Catching Up With The Feuding Redstones
With the once-boiling conflcit between cold-hearted Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman and the insufficiently treasured DreamWorks team he offended with those two now-infamous little words (indeed, "completely immaterial" will soon totally replace "fuck you" in the Hollywood vernacular) momentarily reduced to a public simmer, there's now time to check in on the status of another intramural corporate spat that recently made headlines. According to today's LAT, Sumner and Shari Redstone, the feudingist first family in all of show business, called a truce in their ongoing succession battle long enough to celebrate a happy occasion over Labor Day:
But in August the Redstones privately agreed to a cooling-off period until after the Labor Day weekend, when Shari's 25-year-old daughter, Kimberlee, was to be married.
Sumner and his wife, Paula, attended the Sept. 2 ceremony at the Inter-Continental Boston Hotel, where heart-shaped fireworks lit up the Boston Harbor.
One guest said that although there were no fireworks between Sumner and Shari during the lavish event, the pair weren't exactly cozy.
"There was peace, but they basically didn't speak to each other all weekend," said one person, who asked to remain anonymous because the wedding was a private family affair. The person said the elder Redstone laid low, neither toasting the bride and groom nor playing any other ceremonial role.
A person close to Sumner said he and Shari "hugged each other."
Despite his best attempts at maintaining a tenuous familial peace, the immortal patriarch couldn't help but co-opt part of the reception to make a point about the futility of his daughter's efforts to unseat him. Grabbing Shari by the elbow and leading to the wedding cake stand, he whispered in her ear, "Imagine this delicious dessert is my Viacom empire. If you abandon your doomed campaign to overthrow me, you get this generous slice," then paused to cut her off a small sliver of the frosted treat. But he then quickly withdrew the offering, continuing, "But if you persist in this insubordination, I will eat the whole fucking thing, and you will get nothing," a threat that was immediately followed by the wizened executive's disturbing devouring of the entire three-foot-tall cake-tower—plastic bride and groom included—before a roomful of shocked guests.