Two weeks ago Chris Albrecht flew to Las Vegas on a private jet, made $120
million (£61 million), then tried to strangle his girlfriend.
The first two parts of this story are entirely unremarkable. As chairman and
chief executive of HBO – America’s most successful television network, with
annual profits of $1 billion – Albrecht was travelling to Sin City to watch
a boxing match that he was ultimately responsible for televising: Oscar De
La Hoya versus Floyd Mayweather Jr. Subscribers to HBO could pay $54.95 each
for a virtual ringside seat at the bout, which was hyped with the promoter’s
headline “The World Awaits”. But Albrecht, 54, had no intention of watching
the fight on the small screen: he wanted the real deal in the MGM Grand
Garden Arena. “For events like that, the whole team flies over there from LA
in the corporate jet,” says a friend of Albrecht’s. “If they’re not
ringside, they’re pretty damn close.”
With his shaved head, tanned skin and black open-necked shirt, the HBO chief
looked every bit the media mogul. Beside him was his TV starlet girlfriend,
the Latina presenter Karla Jensen, 17 years his junior and a society page
regular.
Drinking heavily, cheering the fighters along, Albrecht was a pressure-hose of
booze, testosterone and adrenalin. An alcoholic, he had decided two years
previously that he could handle a drink or two at social events. He was
wrong, and the tension in the arena wasn’t helping. It was the Mexican
holiday of Cinco de Mayo, and Mayweather (an African American) had swaggered
into the ring wearing a sombrero and a cape in the colours of the Mexican
flag – mocking De La Hoya’s racial heritage. The rapper 50 Cent was also
striding around with Mayweather, bragging about the $1 million bet that he
had placed on his friend.
Boos echoed. De La Hoya– the “Golden Boy” – raised his arms and the crowd
rallied. But no matter what the outcome in the ring, Albrecht was going to
be the loser of the evening. By the next morning his 22-year career at HBO
would be ruined, his past uncovered, his family embarrassed and his employer
in turmoil.
Perhaps, in one of those last moments before the bell rang, Albrecht might
have recognised a bit of himself in De La Hoya. After all, the HBO chief was
the golden boy of his profession. A Queens-born comedy club
manager-turned-programming executive, he “green-lit” shows at HBO –
sometimes after rival networks had turned them down – that went on to gain
both critical adulation and worldwide followings: The Sopranos; Sex and
the City; Six Feet Under. His involvement in The Sopranos was
so deep that he personally changed the details of Tony Soprano’s first
murder to make the depressed Mob boss more sympathetic.
With no advertisements and epic, BBC-worthy production budgets, Albrecht’s HBO
changed television, abandoning the channel’s 1980s sales gimmick as a
first-run movie service and instead filling the vacuum that had emerged
between movies and schlock TV.
Albrecht’s formula has since been replicated by newer rivals such as FX and
Showtime, resulting in post-Sopranoshits such as The Shield and Dexter.
In fact, at the time of the De La Hoya/Mayweather fight the press was
beginning to ask what Albrecht was planning to do when The Sopranos
came to an end this year. Nevertheless, for that one night at the MGM, he
was still the king: more than two million pay-per-views added up to a
staggering revenue of $120 million for “The World Awaits”, not to mention
the $19 million that MGM had collected at the gate. This was the most
lucrative fight in boxing history – and an entertaining one: it took 12
closely matched rounds and a highly controversial split verdict from the
judges before the ageing De La Hoya lost his title.
The bout was over. But for Albrecht, by now utterly wasted, the trouble was
just about to begin.
There are, as you might expect, varying accounts of what happened next. The
Times asked Albrecht for his version but he declined, somewhat
understandably, to be interviewed. His friends spoke off the record. Which
brings us to the report filed by Albrecht’s arresting officer the next day.
It begins: “In the MGM parking lot we observed a white male grabbing a white
female by the throat with both hands. The male was later identified as
Christopher Albrecht and the female as Jensen’s name is blanked out].
Albrecht was also observed dragging [Jensen] in a northbound direction
towards the entrance of the hotel. As I ran towards the two subjects [a
security guard] pulled Albrecht’s right arm, partially freeing Albrecht’s
grip from [Jensen’s] neck. I then placed Albrecht’s left arm in a
submission hold and placed Albrecht on the ground and into custody. I could
smell a strong odour of alcoholic beverage.”
The report goes on to note the red marks on Jensen’s neck, her unwillingness
to co-operate (a sign, some have since claimed, of “battered woman
syndrome”) and her refusal of medical attention. Albrecht, meanwhile, told
the officer that his girlfriend had “p****d me off”.
Towards the end of the report a passing detail, brilliantly vulnerable to
interpretation, is offered: “Albrecht informed me he was the CEO of HBO.”
