Indecent Exposure (22 page)
- Aside from Rona Barrett, the most important journalist in Hollywood was A. D. "Art" Murphy of
Variety.
Instead of having an audience in the millions and international fame, Art Murphy wrote for an audience of only a few thousand and settled for limited local notoriety. For an entertainment writer, however, Murphy's audience was important. It was the Los Angeles-New York entertainment community which read
Variety,
in both its daily and weekly forms, from cover to cover. Among this audience Art Murphy was considered the best-informed writer anywhere on the
business
of Hollywood. A former naval officer and lifelong movie buff, Murphy was not a crusading investigative reporter looking for scandal. He loved Hollywood and its personalities, rogues as well as saints, and derived little pleasure from raking muck; it is muck, after all, that gives Hollywood much of its charm. Instead, Murphy provided authoritative analysis of the corporate side of the movies—studio profits and losses, box office grosses, the commercial outlook for new films, and the shuffles of executives. He was alert not only to numbers but to the machinations of the moguls. - Late that Thursday afternoon, Murphy wrote an innocuous three-paragraph item for publication in the inside pages of
Variety
the next morning, Friday. September
30.
Headlined
something's cooki
ng on High at Columbia
, the item reported that for the second time in two weeks Columbia Pictures had postponed a groundbreaking ceremony marking the beginning of construction of a building at The Burbank Studios. "Col Pictures chief David Begelman late yesterday was called to N.Y. . . ." Murphy wrote. "The groundbreaking ceremony, originally set for Tuesday (Sept. 27), was first shoved back to next Monday (Oct.
3).
Late yesterday, it was pushed back to some unspecified date." The item indicated that Murphy did not know the reason for the postponements or for Begelman's trip. He speculated that the developments might be related to Columbia's ongoing search for new financial partners for its films. - Most of the cocktail chatter at the Mondales was about Bert Lance. But when Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss arrived, Hirschfield, Allen, and Jaffe took him aside and told him quietly about the Begelman problem. Strauss, a close friend of Herbert Allen's, had been a member of the Columbia board of directors prior to becoming party chairman. He was stunned by the news.
- The three Columbia executives were back in New York by eleven o'clock that evening. Three hours later, at eleven in California, Jim Johnson stood on the steps of the Columbia building with a studio security man, waiting for the only twenty-four-hour locksmith in Burbank. Earlier in the day—after David Begelman had left for New York—Joe Fischer had told Jim Johnson by phone: "Secure Begelman's office. Change the locks."
- Baffled by Johnson's request for a locksmith, the security man said, "Are you kidding me?"
"No," Johnson retorted, "I want you to get somebody and be at the studio at eleven tonight. I'll tell you then what 1 want you to do. It's fuckin' top secret and it's urgent." - The locksmith arrived and Johnson led the way to Begelman's second-floor quarters, the only suite of offices with a double door. "We've
got to change the fuckin' lock;
—all of 'em," Johnson said. The locksmith went to work on the double outer door and then proceeded to the doors to Begelman's private office and a conference room. The security man remembered a passage from Begelman's office directly into the office of Dan Melnick, the head of production. The two offices shared a bar in the passageway. The lock on that door was changed, too. - For Jim Johnson, who had admired David Begelman even more perhaps than others had, and had then found himself the conduit of an increasing flow of damning information, the changing of the locks brought a wrenching sense of physical finality—like slamming the lid on a steel coffin.
- Johnson got home after his wife had gone to sleep. But she awakened at 3 A.M. to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, sobbing uncontrollably.
