EDGAR & THE HOUSE OF SEAGRAM

MOIRA JOHNSTON

There's a lot riding on the Bronfman dynasty's choice for the hot job at Seagram: a thirty-two-year-old maverick with a movie-business past and a black actress wife—Edgar Bronfman Jr. MOIRA JOHNSTON reports

At a vast polished desk in his family's burnishedbronze fortress on Park Avenue, the handsome young champion of liquor's dispirited legions, Edgar Bronfman Jr., reviews events and plots strategy for Seagram's forthcoming campaigns. He sits in a high-backed upholstered chair, poised and polished, his movements as gracefully linked and deliberate as a T'ai Chi master's, his words sculpted with exquisite care. And yet, behind the studious-looking glasses and elegant gray pin-striped Armani suit lurks a man whose teenage passion for the London and Hollywood movie scene and runaway marriage to his gorgeous black wife, Sherry, hint at a taste for adventure.

For now, though, Edgar junior has put aside the rebelliousness that characterized his youth. At thirty-two, he has been chosen to carry the Bronfman dynasty through the third generation—the point at which most great fortunes disperse as the work ethic and energy of the founder are diluted and give way to a generation of greedy wimps. A man who never went to college and entered the business only five years ago with a track record of several failed plays and movies, Edgar junior now finds himself one of the most powerful industrial figures of the Western world, his father's choice as steward-designate of a family fortune that rivals those of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers.

The base of Bronfman wealth and power is Seagram's more-than$7-billion corporate empire. When his father told him some two years ago that he would be raised above his older brother, Sam, to become heir apparent at Seagram, Edgar junior sat at his table at the Four Seasons (the table, No. 45, on the upper level of the Grill that has been his since he was nineteen) and talked to Tom Margittai, the restaurant's co-owner. "It was a very big decision for him," Margittai recalls. "But I don't think he had a choice. He is a very duty-bound individual, and duty called."

With to their marriage brewing in Edgar's family, they eloped.

The only visible clue in his office to the glamour-seeking side of Edgar junior is a gold record, framed and hung on the wall by the window. He can see it from his desk: Dionne Warwick's hit album Friends. There's his name, Edgar Bronfman Jr., as lyricist for the erotic "Whisper in the Dark," one of the songs that sent that record flying. "I want to hold your body next to mine/I want to hurry love and take my time..."

"Dionne's a good friend. I owed her a favor, and I said, 'Dionne, I'm going to write you a hit,'" he says, smiling. "Friends reached seventh on the charts." It was his thank-you to Warwick for introducing him to Sherry, "the most beautiful... no, the most attractive woman I'd ever seen." They met in Warwick's dressing room on the set of a CBS special. A fashion model and actress, Sherry had studied at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and played the featured role of Minnie Fay in Hello, Dolly! with Pearl Bailey. An accomplished seamstress, she designed and sewed her own wedding dress.

The gown played to a very small audience. Sherry and Edgar had been living together for several years, but in 1979, with resistance to their marriage brewing in Edgar's family, they eloped. "Sherry has enhanced my sensitivity," says Edgar, "but it's always been there." So far, the couple's marriage has been insulated against prejudice. "First, my children are too young to face any kind of problem. Second, in the entertainment business, there is no problem. And in this business, no one has dared tell me. But I can't imagine the children won't face it as they grow up." Edgar has become a board member of the United Negro College Fund; Sherry sits on the board of the National Urban League.

And, out of the crucible of the past seventeen years, he has forged his own luxuriously low-key life-style. "Most of my friends are not in the business." He and Sherry live in a restored town house on the Upper West Side, with seven fireplaces and a peach-coral decor that gives "an overall warmth to the house and makes people look good and feel comfortable. I may be conservative at the office, but at home it's cords, a shirt, and a V-neck sweater—Italian cords, Missoni sweaters, and shirts made in my pet place in Paris," he adds with a chuckle.

