Things don’t look great for Les Moonves. He’s out at CBS and more and more news about the shitty things he’s done keep coming out. Even if it turns out he never committed any sort of sexual misconduct, the guy sounds like a Madmen-style old school misogynist.
Designing Women creator Linda Bloodworth Thomason wrote a scathing piece for The Hollywood Reporter outlining how while Moonves never assaulted her, he refused to pick up any pilots from her despite big penalties for passing and the fact that she’d given the network two hit shows already.
But one passage in particular stood out, even though it wasn’t about Thomason herself:
Soon, I would hear how he had invited a famous actress to lunch in the CBS dining room. Coming off the cancellation of her iconic detective show, the star began pitching a new one. He informed her that she was too old to be on his network. She began to cry and stood up to go. He stood up too, taking her by the shoulders and telling her, “I can’t let you leave like this.” She reacted, suddenly touched. Then he shoved his tongue down her throat. I know this happened because the star is the person who told me.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like Dame Angela Lansbury, star of Murder, She Wrote, which Moonves moved to a new time slot opposite Friends in order to justify cancelling it when it was still a major hit for The Eye.
Back in 2011, Moonves said “When I first got to CBS, the sexiest woman on the network was Angela Lansbury but fortunately we’re doing a little bit better than that now.”
That really makes him sound like a creep, doesn’t it? He pushed Angela Lansbury off of television for being too old, made a move on her and then went around saying how unattractive she was. If I were Julie Chen, I would cool it on the “Julie Chen-Moonves” thing.