Charles Dolan, HBO founder who sat atop Cablevision empire, dies at 98

Charles F. Dolan, who founded HBO, merged a group of small Long Island cable TV systems into a network he called Cablevision and amassed a fortune building an innovative communications, entertainment and sports empire that included Madison Square Garden and its professional teams, died on Saturday. He was 98.

A representative for Dolan’s family confirmed the death on Sunday in a statement, which did not say where he died.

Cablevision Systems Corp. had 1,500 customers when Dolan founded it in 1973. It was serving 3 million cable TV households in the New York metropolitan area and providing internet and digital telephone service when he reached a deal in September 2015 to sell it to Altice, a European media company, for $17.7 billion. Altice USA now runs it under the Optimum brand.

Dolan “helped establish cable television as an economic, social and cultural force in the United States during the final quarter of the 20th century,” Douglas Gomery, a mass communications scholar, wrote in the 2004 edition of “Encyclopedia of Television,” a publication of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.

The deal with Altice, completed in June 2016, included the Long Island-based Newsday and Dolan’s News 12 cable stations providing news from the New York metropolitan area. But the Dolan family regained control of Newsday two weeks later, buying back a 75% interest for an undisclosed sum.

In August 2018, Newsday announced that Dolan’s son Patrick, who had been the president and majority owner of the Newsday Media Group, had acquired the remaining shares to become the sole owner of Newsday. (Patrick Dolan continued as president of the News 12 stations when Altice obtained them from Cablevision, but he later stepped down and was named a senior adviser of the network.)

The Dolan family also remains a powerful presence on the New York sports and entertainment scenes. It owns the Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp., which operates the arena; the Madison Square Garden Sports Corp., whose properties include the arena’s teams, the New York Knicks and the Rangers; and the MSG sports-programming cable TV stations. All are run by Charles Dolan’s son James.

The Dolans also have control of AMC Networks; hold a long-term lease on Radio City Music Hall; and operate the Beacon Theater in New York, the Wang Theater in Boston and the Chicago Theater. Forbes magazine estimated the Dolan family’s net worth at $5.2 billion in early 2020.

Charles Dolan was one of the cable TV industry’s most aggressive operators and marketers. He created the nation’s first urban cable television network, Manhattan Cable, in the 1960s. He introduced feature-length, commercial-free movies on cable with his Home Box Office, for subscribers who paid extra to receive it. He created the first regional cable sports network with SportsChannel, developed cable TV arts programming through Bravo and pioneered TV cable stations for local news through his Channel 12 outlets.

Dolan had a luxurious home in Cove Neck on Long Island’s North Shore and once owned a sloop that his son James skippered with a large crew in ocean racing. But he did not flaunt his wealth.

At age 54, he was described in The New York Times as “a soft-spoken, self-effacing man with boyish Dennis-the-Menace looks.”

Dolan was viewed in the business world as low key during negotiations and willing to listen to other parties, but nonetheless tenacious in his deal-making.

“Don’t mistake gentlemanliness for being an easy negotiator or not being tough as nails when he has to be,” Tom Rogers, then the president of NBC Cable, who had negotiated with and against Dolan, told the Times in 1998. “Sometimes the mistake people make with Chuck is they don’t know how to deal with how creative he is.”

As one cable executive put it, Dolan was “such a contradiction.”

“He has this veneer as a cordial, easygoing, accepting person,” the executive said, but “he is absolutely a lethal competitor.”

“He’s like Darth Vader dressed up in a Howdy Doody outfit.”

Although customarily loath to discuss family and business matters in public, Dolan reflected on his quest to be a pioneer in a 1988 interview with the Times.

“We definitely think we are in the communications programming business and not in the cable business,” he said. “Cable is a misnomer. We’re not wedded to cable. It’s a wonderful technology now. It’s the one you should use now. But as soon as it’s obsolete, junk it; let’s go on to the next one.”

Amid Cablevision’s growth, Charles Dolan and James Dolan clashed on at least one occasion.

In January 2005, Charles Dolan lost a showdown with his son over the fate of the company’s fledgling satellite business, Voom, which offered high-definition channels to cable operators and satellite TV providers around the country. James Dolan and other board members, skeptical of Voom’s prospects, voted to sell it to EchoStar Communications, operating under the Dish brand, just two years after it started, despite fervent opposition from the elder Dolan, who envisioned it as a path to further innovation.

But father and son seemed to be united after that boardroom tussle.

In the wake of that battle and amid criticism leveled at James in the news media over the failings of the Knicks, Charles Dolan wrote a letter to the Times in June 2006 defending his son, the Garden’s chief.