His wine cellar is stocked with four thousand bottles, "mostly French, Bordeaux and Burgundies," but he hates the words "dinner party." "We don't do much formal entertaining. There's not as much time as I'd like with friends, but with a few close friends we mostly go out to restaurants. The Four Seasons, Le Bernardin, Twenty Twenty downtown, and joints like Anita's Rocking Horse on Columbus." And Edgar loves it when they go to Bobby and James Goldman's penthouse (James wrote The Lion in Winter and Follies) and Bobby—"one of the best cooks in America"—cooks. The Four Seasons' Margittai salivates at the memory of one New Year's shared with the Bronfmans and the Goldmans: "Edgar did wines, Bobby did food, and they spent six months planning it." (Edgar served 1945 Chateau d'Yquem with Bobby's tart of foie gras, and 1969 Leroy Nuits-St. Georges with her quail on truffled rice.)

He hasn't let go of show biz completely. "I put some money into the play I'm Not Rappaport. And I'm writing, I'm writing. I write lyrics, Bruce Roberts writes music that tends to ignore my lyrics, then I adjust the words to the music. All I need is a pencil and paper, and a cassette player and headphones. It's a great release for me. But most of my time is consumed now by my work and family."

His father, Edgar senior, is still chairman of the mother ship, the Seagram Company Ltd., headquartered in Montreal. Edgar junior's power base is the American branch of the empire, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, where he is president of the House of Seagram, the spirits-marketing arm. Brother Sam is head of the Seagram Classics Wine Company, which handles the top-of-the-line premium wines, a very secondary power seat. But both sons sit on the operating committee of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. It is there that they are involved in the broadest Seagram strategies, and there that young Edgar exercises the leadership muscles of a king.

One experienced Bronfman watcher claims Edgar senior is still calling all the important shots—"You're not going to let thirty-year-old boys make those decisions." And where, one wonders, could Edgar junior have learned the decisiveness and savvy necessary to run this multinational empire? "I've known so many sons of the rich and powerful," says Tom Mount, an old friend and the former president of production at Universal, "and most are cripples, emotionally and creatively. They're sheltered from failure. They never learn how to fight."

Edgar's childhood was indeed one of buffered privilege. The Bronfman children spent weekends on the family's elaborate Westchester estate. During the week, Edgar and his brothers went off, in blazers, crests, and flannels, to Collegiate School, academic boot camp for Manhattan's rich and powerful. Schoolmate Max Anderson, grandson of the playwright, knew that—even in a class that included the sons of Leonard Bernstein and Henry Grunwald—Edgar's family was in a league of its own. "He never wore his wealth on his sleeve. But we saw the wealth when his father took us to restaurants or sporting events. His sister Holly had a birthday party at the Westchester estate, very lavish, and I was deeply impressed that they had two industrial-size refrigerators filled with soft drinks."

"Edgar intuitively knew he had to get outside and stay outside the family early if he was going to be strong," says Tom Mount. "He took risks and had failures young, and learned from them. It made him tougher and smarter." Anderson, just appointed director of Emory University Museum in Atlanta, saw signs from the third grade that Edgar was independent-minded, "always a little impatient with things, always coming up with projects and ideas." The differences that would send Edgar and Sam, two years older, on sharply diverging routes began to surface in about eighth grade. "We were extremely close," says Sam of his brother. "We were always doing things together—playing football, go-carts. But Edgar had his own mind at an early age." As Sam followed a proper, predictable path, going to Deerfield Academy and then on to his father's alma mater, Williams, Edgar began to rebel. He wouldn't go to camp. As a result, both he and David Puttnam, now chairman and C.E.O. of Columbia Pictures and a highly successful movie producer, had their lives changed.

"My script for Melody had been punted around, was turned down everywhere, and for reasons best known to itself turned up in the Bronfman household," Puttnam recalls. "Efer [as Puttnam's children nicknamed Edgar] read it and urged his father to back it." Edgar senior agreed to finance the film, and at age fourteen Edgar junior landed on the Puttnams' London doorstep to work as a gofer and live with the Puttnams during the filming. "I've always had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to do at a given time, even if I changed my mind later.

