In May 1977 (just ten days, in fact, before David Begelman embezzled $25,000 through the phony Pierre Grolcau transaction), Ransohoff had signed a contract to make four pictures for Columbia.
When Begelman was suspended at the end of September, one of the first people briefed prior to the press announcement was Marty Ransohoff. When Ransohoff came to New York the second week of October, he and Hirschfiel
d had breakfast at the Sherry Nethe
rland. "The situation looks intolerable."
Hirschfield
told him. "David has lied to us repeatedly, and everywhere I turn another shoe drops."
The issue seemed simple to Ransohoff, who knew from his years as chief executive of Filmways how much outside scrutiny is directed at publicly owned companies—from the SEC, from the stock exchanges that regulate trading in the company's stock, and from hypercritical shareholders and their lawyers, some of whom will sue without much provocation. He assumed, therefore, that Begelman unquestionably would be fired and that Columbia's investigation was a formality—a polite way of casing David out. Although
Hirschfield
had mentioned that Herbert felt differently, Ransohoff still was surprised in the Southampton sauna the next day
by the extent of Herbert's naivete
. Marty did not leaven his opinion.
"I believe David's a genuinely sick man," Herbert said.
"You don't buy that psychological shit, do you? Nobody on the coast does."
"If you had seen David's condition in the last couple of weeks, you might think differently."
"No matter how you slice it he was taking the fucking money. He's a felon. If this thing turns around and bites you, you'll get the shit kicked out of you in the press."
"The press is overrated. Ray feels that even if the details get out, it'll blow away in three weeks."
"My ass, it'll blow away. It'll blow away like Dorothy
and Toto. If this were the steel-flange
business or the ball-bearing business, who knows whether anybody would give a shit. But we're living in a fishbowl. This is the glamour biz. You can't t
ell mc there aren't six twenty-e
ight-year-old reporters who'll blow this thing sky high. You're walking into the fire barefooted."
"What should we do then?"
"Give David an independent deal and get him out of the studio."
"Who'll we get to replace him? I can't think of anybody who can do that job like he's done it."
"There are plenty of people. You can find somebody. Alan thinks it's feasible."
"Ray thinks Alan wants to run the studio."
"Ray's been smoking something. That's ridiculous. Alan's got the best of both worlds now. He can go to Beverly Hills and play for a week a month, and he's got final approval of everything the studio does anyway. It's bullshit to think he'd ever want to leave the point of real control—New York. But that's beside the point. The point is how do you justify in a public company keeping a felon in office? The SEC will never sit still for it."
"They have so far."
"They obviously think you're going to get rid of him."
"The SEC has no right to run Columbia Pictures."
"Maybe not, but you watch what they do if you let Begelman stay. And what about your liability as a director? You'll give the shareholders twenty-twenty hindsight. What if you keep David and then the company's fortunes go bad? You'll give the shareholders a twenty-twenty hindsight shot at you. Who the fuck needs it? Are you willing to set your ass up? Is it worth it? Forget yourself. Is it worth dragging your uncle and your family through this? You're in a position now to treat David very well and get the monkey off your back at the same time. This monkey has big claws. If I were on the board I'd throw his ass out in a minute."
"You're not on the board."
"Hey, baby, you asked my opinion! Don't walk on me with your 'Fuck you' shoes! If you hadn't asked, I wouldn't have volunteered. You're a big boy, you're twenty-one, and it's your show."
Herbert and Marty had had enough of the sauna and enough of Begelman. They adjourned up the path to the tennis court.
At t
he Hirschfield home in Scarsdale
that evening, the dinner guest was one of Alan's newer friends, David Geffen.
Geffen
had been the most spectacular impresario in the record business until he had grown weary of the grind and sold his company to Warner Communications. A small, skinny man of thirty-four with a slight resemblance to Lenny Bruce. Geffen had grown up in Brooklyn, the son of a brassiere maker. He had lied about his college record in order to get his first important job, at the William Morris Agency, but had achieved quick success as an agent and later as a record executive. He had guided the careers of Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell, and other top stars, and emerged as a multimillionaire before he was thirty, with a Rolls-Royce, several homes, a large art collection, and an ego, as one friend put it, "as large as all outdoors and the energy of a hyperkinetic child on a sugar binge."
David Geffen and Alan Hirschfield had met at Ray Stark's home and had quickly grown fond of each other.
Hirschfield
loved the record business even more than the movie business. He had enjoyed music since he was a child, and from the time he was a teenager he had liked staying abreast of current trends in popular music. As president of Columbia Pictures Industries, he secretly preferred listening to advance pressing
of new Arista releases in Clive
Davis's office to watching rough cuts of new films at the studio. David Geffen, on the other hand, was still tired of the record business and was considering producing movies.
Apart from their common interests,
Hirschfield
enjoyed Geffe
n's personality. Geffen was something of a
kochleff
in the
Hollywood community—a pot-stirrer, an encrgize
r. Wired snugly to the important power grids and grapevines, which tended to intertwine with each other, causing frequent sparks and smoke, Geffen usually knew the difference between truth and idle rumor. Thus, he was well positioned to appraise the significance of the
Begelman
affair as a phenomenon in the subculture of Hollywood—how it was being received, what effect full disclosure, or total concealment, of the facts might have, who stood to gain or lose the most from David
Begelman
's troubles or from his restoration.
