Indecent Exposure (30 page)
- "You had a chance to fire
Begelman
three weeks ago, and you've had a chance to bring up these other issues for months. Since you didn't do either one, you're now obligated to go through with this investigation, not just pay lip service to it, but actually go through with it and judge the results on the merits. If nothing more is found, and the board isn't any more outraged about these thefts than it is now, you may have trouble getting rid of him." - "We'll find other things, and we will get rid of him. He's not coming back. You can bank on it. Then we'll have total flexibility to reorganize out there." (Hirschfield did not feel free to mention the possibility that some top United Artists officers might join Columbia.)
- Though Adle
r remained doubtful, the conversation turned to lasers and the coming revolution in home video. - Close Encounters of the Third Kind
was shown to selected public audiences for the first time at the Medallion Theater in Dallas, Texas, on the evenings of Wednesday and Thursday, October 19 and 20. Alan
Hirschfield
flew down from New York Wednesday afternoon, the studio executives having arrived from Los Angeles the previous day. Two weeks earlier
Hirschfield
had instructed Dan
Melnick
to keep limousines and other standard accoutrements of movie-studio junkets to a minimum in Dallas; ostentation did not seem appropriate while the company was investigating its studio president for stealing. - The temperature was in the nineties when Hirschfield stepped off the plane. Instinctively, as he did when he arrived at an airport anywhere in the world, he looked around for someone in a chauffeur's uniform t
here to meet him. Seeing no one,
and irritated at
Melnick
who was supposed to have made the arrangements, he trudged to the baggage claim area. There, he was approached by an attractive young woman in jeans. - "Mr.
Hirschfield
?" "Yes." - "I'm here to take you to the hotel." "Oh, fine."
- The woman insisted on carrying
Hirschfield
's overnight bag out to the curb where he saw a decrepit Volkswagen and behind it a gleaming white limousine. A uniformed chauffeur took the bag and put it in the limo. The woman, however, insisted that Hi
rschfield climb into the back se
at of the Volkswagen. "Mr. Melnick's orders," she said. In the Volkswagen was a warm bottle of pink New York State champagne. The woman poured some into a plastic cup and handed it to
Hirschfield
. "Compliments of Mr.
Melnick
," she said. With the white limousine following,
Hirschfield
rode the thirty m
iles to his hotel in the back se
at of the Volkswagen, where it was even hotter than outside. - "I've learned my lesson. You'll hear no more from me about limos," he told a convulsed Dan Melnick at the hotel.
- Hirschfield went immediately to the Medallion Theater, situated in
a large shopping center, to see
Director Steven Spielberg. One decision yet to be made about
Close Encounters
concerned the music for a scene near the end of th
e movie in which the Richard Dre
yfuss character boards the spaceship. The music was "When You Wish Upon a Star" from
Pinocchio.
The decision was whether to use an orchestral arrangement of "When You Wish Upon a Star," written specifically for
Close Encounters,
or an excerpt from the original
Pinocchio
soundtrack on which Cliff Edwards sings the song, supplying the voice of Jiminy Cricket. A third option was to use different music entirely. Alan
Hirschfield
had fallen in love with the Jiminy Cricket version and insisted that Spielberg use it in one of the screenings in order to gauge the audience's reaction. Spielberg agreed, and if he felt it improper for the president of the parent corporation to involve himself in artistic judgments, he showed no disapproval. The musical choice in question was one of several points in the film where Spielberg badly needed the help of a fresh, detached viewpoint in making final editing decisions. - The dozen Columbia executives present were as nervous as they had been two weeks earlier at the private screening in Hollywood. As much as they loved the movie, they all were intimately and painfully acquainted with the unpredictability of audiences. The reaction of the two Dallas groups, however, was overwhelmingly favorable. The enthusiasm on the second evening was even greater than on the first. (The Jimmy Cricket version of "When You Wish Upon a Star" drew a number of titters and was not used in the final cut of the film.)
- David Begelman attended the Dallas screenings, an
d his presence caused no less "e
lcphant-in-the-room" discomfort than it had in the Todd-AO projection room. Wanting to go to Dallas very badly,
Begelman
had sought Melnick's approval. Melnick had called
Hirschfield
, and they railed at each other over the phone, Melnick claiming, quite seriously, that
Begelman
might commit suicide if he were not included, and Hirschfield contending that it was outrageous for a suspended thief to participate in critical company events as if nothing had happened. But
Hirschfield
finally relented. Begelman not only sat with the Columbia group in the theater but also insisted on conferring alone with Spielberg after each screening and sitting in on marketing discussions with Melnick and
Hirschfield
at the hotel pool. - All in all, however, Hirschfield was elated with the Dallas results and looked forward to the next crucial tests of
Clone Encounters—
screenings for reviewers and the rest of the press beginning November 1, and the world premiere in New York on Tuesday, November 15. - On Friday—the day after the second Dallas screening—Peter Gruenberger telephoned a progress
report from Burbank to Robert Werbel,
the Allen & Company lawyer who was acting during the Begelman inquiry as counsel to the audit committee of the Columbia board of directors. In more than two weeks, the investigators had not turned up any instance of embezzlement comparable to those already discovered. They were, however, beginning to find expense-account abuses totaling thousands of dollars. For example, it appeared that
Begelman
, while in Florida overseeing location-filming on
The Greatest,
starring Muhammad Ali,
had used limousines for personal purposes having nothing to do with business, and had charged their $6,000 cost to the budget of the film - Gruenberger told Werbcl that by the end of the investigation the team would have examined roughly twenty thousand checks issued by Columbia Pictures during
Begelman
's tenure. The minimum size of round-thousand-dollar checks to be examined had been lowered from S 10.000 to S5.000 and Gruenberger had decided to examine all checks of any amount issued to a so-called "hot list" of about fifty people who had close personal or business ties to Begelman, e.g., Ray Stark and Sy Weintraub. Moreover, Gruenberger said he expected to have interviewed at least fifty or sixty people before concluding the inquiry.- The work would take another two or three weeks, he felt, and then