But that was probably the most important time in terms of realizing it was possible to do what I wanted to do," says Edgar of his London days.

The Puttnams' "incredibly normal middleclass" home in Chelsea became a safe house where Edgar could experiment with reality beyond the Bronfman compounds. "I wasn't prepared for an old soul," Patsy Puttnam recalls. "When he arrived, he was wearing the same jacket he wore for the next two summers. A cotton, tie-dyed, loose blue jacket. It cost about fifteen dollars. If he was an ordinary kid, you'd just say it was his favorite jacket. But Edgar was no ordinary kid. He'd be given an allowance, and always wanted to have some to give back. He already knew the value of money."

"I would say I had a structured upbringing. It was not strict, but there were limits," says Edgar.

"He had been very well raised. But I wondered how much affection was there," says Patsy. "In the New York home, there were whole areas alarmed off for these fantastic paintings when his parents weren't there. He was very proud of his mother, and I think there was more affection there than with his father. But this kid was aching to be part of a family."

For a kid also "aching to learn about film," David Puttnam was an extraordinary teacher. "My second picture, The Pied Piper, didn't work. Efer saw my process. He saw me in pain and suffering, gaining experience to be a filmmaker," says Puttnam. Finally, in 1981, came Chariots of Fire, and for Puttnam, the rest is history. But the event that both believe was the coming-of-age for Edgar was their confrontation over The Blockhouse. "I read the script and I thought at the time it was the most significant thing ever written," says Edgar.

Something even larger than market share or stock price drives young Edgar, something that can be understood only if you are a Bronfman.

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Puttnam was less enthusiastic. "It was unremittingly dark, and in advertising you learn that there's no point in selling something people don't want."

"Do it yourself," he told Edgar. "I can't help. Doing it is the only way you're going to learn."

"I'm only sixteen years old," Edgar argued.

"But I'm fairly logical," he says now, "and I couldn't come up with any logical reason why it was impossible for me to produce a movie. We started shooting the next summer with Peter Sellers and Charles Aznavour. I didn't produce it well, and the movie was not as good as it should have been, but you don't become experienced without making mistakes."

Life with the Puttnams allowed Edgar to play with the sensual impracticalities that were not part of the formal training of a Bronfman crown prince. "One of the people who had a tremendous influence on him was the writer Andrew Birkin, a totally eccentric, very poetic man who came from a crazy, off-the-wall theatrical family. Efer adored him," says Patsy. "I was alone with the children on a holiday in Corsica, in an eleventh-century apartment falling off a hill, with a sick child. Efer and Andrew were coming out, and I said, 'Please, bring something to eat.' There were those two, getting off the plane, Efer in his same old jacket and Andrew carrying a Fortnum hamper full of books and foie gras. God, foie gras!"

As Edgar approached adulthood, the well-controlled Bronfman family life exploded into an emotional circus. "It was at about this time," says Puttnam, "that Efer swelled up, literally like a grape. He got colossally fat. He and his father were at loggerheads. At one point he refused to go home."

His parents were heading toward divorce. When Edgar senior had married Ann Loeb, daughter of John L. Loeb, senior partner of the distinguished investment-banking house Loeb, Rhoades & Co., it had been a merger of Jewish dynasties made in heaven. Their divorce was only the first in a series of searing family episodes. In 1973, Edgar senior's brief second marriage, to a titled British beauty, Lady Carolyn Townshend, ended in a titillating court case. He claimed sexual rejection by his bride, and won back the estate and $1 million he had signed away to her in their marriage contract.

Just eight months later, an event occurred that is still so sensitive to the entire family that the condition of any interview is that it not be mentioned—Sam's kidnapping. Nine days after he'd vanished en route from his father's Yorktown Heights home—and after his father had paid a $2.3 million cash ransom—Sam was rescued, still bound and gagged. His kidnappers were finally acquitted on the kidnapping charge, after a trial during which the twenty-one-year-old faced accusations of homosexuality, extortion, and collusion in plotting his own abduction. The family stood staunchly behind Sam. "But it closed him up," says David Puttnam of Edgar junior's reaction. "He has not ever, remotely, talked about it." And within three days of Sam's release, Edgar senior married his third wife, Georgiana, who was only three years older than Sam. The press had a field day with the fact that the new Mrs. Bronfman had been a barmaid in her father's pub. Ye Olde Nosebag.

