los Angeles Times in 1986:

     Jim is different. He does his own dirty work. Jim is one of those
     people who are willing to say, "I didn't like your movie."
     Directness is disarming to people who are used to sugar-coating.
     It's tough for people who need approval to see somebody who doesn't.
     Myths and legends begin to surround that kind of person.

Early years

   Born in La Salle, Illinois, James Thomas Steven Aubrey was the eldest
   of four sons of James Thomas Aubrey, Sr., an advertising executive with
   the Chicago firm of Aubrey, Moore, and Wallace; and his wife, the
   former Mildred Stever. He grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of
   Lake Forest and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New
   Hampshire, and Princeton University. All four boys went to Exeter and
   Princeton; his brother Stever became a successful advertising man at J.
   Walter Thompson before heading the F. William Free agency. "My father
   insisted on accomplishment," Aubrey recalled in 1986. In college,
   Aubrey was a star on the football team, playing left end. He graduated
   in 1941 with honours in English and entered the United States Army Air
   Forces. During his service in World War II, Aubrey rose to the rank of
   major and taught military flying to actor James Stewart, who was a
   licensed civilian pilot.^

   While stationed in southern California, he met Phyllis Thaxter (born
   November 20, 1921)^ , an actress signed to MGM, whom he married in
   November 1944. Thaxter's best known role was as Clark Kent's mother,
   Martha, in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie. They had two children,
   Susan Schuyler "Skye" Aubrey (born circa 1946) and James Watson Aubrey
   (born January 5, 1953). The marriage ended in divorce in 1962.

   Aubrey was "6-foot 2-inch with an incandescent smile" with "unrevealing
   polar blue eyes" said The New York Times Magazine in 1964. The next
   year Richard Oulahan and William Lambert wrote he was "youthful,
   handsome, brainy, with an incandescent smile, a quiet, somewhat salty
   wit and, when he cared to turn it on, considerable charm. He was always
   fastidiously turned out, from his Jerry the Barber haircut to his
   CBS-eye cuff links." One producer told Oulahan and Lambert, "Aubrey is
   one of the most insatiably curious guys I know."

Enters broadcasting in radio

   After Aubrey was discharged from the Air Force, he stayed in southern
   California; before his marriage, he intended to return to Chicago. In
   Los Angeles, he sold advertising for the Street and Smith and Condé
   Nast magazine companies. His first broadcasting job was as a salesman
   at the CBS radio station in Los Angeles, KNX-AM, and soon went to the
   network's new television station, KNXT-TV. Within two years Aubrey had
   risen to be the network's West Coast television programming chief.
   There he met Hunt Stromberg, Jr., and they developed the popular
   western Have Gun, Will Travel. They sent their idea to the network's
   chief of programming, Hubbell Robinson, and as Oulahan and Lambert put
   it, "the rest is TV history." Aubrey was promoted to manager of all
   television network programs, based in California, until he went to ABC
   in 1956.

Goes to ABC

   On December 16, 1956, American Broadcasting Company president Oliver E.
   Treyz announced Aubrey would immediately become the network's head of
   programming and talent. ABC, the weakest of the three networks, was a
   perennial also-ran with a weak roster of affiliates and programs,
   something comparable to the early days of the Fox Network. Aubrey told
   the Los Angeles Times in 1986 "at that time, there was no ABC. The
   headquarters was an old riding stable. But I went because [ABC
   chairman] Leonard Goldenson in effect said, 'Look, I don't know that
   much about TV, I'm a lawyer.' And he let me have autonomy."

   As vice president in charge of programs (a title he gained before March
   1957), he brought to the air what he recalled as "wild, sexy, lively
   stuff, things that had never been done before," shows such as Maverick,
   a western with James Garner, and 77 Sunset Strip, a detective show with
   Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (However, by the time Strip went on the air in
   October 1958, Aubrey had already left the network.) Oulahan and Lambert
   said Aubrey scheduled "one lucrative show after another ... and for the
   first time the third network became a serious challenge to NBC and
   CBS." Among the successes he scheduled were The Donna Reed Show, a
   domestic comedy; The Rifleman, a western with Chuck Connors; and The
   Real McCoys, a rural comedy with Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna.

At CBS

   Despite his success at ABC, Aubrey saw a limited future at the network
   and asked to return to CBS, doing so on April 28, 1958, initially as
   assistant to Frank Stanton, president of CBS, Inc., the holding company
   which owned the network. (Thomas W. Moore would take his ABC job.)
   Aubrey was made vice president for creative services in April 1959,
   replacing Louis G. Cowan, whom CBS promoted to network president.

