Hollywood To The White House?

Steven Mnuchin’s odd path from a relativity debacle (and a cameo for Warren Beatty) to Trump’s treasury secretary pick.

 

- Kim Masters

ON NOV. 14, 2015, BANKER, hedge fund manager and Hollywood film investor Steven Mnuchin celebrated his engagement to Scottish actress-producer Louise Linton with a champagne-and-caviar party in the flower-filled Crystal Ballroom at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Among the guests dancing to the cover band that night was embattled Relativity Media founder Ryan Kavanaugh — perhaps surprising given that colleagues say Kavanaugh just months earlier bitterly had blamed Mnuchin’s OneWest bank, which had made significant loans to Relativity, for pushing his company into bankruptcy by abruptly pulling millions of dollars from one or more of its accounts. This wasn’t an ordinary quarrel between lender and creditor: From October 2014 through May 2015, Mnuchin simultaneously had served as chairman of OneWest and co-chairman of Relativity. He quietly had exited Relativity a few weeks before his bank acted to recoup some of the tens of millions it had loaned to Kavanaugh’s troubled studio. Shortly after that, Relativity filed for Chapter 11 protection. (According to a regulatory filing, OneWest’s board had approved all Mnuchin’s dealings at Relativity.)

Also among the guests at the engagement party was former William Morris Agency chairman Jim Wiatt, who along with Mnuchin had been a board member at both OneWest and Relativity. Wiatt describes the groom-to-be as “a good friend, really smart with a good sense of humor” and the future bride as “a really terrific lady.” But while Mnuchin, 53, has a long history of investing in the movie business — and while the guest list included some who, like Wiatt and producer Cassian Elwes, are well known and long established in the entertainment industry — this was not a gathering that included the industry’s top power players. “The core Hollywood establishment was conspicuously absent,” says someone who was there.