Indecent Exposure (82 page)

Cliff Robertson was blacklisted for four years after reporting David
Begelman
's forgery. Finally Robertson was given a part in a film called
Brainstorm,
which proved to be Natalie Wood's last film before she drowned. As might have been predicted, Robertson found himself working on
Brainstorm
for MGM and David Begelman—a fact that Begelman did not allow to go unnoticed. Subsequently Robertson made a picture for Bob Fosse and another for Marty Ransohoff. Although gratified to be working again, Robertson was privately humiliated by the fact that he was being paid less than in the past. He also was embittered by a lack of success in raising money to finance a sequel to his Oscar-winning
Charly.
As for
Good Times, Bad Times,
the subject of the anonymous middle-of-the-night phone calls at the height of the Begelman furor, the picture still had not been made as of the middle of 1983.

In reflective moments,
Begelman
occasionally remarked to friends on the number of lives that had been affected directly or indirectly by the events the Cliff Robertson forgery had set in motion. The number surely was in the hundreds and perhaps the thousands. The entire entertainment community had been shaken. Four of the sever major studios—Columbia, Fox, MGM, and United Artists—had changed drastically, and a fifth, MCA-Universal, had suffered from Frank Price's move to Columbia. Only Warner and Paramount were essentially untouched. (Warner, however, was embarrassed by its own scandal. After a long investiga
tion, culminating in a ten-count
federal indictment for bribery an
d misappropriation of funds, Jay
Emmctt, one of the three membe
rs of the Office of the President
under Chairman Steve Ross, pleaded guilty to two counts of defrauding Warner. The investigation concerned the financial collapse of the Westchest
er Premiere Theatre in which Warn
er had invested.)

Thwarted in his attempt to take control of Columbia Pictures, MGM's controlling shareholder Kirk Kerkorian bought United Artists. David Begelman was shifted from MGM to run UA, and Freddie Fields was brought in to head MGM's motion-picture program. Joe Fischer, after waiting in vain for Hirschfield to hire him at Fox (Hirschfield claimed Denni
s Stanfill
wouldn't permit it), finally accepted an offer from Begelman to become the financial czar of both MGM and UA. Having never been terribly fond of
Begelman
, and having been a principal proponent of Columbia's firing him summarily in 1977 after the revelation of his crimes, Fischer found that his decision to accept Begelman's offer did not come easily. However, Fischer had been treated badly at Columbia after Hirschfield left—"promoted" to executive vice president and then stripped of most of his authority and responsibilities—and he yearned for a new challenge.

The slate of films Begelman developed at MGM, while including a few of high quality and originality
(Pennies from Heaven),
performed poorly at the box office, and MGM and UA in combination slid toward financial difficulty.* Kerkorian created a corporate parent called the MGM/UA Entertainment Company to take fiim command of both studios. He named Frank Rothman, one of his long
-
time lawyers and the man who had defended David
Begelman
during the criminal prosecution, to run the new entity as chairman and chief executive officer. Joe Fischer was made president, Begelman's power declined, and in July 1982, Begelman was dismissed, only to move promptly across the MGM lot to head a new film production company financed in part by die Hunts of Dallas.

Herbert Allen had always said that if someone offered him a "ridiculous" price for Columbia Pictures he might sell it. Generally he defined "ridiculous" as somewhere between 50 per
cent and 100 per
cent above the current market price of the company's stock. In early 1982, the Coca-Cola Company offered what some observers considered a ridiculous price—cash and Coke stock with a total value of between S700 million and S800 million, or about $70 a

*
Meanwhile. G
ladyce
Begelman, along with her two co
-
author
s
updated
N
ew York on
$500
a Day
(
Before Lunch)
and called the new version
N
ew York on
$1,
000 a
Day (
Before Lunch).

Columbia share. (Columbia was trading at about $40 at the time.) On an original investment of S2.5 million, the
Allens
stood to make a profit on their interest in Columbia of more than S30 million, plus a multimillion-dollar investment-banking fee for handling the deal. Coke planned to let Columbia operate essentially autonomously, that is, under the control of Allen, Vincent, and Price. The deal would take months to conclude, and such deals occasionally fall through. Herbert Allen, however, seized the opportunity for a day in the limelight, something his publicity-shy father and uncle had never done in fifty years of deals of comparable magnitude. Herbert appeared on network television and was profiled by
Fortune
and other publications. The media were dazzled by the Coke merger and circulated some questionable propositions, as well as a number of outright errors. Herbert was portrayed as a financial wizard, even though others at Coke and Columbia had conceived the merger.
The New York Times
lavished praise, too, on Fay Vincent, saying, "He has guided the production of such blockbuster money
-
makers as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deep,
and
Kramer vs. Kramer."
Vincent, of course, had nothing to do with those films, all of which were made under Alan Hirschfield and David Begelman. But no one really begrudged Vincent and Allen the publicity. They had, after all, made a killing. And the more interesting question was how soon the chairman
of Coca-Cola, the good-humored,
Cuban-born Roberto C. Goizueta, would "go Hollywood." A man with a taste for silk
ascots and dark glasses. Goizue
ta had long been interested in getting Coke into show business.

At dawn on a cold, rainy Friday in the early spring of 1982, Alan Hirschfield boarded Twentieth Century-Fox's private jet at the Westchester County Airport for a flight to Los Angeles. He was accompanied by a business friend, a writer, a child, and the Hirschfield family dog, a b
lack female poodle named Chaunce
y (after Chauncey Gardiner in
Being There).
The headwinds were strong, slowing the flight and necessitating a stop for fuel in Grand Island, Nebraska.

