Another Life

by Michael Korda

  I shrugged. “The ending works in the book,” I said. “Maybe for the movie you could do something different. After all, in all these books, like Black Sunday and so on, the terrorists’ bomb always gets defused at the last moment. Maybe in the movie you should make the audience believe that’s what’s going to happen, then, at the very last second, you simply show an atomic bomb going off in New York City. The cop has failed. If that doesn’t shock the audience, I don’t know what will.”

  There was a long silence. “You mean, we fry eight million New Yorkers on screen?” Bluhdorn asked.

  “Not all of them,” I said cheerfully. “People in Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island would probably survive. But that’s not the point. Make the ending tough. Have the bomb go off.”

  There was a longer silence. Then Bluhdorn leaned over, rumpled my hair, and pinched my cheek affectionately. “No,” he said, “that’s a terrible idea. But at least you’re trying. I want you to make this your number-one priority from now on.”

  It was nearly dark by the time we had finished and Forman and I were dismissed. I accompanied Forman back to his car. Did he really think the ending was the problem? I asked. “No,” he said. “Forget the ending. Who cares? The movie is never going to get made.”

  “My father used to say half of making movies is wasting time.”

  He rolled his eyes. “He was a wise man. And an optimist.”

  Waste of time or not, Bluhdorn didn’t give up. The next time I heard from him was by way of a telephone call from one of his secretaries. Bluhdorn wanted me to join him for dinner at the Saint-Tropez tomorrow night to talk about the movie.

  I said I’d be delighted. Then I asked where the restaurant was, since I’d never heard of it.

  “It’s not a restaurant, it’s a place. He wants you to join him for dinner in Saint-Tropez, France. Do you know where it is?”

  Yes, I knew where it was, of course, and had been there often, mostly with my Uncle Alex, on his yacht. Did I have a place to stay there? the secretary wanted to know. Mr. Bluhdorn and his party were staying at the Byblos, which was one of the more glamorous hotels in the South of France, I remembered. Would I like her to book me a room there?

  I was momentarily tempted—the last time I had stayed at the Byblos had been with my Uncle Alex and Orson Welles, after Welles had performed the astonishing feat, at La Mère Teraille’s restaurant, in La Napoule, of eating two whole roast chickens before devouring a pot of her famous bouillabaisse that would normally have served four persons, with plenty left over for seconds—but then it occurred to me that by staying in the same hotel as Bluhdorn I would automatically become part of his entourage, and might find it difficult to escape. No, I said, I would look after myself, and called Larry Collins, who, together with Dominique Lapierre, was the real object of Bluhdorn’s visit, and asked for a bed—at the time Collins and Lapierre had houses close by each other in the hills above Saint-Tropez. If experience had taught me anything, it was to make sure of your own accommodation and rent your own car.

  I booked myself on the Concorde, then from Paris to Nice, where I would rent a car for the drive to Saint-Tropez—covering ground that was familiar to me from my childhood and youth. It promised to be a splendid trip, at once full of nostalgia and free—and, as Snyder pointed out, chargeable to the G+W corporate budget, rather than S&S’s. I decided to rent a Mercedes at Nice—there was no point in economizing on comfort, I reasoned.

  My trip was uneventful but punctuated by constant communications from Bluhdorn’s staff: At both airports I was paged relentlessly. Mr. Bluhdorn was over the Atlantic now, together with Mr. Diller, and they would touch down at London, where I should join them for the flight to Nice. Then: They would land in Paris, not London. Then: They were no longer going to land in Paris but had decided to fly on to Amsterdam, instead, where I should meet them.

  I ignored all these messages, turned a deaf ear to the loudspeakers calling out my name at the Nice airport, and drove on to Saint-Tropez, arriving at Larry Collins’s house with hours to spare before dinner.

  Collins had received no word from the Bluhdorn party, so I went down to the hotel Bluhdorn was to stay at—prudently taking a book with me—and waited until finally, after several hours, there was a bustle of limousines outside in the courtyard and Bluhdorn arrived at last. He burst into the suite like a rocket, apparently unfatigued by nearly twenty-four hours of travel on a small airplane.

