Indecent Exposure (11 page)

However.
Hirschfield
did reve
al the problem to two people in
New York that Friday. One of them was Clive Davis, the president of Arista Records, Columbia's phonograph record subsidiary. Davis had become an intimate friend and confidant in the two years since Hirschfield had hired him to rejuvenate Columbia's ailing record operations.
Hirschfield
hadn't necessarily planned to confide in Davis so soon, but in the course of a telephone talk on another subject, he simply blurted out his consternation at being confronted with a sensitive, difficult, and unexpected crisis. Clive Davis knew something about such things. He had been fired four years earlier from the presidency of CBS Record
^-
for illegally charging personal expenses to CBS. The expenses included renovation of his Central Park West apartment and a reception at the Plaza Hotel following his son's bar mitzvah. Davis subsequently had been prosecuted for federal income-tax evasion and pleaded guilty.* However, Hirschfield and Herbert Allen had decided they could overlook what they considered minor law violations in order to obtain Davis's c
onsiderable talents as a record
executive. Now, two years later. Davis expressed sympathy for Hirschfield and agreed to say nothing about the Begelman matter to anyone.

The other person whom
Hirschfield
told that day was Leo Jaffe
. Columbi
a's aging board chairman. Jaffe,
who had been with Columbia Pictures for nearly half a century, having started as a bookkeeper in 1930. had seen much of his authority removed when Allen & Company took control and installed
Hirschfield
us chief executive officer. Since then, Jaffe had functioned partly in a ceremonial capacity as an elder-statesman-ambassador-at-large in the Hollywood community, and as the contact man for various public events in which Columbia was obliged to participate. That week Jaffe was busily completing arrangements for a dinner to be held the following Tuesday evening in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldor
f-Astoria Hotel, at which Brande
is University would present its "Distinguished Community Service Award" to Alan
Hirschfield
. The dinner was mounted annually in New York to raise funds for Brandeis. a number of whose graduates held prominent executive positions in the entertainment business. The recipient of the award didn't necessarily have to be a Brandeis alumnus or extraordinarily active in
"community service."
Hirschfield
was neither, although he had given generously to a number of charities.

*
The charges to which Davis eventually pleaded guilty concerned questionable travel expe
nses and did not encompass the b
ar mitzvah or apartment renovation, which h
e has consistently denied involv
ed any wrongdoing.

The dinner meant more to
Hirschfield
psychologically than it did to Brandeis financially. In a sense, the affair was a coming-out party for Hirschfield, a rite of initiation, a symbol that at age forty-one he had been accepted into the high society of show-business tycoons, the loose network of several dozen men who run the entertainment industry in America. The group encompassed not only the heads of the motion picture companies and television networks but also a number of investment bankers, financiers, and lawyers active in the business, and an assortment of other interested hangers-on. The co
-
chairman of the evening, along with Leo Jaffe, was Steven J. Ross, the chief executive of the Warner Communications conglomerate. The "honorary chairmen"—who for the most part did not participate actively but permitted their names to be used—included Charles and Herbert Allen, Leo
nard Goldcnson of ABC, Lew Wasse
rman of MCA-Universal, Arthur Krim of United Artists, Dennis Stanfill of Twentieth Century-Fox
, Barry Dille
r of Paramount, Andrew Heiskell of Time Incorporated, Edgar Bronfman of Seagram's, Preston Robert Tisch of Loew's, and David
Begelman
. Among the "
vice chairmen" were Joseph E. Levine
and Ray Sta
rk, the producers; Herb Schlosse
r of NBC, and David Mahoney of Norton Simon Incorporated (a major shareholder in Twentieth Century-Fox). The 120-mcmbcr "dinner committee" included producers David Merrick, Walter Mirisch, Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, Marvin Josephson, the head of International Creative Management, the world's largest talent agency; Fred Pierce, the president of ABC television; and the entire high command of Columbia Pictures Industries, including its legal counsel, Robert Todd Lang, a senior partner of the prestigious firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Hirschfield had always had mixed feelings about becoming a full, active member of this fraternity. He had spent most of his adult life, in fact, torn between the Manhattan and Beverly Hills high life, and his relaxed family life in Scarsdale. In four years at the helm of Columbia Pictures, he had decided, tentatively at least, that he could mix both lives successfully. Although he had not yet achieved the status of Steve Ross or Herbert Allen in
Manhattan society, or Lew Wasse
rman in the upper st
ratum of Los Angeles, the Brande
is dinner demonstrated that he was on his way. He did not want anything to mar its success.

It was with some hesitation, therefore, that
Hirschfield
distracted Leo Jaffe with the Begelman problem late that Friday afternoon, only four days before the dinner. But he was afraid that Jaffe would hear about it from someone else. Actually, Jaffe was miffed at
Hirschfield
for not telling him immediately upon hearing the news himself, but he registered only a token protest and proce
eded with his work on the Brande
is dinner.

Despite his dismay at the Begelman revelations and Fischer's confirmation of the details, Hirschfield maintained the hope that the incident would turn out to be an aberration which somehow could be contained—handled privately within the company. This hope was lessened considerably, of course, by Fischer's report late Friday of the possibility of a second embezzlement, the Peter Choate
-
Tommy
contract. Although
Hirschfield
wanted to examine the material Fischer had gathered as soon as possible, he was committed to business meetings all day Saturday, so he asked Fischer to come to the
Hirschfield
home on Park Road in Scarsdale at eleven o'clock Sunday morning.

