They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (37 page)

“Well, I feel similarly. You pledged the gift in question to Beverly Sills over two years ago. I have no idea to whom she may have spoken, or who inside Lincoln Center knew the details. But I wish to sincerely apologize to you. And, of course, as the president of Lincoln Center, I assume full responsibility for what could have been an unauthorized disclosure from someone working or volunteering here.”

Understandably, the mayor wished to prevent letting trustees of other arts and culture institutions in town with which he was also associated know the details of his generosity to Lincoln Center. Why have his friends and colleagues who served on the boards of other institutions “complain” that they were less favored by his benefactions? For that reason, and others, I am sure, he wished to maintain some semblance of privacy.

Much to my relief, I think the mayor was surprised by the firmness of my reply, disarmed by the analogous reference to his own recent
praiseworthy act, and pleased that I took full responsibility for the disclosure.

Evasions, circumlocutions, and running away from rather toward problems are not part of Bloomberg’s character. He certainly does not admire these traits in others. The conversation then shifted. He recalled his own service as a trustee of Lincoln Center and how frequently matters discussed in the boardroom somehow became public knowledge, rather quickly.

“The place has always leaked like a sieve,” he acknowledged.

The conversation ended far less coldly than it began, but fell considerably short of the mayor warmly accepting my apology.

In general, Bloomberg’s relationship to Lincoln Center was extremely positive. Beverly Sills was his very close friend, one of only a handful of people annually invited to his small private birthday parties. The physical redevelopment of Lincoln Center was to be a massive undertaking and would not have happened without Bloomberg’s $15 million pledge.

In fact, Bloomberg, not given to off-the-cuff humor, regularly used these lines on the campaign trail while running for election to his first term in office:

Some people think that my spending $75 million is a lot of money to run for mayor.

But what they do not know, is that I served on the board of Lincoln Center and might have succeeded Beverly Sills as its chair.

And if that had happened, it would have cost me a hell of a lot more than $75 million.

As well as leading by his own example, Bloomberg stuck to an agreement reached by Lincoln Center and his predecessor at the very end of Mayor Giuliani’s second term in office. In rough outline, it committed $240 million of city capital funds to a Lincoln Center campuswide physical redevelopment campaign.

It was the first campuswide capital investment since Lincoln Center had been created forty-five years before. Mayor Bloomberg was an indispensable partner in seeing this complex set of projects through from inception to completion. While success may have a thousand parents, the private party who was present at the creation with a generous
gift and the public sector angel throughout was without doubt Michael Bloomberg.

Greatly influenced by a trusted colleague who was soon to become first deputy mayor, Patti Harris, Bloomberg was conspicuous for his supportive presence at cultural venues in every borough—established and fledgling, general and audience specific—and in all genres: theater, ballet, modern dance, opera, jazz, vocal music, chamber music, orchestral work, and visual art.

Bloomberg viewed arts and culture as good business, part and parcel of his notable success in increasing tourism from twenty-nine million visitors annually in 2001 to fifty-three million by 2013, the last year of his third term.

His enthusiasm for the arts as an engine of economic development and as a magnet that drew creative talent to the city of New York, combined with his personal generosity and his commitment of city capital funds, was responsible for nothing less than a renaissance of unprecedented building projects: the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Theatre for a New Audience, the Queens and the Bronx Museums, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, City Center, the Museum of the City of New York, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Roundabout, the Second Stage, and the Public Theater all experienced major renovation, expansion, or both, backed by the City of New York. As, of course, did Lincoln Center and all of its resident artistic organizations.

Yes, the mayor’s bureaucracy could be confounding. The multiple and staggered city agency reviews of the work of redevelopment at every single stage was costly and time-consuming. I learned that taking on a huge building project in New York City was not an assignment for the impatient or for those with a low tolerance for frustration. And the decline in annual operating support from city tax levy dollars to cultural institutions was worrisome.

But these are quibbles. Bloomberg and his colleagues got the big picture right. Art works on many levels. And nowhere more so than in New York City, the cultural capital of the world. His administration supported arts and culture like no other, as did he.

The city began to attract first-rate architects—Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio, Herzog and de Meuron,
Christian de Portzamparc, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and David Rockwell—to design new and expanded artistic spaces. Stimulated by public support, foundations, corporations, and individuals donated unprecedented sums to complement the commitment of government.

I can think of a few but not many very successful, creative businessmen who have become billionaires many times over within a period of three decades. I can list a handful or two of creative, seminal, philanthropic leaders whose gifts have made a real difference in this world. And I can enumerate some outstanding public officials and mayors. But I cannot identify any figure in the twentieth or twenty-first century who has played all three roles with the determination, drive, and brilliance of New York City’s 108th mayor.

His track record of fidelity to the arts and to Lincoln Center was almost enough for me to accept blame for a disclosure to the press I knew nothing of and had nothing whatever to do with.

A H
UNGARIAN REFUGEE
, resettled as a teenager by the IRC, Andy Grove took one glance at America and fell in love. He had found freedom. Fate had bestowed on him the IRC. It resettled Andy in a foreign country, the United States of America. It outfitted him with a hearing aid, offered counseling and financial support of all kinds, and advised him that he could enroll as a matriculated student at no cost in The City College of New York.

When I arrived at the IRC, Grove was a world-renowned figure and a modest (very modest, relative to his means) donor. No one from the IRC had endeavored to contact him personally, until I did.