   Aubrey was named executive vice president on June 1, 1959, a newly
   created post that was the number-two official at the network. His
   responsibilities, network president Cowan told The New York Times,
   would be "general supervision of all CBS Television Network
   departments." On December 8, 1959, Cowan resigned, having been damaged
   from his connection to the quiz show scandals. (He created the show The
   $64,000 Question and owned the company which produced it for the
   network, though Cowan denied he knew anything about the rigging of the
   program.) Cowan's letter of resignation to Stanton declared, "you have
   made it impossible for me to continue." Aubrey was named president the
   same day and elected to the board of directors on December 9.

Named president of CBS

   During his five years running the CBS Network, Aubrey made it
   tremendously successful, substantially increasing ratings and doubling
   the company's profits. In the 1963 – 64 season, all twelve of the top
   daytime programs and fourteen of the top fifteen prime-time shows were
   on CBS — the lone evening exception was NBC's Bonanza, ranked number
   two. After he was fired, journalists Richard Oulahan and William
   Lambert declared,

     In the long history of human communications, from tom-tom to
     Telstar, no one man ever had a lock on such enormous audiences as
     James Thomas Aubrey, Jr. during his five-year tenure as head of the
     Columbia Broadcasting System's television network ... He was the
     world's No. 1 purveyor of entertainment.

Aubrey's formula

   CBS Chairman William S. Paley, Aubrey's boss.
   Enlarge
   CBS Chairman William S. Paley, Aubrey's boss.

   His formula was characterized by a CBS executive as "broads, bosoms,
   and fun," resulting in such shows as The Beverly Hillbillies and
   Gilligan's Island, despised by the critics — and CBS chairman William
   S. Paley — but extremely popular with viewers. While Aubrey had a great
   feel for what would be successful with viewers, he had nothing but
   contempt for them. "The American public is something I fly over," he
   said. His former boss at ABC, Oliver E. Treyz, said at programming "Jim
   Aubrey was one of the most effective ever, from the standpoint of
   delivering what the public wanted and making money. He was the best
   program judge in the business."

   Aubrey said in 1986 of Paley and his programming choices:

     I'd gone to CBS, and I'd become convinced Beverly Hillbillies was
     going to work. Bill Paley wasn't convinced. Bill has this great
     sense of propriety. Putting aside the Sarnoffs and all the other
     great names of broadcasting, Paley stood — stands — head and
     shoulders above everyone else. He had this blasting genius of
     instinctively looking at a show and knowing if it should be on the
     air. He could also be ruthless and distant ... But Bill was
     intuitive about both the business and creative sides of TV. And he
     genuinely disliked Beverly Hillbillies. I put it on the schedule
     anyway.

   "The hucksters' huckster," David Halberstam labeled him, "whose
   greatest legacy to television was a program called The Beverly
   Hillbillies, a series so demented and tasteless that it boggles the
   mind" that was, columnist Murray Kempton claimed, "a confrontation of
   the characters of John Steinbeck with the environment of Spyros
   Skouras," the extravagant chairman of Twentieth Century Fox. But
   regardless of what anyone said about Hillbillies, the public loved it.
   The Nielsen ratings showed 57 million were watching the show — one in
   three Americans.

   When Skouras was forced out of Fox by the company's board of directors
   in July 1962, Aubrey was widely mentioned to be his successor, but he
   openly denied he had any intention of leaving CBS.

Influence on the competition

   CBS's dominance was so great that when the fall schedules were
   announced, ABC and NBC would wait until CBS announced its plans before
   making their own announcements, effectively making Aubrey programmer
   for all three networks. CBS had great success with rural-themed
   programs such as the Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Mr. Ed, Green
   Acres, and Petticoat Junction. Yet another CBS hit Paley hated was The
   Munsters, part of a trend of fantasy shows at the time that included
   CBS's My Favorite Martian and Gilligan's Island. Oulahan and Lambert
   described Aubrey's "unwritten code" for programs

     Feed the public little more than rural comedies, fast-moving
     detective dramas and, later, sexy dolls. No old people; the emphasis
     was on youth. No domestic servants, the mass audience wouldn't
     identify with maids. No serious problems to cope with. Every script
     had to be full of action. No physical infirmities.