  He immediately made for the nearest telephone in the suite, one of those futuristic, streamlined ones that the French are so fond of, and struggled with it for a few moments, stabbing at the buttons and cursing—Bluhdorn was one of those men who seem unable to deal with any mechanical device. I put him out of his misery and placed a call to New York for him. Whoever was on the other end, Bluhdorn did not waste time on amenities. He simply started talking, asking for the prices of various shares, giving orders to buy or sell, and unloaded enough sugar futures to fill God only knew how many trains and ships, his eyes bright despite the time change, a fresh cigar held delicately between his blunt, well-manicured fingers.

  Bluhdorn’s two traveling companions were considerably less full of life than their mercurial chief. Barry Diller, the head of Paramount, looked so tired that his eyes seemed to have rolled up in their sockets, exposing only the whites, like two hard-boiled eggs. I asked him how the trip had been. Diller groaned. Bluhdorn, he said, had never stopped talking all the way across the Atlantic—even when he went to the bathroom, he left the door open a crack so he could continue talking. Although hotel suites had been booked for Bluhdorn and his party everywhere along the route, they never left the airplane. Instead, so as not to waste time, people with whom Bluhdorn had business waited at the airports to come onboard the airplane. As soon as the meetings were finished, the airplane took off again for the next city. The third man in the party was one of Paramount’s European executives, a genial, plump man in his sixties, who had apparently been chosen because of his calming effect on Bluhdorn. Though tired, he looked happier than Diller. I asked Diller why this was so. Barry nodded gingerly, like a man with a bad headache who doesn’t want to make it worse. “He’s learned to sleep with his eyes open,” he said.

  Bluhdorn finished his call and asked for the time—watches, apparently, had a way of going dead on his wrist, perhaps because of the waves of energy emanating from him, or perhaps it had to do with his mechanical ineptitude, whatever the cause he preferred to ask the time rather than glance at a watch. Of course the simple answer may be that since he was always surrounded by people who were paid, among other things, to do his bidding, he simply saw no point in wearing a watch, or making a phone call, or carrying money for tips. Other people could do all those things for him, leaving him free to talk and worry about the price of sugar.

  I told him that it was eight o’clock. “Jezus Ker-RIST!” he howled. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”

  Bluhdorn was in motion again, sending the Paramount executive to search his luggage for a resupply of cigars, briefing us about our host, ordering me to place one last call to New York. We descended to the lobby in a flying wedge, led by Bluhdorn. Collins and Lapierre were waiting for us in the lobby. Bluhdorn hugged them, pulled their ear-lobes, pinched their cheeks. They were his boys, he told them, the goddamn movie was going to get made if it was the last goddamn thing he did. People had told him that The Godfather was a mistake, but he hadn’t listened, he had kept his faith in the book, in the young director, in the whole goddamn thing, and look what had happened. A huge fucking hit, one of the biggest ever! You had to believe, that was all, and he believed, he just wanted them to know that. This was said, I guessed, for the benefit of Barry Diller, who had made it very plain that he did not believe, but Diller was beyond arguing, putting one Gucci-clad foot in front of the other on the gleaming marble floor like a man who has just gotten out of bed for the first time since surgery.

  Bluhdorn seated us in the limousine like a tour director, and
we set off. We were having dinner at the home of Dino Fabbri, he explained, an Italian industrialist and printing magnate, who was both a close friend and a business partner of Bluhdorn’s. Fabbri’s house, when we arrived there, overlooked the sea, and was built in the style and on much the same scale as that of the Emperor Tiberius’s on Capri. The approach was hilly and winding, past small guest houses and garages hidden among small, fragrant pine trees. Bluhdorn charged up a broad flight of marble steps to embrace his host, while we straggled behind.