While there, Chauncey got loose and bolted for the open fields. There was a frantic chase across hundreds of yards of tarmac and prairie before she was trapped against a fence and returned to the plane. Another half hour was lost.

Hirschfield's
limousine and se
nior West Coast secretary, Marce Rae
ther, met the flight in Los Angeles, and since he was late for an already-convened luncheon meeting with Marvin Davis and Mickey Rudin, he was driven directly to the Fox commissary. Moving slowly through the Fox lot, the limousine came up behind production president Sherry Lansing, whom Hirschfield had appointed two years earlier and regarded very warmly.

"Female executives suck!" Hirschfield shouted as the limo eased past Lansing. She squealed with laughter, and everyone else within hearing range guffawed, too. Dennis Stanfill would have found the remark in bad taste, but Hirschfield could get by with such cracks. They were amusing coming from him. And they reflected the more relaxed atmosphere at Fox following Stanf
ill
's departure. The studio was more stable than it had been in years. Hirschfield had signed a lucrative new four-year contract with Marvin Davis, and their relationship seemed good.

Nothing was absolutely certain, of course. It was uncertain whether Lansing, Melnick, Adler, or anyone else—even Hirschfield and Davis—would stay at Fox for the long term. There would be new opportunities, new problems, new feuds. Still, the laughter helped. There had been too little of it in recent years.

Hirschfield
's personal life was more placid, too. His marriage had steadied, and he had finally moved his family to Los Angeles where he had leased a house with a tennis court and pool just north of Sunset near the Beverly Hills Hotel. Chauncey's arrival symbolized the completion of the move west. (The Hirschfiel
ds kept their place in Scarsdale
, however, just in case.)

Although Alan Hirschfield and Herbert Allen encountered each other now and then and exchanged polite words, a genuine rapprochement seemed unlikely. Various Fox and Columbia officials sometimes talked business, but the personal wounds of 1977 and 1978 had not healed and neither Alan nor Herbert had any real desire to be friends again. When they talked of each other with other people, their words were still venomous.

It was Charlie Allen, not Herbert, who wanted peace. As he approached the eightieth year of his life, Charlie made small efforts to rekindle the warmth between the
Hirschfield
and Allen families. He occasionally telephoned Alan or his father, usually on a birthday or some other special occasion. But the warmth was superficial. Long after his son had been fired by Herbert Allen and the board of directors of Columbia Pictures, Norman
Hirschfield
remained deeply distressed.

"I think Charlie was wrong. There comes a time in life when you have to take a position, a stand. I was greatly disappointed in Charlie. He should have done it [stopped Herbert] out of friendship. He knew it hurt me. I was terribly depressed, physically ill. But you can't go through life with hatred. You'll destroy yourself. I won't destroy Herbert. I'll destroy myself. I'll never forget it, though."

NOTES

The primary source of the factual material in this book is hundreds of hours of interviews, many of them tape-recorded, which the author conducted with more than a hundred people who have detailed, first
-
hand knowledge of the subject. The author also has had access to the complete transcripts of sworn testimony taken by investigators for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the case titled
In the Matter of Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.,
Case No. HO-1076, from the following people:

Herbert Anthony Allen David Begelman Alan James Hirschfield Leo Jaffe Joseph
R. Lipsher Erwin Gerald Lipsky,
John H. Mitchell
,
Clifford Parker Robertson III
,
Raymond Otto Stark
,
Robert Lewis Stone
, John Patrick Ve
itch
,
Seymour Weintraub

The SEC testimony in most instances is consistent with interviewees' statements to the author.

The book employs voluminous documentary material—corporate records of various types including confidential minutes of meetings of the Columbia Pictures Industries board of directors, audit committee, and executive committee; reports of investigations by Price Waterhouse & Company, the certified public accounting firm; official police files and records of court proceedings, civil and criminal; analyses by investment firms; individuals' daily appointment calendars, telephone logs, and travel records; memoranda, letters, informal notes, and diaries; photographs; newspaper and magazine articles; and books.

Descriptions of physical settings are drawn in nearly every instance from the author's visits to the settings and his research into changes in the settings, if any, subsequent to the events described. References to weather and climatic conditions
are
taken from the daily records of the National Weather Service.

The author's basic interviewing method was to refresh the interviewee's memory by placing before him his appointment calendar, telephone log, and/or any other information about his activities on a particular day, and then to ask the interviewee to describe his actions, conversations, thoughts, and feelings, and those of other people to the extent that he had knowledge of them. This information was checked with other sources, e.g., other people involved in a particular meeting or conversation. The occasional conflicts in recollection were resolved by further interviewing and the marshaling of documentary material, and by the author's own knowledge, developed in the course of hundreds of hours of interviewing and verification, of which interviewees tended to have the best memories and most reliable records, and tended to tell the verifiable truth most consistently. If an interviewee's version checked out consistently well, when tested against others, it was given appropriate weight. If an interviewee exhibited poor memory, or tended to give vague answers, or answers that conflicted with multiple identical recollections of others, that, too, is reflected in the narrative. Certain remaining conflicts
are
footnoted in the text or cited below. Having thus assembled the facts, the author deemed it most efficient to tell the story without specific textual attribution of each fact to the source or sources of that fact.