House of Hammer (2022) s01e02 Episode Script
Sins of the Father
My grandfather
lived in Holmby Hills,
which is the neighborhood
right between Wilshire
Boulevard and Sunset
in Westwood.
It's the elite of the elite.
And now, we're gonna
come up on the right side,
is my grandfather's house.
There's his house,
and we would park
right here in front,
and then we would get
up and race up the stairs.
And that front window
was Grandpa's office.
As president
of Occidental Petroleum,
Armand Hammer turned it
into the 11th largest oil company
in the United States.
The Hammer name
wielded a lot of prestige and power.
And the two grandchildren,
Michael and Casey,
would you please stand up?
We were always hanging
out with royalty at these parties,
and we would get training,
and we would learn how
to address the royalty.
It was just this kind
of secret society,
kind of inner
circle of the elite.
How on Earth do they expect us
to get anything done
without money?
People were so
curious about that lifestyle,
about all that wealth.
On the outside, we
were a perfect family.
- Hi, Casey!
- Come on in.
Watch your step.
But beneath it all was
a dark world of deceit,
betrayal, and corruption
and that's why I'm
coming forward now.
It's time to stop the cycle.
So, this is a picture
of the Hammer family,
and there's my father, Julian.
I'm standing behind him.
You have my brother, Michael,
and then, in the
center of the shot
is my grandfather,
and he's holding Armie.
How did Armie Hammer
go from Hollywood golden boy
to an alleged abuser
in the space of one
evening in January?
When all this
came out about Armie,
I was not shocked.
Sexually graphic texts and DMs
of dominating, BDSM,
and even cannibalism
began trending.
This behavior, it's deep-rooted.
My father, Julian Hammer,
is Armie's grandfather.
When my mother met my father,
they ended up in Tijuana,
drunk on the back
of a motorcycle,
and getting married.
And my mother had no idea
that my father was
Armand Hammer's son.
Had no idea about the wealth,
had no idea about any of it.
And then, when my
father got married,
my grandfather decided
that my father needed
to be responsible
now that he had a wife.
I was born in 1960.
We moved to Pacific Palisades,
which was near the
coast in California.
But my father was such a mess.
He was always drunk,
and you just never knew
what kind of condition he was in.
There was a lot going
on behind closed doors.
Christmases were probably
my favorite time of year.
It was a big deal.
It was like a department store.
We all got piles and piles
of Christmas presents.
That's my brother, Michael,
Armie's father
and there he is,
riding a little motorcycle.
I should be somewhere in there.
I remember one year,
it was Christmas Eve.
I was young, maybe five,
and I still believed
in Santa Claus.
After I had gone to bed,
I heard screaming.
My father and
mother were fighting,
and he was
threatening to kill her.
My father slapped
my mom really hard,
and I just remember
seeing blood splatter.
She made me go back to my room
and told me that everything
was gonna be okay,
and if I didn't
go right to sleep,
Santa Claus wasn't gonna come.
As a little girl,
when you're seeing your
mom get beat up by your father,
and blood running down
the front of her body,
and her screaming,
you don't really understand
what's happening.
I can't tell you how many times
I would get under my
covers as a little girl
and put my fingers
in my ears and sing
because I didn't
wanna hear the noise.
I didn't wanna hear
the screaming
because you can't make it stop.
As we got older, my father
He just got worse
and worse and worse.
In the middle of the night,
my mom would collect me,
and we would grab what we could
and get in the car
and drive down the hill
and go to a motel
and wait until
the sun came up
until my father cooled down,
and then we would
go back to the house.
That happened a lot.
It always escalated.
You didn't know what
was gonna happen next.
My mom had been
threatening to leave.
But my grandfather always said,
"If you leave my son,
I'll ruin you and make
your life miserable,"
and, you know,
"You won't have a penny."
My grandfather had very
powerful attorneys back then.
The public persona turned into,
"I can take everything
away from you
with one stroke of the pen."
So it was a frightening,
scary energy
that my grandfather had.
The Hammer family
name had to be pristine.
You couldn't be the
reason for the black mark.
While my grandfather was alive,
you played by his
rules, or you got cut off.
We were taught that Big
Brother's always watching.
You can't get away from it.
My grandfather had files on anybody
you dated or any of your friends.
You would
pick up your phone to talk to someone,
and you would hear a click,
and you knew you
were being recorded.
You didn't make a move
without thinking about,
"What if Grandpa finds out?"
Casey's
grandfather controlled his family.
He controlled everything.
That has to be scary,
to know that there are people
watching you all the time.
"Walk the straight and narrow.
I see you.
You don't see
me, but I see you."
I like to say that our
lives were like a chessboard,
and my grandfather basically
controlled all the moves.
But I had no idea
about half of the things
my grandfather did
and how powerful he really was.
Well, look who is here.
He happens to be
president and CEO
of Occidental Petroleum
in Los Angeles.
Maybe I should say he is also one
of the wealthiest men in the world.
Please welcome
Dr. Armand Hammer.
My grandfather
built an oil empire
that up until his death
was, I believe, the 16th
largest company in the world.
Well, that's a pretty
good hand for a rich guy.
Everything he
touched turned to gold.
I worked for
Armand Hammer from 1986 to 1989
as one of his political
and media consultants.
And I saw him exercise
access around the world
which was unparalleled
for a private individual.
He could, at will,
enter the Kremlin.
I help him, he helps me.
It is mutual.
We do not discuss
secrets, just business.
Buckingham
Palace, the White House
They were all at his disposal
and at his bidding.
- Mr. Hammer?
- Yes?
Oh, this
is the President, how are you?
Oh, hello, President
Kennedy, I'm glad to hear from you again.
I remember once
asking my grandfather
why he wasn't President
of the United States,
and he laughed and said
there wasn't enough power in it.
I mean, even now,
people are still so fascinated.
This stuff didn't
start with Armie.
He is the great-grandson
of Armand Hammer,
an oil tycoon whose son, Julian,
who would be Armie's
grandfather, was insane.
He beat the living
daylights out of his wife
I was definitely
pulling in eyeballs,
like, just by sharing the
things that I was looking into.
I had so many tips coming in,
and it wasn't just
tips about Armie.
It was just tips about
the whole family.
By virtue of sharing the story,
Candice and I found
each other on Instagram,
and we started
talking about the case.
I didn't even know who
Armand Hammer was,
and looking into
him and his son,
and his son after that,
and then Armie,
it was so many people in this
family that had a sort of history.
People were
absolutely dumbfounded.
What are the odds
that there would be
so many generations of a family
behaving so badly?
What became
readily apparent to us
was that there was still
a lot of things to uncover.
My mom had always said that she
stayed with my father as long as she did
because of my grandfather.
So, it was a never-ending
cycle for a very long time.
But then finally, I was
11, and she'd had enough,
and we went down
the street to the motel
and this time,
we didn't go back.
When my parents got divorced,
my grandfather kept to his word,
and my father destroyed
my mother in court.
My father ended
up only paying, like,
$200 a month's child support.
My mom said that the
biggest regret of her life
was letting Michael decide
to stay with my father.
It was a while before my mother
let me go down and visit my father.
I just remember,
it was the house I grew up in,
so it was familiar,
but yet, there
were tons of people.
It was a lot of drinking
a lot of smoke-filled rooms,
a lot of screaming,
a lot of loud music
a lot of drugs.
He always had, like, 16
or 17-year-old girls around,
not much older than I was,
five or six years older,
and he called them
his "housekeepers."
It was code for his girlfriends.
I believe it was
sexual, in a sense
where they were usually
sitting on each other's laps
or kissing or
fondling each other.
It was almost like giant orgies.
