The extraordinary battle over an aging Hollywood titan's care
LOS ANGELES - Last May, Eric Semel, the eldest child and only son of former Warner Bros. chief Terry Semel, filed a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court to appoint a temporary conservator for his father. Semel had been a lion of Hollywood during his heyday, winning admiration for the way he revolutionized the movie business during two decades at the top - and for the finesse with which he'd conducted himself while doing so. But by last year Semel, then 75 and suffering the ravages of Alzheimer's, had for some time been unable to manage his personal or financial affairs.
Two years earlier, Semel's wife, Jane, had put him in a nursing facility. Now Eric was claiming that his stepmother "was in serious breach of her fiduciary duties" and "causing serious harm to Terry's health and safety, potentially rising to elder abuse and neglect."
The allegations were as numerous as they were disturbing. In the filings, Jane is accused of instructing Semel's private caregivers to change the dosages of his prescriptions or eliminate them altogether; ignoring repeated requests to take her husband, who also suffered from high blood pressure, for regular physical examinations; and refusing to allow him to leave the facility, curtailing his social activities. Semel, his son claimed, had been reduced to living in a 500-square-foot bedroom at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement community in Woodland Hills, against his expressed wish to remain at his home, a 13,000-square-foot Bel-Air mansion.
Jane Semel said in court filings that she moved her husband to the Motion Picture home on the advice of doctors. Before the warring factions reached a confidential agreement last fall, Jane refuted her stepson's characterization of Semel as a "man dumped by his wife in a substandard facility and denied necessary medical care capriciously and against the advice of his doctors." Her husband, she stated in a court filing, "is
