Troubleshooting Life 155, June 3 - Develop your “seeing eye” to see the hunt before the throng.

On June 3, 2002, Jack Valenti wrote a guest column for Variety after Lew Wasserman died.

Jack wrote that Lew Wasserman entered into that place where legends live on.

He described Lew Wasserman as non-xeroxable, and quoted Winston Churchill, who said Lew had “the seeing eye, the ability to see beneath the surface of things, to know what is on the other side of the brick wall, to follow the hunt three fields before the throng.”

In Connie Bruck's biography of Lew Wasserman, When Hollywood Had a King, she writes about when Jack Valenti joined President Johnson as one of his special assistants.

Kennedy had just been assassinated, and Johnson was planning a trip to Los Angeles early in his 1964 campaign,

He wanted to have a trailer at a certain location and told Valenti to call Wasserman.

Over the course of one hour, Wasserman made calls and visits and got the President a trailer.

In Barry Avrich’s The Last Mogul, Avrich cites how, in 1966, Lew Wasserman helped Reagan become Governor of California.

Later on, he would bail Reagan out of financial trouble, by brokering a deal to sell 236 acres of Reagan’s Malibu ranch to 20th Century Fox for $2 million.

The county appraisal of the land? $115,000.

In the documentary, Avrich includes a sound bite from Ronald Reagan: “All of us are grateful for the years of help you’ve given us. You’ve done so much for Nancy and me over the years. Some day I think we’ll even get around to taking a picture with you. Lew, Nancy and I love you. God bless you.”

ACTION POINT: Develop your “seeing eye” to see the hunt before the throng