   The reporters acknowledged there were exceptions, such as The Defenders
   with E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as socially conscious attorneys, and
   quoted Aubrey's defense to charges of pandering to the public. "I felt
   that we had an obligation to reach the vast majority of most of the
   people," he said. "We made an effort to continue purposeful drama on
   TV, but we found out that people just don't want an anthology. They
   would rather tune in on Lucy."

   In 1962, a United States Senate committee investigating juvenile
   delinquency held hearings on sex on television and called executives
   from the three networks. The chairman, Senator Thomas J. Dodd ( D-
   Connecticut), blasted "an unmistakable pattern" and informed the
   executives "you all seem to use the same terminology — to think alike —
   and to jam this stuff down the people's throat." Dodd accused Aubrey of
   putting "prurient sex" in the CBS program Route 66 and confronted him
   with the "bosoms, broads, and fun" quotation from a memorandum by a CBS
   executive. Aubrey denied saying the phrase.

"The Smiling Cobra"

   Aubrey was a controlling man and a workaholic, putting in twelve-hour
   days six days a week. He endlessly read scripts, screened episodes, and
   ordered reshoots or changes made in the furniture and dressing of a
   set. Murray Kempton wrote that he would see six movies every weekend
   and read three books on transcontinental flights. Kempton quoted a CBS
   executive saying,

     He read everything. Like he saw every movie. But he had the smallest
     world there could be. He'd watch a movie and, while everyone else
     was involved in the story, he'd say out loud "that kid could be the
     lead in a television program." He read everything sure. All the new
     fiction. What he didn't like was Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Salinger,
     Capote, and Mailer. He didn't know how to use them.

   Kempton claimed Aubrey

     was the fourth president of CBS-TV as Caligula was the fourth of the
     twelve Caesars. Each carried the logic of his imperial authority as
     far as it could go. Each was deposed and disappeared suddenly
     leaving bad press behind him.

   Oulahan and Lambert claimed "Aubrey exercised his tremendous power with
   the canny skill and the ruthlessness of a Tatar khan." Aubrey's
   treachery led the producer John Houseman in 1959 to dub him "The
   Smiling Cobra." Houseman in public was less direct. In December 1962,
   CBS announced it was spending $250,000 an episode on Houseman's
   hour-long drama on American history for the next season, The Great
   Adventure, but on July 25, 1963, CBS announced Houseman had resigned.
   The producer told The New York Times "The kind of show they want is not
   what I wanted to produce" but attributed his departure to a simple
   difference of opinion, the Times reporter stating Houseman "expressed
   no criticism of CBS." (The show ran for one season, 1963 – 64.)

   In Only You, Dick Daring!, his humorous yet damning account of the five
   and a half months he spent trying to make a show with CBS for the
   1963 – 64 season based on an idea of Aubrey's about a county agent,
   writer Merle Miller described how Aubrey would simply walk out of
   meetings without offering any substantive comments on Miller's program
   and the nineteen rewrites he did of the pilot episode. Miller was
   assured by other CBS executives that Aubrey's silence meant things were
   fine — Kempton quoted a CBS producer telling Miller "this has nothing
   to do with a good script or a bad script. It has to do with pleasing
   one man, Jim Aubrey. Don't ever forget it" — and Miller later learned
   of efforts by Aubrey to force him out. (A pilot for the show, known as
   Calhoun and County Agent, to star Jackie Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck,
   was shot and put on the fall schedule, but the series was cancelled
   before it ever aired.) Miller quoted an independent producer: "Aubrey's
   the most important man in television, in the history of television,
   maybe in the history of entertainment. He out-Mayers Louis B. Mayer ten
   times over."

Abrasive toward many

   Aubrey's success seemed to have gone to his head and he became even
   more arrogant. He was abusive to the network's affiliates, advertisers,
   producers, and talent. Friends of Aubrey's such as producers Dick Dorso
   of United Artists, Martin Ransohoff of Filmways, and David Susskind,
   who had each sold several series to CBS, suddenly found themselves shut
   out. "He's a friend of mine, but he cut me stone cold last year," he
   told Oulahan and Lambert on Aubrey's behaviour. "I was hanging there
   with my pants down, wondering what I'd tell the stockholders."

   Garry Moore, a popular personality in the 1950s, wanted to make a
   comeback on CBS, but Aubrey casually dismissed him: "Not a chance."
   John Frankenheimer, critically acclaimed as the number one director of
   live TV dramas during the 1950s, was shown the exit door by Aubrey in
   1960. Frankenheimer was forced to find a new career as a movie
   director, although he had wanted to continue in television. In 1996,
   during a personal appearance at the Museum of Television & Radio,
   Frankenheimer described Aubrey as "a barbarian."

