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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

would cheat. They would copy. Everything that was wrong, they did. They made a lot of money. There are a lot of guys on Seventh Avenue doing that every day doing that with design. There are people doing that in all kinds of fields where they're perfectly happy to be second, third, or fourth-best. They'll take everybody else's ideas. They never come out with the same bite and edge that the original has. Copies never do. But for those guys, they don't see it. The Coffin brothers thought they were doing something pretty damn good. I just shuddered when I went up there. I don't think he was ever up there but once. It was just, “Go ahead and make it work, and don't spend any money.”

Q:

Pretty impossible position?

Stanton:

Sure. That was the biggest financial -- I don't think we ever had any other -- you don't need much more. The Jackie Gleason deal he was upset with me about. I think maybe I've talked about that. I don't think he ever approved of the [Arthur] Godfrey deal, although we made an outrageous amount of money on the deal. I think he thought I paid too much for the Philadelphia station. I think that he was shocked that I offered twenty-eight million dollars for a property in California and hadn't even gone to the board about it. I mention these things because they, in a sense, show you the latitude that I had, and on occasion thought I had and found out later that there was some reluctance on his part that I did what I did. I told him when he said, “You offered twenty-eight million dollars for that property?” I said, “Sure. I would have gone to thirty-five if I could have gotten any interest.” I thought he was going to fall out of the chair when I said that I would have gone to thirty-five. It later was sold for something in the fifties. Today you could probably buy it for the thirty-five. At any rate, it was the right thing to do at that time. I just wasn't persuasive enough to get the man to sell it to me. I would have had no hesitation in signing my name to the commitment





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