Word: formerly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clout in Hollywood, Martin Davis, 62, would never be mistaken for a movie mogul. He is a soft-spoken man who clearly lacks the bravura of his former boss, producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom Davis once worked as an office boy and press agent. But Davis is a man in a hurry. He leapfrogged to the top of Gulf & Western over two more senior executives after the death of conglomerateur Charles Bluhdorn. It took Davis just six years to transform Gulf & Western from an unwieldy, 1960s-style pastiche of unrelated companies into the more focused media giant that he renamed...
...Some former employees say Davis is an authoritarian manager who sometimes has difficulty keeping talented subordinates. Among the top-level Paramount executives who have gone to rival companies: Barry Diller, now chairman of Fox Inc.; Michael Eisner, chief of Walt Disney; and Dawn Steel, head of Columbia Pictures. Davis told FORTUNE in 1984 that he was "thrilled" to have made the magazine's annual list of toughest bosses. FORTUNE quoted a business associate saying, "He exceeds all of the qualifications for the category of s.o.b...
...that is increasingly turned toward the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. No one asked him what was going on in Europe, only whether he liked it in California. Last month a television-news crew staked out the portals of the Beverly Hills Hotel as the visiting Jacques Chirac, the former French Premier and still well-known mayor of Paris, strode inside, trailing limousines and entourage. The TV crew failed to budge. Turns out it was there to cover a more important celebrity, wrestler Hulk Hogan...
Adding yet more fire to the proceedings was the reappearance of Boris Yeltsin, the crusty, populist former leader of Moscow's Communist Party. Earlier, he had failed to win a seat in the new Supreme Soviet, and that, it | seemed, was the end of his thrust for position. But then Deputy Alexei Kazannick, an obscure university professor from Siberia, rose and announced that he would relinquish his place to Yeltsin. As applause rang through the hall, Gorbachev watched impassively from the raised tribunal before he told the hushed assembly, "In principle, I support such a proposal...
...country considered to be one of the world's breadbaskets amounted to a devastating indictment of the Alfonsin government, which failed to act quickly enough to put Argentina's fiscal house back in order in 1983, when Alfonsin became the first civilian President in nearly eight years. The former human-rights activist valued political stability at the expense of wrenching but necessary economic changes to correct the country's low productivity, over-regulation, bloated public payroll and money-losing state- owned companies. By the time Alfonsin began pushing for economic reforms in 1985, his popularity had eroded, and the Peronist...