"I
spoke to Dan Lufkin around two in the afternoon in the hall of
the eleventh floor," Allen Adle
r wrote later in a memorandum.
"I
told him that the action that they were taking was wrong for the shareholders, for the management, and for the company, and did not represent the best interests of anyone but certain particular shareholders and directors. I asked him why he was involved in such a thing and he said 'there are certain things you do for friendship." He then later tried to bathe his actions in the light of the overall long-term interest, but it was clear, and we refreshed each other on a previous conversation, where he said he had come on the board to protect Herbert Allen's interest and these
are
the things one did for a long-term friend. After the board meeting. Herbert Allen asked to see mc for a few minutes and officially told me that Alan Hirschfield had been terminated. He told mc that the board wanted everyone else to continue and that it would be best in the long run.
I
disagreed and said the same thing to him that
I
said to Lufkin.
I
mentioned to him that I thought it was improper (hat those of us in senior corporate management had not been consulted in any way.
I
told him that he had been operating on misinformation and erroneous 'facts' and that he was too far removed from the business to really know what had been going on. He seems to have the simple
-minde
d view that the stock will go down, but what's the difference; the management will be upset, but they will get over it; and that he can say anything to the public and it's all right. My opinion is he has absolutely not considered the best interests of anyone but his own group."
Adle
r's opinion, of course, was of negligible concern to Herbert Allen, who had never been particularly fond of the hot-tempered young
Cosmopolitan
Bachelor of the Month.
The corporate public-relations director. Jean Vagnini, whom the board of directors had long suspected of being a
Hirschfield
loyalist, was ordered to refer all press calls to Dan Lufkin. Vagnini's office was unceremoniously occupied by Allen attorney Werbel and by operatives of the board's PR firm. Kekst & Company. Vagnini, therefore, hurried to
Hirschfield
's office and used a telephone in his private bathroom—so as not to be seen by unfriendly witnesses—to arrange a press conference for him in a meeting room of the Gotham Hotel across the street. Vagnini and Jonathan Rineheart composed a press release which Hirschfield edited.
The board's announcement and
Hirschfield
's release arrived at news-media headquarters almost simultaneously and were on news wires across the country within minutes. The board's release said, "It has recently become apparent that for Columbia to move forward to new levels of accomplishment, fresh leadership and greater management unity
are
required." In elaboration, Dan Lufkin added, "This is a no-fault divorce. There were honest and sincere attempts to reach agreement."
Werbel and the Kekst operatives monitored Hirschfield's press conference. "The company is operating at the highest level of profitability in its history," Hirschfield said, his voice quavering slightly. ". . . In light of this record, the only possible explanation for the board's action is that it is a direct consequence of the David Begelman affair, during which there were serious differences of
o
pinion
and judgment between certain members of the board and myself as to the proper resolution
of the matter. It is now fully appare
nt that those differences can never be reconciled."
After taking several questions, Hirschfieid returned to the office For his new cameras and got in his limousine for the forty-minute
r
idc to Scarsdale
.
Still numb, he felt little except a vague sense of relief. Everything tad happened in a flash—just like that.
Fired.
An unemployed mogul.
Ten months of ugliness, ten months of fighting, ten months of secret maneuvering—the most horrific months of his life. Was it possible that all of this had started with an IRS form and a forged check? To say it was farfetched was to understate the radical improbability of the whole affair. On the other hand, he had to acknowledge that if he and Herbert hadn't fought over Begelman, they might have clashed eventually over something else. In the end, the issue had become less important than the battle itself.
He could still mount a proxy fight from outside the company, but it would be much more difficult. Perhaps his vision of defeating Herbert had been a delusion from the beginning. All that effort he and Adler had spent on Jimmy Goldsmith. Time, Philip Morris, Penn Central, Mattel, Filmways, and the rest—wasted. Hirschfield had never really gotten properly organized to wage war on Herbert's level.
It was all a blur now, and in a strange way didn't seem to matter much, although he knew that it did matter. The most important business relationship of his life, and of his father's life, lay in ruins. He knew that he would continue to struggle against Herbert Allen, in one way or another, until all possibilities had been exhausted. There would be new dimensions of rage, recrimination, and depression. But the numbness of the moment kept him from feeling any of those things just yet. Instead, he felt oddly energetic, a little high.
Berte
and Laura were waiting at home. They were numb, too, but their eyes were dry. He hugged them both.
"Are you all right?" Berte asked.
"I'm fine," Alan said. "Let's go to camp."
EPILOGUE
There was no mass resignation to protest the firing of Hirschfield. Despite their display of bravado two weeks earlier, the top Columbia executives were bound to the company by contract and would have jeopardized themselves financially by walking out abruptly. Many of them were men with families and big mortgages, and even though they were paid handsomely, they lived from paycheck to paycheck. Moreover, Herbert Allen and Fay Vincent asked them
very nicely
not to leave, and Hirschfield himself discouraged those who volunteered—and a few did—from rash action.