- SIXTEEN
- Hav
ing arrived at JFK with the Bege
lmans after midnight, Sy Weintraub struggled out of bed Friday morning in time to be in lower Manhattan at Herbert Allen's office by 8
a.m
. Weintraub and Allen had known each other for several years; they had both served on the board of directors of Gene Klein's National General Corporation, the Beverly Hills conglomerate that had bought Weintraub's Tarzan production company. - As one could do with Herbert Allen, Weintraub got right to the point: "I know how deeply concerned you are—and with every justificatio
n—about what David has done," We
intraub said. "No company can condone or overlook this sort of thing, and I am not here to suggest that. But David is a very close friend of mine, and I just wanted to let you know what I know about the things he has done. Perhaps it will in some way help your dealing with it." - Begelman, according t
o We
intraub, had spilled everything on the plane the night before: the Cliff Robertson check, the Peter Choate contract, and the Pierre Groleau contract. David had opened his heart. He had held nothing back. Moreover, he was distraught because he had not revealed the Grolcau transaction the previous week when he was in New York. He hud not meant to lie. Rather, he had blocked it psychologically. When his colleagues had told him that he would be fired if they found more embezzlements, he had blocked the third one from his mind. Weintraub was convinced, however, after his exhaustive talk with David, that the Groleau transaction was absolutely the last problem they would find. There were only the three. Sy was so firmly convinced of David's truthfulness, in fact, that he was willing to sign a blank check and leave it with Herbert to cover any other defalcations, in the extremely unlikely event that any were found. Sy was willing to guarantee, with his own considerable resources, that Columbia Pictures Industries would not lose a penny from anything David had done. Sy would not do such a thing, of course, if he were not positive that the three transactions already found were the extent of the problem. - In return, Sy asked Herbert, was it not possible for Columbia to find it in its heart to extend forgiveness and mercy to this troubled but fundamentally decent and honorable man, who had given so much of himself to Columbia?
Herbert was impressed. He had rarely seen a human being display such abiding faith in anothe
r. He invited We
intraub to accompany him uptown and present his case to the others. - The expanding and prosperous law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges occupied the thirty-first and thirty-second floors of the General Motors Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, three blocks north of the Columbia Pictures building. Todd Lang's suite was on the northwest corner of the building, facing the Plaza Hotel, the St. Moritz, and the Gulf & Western Bui
lding to the west; the Sherry Ne
therland and Pierre hotels to the north; and in between the expanse of Central Park. That area of Manhattan is sometimes called Hollywood East, and for good reason. Despite the higher visibility of the Los Angeles fil
m colony, a handful of skyscrape
rs within a half-mile radius of the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth Louse a group of corporations which wield, in the aggregate, considerably more power over the motion-picture, television, and record industries in America than is wielded by their West Coast counterparts. Warner Communications is at Fifty-first and Fifth, four blocks south of Columbia. Paramount is just across the park in the Gulf & Western Building. The headquarters of the ABC, CBS, and NBC television networks, as well as their phonograph-record and tape affiliates, are within five blocks of each other on Sixth Avenue in the forties and fifties, as
are
the principal pay-TV services, Home Box Office and Showtime. The world headquarters of International Creative Management, the largest of the talent and literary agencies, is on Fifty-seventh, and its principal rival, the William Morris Agency, is just around the corner. Most of the big law firms serving these companies are housed nearby, too, as
are
dozens of producers, film fin
anciers, smaller talent agencies, and individual entertainment entrepreneurs of all stripes. - The show-biz ambience of Hollywood East is hard to miss. If New York entertainment executives do not take lunch in their private dining rooms, they frequently can be found at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh, Orsini's on Fifty-sixth, La Cote Basque on Fifty-fifth, "21" on Fifty-second, or Lutece on Fiftieth. And if visiting Los Angeles colleagues do not stay in private apartments, such as Columbia's two suites at the Carnegie House and the Drake, they usually stay at the Plaza, or the Sherry (diagonally across from the Plaza), or the Pierre (a few steps north of the Sherry), or the Regency (two blocks over on Park). On a Thursday at the Russian Tea Room, or at the bar of the Sherry Netherland, or in the corridors of Warner Communications, one often sees the same faces and hears the same talk that one encountered on Tuesday at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or Chasen's. or the Fox commissary, or that one ran into on Wednesday in the first-class cabin of American 32, or United 6. or TWA 8. The two Hollywoods. in fact, sometimes seem not so much like separate communities as like a single, homogeneous community which has been divided arbitrarily into two parts and placed at opposite ends of a three-thousand-mile air corridor through which the residents regularly are shuttled.
