When Hollywood Had a King is the kind of book you're glad you have when stranded on a DIA runway for four hours during a May snowstorm. The plane may not fly, but time does as New Yorker staff writer Connie Bruck presents an intriguing close-up of Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman.

Bruck produces a business-savvy, historic perspective of the mighty Music Corporation of America, while thickening the plot of her lengthy tome about the Cleveland movie-theater usher who rose to become a powerful force in Hollywood with plenty of Tinseltown glamour.

MCA was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a talent for booking bands. Twelve years later, Stein moved the talent agency to Beverly Hills, hiring Wasserman as a publicist. Wasserman would rise to become president of the multimedia company and reign as king of Hollywood, an appropriate title, given his austere yet raging temperament that made industry "screamers and yellers" look like rank amateurs.

"From the start, he prized disciplined troops, and he succeeded in creating legions of followers within his enterprise who were willing to live by his dictates, generally regarding him with fear and awe," writes Bruck.

He "never lost in a deal, never made a mistake, could see around corners," wearing his trademark, thick, black-rimmed glasses that Steven Spielberg once quipped resembled movie screens.

From Hollywood's Golden Era through Wall Street's 1980s merger mania, Wasserman rarely sat for interviews, but in the four years before his death last year, Bruck persuaded him to do several. She found not the robust titan she expected, but a frail man eager to reminisce about his business hits and misses, including the 1990 sale of MCA/Universal to Matsushita, the Japanese electronics firm, that essentially ended his reign as Hollywood mogul.

"Those are the smart things," Wasserman told Bruck during one of their interviews in the glass skyscraper he modeled after the Seagram Tower in New York. "Now do you want to know the dumb thing I did? Sold the company to the Japanese."

In letting Wasserman's vulnerability show through, Bruck is able to balance the man's story, which she tells using unprecedented access to Stein's unpublished memoir, FBI wiretaps of shady characters in Wasserman's world, innumerable correspondence, and her own research of newspaper and magazine stories over the decades.

In a breezy yet intelligent way, she uncloaks the Wasserman mystery to reveal a trajectory beyond Hollywood circles - from mingling with Al Capone in Chicago, Jimmy Hoffa and other mobsters, to seeing the promise of television and brokering alliances in Washington, D.C.

"He helped me become president, he helped me stay president, he helped me be a better president," former President Clinton once said of Wasserman.

But it was Wasserman's business acumen that made him legendary, powerful and rich.

Among the first clients he signed to MCA was Ronald Reagan, who inked a then-standard seven-year contract in 1941 - Wasserman's first $1 million deal, a pen stroke that would cement a lifelong friendship.

Bruck credits Wasserman with later shifting the balance of Hollywood's power from the studios and such seven-year contractual stranglehold on stars to a system in which the stars became profit partners. Jimmy Stewart, starring in Winchester 73, was the first to shatter the studio contract system in 1950.

Later Wasserman was to be consumed by numbers, even down to demanding that each day, his secretary Melody Sherwood give him the hourly Universal Studios back-lot tour count.

"If I hadn't given it to him by eleven, he'd buzz me at 11:05 and say, 'Well, what's wrong?' and I had to call over and ask why they didn't have it - maybe the machine was jammed," said Sherwood.

Bruck tells an equally quirky story of Stein signing his first client in 1937 - Bette Davis, notorious for a hot temper and once even holding a meeting with a nonplussed Stein from her bed while wearing "magnificent white lingerie."

"She was too much of a lady to invite me into her bed but it was obvious she expected me to do so," Stein recalls in his memoir. "The next half hour or so was very uncomfortable but I finally left like I came in."

Such stories abound in When Hollywood Had a King but like a movie that runs too long, Bruck's book occasionally bogs down in minute details such as the "he said," "they said" dialogues and narratives of the 1940s union negotiations. But that's a small distraction in Bruck's tale of a majestic man who is definitely worth a close-up.

Lynn Bronikowski is a freelance writer living in Aurora.