The Man with the Iron Grasp

Through sheer will, he escaped a fatal fire; now the king of MTV wants to become a media tycoon

In the most desperate moments of his life, a severely burned Sumner Redstone saved himself by clinging to a window ledge with his right handand counting to 10 over and over again as flames swept through his room in a Boston hotel fire. "My legs were burned to my arteries," he recalls. "I got to a window, and it wouldn't open. I got to another one and hung by my hands. It seemed like a lifetime." Despite 60 hours of burn surgery, doctors doubted that Redstone would ever walk again. His tendons were destroyed, his little finger partly amputated. Yet 14...

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