They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (35 page)

In our family, my mother revered two Jewish women. One was Bess Myerson, who in 1945 became the first Jewish Miss America. There has not been another since. That Myerson went on to also become the first commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs in the city of New York and a favorite of Mayor Ed Koch was another point of pride for Barbara Levy.

Her second heroine, Beverly Sills, was regarded as virtually a neighbor. If you take a two-and-a-half-mile stroll on the boardwalk going west, starting off across the street from my apartment house on Bay Seven in Brighton Beach, to its very end, passing by all of Coney Island, you reach Sea Gate. That is where Sills was raised. The very idea that a child brought up in a Jewish home in such a place could rise to global prominence was amazing to my mother.

Is there an opera star you know of who could hold her own on
The Johnny Carson Show
, or with Carol Burnett on a one-hour television special in prime time? How many divas can you name who served on four corporate boards of directors, including American Express and Macy’s? Sills could count as close friends not just CEOs and fellow household-name artists, but also mayors, governors, and US senators.

There are only a handful of artists who could move deftly from a career in singing to running an artistic institution like the New York City Opera, which Sills did as its general director from 1979 to 1989.

Sills once told me, tongue in cheek, that she learned all one needed to know about finance from the developer Peter Jay Sharp, the owner of the Carlyle Hotel. Apparently he told her that two things were not good to find when examining an operating statement: any number in parentheses and any number colored red!

Sills’s effervescence was everywhere apparent. She was always upbeat, always smiling. In the business of the arts there are setbacks, of course. But Sills really believed that for every door that closes, a window opens.

Her positive spirit at work and in public was remarkable given the private setbacks she and her husband Peter Greenough endured. Their daughter Muffy was diagnosed as deaf before she was two years old, and their son Peter Jr., “Bucky,” was very severely disabled at birth. That Bev could manage to deal with these setbacks and not let them dilute her indomitable spirit was remarkable. It is not for nothing that she decided to title her book-length self-portrait
Bubbles
.

When it came to attending opera performances, Beverly was the least stuffy person I ever encountered at Lincoln Center. Just enjoy it, she would advise. Don’t treat attending this grand art form as some kind of stress test. Lead with your senses. Study up on the opera later, after you have seen a show, rather than before. If you are too tired to enjoy the performance after the second act concludes at 10:20 p.m. and all you can think about is your 7:00 a.m. breakfast the next morning, then just take your leave. Act 3 will be ready for you when you are better prepared for it. Sills often followed her own advice, stealing away from performances as inconspicuously as possible.

For all of Lincoln Center’s disorganization and for all of the problems that afflicted it, being around Beverly always made me feel relaxed and comfortable. I count myself fortunate for having had the couple of years our lives touched. Barbara Levy would have thought that there was no greater success than to proclaim that one knows, let alone works with, Beverly Sills.

In July 2012 the staff at Lincoln Center decided to hold a party to bid Sills good-bye and to thank her for the service she had rendered as chair for more than seven years. She insisted on planning the luncheon menu: fried chicken, French fries, three quarter sour pickles, and for
dessert, s’mores, cotton candy, ice cream, and the ingredients to make your own sundae: wet walnuts, maple and chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and cherries. And for those who preferred them, root beer floats. Of course there were also egg creams.

Alice Waters, forget it. The choices of our honoree came right out of her Sea Gate origins. There was not a vegetable to be found. There were words of praise and tears of remembrance from all of those gathered in the grand lobby of Avery Fisher Hall. We expressed our appreciation and, in honor of Beverly, we gained some weight. For all of the glamour and glitter, the ball gowns and the white-tie occasions, for all of the globetrotting and the hotel suites in world capitals, and for all of the admiration in which she was held, at bottom, when given her choice, the sights, smells, and sounds of her youth prevailed.

Egg creams in hand, we offered our final toast to a star more indelibly identified with Lincoln Center than any other.
¹

I
FIRST MET
David Koch months after setting in motion his dramatic entrance onto the public stage of Lincoln Center. It happened this way. The New York State Theater, which was owned, notwithstanding its name, by the city of New York, had virtually always housed the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. In a fit of pique, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who did not like fellow Republican, Mayor John V. Lindsay, decided to name the space, designed by Philip Johnson, after New York State.

In anticipation of the desirability of the entire building carrying the name of a private donor as part of a campuswide, comprehensive capital campaign, Lincoln Center took the initiative. On behalf of the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet, we proposed to Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and Governor Eliot Spitzer that a bill be passed permitting the New York State Theater to be renamed for an as yet unknown private party, hopefully a very generous donor.

The statute embodying this purpose was passed by unanimous consent and signed into law on April 23, 2008. That act paved the way for the solicitation of David Koch, who readily pledged $100 million, to be paid out over ten years, for the renovation of what for ballet fans was a hallowed space. The gift was publicly announced on July 10, 2008.

In one decisive move, Koch elevated the way in which donors viewed cultural institutions, and places of public accommodation more generally. Before Koch’s donation, only hospitals and universities were receiving gifts of such size. Now places like Lincoln Center were transformed in the minds of wealthy philanthropists into fully worthy recipients of mega-gifts.

Earlier, the largest-known gifts received by Lincoln Center or any of its resident artistic organizations had been $25 million from financier and Lincoln Center trustee Julian Robertson; $25 million and $30 million from Mercedes Bass and Ann Ziff, respectively, to the Metropolitan Opera; and separate donations, each of comparable size, to The Juilliard School from its board chair, Bruce Kovner.

As if to prove a point, several months later Stephen Schwarzman, the cofounder of the Blackstone Group, donated $100 million to the New York Public Library. The headquarters and main branch, located on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, now carries his name.

