They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (41 page)

T
he voluntary routine of rising every morning at 4:45, no matter what time I fell asleep and without the benefit of any alarm clock, and arriving at the office no later than 6:15 a.m., was beginning to take its toll.

I enjoyed the solitude of that early hour. Uninterrupted time to read and write and to respond to incessant e-mails. The space to think about how best to manage the day, the week, and the month ahead most effectively. You can accomplish a lot between 6:15 and 9:00 a.m., not least reaching important people who are also at their desks before their assistants arrive.

If that was the start of most days, at least four nights a week, often five, there were fund-raising prospects and visiting dignitaries to be hosted by me at dinner and then a show. Most often I chose what to see, and with the help of staff members I’d select a dozen or so couples to invite. Generally, three to four were available, making for a party of eight to ten.

Spending all of an evening in such company was a terrific way to come to know donors and donor prospects and what they are about. The aim was to puzzle out how Lincoln Center might entice each to
contribute a significant first gift or renew and enhance a previous commitment. Part of what made the job at Lincoln Center so much fun was meeting new and intriguing people. Their professional and personal lives, their interests, opinions, and convictions, were almost always engaging. And one thing I learned for sure. People generally love, and those who do not love do not mind, talking about themselves.

Done well, the beginning and the end of every day, not to mention what happened in between, demanded my full and undivided attention. In between deskwork at dawn and social duties in the evening, I found myself motivating, energizing, supporting, and directing staff colleagues, on whom many psychic calories were spent. Embracing trustees and volunteers loaded with ideas and eager to make their mark, to leave an impression on Lincoln Center, also fell largely to me.

The job description did not end there.

Cultivating corporate and foundation donors, coping with the seemingly endless expressed needs of Lincoln Center’s constituents, who treated the “mother ship” as an endless supply of resources with demands that ranged from the serious to the petty. Dealing with appointed and elected officials at all levels of government from around the city, state, country, and world. Responding to requests from outside Lincoln Center for meetings, speeches, and counseling sessions. Launching a start-up consulting practice for Lincoln Center. Helping staff and trustees in need of a reference, a recommendation, a nominating letter, a good word to an admissions officer, a co-op board, or a hospital trustee.

Managing expenses down and revenue up. Recruiting and retaining best-in-class staff and trustees. Keeping one eye on the operating budget and the other on Lincoln Center’s balance sheet. And communicating, consistently, about Lincoln Center’s priorities, goals, and mission.

After some eight nonstop years of all this and more, I longed for a respite. A truly huge undertaking, the campus renovation, was almost all done, with just a couple of elements left to complete. It was 2010, and I had overdelivered on my promise to the Lincoln Center search committee to serve at least five to seven years in office.

That new theater for which Andre Bishop longed, the Claire Tow Theater, was to be opened soon. And a sculpturally expressive pedestrian bridge across 65th Street was also on the drawing board. The
bridge was perhaps the most challenging piece of the entire redevelopment project, as Liz Diller and her team had to satisfy the very different requirements of her Lincoln Center clients and the Department of Transportation, the Department of Buildings, the City Planning Commission, and the Design Commission, among others. All but $75 million of the $1.2 billion needed to pay for the massive renovation and supplemental endowment funds had been raised.

Programs were flourishing. Staff and board ranks had been replenished, both the beneficiaries of energetic, persuasive recruitment.

I felt like it was time to step down and bid Lincoln Center good-bye. But the advice I received from friends and colleagues was almost uniformly to stay for another two or three years. They advised me to try to enjoy the ride and revel in the ribbon cuttings. Why not spend some time actually enjoying all that I had helped make possible?

That turned out to be sound counsel. Not the part about easing the pace. Having Lincoln Center move from strength to strength after my departure was very important to me. That meant the smoothest possible handoff to my successor. Transitions are delicate. Getting it right takes time. I fully intended to race against the clock, not run it out.

I could not have anticipated how pleasant bidding Lincoln Center farewell would be. Its gracious and generous chair, Katherine Farley, her Lincoln Center trustee associates, my professional colleagues, and friends from all walks of life gathered in various configurations and settings on separate occasions to offer fond good-byes. Their odes and gifts were very touching.

At the Lincoln Center Gala held in my honor on May 9, 2013, Bryan Lourd, the managing director and cochair of Creative Artists Agency, brought with him as guests Anne Hathaway and Jimmy Fallon. Anne had recently seen in Alice Tully Hall the American premiere of the film
Les Misérables
, for which she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2013. She marveled at how fine were the sightlines, the visual acuity of the film images, and most of all, the sound.

Alice Tully Hall was best known for projecting unamplified sound: the human voice, solo instrumentalists, choruses, and chamber ensembles. Projecting classical music requires a reverberant hall, one that invites clarity and timbre. Film needs the exact opposite: sound that is dampened. It is no accident that Alice Tully Hall serves both ends
and does so very well. Only weeks before Jeff Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks, had told me that he knew of no other concert hall in the world as good for watching a movie.

Lourd, well aware that it had been my life’s ambition to become a stand-up comic, introduced me to Jimmy Fallon. He too commented on the excellent reports he had heard about Lincoln Center’s physical redevelopment in general, and particularly about Alice Tully Hall. He asked me whether I would be good enough to spend some time on the phone advising him about the acoustics of the new Rockefeller Center studio being built for him. In less than a year, by February 2014, he was scheduled to succeed Jay Leno and bring the
Tonight Show
back to New York City, forty years after Johnny Carson had left town for Los Angeles.

Did I have time for JIMMY FALLON? Oh, my.

