* * *
Herbert Allen was able to relax a little. He took up with a new girl friend, Ann Reinking, a star of
Danc
ing
, All That Jazz,
and
Annie.
And Herbert made time for such things as the annual slow-pitch Softball game mounted by his friend Ed Moose, the proprietor of the Washington Square Bar & Grill in San Francisco. In 1979 the team traveled to Paris to play a team of U.S. Embassy guards a
ssembled by the proprietor of Le
Moulin du Village, a restaurant near Maxim's. The game was played in the Bois de Boulogne, and Herbert was named the most valuable player.
But he soon was engulfed by continuing problems at Columbia. Kirk Kerkorian, the controlling shareholder of MGM, purchased a 25 per
cent interest in Columbia and tried to take control of it, too. After an extremely bitter and costly struggle, Kerkorian backed down, selling his block of stock to Columbia for a hefty profit of about S60 million. Columbia was out a lot of money but was rid of a pesky and unwanted suitor. During th
e fight, Begelman's friend Sy We
intraub was revealed as an ally of Kerkorian's and abruptly left the Columbia board of directors.
We
intraub had been a problem for Columbia ever since Herbert Allen had made him a member of the board in the wake of the firing of
Hirschfield
. Allen and Vincent had placed Weintraub in charge of all motion-picture and television operations on the coast but he had not performed up to expectations. Getting rid of him, however, posed a sensitive public-relations problem for both Columbia and Weintraub. Herbert Allen did not want it known that Columbia's management still was in disarray. And Sy Weintraub had become the company's most visible officer; he was going out with Barbara Walters and was being identified in gossip columns nationwide as her companion as well as a major force at Columbia Pictures. Naturally he did not want it known that he had been stripped of his power and supplanted by Frank Price.
To appease Weintraub, Allen and Vincent gave him the title of chairman of the executive committee. There were protracted disagreements over his contract. Then Herbert Allen began hearing whispers that Weintraub had b
ecome a secret agent for Kirk Ke
rkorian in the Columbia boardroom. William Forman, an elderly theatei owner, an old friend of the
Allens
, and a major behind-the-scenes power in Hollywood for many year
s, telephoned Herbert one day in
Sun Valley where Herbert was sk
iing and reported confidentially
that We
intraub was working secretly with Ke
rkorian in an effort to seize control of Columbia. Shortly thereafter, Weintraub resigned from the Columbia board simultaneously with the public revelation of his alliance
with Ke
rkorian. Weintraub sued Columbia, Columbia sued Weintraub, and invective filled lawyers' conference rooms on both coasts as the suits moved forward.
Warner Communications chairman Steve Ross, who had done business with Weintraub years earlier and did not hold him in high regard, took more than one opportunity to rib Herb Alle
n about his mistake in hiring We
intraub. "Why didn't you guys ask me about Weintraub—I could have told you," Allen quoted Ross as saying.
On Wednesday, June 27, 1979, David
Begelman
again stood before Burbank Municipal Court Judge Thomas C. Murphy, who a year earlier had fined him $5,000 and placed him on three years probation for felony grand theft. As part of his sentence,
Begelman
had produced a film,
Angel Death,
about the dangers of the drug PCP, or angel dust. After praising the film. Judge Murphy reduced the crime of which
Begelman
stood convicted from a felony to a misdemeanor. Then, to the consternation of the deputy district attorney in attendance, the judge entered a non-guilty plea to the reduced charges, dismissed the charges, and revoked the remaining two years of probation.
The judge said, ". . . he can go forward without the stigma of probation."
Begelman
said, "My contrition is complete. It is not manufactured for th
e sake of expediency . . . and I
understand the motivation that led me to commit the acts for which I have atoned."
The deputy district attorney expressed "outrage" and said, "It's very tough to explain to someone that the justice system treats everyone equally when they see something like this."
Back in partnership with his longtime associate Freddie Fields, Begelman spent much of the rest of the year producing his first motion picture for Columbia, a film entitled
Wholly Moses.',
starring Dudley Moore and Laraine Newman. Shot in a remote desert region north of Los Angeles, it was a biblical spoof and turned out to be an inept failure as a film. No one woul
d know that, however, until it o
pened in mid-1980. And in December 1979, precisely two years after his abortive reinstatement as p
resident of Columbia, David Bege
lman's career as a producer ended abruptly, and his restoration o
f
the ranks of movie-industry royalty was completed, when he was named to the presidency of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and commissioned to restore it to its heralded position in the Hollywood of
L.
B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Just before the appointment was announced, a joyous
Begelman
flew to New York and personally told Herbert Allen and Matty Rosenhaus the good news. Liz Smith and Rona Barrett broke the story, and the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
proclaimed
Begelmans Back and MGM's Got Him
. When David strolled into Ma Maison for lunch on the day the news came out, several people stood and applauded, and he was surrounded by hands to be shaken and cheeks to be bussed.
