Jerry Perenchio Dies

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Jerry Perenchio Dies: Hollywood Dealmaker & Former Univision CEO Was 86


UPDATED with statements from Alan Horn and Norman Lear: Jerry Perenchio, billionaire Hollywood mogul, former Univision Chairman and CEO and ex-business partner of Norman Lear, died Tuesday after a five-month battle with lung cancer, his family told the Los Angeles Times. He was 86.

Perenchio began his decades-long career as a talent agent whose firm repped such stars as Andy Williams, Glen Campbell and Henry Mancini. As promoter in the 1970s, he was behind the historic first matchup of heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and also staged the historic “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973.

He went on to work as a film producer on such classic 1980s pics as Blade Runner and Driving Miss Daisy before a brief stint as owner of the Loews theater chain. In the ’90s, he bought cash-strapped Univision Communications with an initial investment of $33 million, transforming it into the country’s predominant Spanish-language media conglomerate and a Fortune 500 company. He and two partners sold Univision to a Haim Saban-led investment group for $12.3 billion in 2007, reportedly netting $1.3 billion for himself. Forbes recently estimated his net worth at $2.7 billion.


In 1973 he began working with legendary television producer Norman Lear. In a 2006 interview with the Times, Lear said, “Jerry was tough, terribly smart and terribly straightforward.” Lear had been working with his producing partner Bud Yorkin at the time. “Neither of us were business people,” Lear told the paper. “But when Jerry joined us, he made it a business.”


The following year Lear and Perenchio formed TAT, a new production company that produced the TV classics The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

In 1982, he and Lear acquired Avco Embassy Pictures for $25 million, merging with it with their TV businesses. It was with Avco Embassy Pictures that they distributed movies such as Blade Runner, This Is Spinal Tap and A Chorus Line. It was sold, along with its rich library of Lear television shows, to Coca-Cola for $485 million in 1985.

“The world has lost a glorious, most generous man and an absolute original,” Lear wrote after learning of the passing of his dear friend. “There will never ever be another him.”

Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn also fondly remembered Perenchio.

“Jerry Perenchio brought me into the entertainment industry to join him, Norman Lear, and Bud Yorkin at (then) Tandem Productions. He was a mentor, a dear friend, and a singular, brilliant talent. More important, he was a man of total integrity, whose humility belied his extraordinary success,” said Horn in a statement. “I loved him.”

Early on in his career, Perenchio also had worked with media mogul Lew Wasserman, joining his Music Corp. of America, a multi-faceted company which at that time had its hand in booking bands, producing films, distributing TV shows and representing talent.

Perenchio also was one of Malibu’s largest land holders through his ownership of the Malibu Bay Co. His home where he died was the enigmatic Bel-Air mansion known to millions of television viewers as the home of the fictional Clampetts in 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.

He also was politically active, donating money to dozens of candidates over the years including Carly Fiorina’s 2016 presidential bid. He also was one of the earliest and largest financial backers of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and also contributed to money to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Diane Feinstein, former Mayor Richard Riordan and former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He also served on the board of directors for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute.

In addition to political donations, Perenchio donated tens of millions to charities, foundations and building projects, including Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. His 2014 gift to LACMA of 47 master artworks worth a combined $500 million-plus is the largest in the museum’s history.

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Jerry Perenchio, Consummate Hollywood Dealmaker and Former Univision Head, Dies at 86

Once a talent agent and promoter, the reclusive executive was a partner in business with Norman Lear and an owner of a valuable art collection.
Jerry Perenchio, the preeminent Hollywood dealmaker who bought and sold Univision, partnered with Norman Lear and promoted game-changing sporting events featuring Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King, has died. He was 86.

Perenchio, who got his start in show business as a talent agent working for the legendary mogul Lew Wasserman, died Tuesday of lung cancer at his Bel Air home, a family spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times.

In 1992, Perenchio and his partners acquired the then-flagging Spanish-language TV network Univision from greeting-card company Hallmark for $550 million, then took it public four years later.

