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Born Sumner Murray Rothstein in Boston's largely Jewish old West End, Redstone was the elder son of a businessman whose nail-biting Depression-era ventures included selling linoleum from the back of a truck, working as a liquor wholesaler and eventually owning two nightclubs and a restaurant. "People think I grew up rich," he recalls. "I grew up in a tenement." From childhood on, "I always had to be the best at what I did. My mother was a big influence. When I used to practice the piano, she would turn the clock back on me," forcing him to practice longer. His father, says Redstone, was a "street kid" with little formal education and a central "need just to survive," which made his household a place where error and failure were not easily tolerated.
Redstone sharpened his competitive instincts at Boston Latin School and then whizzed through Harvard in three years. "Harvard was like going to kindergarten after Boston Latin," he recalls. The public prep school was "tough, almost cruel. The competition was vicious. But the cruelty was not discriminatory. It only had to do with excellence." He graduated first in his class at Boston Latin, a feat he calls "the primary educational achievement of my life."
At World War II Harvard, Redstone's gift for foreign languages caught the eye of Edwin Reischauer, a future U.S. ambassador to Japan, who picked him to join an Army intelligence unit that cracked Japan's wartime codes. Redstone entered Harvard Law School after the Army and began to use his business skills to earn spending money, buying pens, tools and other merchandise with G.I. discounts and selling them to local department stores for a profit. "My children ((Brent, 43, and Shari, 40, both lawyers)) will never have the benefit of that experience, and it is a benefit, let me tell you." Redstone practiced law for six years before deciding that "litigation is generally offensive to me. All that happens is dissipation of intellectual and financial resources."
Turning to business, Redstone joined his father's drive-in movie firm and built it into National Amusements, Inc., an 800-theater chain. "He'd drive me up a wall," says Friedberg. "He'd call the head of a movie company over a single movie in a single town. Saturday or Sunday, he didn't care. He'd do whatever he had to do legally to get the picture away from me." To ensure that he would have total control of his theaters, Redstone insisted on owning both the land and the buildings. He also was a pioneer: first, he personally | litigated (and won) a case that forced the studios to give drive-in theaters the same access to first-run movies as indoor movie houses had. Then, noting that audiences wanted a wider range of features, he helped popularize the multiplex cinemas that are now ubiquitous at suburban shopping malls. And with typical thoroughness, he copyrighted the name Multiplex.