They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (28 page)
Authors: Reynold Levy
Vogelstein called during the search process and asked me to be candid about a leading candidate for the job. Her name was Kathy Brown. To my mind, Brown was close to a perfect choice. She loved dance as an art form. She adored the New York City Ballet as an institution. She had been, for a seven-year period, its major gifts fund-raiser, and as such knew her way around the board, the important individual benefactors, the repertoire, and the institution’s leading figures, not least Peter Martins. She had held a similar post at the New York Public Library and had enjoyed a successful run there. During that stint, I tried hard to recruit her to become the development director of the IRC while I was the president, a change of field that did not engage Brown’s interest.
Instead, she joined Jazz at Lincoln Center’s staff, moving from being its superb head of development at a critical early stage in the life of this fledgling institution to become its executive director. From that post, she was wooed to be the chief operating officer of WNYC, the largest and most successful radio station in the National Public Radio network.
Quite unlike Mortier or Steel, here was a professional with truly relevant experience, and then some. Familiarity with trustees and a temperament to relate well to them. Experience in all dimensions of fund-raising. A close student of the New York City Ballet—its programs, its dancers, its rhythms, and its routines. Someone who knew her way around the operations of a complex house, including some difficult unions that had been the beneficiaries of years of sweetheart deals. Most of all, Kathy Brown admired Peter Martins and genuinely empathized with his huge job. It included not only artistic direction of
America’s largest ballet company, but also oversight of a closely related nonprofit, the School of American Ballet, directed with skill and finesse by Marjorie Van derCook. SAB is also a substantial operation, with its own operating budget nearing $12 million. Kathy understood Martins. His workload, operating style, personality, and pace of decision making.
She was appointed executive director of the New York City Ballet in mid-December 2009. Positive change was not long in coming. Much of what should go up, rose: trustee contributions, foundation and corporate support, ticket income in a completely rescaled house, rental revenue, morale, and favorable press coverage.
Most of what should go down, declined: head count, marketing expenses as a percentage of earned income, and complaints from patrons and licensees.
Sooner than even I had thought possible, dance companies flocked to perform in the David H. Koch Theater, either as renters or enjoying the good fortune of being presented. The Nederland Dance Theatre. The Paris Opera Ballet. The Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The San Francisco Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre for its fall season (the late spring to early summer run would remain at the Metropolitan Opera House). The Mark Morris Dance Company. The Paul Taylor Dance Company. The Bolshoi Ballet.
As predicted, dance enthusiasts within hailing distance of the David H. Koch Theater were deliriously happy. Only the airlines and City Center were disappointed. The former is now less used by dance mavens traveling around the world. The latter had previously housed Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, and ABT and had to bid them good-bye.
By the time I departed Lincoln Center and less than four years after Brown arrived, the New York City Ballet’s budget had improved from that significant $8.5 million deficit to a modest surplus. A fund-raising campaign to strengthen the company’s balance sheet and to finance additional capital improvements was well along in the planning stages. Touring of the company as a whole and in a nimble, lower cost version had been reinvigorated. And experiments in digital media, including putting some ballet performances in movie theaters, were in advanced stages of planning.
In reflecting on the speed of this remarkable turnaround, I was reminded of a remark of Lenin’s that I had first come across many years
ago while in graduate school: “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.”
Kathy Brown would be the first to acknowledge that what was accomplished so rapidly resulted from team effort. But high-performing teams need skilled leaders. In Brown, the board of the New York City Ballet found a smart, savvy, hardworking, and utterly likable chief executive.
T
HE
O
PERA AND THE
B
ALLET
, occupants of the same home, dealt with their challenges very differently. The Opera engaged in escapism and avoidance of its central challenges. The basic blocking and tackling of a successful organization was ignored, as a search for a new home diverted energy and attention from hard and unyielding realities.
The board of directors of the Opera did not insist on a budget in which expenses and revenues were in balance, nor engage in a vigorous debate about the identity of future executive leadership. Its members contributed financially far less than most were capable of offering and far less than what the Opera needed.
At the Ballet, the lesson to be learned is that the quality of trustees and management matter. If they are clear about their respective roles and responsibilities, and if all agree on the challenges to be seized, an organization can turn around and recover quickly. From 2008 to 2010, the Ballet was in an institutional funk, its finances in the red, its audiences eroding.
What changed? Not the market for classical dance, not Mr. Balanchine’s and Mr. Robbins’s choreography, not even the principal dancers, very much. What changed was the energy, determination, and persistence of sound and purposefully led management and trustees, working together, asking one another for improved performance. What changed was the establishment of a new fall season and improved marketing, as reflected in better box office results. What changed was disciplined trustee monitoring of operations, the establishment of clear benchmarks to be met, and the increasing generosity of the board, with many providing annual contributions of $100,000 or more.
The contrast in board and management comportment was stark. The Ballet now thrives. The Opera died. Why?
