They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (2 page)

Not only was holding the post of president an honor, but I was truly blessed by my chairpersons, John Whitehead, Winston Lord, and Dr. James Strickler. All were conscious of the need for this CEO to enjoy considerable running room in an organization that itself required basic repair. Because of them, thousands of refugees are alive and thriving. But for them, the fate of thousands of others would be far less promising.

The Harvard Business School, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Charles H. Revson Foundation, where I played supportive roles, and other organizations cited throughout the book, all helped to shape my view of leadership and to prepare me for its challenges. I am particularly grateful to Allen Grossman of HBS; Fred Bergsten, the founder and CEO of the Peterson Institute; and Julie Sandorf, the president of Revson Foundation. They have been exemplary colleagues in every way.

In writing this book, there are friends to whom I turned for help. There are colleagues at whose side I labored. There are mentors and role models from whom I learned much. And then there is someone who embodies all of these qualities. His name is Bart Friedman. We first met sixty years ago and for much of the time ever since we have kept in close touch.
They Told Me
benefited from his sage advice just as I have all of my adult life.

When my plans to leave Lincoln Center became news, Peter Osnos called to express keen interest in having PublicAffairs publish my book, if I intended to write one. His was a welcome gesture. Peter’s introducing me to Clive Priddle, the publisher of PublicAffairs and my editor, was a gift. The team Clive assembled has handled all aspects of the magical transformation of a manuscript into what you now hold in your hands. They have done so with singular care and attention. At every turn,
They Told Me
is the beneficiary of Clive’s high standards and those of his colleagues. I am one grateful author.

It is not for nothing that Andrew Wylie is a legendary agent. No e-mail to him failed to receive an almost instantaneous and thoughtful response. He is a man of few words, but it is worth weighing them carefully. I appreciate his tutelage.

For my final eighteen months at Lincoln Center, Rachel Moore was my executive assistant. Her efficiency, tact, graciousness, and sheer hard work made it possible for me to think about what this book might be like.

Annie Perretta worked conscientiously and skillfully to type the early drafts of this manuscript. She was a joy to be around. Apparently I was not, as she abandoned me for the Stern School of Business. I am grateful to her for assuming this accountability. It was an act of highly valued friendship.

She then passed on this responsibility to Henry Wainhouse. Henry, too, took on this assignment with consummate care, skill, and good humor. He did so at all hours, sometimes seven days a week, until it was complete.

I cannot imagine undertaking and completing this work without their collective assistance.

I am not sure whether it is easier or more difficult to live with an around-the-clock chief executive or a crazed writer. Somehow my wife Elizabeth has managed both with aplomb. She not only read
They Told Me
. She not only critiqued it. She lived it. Countless people have been introduced to Lincoln Center by her during my tenure as president. She was nothing less than Lincoln Center’s first lady.

I am lucky that she has been mine, too.

PROLOGUE

M
uch of my professional life has been spent as the chief executive officer of three institutions: the 92nd Street Y, an internationally renowned community and cultural center; then the International Rescue Committee, a leading refugee relief and resettlement agency; and finally Lincoln Center, America’s oldest and the world’s largest and most prominent performing arts complex.

I have also served as the architect and first president of the AT&T Foundation, at its founding one of America’s largest asset-based corporate philanthropic funds, and chairman of the board of two bellwether private foundations, Nathan Cummings and Charles H. Revson. The combination of leading top-notch public service organizations and directing over $1.5 billion of grants to hundreds of recipients left me with nothing short of a sense of reverence for what nonprofits and foundations can accomplish. The roles I played allowed me to encounter professionals and trustees at their very best: fully aligned, thoroughly committed, remarkably resourceful, and utterly devoted to the discharge of their missions.

The results? Countless lives saved, the sick healed, children educated, clients trained for jobs, and millions exposed to the very best in the performing and visual arts that our planet has to offer. Nonprofits can rescue refugees and displaced people and reunite children separated from their families. They can eliminate cholera, polio, malaria, and HIV-AIDS from the face of the earth. They can revolutionize the delivery of health, educational, social, and cultural services using the wonders of twenty-first-century technology. They can do all of these
things and much more when leadership is encouraged and when vital energy is aimed directly at the client and the cause.

Sadly, I have also witnessed, up-close and personal, institutional disarray and dereliction of duty. It is very distressing to encounter professionals who do not measure up to the standard of conduct that those they serve have every right to expect. It is painful to observe trustees in positions of authority who permit such deficient behavior in those who report to them. When such trustees are themselves casual about the discharge of their own solemn responsibilities, I despair.

This memoir reveals the dynamics of some of these nongovernmental enterprises. Millions of employees and volunteers labor diligently to support them. They all deserve well-governed and well-led organizations, places in which to do their best work.