Michael, my brother, would
bring his friends up to party,
and they would
hit on them, as well.
The drugs were free-flowing,
so it was a very
free atmosphere.
Casey was one
of my best friends.
I don't remember
when the first time
I met Mike was,
but he was always around.
Casey and I would
go to Julian's,
her father's house.
As you walk in,
there was a big bowl of cocaine
and a very, kind of,
"help yourself" attitude.
It was an environment
where old men
and young girls
and cocaine, and
It was shocking.
Your parents aren't
supposed to do that.
One time at a party,
I had come out of my
bedroom the next morning,
and everyone was
passed out all over the floor.
I remember walking by the couch,
and there were polaroid pictures
of one of my father's housekeepers,
and at the time, I thought
she was eating an ice cream,
because that's what you
did when you were little.
I kept looking at the pictures
trying to figure out
what was happening,
and that's how I realized
that it wasn't an ice cream,
that it was attached to a man.
One of the pictures,
in the background was
this figure in the corner,
in a chair, watching.
I recognized that
that was my father.
Being born in that family
and watching the behavior,
it was my normal.
I mean, how do you know it's
wrong when that's all you know?
So, when my father
and my brother
surrounded themselves with
young, impressionable women
that would basically do
anything that they asked
that was the mentality I saw.
Women were disposable
in the Hammer family.
So, I had to move rooms.
They had to move my room
'cause of some, like, noise
complaints or something.
I think they said it was 417.
Oh, here it is.
A major
news publication posted a video,
and it showed Armie
holding his phone,
walking into his room.
All right, so far, so good.
Uh, that bed looks pretty comfy.
He just glosses over
a woman on all fours in lingerie
and goes out and
shows out the balcony.
Yeah, boy!
It's like, "Look how
much power I have.
I have a lady just
sitting right here,
waiting for me to do
whatever I ask her to
and she's staying quiet."
I was getting
information via DMs
saying that this is
his Finsta account,
"el-destructo-86."
Finsta just means
"fake Instagram."
and these are often
used by celebrities
that have a private account
separate from their public ones.
On this private
Instagram account,
he basically posted
anything he wanted.
Where his public
one was very curated,
this one, he was posting videos
of him engaging
in sexual things,
him doing drugs.
It was pretty wild.
He really wasn't hiding
what he was doing.
He had posted a
picture of him on the toilet
with a drug test, saying,
"All negative. My body is a finely
tuned toxicant processing unit."
Indicating that he definitely took
drugs and he passed a drug test.
Shit's getting weird.
More, one more.
Yep, got it all.
It's just such a reflection of how
above the law this man thinks he is,
that he is not only
in a car taking drugs
and drinking while driving,
but videotaping it
and posting it,
because he thinks it's
cool to show his friends.
Ah.
It seems like each generation
was impacted with
a number of women
who had been wronged
by the Hammer family.
Armie, looking
up here. Right here, over here for me.
It's hard to imagine
one person behaving that badly.
To hear that it's been going
on for so many generations
is kind of unimaginable.
There we go.
My name is Edward Jay Epstein.
Everything okay?
In 1980, The New
York Times came to me
and asked if I wanted to write
a profile on Armand Hammer,
so I did.
I began traveling
with Armand Hammer.
I went all over
the world with him,
got to know him pretty well.
One of the things that
intrigued me about Hammer
was that his public persona
was purposely divorced
from his private activities.
Armand controlled
everyone, including women,
and Hammer in his
life had three marriages.
Well, you haven't been
unlucky in love then?
The first was
in Russia with Olga.
She wanted a career in Hollywood
and I was here in New York.
It didn't last.
We were divorced.
The second was with Angela
Unfortunately,
she was an alcoholic,
and after ten years
of putting up with her,
I divorced her.
Armand's wife, Angela
in her divorce
testimony, she said that he,
"willfully, maliciously, and deliberately
pursued a course of conduct,
employed techniques,
tactics and practices
calculated and designed
to destroy her will.
He threatened her with serious
bodily violence and injury,
and to beat her brains out
by brandishing a metal pipe.
'I feared my husband.
He is a master of
psychological warfare.'"
My present wife, Frances,
we've been married 31
years and this is the happiest
31 years of my life.
Well, what's the
moral of this story?
Well, we must never give up.
Armand Hammer
considered his relations with women
as a means of getting something.
They served a purpose to him.
He married Frances
for her money.
She gave him the
money that allowed him
to go into the oil
business in a big way.
Dr. Armand Hammer
and his third wife, Frances,
took a $100,000 gamble
when they invested in
Occidental Petroleum,
a small and
struggling oil company.
As far as the
public was concerned,
Armand did not have
extra-marital relationships.
But in truth, he
always had mistresses,
and he always womanized.
He looked for young women
who he could control completely.
You have this page,
you got a lot of pictures of
the different women in his life,
but this page, I wanna
show the picture up here.
That's a woman named
Martha Kauffman
It was Martha Kauffman, yes.
- But down here, the same woman is Hilary Gibson
- Right.
Who are these two people?
Are they the same person?
I interviewed Martha Kauffman
also known as Hilary Gibson,
one of Hammer's mistresses.
She told me that his
wife, Frances, found out
she was having a
liaison with her husband.
Frances laid down
the law and said,
"you have to get
rid of this woman."
So, rather than
give up his mistress,
he found a solution that was typical
to the kinds of solutions he found.
He had Martha Kauffman
change her name.
Hilary Gibson.
Wear a white wig
and pretended to his wife
that she was a different woman.
And Frances,
his wife never figured it out?
No.
What he demanded was
control of every part of her life
including her identity.
It was all in his nature
of a man who totally
wanted to control
a woman that he
viewed as a object
not as a human being.
"Martha Kauffman,
Armand's mistress,
had to be available to meet
his schedule at short notice.
He gave her two beepers
to alert her to his calls.
He prohibited her
from seeing other men,
and to make sure of her
whereabouts in Los Angeles,
he had a homing
device installed in her car
and a tap placed on her phone."
He had my location
on his phone
"He also controlled
her vacation schedule.
She had to submit
to his sexual demands
even when she considered
them extremely humiliating."
something is very
degrading, very belittling
Unfortunately, not shocked.
This is exactly
the kind of things
I experienced. This is
extremely humiliating.
I resonate with that.
Armie is so consuming.
He does whatever
he wants, but
you're his.
Completely.
I kept looking more into
the archives of newspaper articles
trying to find more content
relating to the overlaps
and parallels between
each generation.
"Son of Armand Hammer Seized.
Julian Hammer, 47-year-old son
of industrialist Armand Hammer
was arrested at his Pacific
Palisades home Thursday night
for allegedly threatening a
man in his home with a shotgun.
Hammer brandished the
weapon after returning home
and finding 19-year-old Gary
Bowers there with Cathe Boal, 28.
Hammer reportedly
said to Bowers,
'hold it, take another step
and I'll blow you apart.'"
Stop!
You're welcome and
Casey's welcome.
I'm doing this for Casey.
I met Julian Hammer
in the mid-70s.
He needed someone to
come and clean the house
and he offered me the job.
I had just had a child,
so I was able to
bring my son up there
while I was cleaning the house.
The first day I came to work,
there was a big party going on.
It was a gambling party,
it had been going on for
a couple days, apparently.
Everybody in Pacific
Palisades that lived there
knew about Julian.
He was always in really nice
pajamas and a beautiful robe
and slippers and stuff.
That's how he entertained.
Because he was the Hugh
Hefner of Pacific Palisades.
As days went on, he started
kinda opening up to me
about the real him
instead of being the phony
with all of the people coming
up and partying and stuff.