Yes, Mr. Martins’s choice of the repertoire to be performed, the selection of commissioned work, and the artistry of the New York City
Ballet dancers all matter a great deal to the success of the enterprise. Reasonable fans of ballet naturally differ from season to season and decade to decade in their assessment of the company’s performance on the artistic side. But the solidity of the stage on which dance (or music, or theater) is performed depends as much or more on the excellence of management, the effectiveness of trustee oversight, and the size of their benefactions. The New York City Ballet now enjoys first-rate performance in management and governance. It will require continued persistence to maintain that track record.
It is as if all concerned parties had decided to sacrifice on the altar of a cause larger than themselves. At the New York City Ballet, the board and staff might just as well have taken that solemn oath of the kind I had imagined. Its key commitments were being honored rather than ignored or violated. The trustees of the New York City Ballet held themselves accountable for the fiscal and artistic health of the organization.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change.
—CHARLES DARWIN
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
F
or a number of years before my arrival at Lincoln Center, it failed, and by a wide margin, to cover the true cost of maintaining its plant, even accounting for handsome parking revenue and modest public space rental income. One major reason for the deteriorated state of Lincoln Center’s buildings and infrastructure was the unwillingness or inability of all involved parties to collectively cover those deficits and to maintain adequate cash reserves to pay for very much-needed remedial work. The well-known developer Marshall Rose told me before I officially assumed my post at Lincoln Center that its budget and those of the resident artistic organizations were in substantial part balanced on the back of deferred maintenance. A decade later, little had changed in the resistance of constituents to joining Lincoln Center in setting aside ample funds for plant upkeep.
With the redevelopment of Lincoln Center concluded, collectively offsetting any public space deficit that might arise or contributing to an adequate reserve fund to pay for future plant repairs should have been acceptable to everyone. After all, the new campus was splendid, modern, and up to date. Its infrastructure was in excellent shape. But in view of the financial condition of most Lincoln Center constituents, varying, in many cases, from problematic to dire, such an expense was one many thought they could ill afford. Instead, they preferred to minimize the assessments needed to keep the physical plant sound. Some simply wished they would disappear entirely. They wanted a free ride. A few constituents even held to the view that if they did not offer financial support, eventually Lincoln Center, “the landlord,” would be compelled to absorb the entire bill, just as had been the case in redeveloping all of the public spaces on campus.
Under these circumstances, Lincoln Center sought to limit increases in the expenses of security, engineering, and maintenance staffs to no greater than the rate of inflation. We worked to ensure that all suppliers were subjected to rigorous and frequent competitive bidding. And we looked to generate additional earned revenue in new, entrepreneurial ways.
In 2011 IBM mounted its THINK exhibit on the future of world cities in the underpass to the garage drop-off in front of Lincoln Center as part of its one hundredth birthday celebration in Alice Tully Hall and adjacent spaces. Film premieres and television episodes of all kinds were viewed in Avery Fisher Hall or Alice Tully Hall or shot in Josie Robertson Plaza or Hearst Plaza. Photography shoots also frequently occurred out of doors.
Among the popular premieres featured in the new Alice Tully Hall and in Avery Fisher Hall were
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part I
and
Part II
,
The Great Gatsby
,
War Horse
,
Lincoln
,
Sherlock Holmes
,
Waiting for “Superman
,
” Les Miserables
,
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
,
The Grand Budapest Hotel
, and
Superman: Man of Steel
. The public spaces of Lincoln Center attracted
Gossip Girl
,
Black Swan
,
Sesame Street
,
The Celebrity Apprentice
,
Glee
, and
House of Cards
.
As a result, the redeveloped Lincoln Center now draws into its network newcomers and veterans who regularly rent facilities, such as Warner Brothers, Paramount, Walt Disney Studios, DreamWorks, HBO,
ABC, Universal, Netflix, AOL, PBS, Discovery, Fox Searchlight, and The Weinstein Company.
There were annual investor conclaves. Birthday, graduation, engagement, and wedding celebrations. Product introductions of cars, consumer goods, and clothing. Ceremonies and parties preceding or following film premieres.
Memorial services for famous New Yorkers like Beverly Sills; Robert Tisch; Estée Lauder and her daughter-in-law, Evelyn Lauder; former chair of Lincoln Center Martin E. Segal; Nora Ephron; Lou Reed; and Edgar Bronfman were also held at Lincoln Center. That these families wished to honor the memories of their loved ones on our campus spoke to the centrality and symbolic importance of Lincoln Center.
All of these uses to which our campus was put helped to generate income and to have Lincoln Center be viewed as serving the public, broadly construed. These steps not only assisted Lincoln Center and its resident organizations financially, but it drew to it new fans and loyalists. Over 286 outside, nonconstituent rentals of Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Kaplan Penthouse, and the David Rubenstein Atrium generated approximately $6.3 million of net income, and more than thirty-five rentals of all public spaces generated about $4 million of revenue in the last fully recorded fiscal year, 2013–2014.
B
Y FAR THE BOLDEST
achievement was responding favorably to New York City’s request that Lincoln Center accommodate a move of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week from Bryant Park near the New York Public Library to Damrosch Park on the Lincoln Center campus.