Billionaire Sumner Redstone’s bizarre in-flight demands

“YOU have to straddle me.” A former flight attendant has revealed the bizarre requests she says this 93-year-old mogul made on his corporate jet.

Sumner Redstone allegedly made some strange demands of staff on his corporate jet. Picture: Matt Sayles

BETSY Dwyer Loomis thought she’d seen it all.

The former flight attendant had worked corporate jets for years and had flown around the world with demanding billionaires — but nothing, she said, could have prepared her for Viacom boss Sumner Redstone.

The American mogul’s weird habits while in flight included asking a flight attendant to not only undo his seat belt when he had to go to the rest room — but also unzip his fly, said Ms Loomis, who worked on Viacom’s Paramount Pictures corporate jet in 2002.

“I flew with him a couple of times,” Ms Loomis told The New York Post. “He was always in a bad mood.”

The now-93-year-old mogul would also “offer me money to clip his toenails,” Ms Loomis recalled. “He told me how he wanted to have it done and it wasn’t your typical pedicure. He said: ‘You have to straddle me and sit on my legs facing my feet’.”

The executive offered Ms Loomis and other attendants extra money if they removed their underwear while they clipped away, she said.

Ms Loomis, 62, now retired and living in Connecticut, claimed he had offered her between $500 and $1000 for the panty-less toenail-clipping — although some could negotiate on price.

“I never did it,” she said. “The [toenails] were like ancient sea scrolls. You’d need a sandblaster to get them down to something.”

To gently sidestep the request, Ms Loomis would tell Mr Redstone she “wasn’t supposed to touch passengers”.

But she did not succeed in mollifying the mogul; instead, Ms Loomis said, Mr Redstone would go “insane”.

‘FIND YOUR OWN WAY HOME’

One time Ms Loomis refused toenail duty while the Paramount jet landed in Kansas to refuel.

Mr Redstone promptly ordered Ms Loomis off the jet, she said.

“You’ll have to find your own way home,” he told her, Ms Loomis claimed. She made her way back to the East Coast via a commercial flight.

Mr Redstone even had Paramount try to get out of paying her daily fee on that occasion, Ms Loomis said.

A lawyer for Mr Redstone declined to comment on Ms Loomis’ tales. “At 93 years old, Sumner Redstone is focused on his family and his health,” the lawyer said in an emailed statement.

Ms Loomis said that while she had steadfastly refused Mr Redstone’s quirky requests, other flight attendants agreed to some of them — and then would regale the crew with their stories about the experience over occasional dinners.

Like the times it was easy to gauge how well the company’s stock was doing by how happy (or not) Mr Redstone was.

Once, on an eight-day trip, the first leg was pretty normal, Ms Loomis recalled, “but on the second, the stock had plummeted, and when he got on, he was yelling and screaming.

“It was very hard to keep him happy no matter what,” she said. “He would make a fist and start smashing [it] on the table until it almost broke.”

Mr Redstone, who recently announced he was stepping down from an active role on the Viacom board, filed suit in the fall against two former girlfriends, claiming they had fleeced him out of $US150 million. In response, the women claimed Mr Redstone was of sound mind and body when he made the gifts.

As evidence, they claimed Mr Redstone, who was actively running Viacom, once gave $US18 million to one unidentified flight attendant for an undisclosed reason — plus another $US6 million to her sister after he allegedly slept with her.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Mr Redstone wasn’t the only difficult billionaire Ms Loomis had to deal with at 40,000 feet. She recalled the antics of a financial industry executive and his wife, who would regularly demand she fulfil nearly impossible tasks.

On a visit to France, Ms Loomis’ hotel phone rang at 2am ahead of a 6am flight. The billionaire couple wanted a true French dish on the flight home — a bowl of tomato-based fish soup.

But where to get such a meal at 2am, Ms Loomis wondered.

“I had some Ragu sauce with me and added cream and a bay leaf,” she recalled, never thinking she could pull off the cuisine caper.

When the time came to serve the meal on the jet, Ms Loomis was a bit nervous that her “recipe” would be trashed by the power couple.

“They loved it,” she said, laughing at the experience.

This article first appeared at the New York Post and is reproduced here with permission.

Originally published as Billionaire Sumner Redstone’s bizarre in-flight demands