ELEVEN
When Alan
Hirschfield
joined Allen & Company upon graduating from the Harvard Business School in the spring of 1959, it represented the deepening of a business and personal relationship of Charlie Allen's that was considerably older than—and just as important as—his relationship with Ray Stark, Jack Warner, and most of his other cronies. Charlie Allen and Alan Hirschfield's father, Norman, had been friends since the late 1920s when they began doing business with each other in Wall Street.
Born in 1903 and reared in a cold-water flat on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Charlie quit school when he was fifteen and became a "runner" (messenger) for the brokerage firm of Sartorius & S
mith. Four years later, in 1922,
he had saved enough money to start his own firm—consisting of a desk, two chairs, and two telephones. Norman, seven years younger than Charlie, grew up on 116th Street in what later became Harlem. When the divorce of his parents depleted the family's finances. Norman, then fourteen, took a summer job as an office boy at the Wall Street firm of A. M. Lamport & Compan
y. For the next few years until
he finished high school, he worked part-time at the firm, learning to be a bond trader, while attending school in the afternoon. Charlie and Norman, whose offices were only two blocks apart, got to know each other in the course of business. Norman would kid Charlie about having his own office but negligible capital—whenever Lamport & Company sold Allen & Company a block of bonds, payment by certified c
heck would be demanded. In 1931,
at age twenty-one. Norman became a partner and vice president of Lamport, and Charlie took him out to dinner to celebrate. They dined together over the years at speakeasies from one end of Manhattan to another.
Lamport & Company sent Norm
an Hirschfield to Oklahoma City
in 1938 to manage a large natural-gas company which it had financed. Finding even more opportunities to prosper in Oklahoma than in Wall Street. Norman, together with his wife, Betty, and Alan, then three years old, became a permanent resident. Norman stayed in close touch with Charlie Allen, however. Through the forties, fifties and sixties. Norman visited New York often, and rarely failed to see Charlie and
his brother, Herbert Allen. Sr.
who had joined the firm a few years after Charlie founded it.
"It's noon; let's go play golf." Charlie would say, and he, Norman, a
nd Herbert would head for the Deepdale
Golf Club on the north shore of Long Island in Herbert's Rolls-Royce convertible.
More than just social and business friends, they actually participated in each other's lives. When one of Charlie's sons was bitten by a dog. Norman and Charlie searched for twelve hours until they found the animal so that it could be checked for rabies. Norman and Charlie, and frequently their wives, spent time together not only in New York but also in the Bahamas. Paris, and Palm Springs, where they were guests in the home of Jack Warner. When Norman and Betty were in New York, Herbert senior sometimes would lend them his apartment if he was traveling or staying at his country place.
Norman participated in some of Allen & Company's business deals, and the
Allens
invested in some of Norman's ventures in Oklahoma. Norman, in fact, became a sort of informal, untitled Allen & Company representative in the Southwest, always thinking first of the
Allens
(after himself) if a good business opportunity came along. In the late 1950s and early 1960s. at the request of the
Allens
. Norman spent a lot of time away from Oklahoma running two Allen-controlled corporations that were in financial
trouble. One of them was Teleregiste
r Corpo
ration, which later became Bunke
r-Ramo Corporation. When Charlie Alle
n ordered the firing of a top Teleregiste
r executive,
he told Norman: "Get rid of him,
but be nice to him. Don't hurt his feelings."
Naturally. Alan Hirschfield heard a lot about Charlie Allen and Allen & Company as he was growing up in Oklahoma City in the forties and fifties. Except for a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a physician, he never seriously considered any career other than working for Allen & Company as an investment banker. Alan attended the University of Oklahoma (where he directed "Sooner Scandals." the annual variety show, and was named one of the ten outstanding senior men) and th
en went off to Harvard Business
School. His initial assignment at Allen & Company was arranging the first public sale of the stock of Random House, the publishing company, which until then had been wholly owned by Bennett Cer
f and his partner, Donald Klopfe
r. Hirschfield subsequently handled Warner Bros.'s purchase of a major portion of Frank Sinatra's interest in Warner's record company, and in the course of that transaction formed a lasting friendship with Sinatra's lawyer, Mickey Rudin, and with Sinatra himself.
In 1966, while representing Allen & Company on the board of Seven Arts Productions,
Hirschfield
attempted to promote a merger of Seven Arts and Filmways, a small but growing entertainment conglomerate that was controlled by Martin Ransohoff, the producer of
The Beverly Hillbillies
television show and several movies including
The Americanization of Emily.
In theory, the Seven Arts-Filmways deal made sense to all concerned. But there was one problem: Marty Ransohoff and Ray Stark, who was still a power at Seven Arts, detested each other. Hirschfield, however, convinced them that a merger would be wise and arranged a dinner at "21" where he, Ransohoff, and Stark were to settle the final terms of the deal.
Hirschfield
, who was savoring the hefty investment banking fee he would earn, urged both men to control their feelings toward each other during the meal and concentrate on the substantial advantages to be derived from the merger. But the three had hardly ordered drinks before Ray Stark launched a withering commentary on Ransohoff's recent picture projects at Filmways. Hirschfield rolled his eyes and sank a bit in his chair. Stark was especially critical of Ransohoff's purchase of the
movie rights to the James Clave
ll novel
Tai-Pan.
Hirschfield
sank further in his chair. As the first course was being served, Marty Ransohoff had had enough and said to Stark:
"Ray, you've been producing shit for so long you wouldn't know a real picture if you saw one."
Hirschfield
was so low in his chair that he was in danger of slipping beneath the table. The dinner was concluded in tense silence, and the merger of Seven Arts Productions and Filmways never occurred.