To outsiders, Edgar's next few years—as he jetted between New York and Los Angeles on movie, play, and television projects—looked like a glitzy escape. While Sam trekked the conventional path, marrying a Stanford girl and working at Sports Illustrated before joining Seagram in California and then New York, Edgar refused to go to college. But Patsy Puttnam's "old soul" had made his choice deliberately: "I think college serves a number of different purposes, none of which applied to me. I knew what 1 wanted to do. But I did make a commitment to read," says Edgar. According to Broadway producer Jim Walsh, a close friend, "it's hard now to know he doesn't have his Ph.D. in English."

In New York, he moved into his father's movie company, Sagittarius Productions, honed his wine palate at the Four Seasons, and made movies. In Los Angeles, "he was broke. He lived in a cheap little house on the beach like an ordinary citizen," says Tom Mount. "It was the painful moment of breaking away, of cutting off his father's money. But it was critical that he walk away from family. If his parents and grandparents had been designing the perfect future, it would not be joining the entertainment business and marrying Sherry. But all of it is his."

Edgar insists that his subsequent move into the New York theater was not motivated by his movie failures. "Sure, the glamour of movies attracted me. But at the end of the day, I didn't need the money. I did not require the ultimate reward for putting up with an industry that gives meaning to— it defines—the word 'viciousness.' "

"Edgar was always closer to theater than movies," says David Puttnam. "Movies are a very, very tough business. And in plays it's possible to be slightly amateurish and be quite successful." But Jim Walsh, who was general manager for two plays Edgar produced, did not see the dilettante. "His father was a passive investor. Edgar rolled up his sleeves. He made tough decisions, learned how to put dollars and art together. But a critical success is not always a financial success." Ladies at the Alamo and Broadway, Broadway both foundered. "Edgar got stung so bad in theater that it became kind of a rueful joke," says Walsh. "He called me when he read Rappaport and said, 'You're in real trouble. I like the play, and I think I'm going to jinx it for you.' "

Edgar was on the West Coast doing postproduction work on The Border when his father called to invite him to join Seagram. And finally, at age twenty-six, Edgar Bronfman Jr. was ready to take up the dynastic imperative—on his own terms. He flew to New York and said yes. "The day I joined—literally the day—was like coming home. It was uncanny, uncanny!" After a brief apprenticeship in New York, he was sent to London, where he ran Seagram's European operations for two years. There he endeared himself to the horse-loving Brits by saving the endangered Grand National Steeplechase with an eleventh-hour subsidy of $600,000, earning himself an "expensive handshake" from the Queen Mother.

"Perhaps he went with the company because he couldn't reconcile public taste with his dream," David Puttnam speculates. It is a shrewd insight. For at Seagram, young Edgar is putting his judgment on the line, but nothing so fragile as a dream.

From his office in the Seagram Building, he has only to look downstairs, at the bar in the Four Seasons, to see the challenge in microcosm. The market dominated since the 1933 repeal of Prohibition by whiskey and other "brown goods"— traditionally the base of the Bronfman dynasty's profits—has been shrinking. White wine has overrun the boundaries of the crown jewels of his empire—scotch, blends, bourbon, gin. "Whiskey's dead" is the word sweeping across the front from bartenders and liquor-store clerks. "When Edgar has lunch here, he always begins with mineral water," says Tom Margittai. Water. Not only respectable in a bar, but chic. Instead of patiently acquiring a taste for scotch, pin-striped yuppies are drinking Perrier at $2.75 a shot. And augmenting their Fume Blanc with Fuzzy Navels, a mixture of peach schnapps and orange juice.

