A lifetime in television.

Bruce Gordon was born in 1929 in the Surry Hills neighborhood in inner Sydney, Australia. As a young boy, he amused himself by working on his own magic act. As a teenager, he helped his father sell fruit on Pitt Street by juggling the produce to attract attention.

Gordon left the Cleveland Boys High School at the age of 14 and turned down a job at his father's fruit stand because he was chosen to join the cast of the Gang Show, a troupe of talented Boy Scouts who toured Australia. He then went to work as a stage juggler and magician, performing in clubs and local theaters. He also performed his own particular brand of magic for the troops at the Richmond Air Force Base, the Nowra Naval Base and the Army's Liverpool barracks with an entertainment troupe called The Waraths.

The Gordon legend prompts newspapers to such phrases as "from a poverty-stricken childhond" and "from rags to riches." In actuality, although the Gordons weren't well off, they spent their summer vacations at Stanwell Park Lake, where they were able to buy a weekender.

Gordon landed a job with the Sydney-based Tivoli Circuit theater: one of the attractions listed in its Galeties of 1952 program guide was Act 17, "Bruce Gordon's Magical Moments." Gordon reminisced, "I started also doing pantomime in Melbourne, then moved on to doing the advertising and promotion [for the Tivoli]." Before long, Gordon was the Tivoli's advance man for stage shows touring Australia and New Zealand. He made all the arrangements, including making ship bookings for the casts, shipping props, printing tickets and handling newspaper advertising and interviews. He even went to the local hospitals and invited the nurses along to the first few shows to ensure that there would be a full house.

In the process, Gordon managed to make some entertainers very popular. Indeed, author Dennis O'Brien, in a biography of showbiz entrepreneur Harry Miller, revealed that it was Gordon who gave Miller his first break.

The Tivoli theater was at that time controlled by the legendary David "Donkey" Martin, whose son Lloyd later became the manager of the Sydney Opera House. The Tivoli was the home of vaudeville, cabaret and imported musicals such as West Side Story as well as a venue for visiting overseas stars. Gordon became a trainee stage manager and at 26 became the youngest house manager the theater had ever had.

In those days Gordon's friends included Rupert Murdoch, who was then the owner of the Adelaide News, a newspaper Gordon visited every time he had to promote a show in Adelaide. Gordon's other friends included Bruce Gyngell, who was then with Sir Frank Packer's Channel Nine, and both of Sir Frank's boys, Kerry and Clyde.

Later, Gordon married the Tivoli's No. 1 dancer, Joan Roberts, whose sister later married John Rushton, the longtime manager of the Gordon family's broadcasting investments in Australia.

Gordon rose to the position of business manager in 1958 and became a member of the Tivoli chain's management board in 1960.

In 1962, at the suggestion of Gyngell, Sir Frank recommended Gordon to Richard Dinsmore, vp of Desilu Studios, who had traveled to Australia to find a regional sales executive. At that time, the Hollywood-based Desilu produced the ever popular series I Love Lucy. Gordon flew to the U.S. to meet Desilu's Desi Arnaz and was given the job, which involved serving Australasia.

The decision to leave the theater business was a difficult one for Gordon to make, even though he knew that this new medium, television, was going to seriously weaken the hold of live theater. Another concern was that he knew little about the business of television: but Gyngell came to the rescue, spending weekends with Gordon discussing the ins and outs of TV.

Those early days at Desilu were somewhat primitive - Gordon sold programs out of a small back office with only a secretary - but they gave him the chance to learn about the different television organizations and their tastes.

In 1968, Desilu was bought by Paramount (which had itself been acquired by Austrian immigrant Charles Blubdorn's Gulf & Western in 1967), and Gordon became the studio's managing director for the Far East. A year later, he was appointed to the board of the TV corporation, which operated the Channel 9 TV stations and the company's theaters in Sydney and Melbourne. Gordon was also a director on the Board of Academy Investments, which operated a Perth theater chain and was responsible for building the Perth Entertainment Centre. In 1972, Gordon was promoted to vp of International TV Sales for Paramount.