Those in positions of authority who fall well short of accomplishing what is reasonably expected of them are often not held accountable. How can that be? When customers and audiences are poorly served. When budgets are in deficit condition. When operations are off kilter. And when balance sheets are drained of assets. Such performance failures are hardly inevitable. They are the consequence of poorly monitored institutions and of inept management. They are examples of leadership gone astray.

Despite the lapses that I cite, I hope readers will come away from this volume with a palpable sense of why America’s nonprofit institutions are so important. The challenges of discharging their mission well are easily as complicated as running a commercial or governmental entity, and no less significant for the welfare of our communities and for the competitive standing of our country.

I wrote this book wishing that professionals and volunteers might find useful lessons from my experience. It will be a source of pleasure if there are takeaways in these pages that can help others who are striving for superior programs, healthier balance sheets, sounder operating budgets, and excellent governance.

This is my account, and I do my best in good faith to accurately depict Lincoln Center’s officials and other important figures, revealing their noble feats of leadership and their painful acts of omission and commission, the better to learn from them.

The three organizations with which I was privileged to be associated are highly regarded. Whatever their shortfalls, deficiencies, and blemishes, the 92nd Street Y, the IRC, and Lincoln Center continue to draw to themselves unparalleled levels of professional talent, voluntary expertise, and philanthropic resources.

The character, comportment, and competence of nonprofit organizations are not to be taken for granted. Eternal vigilance is the price we must pay for ensuring that valuable institutions like these will remain beacons of superlative service. America needs tens of thousands of public service agencies, each in its own way serving as a source of excellence and object of civic pride.

I hope my story assists and encourages those drawn to causes such as these.

CHAPTER 1

A Kid from Brooklyn Becomes a President (Again)

I
was warned. They told me not to take that job.

“It’s a freewheeling circus, Reynold. And there’s no ringmaster.”

“Why would you want to cope with so many self-reverential personalities run amok?”

“Only Darwin and Hobbes would fully understand what’s really going on over there.”

To compete to be the president of Lincoln Center was regarded by my friends and mentors as bordering on a self-destructive act.

The most recent incumbent, Gordon Davis, had lasted all of nine months. The board chair, Beverly Sills, was mired in controversy, exhausted after seven and a half years in that role, and eager to leave. Lincoln Center’s much-touted redevelopment project was tied in a Gordian knot.

The widely admired developer Marshall Rose, who so successfully spearheaded the restoration of Bryant Park, had just resigned from his post as chair of Lincoln Center Redevelopment and was quoted on the way out as saying, “[I] was stabbed in the back.”
¹

If that sounds Shakespearean, the allusion fits. Rivalries abounded. Personalities clashed. Egos reigned. Reputations were badly damaged. And the whole circus was reported on assiduously by a delighted press, analyzed to a fare-thee-well by the newspapers and weekly magazines:

First, its President of 17 years, Nathan Leventhal, stepped down just as the [redevelopment] effort was getting underway. Then, the Metropolitan Opera held the project hostage in a very public battle over management issues. Then, the economy took a dive, terrorists attacked New York, and now Lincoln Center’s new President, Gordon J. Davis, has decided to resign after less than a year. Can the institution still hope to raise $1.5 billion to rebuild its complex over the next ten years? Some top cultural officials have said no, that the project was likely to be postponed or abandoned, perhaps simply because the Met and the other constituent arts groups still cannot agree on how to proceed.

              
—Robin Pogrebin,
New York Times
, September 29, 2001

. . . a study in the treacherous—some would say dysfunctional—politics of the city’s largest and most fractious arts organization. Hamstrung by rivalries among the Center’s warring constituent members; undercut by Ms. Sills, who seemed unwilling to cede power to her new President; and derided by staff members . . . a disillusioned Mr. Davis finally called it quits on September 27.

              
—Elisabeth Franck and Andrew Rice,
New York Observer
, October 8, 2001

Lincoln Center is a community in deep distress, riven by conflict over a grandiose $1 billion redevelopment plan . . . instead of uniting the Center’s constituent arts organizations behind a common goal, the project has pitted them against one another in open warfare more reminiscent of the shoot-out at the OK Corral than of a night at the opera. “To say that it is a mess is putting it mildly,” says Johanna Fiedler, the author and a former staff member at the Metropolitan Opera. “There is nobody running the show right now.”

              
—Leslie Bennetts,
New York Magazine
, February 4, 2002

What is wrong with Lincoln Center? The problem goes deeper than the virtuoso bickering over redevelopment which, to judge from reports, fills the corridors of what is called “the world’s larg
est cultural complex.” The chief personalities of the place—Beverly Sills, Joe Volpe, Paul Kellogg, and the rest—make entertaining copy, and it would almost be a pity if the soap opera were to end.