   The star of CBS's The Lucy Show had problems with Aubrey. " Lucille
   Ball couldn't say his name without calling him an S.O.B.," Stanton
   said — though Kempton quoted her after Aubrey's firing as saying "he
   was the smartest one up there." Aubrey fought with Red Skelton, Danny
   Thomas, and Arthur Godfrey as well. The treatment of Jack Benny was
   typical.

   Aubrey first rescheduled Benny's long-running series without consulting
   the star. Benny, a good friend of Paley's since he lured the comedian
   to CBS in 1948, objected to his new lead-in on Tuesdays for the 1963 –
   64 season, Petticoat Junction, instead of the previous season's The Red
   Skelton Hour. Then in the summer of 1963, Aubrey told Benny his show
   would not be renewed at the end of the forthcoming season, Aubrey
   having decided that Benny was out of step with current tastes and no
   longer relevant. "You're through," Aubrey told the star. Benny took his
   show to NBC, his home before 1948, where it was cancelled after only
   one season, proving Aubrey's point if not his tactics.

Favoritism alleged

   There were charges of favoritism in purchasing programs. Aubrey's
   friend Keefe Brasselle, who had bit parts in several movies in the
   1940s and 1950s and met Aubrey when they both worked at KNXT-TV, had no
   experience as a producer. "A 1965 edition of George Raft," said David
   Susskind, particularly apt as there were also rumors Brasselle had ties
   to the Mafia. Nevertheless, Aubrey scheduled three shows from
   Brasselle's Richelieu Productions for the 1964 – 65 season, all without
   pilots, still an almost unheard-of practice. (The shows were The
   Baileys of Balboa, a sitcom with Paul Ford; the newspaper drama The
   Reporter; and The Cara Williams Show, a sitcom starring red-head
   Williams, billed as the next Lucille Ball.) Brasselle would personally
   supervise The Reporter, shot in New York City. Costs skyrocketed on
   Brasselle's shows — after nine episodes, The Reporter was $450,000 over
   budget — and all three bombed — The Reporter running only three months,
   Baileys until April 1964; and Cara Williams finishing the season.
   Aubrey was later asked why he aired three untested programs.
   "Arrogance," he admitted.

   But, as his critics acknowledged, Aubrey could be charming and go to
   great lengths to please talent. To keep Jackie Gleason happy when he
   moved his show from New York City to Miami Beach in 1963, Aubrey had
   CBS buy Gleason's futuristic home in Peekskill, New York — The New York
   Times called it "a flying-saucer like cabana" — for $350,000. The
   network was still trying to sell it years later.

Aubrey, news, and sports

   Aubrey, who on May 9, 1963, warned the network's affiliates the high
   cost of rights for professional sports could price them off television,
   nevertheless in January 1964 agreed to pay $28.2 million to air the
   games of the National Football League for two years, seventeen games
   each season. "We know how much these games mean to the viewing
   audience, our affiliated stations, and the nation's advertisers,"
   Aubrey told The New York Times. In April, he agreed to extend the deal
   for another year for a total of $31.8 million.

   In the spring of 1964, The New York Times Magazine declared CBS "for
   the 10th year in a row ... was the undisputed champion of the
   television networks." The Times quoted an analyst who said CBS was
   "almost comparable to what General Motors did in autos or what General
   Electric [did] in electrical equipment."

   Aubrey fought constantly with officials of CBS News, especially its
   chief, Fred W. Friendly, who was just as demanding and controlling as
   Aubrey. Friendly felt Aubrey was insufficiently concerned with public
   affairs and in his memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control,
   recounts one budget meeting at CBS when Aubrey talked at length of how
   much money the news was costing the company, a sea of red ink that
   could be stopped by replacing news with more entertainment programs.
   However, Paley supported the news and protected Friendly's division
   from Aubrey's proposed budget cuts. Aubrey in 1962 ordered that there
   would be fewer specials, both entertainment and news, because he felt
   interruptions to the schedule alienated viewers by disrupting their
   routine viewing, sending them to the competition. Friendly resented
   this move.

   In 1964, Aubrey briefly attended the Republican National Convention at
   the Cow Palace in San Francisco at which Barry M. Goldwater was
   nominated for president. Aubrey left after two days, appalled at what
   he saw as the waste of money, declaring, "I'm going home. I can't stand
   the sight of all that money going out the window." Said Aubrey:

     This damned thing is gonna cost us $10 million. Who wants to listen
     to the news? This is the time we could be selling. If I had my way,
     we'd have some guy come on at 11 P.M. and say 'The following six men
     made horses' necks of themselves at the Republican convention today'
     and he'd give the names and that would be it.

