Deep Read: 'New York' on Jeff Bewkes

Since word came down last fall that Jeff Bewkes would take over for Dick Parsons as CEO of Time Warner, we've been hearing an awful lot about what he'll do but very little about what he's like.

New York remedies that today with a profile by Portfolio columnist Lloyd Grove. By all accounts, Bewkes is a smooth operator and team player, meaning he makes a less colorful profile subject than, say, Col Allan. But there's still much to learn. For instance:

-Bewkes is a little neurotic. "A former colleague describes Bewkes, 55, as a quasi hypochondriac who fastidiously washes up after shaking hands ('If you've got a cold,' says the colleague, 'Jeff won't come anywhere near you') and can expound learnedly on the relative merits of various antibiotics."

-Bewkes doesn't have a lot of rich-guy pretensions, unlike his oenophile predecessor. Says another colleague, "He still has a tuna sandwich for lunch, and doesn't even eat the whole thing."

-His wife, Peggy, must be a patient woman: "Bewkes is known for being an outrageous flirt, especially with actresses."

-He was a college hipster: "To the callow underclassmen of Yale's Pierson College, Bewkes was a somewhat romantic figure of countercultural elan--a tad scruffy and artistic-looking in a battered leather jacket and definitely more successful with the opposite sex than we were."

-He still has that elan thing going for him. Says former Time Warner exec Michael Fuchs, "Jeff has a certain grace about him. It reminds me of what they used to say about Joe DiMaggio. He never looked like he was running in the outfield, but he would catch the ball nevertheless."

-He has major balls, judging from what happened at a dinner party where he was seated next to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia was patiently explaining to Bewkes, a nonlawyer, why the correct way to interpret the Constitution was to employ the analytical methods of "originalism," a rarefied legal theory in which jurists must divine the intent of a statute based on how reasonable people are likely to have understood the statute at the time it was enacted. "That's bullshit, isn't it?" Bewkes puckishly suggested. "Because you're really not acting as a judge, you're being a historian."

Grove also has this priceless tidbit from a purportedly off-the-record session at last November's Foursquare conference.

Back in November, Parsons appeared at a VIP conference hosted by the investment firm Quadrangle Group LLC.

"If you were Jeff, coming in--" he was asked.

"If I were Jeff," Parsons interrupted, "I would shoot myself."

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