They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (22 page)

It was the golden mean, the third alternative, that all parties, including Guenther, had jointly agreed, just several weeks before, to bring to the executive committees of the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, which would meet together for the first time. After months of work, the architectural firm of Pritzker Prize–winner Norman Foster, along with consulting acousticians and theater designers, had devised what appeared to be a very fine recommendation.

What they proposed was a brand-new auditorium within the existing structure. It would be moved south inside the building footprint, away from 65th Street, and toward Josie Robertson Plaza. In the auditorium, the seat count would be reduced from 2,738 to 2,400, and 250–300 seats would be placed behind the stage, facing the conductor. The stage itself would be thrust forward twelve to fourteen rows into the auditorium. The ceiling would be lifted to the bottom of the roof, the third balcony removed, and new floor and wall treatments applied everywhere.

By altering the cavernous and long shoe box design of the auditorium in Avery Fisher Hall to something resembling a vineyard-like configuration, the performers would enjoy a sense of intimacy and immediacy with the audience.
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The overall result would be improved aesthetics and acoustics. The “Foster plan” would also satisfy most of the program and functional needs set forth by the staffs of Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic. It could be accomplished in roughly half the time it would take to demolish the existing building and erect a new structure. It could be done for 75 percent of the cost (then estimated at $300 million versus $400 million). Because the building’s dimensions and footprint wouldn’t change, city and state regulation would be very lightly administered. And the Fisher family was amenable to our naming the new auditorium
for a new donor as long as the building itself was called Avery Fisher Hall, as it had been since its opening in 1962.

The obstacles of too much time for the orchestra out of its home base, of having to raise too much money, of battling with the Fisher family over the naming of a new building, and of the heavy hand of government regulation, either were eliminated entirely or were significantly lowered by exercising this option. The prospects for major acoustic, programmatic, and aesthetic improvements all seemed to be substantially brightened by this approach, on which both institutions had worked together in good faith.

Or so we thought.

Foster’s firm had become well known for reconfiguring the innards of famous buildings, while leaving their total original structure intact. The Reichstag. The British Museum. The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. And the then new, soon-to-be built corporate headquarters of the Hearst Corporation, only several blocks south of Lincoln Center. Foster’s scheme for a brand-new auditorium in Avery Fisher Hall had generated much enthusiasm among all concerned.

Or so we thought.

At the request of the working group of trustees from both Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic, I had prepared a draft memorandum to the executive committees of both institutions formally presenting this option. It was framed as a united recommendation in advance of that joint meeting, scheduled for only a couple of weeks later. This unanimous agreement represented a major conceptual and procedural breakthrough, a source of hard-won consensus after months of intense work.

What Guenther told Bruce Crawford and me that Thursday at the end of May startled and shocked us. He said the New York Philharmonic intended to formally commence discussions with Sandy Weill, the chair of Carnegie Hall, to effectuate a merger of the two institutions. Nervously, Guenther cited two reasons for this decision. The cost of fixing up Carnegie Hall to house a full-time orchestra would be a relatively inexpensive $120 million, and the New York Philharmonic would be returning to an acoustically superior hall. He, and the few trustee colleagues who may have been consulted, viewed the Carnegie Hall option as no risk, low cost, and high return.

We asked whether the New York Philharmonic had considered the implications of a merger for its board, its staff, its artistic assets, its brand, and its donors. “Not yet” came the reply.

We reminded Guenther that Lincoln Center’s constituency agreement with the New York Philharmonic as our anchor tenant and partner for the use of Avery Fisher Hall ran until 2012. It contained a list of obligations, and not the least of them was financial. These included payments for any dates between 2003 and 2012 that Lincoln Center could not fill in Avery Fisher Hall that would otherwise be occupied by the New York Philharmonic; payment of all legal costs; the loss of its share of the annual Lincoln Center Corporate Fund proceeds distributed to all constituents in good standing; and payment of discrete staff and consultant costs explicitly requested or caused by the New York Philharmonic.

We felt duty bound to see that these obligations were discharged with fidelity. “Understood” came the reply. We then noted that, with this news in mind, we had no alternative but to inform the members of the Lincoln Center executive committee of this completely surprising turn of events and, in so doing, cancel the scheduled June 16 meeting. “Fine with me,” was Guenther’s response.

The New York Philharmonic’s bolt from the blue was presented by Guenther as firm, unwavering, and irreversible. We stressed that a leak of this sudden change of position could easily become front-page news.
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We urged Guenther to treat the matter with the utmost discretion, so that we could arrange for a dignified joint announcement the following week, on Tuesday or Wednesday. “Of course” he said.

The story was leaked less than thirty-six hours later. It came as little surprise to Bruce Crawford or me.
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President John Kennedy once noted, in referring to the source of leaks, that “the ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top.” Well, Lincoln Center had been a notorious source of leaks for years, and many believed that Paul Guenther could rightly claim a share of them.

We knew that the New York Philharmonic had retained Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to explore the technical issue of whether the orchestra could logistically fit into Carnegie Hall. But we were told that this inquiry was low key, that it was conducted at the behest of a very few vocal members of the board, and that it would go nowhere.

In March, Guenther had told me in a telephone conversation that he was going to walk into the office of Zarin Mehta, the New York Philharmonic’s executive director, and tell him to “knock off this Carnegie Hall inquiry.” In April, Bruce Crawford told me Guenther had assured him that the notion of the New York Philharmonic going to Carnegie Hall was so unlikely that Guenther would resign as chair if it ever came up for serious consideration. Crawford also reported that in another conversation, Guenther had pledged that the New York Philharmonic would relocate to Carnegie Hall only over its chairman’s dead body.