It was ironic that Geffen had met
Hirschfield
at Ray Stark's, because on this Octob
er Saturday evening in Scarsdale
, Geffen was warning
Hirschfield
to be careful of Stark. He claimed that Stark was beginning to work against Hirschfield on the Begelman issue. Though David Geffen and Ray Stark were very friendly, they had become engaged in a running argument over the
Begelman
affair and Hirschfield's role in it. According to Geffen. Stark was impugning Hirschfield's "moral" stance and claiming that Alan in fact was being disloyal to Begelman and trying to inflate his own power at the studio by exploiting
Begelman
's problems. Geffen had defended
Hirschfield
but he was now cautioning Alan that Ray could be a powerful foe if his ire was aroused.
Hirschfield thanked Geffen and told him to keep his
ears open. But he failed to see
how Ray Stark's comments to friends on the Hollywood social circuit—particularly an opinion as bizarre as
Hirschfield considered that which
Geffen
attributed to Stark—could affect the resolution of the Begelman issue.
After dinner, everyone went downstairs to the
Hirschfield
s' projection room to see
Julia,
one of the major fall releases from Twentieth Century-Fox.
TWENTY-ONE
Hirschfield took his brash young senior vice president Allen Adler, the
Cosmopolitan
Bachelor of the Month, to lunch on Monday to discuss a meeting they were to have in the afternoon with an IBM executive about the laser video system that IBM was secretly developing.
Hirschfield
was confident that Columbia still stood an excellent chance of landing the software contract, despite the embarrassment of the
Begelman
affair. He felt he had sufficiently reassured the IBM people who had visited the studio two weeks earlier, the second day of
Begelman
's suspension, and he looked forward to continuing the discussion of the video system.
Adler and Hirschfield had not been together since a meeting in
Hirschfield
's office nearly three weeks earlier when Adler had tried, without success, to persuade Columbia's top executives to act more decisively against
Begelman
than they were disposed to act. Adler was surprised, therefore, to hear
Hirschfield
confide at their table at La Cote Basque: "I've got news for you.
Begelman
's not coming back."
"What do you mean he's not coming back? I thought you weren't going to decide until after the investigation."
"I won't, officially," Hirschfield said. "But it's already clear he's guilty as charged, so as far as I'm concerned he's finished. We'll make him
a producer and that will be that
. It's not the end of the world. This should make it easier to make some of those changes we were talking about months ago."
Adler was skeptical. As his longtime mentor, Hirschfield typically displayed toughness and decisiveness when he was alone with Adler, as an older brother might to a younger brother, but he showed less fortitude with the more powerful people at the company, Herbert Allen in particular. The "changes" to which Hirschfield referred h
ad been suggested to him by Adle
r the previous January. Hirschfield had asked Adler to organize his thoughts about the current problems and future directions of the corporation. On January 5, the Wednesday after New Year's, they had walked over to the company apartment in the Carnegie House and talked for three hours. The meeting was kept secret; Adler marked his summary memorandum to Hirschfield "for your eyes only."
Adlcr spared few major people in the company, but he was especially critical in the memorandum of David
Begelman
's performance as president of the studio. "It is clear that none of the recently discussed plans for reorganization would work because they do not deal with the real problem, and involve hiring around the real problem, which is DB," Adlcr wrote. While acknowledging the value of Begelman's deal-making ability and his excellent contacts with actors, directors, and agents—the so-called "creative community" —Adler charged that
Begelman
's management of the studio and the film-production program was erratic and lax. He had hired a number of people at the studio who were incompetent and overpaid, and had neglected impor
tant administrative issues, Adle
r claimed. The result was an insufficient number of films at too high an overall cost.
On a deeper level, Adle
r was convinced that Begelman, at fifty-six, was too old to be counted on for the vision and acuity needed to lead the studio into the new era of multifarious video forms such as cassettes, discs, and satellite television, and to adapt to the uncertain demands the new forms would make on the studios as the conventional suppliers of motion pictures and television programs.
As a solution, Adle
r proposed that Begelman's job be redefined and renamed—perhaps elevated in status and called "chairman" of the studio—enabling
Begelman
to concentrate solely on assembling the major motion-picture deals. A new president—a younger man— could be hired to manage the studio, run the production program, hire and fire, plan for the future, and take on the other tasks which
Begelman
, in Adlcr's opinion, was failing to accomplish.
Hirschfield had agreed with most of the suggestions but, to Adler's chagrin, had never acted on th
em. Adler felt that was because
Hirschfield
dreaded the inevitable confrontation with Herbert Allen and other board members who felt that Begelman's performance was outstanding in every way. Adler suspected that Hirschfield would be even more reluctant to face such a confrontation now because it surely would become entangled with the deliberations on
Begelman
's embezzlements.
"I
think you're kidding yourself," Adler said at the luncheon table in response to Hirschfield's tough talk about Begelman.
"I
think you've blown it."
"How so?"