Gordon became a broadcaster by chance. In the mid-1960s he began to buy shares of Sydney's Channel Ten as an investment. When Murdoch decided to take control of Channel Ten, he met Gordon for lunch in New York in 1979 and traded his TV station WIN-4 in Wollongong for the Gordon family's shares of Channel Ten. The seaside resort town of Wollongong has been Gordon's borne base ever since.

Through WIN, Gordon has been able to lend his support to many community projects. When the local Performing Arts Centre was in the planning stages, Gordon gave a donation that helped bring the project to fruition. That's why Wollongong's auditorium carries his name.

In 1974, a month after Barry Diller became chairman of Paramount, he promoted Gordon to president of the Paramount International TV division upon the death of Manny Reiner, who had held the position. Gordon packed up his wife and three-year-old son, Andrew, and relocated to New York. Gordon commuted to the New York office from the family's home in the nearby town of Rye. In 1996, Gordon and Joan Roberts divorced Andrew, after training in Japan and Germany, became manager of radio station i98 FM in Wollongong. Andrew conceded that the fact that his family were investors in the station no doubt helped, but Bruce Gordon said that he didn't put his son in the job: "They rang me in London and told me. I was surprised. He'll probably make a few mistakes like everyone else, but as long as he's right 60 percent of the time...." Andrew hasn't proven his father wrong. After 18 months on the job, he turned the station around and established a 10-point ratings lead over the competition.

During Bruce Gordon's time in New York, he was able to expand and diversify Paramount's operations into production, co-production and acquisition. It was then that he brought compatriot Paul Hogan to Paramount Pictures. While in the U.S., Gordon also worked with Michael Eisner, Rich Frank and Frank Mancuso. One of the first movies Gordon acquired for international distribution, under a 15-year agreement with CBS, was My Fair Lady. A Nine Network Australia press release noted of Gordon: "he was active in arranging coproductions between Paramount and the Nine Network, including the successful series Spyforce. Plus, Gordon was part of the team that co-produced Mission Impossible in Australia with the Nine Network and ABC in the U.S. for Paramount." In 1982 Variety wrote of Gordon that he was "clearly the dean among U.S. sales execs." In 1982 Gordon put together Shogun, a co-production with three major Japanese companies, for Paramount Productions' Gary Nardino. Gordon headed Paramount's international sales division from the New York office until 1985, when his headquarters moved to Bermuda, where he has been ever since.

Gordon has not forgotten his roots. "I never stop thinking of myself as Australian," he told Sydney's Sun Herald in 1990. "I went overseas to work for the Americans and I took Australian programming over there and sold it to the Americans, and I have done everything I could do to help the local industry here."

After living through the Martin Davis era, Gordon survived another change in leadership when Paramount was acquired by Sumner Redstone's Viacom in 1994.

Another Gordon legend centers around his various nicknames. Internationally, he known as "the general, but in Australia they call him "God." Gordon acknowledged "the general" tag, explaining that, after seeing him followed by a group of kids in Bali, a Fox executive kept hailing "General Gordon and his troops," and "the general" part just stuck. However, Gordon is surprised to be called "God." "Most likely, it's 'bloody God,'" he said.

"People often make the mistake of thinking that he and Packer are confidants because of WIN's close affiliation with Nine," Business Week reported after a rare unguarded interview with Gordon. "He calls Packer and Murdoch 'great Austrians,' but he clearly has more affection for, and is more in awe of, Murdoch." In the same article, John Rushton said that in the beginning "my thoughts were that [Gordon's] human relations expertise was nil" but that later he realized that Gordon"has the best gut feel of anybody I know." "I live in a suitcase. I don't spend a lot of time anywhere," said Gordon, explaining that as a result he doesn't have many close friends.

Gordon is a world traveler, often on the road for four or five months of the year. He once summarized his business philosophy this way: "A guy at a station in Japan doesn't send you a postcard and say, 'I'll buy MacGyver? You've got to get on a plane and go to Japan and see your clients and then make your deal."