Indecent Exposure
Indecent Exposure
David McClintick
Published: 2002
Tags: Non Fiction
Non Fictionttt
* * *
SUMMARY:
When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street. Soon powerful studio executives were engulfed in controversy; careers derailed; reputations died; and a ruthless, take-no-prisoners corporate power struggle for the world-famous Hollywood dream factory began. First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud . . . until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.
Indecent Exposure
A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street
David McClintick
INDECENT EXPOSURE
A CORGI BOOK 0 552 12389 7
Originally published in Great Britain by Columbus Books
PRINTING HISTORY
Columbus edition published 1983 Corgi edition published 1984 Corgi edition reprinted 1984
Copyright © 1982 by David McClintick
Conditions of sale
1. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover
other (ban that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
2. This book is sold subject to the Standard Conditions
of Sale of Net Books and may not be re-sold in the UK
below the net price fixed by the publishers for the book.
Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers Ltd., Century House, 61-63 Uxbridgc Road, Ealing, London W5 5SA
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Hunt Barnard Priming Ltd., Aylesbury, Bucks.
For Judy and
For my parents Dorothy and Dean McClintick
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to a large number of people whose aid and comfort were crucial in the writing of this book— friends and acquaintances in the entertainment industry and the business world at large, as well as at my former professional home, The Wall Street Journal. They contributed time, encouragement, and various forms of more tangible help—sometimes when it was not convenient, and occasionally against their better judgment. Most of them would be uncomfortable if I named them, but they know who they are and how much they mean to me.
In the category of equally important people who can be identified, I should like to thank the management and staff of William Morrow & Company, especially my outstanding editor, James Landis, and of Dell Publishing Company, particularly Carole Baron and Susan Moldow.
Thanks also to Robert D. Sack, the finest libel lawyer in America and, not insignificantly, an astute editorial critic.
I owe the profoundest of gratitude to Kathy Robbins and Richard Covey, who have combined literary representation of the very highest quality with a deep and durable friendship that 1 cherish. They have, quite literally, changed my life. ' Finally, Judith Ludlam McClintick, my wife. The period of this book's preparation, and the writing itself, have encompassed times of pain and anguish. Judy has seen me through all of them with strength, grace, wit, and love.
AUTHORS NOTE
Everything in this book is real—every episode, scene, weather reference, conversation, and name. The reader is urged to consult the source notes for a detailed explanation of the author's modus operandi and a delineation of his sources.
"It's the jungle. It appeals to my nature. . . . It's more than a place where streets are named after Sam Goldwyn and buildings after Bing Crosby. There's more to it than pink Cadillacs with leopard-skin seat covers. It's the jungle, and it harbors an industry that's one of the biggest in the country. A closed-in, tight, frantically inbred, and frantically competitive jungle. And the rulers of the jungle are predatory and fascinating and tough. L. B. Mayer is one of the rulers of the jungle. I like L.B. He's a ruler now, but he has to watch his step or he'll be done in. He's shrewd. He's big business. . . . L.B. is tough. He's never trying to win the point you're talking about. His aim is always long-range—to keep control of the studio. He loves Dorc. But someday he'll destroy Dore. L.B. is sixty-five. And he's pink. And healthy. And smiling. Dore is about twenty years younger. And he looks old. And sick. And worried. Because L.B. guards the jungle like a lion. But the very top rulers of the jungle are here in New York. Nick Schenck, the president of Loew's Inc., the ruler of the rulers, stays here in New York and smiles, watching from afar, from behind the scenes, but he's the real power, watching the pack close in on one or another of the lesser rulers—close in, ready to pounce! Nick Schenck never gets his picture in the papers, and he doesn't go to parties, and he avoids going out in public, but he's the real king of the pack. And he docs it all from New York! God, are they tough!"
JOHN HUSTON 1950
"The new Hollywood is very much like the old Hollywood."
—DAVID CHASMAN
Executive Vice President, MGM
ONE
Evelyn Christel, a slim woman of forty-one with short blond hair, cased her brown Pinto from Van Nuys Boulevard into the rush-hour crawl of the Ventura Freeway and headed cast. She squinted into the sun, which had just cleared the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains on the far horizon straight ahead.
It was 8 A.M., Friday, February 25, 1977, clear and bracing—one of the chilliest mornings of the brief, subtropical Los Angeles winter.
Evelyn's drive would take thirty-five minutes if she was lucky, forty-five minutes if she was not. Like thousands of logs glutting a river, the traffic crept past Bullock's and I. Magnin, Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Twenty miles an hour, then fifty, then ten.
Evelyn negotiated a careful merge with the southeast-bound Hollywood Freeway. Universal Studios on the left. Cahuenga Pass through the scrubby hills, green from the winter rains. Hollywood Bowl on the right.
Off the freeway at Vine. South on Vine down the hill, stop-and-go, through Central Hollywood. The Capitol Records Tower. TAV Celebrity Theater Presents the Merv Griffin Show. Art City.