   That fall, CBS Reports, a news program at eight o'clock on Wednesdays,
   was blamed in the press for the sharp drop off in the ratings of The
   Beverly Hillbillies — the comedy had been number one in its first two
   seasons, but dropped to eighteenth when CBS Reports became the
   Hillbillies lead-in for its third season. (Hillbillies had aired at
   nine o'clock before moving up a half hour in 1964.) CBS responded by
   moving CBS Reports to Mondays.

Aubrey's dismissal from CBS

   The FCC was concerned by secret payments to Aubrey.
   The FCC was concerned by secret payments to Aubrey.

   In the spring of 1964, charges were printed in the April 16 issue of
   Close-Up, a celebrity scandal sheet, which claimed Aubrey was taking
   kickbacks from producers. The Federal Communications Commission made
   inquiries, and CBS learned that despite his $264,000 annual salary from
   the company, Aubrey's apartment on Manhattan's Central Park South was
   owned by Martin Ransohoff, the head of Filmways, the producer of the
   Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Mr. Ed, and other CBS programs. And
   though he had a chauffeur-driven car paid for by the network,
   Brasselle's Richelieu Productions was paying for another chauffeured
   car for Aubrey, done so Paley and Stanton would not know what Aubrey
   was doing after hours. CBS had not known of either the apartment or the
   car. The company was also concerned about the money spent to buy
   Gleason's former home.

   In late 1964, Aubrey approached Stanton with a proposal. Claiming he
   had investors lined-up and ready to buy the company, Aubrey said once
   in control, they would fire Paley, install Stanton as chairman, and
   promote Aubrey to Stanton's post, CBS corporate president. This did not
   come to pass, but Aubrey's contempt for his boss William S. Paley knew
   no bounds, Aubrey even showing his disregard for Paley in public. The
   Internal Revenue Service filing a tax lien against Aubrey for
   $38,047.93 was another irritant for Paley. Aubrey also seemed to have
   lost his touch, the early ratings for the 1964 – 65 season showing the
   new shows that fall were flops. Aubrey panicked, noted Oulahan and
   Lambert, and "by that time Paley had made his decision to fire Aubrey,
   though he had yet found no plausible excuse."

   "Aubrey was torpedoed at last," wrote The New York Times Magazine, "by
   a combination of his imperiousness, the ratings drop, and a vivid
   afterhours life culminating in a raucous Miami Beach party — details of
   which no one ever agrees on — the weekend he was fired." (Aubrey had
   been in Florida for Jackie Gleason's forty-ninth birthday party.)

   "I don't pretend to be any saint. If anyone wants to indict me for
   liking pretty girls, I'm guilty," Aubrey said at the time, one factor
   in his divorce in 1962, which freed him, as Oulahan and Lambert put it,
   to

     live the high life around New York, Hollywood, Miami, and in Europe
     with such companions as Judy Garland, Julie Newmar, Rhonda Fleming —
     and with other dolls who were only faces and figures, not names. His
     late dates and early morning parties were the talk of several towns.

   Paley ordered Stanton to fire Aubrey, and he did so on February 27,
   1965, though the announcement was delayed until the following
   afternoon, a Sunday. Stanton's statement declared:

     Jim Aubrey's outstanding accomplishment during his tenure as head of
     the C.B.S. television network need no elaboration. His extraordinary
     record speaks for itself.

   In 1986, Paul Rosenfield wrote,

     There are at least 134,000 theories on why he got the ax, some of
     them lurid, but none as obvious as the fact that CBS was starting to
     slip in the Nielsens. "And there was a basic dissatisfaction with
     me," as he put it. If Aubrey understood ratings and revenue, he also
     was no stranger to a kind of after-hours recklessness that mirrored
     the Camelot of its day. Nobody questions that Jungle Jim had a good
     time in the playgrounds of Manhattan and Hollywood.

   Rosenfield also claimed "for years gossip columnists had to bite their
   tongues because the fodder on Aubrey was so tempting, but mostly
   unprintable. How much was hearsay and how much was fiction is not
   clear." Aubrey's successor was announced as John A. Schneider, the
   general manager of WCBS-TV in New York City, who had no experience in
   network television. Aubrey was so despondent at losing his job Stanton
   feared he would kill himself. Wall Street took the news badly as well:
   CBS stock plunged nine points over the following week. "Which puts my
   net value to the network at $20 million," Aubrey noted. Aubrey
   continued to be a CBS employee until April 20.