He was a real charmer,
he knew how to get his way,
and he was just suave, you
know, when he wanted to be.
As time went on we
just got real close.
When my son was nine months old,
Julian convinced me that I
should leave my husband.
We had probably been seeing
each other around six months or so
and we, um, got engaged.
He seemed to be more
possessive as time went on.
He didn't want me
to have any friends.
Just him.
I was naive, really, I
guess you might say,
but I thought if I could
give him enough love
that maybe I could change him.
Which, of course, you
don't change anybody,
but I didn't know that then.
One night, I convinced him that
it was time for him to take me out.
And after we had dinner,
he wanted to stop at a bar.
Julian started hanging
around with the guys in there
and kind of flirting
around with the guys.
I got jealous, I
didn't like the idea
that he's flirting
with these guys.
"Why aren't you flirting with me?
Why are you flirting with these guys?"
Then I started realizing
it was a gay bar.
He did not want to leave.
I just got so upset, I
just walked out of the bar,
walked across the
street, put my thumb out.
Within, like, five minutes,
this really nice guy pulled over
and he took me
to Julian's house.
And as he started to
leave, Julian pulled up.
And that's when
everything escalated
'cause Julian saw
him at the door
and got upset that a
man had brought me home.
The go-to was always a gun.
That was his thing when
he got mad like a little baby.
"I'm gonna go get my gun
and I'm gonna shoot you."
That was his way to get control.
Oh, boy.
"Julian Hammer, 47, son of
industrialist Armand Hammer,
was arrested on suspicion of
assault with a deadly weapon
and released on a $1,000 bail."
Somehow or another I
always would give into him
thinking, "all right, this time it'll
be better, this time it'll be better."
Unfortunately, it never was.
Few days later, we
got in an argument,
and I saw the gun in
his hand and I just said,
"you are not gonna
pull that gun out on me,
you're not gonna
point it at me,"
and that's when I
went for the gun.
The gun went off.
My nine-month-old son
was in the same room.
He was only a few feet away,
and so it could have ricocheted
and hit him and killed him.
So, that was it, I left,
that was it, it was over.
There's no consequence.
Well, what message
are you sending?
"So what? What's gonna
happen to me? I'm a Hammer."
Nothing ever happened to Julian
because Armand Hammer had
the money to make it go away.
Bottom line, he
could do whatever he wanted.
He could get away with murder.
And he did.
Armie Hammer's
great grandfather, Julian,
was arrested for
manslaughter in 1955.
His old friend, Bruce, came
to LA to celebrate his birthday,
and reminded him that
Julian owed him $400,
and then Julian
shot him two times.
This all happened when Sue was
pregnant with Armie's father, Michael.
The story that he
told us was self-defense,
but my mom was
very quick to tell me,
"no, your father just murdered
someone in cold blood."
Armand Hammer got a phone call
saying that his son
had just shot someone.
And so, to save not his son,
but to save his
own reputation
he actually delivered
$50,000 in cash to his lawyer,
basically quashing the
charges against his son,
stopping his son from
going to prison for murder.
And he didn't even
seem like he was really bothered
in that he shot his friend
over the gambling debt.
He talked to me just
nonchalant about it.
You could get away
with murder, you could do anything.
There was no accountability.
Each generation,
the men learned very early that
money makes things go away.
It keeps people quiet.
After the murder,
Julian was given a
position by Armand Hammer
at Occidental Petroleum
out of the public eye.
Julian eventually began
doing things for his father,
illegal things like
helping his father
surreptitiously
record conversations.
Julian set him up with
a hidden microphone
and wired 'em up as
we've seen in police movies.
So, he became part
of the secretive world.
A spy world, if you want.
Armand Hammer
understood the criminal mind.
That if you're wired and
have someone on tape,
you have control over them.
The perception
of Hammer in the early 1980s
was that he was a humanitarian,
a philanthropist,
he was a billionaire,
basically, whose mission in life
was to bring about world peace.
A few of us who were
writing about Hammer
were finding out there
was this story there
that the press had
not gotten a hold of.
How do you do,
ladies and gentlemen.
Hammer had successfully
buried the story of his past.
In the Hammer family tree,
you have Armie Hammer
and his father, Michael,
his father, Julian,
his father, Armand,
and his father, Julius.
I'm here to talk about Julius.
Julius Hammer
had come to America
like many of the Jews of Russia.
He was also a doctor,
but more than that,
he became an active politician.
Julius Hammer was a founder
of the American Communist Party.
When his son in 1898 was born,
he named him Armand
Hammer after the symbol
of the Communist
Party in Russia.
The arm and the hammer.
The Russians
used the Hammer family
through Julius Hammer to
channel money into New York,
fund the Communist Party
and then steal technology,
and trade secrets
from the United States.
After years of research,
the CIA concluded
that Armand Hammer
was used to collect
information for the KGB.
He was an agent
of the Soviet Union.
Armie's great
grandfather, Armand Hammer,
goes to Moscow to take over
what his father had built there.
Armand Hammer became
an agent of his father's company.
He was a money
launderer, he was a courier
for funds that were channeled
to Soviet espionage
in the United States.
It was secret, it was
illegal, it was dangerous.
Behind every
great fortune is a great crime.
Certainly behind
the Hammer fortune
there were a great
number of great crimes.
The time for
successful capitalists
earning profits in the height
of communism was over,
and Dr. Armand
Hammer decided to leave
because he realized his
businesses would never triumph
under Stalin's crushing rule.
When Hammer arrived
in the U.S. in the early 1930s
there was still this fear
of Russia and communism,
so, one of his most
important missions
was to bury his past.
Dr. Hammer, I must show
this audience a picture of Olga.
This is your first wife here.
There she is.
What didn't fit
in with his legend
of being an American who
just happened to be in Russia
was that he had a Russian
wife and a Russian child
born in Moscow, Julian.
So, he tried to create as
much distance as he could.
He even had a
paternity test taken
in the hopes that it would
show that his son, Julian
was not really his son.
It was very sad when
I heard the whole story
from Julian's point of view.
He knew he was always
thought of as an embarrassment.
An albatross.
So, the relationship
between Armand and Julian
was a relationship of
a father trying to hide
his son.
And his only son from the world.
My father and
brother hated each other.
They constantly were arguing
and bickering and fighting.
But on the outside
in front of Grandpa,
they were patting
each other on the back
and being so phony
and superficial.
My brother wanted
to surpass my father,
but my father wasn't
gonna let that happen.
Julian was very
jealous of Michael. That I saw.
He was very jealous, he
was very rough on Michael.
Very mean to Michael.
I did see a pattern there.
That Julian, I think,
was hard on his children
because Armand
was hard on Julian.
The second trip I
took from Washington
down to visit my father
everyone was
drinking way too much
and my
father offered my brother
$1 million for his girlfriend.
My brother, it was like
a monster unleashed.
They both said, "I'm gonna
kill you," and they ran outside,
and when I finally
circled the building,
I saw police had separated them.
The cops didn't arrest
either one of 'em,
and let them both drive
away intoxicated as they were,
and Michael's girlfriend
ended up going with my father
quote unquote to
tame the situation.
She was older than
most of the girls.
Probably 19.
She ended up living with my
father for, like, another eight months.
When I graduated from high
school, my grandfather said,
"you're now going to the University of
San Diego because your brother's there."
USD was a Catholic
private school,
2000 students, so,
it was very small.
Michael was larger
than life on the campus,
meaning he had a reputation.
Him and his friends are partying
and just, um, all kinds of things.
Michael was the
life-of-the-party guy.
He was the leader of the guys.
When their group would come in,
Michael would always
be front and center.
He was almost the stereotypical
wealthy kid that you
see in teen movies.
