ALL ABOUT STEVE

Show Business

How Steve Tisch left the family business and turned risky business into big business

JOHN P. DAVIDSON

Steve Tisch is on the phone in his office in West Hollywood, negotiating credits for Dirty Dancing, the television series he is developing. He appears the soul of confidence, and he has good cause. At the age of thirty-nine, he has made it big in both television and film. With his ex-partner, Jon Avnet, he produced a series of gritty sociological dramas for television, the most successful of which were The Burning Bed, the story of an abused wife (played by Farrah Fawcett) who ignites her husband, and Silence of the Heart, about teenage suicide, starring Charlie Sheen. His feature films have tended to be lighter in tone. In 1983 he and Avnet produced Risky Business, which grossed about $100 million and made a teen idol of Tom Cruise. His latest film, produced with Michael Peyser for Touchstone Pictures, is called Big Business. A screwball comedy with enormous potential, since it's about two sets of identical twins played by Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, it opens this month.

Tisch's personal achievements are magnified by a growing national awareness of his family name and fortune. Since his uncle, Laurence Tisch, took over CBS, and his father, Preston Robert Tisch, served as postmaster general, the Tisch family has begun to emerge as America's newest dynasty, with a $19 billion empire that includes 25 percent of CBS, the Loews Hotels, CNA Financial Corp., Lorillard tobacco, and the Bulova Watch Co. Steve Tisch can pretty well do whatever he wants.

He is a large man with sandy hair and a massive brow. He's wearing loafers, a pair of gray corduroy trousers, and a white shirt with tan stripes, open at the neck. His modest offices are on the second floor over an antiques shop on Robertson. Most of his other phone calls this morning involve The Heart of Dixie, the new movie he is shooting in Mississippi. It's about three young women in college who come of age at that moment in history marked by the appearance of Elvis Presley and the birth of the civil-rights movement. The film will star Ally Sheedy, Phoebe Cates, Virginia Madsen, and Treat Williams, and it's planned for a spring 1989 release.

Tisch says he's not sure exactly how many other projects he has going, but there are a lot. It took him three years to nurse Big Business from an idea pitched by the screenwriters to the actual making of the film. "The important thing is not to be defeated when people tell you no,'' he says. "The nice thing about studio heads' changing every three or four years is that it pays to keep going back."

While Tisch was a student at Tufts, he had a summer job working as a film booker for the family's movie chain. The next summer he worked for John Avildsen on what Tisch describes as an essentially soft-porn movie, and his last summer job was with Otto Preminger. After graduating he went to Columbia Pictures, where he worked as Peter Guber's assistant and later in acquisitions. He opened his own production company, in partnership with Jon Avnet, in 1976. "Of course, it helped to be named Tisch when I was getting started. It got me in the door. But I've seen a lot of people have the door opened for them because of family or connections, and many of them were never able to walk through."

In Hollywood, Steve and his wife, Patsy, have the reputation of having done everything right. Success, money, two children, the right friends, a beautiful house in a smart section of Los Angeles. Steve is a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is on the board of trustees at the Los Angeles Children's Museum. There's a large Hockney in the entrance hall of his home, and paintings by Arthur Dove and Sam Francis in the living room. All of the furniture was designed and built for the house, which is large and intricately crafted in the style of Greene and Greene.

Show Business

Patsy, a tall, athletic blonde in blue jeans, cooks dinner while the nanny looks after William, the new baby. Steve puts their four-year-old daughter to bed, and then we eat, in the kitchen. It's a pleasant meal. Steve and Patsy Tisch seem like almost any other nice young couple.

After dinner, I ask Steve about his family, curious not so much how he ended up in movies, but how he turned out to be so normal. "I was the oldest of seven cousins," he says. ''I watched my father and uncle put it all together, so I never took any of it for granted. And they were never pretentious. When I went to my father and uncle's offices in New York, they were like any other office. What they were good at was seeing opportunity.

"Their parents had started out with a children's summer camp, then bought a resort that was popular with Jewish families, in Lakewood, New Jersey, where my father and uncle both worked as young men. In the early fifties they bought two hotels in Atlantic City, which was where I grew up. We moved to Miami for a year when I was ten, then to Scarsdale, New York. I went to the Gunnery, a prep school in Connecticut, then to Tufts. After I graduated, and decided to come out here, my parents didn't do a lot of second-guessing. They cautioned me, but they didn't want my pride to keep me from coming back if it didn't work out. But after watching my father and uncle, I felt I could do it on my own."

"And what's the next stage?" I ask.

"I don't know. I just hope I don't lose enthusiasm for my life now. And if I do, I hope I'll have the sense to do something else."

That's a very modest response, but later, talking to Marty Davidson, the director of The Heart of Dixie, I gather it is characteristic. "You see very few signs of wealth. One of the few ways you do is in meetings when things get tense with studio heads. Steve will say something funny when no one else would dare. He has the innate ability to say the right thing at the right moment. But, I mean, his uncle owns CBS, so what's the mystery? Steve Tisch could buy the studio. He could do anything he wanted. If he's not talking about what's next, it's probably because he's been around actors so much. Actors always try to live the moment, to fulfill each moment, and be grateful for that moment. But why should Steve deal in results? It would be a disservice to him and to the fun of getting there."