They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (4 page)

The band, the symphony, the chorus, the chamber music group, and the annual musical theater competition; the class trips to Broadway and Off Broadway, and to museums: all these in-school and extracurricular activities were led by an inspiring faculty deeply committed to exposing their students to the joys of music, dance, theater, film, and visual art.

What existed in abundance for most school kids in those decades had largely disappeared from New York City’s public school system by the end of the twentieth century. As I prepared to meet with Lincoln Center’s search committee, I wondered whether its members would encourage a new president to take the lead in restoring the arts to school curriculum and exposing kids in unprecedented numbers to the treasures at Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Center should be devoted to the first-generation New York family, that Metro card–holding, brown-bag-carrying youngster, those children receiving one or more forms of public assistance. No kid should grow up in the cultural capital of the world without being exposed to the best in the performing and visual arts. Lincoln Center needed to show the way not just by enunciating that precept, but by practicing it. I was confident that our doing so would be neither unnoticed nor unemulated.

M
UCH OF MY OWN
enthusiasm for the performing arts and concern for their financial well-being originated in my childhood and late
adolescence. Abraham Lincoln High School and the intellectually ambitious students drawn to it nurtured my exhilaration in learning. Lincoln was a very large public high school. There were about as many students in my senior class as there were in the total undergraduate enrollment at Hobart College, where I was destined to go. I remember looking around the college campus and asking, “Where is everybody?”

Hobart professed justifiable pride in an outstanding faculty that cared about teaching in small classes and in the pursuit of a liberal arts education as an intellectual adventure. I couldn’t wait to partake of it.

My only major concern was money. Hobart offered a generous scholarship, but it was less than half of what I needed for tuition, room, and board. Some of the remainder I could borrow from the state and federal governments at a very low interest rate, but debt was a condition I hoped to avoid as much as possible.

From the beginning of my time in Geneva, New York, in 1962 until graduation in 1966, I took every job I could. I arrived two weeks early in my freshman year to work at the bookstore. There was no pay, but I received free books. I worked the food line in the cafeteria for $1 a meal and all I could eat. Later, when it became clear that I was a very good student, I served as a tutor to both members of fraternities and athletes, who needed all the assistance they could afford in swimming upstream intellectually to pass some fairly demanding required courses.

My dad offered to help, but we never discussed how much money would be involved or how often he could send it. Then, in my first week at school, a lovely letter from him arrived with a check for $7. He sent heartfelt wishes for success at Hobart and promised to forward the same sum every week. He wished it could be more.

Well, forty weeks of school times $7 per week equaled $280, about 5 percent of the some $4,000 I needed for tuition, room, and board. I knew that Dad was doing all he felt he could to support me.

Soon after receiving Dad’s letter, I joined my newfound friends at a local pub and pizza hangout named after its owner, “Dutch.” I signed over the check to Dutch to pay for a pizza and a Pepsi. As a kid from Brooklyn, I knew something about decent pizza, and what Dutch offered wasn’t bad at all. Given how few culinary choices there were in Geneva, Dutch’s affordable fare and friendly atmosphere made me feel very much at home.

A week later, on a break from studying, I made my way back to Dutch’s. As I entered, he greeted me and led me over to a corner, asking how I was faring at school. We exchanged pleasantries, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Son, I am sorry to tell you, but your dad’s check bounced.”

I was mortified. Dutch said it was no problem, last week’s food and drink would be his treat and not to worry, but he felt I ought to know.

When I returned to my dorm room, I wrote Dad a letter. I exaggerated the number of jobs I was able to manage and told him that while I appreciated very much receiving his weekly checks, really, they were not necessary.

He never sent another. The bounced check was never mentioned. He must have felt relieved by my freeing him of the obligation to send me something weekly. Finances at home were obviously much tighter than I had ever imagined.

I learned many lessons at college, and not all of them were in the classroom. Financially, I was on my own. And I have been ever since.

Really, I did not mind. In fact, it occurred to me that until my freshman year in college, I had never given much thought to our family’s financial circumstances. True, sometimes my birthday gift as a child would come months late, whenever the household’s cash trickle allowed. For me, sleeping in the living room next to my younger sister, Joyce, was quite natural.

My pleasures as a child were simple, and Dad had a knack for making them fun. For example, on Saturdays, on the rare occasions when we were alone, while my mom was at the beauty parlor, we would go up to the rooftop of our apartment building, where one of the tenants maintained a pigeon coop. On those occasions, Dad would remove his trumpet from its case and play tune after tune. I was totally absorbed, a joyful, admiring audience of one.

We’d then return to our fourth-floor apartment, where Dad would prepare lunch for just the two of us. His menu was consistent: scrambled eggs and my choice of either rye toast or an English muffin, with sliced tomato on the side, and Tropicana orange juice to drink.

We had no formal dining room, so usually as a family we ate together in a nook at the tail end of our tiny kitchen. But with Mom not home, we
didn’t need that much space, so Dad would open the oven door, which served as our table, and we both sat at footstools, happily conversing.

By the time I was nine years old, and my dad was thirty, in the afternoon, weather permitting, I was allowed to join my friends in the immediate vicinity of our apartment building. One of us—Johnny Rodriguez, Elliot Wienerman, Mark Feldman, or Allen Rome—would bring a pink rubber ball—the only kind worth using, a Spalding—and depending on how many friends gathered, we played street games to our heart’s content: hit the penny, off the wall, curves, punch ball, stick ball, stoop ball, slap ball, kings, handball, paddle ball, running bases.

