NEW YORK -- As Sumner Redstone, the 76-year-old chairman and chief executive of Viacom Inc., stepped from an elevator in the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, the man right next to him, Melvin Karmazin, 56, president and chief executive of CBS, appeared to be temporarily distracted.
But after a polite second or two watching Karmazin accept the congratulations of onlookers, Redstone turned, his eyes plainly beseeching his new partner."I'm right behind you, Sumner!" Karmazin said, rushing past a throng of photographers.
In many ways, that moment captured the complex new relationship that now unites the two men. For while Redstone may be buying CBS to add to Viacom's media empire and will remain as chief executive, he is clearly depending on Karmazin to run the company for him.
Not a man known for puppy dog-like eagerness, Karmazin, who will serve as chief operating officer and will have all units reporting to him, is the aggressive former radio ad salesman now widely considered the media world's most ruthless manager and cost slasher.
Redstone, an eminent figure of the media world, is the tireless builder who grew up in a Boston tenement during the Depression and who transformed a handful of bedraggled movie theaters into the country's largest privately held theater chain, eventually buying Viacom in 1987.
The $37.3 billion deal joins not just two enormous media companies but two oversized corporate personalities in a marriage that was consummated after a two-year flirtation and a brief but painstakingly intense two-week prenuptial discussion.
"He seduced us," Redstone said of Karmazin Tuesday. "This began as a deal involving some television stations. Then he started talking about cable networks. Then I could see it coming. He is a master salesman, and he began to turn me on."
Raised in a housing development on Long Island, Karmazin is the son of first-generation Americans. His father, now dead, drove a taxi and his mother, with whom he is still very close, worked in a cur-tain-rod factory. After high school, Karmazin worked days at a tiny advertising agency and earned his undergraduate degree at Pace University by night.
"He is unencumbered by convention, and even running this company has not seduced him," said a Los Angeles television executive who is a close friend to Karmazin. "He has gone from being an ascetic who lived in a small apartment to an ascetic who lives in a big apartment."
As chief executive of CBS, Karmazin trimmed the already weakened news division's budget by 10 percent and ushered in a new round of company-wide layoffs. He has been known to loudly question what he perceives to be excessive lunch tabs on expense accounts. His self-composed entry in "Who's Who" is brief: just under five lines.
While members of Karmazin's public-relations team are eager to quash any notion that Karmazin is simply a cost-cutter, he made several pointed references to his tight-fisted reputation. Redstone and Karmazin, for example, said they planned to fly to Washington Wednesday morning to meet with officials of the Federal Communications Commission. Karmazin remarked, "He'll fly on his jet, and I'll take the shuttle." Redstone owns a Gulfstream III jet.
But Karmazin is not just a penny pincher. "I have been working with Mel for two years," said Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS Television, "and he has never denied me any of the money it took for me to get something on the screen."
Redstone is an equally ambitious entrepreneur who is also from a less-than-wealthy background. His father, Max Rothstein, began a nightclub business by buying New York City's Latin Quarter nightclub from Lou Walters, Barbara Walters' father. (Rothstein, not Redstone, changed the family name, said Carl Folta, a Viacom spokesman.)
With a degree from Harvard Law School, Redstone bought and began to turn the National Amusements movie theater chain into a thriving business in the 1950s and 1960s, acquiring pieces from Columbia, MGM/UA and Loews after the studios were required to divest themselves of theaters.
He eventually gathered enough resources to take over Viacom in 1987, which was then an ill-defined hodgepodge of cable, broadcast and syndication divisions. When the company was struggling, rather than cede to pressure from advisers to sell MTV and Nickelodeon, Redstone reduced debt by selling off assets like Madison Square Garden and several cable systems, radio stations and book publishers. That included an educational division of Simon & Schuster that went to the British company Pearson PLC for a price tag that stunned the industry: more than $4 billion.
The swiftness and certainty with which the CBS-Viacom deal was concluded confirms that both men had been eyeing each other for at least two years, said several executives involved in the deal.
But Karmazin said he first approached Redstone seriously right after the FCC proposed in early August to relax the rules limiting media concentration. According to executives involved in the deal, Karmazin and CBS' chief financial officer, Fredric Reynolds, began seeking advice the very day the FCC made its announcement. Karmazin, a Viacom executive said, wanted to be the first to take advantage of the new regulatory climate.