Vine becomes Rossmore at Melrose. Along Rossmore. gently curving, past the Wilshire Country Club and the grand old homes of Hancock Park, all the way to Wilshire Boulevard. A long light, then across Wilshire to the stone gates of Fremont Place, an elegant and very private residential enclave. Another wait while the guard located Evelyn's name on his list. Over the speed bump, around the corner to the right, and into the driveway of the first house. 97 Fremont Place West, where Evelyn's employer. Cliff Robertson, the motion-picture actor, was in temporary residence.
Evelyn might have preferred a commute as short as those during Cliffs previous extended visits to Los Angeles. He had rented houses in Coldwatcr Canyon and Brentwood, which were much closer to her home in the working-class San Fernando Valley community of Van Nuys. But in nineteen years as Cliff Robertson's part-time secretary, Evelyn Christel had grown used to, and actually quite fond of, just about all of Cliffs eccentricities, mainly because they weren't really eccentricities at all but quite normal traits that seemed eccentric only in Hollywood. One of them was a strong preference for living near where he was working. Most movie celebrities,
no matter how remote the location of the studio that might be employing them at a particular time, insisted on living in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. Any other place would have threatened their self-image. Cliff Robertson, however, wasn't so insecure as most in Hollywood (another of his "eccentricities"). Although he sought out luxurious comfort wherever he went, it didn't necessarily have to have a chichi name like Beverly Hills. And since he was making a movie at Paramount that winter, the real-estate agent had suggested to Evelyn Christel that Cliff consider Fremont Place, which was only five minutes from the Paramount lot.
Most of the seventy-three houses in the half-century-old enclave were as elegant as many in Beverly Hills. But only three celebrities lived in Fremont Place—Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxer; Karen Black, the film actress; and Lou Rawls, the pop singer. The majority of the residents were lawyers, bankers, and businessmen who drove cast to offices in the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles instead of west and north to the show-business factories of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Burbank. Fremont Placers tended mildly to disdain the entertainment industry; its products occasionally were amusing, but its people and ambience were too gaudy and often too vulgar for the modest and somewhat smug sensibilities of Fremont Place.
As it happened, this was an attitude which was privately shared by the new resident of Number 97 West—still another of Cliff Robertson's atypical traits. But as people close to Cliff were aware, his choice of temporary abode and his attitude toward his industry were not isolated quirks. They were broad hints of the kind of person Cliff Robertson was—a maverick, usually a benign one, but by Hollywood standards nonetheless a maverick, whose determined independence manifested itself multifariously, from the way he handled his money, to the way he handled his career, to the way he handled his life.
Although he had grown up in Southern California. Robertson had always found the Hollywood community somewhat claustrophobic and more than a bit tawdry, and had chosen to live in New York City for much of his adult life. He didn't depend on Hollywood for financial security, though he had earned a great deal of money there. He was independently wealthy in his own right and was married to one of America's richest women. Dina Merrill, the actress, socialite, and daughter of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post and the late E. F. Hutton. Unlike many movie people who found it chic to spend their money freely but ignore its management. Robertson watched his money and investments carefully. And instead of using one of the big, flashy financial-management agencies in Beverly Hills, which were status symbols themselves to many in the community, he chose to have his finances handled by a small, staid CPA firm on Sunset Boulevard in old Hollywood.
At deeper levels of personality and character, too. Cliff Robertson was something of an alien. In an industry populated by sizable numbers of loud, slick, bullying maneuverers, Robertson came across as the complete gentleman—kind, pleasant, deliberate, not especially temperamental, not unreasonably demanding toward people around him, a man who was never more content than when he was spending time with his family in the privacy of their home. ("The last of the hearth huggers." Dina called him.) Moreover, in a community where erratic and unethical human behavior were common enough to require constant vigilance. Robertson seemed to live by a traditional moral code—simple and staunch—forged in his strict Presbyterian upbringing.
Robertson's way of life, of course, endeared him to his friends, associates and employees—people like Evelyn Christel, for example, who had lived for two decades on the fringes of the Hollywood scene but centered her life on her family, their printing business in Van Nuys, and the Roman Catholic Church. But Cliff’s qualities grated a little on a lot of Hollywood people. They found him self-righteous, old-fashioned, too bland to be much fun and. worst of all, too unpredictable ever to be fully acceptable in the world's ultimate company town.
In these people's eyes. Robertson was perpetually guilty of a serious and unforgivable offense: he didn't truly need Hollywood.
As u result, a number of his relationships in the entertainment community had always been a bit uncomfortable and had contained the seeds of friction. Although Cliff had never been a big enough star to dictate terms of film contracts and isolate himself from the hurly-burly of the business, the friction had usually been quiescent and had affected his career only occasionally and only in relatively minor ways.
But all of that was about to change. Cliff Robertson soon would be engulfed in a holocaust of controversy and pain that would maim several lives, including his own, would hundreds of other people, and jostle the foundations of the world's most glamorous industry.
