Top Grade

There are three things that every Englishman seems to have: a pet, an umbrella and a Lew Grade story. As Britain's most prominent show-business entrepreneur, jowly, Goldwynesque Lew Grade enjoys a following that is not so much doting as anecdoting. His custom-made, 7 3/4-in. Cuban cigars are an indispensable prop of cartoonists. His multimillion-dollar deals get him lampooned as "Low Greed" in the satirical magazine Private Eye. He even has his own favorite story about himself. It concerns a little girl who asked him if he knew what two and two make. "Buying or selling?" he replied. It is no truer than most of the stories about him, but it imparts the flavor of the man.

Sir Lew--he was knighted in 1969--is chief executive and principal voting shareholder of Associated Television Corporation Ltd. (ATV), the largest of the 15 regional firms that make up Britain's commercial TV network. ATV originates 25% of the network's nationwide programming. Much of ATV's $95 million annual business comes from other ventures as well, including records, music publishing (copyrights on most of the Beatles' hit songs), a theater chain, toys and bowling alleys. Last week in London, after ATV directors reported record 1970-71 profits of $10.4 million after taxes, Chairman Lord Renwick hardly exaggerated when he praised Sir Lew as British television's "supreme impresario."

Dictatorship and Delicatessen. Sir Lew's orbit extends far beyond Britain. He was one of the first to see the potential in filmed TV programs--as opposed to live ones--shot relatively cheaply in Britain and syndicated around the world. His first production, the 1954 series Robin Hood, is still being rerun in Poland, Kuwait, New Zealand and many other countries. Over the years, he has sold more than 100,000 hours of programming to 104 countries--"everything but the weather forecast," he told TIME Correspondent Christopher Porterfield. Among his recent exports to the U.S. are the Tom Jones Show, Hamlet starring Richard Chamberlain, and two new series this fall--The Persuaders, with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, and Shirley's World, with Shirley MacLaine (see TELEVISION). Last year's foreign sales of $30 million were more than twice those of the BBC or all the other commercial TV firms combined.

As managed by Sir Lew, ATV falls somewhere between a benevolent dictatorship and a family delicatessen. "There are two Lew Grades--the patriarch and the businessman," says one of his executives. "Ask for -L-500 because of some personal crisis, and it's yours. Ask for -L-500 extra on a budget--not a chance." Grade chooses new programs largely on instinct. His motto: "My tastes are the average person's tastes." After he approves a project--something he often does on the basis of a one-page description--he maintains that his creative staffers have a completely free hand. "Then if I don't like the results they get hell," he says. Certainly he leaves the finer points of culture to others. Once, when ATV was shooting an excerpt from The Master Builder, he asked an aide: "How's the Shakespeare coming along?" The aide murmured that it was Ibsen, not Shakespeare. "Well," said Sir Lew, "it's all costume, isn't it?"

Proud Mom. Born Louis Winogradsky in Tokmak, Russia, he was taken to London's slums by his parents when he was five. Ten years later, he and his father, a frustrated opera singer, opened an embroidery factory. At 20, he had won enough dance contests to change his name and go onstage as "the World Champion Charleston dancer." A few years later, he decided that he could do better by spotting and promoting other talents, and he became an agent.

After World War II, he teamed with his two brothers, who had also become agents and producers. Before they sold out to the giant Electrical and Musical Industries for $22 million in EMI stock in 1967, they had built up the largest theatrical organization in Europe, and numbered among their clients Sir Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward and Vanessa Redgrave. "You must be very proud of your children," the Queen Mother once said to Mrs. Winogradsky at a charity gala. Replied Mrs. Winogradsky: "And you must be very proud of your children too."

Though he will be 65 on Christmas Day, Sir Lew shows no sign of slacking off. He still regularly glides up to his office in his chauffeured, beige Rolls-Royce at 7 a.m. After returning to his ten-room London apartment around 6 p.m., he spends most evenings watching the telly and making business calls on his three unlisted phones. A dozen times a year he flies to Manhattan to market his wares to U.S. networks and advertisers. Had he been there last week, he could have attended the opening of his first feature film production, Desperate Characters. "I'm only just starting," he proclaims, waving one of his 15 daily cigars. "I'm going to make a fortune in the film business, and I mean a fortune." Then, struck by an uncharacteristic afterthought, he adds: "Whenever I say 'I,' of course, I mean the company."

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