   Jack Gould, television critic for The New York Times, wrote two days
   after Aubrey's dismissal that Aubrey

     symbolized an era in television that has been and is too much rooted
     in calculated and insensitive preoccupation with making more money
     this year than last ... Automated situation comedies that wooed the
     young and did not drive away the old were the mainstay of his
     philosophy and they paid off.

The interregnum

   Aubrey, who left CBS with $2.5 million in network stock, moved to the
   Sunset Strip and set up a production company, The Aubrey Company. His
   attorney, Gregson E. Bautzer, in 1967 tried to buy the American
   Broadcasting Company for another client, the Las Vegas-based
   millionaire Howard Hughes. Aubrey was to have run ABC after the
   takeover, but the reclusive Hughes refused to testify in person at
   hearings before the Federal Communications Commission, which had to
   approve the purchase, and the deal collapsed.

   Aubrey's outsize reputation — beaming smile, dapper dress, endless
   womanizing — and his dramatic exit from CBS inspired characters in
   three novels. His former friend Keefe Brasselle wrote The CanniBalS: A
   Novel About Television's Savage Chieftains (1968), the title of which
   had very unsubtle capitalization and was, in Nora Ephron's assessment,
   "unreadable." Harold Robbins's The Inheritors (1969) and Jacqueline
   Susann's The Love Machine (1969) also contained characters based on
   him. In Susann's book, Aubrey is network executive Robin Stone. Paul
   Rosenfield said Aubrey had "quietly cooperated" with Susann, "giving
   her background on TV." Susann said Aubrey, her neighbour, was "one of
   those people who are born to run the works. A natural for a novel."

   In June 1967, Aubrey agreed to a two-year contract to produce films for
   Columbia Pictures. Despite being frequently rumored as a candidate for
   many posts in the entertainment industry, Aubrey told Vincent Canby of
   The New York Times he had "no desire ever again to become involved in
   the corporate side of the entertainment business" and had been, in
   Canby's words, "dabbling in a number of enterprises, including the
   acquisition of films for TV, real estate, and cultured pearls." In
   1965, Oulahan and Lambert had noted he had "extensive investments in
   everything from copper mines to a chain of waffle shops." His first
   project for Columbia was to be an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith
   book, Those Who Walk Away. "The criteria is profitable entertainment,"
   he told Canby. Before the deal collapsed on January 1, 1968, Aubrey had
   been rumored to be the leading candidate to be hired as ABC television
   entertainment chief if International Telephone and Telegraph's takeover
   of ABC, which was announced in March 1966, had been completed.

Picked to run MGM

   Aubrey resurfaced in 1969 when Las Vegas businessman Kirk Kerkorian
   took control of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio for the first time,
   ousting Canadian liquor magnate Edgar M. Bronfman, who had gained
   control earlier that year. Aubrey's attorney Gregson E. Bautzer also
   represented Kerkorian, and Bautzer recommended Aubrey for the MGM post.
   Aubrey, announced as MGM president on October 21, 1969, was Kerkorian's
   third choice after Herb Jaffe of United Artists and independent
   producer Mike Frankovich both declined the post, while producer Ray
   Stark was also considered. Aubrey replaced the fired Louis F. Polk,
   Jr., who had been MGM president only since January 14, 1969. Aubrey was
   the studio's third president that year. Polk told The New York Times,
   "no one likes to leave a job unfinished," and said he had started
   much-needed reforms at the studio, which suffered a $35 million loss in
   the fiscal year ending August 31, 1969.

   Aubrey received a salary of $4,000 a week, but had no contract. He said
   in 1986, "I wanted Kirk to be able to say, 'Get lost, Jim,' without
   obligation if it didn't work." Like most of the big studios in the
   1960s, MGM was struggling and Kerkorian said his new president would
   bring the company roaring back to its former glory. Instead, Aubrey
   largely liquidated the company as Kerkorian transformed it into a
   hospitality company with the MGM Grand Hotel he was building. "We've
   been using old-fashioned methods here," Aubrey said at the time. In
   1986, he said the company was "total disarray. Until you were in a
   position to lift up the rug, there was no way to know how much
   disarray. The crown jewel of studios had become a shambles."