- Such appearances
are
deceiving, however. The differences between the New York and Los Angeles show-business enclaves are more important than the similarities. One has more perspective in New York. Even though a great deal of power over the entertainment industry is concentrated in a few blocks, one cannot stroll those streets without realizing that Exxon and Mobil and Burlington Industries and Revlon and McGraw-Hill and dozens of other giant corporations in diverse industries make their homes not only in the same city but in the same neighborhood. In Los Angeles, the film studios and television production facilities are physically and psychologically so imposing, and other institutions so lacking in sense of presence, that although the geography is measured in square miles rather than blocks, one can live and work for days, driving considerable distances and experiencing a variety of milieus, without once being reminded that there is any business in the world except show business. The insularity of Los Angeles, after a while, begins to distort the vision and jostle the equilibrium of all but the very strong and the very independent. - Which is where New York comes in. When Hollywood needs an injection of reality, when it needs to be brought up short, it is New York, the true scat of power, that docs the job.
- New York is the enforcer. New York is where the heads roll.
- The command post for the day was Todd Lang's conference room. When Herbert Allen and Sy Weintraub arrived, the others—including Begelman—were already there. Hirschfield, Allen, and Rosenhaus immediately went into the privacy of an adjoining office, where Herbert told of his meeting with Weintraub and asked that he be permitted to speak to the group. Matty Rosenhaus, on the verge of tears, immediately agreed, but Hirschfield was reluctant.
- "Look, this has got to be the end," Hirschfield said. "We just can't go any farther. God knows what else is under the rug. Who knows whether he's having emotional blocks or not. There could be hundreds of thousands of dollars out there. The Groleau thing is especially bad. It shows total malice aforethought—a whole, elaborate scheme to write checks against a bank account and defraud the company. I don't know what's going on in David's head, and you can't tell me Weintraub does cither. He's no psychiatrist."
- "Isn't there some way we can help him," Rosenhaus pleaded. "We can't just throw him out on the street. This is a tragedy. It's terrible. The dumb son of a bitch! How could he have done this to himself!"
- "No, Matty, this is the end,"
Hirschfield
declared. "God knows what else is out there. We're dealing with dynamite. We've talked to the SEC. We've gotten down on all fours and said, 'Fellows, this is it. There were only two incidents.' Now we have to call them three days later and say, 'By the way, there's a third incident.' This is a horror show!" - Herbert Allen retorted, "The SEC isn't the point. The point is how we deal with David on the merits. Matty's right. We can't just throw him to the wolves. He's in bad shape, and we've got to give him protection. He probably should be out of the company while we get to the bottom of this, but he's not a common criminal." Herbert urged that they stick to the plan developed earlier in the week— Begelman would resign from his corporate positions and take a leave of absence from the studio. "But first listen to Weintraub," Herbert urged. "1 promised him he could say his piece."
- They returned to the conference room and asked
Begelman
to leave while they spoke with Weintraub, who repeated, in a more elaborate and impassioned way, what he had said to Herbert. "David has undergone a very pressurized business existence at Columbia for the past several years. The things he has done
are
very unfortunate, but under the terrible pressure of bringing, or helping bring Columbia out of the desert into the green valleys, he had an emotional breakdown, a temporary one. In other men, it might have manifested itself as a heart attack. With David, it came out in the form of these acts. I have known David for a number of years. I find him a very honorable man, a dedicated and loyal man. He should certainly be made
to repay his obligations, and I
have offered to guarantee the payment of any other defalcations that may have occurred. But he should be forgiven. Otherwise, he will be destroyed. If you take away his job, it will destroy him. It will disgrace him, his wife, and his family. I can't be sure that he won't take his own life, and 1 know that no one here wants that, or wants to feel that anything done here contributed to such a result."
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