Either the Paul Guenther we saw that May 29 afternoon never had that promised showdown with Mehta, or it yielded an entirely unsatisfactory result. He didn’t resign as chair of the New York Philharmonic. In possession of all his vital signs, he failed to redeem his pledge.

Bruce Crawford and I resolved not to become entangled in any personality issues. The most that Crawford would allow himself to say for public consumption was that he and Lincoln Center had been treated in less than collegial fashion by his counterpart at the New York Philharmonic. Crawford’s low-key and cool reaction set the tone for Lincoln Center’s modus operandi in the months ahead. From our perspective, Lincoln Center’s mandate was to serve the public. We turned our attention almost immediately to how best to physically transform Avery Fisher Hall’s venue, its programming, and its identity in the wake of the New York Philharmonic’s anticipated departure. At our request, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programs, Jane Moss, crafted a white paper outlining many exciting artistic initiatives that could take place in Avery Fisher Hall on dates now available for the first time. Its alternative futures were extremely promising. We were enthusiastic about them.

While we were determined to avoid the ad hominem and to attend to wounded feelings, not least our own, we were also confounded by the lack of any logical explanation for what had just happened.

One school of thought had it that Guenther’s leadership style was so disorganized and mercurial that to assume negative motives would be to pay him a compliment. Robin Pogrebin, the indefatigable
New York Times
reporter who rightly regarded the redevelopment of Lincoln Center as her exclusive beat, quoted a Philharmonic board member as characterizing the chairman’s decision-making process as nothing other than “ready, fire, aim.”
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Evidence for this opinion included what were widely regarded as two bungled searches for music director. According to multiple news accounts, neither Kurt Mazur nor Lorin Maazel was the New York Philharmonic’s preferred choice. The sense was widespread that in Mazur and Maazel the involved trustees had settled rather than selected. Both were septuagenarians, retained at the tail end of their careers. Neither would introduce new repertoire, new energy, or new direction to an orchestra many felt to be in need of them. Neither could connect to New York City in any meaningful way.
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Mazur brought discipline and Maazel superb baton technique and rehearsal efficiency to the musicians, but little to excite audiences and impress critics. Indeed, virtually no young conductors—Robert Spano, David Robertson, James Conlon, and Michael Tilson Thomas among them—were given serious consideration in either search. The hiring process in both searches was criticized even by prominent members of the New York Philharmonic board for being uninspired and tactically clumsy.

This same lack of clarity and purposefulness of the orchestra was fully reflected in its confusion throughout the process of thinking through a new hall. First, Guenther and Mehta argued that nothing less than tearing down the existing structure and starting afresh would suffice. Then they contended that following that approach would be too costly and too huge a fund-raising task and would keep the Philharmonic homeless for too long. Then their view shifted to preferring a new auditorium in the existing structure. But soon Mehta, Guenther, and a few other trustees complained that without a new footprint the Philharmonic’s needs couldn’t be satisfied, that the new auditorium couldn’t guarantee world-class acoustics, and that even it would cost too much money.

In 1962, a new baseball team was formed in the National League. Its name was the New York Mets. The near-term prospects for the franchise did not look good. The idea occurred to management that perhaps hiring out of retirement Casey Stengel, the legendary New York Yankees manager, to nurture the motley collection of young players and to guide the “over the hill” types who constituted the Mets’ first team would make good sense. Stengel accepted in the hope of creating a decent franchise.

After the first two months of the season, it became abundantly clear that Stengel’s hopes would be dashed. The Mets were the laughingstock of the National League, consigned to its basement, last place. At the end of the year, their record stood at 42 wins and 120 losses. And nothing that Stengel could do helped matters much.

Jimmy Breslin reported that Stengel at one point during the season looked forlornly down the Mets bench, shook his head, and plaintively asked, “Doesn’t anyone here know how to play this game?”

In October 2003, when the New York Philharmonic announced that it hadn’t meant what it said five months before and was “returning,” having never really left Lincoln Center, I was quoted as saying, “Welcome home. All’s forgiven. We have a lot to discuss.”
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That remark was not off-the-cuff. It expressed my careful, if seemingly lighthearted, attempt to build a bridge back to a battered and chastened refugee orchestra. After leading the IRC for six years, during which time it had resettled a total of about seventy thousand refugees in America, I could credibly claim to know something about the process. To return home, the refugee needs to advance the case convincingly that he or she is fleeing from danger or is reuniting with family. By my lights, the New York Philharmonic, an institutional refugee, had met the latter test and was therefore entitled to come home. That explains those three pithy sentences. They came by way of an embrace.

Had I been less responsible, or more accurate, or had I simply given vent to my true feelings about the performance of the New York Philharmonic’s leadership, I might just as well have quoted Stengel.

T
HE FLIGHT OF
the New York Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall was purportedly designed to achieve freedom from the strictures of the Lincoln Center relationship. But its position as an anchor tenant at Avery Fisher Hall and a partner of Lincoln Center in financing its operations offered the orchestra what Carnegie Hall could not or would not. A wide, almost unlimited choice of performance and rehearsal dates in season. Complete freedom as to what would be performed in the symphonic literature and by whom. The choice of music director and all other staff, artistic and managerial. Control over the New York Philharmonic name and how it is depicted, the sources from which it chooses to raise funds, and the number and kind of trustees that
would populate its board of directors as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Apparently, soon after the triumphant expression of an intention to merge operations was announced with great fanfare, it became abundantly clear that all of these freedoms enjoyed by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center might well be relinquished if it returned to Carnegie Hall.