Edgar's family's corporate flagship, the Seagram Company, is still the world's second-largest producer and marketer of distilled spirits. Its Chivas Regal and Glenlivet, from the Scottish Highlands, still sources of pride and profit, its Seven Crown still the world's biggest blended whiskey and the third-largest-selling liquor brand in the U.S., after Bacardi rum and Smirnoff vodka. But even sales of Seven Crown retreated an alarming 9 percent in the U.S. last year, joining a decline of all but three of Seagram's top fourteen liquor brands. And Guinness, in England, has acquired the Distillers Company, in a stroke snatching Seagram's claim to first rank in global whiskey sales.

There is worry, too, on another front. Although Edgar is throwing formidable resources into the fiercely fought war for a market share of that brash California phenomenon, the wine cooler, and sees Seagram's premium wines holding their ground, his low-priced wines have been badly wounded. Over the past year, Seagram sold off the lower end of its vast American wine domains—including Paul Masson—to Vintners International. But its wines continue to compete with its spirits.

At the expense of his wine holdings, Edgar took tough and controversial steps to shore up the market for spirits. He angered the California wine industry with his audacious "equivalency" campaign, and resigned Seagram's membership in its political and promotional arm, the Wine Institute. Claiming that "a drink, is a drink, is a drink," his alcohol-equivalency campaign was a lavishly bankrolled effort that, on its surface, challenged the networks to allow hard-liquor advertising along with beer and wine ads. The wine industry saw its covert purpose as raising taxes on wine. Seizing on the ethyl alcohol common to all liquor, "equivalency" tried to tear wine from the turf it has carefully tended—its ancient association with food and human celebration, its place at the family table and sacramental altar, its moderating influence, its romance, dammit!—and lump it in the same sin bin with hard liquor.

"Who ever heard of vodka-and-food societies, or whiskey-and-food tastings? I think Seagram's telling a child in high school or college just starting to drink, 'A drink, is a drink, is a drink,' is immoral," snapped Robert Mondavi's son Michael from the Mission-style Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley, headquarters of the premium-wine forces.

Edgar alienated the wine industry just when, as he himself admitted, "there is a critical need, more than at any time since the repeal of Prohibition, for our industry to stand united and strong together." For all alcoholic beverages are being assaulted by the strongest anti:alcohol movement since Prohibition, the convergence of several powerful social forces—America's new health conscioqsness, Reagan's anti-drug initiative, outrage over increased drunkendriving deaths, and a lingering temperance ethic from the twenties. The New Temperance Movement, or Neoprohibitionism, as it is variously called, has succeeded in making its basic principle national policy: Reduce consumption of all alcohol, and alcohol abuse will be reduced in equal measure. In the courts, in the advertising world, and in Congress, Edgar confronts a sophisticated strategy aimed at restraining the liquor industry on all fronts.

But it is the bottom line, not love of whiskey, that explains Edgar's fight for spirits. Michael Mondavi, now chairman of the Wine Institute, glimpsed the young spirits prince's larger agenda earlier than most in the wine industry. Sharing a cab from a wholesalers' convention to the PBS station where they would debate equivalency on Chicago Tonight, the two men had seemed to strike a bond. Italian and Jewish, both had grown up in strong families where wine was a natural element at the dinner table. They were chatting in the greenroom, Michael recalls, "when some news came on television that had to do with Du Pont's earnings. And Edgar went, 'Just a minute, just a minute,' and was glued to that Du Pont thing. He wasn't worried about his debate with me."

Edgar junior's primary and long-range goal is the continued good health of the Bronfman fortune. And that lies largely in the price of Seagram's stock, publicly traded as VO on the New York Stock Exchange. For the Bronfmans hold 38.2 percent of Seagram's stock, which in early 1987 had a market value of nearly $3 billion. While its spirits and coolers are still a $1.4 billion business in the U.S. alone—far outstripping wine as a profit source—the dividends from its 22.5 percent stake in Du Pont, valued at $6.8 billion, earn far more for Seagram than wine and spirits sales combined.