Hirschfield procrastinated through the rest of 1978 before deciding against waging a proxy fight for control of Columbia. Spurred by Allen Adler and other supporters, he conferred frequently with la
wyer Sidney Silbe
rman and potential financial backers, but finally concluded that victory was problematic and that he would hurt himself more by fighting and losing than by not fighting at all. He also retreated from another idea—starting his own motion-picture production company, a venture for which he could have obtained $150 million in credit from several banks and other sources. Even with that much money at his disposal, the company would have been relatively small, and Hirschfield aspired to bigger things.
At the beginning of 1979 he accepted an offer from his friend Steve Ross, the chief executive of Warner Communications, to become a consultant to Warner. Both men viewed the post as a temporary "parking place" that might lead to a permanent job. Although Hirschfield felt somewhat nostalgic at Warner—he had done a lot of investment banking for the company in the pre-Ross era of the sixties and had been financial vice president for a year—it became clear after a few months that there was no place for him
in
the upper echelon of the company. Warner was fully staffed if no overloaded with talented executiv
es, some of whom felt threatened
by Hirschfield's presence and
potential ascendancy. He had no
power, accomplished little, and suffered from depression, a
delayed
reaction to his experience at Columb
ia as much as a current reaction
to the lack of opportunity at Warner. He brooded a lot, read a lot spent some time with a psychiatri
st, and recommended that his many
friends read Daniel J. Levinson's
The Seasons of a Man's Life, ;
sort of highbrow
Passages.
After several months at Warner, Hirschfield got a lucky break Alan Ladd, Jr., resigned as head of Twentieth Century-Fox's motion picture unit, along with his top aides, after a dispute with corporati
on
chairman Dennis Stanfill. Stanfill
decided to hire Alan Hirschfield
not only to replace Ladd but also t
o oversee Fox's other entertain
ment operations. By the middle of
1980, Hirschfield had brought to
Fox dozens of his former Columbia colleagues, including Dan Melnick Sherry Lansing, Allen Adler, No
rman Levy, and Clivc Davis. Lan
sing was named president of Fox pro
ductions, the first woman in the
industry to hold such a high post.
Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of the Seagram liquor empire, sent copy of
The Joys of Yiddish
to Fay Vincent shortly after Vincen
t
accepted the presidency of Colu
mbia Pictures Industries. Having
been in and out of the movie business more than once.
Bronfman
thought that Vincent, as a staunch
Roman Catholic from a conserva
tive background, probably cou
ld use some help with elemental
communication in the world of Hollywood. "At least the book can'
t
hurt," Bronfman said, only half facetiously.
Herbert Allen meanwhile moved quickly to consolidate the spoil of his victory in the struggle with Hirschfield. Sy Weintraub Begelman's close friend whose el
ection to the Columbia board had
been vehemently opposed by Hirschfield, joined the boar
d. An Robert Stone, the stiff. e
x-RCA o
fficer whom Hirschfield and Allen
had fought over so bitterly, was hired as Columbia's executive vi
c
e president and chief operating of
ficer, the job Herbert had wanted
him to have all along.
A number of
Hirschfield
's
policies were continued, however
Columbia developed several methods for sharing the financial risk c picture-making with outside investors, a concept Hirschfield ha
d
pioneered. Vincent and Allen also had the good sense to retain Fran
k
Price, whom Hirschfield und
Melnick
had made head of motion-picture production. With the help of several films like
Kramer vs. Kramer
and
The China Syndrome,
which had been nurtured at Columbia by Hirschfield,
Begelman
. Melnick, and Lansing, Frank Price showed that he could run the Columbia studio just as well as he previously had run Universal's television arm. Price established good relationships with Fay Vincent (to whom he reported directly instead of through Robert Stone, despite Stone's highfalutin title) and with Ray Stark, whose power was underscored and enhanced by the firing of
Hirschfield
. Aside from the job itself, Frank Price felt that the two most attractive elements in the Columbia situation were the presence of Stark, whom Price considered the ablest producer in town, and the presence in the Columbia production pipeline of
Annie,
which Price believed held the potential of becoming the biggest movie musical in years.
Several films that Price himself squired, such as
The Blue Lagoon
and
Stir Crazy,
did well commercially. And the corporation's earnings also were aided substantially for years into the future by television syndication deals that Norman Horowitz, an important member of the
Hirschfield
team, had made before resigning as president of Columbia television distribution.* Horowitz was one of the many Columbia employees—ranging from top executives to secretaries— who left Columbia in the years after the firing of Hirschfield. In addition to those who resigned readily for new opportunities, others departed only after long periods of anxious procrastination and the eventual realization that they could not work effectively under Herbert Allen's new management team. And the new management naturally fired a sizable number of holdovers. The lives of many people, indeed entire families, were disrupted. Marriages were strained, and a few broke up. At the office and at home, in Los Angeles and New York, there were ugly scenes, loud denunciations, screaming telephone conversations, tears, and sleepless nights. The new Columbia management rewrote a lot of history. Having called Norman Levy, who headed motion-picture distribution and marketing, "the top executive in his field" while he still worked for Columbia, the company said less flattering things about him after he resigned to join Hirschfield at Fox.
*Norman Horowitz left to become president of Poly
Gram Television, a new company start
ed by the PolyGram Group, th
e huge West German-D
utch entertainment conglomerate