  Fabbri was tall, slender, elegant. He didn’t seem to mind Bluhdorn’s bear hug, but he didn’t look as if he enjoyed it much either. He managed to extricate himself, shake hands with each of us, then led us through room after magnificent room, all of them in the somewhat cold and formal style of the lobby of a very expensive, but modern, grand hotel de luxe—the Baur Grünwald in Venice came to my mind. The floors were gleaming marble, and the furniture heavily gilded. Bluhdorn was on edge, trying to move as fast as he could, but Fabbri held him back, determined to show him the grandeurs of his palazzo, with a certain amount of pride. Clearly, he had gone to a great deal of trouble to put on this dinner. Spread out gracefully in the rooms were any number of very beautiful women in couture dresses, most of them showing a lot of deeply tanned skin, and a certain number of very sleek men wearing the kind of summer suits that can be had only from a Roman tailor, which never seem to crease or wrinkle. Under the subdued lighting, there was a sparkle and glare of gold and gemstones. Fabbri, in short, had produced a party of beautiful people for Bluhdorn, all of them attractive, wealthy, or both. Bluhdorn, however, despite his eye for a good-looking woman, walked right past them all without a word, until we were on the terrace, which was lit with blazing torchères. At the far end a huge buffet had been set up. There were piles of lobsters, displays of every imaginable kind of seafood, hot dishes, cold dishes, all presented with the kind of old-fashioned opulence and elegance that only the French can achieve when money is not a concern. Fabbri held out both arms in a gesture of hostly pride. “What do you think of that?” he asked.

  Bluhdorn wasn’t impressed. “Are we here to eat or to talk business?” he growled, and before we could even put a few crevettes roses with ail on a plate, we were whisked off to a small library, a few of the beautiful young women were pushed out, and we sat down to discuss all over again, at interminable length, the problems of making The Fifth Horseman into a movie. Tired Barry Diller may have been (when we finally did sit down to dinner, he instantly went to sleep at the table), but he was not so tired that he had forgotten how to say no.

  Collins and Lapierre told him all their ideas for turning the book into a script, while he listened politely, shaking his head. In the end, even Bluhdorn got tired of the whole thing, and we were eventually allowed to sit down and eat. About midnight, I was told that I should spend the night, since Bluhdorn wanted to talk to me over breakfast. Too tired to be apprehensive, I allowed myself to be led away to one of the guest houses. I could not help noticing that while the rich often spend lavishly on their houses, they tend to economize on guest rooms. This one could have been a bedroom on the ground floor of any budget-priced motel in America. Clearly, some young woman had been displaced from it on my behalf, since her things were all over the room. I moved her lingerie off the rumpled bed and fell instantly asleep.

  In the morning, I walked up to the main house and found Bluhdorn seated on a terrace, at the breakfast table, surrounded by flowers and birds, reading the morning newspapers in several languages. He was wearing an open sports shirt in a vivid pattern, a pair of shorts, and sandals, but there was nothing relaxed about his manner. We talked about the previous night’s meeting as we ate breakfast. Did I think it had gone well? he asked.

  I sipped my coffee. I saw nothing to be gained by avoiding the truth. No, I didn’t think so, I said. Whatever the story problems were, it didn’t seem to me that they had been solved. The truth of the matter was that it was all a waste of time and effort. The fact remained that either you wanted to make a movie about a Palestinian terrorist planting an atomic weapon in New York City or you didn’t. If you did, there was more than enough material to make it, whoever wrote the screenplay. If you didn’t, then no amount of ideas, however clever, would convince you.

  Bluhdorn nodded. He was in a sunny mood—maybe it was the weather, maybe he was simply a man who enjoyed breakfast. He lit a cigar and looked out over the orange groves and pine trees to the sea. “What the hell,” he said. “We tried, right?” No answer seemed to be called for. “What else do you have to do here?” he asked.

  Nothing, I told him.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You mean you flew over here just for this one goddamn meeting?” I nodded. He reflected on this and shook his head. “Then you’d better be getting back to New York.”

  I was back in New York the same day. The journey had been so rapid that a lot of people didn’t even know I had been away, and, after a few days, I wasn’t even sure myself.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE the trip had been unsuccessful, I never came that close to Bluhdorn again. It is possible that he associated me in his mind with one of his rare failures, though I think it is more likely that his attention was already being drawn away by more pressing concerns.

  The scene during which Bluhdorn had made confetti of the Times for our benefit was prophetic. Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting was the opening salvo in an attack on G+W, most of which was aimed personally at Bluhdorn—who took it personally, of course.

