Tom Freston

The media mogul who built MTV is watching it get torn down from the well-appointed sidelines.

- BY JAKE NEVINS

THE FORMER MTV BOSS Tom Freston had hoped to meet at one of his old haunts, someplace that might evoke the good old days of the music network he co-founded in 1981. But most of those places are gone: the Greek luncheonette he and his colleagues used to frequent, the Mexican joint where the bartender sold cocaine, even the old MTV offices at 1775 Broadway, an entire floor of which went up in flames in 1988 when an employee working overnight tossed a lit cigarette into a garbage can. “I can’t remember any other place that’s still standing,” Freston says while thumbing a sugar packet at the Cosmic Diner in the Theater District, where we meet for breakfast.

Now 79, Freston presents me with a manila envelope, inside of which is a copy of his new memoir, Unplugged, a frisky account of his nearly two decades at the helm of MTV that doubles as a sort of handbook for dealing with hustlers, rock stars, and megalomaniacs. Among those in the last category Freston dealt with personally was Sumner Redstone, the intransigent late media magnate, whose $3.4 billion takeover of Viacom in 1987 allowed Freston to grow MTV from a scrappy DIY upstart to a world-beating, generation-defining institution.

Redstone, who elevated Freston to CEO at Viacom in 2006 before getting rid of him eight months later, figures prominently in the book as a mercurial, stock-market-obsessed strongman. In one of Unplugged’s many digressions, he enlists Freston to take him on a walkabout through Bangkok’s most sordid sex clubs. “The rest of the room had pretty much gone back to their conversations, as if they couldn’t care less about the acrobats fucking on a running motorcycle just over their heads,” writes Freston. “But Sumner could not take his eyes off the fornicators.”