Although young Bronfman artfully avoids disclosing his own net worth, his father's personal holdings of Seagram's stock, more than 15 million shares (a 16.5 percent stake), have a current market value of roughly $1.2 billion. When Sam turned thirty, he and Edgar each received around $5 million from various family trusts, and, reportedly, when Sam turns forty, each will receive another $10 million or so.

There is something even larger than Seagram's market share or stock price that drives young Edgar, something that can be understood only if you are a Bronfman. It is the dynastic imperative laid down by founding patriarch Sam as his own modest immigrant stake evolved into staggering wealth. Since Sam first grasped that there were tidy profits in the hotel bars of Saskatchewan after his family's arrival from western Russia in 1889, he strove to increase Bronfman wealth and power, and to keep control tight within the family. With Prohibition engulfing the U.S. but spreading only haphazardly through Canada, there were huge fortunes to be made in shipping imported scotch and his own smooth blended whiskeys south. The Bronfmans were ready at Repeal to slake American thirst with huge inventories of aged scotch and blends. Over the years, as millions poured in, the sense grew that money isolated the Bronfmans and bound together a family of disparate and intense individuals.

As the destinies of both fortune and family were perceived as inseparable, a belief in direct family operating control led each generation to select its fittest with Darwinian ruthlessness, siblings be damned. Traditionally only two members of any generation work at Seagram, and they must be the best. Old Mr. Sam gathered his brothers and sisters together and told them that his line would run the company and own the largest share of the pie—an act that would set up a rival faction of Canadian Bronfmans, whose financial empire has competed petulantly with Mr. Sam's. Sam's son Edgar senior claimed the United States, the power base, from his brother, Charles, and has chosen Edgar junior, from among his seven children, as his heir, a choice challenged by Charles as one which must ultimately be made by shareholders. Although the abrupt decision to disburse the family's multibillion-dollar Cemp trust fanned rumors that Charles and his children were challenging Edgar junior's new dominance, there is, insiders claim, "no change in Edgar's appointed course."

Sam II, a lanky and affable jock, handled the humiliation of being bypassed with unflappable grace. He admitted to having felt momentarily "chagrined" at being told by his father that he was good, but not good enough. But he now deflects the media's search for spite with the statement "You will never read about an iota of conflict, because there is none. What we care about is that we as a family succeed." Edgar junior reinforces the unified front: "There are no conflicts of strategy or philosophy between Sam and me."

The family's success has been accompanied by a search for legitimacy. Old Mr. Sam never stopped reaching for respectability—or being rebuffed. When the Mies van der Rohe-designed headquarters on Park Avenue were opened in 1958, creating an instant architectural landmark, Edgar senior said with pleasure that the building "establishes us... as people who are solid and care about quality." But even the Seagram Building failed to wipe away, at least in Sam's lifetime, the labels of "Jewish" and "bootlegger" that made him unacceptable to the clubby old boys of the Wasp establishment in Ottawa and Montreal. His sons, Charles and Edgar, turned their energies to Jewish causes. Charles, co-chairman of the Seagram Company Ltd. in Montreal, and Edgar senior, chairman of the mother ship and C.E.O. in the U.S., are among the most generous and politically influential philanthropists in North America.

The legacy of "second-class citizenship" still galls. It gives a warrior's edge to Edgar junior's determination to save the spirits industry. He fights skirmishes in state courts all over the country, trying to free distilled spirits from the Balkanized state system of laws and regulations that has punished liquor since Repeal. He sees wine—that genteel liquid blessed by the Bible, perceived as a food, and taxed less harshly than spirits—gaining respectability, filling the cellars of upscale young politicians, and shedding the constraints that still shackle "booze." "We allowed ourselves to be haunted by the knowledge that what we do for a living today was once illegal. . .. We've paid a price for that in unfair taxation, statutory and regulatory clamps on our distribution and marketing systems and discriminatory public attitudes." He maintains that beer, not spirits, accounts for the vast majority of drunkendriving cases. Will he ever be able to rub out the damned spot?

And will he be able to meet the dynastic imperative? Will he translate the social respectability the Bronfman family has finally earned into official approval, measured in lower taxes on liquor? Will he be able to expand the fortune and hold operating control for the next generation?

