Marvin Josephson was born on March 6, 1927 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His parents, Joseph and Eva Rivka (Rounick) Josephson, ran a cl...
Marvin Josephson was born on March 6, 1927 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His parents, Joseph and Eva Rivka (Rounick) Josephson, ran a clothing store.
He graduated from Atlantic City High School, served in the Navy at the end of World War II, earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, and in 1952 earned a law degree from the University of New York. He then worked in the legal department of CBS.
“Three years of writing contracts convinced him that the crops would be greener if he represented talent,” as Newsday put it, and in 1955 Mr Josephson set up his own personal management company. A potential source of business, he thought, might be the broadcast journalists he had come to know at CBS: when they walked around Manhattan with either of them, passers-by often stopped by to say hello and sometimes asked for an autograph.
“They thought of themselves as journalists,” he told the Miami Herald in 1984, “but they were becoming celebrities or stars.”
Charles Collingwood, the CBS reporter, became his first client, and others followed, including Chet Huntley and, years later, Barbara Walters. Then there was his other founding client, Mr. Keeshan.
At the time, in 1955, Mr. Keeshan was on a local children’s show, “Tinker’s Workshop,” on WABC-TV in New York. Mr. Josephson wanted to move him and the show to CBS, but WABC argued that the station, not Mr. Keeshan, owned the show.
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