Later that year, however. Jack Warner, who had reached his seventies and was thinking of retiring, told Charlie Allen that he wanted to sell his stock in Warner Bros. Pictures. Hirschfield and Allen arranged for Seven Arts to buy Jack Warner's stock for $32 million, and early in 1967, Warner Bros, and Seven Arts merged. Hirschfield took a leave of absence from Allen & Company to serve as vice president for finance of the new corporation, known as Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Ltd., and spearheaded its purchase of Atlantic Records, a rhythm and blues label. Since Warner Bros.-Seven Arts already owned two other record labels, buying Atlantic enabled the corporation to become one of the world's largest record concerns, while maintaining its rank as a major motion-picture maker. But
Hirschfield
's career as a line officer lasted only a year. He clashed repeatedly with Eliot Hyman. the chairman of the new company, and found himself competing for Hyman's car with Kenneth Hyman, Eliot's son, who had become head of motion-picture production. (Ray Stark, with a big block of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts stock in his possession, as well as a lucrative consulting agreement with the company, had left to produce the film version of
Funny Girl.)
Kenneth Hyman accused Hirschfield of plotting to overthrow Eliot and take the helm of the company himself. Hirschfield denied the charge but found he could no longer work with the Hymans and left the company.
Only a few months after its debut as a combined enterprise, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts became a target of takeover moves by others. The late sixties was a time of scrambling for corporate power throughout the entertainment industry, and although it was neither the first nor the last such scramble, it was among the most significant bec
ause it resulted in the conglome
ratization of much of show business in America. United Artists, which was founded in 1919 as an effort to afford filmmakers artistic freedom, and evolved in the early 1950s into a company run by lawyers who still permitted more artistic flexibility than most moguls, was swallowed up by the Transamerica Corporation, a huge and diversified insurance company. Unlike other corporate suitors, Transamerica left United Artists' management in place, and the studio for the time being continued to offer more creative freedom than any other.
Control of MGM was sought by Phil Levin, a real-estate magnate, then by Time Incorporated and Seagram's Edgar Bronfman, and finally was grabbed by Kirk Kerkorian, who was in the airline and gambling businesses and had been the largest stockholder of Transamerica until he sold that interest in order to make his run at MGM.
Columbia Pictures caught the eye of two suitors, a Paris bank and the Lee National Corporation, a diversified U.S. company. Neither bid was successful, and Columbia came under the control of a pharmaceuticals tycoon, Matthew Roscnhaus, who was bro
ught into Columbia by Serge Semene
nko. Rosenhaus was friendly to the incumbent Columbia management, which had been in place since the company's cofounder, Harry Cohn, died in 1958.
Herbert Siege
l, an ex-agent and would-be movie mogul who headed Chris-Craft Industries, bought a major interest in Paramount Pictures, but only succeeded in driving it into the arms of Charles Bluhdorn's Gulf & Wes
tern Industries. Sie
gel then made a move for Warner-Seven Arts, again unsuccessful. National General Corporation, which owned movie theaters and publishing interests, also tried to buy Warner-Seven, as did Commonwealth United Corporation, a company with interests in movies, juke boxes, vending machines, recording, real estate, and insurance.
The eventual victor in the Warner-Seven contest was Steven J. Ross, the savvy president of Kinney National Service Incorporated, whose varied interests dated back to the nineteenth century and included such prosaic components as funeral parlors, termite and pest control, building maintenance, and parking lots. Warner-Seven's investment banker in the deal with Kinney again was Allen & Company. The combined corporation was called Warner Communications and went on to become one of the largest and most powerful entertainment concerns in the nation. Among those who profited handsomely from the deal or the steps leading to it were the
Allens
, Alan Hirschfield, Ray Stark, Frank Sinatra, and Mickey Rudin.
The only major motion-picture companies whose structures were untouched by the turmoil of the late sixties were MCA and Twentieth Century-Fox, although each endured painful internal power struggles during the period. Lew Wasserman consolidated his power at MCA, whose form had not changed drastically since it acquired Universal Pictures and a record company and sold off its talent agency business, in a sequence of moves several years earlier. At Fox. the Zanuck era ended when Darryl, and later his son. Richard, left the company after a period of bitter internecine, and even intrafamily, strife. Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment banking house that had played a major role in the affairs of Twentieth Century-Fox for decades, installed one of its former partners,
Dennis Stanfill, as Fox's chief executive. (Warburg Pincus, another New York investment concern with a big interest in Fox, also was instrumental in Stanfill's elevation.)
During the fifties and sixties, of course, the seven major motion-picture companies were joined in the Hollywood power elite by the three major television networks. To a large extent, television had replaced "B" movies in the entertainment universe. Instead of making a limited number of "A" pictures and a lot of "B's," as it had done in decades past, Hollywood was making a limited number of "A" pictures and a lot of television shows.
Between 1950 and 1970 the number of American homes with television sets rose from less than 10 percent to more than 95 percent. Movie-theater audiences dropped from sixty million people a week, going to see more than six hundred movies, to fewer than twenty million people weekly leaving their homes to see fewer than four hundred movies. But the shifting statistics tended to obscure the remarkable consistency and durability of the way Americans were entertained. The flickering images of film, whether they emanated from theater or television screens, remained the primary entertainment medium in 1970 just as they had been in 1950. There were only a few excellent movies in 1950—e.g..
All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard,
The Third Man, Born Yesterday,
and
The Asphalt Jungle
—and hundreds of less distinguished efforts. There were only a few excellent movies in 1970—e.g.,
M*A*S*H. Patton, Five Easy Pieces.
and
I
Never Sang for My Father
in the theaters.
The Price
and
The Andersonville Trial
on television—and hundreds of less distinguished efforts in both media.