“Jim is unafraid in facing unpopular problems, whether investing unhesitatingly in support of the Knicks, sitting in the front row for nearly every game or revising some of his father’s favorite business plans,” Dolan wrote.

James Dolan continued to be buffeted by criticism as the Knicks mostly foundered in the seasons that followed, despite their huge payrolls. The Garden, meanwhile, underwent a $1 billion renovation, completed in October 2013.

Charles Francis Dolan was born on Oct. 16, 1926, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His mother, Corinne, worked for the charity arm of the local Roman Catholic diocese; his father, David, whom he described in a 1990 interview with Newsday as “sort of a self-educated mechanical engineer,” invented an anti-theft device for automobiles that he sold to Ford, receiving wholesale distributorships to sell autos in return. But that business ultimately faced difficult times, and David Dolan died when Charles was a teenager.

Charles Dolan attended John Carroll University outside Cleveland, but he dropped out to edit and produce sports newsreels for syndication to television stations. After selling the business, he moved to the New York area in the early 1950s.

In 1962, he founded the TV service Teleguide, which provided hotel guests in New York with information, including the availability of Broadway show tickets, motion picture recommendations and stock ticker reports.

But Dolan had far more ambitious designs. He coveted the home market for cable TV, then in its infancy, and in 1965 obtained a franchise from New York City to wire the southern half of Manhattan for cable, gaining rights to transmit as high as East 86th Street and West 79th Street.

His Manhattan Cable Television (later Sterling Manhattan Cable Television, for Sterling Communications, the parent company he headed) faced expensive wiring costs and the perception that cable TV was mostly a means to improve reception.

Seeking to enhance the appeal of cable, Dolan introduced a separate channel for pro sports and televised Knicks and Rangers playoff games in the spring of 1969. He signed a contract with the Garden to carry all Rangers and Knicks home games in the 1969-70 season, a time when their games at the Garden were blacked out on local broadcast TV.

When the Knicks faced the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals in late April and May 1970 en route to the first league championship in their history, the cable telecasts were a sensation at Manhattan bars, which bought the service to lure in customers since so few people had cable at home. “Inside the Red Blazer, on Second Avenue near 82nd Street, they were four deep at the bar and every table was filled,” the Times reported at the time, with Marty Glickman announcing the games, shown on two large color TVs.

Dolan founded Home Box Office after that, but cable franchises in New York City were not allowed to carry feature-length movies at the time, so he had to market it to outside cable companies.

Sterling Manhattan Cable lost money, and Dolan sold stock to the public to raise cash. By 1971, Time Inc. controlled 80% of the company, and it took over the cable company and HBO. Dolan used his remaining 20% of the stock, valued at $675,000, to buy Time’s Long Island cable systems, and he combined them to form Cablevision two years later.

By the mid-1980s, Cablevision and its affiliated companies had about 618,000 subscribers in the New York metropolitan area, Chicago, Boston and the Cleveland suburbs. In 1986, Dolan introduced 24-hour local news to cable TV with the creation of News 12 Long Island. He later expanded the Channel 12 concept to stations serving Brooklyn, the Bronx, Westchester County, Connecticut and New Jersey.

In 1994, Cablevision joined with the conglomerate ITT in purchasing Madison Square Garden, its MSG Network and its pro sports teams from Viacom for $1.075 billion.

Cablevision acquired ITT’s stake in the Garden for $650 million in 1997, giving it nearly total control of the televising of pro sports in New York by combining the MSG Network’s rights to show the Yankees, Rangers and Knicks games with Cablevision’s rights to televise the New York Mets, the Brooklyn Nets, the New Jersey Devils and the New York Islanders on its SportsChannel.

Dolan tried to take Cablevision private twice, but failed to do so. In 2007, shareholders voted against a $10.6 billion bid for Cablevision by the Dolan family.

He sought to buy into the pro sports world outright, but was unsuccessful in his efforts to purchase the Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the New York Jets, Washington’s NFL team and the expansion franchise awarded by the league to the Cleveland Browns.

Dolan was chair of the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, having founded it in 1998 with Marc Lustgarten, a senior Cablevision executive, who died of the disease a year later.

Full information on Dolan’s survivors was not immediately available.

Dolan’s wife of 73 years, Helen Ann, died in August 2023 at 96.

The tales of Dolan’s toughness in negotiations weren’t confined to the business world.

Jean Dolan, the wife of Dolan’s brother William, once reflected on Charles Dolan’s competitiveness in a low-stakes battle she waged with him.

She told Newsday in 2005 that he would bet against her on football and when he lost would show his displeasure by mailing her a $20 bill cut into pieces, forcing her to take the scraps to a bank to cash in her winnings.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.