An alternative and much less damaging account of the scene outside the MGM was
given to the New York Daily News by an unidentified friend of
Jensen’s. “Chris was trying to guide [Jensen] to the car and she slipped on
her wobbly high heels,” said the source. “He was helping her up when the
police grabbed him.” Even Jensen herself eventually weighed in, saying that
the neck-hold was “fuelled by both of us drinking too much alcohol . . . but
I was not injured . . . I still love him and I forgive him. Chris and I are
both committed to our sobriety and are looking forward to putting this
behind us and moving on.”
What’s known for sure is this: after 12 hours in a Las Vegas county jail,
Albrecht was released to face the mother of all Monday mornings. Indeed, he
spent most of it composing an e-mail that pinged after lunch into the
inboxes of HBO employees on both coasts, explaining that he was “deeply
sorry for what occurred in Las Vegas” and that it was “a wake-up call to me
of a weakness I thought I had overcome long ago”. It went on: “I have been a
sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 13 years. Two years ago I decided
that I could handle drinking again. Clearly I was wrong. Given that truth, I
have committed myself to sobriety.” Albrecht announced that he would take an
immediate leave of absence and “go back to working with” AA.
It was a classic non-apology apology, crafted perhaps in part by Albrecht’s
lawyer, David Chasnoff, a Las Vegas bruiser who specialises in managing
thermo-nuclear celebrity hangovers (it is said that he was instrumental in
the annulment of Britney Spears’s 55-hour Las Vegas marriage). Also helping
was Allan Mayer, a PR man adept at cutting free household-name clients from
the wreckage of their personal lives. By Tuesday, Albrecht and Jensen, their
relationship apparently still functioning, had ventured out near the HBO
chief’s home in Beverly Hills to a party at the Laura M boutique, where
Albrecht’s 24-year-old daughter Kate (who makes occasional appearances in
the HBO show Entourage) was launching a jewellery line. Albrecht’s
other daughter is still in high school; both are from his former marriage
that ended in 2000 after 20 years. Most of the Entourage cast
stayed well away. The paparazzi, meanwhile, were out in droves.
Perhaps Albrecht believed that he still had a chance of keeping his job. After
all, he was good friends with his predecessor and mentor Jeff Bewkes, now
president of HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, and in line to become its
next CEO. That hope must have disappeared the next morning, when an
astonishing fact was revealed by the Los Angeles Times: in 1991,
HBO had paid a sum estimated at between $400,000 and $500,000 (£202,000 to
£253,000) to Sasha Emerson, a former employee and girlfriend of Albrecht’s,
to settle an allegation that he had shoved and choked her at HBO’s offices
in Los Angeles. The payout had apparently been blessed by Bewkes.
“With great regret, at the request of Time Warner, I have agreed to step
down,” announced Albrecht later that day. “I take this step for the benefit
of my HBO colleagues, recognising that I cannot allow my personal
circumstances to distract them from the business.” And just like that, one
of the most remarkable careers in American media was over – at least for the
time being. The tussle over Albrecht’s succession has already begun, with
candidates including his deputy, Bill Nelson, and Eric Kessler, the HBO
marketing head. Colin Callender, the Briton who runs HBO’s original movies
division, is regarded by some insiders as “too creative” for the job.
Many in the business have yet to absorb what happened. “Chris didn’t have many
enemies,” explains one LA-based entertainment executive. “There’s no sense
of satisfaction that he was brought down by this.”
Meanwhile, levels of outrage at the domestic-violence allegation vary. Some
find it hard to take seriously (“Since when did it become a crime to beat up
your girlfriend in Las Vegas?” one TV writer joked to The Times),
while others are appalled. “He does have an alcohol problem,” said one
executive, “but to say that’s why he beat up his girlfriend is too much of a
reduction for me. I mean, I’ve gotten drunk plenty of times and haven’t
beaten up any women.”
Albrecht admitted a charge of battery last week, paid a $1,000 fine and was
given a six-month suspended sentence. He is still being photographed out and
about with Jensen.
By Hollywood standards he is not rich enough to retire – his estimated $2
million to $3.5 million salary at HBO was considered modest in LA – and is
expected to sign an independent production deal with a studio before the end
of the year; independent because the events of the past fortnight have shown
that a personal indiscretion by an official at a public company can become a
major news event; and the cost of a major news event can be great indeed.
The very fact that Bewkes’s future as CEO of one of America’s biggest
companies can be vulnerable to a subordinate’s drunken behaviour is a lesson
that Time Warner and others are unlikely soon to forget. Meanwhile, with all
the time that Albrecht now has on his hands, perhaps he can catch up on
recent Sopranos episodes. Last Sunday’s instalment featured an
alcoholic mobster falling off the wagon and Tony leaving New Jersey for a
short holiday. Guess where he went?
