They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (3 page)

              
—Alex Ross,
New Yorker
, April 1, 2002

The situation at Lincoln Center was in a state of disarray. Disagreements proliferated, and civility had all but disappeared. Relationships and processes that had bound constituent artistic organizations together were unraveling, very publicly. At stake was the very future of Lincoln Center as the leading performing arts institution in the world.

There were real challenges and threats to be managed. The nine performing arts organizations, two educational institutions, and one branch of the New York Public Library all confronted some combination of these realities: declining and aging audiences; a post-9/11 flagging economy; competition for consumer discretionary income; and significant reductions in government support—federal, state, and municipal—for annual operating requirements.

Yet the most pernicious dangers emanated from inside Lincoln Center, in the form of self-inflicted wounds. In the absence of forward-looking leadership, resident artistic forces behaved more like rivals and adversaries than partners and allies. Staff and trustees were highly unrealistic about the energy and determination needed to remedy decades of deferred maintenance, to fix a deteriorating infrastructure, and to enliven tired and uninviting public spaces. Instead of reimagining how cultural encounter and civic engagement might meet in the twenty-first century, Lincoln Center had become a nasty mixture of shortsightedness and pettiness.

Parochialism prevailed. Lincoln Center was a quarrelsome, unpleasant place. Its leaders seemed tired, bereft of ideas, and lacking in energy. The best years of the oldest American performing arts center, the largest and most prominent in the world, were increasingly described in the past tense by observers, commentators, and insiders.

Fortunately I was forearmed, because I chose to disregard the warnings.

After six years of traipsing through much of the Third World and many failed states as the president of the International Rescue Committee
(IRC), one of the world’s leading refugee assistance organizations, somehow the stresses and strains of Lincoln Center, with its sixteen acres and twelve world-class arts institutions, struck me as manageable.

After having dealt with Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Slobodan Milošević of Serbia, and their followers, Joe Volpe, the volcanic general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, seemed to me if not a pleasure, well, hardly daunting.

And having ordered food drops from the air over Kosovo; rushed assistance to malnourished children in Burundi, Tanzania, and East Timor; and let the world know that the Eastern Congo and South Sudan are the planet’s two most dangerous places, because I had witnessed human agony and depravity there with my own eyes, Lincoln Center and its key figures, with their bombast and betrayals, somehow fell into a proper context. Whatever the quarreling was about, surely life or death was not at stake.

Another motivation for me to compete for the job was that although I am a very well-traveled and a reasonably well-read guy, I am an unabashedly proud New Yorker. The events of 9/11 shook me and my seemingly impregnable, defiant city to our psychic foundations. Rather than “retreat” to the challenge of teaching and writing in a just-offered, tenured post at the Harvard Business School, I was haunted by a question: How could I help, even in a small way, recently elected Mayor Bloomberg to nurture my hometown back to recovery?

For much of my adult life I had watched JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports embarrassingly deteriorate. Second-tier American cities and third world countries had more modern transportation infrastructures. I had rooted in vain for New York City to once again compete for large trade shows and professional conventions by modernizing the utterly outmoded Javits Center. I also had seen little forward movement on converting the Farley Post Office at 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues into a new Moynihan Station, which has been on the drawing board as the much-desired
eventual
replacement for the deteriorating Penn Station. Few people believed that the Second Avenue tunnel would be completed, and certainly neither on time nor anywhere near budget. I watched sadly as major ideas for the development of Governor’s Island moved from one stage of drift and indecision to another.

All of these and other projects critical to New York’s economic future were stymied by political battles among mayors, governors, Assembly speakers, and Senate majority leaders. The projects were victims of what Senator Chuck Schumer politely called the culture of inertia.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised a different future. And I hoped that my professional habit of getting things done might be put to good use.

Ever since my stint as executive director of the 92nd Street Y from 1977 to 1984, I had been beguiled by the performing arts. I was, and remained, a Lincoln Center loyalist, enamored of its ten first-class resident arts organizations and two teaching academies. The opportunity to help them overcome their many self-imposed obstacles to progress and to lead in Lincoln Center’s preparation for the next generation of artists and audiences was simply too tempting. And so was being in charge of the largest and most consequential presenter of arts in the world.

O
RIGINALLY
I
THOUGHT
the chances of my being selected by the search committee were even at best. True, my seven years with the 92nd Street Y had brought about a much-noticed revitalization of all the performing arts at that venerable organization. But the powers that be at Lincoln Center might have viewed the Y as modest in size, an upstart, a marginal player.

Their possible attitude reminded me of a story I used to tell as the Y’s executive director whenever I needed an excuse for being late to an appointment downtown. Traffic traveling south on Lexington Avenue was often at a standstill. Hailing a taxi meant risking a delayed arrival. The subway was also notorious for equipment breakdown. I ran the risk of being held up in a train that would just not move. So, when seeking forgiveness, I would mention Isaac Stern, who performed at the Y for years.

Fairly early in his career, he was pacing up and down in his famous agent’s office in a distressed state. Isaac was represented by the legendary impresario Sol Hurok. They were very close, and Sol treated Isaac like a son:

“Isaac, you look very upset. What is wrong?”

“Papa, each year you schedule me on the west coast at the start of the season. By the time I cross the country and reach New York in the late spring, my playing has improved, and I am ready for the tough-minded, demanding New York newspaper critics. But for some reason, this year, my very first solo recital is here in Manhattan.”

“Isaac, I have forgotten. Where did I book you?”

“I am playing at the 92nd Street’s Y Kaufmann Concert Hall.”

“Oh, Isaac, quit worrying. That is an out of town engagement.”

