The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram

by Nicholas Faith

The story of the Bronfman family is a fascinating and improbable saga. It is dominated by “Mr. Sam,” the single greatest figure in the history of the liquor business, the man who made drinking whiskey respectable in the United States and who in the 1950s and 1960s built Seagram into the first worldwide empire in wine and spirits. After Sam’s death in 1971, his oldest son, Edgar, maintained the business, though he was distracted by his matrimonial problems. Nevertheless, in the 1980s he masterminded a major coup when he translated a small investment in oil made by his father into a 25 percent stake in the mighty DuPont company.
But in the 1990s, Edgar allowed his second son, Edgar Jr., to indulge his ambition to become a media tycoon. The stake in DuPont was sold, and the money reinvested in Universal, the film and theme-park empire. Edgar Jr. then paid more than $10 billion to buy Polygram Records and thus fulfill his fancy to be king of the world’s music business. But at the same time, he remained in charge of the liquor business, which started to stagnate—indeed, to fall apart. Then came the final disaster when the increasingly divided family sold out to Jean-Marie Messier, overreaching empire builder of Vivendi, the French conglomerate.
But the story of this amazing family over the past century is about more than booze and business. The Bronfmans is a spectacular account that details the larger-than-life personalities and bitter rivalries that have made the family so famous and, sometimes, so infamous.

Genres: Biography, Business

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Nicholas Faith is a former senior editor for the Sunday Times and The Economist, a journalist and author.

He has written widely on wines, spirits and transport.

In 1996 he founded the International Spirits Challenge.

In September 2010 Nicholas Faith was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Bureau National Interprofessional de Cognac.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is disappointing. Don't really know why I finished it (or started it for that matter.) The beginning about how a Jewish immigrant Canadian family was able to get whiskey into the U.S. during prohibition without themselves becoming crooked is terrific. The characters in the family are interesting. Their business empire then came apart via their involvement with media companies during the dot-com boom. Potentially very interesting to anyone like me who worked for Time Warner or Universal Vivendi during those years. Certainly it was interesting to get info about personalities involved. Juicily mean in places. But I had the feeling that the author himself didn't really understand the financial content of what he was writing about. Large stretches of the book at that point seemed like maybe one index card of info after another he had collected got pasted into a document and not edited. It's not comprehensible and it gets unbelievably boring and irritating. Literally one paragraph doesn't follow another. I wonder if what happened was that even his editor decided to not actually read it?! Or if they decided that the material was so boring they could get away with not editing it because no one would actually persist reading that far?

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a real slog

[Marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Convoluted in flow, inconsistent in tone, and mostly rather boring; question is: who commissioned this book and who chose Faith to deliver it?

[Jeff Gramm]

I read this retarded book immediately after I finished "Ogilvy on Advertising". Maybe Ogilvy's super-precise writing had left me overly-sensitive to author Nicholas Faith's biases in this missive about the Bronfman family, but it seemed like there wasn't a clear sentence in the entire book. The author's resume seems decent enough (assistant editor of Economist and business editor of Sunday Times), so my guess is he wrote this book very very quickly. Check out this passage from the book and you'll see what I mean:

"Edgar particularly admired Edgar Jr.'s toughness as against what he perceived correctly as Sam's gently nature. In "Good Spirits" Edgar tells the story of a tennis match against a couple where, as he writes, 'the man had a slight disability making it difficult for him to shift positions easily. Noticing this I said to Sam 'you can afford to poach at net.' Sam replied 'oh dad.' If Edgar Jr had been playing he would have noticed immediately and moved nearer the center of the court.' According to Edgar Jr's biographer, however, this story seems totally improbable. For Sam was by far the better player and had driven his brother out of the game in his teens. Junior, unwilling to admit defeat, had taken up golf instead."

[G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having some knowledge of 20th Century Canadian history would help before reading this book. I didn't and found myself having to jump to wikipedia to get background on various people and events. Written by a writer about the liquor industry for business publications the book gets fairly dry in spots. I was sorry I hadn't written out a "cast of characters/companie" when I started as the same people/companies recur throughout.

[The Devine Ms Em · Rating 2 out of 5]

A long book about the Montreal Bronfman family business.