During the next six months
Begelman
hired several old colleagues and friends from Columbia and elsewhere, and launched what MGM called the most ambitious production program in its history. The studio took a four-page, full-color advertisement in
Variety,
picturing forty stars and listing fifty-one movie projects in various stages of development. The ad revived one of MGM's most famous old slogans, "More stars than there are in Heaven."*
Over at Fox, Alan Hirschfield and Dennis Stanfill weren't getting along well. Trouble had been predicted from the start. They were men of vastly different personal styles: Stanfill, the starchy, severe Annapolis graduate, known around Hollywood as the town
goy,
the only major motion-picture executive who did not live in Beverly Hills or environs (he lived in San Marino, near Pasadena); and
Hirschfield
, the loose, playful Oklahoma Jew who wanted nothing more than to make a lot of money and have a roaring good time doing it. Although both men had come from Wall Street originally, they had come from the opposite sides of the Street. In contrast to the entrepreneurial, rough-and-tumble environment of Allen & Company, Dennis Stanfill's arena had been old-line, blue-blooded, conservative Lehman Brothers.
Little that Hirschfield wanted to do at Twentieth Century-Fox worked out, and he decided against moving his home and family to Los Angeles. Fox tried and failed to acquire EMI. It tried and failed to acquire Norman Lear's company. Tandem Productions.
Hirschfield's old pal Herb Siege
l, the chairman of Chris-Craft Industries, raised his stake in Fox to nearly 25 per
cent, making Dennis Stanfill very nervous. To ward off the possibility of a hostile takeover, Stanfill
*
With Bege
lman no longer available to produce
Annie.
Frank
Price transferred the project to Ray Stark and approved Stark's choice of John
Huston to direct the picture. B
y the time of its opening in 1982
Annie
had become Columbia's most expensive film since
Close Encounters.
developed a plan to convert Fox into a privately owned corporation. But the banks, led by the First of Boston, refused to support the plan unless Stanfill guaranteed that Alan Hirschfield and the management team Hirschfield had assembled would be an integral part of the newly formed company. Stanfill scuttled the plan.
The two men's relationship deteri
orated further when Harris Katle
man, the flamboyant Hollywood figure whom Hirschfield had hired to rejuvenate Fox's ailing television operation, was charged with—and denied—cheating on his expense account. Dennis Stanfill, invoking the
Begelman
case and declaring that no chicanery would be tolerated at Fox, wanted to fire Katleman. Hirschfield, however, believed that the charges against Katleman were in no way comparable to Begelman's forgeries and embezzlements and insisted on keeping him.
The Katle
man issue and the overall tension between Hirschfield and Stanfill were resolved when Denver oil baron Marvin Davis, who had made two unsuccessful attempts to buy the Oakland A's baseball team, purchased Twentieth Century-Fox for about $700 million and countermanded Stanfill's order that Harris Katleman be fired. Stanfill resigned. Davis named Alan Hirschfield chairman and chief executive officer of Fox. Stanfill began a lawsuit against Davis and Fox for breach of contract, which they denied.
In his office on the Fox lot, Hirschfield pasted a crown on his own photograph, along with the words, "It's good to be the king," a line from Mel Brooks's
History of the World, Part One,
which had just opened. It was a joke, of course, but it also was somewhat reminiscent of Alan's old naivete. He wasn't the king. Marvin Davis was.*
Law enforcement authorities and the media continued to make much of the widespread allegations, originating with the Begelman affair, that Hollywood is rife with corruption. Los Angeles District Attorney John Van de Kamp established an "Entertainment Industry Task Force" and published a special telephone number that anyone could use to report embezzlements or other types of wrongdoing. During the first two years of the task force's existence it received more than six hundred calls, mostly from anonymous tipsters. A few major prosecutions resulted. A unit production manager at Universal pleaded
*
Davis's purchase of F
ox ha
d been initiated by Ira Harris
of
Salomon Bro
thers, the investm
ent banker who had put Hirschfi
eld in touc
h with Jimmy Goldsmith in December 19
77.
guilty to grand theft after he was caught putting his girl friend, an actress, on the payroll of a film in which she did not appear. The manager had forged the woman's name on time cards. An employee of Twentieth Century-Fox's film processing laboratory pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion in connection with the embezzlement of about SI.2 million. A Paramount employee pleaded no contest when charged with stealing $42,000 from that studio. The controller of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences pleaded no contest to an allegation that he stole about $23,000 from the academy.
The DA's task force investigated allegations made by Jennifer Martin, an attorney for ABC-TV, that Leonard Goldberg, Aaron Spelling, and others diverted funds from the television series
Charlie's Angels
and thus defrauded the show's profit participants, who included Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. The investigation took a year. It was marked by an odd press conference, featuring both the investigator and his targets, at which Goldberg and Spelling denied the charges and the deputy district attorney in charge of the investigation described the two producers as "completely cooperative" and "very respected members of the entertainment industry." In light of the tone of the press conference, it was no surprise when the case was dropped. "There is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Aaron Spelling, Leonard Goldberg (or the others) are criminally responsible for conspiracy, grand th
eft, or
embezzlement," said an eighty-one-page
report prepared by the DA's office. Although District Attorney Van dc Kamp assailed "shoddy business practices" and "murky contracts" in the entertainment industry, and raised questions about "fair dealing," he suggested that any disputes arising from
the Spelling-Goldberg situation
would be handled more appropriately through t
he civil courts than
through criminal prosecution.*
Sixty Minutes
did a story on "creative accounting" in the movie business. The
Los Angeles Times
published several lengthy article; on the same subject. Cliff Robertson appeared for an hour on Phi Donahue's television program, asserting, "We're trying to stop
thi
s corruption that has become mal
ignant in our industry and growing
every year." Along the way, the media cumulatively pointed ou
t
that nearly every major star in Ho
llywood, in addition to a lot of