Word: neils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...eight years as head of the entertainment end of his father's business, young Tom O'Neil had put together a $35 million chain of five wholly owned TV stations, and a 569-radio-station network, stretching from New England to the West Coast. Now, for $25 million more, borrowed from the Chase Manhattan Bank, he bought Howard Hughes's RKO Radio Pictures Inc.,* its moviemaking facilities, distribution system, and a library of some 700 films, including such popular favorites as Gunga Din, Citizen Kane, Stage Door, Little Women, Lost Patrol, The Informer. In addition...
Radio-TVman O'Neil also got what was once one of Hollywood's busiest studios and is now one of its sickest. Millionaire Hughes had chopped the studio's 2,000-man payroll to 300, lost his distribution contracts for Walt Disney and Sam Goldwyn films, made fewer pictures (not a foot of RKO film has been shot this year). He haggled steadily for six days and nights with O'Neil over the sale...
...point, the two men piled into Hughes's Convair and took off for Las Vegas. As the plane droned over the desert, Hughes and O'Neil dickered in the cockpit, while two lawyers dozed in the seats behind them. At one point Hughes casually turned the piloting over to O'Neil (although he had never flown a plane), came back after a while and said, "Well, Tom, you're a great pilot...
Later when the deal was finally sewn up, O'Neil was flown back to General Tire's Akron headquarters to get the board's approval, finally stumbled into bed, groaning: "I haven't had any sleep for 36 hours. He's a very clever man, a very clever man." Hughes's estimated profit: about...
...Makes Money." But the profit to Hughes may be small compared to what O'Neil hopes to make on the deal. On past performance, he may be just what RKO needs. A burly (6 ft. 4½ in., 215 Ibs.) ex-Holy Cross ('37) football end, O'Neil first learned his way around his father's tire company after college, did a four-year stint in the Navy, part of it skippering an LST in the Pacific. When he got back in 1945, he went to work for General Tire in earnest. Three years before...