What was his, uh, slogan?
I think he even wanted T-shirts made
that said, "Decadence, a way of life."
He kind of
always had a different girl.
It would be one of those
things where, you know,
"Do we really have
to get to know her?
There will just be a
new one next week."
It didn't matter
what room he was in,
he commanded your attention,
he wanted your attention.
Almost every single one
of Casey's closest friends
ended up sleeping with
Michael at some point or another.
One night, I had found
a photo album in his closet.
And it was a lot of naked people
in the pictures, like an orgy,
and there was cash,
and there were drugs,
and there was a gun
in the closet as well.
Michael was mirroring my father
and showing early signs
of what my father was like.
It was scary.
My name is Wendy Williams.
Casey Hammer and Michael Hammer
are my cousins.
I thought that they
were just wealthy,
they had this wonderful life,
when it was not
like that at all.
Michael was pretty reckless
when he was younger.
I remember Armand Hammer
coming in to
intervene with Michael.
He was making very
specific demands
of how Michael's
life was going to be.
Basically, there
would be no money
unless he cleaned up his life
and did what Armand
wanted.
Which was, come
work for the company.
It always appeared that Michael
was the Hammer heir.
And Casey was,
for a lack of a
better way to say it,
"Just be nice and be pretty
and we'll take care of you."
Michael had gotten back
into graces with my grandfather
and then was hired at Oxy.
And so, Michael saw
he could try and
manipulate my grandfather,
or get, you know, above
my father's hierarchy.
Grandpa would
throw parties all the time.
We would get invited,
and it was a select few
2,000 of his closest friends.
And it was who's who in
Hollywood if you got invited.
It's now my great privilege to
introduce Mr. Gregory Peck.
It was a huge
deal when they were like,
"Armand Hammer is hosting
Prince Charles and Lady Diana."
So, yeah, it was pretty cool when you
got to tell people that you were there.
My father was forced to show up
at a function or a party,
and just didn't wanna
have anything to do with it.
Whereas my brother
wanted it so deeply
to take his place as
heir apparent to the throne.
I tried watching the
HBO show Succession.
I got through three episodes
and I had to turn it off.
Everyone's
brown-nosing each other
and saying fake stuff, and everyone
hates each other on the inside,
but on the outside they're
all pretending to get along.
Magnify Succession
a million times,
and it was literally my family.
Michael was 27,
28, when he first met
Armie's mother, Dru.
He was flying first class
and he was really drunk,
and I guess Dru was
sitting next to him.
And she said before
she got off the airplane,
she was planning to marry him.
She was very religious
and very not like what
Michael goes out with.
So when he got off the airplane
and he was saying,
"I met someone,"
we were all like, "Sure, okay."
And then when we met Dru,
we just thought, "Oh,
that's never gonna last."
But my grandfather rolled out the
red carpet for her and her parents.
He wanted Michael
and Dru to get married,
because this was a
wholesome, Tulsa, wealthy family
that was very religious,
and my grandfather believed
that Dru could change Michael.
After we got out of college, Michael
came over one night to Casey's house
and introduced this woman as
his fiance, and we got to know her.
But then he was with other girls
who went out with us,
and, you know, we
would ask questions like,
"Oh, did you break
up with your fiance?"
"No, no, she's fine. She just
couldn't come out tonight."
When they got married, it
was a big, elaborate, to-do in Tulsa
where who's who was invited.
It was a giant wedding.
When Dru gave birth to Armie,
they would parade him
around to Grandpa's.
Everyone fawned all over him.
I remember being at Michael
and Dru's house in the Palisades.
Armie, just this little,
cute towhead little boy,
comes up to me.
And Michael says,
"Are you gonna give
your aunt Casey a hug goodbye?"
And he kicked me in the shins.
I was like, "You're
such a little brat."
But God forbid you touch
or say anything bad to Armie.
He was given Armand Douglas
Hammer, after my grandfather.
He was the prince, the crown,
the continuation of
the Hammer name,
so the whole Hammer
family could live again
in a whole another generation.
- Armand Hammer
- Dr. Armand Hammer
Self-made millionaire
Armand Hammer is dead.
He died last night
at the age of 92.
I was living in
Hawaii when I got a phone call
that my grandfather had passed.
And
it was the phone call
that you never thought
was gonna happen.
It was from Michael.
I remember dropping the phone
and the room spinning.
Armand Hammer, philanthropist,
art collector, and industrialist
It was a huge deal. The
coverage was incredible.
From 1921,
Hammer was making deals
I just remember being at the
airport getting ready to board my flight,
and on all the monitors and TV
screens, "Armand Hammer Dies."
Armand Hammer,
the son of one of the founders
of the American Communist
Party, acquired Occidental
You couldn't get away from it.
It was just surreal.
I hope that when I pass
on, I will have left the world
a little better than
when I found it.
Michael had called me,
and Grandpa was
still dead on the bed
while he was looting the house.
There were five vans out front,
and Michael and Dru
bringing down tapestries
and taking things
from the house.
I had flown in that morning.
I rented a car and I remember
driving to my father's house.
I was just trying to
make sense of everything.
Few days later, we were called
into Arthur Groman's office,
who was my grandfather's
best friend and attorney,
and that was where the
reading of the will was.
Michael was on my right and
my father was across from me.
Arthur Groman's reading
through it and saying,
"And I leave my granddaughter,
Casey Layne Hammer,
$250,000 in cash."
Let's see what else.
"And I leave Julian
Hammer, my son
$500,000.
Pay off his house
and car and debts.
And I leave Michael Armand
Hammer the Rolls-Royce."
And then the
last paragraph or so was,
"And the executor of the estate
is Michael Armand Hammer
and his wife, Dru Ann Hammer."
My grandfather had
$40 million of cash left.
I got $250,000,
my father got $500,000
everything else got
passed on to Michael.
At that point, you're
like, "Wait, what?"
You don't think
you're hearing any of it.
And my father starts going off,
"What do you mean,
you get the Rolls-Royce?
I want the Rolls-Royce."
And I'm like,
in my mind, thinking,
"You don't even understand
the gravity of what just happened."
It made no sense.
And when I asked when
the new will was signed
it was in October.
Forty days later,
my grandfather died.
The expectation
of his family members
was he was a billionaire.
And then when
his will was read
they learned that he wasn't.
He had given away
most of his money.
So, the Hammer family was left
basically fighting among themselves.
Michael decided he would
grab as much of the money
and as much of the
power as he could,
and as executive, there were
very few people to oppose him.
It was like checkmate.
Michael was putting the
screws to my father and I,
and my brother told my mother,
"Casey's just a casualty,"
because he hated
my father so much,
he wanted him out on the street.
To have Michael, who professed
himself as a man of God,
doing this to my
father and myself
it's not about the inheritance
as much as it is about
just being acknowledged.
I was completely left out.
That's really sad
when you realize that
you don't have
any family or anybody who love you.
I don't know how
to process all of that.
I just, um
yeah.
It didn't end well.
Armie talked a lot
about the evilness
of the men in his family.
His dad, his grandpa,
his great-grandpa.
But he didn't sound like
he was ashamed of it.
It's almost like it
was a badge of honor.
After the Sedona
night with the ropes,
Armie's pulling me even closer.
We go to Dallas
and meet his mom.
He warned me that it
would be interesting.
And that, it was.
She's just like Armie, she's
gorgeous, tall, really beautiful.
They both command a room.
You know, they have a presence.
At dinner, Armie was talking
negatively about his father.
And she just blurted out, "You
need to give him some slack,
because this happened to him
when he was younger."
And it was something that I
should not have been there for.
Nobody could have been
prepared for what I heard that night.