Several years later John Paulson, a leading hedge fund manager, donated $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy.

David Koch’s gift not only set an extraordinary precedent, but as a practical matter it enabled the frequently quarreling New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet to cooperate on a marvelous modernization. The gift made possible the removal of carpeting and layers of material from the floor and walls of the theater, significantly improving its acoustics. It allowed for the creation of an orchestra lift that would elevate the musicians from the pit to become level with the stage if the repertoire so demanded. It created a media room that could potentially broadcast and narrowcast what was appearing on the stage outdoors on Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza and to movie theaters, television sets, and mobile devices. It enlarged and improved bathroom facilities. It created aisles for easier access to seating in the orchestra, originally built to the specifications of George Balanchine as the home of the New York City Ballet, the place with which his name will forever be indelibly associated.

Koch, of his own volition, took another very unusual step. Typically, buildings and parts of them are named in perpetuity by way of acknowledgment for appropriately sized gifts. David Koch voluntarily offered to have his name on the building for a fixed period of fifty
years and not a day longer, thereby enabling that funding opportunity to be “resold,” charitably speaking. His generosity on this score is rare and much to be admired. He had created nothing less than a timeshare opportunity that could be renewed and renamed for another family. Alas, no such provision exists for the likes of Alice Tully Hall, or Avery Fisher Hall, or Frederick P. Rose Hall, or the Vivian Beaumont Theater, or any other space, indoors or out, that carries a benefactor’s name on Lincoln Center’s sixteen-acre campus.
²

Koch and I met on February 22, 2009, at the first concert in the completely new and refurbished Alice Tully Hall. He could not have been more engaged or curious. He marveled at the idea that the wood paneling of the entire auditorium came from one African moabi tree, cut into the thinnest slices in Japan and shipped to New York City. He was very impressed with the geometric contours of the space, likening it to a cruise line or a spaceship. He couldn’t quite believe the dramatic effect that light-emitting diodes carefully placed behind the thin wood veneer had on the room, “blushing walls,” in a hall where the interior was fitted out as if it were a “bespoke suit.” And Koch, who holds an engineering degree from MIT, put many questions to me about why musicians, audiences, and critics were so captivated by the acoustics, referring to them as heavenly, among other words of praise. What is it about the shape of the hall and/or the three stage configurations and/or the volume of the space that allowed for just the right reverberation time, leading to splendid sound?

I found Koch genuinely enthusiastic about what Lincoln Center had accomplished and eager to learn more about its whys and wherefores. His excitement extended to other elements of Lincoln Center’s physical transformation, not least the new fountain. Its engineering enabled hundreds of spigots to create a kind of water choreography that enchanted David as it did thousands of visitors each week. All eagerly witnessed the various configurations of water that staff fondly called by names like “The Wedding Cake” and “The Swan Song.”

Koch showed up at the fountain’s inauguration and was mesmerized by all the tricks it could play. He asked to be taken to the mechanical room underneath the plaza at Lincoln Center that ran the fountain and to be tutored in the software that drove it. He even wanted to see the manual that explained to staff how it worked.

Apart from his natural curiosity, he had a specific purpose in mind as he put these questions to me. Serving on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he found its Fifth Avenue frontage in general, and its ill-kept and unkempt fountains in particular, forlorn and depressing. Its renovation was very much on his mind.

Working together with developer Dan Brodsky, who in a volunteer capacity had guided the Josie Robertson Plaza renovation, Koch ultimately donated $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum to modernize its Fifth Avenue frontage. It turned out that Brodsky was also the chair of the Met’s real estate committee, and as such had oversight over this modernization as well. Soon thereafter Dan, a good friend, was appointed chair of the board of the Metropolitan Museum.

A couple of years later, Koch was invited to serve on Lincoln Center’s board of directors. That invitation was not without controversy. He and his brother Charles were among the principal benefactors of the right wing of the Republican Party. They lavished tens of millions of dollars on their own super PAC, Americans for Prosperity, on the election campaign of Mitt Romney, and on Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads. These investments had paid virtually no dividends. President Obama was reelected with plenty of room to spare. The Democrats gained two seats in the US Senate and eight more in the House of Representatives.

Nonetheless, as word spread about how tens of millions of dollars had been pumped into 2012 election campaigns and separate committee advertising campaigns by the Koch brothers, among others, strong supporters of the Democratic Party were not pleased by the New York State Theater’s new name, nor with David’s presence on our board. Displeasure was expressed at a few poorly attended demonstrations and in a steady flow of protest letters, many originating from bastions of liberal Democratic strongholds, like the Upper East Side and West Side of Manhattan, gentrified Brooklyn, and even Greenwich, Connecticut, the world’s hedge fund capital.

How could Lincoln Center accept “guilt money” and lend legitimacy to a family notorious for taking so much advantage of the Supreme Court’s decision in the
Citizens United
case? That ruling treated money as speech and determined that it would be unconstitutional to place any limits whatsoever on how much cash could be given to support
candidates without violating the First Amendment rights of citizens. Moreover, the Supreme Court had also determined that corporations are people, and therefore Koch Industries, as a company, enjoyed similar campaign contribution prerogatives.

How could we, a performing arts center that cooperated fully with dozens of unions, countenance a huge gift from David Koch, who was bound and determined to weaken, if not destroy, them?

Dismantling the New Deal, shrinking the federal government, and favoring policies that strengthened still further the wealthy at the expense of the poor and working class were policy stances attributed to the Kochs and widely opposed. By accepting his outsized donation and asking David to be on the boards of the New York City Ballet and Lincoln Center, we were accused in some quarters of virtually endorsing them. In the view of what appeared to be a small but strident minority, we were thought to be guilty by association.