Would the search committee in 2002 dismiss my Y experience as not only “out of town,” but also too far in the past to be relevant, as I had left that executive director post eighteen years earlier?

In my favor, I had been the architect of the AT&T Foundation, the largest corporate-asset-based philanthropic entity in America. The arts was one of its leading priorities. Together with Exxon and Philip Morris, the AT&T Foundation was the most generous corporate benefactor to the performing arts in the country. Most Lincoln Center artistic organizations regularly received handsome charitable gifts from the foundation during my tenure as president or chairman from 1984 to 1996.

But few institutional philanthropists contributed enough to loom large in the economic life of the ballet, the theater, the orchestra, and the opera, to name but four of the beneficiaries of AT&T support. My leadership there was nice, perhaps a plus, but hardly dispositive.

If that was the case for my time at the AT&T Foundation, it was even more so for my role as chair of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a formidable family fund with a substantial performing arts program to its credit.

Even my business responsibilities at AT&T—helping to lead its media, public relations, advertising, and public affairs programs and assisting in charting a course for the company to conduct business overseas—might have been viewed as of marginal relevance to playing the role of the Lincoln Center’s president.

Teaching, consulting, and writing seemed to gain me no credit in search committee deliberations. I was not asked a single question about these roles, except whether I expected to give them up entirely if I was offered the job.

My time as president of the largest refugee relief and resettlement agency (1997–2002) was regarded as somewhat exotic work, its applicability to Lincoln Center hard to fathom.

I had two opportunities to overcome any doubts, misperceptions, and reservations, at full search committee meetings. And although I had not previously met two of the most influential members—Frank A. Bennack Jr., president of the Hearst Corporation and vice chair of Lincoln Center, and Bruce Crawford, the chair of the Metropolitan Opera—and knew Beverly Sills, Lincoln Center’s chair, only slightly, the interviews seemed to go smoothly.

When one of my primary rivals, a quintessential insider, Joseph Polisi, at that time the president of The Juilliard School for some thirteen years, publicly withdrew from contention, my prospects improved. Little did I know with how many job applicants I was actually competing, including former cabinet members in the Clinton administration and corporate leaders of some repute from around the country.

I described the forces at play to my wife Elizabeth, whose response was unforgettable.

“Reynold, you are a competitive guy. I am sure you will secure this offer, and the place will be lucky to have you.

“But are you sure you want this headache of a job, in view of all that you are learning about the poisonous environment at Lincoln Center?”

She was absolutely right to pose that question.

Why was I drawn to this post, notwithstanding all the warnings and the prevailing negativism?

Generally, I favor the underdog. When two sports teams play against one another, and I am a fan of neither, I routinely root for the club that comes from the town with the highest unemployment rate. The 92nd Street Y—dispirited, running an operating deficit, underutilized, talent deprived, and needing an infusion of energy and leadership—had been just the place for me.

In 1982 AT&T, at that time the largest company in the world, was just about to divest itself under court order of local telephone companies and compete in every American market for both services and equipment, as well as to conduct business abroad. Under such circumstances, it was turning to outsiders for help. I was flattered to be asked
to be one of them. And what I knew about the business initially consisted of picking up a phone and waiting for a dial tone.

I, a New Yorker, was working in a firm dominated by midwesterners; a Democrat in a rock-solid Republican corporation; a fellow who preferred Beethoven to Willie Nelson, and tennis to golf. Four strikes against me, I was told. It was the perfect challenge.

The IRC had trouble meeting payroll and severe problems making financial ends meet. The nobility of its cause and the compelling need for its services threatened to be overwhelmed by a scarcity of revenue, the absence of cost controls and risk enterprise management tools, and a breakdown of management accountability. Institutional crisis was fast approaching. Maybe I could lead in the repair of a broken, but very worthy and much-admired, organization.

So the mission ahead at Lincoln Center appealed to me. I was drawn to the challenge of resolving conflict in its conspicuously failing physical transformation. It was mired in controversy. I was confident that I could solve the stalemate and help lead the organization out of a cul-de-sac.

But I hoped to do much more than break an impasse.

I wanted to associate with the glamour and the glitter, to be ultimately responsible for the production and presentation of classical performing arts and of the new, the fresh, and the innovative. I yearned to encourage gifted staff to bring to their indoor and outdoor stages the most daring, audacious, and ambitious work. I was drawn to the soaring wonder of the performing arts at their finest.

Really, though, what I longed for was to expand, and by a wide margin, the Lincoln Center practice of subsidized tickets and free performances that lowered the barriers to entry for working-class families. This is the Lincoln Center that welcomes all and invites New Yorkers and visitors from every economic class to come early and stay late. I yearned for it to remain or to become a destination in and of itself, an oasis of relaxation and greenery in a crowded and dense town, a mainstay contributor to the quality of life in New York City, and a very important source of civic pride.

At this book’s opening I quote E. B. White, who described three kinds of New Yorkers: those who were born here; those who commute; and those from out of town or another country, who arrive in New
York City as their final destination. Lincoln Center must serve all three, but it needed to extend itself, with special attention, to welcome those first-generation New Yorkers, “the settlers,” who give the city passion.

As a kid growing up in a poor and working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1950s and 1960s, I attended PS 100, situated between Brighton Beach and the edge of Coney Island, and Abraham Lincoln High School, located on Ocean Parkway. Both offered an excellent education for students willing and able to take advantage of a superb faculty and a tradition that highly prized excellence in teaching and learning. And both placed no small emphasis on the performing arts as a pathway to education; a method of transmitting national and universal values; a source of social cohesion; and a way for kids to develop self-confidence, poise, empathy, and a capacity to imagine.