It was just some
deep-rooted family trauma.
lived in Holmby Hills,
which is the neighborhood
right between Wilshire
Boulevard and Sunset
in Westwood.
It's the elite of the elite.
And now, we're gonna
come up on the right side,
is my grandfather's house.
There's his house,
and we would park
right here in front,
and then we would get
up and race up the stairs.
And that front window
was Grandpa's office.
As president
of Occidental Petroleum,
Armand Hammer turned it
into the 11th largest oil company
in the United States.
The Hammer name
wielded a lot of prestige and power.
And the two grandchildren,
Michael and Casey,
would you please stand up?
We were always hanging
out with royalty at these parties,
and we would get training,
and we would learn how
to address the royalty.
It was just this kind
of secret society,
kind of inner
circle of the elite.
How on Earth do they expect us
to get anything done
without money?
People were so
curious about that lifestyle,
about all that wealth.
On the outside, we
were a perfect family.
- Hi, Casey!
- Come on in.
Watch your step.
But beneath it all was
a dark world of deceit,
betrayal, and corruption
and that's why I'm
coming forward now.
It's time to stop the cycle.
So, this is a picture
of the Hammer family,
and there's my father, Julian.
I'm standing behind him.
You have my brother, Michael,
and then, in the
center of the shot
is my grandfather,
and he's holding Armie.
How did Armie Hammer
go from Hollywood golden boy
to an alleged abuser
in the space of one
evening in January?
When all this
came out about Armie,
I was not shocked.
Sexually graphic texts and DMs
of dominating, BDSM,
and even cannibalism
began trending.
This behavior, it's deep-rooted.
My father, Julian Hammer,
is Armie's grandfather.
When my mother met my father,
they ended up in Tijuana,
drunk on the back
of a motorcycle,
and getting married.
And my mother had no idea
that my father was
Armand Hammer's son.
Had no idea about the wealth,
had no idea about any of it.
And then, when my
father got married,
my grandfather decided
that my father needed
to be responsible
now that he had a wife.
I was born in 1960.
We moved to Pacific Palisades,
which was near the
coast in California.
But my father was such a mess.
He was always drunk,
and you just never knew
what kind of condition he was in.
There was a lot going
on behind closed doors.
Christmases were probably
my favorite time of year.
It was a big deal.
It was like a department store.
We all got piles and piles
of Christmas presents.
That's my brother, Michael,
Armie's father
and there he is,
riding a little motorcycle.
I should be somewhere in there.
I remember one year,
it was Christmas Eve.
I was young, maybe five,
and I still believed
in Santa Claus.
After I had gone to bed,
I heard screaming.
My father and
mother were fighting,
and he was
threatening to kill her.
My father slapped
my mom really hard,
and I just remember
seeing blood splatter.
She made me go back to my room
and told me that everything
was gonna be okay,
and if I didn't
go right to sleep,
Santa Claus wasn't gonna come.
As a little girl,
when you're seeing your
mom get beat up by your father,
and blood running down
the front of her body,
and her screaming,
you don't really understand
what's happening.
I can't tell you how many times
I would get under my
covers as a little girl
and put my fingers
in my ears and sing
because I didn't
wanna hear the noise.
I didn't wanna hear
the screaming
because you can't make it stop.
As we got older, my father
He just got worse
and worse and worse.
In the middle of the night,
my mom would collect me,
and we would grab what we could
and get in the car
and drive down the hill
and go to a motel
and wait until
the sun came up
until my father cooled down,
and then we would
go back to the house.
That happened a lot.
It always escalated.
You didn't know what
was gonna happen next.
My mom had been
threatening to leave.
But my grandfather always said,
"If you leave my son,
I'll ruin you and make
your life miserable,"
and, you know,
"You won't have a penny."
My grandfather had very
powerful attorneys back then.
The public persona turned into,
"I can take everything
away from you
with one stroke of the pen."
So it was a frightening,
scary energy
that my grandfather had.
The Hammer family
name had to be pristine.
You couldn't be the
reason for the black mark.
While my grandfather was alive,
you played by his
rules, or you got cut off.
We were taught that Big
Brother's always watching.
You can't get away from it.
My grandfather had files on anybody
you dated or any of your friends.
You would
pick up your phone to talk to someone,
and you would hear a click,
and you knew you
were being recorded.
You didn't make a move
without thinking about,
"What if Grandpa finds out?"
Casey's
grandfather controlled his family.
He controlled everything.
That has to be scary,
to know that there are people
watching you all the time.
"Walk the straight and narrow.
I see you.
You don't see
me, but I see you."
I like to say that our
lives were like a chessboard,
and my grandfather basically
controlled all the moves.
But I had no idea
about half of the things
my grandfather did
and how powerful he really was.
Well, look who is here.
He happens to be
president and CEO
of Occidental Petroleum
in Los Angeles.
Maybe I should say he is also one
of the wealthiest men in the world.
Please welcome
Dr. Armand Hammer.
My grandfather
built an oil empire
that up until his death
was, I believe, the 16th
largest company in the world.
Well, that's a pretty
good hand for a rich guy.
Everything he
touched turned to gold.
I worked for
Armand Hammer from 1986 to 1989
as one of his political
and media consultants.
And I saw him exercise
access around the world
which was unparalleled
for a private individual.
He could, at will,
enter the Kremlin.
I help him, he helps me.
It is mutual.
We do not discuss
secrets, just business.
Buckingham
Palace, the White House
They were all at his disposal
and at his bidding.
- Mr. Hammer?
- Yes?
Oh, this
is the President, how are you?
Oh, hello, President
Kennedy, I'm glad to hear from you again.
I remember once
asking my grandfather
why he wasn't President
of the United States,
and he laughed and said
there wasn't enough power in it.
I mean, even now,
people are still so fascinated.
This stuff didn't
start with Armie.
He is the great-grandson
of Armand Hammer,
an oil tycoon whose son, Julian,
who would be Armie's
grandfather, was insane.
He beat the living
daylights out of his wife
I was definitely
pulling in eyeballs,
like, just by sharing the
things that I was looking into.
I had so many tips coming in,
and it wasn't just
tips about Armie.
It was just tips about
the whole family.
By virtue of sharing the story,
Candice and I found
each other on Instagram,
and we started
talking about the case.
I didn't even know who
Armand Hammer was,
and looking into
him and his son,
and his son after that,
and then Armie,
it was so many people in this
family that had a sort of history.
People were
absolutely dumbfounded.
What are the odds
that there would be
so many generations of a family
behaving so badly?
What became
readily apparent to us
was that there was still
a lot of things to uncover.
My mom had always said that she
stayed with my father as long as she did
because of my grandfather.
So, it was a never-ending
cycle for a very long time.
But then finally, I was
11, and she'd had enough,
and we went down
the street to the motel
and this time,
we didn't go back.
When my parents got divorced,
my grandfather kept to his word,
and my father destroyed
my mother in court.
My father ended
up only paying, like,
$200 a month's child support.
My mom said that the
biggest regret of her life
was letting Michael decide
to stay with my father.
It was a while before my mother
let me go down and visit my father.
I just remember,
it was the house I grew up in,
so it was familiar,
but yet, there
were tons of people.
It was a lot of drinking
a lot of smoke-filled rooms,
a lot of screaming,
a lot of loud music
a lot of drugs.
He always had, like, 16
or 17-year-old girls around,
not much older than I was,
five or six years older,
and he called them
his "housekeepers."
It was code for his girlfriends.
I believe it was
sexual, in a sense
where they were usually
sitting on each other's laps
or kissing or
fondling each other.
It was almost like giant orgies.
Michael, my brother, would
bring his friends up to party,
and they would
hit on them, as well.