Faced with such a mandate, a weaker man might well have cut and run. But Edgar has shown an Alexandrian love of command. Since his return from London in 1984, he has used the presidency of the House of Seagram as a staging ground for a barrage of bold moves that are rocking the tradition-bound spirits industry and earning respect from Bronfman watchers. "He has the qualities to really be a very effective and thoughtful chief executive of the Seagram Company in an industry going through change," says Mike Overlock, Goldman, Sachs's chief of mergers and acquisitions.

Edgar junior admits that it is too soon to know if his decisions will positively "enhance shareholder value"—to know if his father's choice was right. But he plays the game with presence and elan. He strides out to the reception desk to meet a visitor, free of pretension, no aides or secretaries fronting for him. He seems to have found the confidence to shed the ostentation that encrusted his father's life with baronial Tudor mansions, larger-thanlife Rodins in his office, white-glove formality, and what one friend terms "superciliousness."

"There was no way I was going to come into this job and tread water," he says with a laugh, rattling off a list of his reforms: a massive shuffling of the distribution system, a restructuring of the spirits division that eliminated the cannibalizing of the company's own products by competing Seagram brands, and, last May, a dramatic reorganization of the House of Seagram. With this latest move, Edgar has taken overall marketing strategy into his own hands, while moving sales responsibility out to new state and regional centers. His mentor when he joined Seagram five years ago, then president Phil Beekman, vanished from Seagram, an unexplained event that was read by some as a clue to Edgar's determination to take control of marketing.

His mind clearly crackles with a visceral thrill as he describes the launch of his Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler. "I reasoned that '86 would be a critical shakeout year for wine coolers, when the leading brands would be determined. We had to be a player in '86." Gallo's Bartles & Jaymes had come from behind the early leader, California Cooler, to the number-one spot. In Seagram's war rooms in December 1985, "we made the decision to be national by May with a product that, five months earlier, did not exist. We had no product, no package, no position, nothing." He managed to launch the cooler in April. Then, hoping to catch the coattails of the wine-cooler boom for his spirits, he splashed vodka, gin, and rum into fruit juices, and successfully shot his Golden Spirits coolers into test markets. Moonlighting star Bruce Willis's commercials worked their magic, and an ebullient Edgar watched his wine cooler climb into the second rank nationally by the end of 1987, challenging Bartles & Jaymes for category leadership.

"That's Edgar!" cheered Tom Mount. "In hard times for liquor, marketing becomes 90 percent of the game, and he has the cultural pulse."

Edgar junior believes his secret weapon—his Excalibur—is his youth. "I don't think consumer impatience exists because the current product isn't serving them well. It exists because they are used to change. For people who are thirty, it is the norm— we landed on the moon when I was fourteen! For us, there are no patterns." But the "brown goods," the spirits that made the Bronfman fortune, still have an important role in Edgar's long-term strategy: "There is no such thing as an intractable trend. Everything goes in cycles. At the moment, coolers and everything that represents light, sweet, and cold represent a change from the norm. When that becomes the norm, I believe they will come back to distilled spirits. And we have to be sure we're there when they come back, and with a superior market share." Meanwhile, he's been mending fences: rejoining the Wine Institute, canceling his abrasive equivalency campaign, and showcasing his classy California wines (Sterling, Monterey Vineyard, Domaine Mumm) by moving the premium-wine headquarters, along with Sam and his family, to San Francisco.

The jury, of course, is still out on the young spirits prince—and on his predictions for the liquor industry. But tucked away in his show-biz experience may be a clue to the kind of maturing judgment that will ultimately show in Seagram's bottom line. With I'm Not Rappaport, he has finally broken the jinx: "He's making a 200 percent profit on his investment—and it won a Tony Award," Jim Walsh exults. And David Puttnam, who took a confused and rebellious adolescent under his wing, watches Efer with pride and expectation. "He's a tough executive, but a man with a terrific heart. I'd be very stunned if I reached seventy and my young friend hadn't done something very significant."