   Within days of his hiring, twelve films were cancelled because of
   financial issues, among them director Fred Zinnemann's Man's Fate, days
   from starting principal photography.

Restructures the company

   Aubrey eliminated hundreds of jobs when he relocated corporate
   headquarters from New York City to Culver City, which was announced on
   April 29, 1970. "It would seem to me to make more sense to have a
   company as close to its production facilities as possible," he said.
   Aubrey ordered the sale of MGM's historic collection of costumes and
   props such as the Ruby Slippers wore by Judy Garland in The Wizard of
   Oz and the suit Spencer Tracy wore in Inherit the Wind. (It was bought
   by one of the defense attorneys defending Charles Manson, who regularly
   wore it to court.) The studio's camera department was auctioned. Most
   of the studio's Culver City backlot and its 2,000-acre ranch in the
   Conejo Valley were sold to developers, moves already planned under
   Polk. Aubrey literally threw the company's valuable archives into the
   trash and brought production to a standstill. Aubrey was criticized for
   these actions. In 1986 he recalled, "the buck had to stop somewhere,
   and it was with me. Nostalgia runs strong out here, so we were
   criticized for selling Judy Garland's red shoes. To us they had no
   value, and they had no intrinsic value."

   These moves were effective in restoring the company's finances. In his
   first nine months on the job, he cut MGM's debt by $27 million, nearly
   one-quarter the total, and the company posted profits of $540,000 for
   those nine months compared to a $18,372,000 loss in the comparable
   period in the preceding fiscal year.

Changing tastes

   Losses were so great because Polk wrote off as total losses many films
   made under his predecessors; the company posted a $35,366,000 loss in
   the fiscal year ending August 31, 1969. "Basically what we're really
   concentrating on at the moment is to really streamline this operation.
   There isn't much else to do when you're losing as much money as we
   are," Aubrey told Leonard Sloane in December 1969. Aubrey said, "we
   have determined that we're not going to continue to produce on the
   basis of forty acres and acres and acres of standing sets. Young people
   who are the major movie audience today, refer to that as the plastic
   world and that is almost a deterrent in the business today."

   Aubrey announced plans for faster and cheaper movies, none of which
   would have a budget above $1 million, but many of these inexpensive
   films bombed with critics and audiences. One notable success was the
   Richard Roundtree film Shaft, which cost $1 million and sold $12
   million worth of tickets. Agent Sue Mengers said he was a very tough
   dealmaker. "I'd rather go to bed with him than negotiate with him."
   Upon assuming his MGM post, Aubrey almost immediately cancelled
   production on two Julie Andrews pictures, She Loves Me and Say It With
   Music, the late 1960s fad for musicals having ended.

Return to profitability

   In the first half of fiscal 1970, the company had profits of $6,531,000
   despite sizable write-offs. The company had significantly cut its
   operating losses from $6,547,000 to $1,594,000. Aubrey told the press
   in April 1970 the company would have made money if not for four films:
   Herbert Ross's musical version of James Hilton's novel Goodbye, Mr.
   Chips starring Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark; Michelangelo Antonioni's
   Zabriskie Point, a film Pauline Kael called "a huge, jerry-built
   crumbling ruin of a movie"; the adventure Captain Nemo and the
   Underwater City with Robert Ryan and Chuck Connors; and Sidney Lumet's
   The Appointment with Omar Sharif, Anouk Aimée, and Lotte Lenya. "These
   pictures cost almost $20-million to make. If the films would have
   broken even, we would have been highly profitable." In The New York
   Times, Vincent Canby noted that same month "the fickle tastes of the
   movie-going audience have made a large part of [studios' film]
   inventory obsolete."

   By the end of the fiscal year, the company had made $1,573,000 in
   profits; a remarkable turnaround for a company which posted a $35
   million loss one year before. In January 1971, Aubrey declared, "we are
   pleased that the company has been turned around. Through the policies
   of this management, including a complete reorganization, substantial
   economies, consolidation of operations and through better performance
   of recent films, we have been able to operate substantially in the
   black."

   That same month, Aubrey announced the company was in merger talks with
   Twentieth Century Fox, days after Fox fired its top executives, Richard
   D. Zanuck and David Brown. Two weeks later he announced the talks had
   ended. However, Darryl F. Zanuck, chairman and CEO of Fox, publicly
   denied any negotiations. "There have not been and are not now and are
   not scheduled for the future any discussions concerning a merger or any
   other type of combination between our two companies," he told the
   press.