The drugs were free-flowing,
so it was a very
free atmosphere.
Casey was one
of my best friends.
I don't remember
when the first time
I met Mike was,
but he was always around.
Casey and I would
go to Julian's,
her father's house.
As you walk in,
there was a big bowl of cocaine
and a very, kind of,
"help yourself" attitude.
It was an environment
where old men
and young girls
and cocaine, and
It was shocking.
Your parents aren't
supposed to do that.
One time at a party,
I had come out of my
bedroom the next morning,
and everyone was
passed out all over the floor.
I remember walking by the couch,
and there were polaroid pictures
of one of my father's housekeepers,
and at the time, I thought
she was eating an ice cream,
because that's what you
did when you were little.
I kept looking at the pictures
trying to figure out
what was happening,
and that's how I realized
that it wasn't an ice cream,
that it was attached to a man.
One of the pictures,
in the background was
this figure in the corner,
in a chair, watching.
I recognized that
that was my father.
Being born in that family
and watching the behavior,
it was my normal.
I mean, how do you know it's
wrong when that's all you know?
So, when my father
and my brother
surrounded themselves with
young, impressionable women
that would basically do
anything that they asked
that was the mentality I saw.
Women were disposable
in the Hammer family.
So, I had to move rooms.
They had to move my room
'cause of some, like, noise
complaints or something.
I think they said it was 417.
Oh, here it is.
A major
news publication posted a video,
and it showed Armie
holding his phone,
walking into his room.
All right, so far, so good.
Uh, that bed looks pretty comfy.
He just glosses over
a woman on all fours in lingerie
and goes out and
shows out the balcony.
Yeah, boy!
It's like, "Look how
much power I have.
I have a lady just
sitting right here,
waiting for me to do
whatever I ask her to
and she's staying quiet."
I was getting
information via DMs
saying that this is
his Finsta account,
"el-destructo-86."
Finsta just means
"fake Instagram."
and these are often
used by celebrities
that have a private account
separate from their public ones.
On this private
Instagram account,
he basically posted
anything he wanted.
Where his public
one was very curated,
this one, he was posting videos
of him engaging
in sexual things,
him doing drugs.
It was pretty wild.
He really wasn't hiding
what he was doing.
He had posted a
picture of him on the toilet
with a drug test, saying,
"All negative. My body is a finely
tuned toxicant processing unit."
Indicating that he definitely took
drugs and he passed a drug test.
Shit's getting weird.
More, one more.
Yep, got it all.
It's just such a reflection of how
above the law this man thinks he is,
that he is not only
in a car taking drugs
and drinking while driving,
but videotaping it
and posting it,
because he thinks it's
cool to show his friends.
Ah.
It seems like each generation
was impacted with
a number of women
who had been wronged
by the Hammer family.
Armie, looking
up here. Right here, over here for me.
It's hard to imagine
one person behaving that badly.
To hear that it's been going
on for so many generations
is kind of unimaginable.
There we go.
My name is Edward Jay Epstein.
Everything okay?
In 1980, The New
York Times came to me
and asked if I wanted to write
a profile on Armand Hammer,
so I did.
I began traveling
with Armand Hammer.
I went all over
the world with him,
got to know him pretty well.
One of the things that
intrigued me about Hammer
was that his public persona
was purposely divorced
from his private activities.
Armand controlled
everyone, including women,
and Hammer in his
life had three marriages.
Well, you haven't been
unlucky in love then?
The first was
in Russia with Olga.
She wanted a career in Hollywood
and I was here in New York.
It didn't last.
We were divorced.
The second was with Angela
Unfortunately,
she was an alcoholic,
and after ten years
of putting up with her,
I divorced her.
Armand's wife, Angela
in her divorce
testimony, she said that he,
"willfully, maliciously, and deliberately
pursued a course of conduct,
employed techniques,
tactics and practices
calculated and designed
to destroy her will.
He threatened her with serious
bodily violence and injury,
and to beat her brains out
by brandishing a metal pipe.
'I feared my husband.
He is a master of
psychological warfare.'"
My present wife, Frances,
we've been married 31
years and this is the happiest
31 years of my life.
Well, what's the
moral of this story?
Well, we must never give up.
Armand Hammer
considered his relations with women
as a means of getting something.
They served a purpose to him.
He married Frances
for her money.
She gave him the
money that allowed him
to go into the oil
business in a big way.
Dr. Armand Hammer
and his third wife, Frances,
took a $100,000 gamble
when they invested in
Occidental Petroleum,
a small and
struggling oil company.
As far as the
public was concerned,
Armand did not have
extra-marital relationships.
But in truth, he
always had mistresses,
and he always womanized.
He looked for young women
who he could control completely.
You have this page,
you got a lot of pictures of
the different women in his life,
but this page, I wanna
show the picture up here.
That's a woman named
Martha Kauffman
It was Martha Kauffman, yes.
- But down here, the same woman is Hilary Gibson
- Right.
Who are these two people?
Are they the same person?
I interviewed Martha Kauffman
also known as Hilary Gibson,
one of Hammer's mistresses.
She told me that his
wife, Frances, found out
she was having a
liaison with her husband.
Frances laid down
the law and said,
"you have to get
rid of this woman."
So, rather than
give up his mistress,
he found a solution that was typical
to the kinds of solutions he found.
He had Martha Kauffman
change her name.
Hilary Gibson.
Wear a white wig
and pretended to his wife
that she was a different woman.
And Frances,
his wife never figured it out?
No.
What he demanded was
control of every part of her life
including her identity.
It was all in his nature
of a man who totally
wanted to control
a woman that he
viewed as a object
not as a human being.
"Martha Kauffman,
Armand's mistress,
had to be available to meet
his schedule at short notice.
He gave her two beepers
to alert her to his calls.
He prohibited her
from seeing other men,
and to make sure of her
whereabouts in Los Angeles,
he had a homing
device installed in her car
and a tap placed on her phone."
He had my location
on his phone
"He also controlled
her vacation schedule.
She had to submit
to his sexual demands
even when she considered
them extremely humiliating."
something is very
degrading, very belittling
Unfortunately, not shocked.
This is exactly
the kind of things
I experienced. This is
extremely humiliating.
I resonate with that.
Armie is so consuming.
He does whatever
he wants, but
you're his.
Completely.
I kept looking more into
the archives of newspaper articles
trying to find more content
relating to the overlaps
and parallels between
each generation.
"Son of Armand Hammer Seized.
Julian Hammer, 47-year-old son
of industrialist Armand Hammer
was arrested at his Pacific
Palisades home Thursday night
for allegedly threatening a
man in his home with a shotgun.
Hammer brandished the
weapon after returning home
and finding 19-year-old Gary
Bowers there with Cathe Boal, 28.
Hammer reportedly
said to Bowers,
'hold it, take another step
and I'll blow you apart.'"
Stop!
You're welcome and
Casey's welcome.
I'm doing this for Casey.
I met Julian Hammer
in the mid-70s.
He needed someone to
come and clean the house
and he offered me the job.
I had just had a child,
so I was able to
bring my son up there
while I was cleaning the house.
The first day I came to work,
there was a big party going on.
It was a gambling party,
it had been going on for
a couple days, apparently.
Everybody in Pacific
Palisades that lived there
knew about Julian.
He was always in really nice
pajamas and a beautiful robe
and slippers and stuff.
That's how he entertained.
Because he was the Hugh
Hefner of Pacific Palisades.
As days went on, he started
kinda opening up to me
about the real him
instead of being the phony
with all of the people coming
up and partying and stuff.
He was a real charmer,
he knew how to get his way,
and he was just suave, you
know, when he wanted to be.
