Merv Adelson
Film and television producer.
Born: October 23, 1929.
Died: September 8, 2015.
Merv Adelson, who has died following a stroke aged 85, was a grocer’s son who became a multi-millionaire, with interests in retail, leisure and entertainment. He mixed with Hollywood royalty and married one of American television’s top celebrities, before losing his fortune in what has been described as a classic “rags-to-riches-to-rags” story.
Adelson made his initial fortune when he spotted the potential of 24-hour grocery stores in Las Vegas. He then got involved more directly in the leisure and entertainment businesses, as one of the developers behind California’s La Costa resort, where mob bosses rubbed shoulders with stars such as Frank Sinatra.
Over the years he was haunted by rumours and media reports of links to the Mafia and dodgy money, but there is no disputing that, whatever the source of his funding, by the 1970s and 1980s he was a major player in Hollywood.
At the end of the 1960s he had co-founded Lorimar, which became a hugely successful film and television production company, with credits that included The Waltons (1971-81) Dallas (1978-91) and the films Being There (1979), S.O.B. (1981) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982).
His grandparents emigrated from Russia to the US and he was born Mervin (sic) Lee Adelson in 1929 in Los Angeles, where the family had a grocery store. He delivered groceries to stars in Beverly Hills and went into the business when he left school.
In the late 1940s he would accompany his father on trips to Las Vegas. “I suddenly thought, everything is open 24 hours, but there's no place to buy groceries,” he said in a Vanity Fair article in 2013.
By the 1980s he had risen from grocery boy to the stars to their executive producer and financier. This was back in the day when television was film’s very poor relation, but his company Lorimar was prepared to spend big, with high production values and sometimes star names, in order to secure big audiences and big international returns.
He met television presenter Barbara Walters on a blind date in 1985 and a year later they married. They divorced in the early 1990s. He was married and divorced four times.
In the late 1980s Lorimar was sold to Warner Communications for more than $1 billion. Adelson’s personal fortune was reportedly about $300 million and he had houses in Bel-Air, Malibu and Aspen, Colarado.
He decided there were further millions to be made on line, invested heavily in internet start-up companies and got caught in the dot-com collapse of the late 1990s.
After being declared bankrupt, he was forced to live more modestly and Vanity Fair reckoned his Santa Monica apartment was no bigger than the walk-in closets he had had in previous residences. He is survived by five children.
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