Redstone’s visions of immortality for his vast business domain seem parallel to those he harbors for himself. And it’s true that he has survived a series of personal crises that might easily have killed him. He nearly perished in Boston’s terrible Copley Plaza Hotel fire in 1979, hanging from a third-floor windowsill as the inferno blistered 45 percent of his body. After enduring months of excruciating skin grafts, he went on to turn a chain of theaters started by his father, Mickey (who changed the family name from Rothstein), into a worldwide colossus comprising such enterprises as MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, Simon & Schuster, an outdoor-advertising company, and hundreds of radio and television stations, not to mention the CBS broadcasting network and Paramount Pictures. Redstone accomplished this beginning in 1987 with National Amusements’ highly leveraged hostile takeover of Viacom; a little more than a decade later, Viacom swallowed up CBS. (Redstone split Viacom and CBS into separate companies in 2006 in a vain attempt to “unleash value.”)

Four years ago, Redstone was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He now claims to have “made medical history” by becoming cancer-free, crediting a daily regime of 60 to 70 minutes of exercise—and all those antioxidants.

Along the way, Wall Street cheered Redstone’s acquisitions. Some of them, with the benefit of hindsight, now look like losers, CBS chief among them. The broadcasting behemoth, despite boasting the TV network that won the latest ratings sweeps, is starving just like its brethren from falling advertising revenue in a souring economy; in the third quarter of 2008, it was forced to take a $14 billion write-down on the reduced value of its television and radio stations. As he sits in his living room, his P.R. man scribbling notes, Redstone takes a swipe at Moonves. He tells me that Moonves, a hard-charging, universally respected television programmer, “overpaid” for CNET, a group of internet sites that CBS acquired last summer for $1.8 billion. While that’s a commonly held view on Wall Street, it’s more than a little alarming to hear it endorsed by Redstone, who, as executive chairman of CBS’s board, signed off on the CNET purchase price. He airily brushes off responsibility. “You have to understand the way I operate. I’m extremely nonintrusive,” he says with no apparent irony. “I told Les that I and many investors did feel that the price he paid was too high,” Redstone adds. “I made no bones about it.”

Moonves declines to be drawn into a public spat with his boss. “You’ll have to get that from him,” he says. “I’ve talked to him a number of times about [CNET] and went through it.” He adds, “There’s not a major move I make without checking with him and making sure he’s okay with it.”

Redstone is still second-guessing another business decision—the failure of Viacom to purchase the social-­networking site MySpace, snapped up by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2005. Redstone blamed the popular Tom Freston, then chief operating officer of Viacom. Freston was credited with much of the company’s success in building MTV into a hugely profitable global brand. Redstone, who had promoted Freston to Viacom C.E.O. even after the MySpace debacle, summarily fired him in September 2006. A new book about the deal, Stealing MySpace, by Julia Angwin, argues, however, that it was Freston who pushed Redstone to keep bidding against Murdoch and that Redstone and Dauman—who was then a Viacom board member and is now the company’s C.E.O.—shut Freston down. Redstone, always ready to justify his positions and relitigate ancient conflicts, offers his version of events. “Nobody, certainly not I, stood in the way of Tom [Freston] making that deal,” he says. “Actually, I pushed Tom to make the deal. I pushed him.”

And then Redstone goes off on his rival in the deal. “The fact is that Murdoch will pay anything. Just look at the Wall Street Journal—he paid at least $5 billion, he had no competition,” Redstone says. “Murdoch is known to make deals without due diligence.” He adds, “I don’t want to attack him, because I like him a lot.... I’m not criticizing him. He has his style; I have mine.” A Murdoch spokesman declined to comment.

As Redstone spins revisionist history, Paula sits barefoot and curled up on a sofa, listening and occasionally chiming in protectively, especially when I ask Redstone if it’s prudent corporate governance for an octogenarian to be in charge of two public companies. “That’s unfair,” Paula tells me. “That’s ageism.”

It’s a little unclear what she’s doing there at all, considering the fact that Redstone is about to dispatch her from the fabulous life into which she was only recently welcomed. He has already bought two houses for her—a beachfront condo in Sarasota, Florida, and a house in Beverly Hills—both at a considerably lower altitude, in every respect, than the one in which she currently resides. Redstone declines to reveal what he paid, but he makes it clear that the houses will be in her name alone and that he is giving her substantially more than is required by their prenuptial agreement. (He won’t say how much more, but a source close to the family says the total is nearly twice the $5 million figure.) “He’s a pussycat,” Paula gushes and then goes on to reminisce about their first date, which was set up by a mutual friend. She claims she didn’t even know what her suitor did for a living. “He could read books,” she says, with a vague smile. “He was charming. He held my hand. He would give me a sweet and gentle kiss.”

“When we go out, people don’t think I’m her father,” Redstone volunteers with pride. “They know I’m her date.” So why the divorce? Redstone’s explanation seems less than forthcoming—that he is traveling so frequently on business, all over the world, that it’s really “not a life for a wife to have.” Paula offers, “We’re two type-A personalities.”