As time went on we
just got real close.
When my son was nine months old,
Julian convinced me that I
should leave my husband.
We had probably been seeing
each other around six months or so
and we, um, got engaged.
He seemed to be more
possessive as time went on.
He didn't want me
to have any friends.
Just him.
I was naive, really, I
guess you might say,
but I thought if I could
give him enough love
that maybe I could change him.
Which, of course, you
don't change anybody,
but I didn't know that then.
One night, I convinced him that
it was time for him to take me out.
And after we had dinner,
he wanted to stop at a bar.
Julian started hanging
around with the guys in there
and kind of flirting
around with the guys.
I got jealous, I
didn't like the idea
that he's flirting
with these guys.
"Why aren't you flirting with me?
Why are you flirting with these guys?"
Then I started realizing
it was a gay bar.
He did not want to leave.
I just got so upset, I
just walked out of the bar,
walked across the
street, put my thumb out.
Within, like, five minutes,
this really nice guy pulled over
and he took me
to Julian's house.
And as he started to
leave, Julian pulled up.
And that's when
everything escalated
'cause Julian saw
him at the door
and got upset that a
man had brought me home.
The go-to was always a gun.
That was his thing when
he got mad like a little baby.
"I'm gonna go get my gun
and I'm gonna shoot you."
That was his way to get control.
Oh, boy.
"Julian Hammer, 47, son of
industrialist Armand Hammer,
was arrested on suspicion of
assault with a deadly weapon
and released on a $1,000 bail."
Somehow or another I
always would give into him
thinking, "all right, this time it'll
be better, this time it'll be better."
Unfortunately, it never was.
Few days later, we
got in an argument,
and I saw the gun in
his hand and I just said,
"you are not gonna
pull that gun out on me,
you're not gonna
point it at me,"
and that's when I
went for the gun.
The gun went off.
My nine-month-old son
was in the same room.
He was only a few feet away,
and so it could have ricocheted
and hit him and killed him.
So, that was it, I left,
that was it, it was over.
There's no consequence.
Well, what message
are you sending?
"So what? What's gonna
happen to me? I'm a Hammer."
Nothing ever happened to Julian
because Armand Hammer had
the money to make it go away.
Bottom line, he
could do whatever he wanted.
He could get away with murder.
And he did.
Armie Hammer's
great grandfather, Julian,
was arrested for
manslaughter in 1955.
His old friend, Bruce, came
to LA to celebrate his birthday,
and reminded him that
Julian owed him $400,
and then Julian
shot him two times.
This all happened when Sue was
pregnant with Armie's father, Michael.
The story that he
told us was self-defense,
but my mom was
very quick to tell me,
"no, your father just murdered
someone in cold blood."
Armand Hammer got a phone call
saying that his son
had just shot someone.
And so, to save not his son,
but to save his
own reputation
he actually delivered
$50,000 in cash to his lawyer,
basically quashing the
charges against his son,
stopping his son from
going to prison for murder.
And he didn't even
seem like he was really bothered
in that he shot his friend
over the gambling debt.
He talked to me just
nonchalant about it.
You could get away
with murder, you could do anything.
There was no accountability.
Each generation,
the men learned very early that
money makes things go away.
It keeps people quiet.
After the murder,
Julian was given a
position by Armand Hammer
at Occidental Petroleum
out of the public eye.
Julian eventually began
doing things for his father,
illegal things like
helping his father
surreptitiously
record conversations.
Julian set him up with
a hidden microphone
and wired 'em up as
we've seen in police movies.
So, he became part
of the secretive world.
A spy world, if you want.
Armand Hammer
understood the criminal mind.
That if you're wired and
have someone on tape,
you have control over them.
The perception
of Hammer in the early 1980s
was that he was a humanitarian,
a philanthropist,
he was a billionaire,
basically, whose mission in life
was to bring about world peace.
A few of us who were
writing about Hammer
were finding out there
was this story there
that the press had
not gotten a hold of.
How do you do,
ladies and gentlemen.
Hammer had successfully
buried the story of his past.
In the Hammer family tree,
you have Armie Hammer
and his father, Michael,
his father, Julian,
his father, Armand,
and his father, Julius.
I'm here to talk about Julius.
Julius Hammer
had come to America
like many of the Jews of Russia.
He was also a doctor,
but more than that,
he became an active politician.
Julius Hammer was a founder
of the American Communist Party.
When his son in 1898 was born,
he named him Armand
Hammer after the symbol
of the Communist
Party in Russia.
The arm and the hammer.
The Russians
used the Hammer family
through Julius Hammer to
channel money into New York,
fund the Communist Party
and then steal technology,
and trade secrets
from the United States.
After years of research,
the CIA concluded
that Armand Hammer
was used to collect
information for the KGB.
He was an agent
of the Soviet Union.
Armie's great
grandfather, Armand Hammer,
goes to Moscow to take over
what his father had built there.
Armand Hammer became
an agent of his father's company.
He was a money
launderer, he was a courier
for funds that were channeled
to Soviet espionage
in the United States.
It was secret, it was
illegal, it was dangerous.
Behind every
great fortune is a great crime.
Certainly behind
the Hammer fortune
there were a great
number of great crimes.
The time for
successful capitalists
earning profits in the height
of communism was over,
and Dr. Armand
Hammer decided to leave
because he realized his
businesses would never triumph
under Stalin's crushing rule.
When Hammer arrived
in the U.S. in the early 1930s
there was still this fear
of Russia and communism,
so, one of his most
important missions
was to bury his past.
Dr. Hammer, I must show
this audience a picture of Olga.
This is your first wife here.
There she is.
What didn't fit
in with his legend
of being an American who
just happened to be in Russia
was that he had a Russian
wife and a Russian child
born in Moscow, Julian.
So, he tried to create as
much distance as he could.
He even had a
paternity test taken
in the hopes that it would
show that his son, Julian
was not really his son.
It was very sad when
I heard the whole story
from Julian's point of view.
He knew he was always
thought of as an embarrassment.
An albatross.
So, the relationship
between Armand and Julian
was a relationship of
a father trying to hide
his son.
And his only son from the world.
My father and
brother hated each other.
They constantly were arguing
and bickering and fighting.
But on the outside
in front of Grandpa,
they were patting
each other on the back
and being so phony
and superficial.
My brother wanted
to surpass my father,
but my father wasn't
gonna let that happen.
Julian was very
jealous of Michael. That I saw.
He was very jealous, he
was very rough on Michael.
Very mean to Michael.
I did see a pattern there.
That Julian, I think,
was hard on his children
because Armand
was hard on Julian.
The second trip I
took from Washington
down to visit my father
everyone was
drinking way too much
and my
father offered my brother
$1 million for his girlfriend.
My brother, it was like
a monster unleashed.
They both said, "I'm gonna
kill you," and they ran outside,
and when I finally
circled the building,
I saw police had separated them.
The cops didn't arrest
either one of 'em,
and let them both drive
away intoxicated as they were,
and Michael's girlfriend
ended up going with my father
quote unquote to
tame the situation.
She was older than
most of the girls.
Probably 19.
She ended up living with my
father for, like, another eight months.
When I graduated from high
school, my grandfather said,
"you're now going to the University of
San Diego because your brother's there."
USD was a Catholic
private school,
2000 students, so,
it was very small.
Michael was larger
than life on the campus,
meaning he had a reputation.
Him and his friends are partying
and just, um, all kinds of things.
Michael was the
life-of-the-party guy.
He was the leader of the guys.
When their group would come in,
Michael would always
be front and center.
He was almost the stereotypical
wealthy kid that you
see in teen movies.
What was his, uh, slogan?