Hands-on

   Aubrey again took a hands-on approach to MGM's products, personally
   ordering cuts on films. The New York Times Magazine wrote, "Aubrey's
   heavy involvement with every creative detail of MGM's pictures far
   surpassed his immersal in CBS's scripts." After he made edits to the
   film Going Home starring Robert Mitchum, its director, Herbert Leonard,
   protested publicly. "He unilaterally and arbitrarily raped the
   picture," he told Time in 1971. Director Blake Edwards was incensed by
   changes Aubrey made to his film The Wild Rovers with William Holden,
   telling The New York Times Magazine, "Cuts? He doesn't know as much as
   a first-year cinema student. He cut the heart right out of it."
   Television producer Bruce Geller, who created Mission: Impossible, had
   his name removed from the credits of his first film, Corky, because
   "It's not my picture any more." The producer of the film Chandler,
   Michael S. Laughlin, and its director, Paul Magwood, took out a full
   page ad, bordered in black, in the trade papers declaring,

     Regarding what was our film Chandler, let's give credit where credit
     is due. We sadly acknowledge that all editing, post-production as
     well as additional scenes were executed by James T. Aubrey Jr. We
     are sorry.

   Laughlin told Time, "You just can't deal with Aubrey. He realizes that
   litigation can be a great expense, and that because of legal delays the
   film will have disappeared long before your case comes to court."

   MGM had disagreements with the Motion Picture Association of America
   and its rating system for films, which had been instituted in 1968. MGM
   resigned from the MPAA in 1971 over the issue of ratings and
   "exorbitant dues charges," Aubrey said. In October 1971, MGM announced
   that it was to build the world's largest hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada,
   what would become the MGM Grand Hotel, and was to enter the cruise-ship
   business. The next month, the company announced fiscal 1971 profits of
   $16,358,000, up sharply from the $1.6 million in fiscal 1970 and the
   highest in a quarter century.

   In 1973, Aubrey announced his resignation, declaring, "The job I agreed
   to undertake has been accomplished." Kerkorian was named as his
   successor on October 31. Time Magazine declared, "Under Aubrey, MGM
   churned out profitable, medium-budget schlock like Skyjacked and Black
   Belly of the Tarantula; directors often charged him with philistine
   meddling, and he alienated many of them" but "as a financial auteur,
   Aubrey may have deserved an Oscar."

   Aubrey and Sherry Lansing, who entered the movie business as a script
   reader at MGM under Aubrey, were struck by a car while crossing
   Wilshire Boulevard in the mid-1970s. Both were badly hurt and Lansing
   had to use crutches for a year and a half. Aubrey nursed her back to
   health. "He came every day. He would say, 'You're not going to limp.'
   My own mother and father couldn't have given me more support," she told
   Variety in 2004.

Final years

   Aubrey became an independent producer after leaving MGM, producing ten
   films, none memorable. His greatest success was a 1979 television movie
   about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders starring Jane Seymour — "broads,
   bosoms, and fun" once more.^ In the mid-1980s, he was chairman of
   Entermark, a production company which made low-budget films and was
   backed by several wealthy Texans — including former Governor John
   Connally. "Our theory is that with today's ancillary rights, there is
   real profit in a movie that costs $3 million. We don't need to gross
   $40 million, or open on Christmas Day," he said. To publicize this
   venture, he granted a rare interview to the Los Angeles Times in 1986.
   Reporter Paul Rosenfield found him unrepentant:

     Aubrey doesn't deny that he shoots from the hip, in a style that can
     unhinge the fragile egos of show business. "If I was in the tire
     business," reasoned Aubrey, "I wouldn't be hurt if the customer
     didn't buy my tires. I'd think, 'So what?' But in my business, if I
     don't buy the script, then the writer kicks the dog and beats his
     wife. So you learn to pay attention to personal relationships. But
     that doesn't mean you lie to people. I've been the screwer and the
     screwee, and I know which is better. It's better to be the screwer,
     and it's very difficult to do that with honesty, but it's how I
     prefer to be treated. I don't want power now, or authority, so I
     suppose my candor can't hurt me.

   New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith reported this profile of
   Aubrey had led to rumors he would again return to head CBS after Paley
   was forced out in 1986 when Laurence Tisch acquired the network.

   He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1994, largely forgotten,
   and was buried in Los Angeles's Westwood Memorial Park.^ His marker
   there identifies him as "A Man Among Men." In the summer of 2004
   Variety reported his daughter is writing a biography of her father.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_T._Aubrey%2C_Jr."
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