That's the question posed by Seth Stevenson in his profile of ex-AOL Time-Warner (parent company of CNN) CEO Jerry Levin in New York magazine.
Under the headline, "The Believer," the profile teases:
Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin dropped out of sight after the disastrous merger with AOL. Now he’s back, selling brain painting, equine therapy, and soul communion with the dead.
And so the divorced-and-remarried Levin--having "vaporized," as Stevenson puts it, $200 billion in shareholder value--is now the co-proprietor of the Moonview Sanctuary, a spa in (where else?)Santa Monica, CA. The piece describes--maybe I am being harsh here--how the much-younger Laurie Perlman lured Jerry away from his then-wife, leading one Levin associate to muse:
"The merger drove him to reinvent himself because it was such a public failure,” says a former colleague, who knew and worked with Levin for many years. “After that, he left his job, his industry, his city, and his marriage.”
Of course, no profile of Levin can be complete without mentioning the tragic death of his son, an idealistic young man who was brutally murdered by thugs in 1997. Without a doubt, that event affected Levin deeply, and we should all offer our condolences and perhaps pray, if we wish, for the soul of Jonathan Levin, who seems to have been an exemplary young man.
But now, back to Jerry Levin, who obviously has made some enemies in the business world. Here's more from Stevenson's piece:
“No one has ever left a company more disliked than he was,” Fuchs tells me. “He didn’t have one friend in the company. Or one friend outside the company. Nor has anyone left such a powerful company in worse shape. He killed everyone in the way of keeping or getting his job. We called him Caligula.”
Ouch! I might need some brain-painting if someone called me that, even though I don't have the $175,000 a year one needs to be a client at Moonview.
Stevenson, obviously an emerging star at New York, shows a great ability to get inside the head of the reader, to articulate what the reader might be thinking:
I’ve sensed only genuine love and devotion between them, but it’s clear to me that their relationship could be construed by some as distasteful, or perhaps even sinister. Cast in the coldest, most cynical terms: Laurie sought a meeting with a wealthy man and, after laying a bit of groundwork, told him she’d communicated with his tragically murdered son. The wealthy man believed—no doubt wanted to believe—in her supernatural tale, and within months, he became both her lover and her business partner.
Then he gives the two lovebirds, Jerry and Laurie, a chance to refute the allegation--very fair & balanced of him. But next comes this--I report, you decide:
Despite Jerry’s protestations about how “unique” these circumstances were, I was struck by something odd that happened in the midst of one of my interviews with Laurie. She suddenly interrupted the conversation. “Is there a connection that you have with Ian Schrager?” she asked. I told her I’d spoken to the hotelier once for a story. Oh, and I’ve stayed in his hotels on occasion. “So you have spoken to him, and he’s someone you’ve connected with,” she nodded, latching onto an inflated notion of our relationship. “I think you’re a link to help me get to him. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Ian because if Moonview expands, I felt like we could do something as a partnership.”
A few weeks later, I brought this exchange up with Laurie. She told me that Ian Schrager’s brother was a friend of hers in high school and that Schrager’s dead mother has “come to” her over the years. “Blanche came while you and I were talking,” Laurie explained to me. “I felt my energy pulled, and I knew I was having a simultaneous conversation with the other side. So I felt compelled to ask you about Ian. I felt I was meant to bring it up."
Laurie is also writing a book, and attempting to file a patent, regarding “the way a corporation or an endeavor can be founded using ‘the other side’ as your partners. You’re bringing in souls past and present.” As Jerry describes it, “Organizations can consult the guidance of an unseen realm. The metaphor is that it gives off into the ether, and it’s always there, like a television signal. Everything that’s ever been broadcast is somewhere out there.” Laurie says that during the planning stages for Moonview, she personally consulted Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. She says Moonview as a whole consulted “Christ, Buddha, and doctors who’ve made breakthroughs.”
OK, The Cable Game will just leave it at that, because I need to get back to solid ground. You, fellow Cable Gamer, can decide what to make of Laurie, her technique, her book, her hoped-for patent--and her husband, the man who helped make CNN what it is today.
And if you have $175,000 you don't need, and you get to Moonview, please drop me a line and tell what it's like--I won't get to know what it's like there otherwise!