Begelman
would be interrogated on the findings. - In addition to perusing, analyzing, and marshaling thousands of facts—data which were verifiable and often documented—the Gruenberger team found itself confronted with another category of information: rumor, gossip, scuttlebutt, every form of whisper about David Begelman. Gossip in Hollywood is not just idle back-fence chatter. It is an energizer of the town's central nervous system, a stimulant essential to the stability of an insecure community gripped by chronic self-doubt. Rumor and gossip tend to assuage one of the chief psychological dilemmas of Hollywood, the nagging confusion between illusion and reality. By occupying space between illusion and reality, rumor and gossip make the need to differentiate seem less important. Thus, by focusing on what transgressions David Begelman
might
have committed, Hollywood was able to amuse itself until it could learn what transgressions he had
in fact
committed. - The
Begelman
affair permeated the community like a thick, piquant mist. As the weeks wore on there were few conversations anywhere— at morning tennis games in Beverly Hills, over lunch at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street, during breaks in filming at the Pinewood Studios in London, in the upstairs lounges of New York-Los Angeles 747s—that did not contain at least a passing reference to David
Begelman
. Were the gambling stories true? Had he really charged his European honeymoon to Columbia Pictures as a business expense? Did he really forge a check? What would Columbia do? What was Alan Hirschfield up to? There were rumors about
Begelman
's recent past, distant past—even his future—and most of the rumors eventually made their way to Peter Gruenberger. - Although the Columbia board of directors had decreed that the investigation be limited to
Begelman
's time at Columbia, it was impossible to ignore some of the reports from his past, particularly if they overlapped the 1973-77 period. The most persistent of these reports was that Begelman was and always had been a gambler—a heavy gambler, a losing gambler, a gambler who, even as he was being investigated in the fall of 1977. owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a multitude of interests, some of them unsavory, in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and London. (The gambling rumors had been heard when Columbia hired Begelman in 1973, and he assured
Hirschfield
and others at the time that though he had gambled in the past he had stopped and had no plans to resume.) - While multiple themes and variations ran through Begelman's "gambling profile," the figure $400,000 and the name of his producer friend Leonard Goldberg of Spelling-Goldberg cropped up often.
Theme:
Once in the 1960s Goldberg personally had carried $400,000 in cash to Las Vegas in a suitcase to bail Begelman out of a gambling debt.
Variation:
Goldberg had sent the $400,000 to Vegas via a shady messenger.
Theme:
The payment had cleared
Begelman
's accounts and he had not gambled since.
Variation:
The payment had cleared his accounts for the time being, but he had run up another $400,000 in debts since then, and the mob was pressing him.
Theme:
During his Columbia years—probably while in France for the Cannes Film Festival in May 1976—he had lost a bundle in Monte Carlo.
Variation:
He had won a bundle in Monte Carlo. - Begelman
and Goldberg flatly denied all versions of the Las Vegas loan story. Gruenberger exhausted his investigative resources and could not confirm it. Alan Hirschfield finally asked Mickey Rudin to look into the matter, particularly the question of whether
Begelman
owed any current debts or had owed any that he might have settled with stolen money. Rudin ran a credit check on Begelman in Las Vegas and found nothing. The issue was dropped. Another blind alley.
Eventually, it was determined that Begelman had in fact gambled in Monte Carlo in 1976, but only very modestly. - Peter Gruenberge
r's efforts to sift fact from rumor, and innocent fact from guilty fact, would have been difficult even in isolation. Since he did not represent a law-enforcement body, he did not have subpoena power and could not compel anyone to help him, much less tell him the truth. And since Columbia was preoccupied with keeping secret the nature of Begelman's misdeeds and the details of the investigation, Gruenberger was forced to proceed in total privacy. He could not, as the Los Angeles district attorney would a few months later, publicize a special telephone number which everyone with information about corruption in Hollywood was invited to call. The difficulties posed by these limitations were complicated. - moreover, by the peculiar climate within which the investigation was being conducted—the climate of a small, insular one-industry town under attack from the outside, a climate which by late October was becoming hostile and political. "Columbia's decision not to fire David Begelman a month earlier, but instead to suspend him and embark upon an investigation, had given Begelman's partisans time to appraise the situation and mobilize support for the notion that he should be reinstated as president of the studio. Their campaign had barely begun to form and was almost as private as the investigation. (The press had carried very little on the
Begelman
affair since the burst of publicity during the first week of October.) Nevertheless, the campaign was real, and as it gained momentum, the hostility facing Peter Gruenberger increased. Fewer and fewer people were willing to give him more than grudging cooperation. Some of those who were interrogated leaked selectively the information which they gleaned or inferred from his line of questioning, if they felt leaks would inhibit his efforts. Indeed, one of the pro-Begelman forces' most potent weapons was information—essentially the same agglomeration of fact, rumor, and gossip with which the investigators were grappling. As in any propaganda campaign, the
Begelman
partisans were interested not in establishing the truth but in formulating a plausible story that could aid their cause. The story which they concocted employed a few facts, a few half-truths, a few rumors, and a few lies. It also involved—in a crucial and fundamental way—the attempted confinement of certain facts, i.e., the true nature of Begelman's wrongdoing, to a small circle of people, and the assumption that those facts would never become known outside of that circle.
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