(Bloomberg) -- J. Richard Munro, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Time Inc. who helped create the world’s largest media and entertainment company through a 1989 merger with Warner Communications Inc., has died. He was 93.
He died on Aug. 11 in hospice care in Naples, Florida, the New York Times reported, citing Munro’s son, Mac. The cause was melanoma.
The Time-Warner merger was a landmark marriage within the entertainment industry, bringing together the New York-based publisher of some of America’s best-known magazines including Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated and a Hollywood producer of movies and records. Both companies were also active in the world of cable television.
Though structured as an acquisition of Warner by Time, the merger was in many ways centered around Warner’s chief executive, Steven J. Ross, whose big personality and lavish pay package became an issue in negotiations, and who helped lead the combined business until his death in 1992.
Munro’s “single greatest contribution to the deal” may have been his “impassioned defense” of Ross to Time’s board, Connie Bruck wrote in Master of the Game, her 1994 biography of Ross.
Harvard Business School ranked Munro as among the great American business leaders of the 20th century based on his record as Time’s CEO from 1980 to 1990.
While head of Time’s video operations group in the mid-1970s, he laid the groundwork for turning its money-losing Home Box Office unit into a cable powerhouse. Key to his success was the pioneering step of providing HBO’s pay-for-view content to cable companies by satellite, replacing microwave and telephone line delivery. His work on HBO helped vault Munro to the top of company leadership.
Battled Paramount
The Time Warner deal, which he called “my legacy,” was made amid shareholder demands to produce greater value for investors and while Time was facing pressure from the global growth of foreign competitors such as Bertelsmann AG and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
To close the deal, Time and Warner had to battle Paramount Communications Inc. and its chairman, Martin Davis, who swept in at the last moment with a hostile bid for Time. To avoid putting Paramount’s more generous offer to a vote by Time shareholders, Time and Warner scrapped plans for all-cash deal and instead had Time buy Warner for almost $14 billion, taking on more than $11 billion in debt, according to the New York Times.
That debt caused headaches for the combined company, which was led for one year by Munro and Ross sharing power as co-CEO and co-chairman. The cash-stretched company was forced to restructure its stock through rights offerings, sell billions in bonds, refinance its $11.2 billion in debt and sell regional telephone company US West Inc. a $2.5 billion stake in the company, more than half of which went to debt payments.
The debt Munro created to do the Time Warner deal had ripple effects as he became head of the board’s executive committee in 1990.
John Richard Munro was born on Jan. 26, 1931, in Syracuse, New York, one of three children. His father, John, of Scottish ancestry, owned property in upstate New York. His mother, whose relatives had come from Germany, was a onetime Broadway singer. His parents divorced when Munro was five, according to a 1990 interview conducted for the Denver-based Cable Center.
Wounded in War
Munro went to public schools in upstate New York in Skaneateles, a suburb of Syracuse, before his divorced mother moved him to Florida, where he graduated from West Palm Beach High School.
He joined the Marine Corps out of high school and was wounded three times during the Korean War. “It doesn’t mean I’m a hero – it means I didn’t duck,” he joked in a 2017 interview with the Naples Daily News, his Florida hometown paper.
He graduated from Colgate University in 1957. He later did post-graduate work at Columbia University and New York University.
Munro started at Time in 1957 in the circulation department of the company’s flagship weekly news magazine. He worked his way to the top through a variety of posts, including publisher of Sports Illustrated, a money-losing enterprise when he first worked for it as assistant business manager.
In 1979, as a reward for work with HBO, Munro was promoted to executive vice-president in charge of operations and fiscal policy. The post put him in line to become CEO the following year as cable revenue began to rival that of Time’s other operations.
Under Munro, in the early days of the cable industry, Time suffered defeats at the hands of Warner and other competitors in obtaining franchises in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and New Orleans. During his tenure as CEO, he also had to close down TV-Cable Week magazine in 1983, incurring a loss of $47 million, only five months after it was introduced.
After the Warner merger, Munro stayed on the board, serving as chairman of the executive committee until 1997, when he left to become chairman of Genentech Inc., a biotechnology company.
Munro met his wife, Carol, while both were working at Sports Illustrated. They had three children: John, Douglass and McCleane, two of whom had diabetes, a disease Munro took an active interest in, serving as chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. He also served as a director with the United Negro College Fund for 25 years.
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