After adding 13 TV stations in a $1.1 billion deal with Barry Diller to their portfolio, they sold Univision to an investment group led by Haim Saban for $12.3 billion in 2007. (Perenchio collected some $1.3 billion for his stake off his initial investment that was said to be about $33 million.)

In 1973, longtime showbiz partners Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin enlisted Perenchio to work with them at Tandem Productions, their burgeoning company behind such TV hits as All in the Family, Maude and Sanford & Son (and later One Day at a Time, Good Times and The Jeffersons).

Lear and Yorkin had met Perenchio, then an agent, when they were working on a TV special starring crooner Andy Williams and were looking to book a comedy act called The Stewed Prunes (Richard Libertini and MacIntyre Dixon), who were represented by Perenchio.

"I knew from that experience on, if I ever got to a place where it was time to have a business head, I would want Jerry," Lear said in a 1998 interview with the Archive of American Television.

Perenchio helped grow the business, and in 1981, he and Lear acquired the film and TV studio Avco-Embassy for $25 million and added that to the Tandem assets. Four years late, they sold their company to Coca-Cola — which a couple years earlier had bought Columbia Pictures — for $485 million.

"The word creative is so often misused in our business. There's the creative side and then the 'other,'" Lear said. "There is more creativity in Jerry Perenchio than there is in three-fifths of the 'creative community.'"

Said Lear on Wednesday in a statement: "The world has lost a glorious, most generous man and an absolute original. There will never ever be another him."

Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said he got his start in the entertainment industry when Perenchio hired him at Tandem. "He was a mentor, a dear friend and a singular, brilliant talent," Horn said. "More important, he was a man of total integrity, whose humility belied his extraordinary success. I loved him."

Perenchio also was an original investor in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas; a pioneer in pay-per-view television; and instrumental in bringing then-unknown British singer Elton John to the U.S. And he was a money man behind such films as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Driving Miss Daisy, the 1990 Oscar winner for best picture.

The reclusive executive rarely spoke to the media and reportedly fired those under him who did. He followed Wasserman's "Rules of the Road," one of which was: "Stay clear of the press. No interviews. No panels. No speeches. No comments. Stay out of the spotlight. It fades your suit."

The grandson of Italian immigrants, Andrew Jerrold Perenchio was born in Fresno, Calif., on Dec. 30, 1930. He was an only child, and his father owned a winery. He spent time at a military school in Los Angeles, then graduated from UCLA in 1954 and served in the U.S. Air Force as a fighter pilot.

In 1958, Perenchio landed a job in the mailroom at MCA and then became a talent agent, eventually representing the likes of Marlon Brando and Ronald Reagan.

When the Justice Department forced MCA, also the owner of the Universal movie studio, to divest itself of its talent operation, Perenchio lost his job. But in 1963, he launched his own agency, Chartwell Artists — named after Winston Churchill's country estate — where the clients would include Elizabeth Taylor as well as music acts Williams, Donovan, Henry Mancini, Glen Campbell and Johnny Mathis.

While on a visit to London, Perenchio heard John's first album and instructed an agent at Chartwell to get the musician to the U.S. as soon as possible. Soon, the singer/piano player was making his American debut at the Troubadour in L.A. on Aug. 25, 1970.

Perenchio and co-promoter Jack Kent Cooke (then the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings) bankrolled the first of Ali's three legendary boxing matches against his bitter rival Joe Frazier, guaranteeing a $5 million purse for the March 1971 bout at New York's Madison Square Garden.

At the time, both fighters were undefeated, and Ali was trying to regain the heavyweight crown that had been stripped from him for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War.

Frazier won a brutal 15-round unanimous decision, and Perenchio was a big winner, too: An estimated 300 viewers around the world paid $25 apiece to get into a theater to watch the bout on closed-circuit television.

In 2001, Perenchio was back in the fight game as the promoter for the popular, East L.A.-bred Oscar de la Hoya.

