Is America’s Ahab, Sumner Redstone, all washed up?

Sumner Redstone is the nasty old man of America's 'new establishment' tycoons, and there is secret joy that he seems destined to be the first to lose his shirt in the economic collapse.

He owns the media conglomerates Viacom and CBS, which between them include the CBS television network, MTV and a host of cable companies, and Hollywood's legendary Paramount film studios.

His problem is that he has to make repayments on $1.6bn he borrowed from banks to finance his buying spree, and he hasn't got the cash. He has already sold $200m of his own controlling stake in Viacom and Paramount, but it's not enough.

Just a few years ago, when he bought Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio, the absolute pinnacle of Hollywood glamour, Redstone was a player. He ranked at number three on Vanity Fair magazine's zeitgeist list of the dot.com and media 'new establishment', just behind Rupert Murdoch, and, after spending years in hotel rooms, moved to Beverly Hills as neighbour to Sylvester Stallone, Rod Stewart and Denzel Washington. It looked like a happy ending to the lifetime of business graft described in his ghost-written autobiography, A Passion to Win.

Redstone’s fall-out with Hollywood began with his fight with Dreamworks

But now, at 85, his demons have come home to roost. He lives alone in his mansion, famously miserly, shaving naked in the hot tub and obsessively feeding his tropical fish, his only constant companions since the collapse this year of his five-year marriage to Paula Fortunato, a former New York City teacher who was as much nurse as wife. He runs his disintegrating empire from the speaker-phones in his study.

With barely repressed glee, Hollywood and Wall Street are a-chatter with reports of Redstone bumping into walls and suffering long "senior moments" between bouts of incandescent anger.

His slide from the Hollywood firmament began with the fight he picked with the Dreamworks team, particularly with Spielberg's partner David Geffen, who always wins his fights. Paramount bought Dreamworks, and then Redstone complained that they didn't make him any money. Spielberg and Geffen reacted by dismantling that deal and selling themselves to Bollywood's Reliance ADA Group instead.

"I am not responsible for the public discourse about Mr Redstone at all," sniffs Geffen, whom Redstone accuses of spreading gossip. "I don't care