During a break on Saturday,
Hirschfield
decided to do a small amount of detective work on his own. He telephoned a man in Los Angeles who had recently left the Columbia studio after several years to take a post at another motion picture company. It was a man with whom
Hirschfield
had a close relationship and whom he could trust to keep a confidence.

"I want to ask you a yes-or-no question,"
Hirschfield
said. "Your inclination is going to be to say no, so I'd really like you to think about it before you answer."

"All right, what is it?"

"In all your time at Columbia, did you ever have occasion to suspect
Begelman
of doing anything improper? Improper in a financial sense, that is. In his handling of funds?"

The man took only a few seconds to answer.

"There was one thing that seemed sort of odd. A couple of years ago he hired somebody—some outside contractor—to install special sound equipment for
Tommy.
I could never put my finger on what it
was, but something about it smel
led fishy. I was never sure he actually hired the guy. Nobody ever saw him."

Hirschfield
's sigh was audible e
ven over the hiss of the coast-t
o-coast telephone connection.

"What's going on? Do you have a problem?" his friend asked.

"I can't say anything right now. But can you remember anything more about this
Tommy
situation? Anything at all would be helpful."

"No, just that David seemed to take an unusual amount of personal interest in hiring the guy. It was handled pretty much out of the chain of command. And then nobody ever saw any trace of the fellow. It may have been nothing, but since you ask, it did seem odd at the time."

"Okay, thanks very much. And please don't say anything about this to anybody."

Hirschfield
sat at his dining-room table sipping coffee and studying the material that Fischer had spread before him. He was beginning to feel as much anger toward
Begelman
as shock and dismay. Here was documentary evidence that one of the two or three most important officers of Columbia Pictures Industries—some felt
the
most important— was a thief—a man directly responsible for restoring the health of Columbia's ailing movie studio and more recently its lethargic television production company; a man with whom Hirschfield had worked closely for four years and had a warm personal and professional relationship; a man whom
Hirschfield
had defended two years earlier when a powerful Columbia board member and stockholder— Matthew Rosenhaus—had wanted to dump Begelman and replace him with Frank Yablans, a recognized figure in the industry who had just been fired as the head of Paramount Pictures.

A sense of dread enshrouded
Hirschfield
and Fischer like a thick, foul fog. The
Begelman
problem seemed surrealistic. Each question they asked themselves seemed to have no adequate answer and led only to a more perplexing question. Why did he steal? If he'd needed money he easily could have borrowed from any one of several friends and colleagues in the company, or from the company itself.
He could have borrowed, that is,
unless he needed a huge sum. Were the
Cliff Robertson and Peter Choate
transactions (assumin
g for the moment that the Choat
e matter was fraudulent) only a small part of the total? If they were, how much more had
Begelman
stolen, and by what means? Did Begelman have some secret, desperate need for a lot of money? Had he been gambling? Was he in hock to loan sharks? Mobsters?

How would the company be affected? It seemed clear to Hirschfield that if
Begelman
had done what he appeared to have done, he would at the very least have to resign from Columbia. Even if the company could avoid the embarrassing public spectacle of having him prosecuted for forgery, there was no way he could stay in the company.

On that Sunday, however.
Hirschfield
gave little thought to how he might replace
Begelman
. He still was intent on containing the problem, and still preoccupied with whom to tell next about the embezzlements. He longed to summon his friend Todd Lang, Columbia's chief legal counsel, who lived just around the corner. On the other hand, he dreaded telling Herbert Allen and the rest of the board of directors. Something like this reflected badly on the officers of the company above and around Begelman, including Hirschfield himself.

Finally, he and Fischer decided to confer with Mickey Rudin as scheduled the next day before letting anyone else in on their secret.

That evening. Hirschfield hosted a pre
-
release, VIP screening of the new Columbia film
Bobby Deerfield,
starring Al Pacino,
at the Coronet Theater in Manhattan. Several Columbia board members, Allen & Company officers, and Wall Street brokers and investment bankers were on hand. At the film, and at the dinner afterward at Tavern-on-the-Green, Hirschfield managed to hide his gloom an
d show nothing but his usual gre
gariousness and good humor. He was adept at rising to such occasions. He genuinely enjoyed playing host at social events, and by the end of the evening he was in the best mood he'd been in since before Detective
Silvey
's Wednesday call.

Instead of going home to Scarsdale. Hirschfield spent the night at an apartment which Columbia maintained for visiting executives in the Carnegie House at Fifty-seventh Street and the Avenue of the Americas. The company leased the place—a spacious two-bedroom duplex complete with live-in butler—from Freddie Fields, David
Begelman
's ex-partner. Appropriately enough, the butler had worked many years earlier for Harry Cohn, who cofounded Columbia Pictures in 1920 and ran it until his death in 1958. When Hirschfield arrived, he found a wry note from Jim Johnson, who was occupying the smaller of the two bedrooms over that weekend: "Dear Alan. When you get in, please don't make any noise. I'm upstairs working. How about breakfast?"

Hirschfield left before Johnson awakened on Monday morning, but replied to
his note in kind: "Jim. Sorry I
missed you at breakfast. I wanted to discuss your becoming president of the studio."