  Hersh’s charges stemmed from a defection that Bluhdorn regarded, perhaps correctly, as a personal betrayal, comparable to that of Judas—Joel A. Dolkart, a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and G+W’s chief legal adviser, had been indicted on many counts of fraud, including the theft of $2,500,000, in the face of which, being disinclined to spend several years in prison, he agreed to cooperate, providing the feds (and The New York Times’s Seymour Hersh) with a rich harvest of allegations with which to torment Bluhdorn. It was, one of Bluhdorn’s advisers put it, “as if Henry Kissinger had defected to Moscow.”

  Increasingly, Bluhdorn began to resemble a Spanish fighting bull—snorting, angry, bloody, and unbowed, reacting to pricks from the picador. It was not that any of the allegations were, in themselves, all that startling—they included “questionable tax practices,” “questionable corporate payments abroad,” “unreported use of company resources for the private gain of company officials,” the “mishandling” of the company’s annual financial statements, “a pattern of transactions … designed to conceal the true financial condition of the company,” and “inadequate public disclosures about the administration of [the company’s] employee pension fund,” but nevertheless the company’s innermost financial secrets had been exposed, in an invidious light, by a long-term insider, something that happens rarely in corporate America.

  Many of the charges were spurious, or exaggerated by the press, or made more dramatic in the telling by Sy Hersh; others were pretty much the norm in high-flying conglomerates like G+W. After all, nobody had ever pretended that G+W was AT&T or IBM; it was a company in which executives were expected to think on their feet, to take risks, and to do everything they could to keep the stock price going up. Certainly, it wasn’t the kind of company in which people spent a lot of time worrying about whether X or Y was really entitled to use one of the corporate jets, or pause to ask whether the financial people should be spending their time working on Bluhdorn’s personal taxes. It was understood by everyone—certainly by the shareholders and the executives—that in a certain sense Bluhdorn was G+W. When you invested in the company, you were investing in Charlie Bluhdorn’s smarts, instincts, daring, and ambition. It was Bluhdorn who had collected this odd group of companies, Bluhdorn who bought and sold them, Bluhdorn who was not just the spokesman for the company, but its very reason for being. There simply was not, in his mind, a difference between himself and the company, they were one and the same thi
ng.

  This was not, alas, a position with which Sy Hersh sympathized, or Stanley Sporkin, the crusading chief of the Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. What seemed to most people within the G+W “family” that revolved around Bluhdorn merely interesting management idiosyncrasies, perhaps even lovable eccentricities on the part of the company’s founder, appeared to Sporkin as gross illegalities. The truth, one suspects, is that Sporkin’s ambition and Bluhdorn’s clashed—for Sporkin was a deeply ambitious man, as ambitious as Bluhdorn himself, and in Bluhdorn he doubtless saw an opportunity for endless stories in the press for himself, as a crusader for corporate justice and responsibility. “This will be war!” ran one headline, quoting one of Bluhdorn’s lawyers, which more or less set the tone for the dispute.

  The endless wrangle and the publicity that surrounded it—for Sporkin turned out to be a master at getting his side of the story told in the press—ended in 1981, in a kind of draw in which the company basically agreed to stop doing what it had denied doing, and the SEC agreed to leave it alone. One consequence of the long struggle, however, was that Bluhdorn stepped out of the spotlight for a time. He no longer gave long, garrulous, and alarmingly frank speeches to financial reporters, and he spent more time than before at his house in the Dominican Republic.

  At company functions, he began to seem almost benign. He set out to portray himself as the elder business statesman now, rather than as the hard-driving conglomerateur. He wanted people to see Gulf + Western as a successfully completed organization, not as a conglomerate that was constantly changing, unfinished, and fluid, and this was achieved, on paper, at any rate, by splitting it up into eight divisions. Paramount and Simon and Schuster, for instance, were lumped together in “The Leisure Time Group”; the grandly named “Consumer Products Group” was principally engaged in the manufacture and sales of cigars, and so on, until a total of some 850 different types of products and services were divided into eight “groups”—a Procrustean way of proving the company had arrived or matured. “Synergy,” the magic word that was supposed to explain to shareholders and the other rubes outside the tent what the purpose of all this conglomeration was, now became a war cry within the company, as if there were really some link between auto parts, truck and auto leasing, mattresses, movies, resort hotels, sugar, zinc, and books.