Stephen Jay Ross

Steven J. Ross, who built a family funeral parlor business into Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media and entertainment company, died in December 1992 in Los Angeles. He was 65 years old. Mr. Ross moved before many of his competitors to bet heavily on the worldwide potential of cable television, records and videos. Under his leadership, Warner Communications grew from a troubled movie studio into a huge entertainment business even before Mr. Ross negotiated a $14 billion deal with Time Inc. in 1989. Born Steven Jay Rechnitz in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn on April 5, 1927, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father lost his money in the Depression and in 1932, struggling to find work, changed the family name to Ross. After two years at Paul Smith's College, a small school near Saranac Lake in upstate New York, and a brief stint in the Navy, Mr. Ross went to work for an uncle in the garment district of Manhattan. At the age of 26, he married Carol Rosenthal, the first of his three wives. Her father, Edward, owned a successful funeral parlor in Manhattan called the Riverside. The leap into entertainment came in 1969, when Kinney paid $400 million for the ailing Warner-Seven Arts film studio and record business, and two years later renamed itself Warner Communications.Because of Mr. Ross, Warner bought cable properties in 1971. This vision led to MTV: Music Television, and Nickelodeon, two successful ventures that Warner later sold. In 1977, a young Warner executive whom friends say Mr. Ross loved as a son, Kenny Rosen, suffered irreversible brain damage in a horse-riding accident. A year later, Mr. Ross and his wife, Carol, divorced. In 1980, Mr. Ross suffered a serious heart attack. That same year he married Amanda Burden, the daughter of Barbara (Babe) Paley and stepdaughter of William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS. The marriage lasted 16 months and ended in a difficult divorce. Time Inc. bought Warner in 1989 and attempted to assemble the largest media and entertainment company in the world. Only in the last year of Mr. Ross's life did the uneasy merger seem to be working more smoothly. Mr. Ross was survived by his wife, Courtney Sale Ross, whom he married in 1982, and their daughter, Nicole, as well as two children, Toni and Mark, from his first marriage.