I think he even wanted T-shirts made
that said, "Decadence, a way of life."
He kind of
always had a different girl.
It would be one of those
things where, you know,
"Do we really have
to get to know her?
There will just be a
new one next week."
It didn't matter
what room he was in,
he commanded your attention,
he wanted your attention.
Almost every single one
of Casey's closest friends
ended up sleeping with
Michael at some point or another.
One night, I had found
a photo album in his closet.
And it was a lot of naked people
in the pictures, like an orgy,
and there was cash,
and there were drugs,
and there was a gun
in the closet as well.
Michael was mirroring my father
and showing early signs
of what my father was like.
It was scary.
My name is Wendy Williams.
Casey Hammer and Michael Hammer
are my cousins.
I thought that they
were just wealthy,
they had this wonderful life,
when it was not
like that at all.
Michael was pretty reckless
when he was younger.
I remember Armand Hammer
coming in to
intervene with Michael.
He was making very
specific demands
of how Michael's
life was going to be.
Basically, there
would be no money
unless he cleaned up his life
and did what Armand
wanted.
Which was, come
work for the company.
It always appeared that Michael
was the Hammer heir.
And Casey was,
for a lack of a
better way to say it,
"Just be nice and be pretty
and we'll take care of you."
Michael had gotten back
into graces with my grandfather
and then was hired at Oxy.
And so, Michael saw
he could try and
manipulate my grandfather,
or get, you know, above
my father's hierarchy.
Grandpa would
throw parties all the time.
We would get invited,
and it was a select few
2,000 of his closest friends.
And it was who's who in
Hollywood if you got invited.
It's now my great privilege to
introduce Mr. Gregory Peck.
It was a huge
deal when they were like,
"Armand Hammer is hosting
Prince Charles and Lady Diana."
So, yeah, it was pretty cool when you
got to tell people that you were there.
My father was forced to show up
at a function or a party,
and just didn't wanna
have anything to do with it.
Whereas my brother
wanted it so deeply
to take his place as
heir apparent to the throne.
I tried watching the
HBO show Succession.
I got through three episodes
and I had to turn it off.
Everyone's
brown-nosing each other
and saying fake stuff, and everyone
hates each other on the inside,
but on the outside they're
all pretending to get along.
Magnify Succession
a million times,
and it was literally my family.
Michael was 27,
28, when he first met
Armie's mother, Dru.
He was flying first class
and he was really drunk,
and I guess Dru was
sitting next to him.
And she said before
she got off the airplane,
she was planning to marry him.
She was very religious
and very not like what
Michael goes out with.
So when he got off the airplane
and he was saying,
"I met someone,"
we were all like, "Sure, okay."
And then when we met Dru,
we just thought, "Oh,
that's never gonna last."
But my grandfather rolled out the
red carpet for her and her parents.
He wanted Michael
and Dru to get married,
because this was a
wholesome, Tulsa, wealthy family
that was very religious,
and my grandfather believed
that Dru could change Michael.
After we got out of college, Michael
came over one night to Casey's house
and introduced this woman as
his fiance, and we got to know her.
But then he was with other girls
who went out with us,
and, you know, we
would ask questions like,
"Oh, did you break
up with your fiance?"
"No, no, she's fine. She just
couldn't come out tonight."
When they got married, it
was a big, elaborate, to-do in Tulsa
where who's who was invited.
It was a giant wedding.
When Dru gave birth to Armie,
they would parade him
around to Grandpa's.
Everyone fawned all over him.
I remember being at Michael
and Dru's house in the Palisades.
Armie, just this little,
cute towhead little boy,
comes up to me.
And Michael says,
"Are you gonna give
your aunt Casey a hug goodbye?"
And he kicked me in the shins.
I was like, "You're
such a little brat."
But God forbid you touch
or say anything bad to Armie.
He was given Armand Douglas
Hammer, after my grandfather.
He was the prince, the crown,
the continuation of
the Hammer name,
so the whole Hammer
family could live again
in a whole another generation.
- Armand Hammer
- Dr. Armand Hammer
Self-made millionaire
Armand Hammer is dead.
He died last night
at the age of 92.
I was living in
Hawaii when I got a phone call
that my grandfather had passed.
And
it was the phone call
that you never thought
was gonna happen.
It was from Michael.
I remember dropping the phone
and the room spinning.
Armand Hammer, philanthropist,
art collector, and industrialist
It was a huge deal. The
coverage was incredible.
From 1921,
Hammer was making deals
I just remember being at the
airport getting ready to board my flight,
and on all the monitors and TV
screens, "Armand Hammer Dies."
Armand Hammer,
the son of one of the founders
of the American Communist
Party, acquired Occidental
You couldn't get away from it.
It was just surreal.
I hope that when I pass
on, I will have left the world
a little better than
when I found it.
Michael had called me,
and Grandpa was
still dead on the bed
while he was looting the house.
There were five vans out front,
and Michael and Dru
bringing down tapestries
and taking things
from the house.
I had flown in that morning.
I rented a car and I remember
driving to my father's house.
I was just trying to
make sense of everything.
Few days later, we were called
into Arthur Groman's office,
who was my grandfather's
best friend and attorney,
and that was where the
reading of the will was.
Michael was on my right and
my father was across from me.
Arthur Groman's reading
through it and saying,
"And I leave my granddaughter,
Casey Layne Hammer,
$250,000 in cash."
Let's see what else.
"And I leave Julian
Hammer, my son
$500,000.
Pay off his house
and car and debts.
And I leave Michael Armand
Hammer the Rolls-Royce."
And then the
last paragraph or so was,
"And the executor of the estate
is Michael Armand Hammer
and his wife, Dru Ann Hammer."
My grandfather had
$40 million of cash left.
I got $250,000,
my father got $500,000
everything else got
passed on to Michael.
At that point, you're
like, "Wait, what?"
You don't think
you're hearing any of it.
And my father starts going off,
"What do you mean,
you get the Rolls-Royce?
I want the Rolls-Royce."
And I'm like,
in my mind, thinking,
"You don't even understand
the gravity of what just happened."
It made no sense.
And when I asked when
the new will was signed
it was in October.
Forty days later,
my grandfather died.
The expectation
of his family members
was he was a billionaire.
And then when
his will was read
they learned that he wasn't.
He had given away
most of his money.
So, the Hammer family was left
basically fighting among themselves.
Michael decided he would
grab as much of the money
and as much of the
power as he could,
and as executive, there were
very few people to oppose him.
It was like checkmate.
Michael was putting the
screws to my father and I,
and my brother told my mother,
"Casey's just a casualty,"
because he hated
my father so much,
he wanted him out on the street.
To have Michael, who professed
himself as a man of God,
doing this to my
father and myself
it's not about the inheritance
as much as it is about
just being acknowledged.
I was completely left out.
That's really sad
when you realize that
you don't have
any family or anybody who love you.
I don't know how
to process all of that.
I just, um
yeah.
It didn't end well.
Armie talked a lot
about the evilness
of the men in his family.
His dad, his grandpa,
his great-grandpa.
But he didn't sound like
he was ashamed of it.
It's almost like it
was a badge of honor.
After the Sedona
night with the ropes,
Armie's pulling me even closer.
We go to Dallas
and meet his mom.
He warned me that it
would be interesting.
And that, it was.
She's just like Armie, she's
gorgeous, tall, really beautiful.
They both command a room.
You know, they have a presence.
At dinner, Armie was talking
negatively about his father.
And she just blurted out, "You
need to give him some slack,
because this happened to him
when he was younger."
And it was something that I
should not have been there for.
Nobody could have been
prepared for what I heard that night.
It was just some
deep-rooted family trauma.