If the weather was inclement, then I was in for a real treat. Dad would roll up the throw rug in the living room and lay out brown butcher block paper. He would find a set of magic markers in a desk drawer and put a 78-rpm record on the Victrola to play Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, or Vivaldi. He would ask me to imagine what the composer might have been thinking or what kind of mood he was trying to convey and then draw whatever came to mind.

It was an exercise in creativity, and we would discuss my earliest attempts to think about what the sounds I was hearing meant to me and how they moved me. Translating them into another form of art was always exciting. Dad made sure that the drawing was Scotch taped to the front door to greet Mom when she returned home.

If there was time left over, then came the really fun part. My dad was a skilled tap dancer. He greatly admired both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, but because he was five feet eight, like Mr. Kelly, he would impersonate him, putting on khakis, athletic socks, penny loafers with taps on them, and a pretty tight-fitting white T-shirt. Then he would dance a Kelly routine just like those made famous by the movie
Singin’ in the Rain
.

At bar mitzvahs and weddings my father could be relied upon to tap a dance for the assembled guests.

One of my most memorable late birthday gifts was a certificate to attend classes at a tap dance school. To this day, it doesn’t take much to coax me into a time step or a soft shoe. My upbringing provided an enticing exposure to music, dance, and visual art. It prepared me to appreciate the rich cultural inheritance we all can enjoy.

These childhood pleasures and the bliss that comes from economic ignorance faded as I grew older, replaced by a sense of financial insecurity. I pledged that my spouse, children, sister, niece, and granddaughter would not want for life’s necessities or even occasional extravagances. What lured me away from the 92nd Street Y to AT&T was not just feeling that my work was complete at the world’s largest community center. The opportunity to test my mettle in a for-profit firm entering competitive foreign and domestic markets was enticing. Could I prove my worth to senior executives for whom a profit and loss statement and the return on equity were all that mattered?

Taking that job would put me in an entirely new financial condition. A handsome salary, annual bonuses, and stock option awards would allow me to build a nest egg. Then, after a decent interval (which turned out to be a dozen years), I might return to public service, without worrying about whether I could afford to do so.

Although my twelve years with AT&T proved to be lucrative, at least by my own standards and expectations, they did not mitigate the impact of my encounter in early adulthood with the reality of debt and its consequences. I am sure that this experience is partly responsible for my ironclad commitment to deliver balanced or surplus budget results in all of the posts I have held, for all the years I have held them.

Living beyond one’s means is unhealthy for families and institutions. Working hard to generate surplus capital is an admirable discipline, organizationally and personally. Special needs and rainy days are inevitable. Accumulated savings will help to manage them. That small pizza and Pepsi at Dutch’s and that bounced check embarrassed an eighteen-year-old freshman. It was one source of distress that never again made an appearance in my life.

M
Y YEARS AT
Lincoln Center were tumultuous and eventful. They began in March 2002 and ended on January 31, 2014.

During this period the New York Philharmonic publicly reversed itself, first triumphantly announcing a merger with Carnegie Hall, and then, five months later, abashedly declaring the merger a nullity, much to the embarrassment of all involved parties.

This fiasco was no surprise to those who had watched the New York Philharmonic closely. We sadly observed an orchestra adrift, lacking in
managerial and trustee leadership. Its superb musicians, often performing with astonishing virtuosity, deserved better.

During his seven-year tenure, its music director, Lorin Maazel, was arguably among the world’s most technically able conductors, and surely
the
most handsomely paid. He was also, before and after concerts, for all intents and purposes missing in action, a veritable mystery man. During his tenure, never once, unlike virtually all of his predecessors, did he deign to conduct The Juilliard Orchestra or any other private school ensemble. He never expressed interest in improving the state of music education in New York City’s elementary and secondary schools. Indeed, he rarely appeared on local radio or television. The board of directors and staff seemed entirely comfortable with a music director largely unrelated to the city that surrounded him. The New York Philharmonic was in a sense a disembodied ensemble, led by a globe-trotting septuagenarian, more at ease on his Virginia farm or, apparently, in almost any European capital, than in Manhattan.

Concurrently, Gustavo Dudamel, Michael Tilson Thomas (MTM), and David Robertson, to name but three conductors, came to personify the excitement and energy generated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the St. Louis Symphony, respectively. These are well-led institutions; they know what they are about. They have artistic profiles and stand for something musically. Audiences and critics flock to their performances. Other cities in America and around the world invite them to perform, early and often. Each artistic leader embodies and personifies the town that engages him professionally. MTM and Gustavo are known to concertgoers and taxi drivers alike. That was not the case for their counterpart in New York City.

It is said that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. The New York Philharmonic’s detour to Carnegie Hall was paved with a reckless neglect of the interests of a precious artistic institution and the public it was bound to serve. For Lincoln Center’s resident orchestra, maintaining robust audiences was a constant challenge. The New York Philharmonic was stuck, year after year, with an alarming operating deficit. It was neither seasonal nor cyclical, but structural. Governance and management mediocrity became the norm. How could this condition be tolerated by respected trustees possessed
of the capacity to express their views and, if necessary, part company with an organization that seemed to be just coasting along?

At the same time, the New York City Opera fought hard to leave what it described as a deficient New York State Theater in favor of becoming one of the resident artistic organizations at the 9/11 site, but without success. Twelve years later and counting, it remains a mystery as to which artistic organizations will occupy a piece of that hallowed ground.

As the New York City Opera searched for another home, there was an air of desperation about its odyssey. In a sense, the search was nothing more than an exercise in futility and escapism. There was simply never an adequate audience or fund-raising base to build a new opera house from the ground up on the island of Manhattan.