Perenchio also was architect of the September 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match between King and Bobby Riggs held at the Houston Astrodome. A crowd of nearly 30,000 (and another 50 million watching live on ABC) saw King win, striking a blow for feminists everywhere.

Perenchio helped launch National Subscription Television (ONTV), one of the first over-the-air television subscription services, in 1977, and he later owned and sold Loews Theaters, making millions on that deal.

In 1986, Perenchio bought for $13.5 million the Bel Air mansion on 10 acres that TV viewers know as the Clampetts' house on The Beverly Hillbillies. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were his neighbors, and in July he purchased their home for $15 million. He also owned several sprawling properties in Malibu.

Forbes last year estimated Perenchio's net worth at $2.6 billion.

In November 2014, Perenchio announced that his $500 million art collection, which included paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Edouard Manet, would go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art upon his death.

His appreciation for art began when, as a junior agent at MCA, he was assigned to accompany British actor Charles Laughton to museums all over the U.S.

Survivors include his wife, Margaret.

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Jerry Perenchio, Billionaire Media Mogul Behind Univision, Dies at 86


Media mogul A. Jerrold “Jerry” Perenchio, who amassed a fortune by building a powerhouse TV production company and later the Spanish-language network Univision, and was among California’s most prolific philanthropists and political donors, has died. He was 86.

Perenchio died of lung cancer at his Bel Air home on Monday, a family spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times.

His personal wealth, along with an early career managing high-profile stars and promoting major sporting events, belied a fierce determination to stay out of the limelight, in which he granted few interviews and rarely allowed his associates to do the same.

A partner with Norman Lear in the production of such shows as “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time,” Perenchio made a fortune on megahits of the 1970s, particularly from the sale of the shows into syndication.


No media investment, however, was as lucrative for Perenchio as the one in Univision, which he sold to a consortium led by Haim Saban at a price of $13.7 billion in 2007. According to Forbes, Perenchio netted $1.1 billion on an initial $33 million investment. In 2014, the magazine estimated his net worth at $2.6 billion.

His tight control over Univision was most apparent in his interface with the media — which was close to nil. According to a 2004 Business Week profile, the No. 1 rule of a 20-point manifesto for Univision executives was “Stay clear of the press. Stay out of the spotlight. It fades your suit.” To little surprise, he declined to participate in the profile.

“I really don’t want my name in the goddamn paper,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1981. “I really don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t want to give out interviews. I just hate them. Inevitably, I ended up hurting some people or leaving some names out, or getting quoted out of context.”

Nevertheless, Perenchio was not a recluse, but an avid philanthropist and political donor and fundraiser, entertaining frequently at his Malibu and Bel-Air homes, the latter a sprawling estate that was immortalized as the house used as the model for Jed Clampett’s digs in “The Beverly Hillbillies.” In Malibu, he and his wife Margaret were for a time believed to be the city’s largest landowners, with commercial real estate holdings and a private 10-acre golf course near the coast that was concealed behind a prominent stone wall.

“Jerry is the walking embodiment of the history of Hollywood and modern Los Angeles,” Henry Cisneros, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former Univision president, told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “He has been present in the worlds of many of the most prominent people.”

Born in Fresno, Perenchio was from a family of vintners. His grandfather, an immigrant, founded the Fresno Grape Exchange. But Perenchio left California’s Central Valley and went to high school in Los Angeles, where he was drawn to entertainment. As a student at UCLA, he was a band booker and, after a stint in the Air Force as a single engine jet pilot, pursued a career in showbiz and sports.

Lew Wasserman plucked him out of the mailroom when he was working at MCA, where he got a taste for working behind the scenes and letting the talent get the attention. After the government-forced breakup of MCA, he took over a boutique firm to start his own talent agency, Perenchio Artists, in 1964, which he merged three years later with another agency to become Chartwell Artists, representing actors including Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and musicians such as Glen Campbell and the Righteous Brothers.