So we arranged a call. It went something like this:

Reynold: “Jimmy, rest assured, Lincoln Center can recommend an excellent acoustician to help the NBC in-house team. The challenge, though, often has to do with the client, namely, you.”

Jimmy: “What do you mean?”

Reynold: “Well. When you sit down to dinner at a first-rate restaurant and tell the waiter or sommelier that you would like a good red wine, he is likely to ask you questions about what you mean by good. Fruity? Aromatic? Smooth? Complex? Questions like that. We should talk about what you want in studio sound. That process can take some time.”

Jimmy: “Reynold, I beg to differ. The answer is simple. I know exactly what I want.”

Reynold: “Oh you do? Tell me.”

Jimmy: “Well, there are 350 seats in the studio. I will tell a joke. 35 members of the audience will laugh. I WANT IT TO SOUND LIKE 350. Just deliver to me an acoustician who can make that happen.”

After promising to do so, I reminded Jimmy of my own aspirations and asked whether he would indulge me by listening to just two jokes and assessing my potential for comedic stardom. He readily agreed.
And I reported for weeks to everyone I knew that Jimmy Fallon loved my jokes and that he thought I had a future in stand-up comedy.

Memorable, no? This whole incident was scrapbook worthy. A keeper. One of the many farewell scenes I cherish.

A
T THE
I
NTERNATIONAL
R
ESCUE
C
OMMITTEE
, I learned anew why it is that I am so enamored of so many donors. There are many reasons to fall madly in love with them. Some are obvious. Others less so. In the surprise category is the fact that most benefactors think about the institution or cause you represent in a simpler and more penetrating way than many who work full-time in the organization.

One winter afternoon in the middle of my six years of tenure at the IRC, I accompanied my chairman, John Whitehead, the former cochair of Goldman Sachs and deputy secretary of state in the Reagan administration, on a solicitation call to Arthur Ross.

We met over lunch at the highly exclusive Links Club right off Madison Avenue on 62nd Street. It is not identifiable, except for the address, and its membership is confined to the wealthy.

In my experience, most clubs in New York City offer pretty mediocre food, and the service leaves a lot to be desired. The Links is an exception.

John and Arthur didn’t agree with this observation entirely. In fact, lunch began with both bemoaning the limited selection of white wine, as neither cared for chardonnay and the sauvignon blancs available by the glass apparently left a lot to be desired.

Arthur and John were good friends, so John asked about Arthur’s place in Jamaica, how his golf game was faring, and what his prognosis was for the stock market in the next quarter. As members of the Board of Directors of the United Nations Association, they bemoaned the UN’s slow and steady deterioration.

With the entrée consumed and coffee on the way, Arthur turned to me and said, “Reynold, I strongly suspect that John has brought you here for a reason, so tell me a little bit about the International Rescue Committee.”

I mentioned that refugee organizations were generally divided into two types. There were hundreds in our country that provided relief services to refugees outside of the United States. And there were about a
dozen and a half that helped to resettle refugees from around the world in America. The IRC was the only NGO that performed both functions.

“So, Arthur, which of the two areas would you like most to be briefed on?”

He chose resettlement.

Trying to be as concise as possible, I told Arthur that there were essentially two legal justifications for refugees coming to the United States. They needed to prove that they were either fleeing from persecution in their home country or were reuniting with family members in the country of resettlement. The IRC helps refugees advance their case for entry into the United States on either or both of these grounds with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Once the IRC succeeds, the refugees are then flown to the United States, where they are met by IRC staff and volunteers, who arrange for housing, for US financial and social service support, and for cultural orientation services.

“Arthur, the results are amazing. Within ninety days, 90 percent of the heads of refugee households are fully employed, many even before they have learned to speak much English.”

“Let me see if I have got this right, Reynold. I think I can describe what you have said in one sentence. The IRC takes refugees from the INS to the IRS in less than three months!”

There you have it. Arthur compressed pages of the IRC’s description of resettlement into fifteen words. I have been plagiarizing them shamelessly ever since.

It is a mark of donor influence that I can’t recall precisely how much Arthur pledged to support the IRC’s resettlement work that afternoon. Memory may not serve. But I am reasonably certain it was no less than $100,000. What I am crystal clear about, however, is how Arthur so quickly penetrated to the essence of what the IRC’s domestic mission is all about.

Donors have that uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter.

T
O MY DELIGHT
, the board of directors voted to name that footbridge after me. In a ceremony with Katherine Farley presiding, Mayor Bloomberg crossed that span with me behind him, each of us hand-in-hand with a School of American Ballet student. It was a splendid, well-planned event, and when a banner was removed from each side of
the bridge revealing these words, “The President’s Bridge: In honor of Reynold Levy, October 1, 2012,” I was truly moved.

There I was, up there in the ranks of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, George Washington, and 59th Street. A New York City bridge, named after me!

To reconcile the differing views of so many city agencies and her client, Diller had prepared dozens upon dozens of conceptual designs for the bridge, which I was given as a keepsake of the final product that carried my name. Appropriately, it is entitled
The Book of Bridges
, and it has found a proud place in my home library. By the way, there are over one hundred concept designs of bridges contained in it. I kid you not.

Before our maiden bridge crossing, in my own remarks recognizing the accomplishments of the staff, donors, and government officials assembled to celebrate the conclusion of this huge and unprecedented capital campaign, I asked all present to think about the tribute to the great English architect, Christopher Wren, who is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Near his tomb, there is a plaque that reads:

Here in its foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren, who lived beyond 90 years, not for his own profit, but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, all you need do is look around you. February 25, 1723.