We met in an unpretentious suite in a midtown hotel. He was with his wife, Eva. Andy came across as a no-nonsense, all-business interrogator. America was then in the midst of the Kosovo crisis. Grove asked to be briefed.

“The IRC is one of only four NGOs present in Kosovo when the NATO bombing began,” I started.

During the half hour that followed, Andy asked many probing questions. I had but one request of him. Would he join the IRC’s board of directors?

I was elated when he said yes.

Several years later came another question from me. Would Andy agree to be honored at a gala held in the heart of Silicon Valley?

As the president of the IRC, I was struck by how distant the world of high-tech was from humanitarian refugee causes, even though hundreds of senior executives up to and including CEOs were themselves first- or second-generation immigrants or refugees. Grove provided the chance to break through into this wealthy, scientifically sophisticated, and very influential community.

We were told that Silicon Valley types did not show up at fundraising events. We were informed that those relatively few who live in San Francisco would not trek up to Burlingame, where the event was to be held at a hotel close to the airport and convenient for the landing of corporate jets. We were informed that those who worked in the valley wished to go home at the end of the day and would not assemble in a hotel room for dinner and speeches, even to honor one of their own. To do so was, well, “so New York.”

The naysayers underestimated our bicoastal determination, and they certainly didn’t account for how beloved was Andy Grove, as a founding father not only of Intel but more generally of the high-technology community.

Tom Labrecque, then CEO of Chase Bank and an IRC board member, readily agreed to emcee the event. Bill Gates, then a very active CEO of Microsoft, served as its chair. Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, at the request of another IRC board member, Henry Kissinger, agreed to be the featured speaker.

But the centerpiece was Grove, who spoke of the kindness of strangers. About how the IRC helped situate him in a new country with counseling, financial support, and that new, relatively inconspicuous hearing aid. He held it up for all to see, together with his identity card, which he had saved all these years, a precious piece of paper prepared by the IRC that permitted him to be admitted to the country.

Grove offered his heartfelt thanks not only to the organization that had rescued him from his native Hungary during the 1956 revolution through its office in Vienna, but also to his immediate personal family and to his extended professional family, present in that packed ballroom.

The message was simple and powerful. Today’s Andy Grove is not Hungarian. He or she is Cambodian, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Burmese,
Bangladeshi, Russian, or Indian. It matters not. America has been blessed by newcomers, brave and ambitious people who flee persecution in their own countries and envision a future for themselves and their children here. Not so long ago, he had been one of those “tired and poor,” a member of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” He told those gathered in the ballroom that it was up to them to guarantee that the words etched on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are given new life, generation after generation, not just for the benefit of refugees and immigrants, but for the future vitality and creativity of our country, to which they have contributed disproportionately.

The IRC won many friends that night, and Grove rekindled his own interest in the refugee cause by becoming a major and important contributor of time and treasure.

P
ERHAPS THE LAST
of the generation to legitimately claim to be a founding father of Lincoln Center was Martin E. Segal. I had been proud to call him a friend ever since I had first met him and his wife Edith when I was executive director of the 92nd Street Y. Marty was a confidant, an informal advisor, an indispensable part of Lincoln Center’s intelligent memory.

Born in Russia on July 4, 1916, Segal was a life force. He once told me that his very first involvement in the arts occurred when he was about six years old. He played the role of Spinach in a first-grade play. Rumor has it that he insisted on top billing. His wife of seventy-three years, Edith, the love of his life, overheard him telling this story. She whispered that Spinach was Marty’s first and last nonspeaking role.

Segal progressed from a vegetable that’s good for you to becoming the founding president of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. During his tenure, Marty arranged for Charlie Chaplin’s very controversial return to America to become the first Film Society honoree. The second was Fred Astaire. There were few things that Segal didn’t much like, but going to the racetrack was one, cigars another. To woo Fred, who loved both, Marty smoked from the stands at the Kentucky Derby with Astaire, his host.

With Nat Leventhal as Lincoln Center’s president at his side, Marty chaired its board of directors with consummate skill, finesse, and prodigious fund-raising from 1981 to 1986. After concluding his term as
chair, for the next twenty-five years Segal faithfully attended Lincoln Center board meetings and participated fully in the active board emeriti group, serving with distinction and characteristic flair as its cochair.

He could be a stickler for detail. Few acts of omission were as inexcusable to him as failing to show up, as promised, on a gala occasion or at a Green Room Dinner, without at least calling in advance. Whenever that happened, Segal is reputed to have asked his secretary and assistant, Bonnie Zitofsky, who worked closely with him for almost half a century, to follow up with a telephone conversation of her own, which went something like this.

Bonnie: “Hello, is this Mr. Adler’s secretary?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m calling for Mr. Martin Segal, and he asked me to express his grave concern about Mr. Adler’s health and to inquire as to what hospital flowers should be sent, or whether Mr. Adler is convalescing at home.”

“Well, Mr. Adler is perfectly fine, and he is in the office.”

“Oh, I see, I’ll report that to Mr. Segal. I am sure that he will be relieved to learn of Mr. Adler’s good health. And I am also very certain that Mr. Adler will be hearing directly from Mr. Segal very soon.”

Marty Segal loved the arts, and he adored artists. He found it simply magical that a violinist or pianist could walk into a grand space, like Alice Tully Hall, and fill it with beautiful sound. Or that an actor could transport one into another time and place, inhabiting a character as one might wear a custom-made suit or a made-to-order dress. For Segal, there was nothing like a night at the movies or opera, preceded or followed by animated conversation between and among friends about art, politics, current events, and what could be done to help repair our broken world.