The institution of Hollywood, with all its staying power, would never be quite the same again.
Evelyn Christel passed through the white stucco Spanish-style house and out onto the large patio where Cliff Robertson, clad in slacks and a heavy sweater, was relaxing next to the pool with a mug of coffee and a lap full of mail.
Dina wasn't in evidence. Eight-year-old Heather Robertson was brought to the patio by her governess to kiss her father good-bye before leaving for school, and Cliff and Evelyn got down to work. When the Robertson family was away from New York for extended periods, their mail was collected in large envelopes and forwarded to them every few days. When it arrived in Los Angeles, Cliff would summon Evelyn, dictate replies to letters, give her bills to pay, and turn over any other matters which she appropriately could handle.
That morning in Fremont Place it took about an hour and a half to dispense with the two dozen or so pieces of mail that had just arrived. All but one were fairly routine. It was a windowed envelope from the Internal Revenue Service containing an IRS Form 1099, Statement of Miscellaneous Income, 1976. The form indicated that Cliff Robertson had been paid $10,000 the previous year by Columbia Pictures.
"Does this ring any bells with you?" Cliff asked Evelyn. She examined the document. "No."
"Columbia Pictures. Ten thousand dollars." Cliff mused. "That's funny. I didn't do any work for them last year, and I certainly didn't get any money from them. At least I don't remember any. It's an odd figure, too. ten thousand. That's not what I get for a picture. Maybe it was supposed to be a residual payment of some kind, but whatever it was I'm quite sure I didn't receive it. Why don't you check with Michael or Bud and see if they know anything about it."
By noon. Evelyn was back in Van Nuys and Cliff was at Paramount where, since late December, he had been filming a television movie to be entitled Washington: Behind Closed Doors, based on the John Ehrlichman novel about the Watergate White House and the CIA. Cliff played the director of Central Intelligence.
TWO
The inquiry into the matter of the $10.000 seemed no more urgent than the many other tasks that Evelyn Christel was performing for Cliff Robertson, and it was not assigned a unique priority. The following week, she telephoned Abraham "Bud" Kahaner. the senior partner of Prager & Fenton, Robertson's accountants. Kahaner had no record of the $10,000 payment from Columbia Pictures. Neither did Michael Black, Cliff’s agent at the Los Angeles office of International Creative Management. Evelyn then phoned the Columbia accounting department in Burbank. After being passed among several clerks, she finally was told that the payment appeared to be related to the 1976 motion picture Obsession, a psychological thriller in which Robertson played a businessman who meets the double of his widow (Genevieve Bujold). Obsession, which director-writer Brian De Palma derived in part from Hitchcock's Vertigo, had not been made under Columbia Pictures' aegis: the studio had purchased the finished movie from an independent film company and distributed it. Evelyn confirmed with Kahaner and Black that all of Robertson's fees from Obsession had been paid by the filmmaker. He was owed nothing and had received nothing from Columbia Pictures.
Cliff told Evelyn to demand a written explanation, and on Tuesday, March 15, she dispatched a letter to Columbia's accounting department asking the details of the $10.000 payment.
* * *
Columbia Pictures' movie and television operations were
situated at The Burbank Studios, a 105-acre tract at the north foot of Cahuenga Peak, one of the highest and steepest hills in the ridge separating the San Fernando Valley from the rest of Los Angeles to the south. The Burbank Studios, together with nearby NBC, Universal and Disney, formed the northern point of a rough, fifty-square-mile diamond within which were found just about all of the companies, facilities, and people comprising what the world at large thought of as "Hollywood," or the "Show Business Capital of the World." The eastern point of the diamond, as one looked at a map, was formed by Paramount Pictures and the ABC studios southeast of Burbank across the hills in the eastern part of Hollywood proper. The western point was the cluster of Beverly Hills, Century City, and the Twentieth Century-Fox studios southwest of Burbank across the hills in the western sector of Los Angeles. The southern point of the diamond was the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot, housing MGM and United Artists, a forty-five-minute drive south of Burbank in Culver City, not far from the Los Angeles airport.
Columbia Pictures shared the thirty-eight sound stages and other facilities of The Burbank Studios with Warner Bros. The Columbia executive offices were housed in a striking two-story redwood, tinted glass, and concrete building with a central atrium at the northeast corner of the Burbank lot. The accounting department was on the second floor at the back.
When Evelyn Christel's letter arrived, the accounts-payable supervisor, Dick Caudillo, pulled the files and found that a check payable to Cliff Robertson had been drawn on September 2, 1976, at the request of the president of the Columbia studio, David Begelman, the flamboyant former talent agent who had been running Columbia for nearly four years. Caudillo informed Begelman's office of the Robertson inquiry and was told that the money had been paid to Robertson to cover his expenses for a personal-appearance tour that he had made to promote Obsession. The inquiry took two weeks to make its way from Caudillo to David Begelman's office and back. Caudillo forwarded the information to Evelyn Christel on Monday, March 28.