He also had a major role in setting up some major sporting events, such as the 1971 world championship “fight of the century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier at Madison Square Garden, a match-up of heavyweight champions that lived up to its billing and reaped huge returns when it was shown on closed-circuit TV. With a flair for promotion, Perenchio helped fill the crowd with celebrities. Burt Lancaster did color commentary for the closed circuit broadcast, and Frank Sinatra photographed it for Life magazine.

Two years later Perenchio was the promoter behind the Battle of the Sexes, the match up of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs on the tennis court that was a milestone in the women’s liberation movement.

That same year he partnered with Norman Lear, then enjoying the runaway success of “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” produced with Bud Yorkin via their Tandem Prods. With Lear, Perenchio formed an entertainment consortium called T.A.T. Communications, which eventually grew into a production and distribution company that produced TV shows like “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Diff’rent Strokes.” (T.A.T. stood for a Yiddish expression meaning “put your ass on the table.”)

In his memoir, Lear credited Perenchio and his associate Alan Horn for their business savvy that enabled the company to become a formidable distribution company. “Jerry is an Italian and he wears it like a glove, a very fine glove,” Lear wrote. “No one loves and reflects finery better than Jerry. He is a piece of finery himself.”

Lear said in a statement on Wednesday, “The world has lost a glorious, most generous man and an absolute original. There will never ever be another him.”

They were among the most successful primetime producers of the ’70s and early ’80s, and in 1981 Perenchio, Yorkin and Lear ventured into feature films when they bought Avco Embassy Pictures, renaming T.A.T. Communications as Embassy Communications. They had success with such feature films as “This Is Spinal Tap,” and the Avco film library proved valuable in the emerging home-video market, and along with the TV studio they reaped $485 million when they sold the properties to Coca Cola in 1985.

After investing in movies like “Blade Runner,” Perenchio was the financier who helped Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck’s production company when they tried to make “Driving Miss Daisy,” an uphill climb for financing that ultimately produced the best picture Oscar in 1989. When Richard Zanuck accepted the award he called Perenchio “our partner and dear friend who had such great faith in us from the very beginning and in this project from the very beginning.”

His most forward-looking career move came in 1992, when he and two foreign investors, Emilio Azcarraga Milmo and Gustavo Cisneros, bought a struggling Spanish-language network, foresaw the growing power of the Latino marketplace and turned Univision into a media powerhouse. Univision became a Fortune 500 company and the dominant Spanish-language television network in the country.

The ratings were in large part driven by Univision’s ability to mine Mexican media conglomerate Televisa, controlled by by Azcarraga and later his son, and Venezuela conglomerate Venevision, controlled by Cisneros, for hugely popular telenovelas.

Perenchio managed to largely take control of Univision, serving as its chairman and CEO and taking it public in 1996.

After the sale in 2006, Perenchio continued to invest through his company, Chartwell Partners. He and his wife were major philanthropists, particularly of education and the arts in the Fresno area, as well as the Los Angeles Opera and to the UCLA Foundation.

He also was among the GOP’s biggest donors in 2012, backing Mitt Romney and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads with more than $2 million in contributions. But he didn’t always fall in line with causes from the right. His foundation backed environmental groups and Planned Parenthood, and opposed a 1998 California ballot proposition that would have restricted school teaching to English only.

After he bought his Bel-Air home in 1986, he began buying up properties to fold into his French-inspired estate, spending millions on renovations that included an underground motorcourt for 30 cars and eventually a helipad.

Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, credited Perenchio for giving him a big break when he brought him in to work at Tandem Productions in the early 1970s.

“He was a mentor, a dear friend, and a singular, brilliant talent,” Horn said in a statement on Wednesday. “More important, he was a man of total integrity, whose humility belied his extraordinary success. I loved him.”

Perenchio is survived by his wife, and three children from his first marriage, to Robin Green, which ended in divorce.