You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [85]
You Forged What?
When you are at the top of your field, well respected and overcoming earlier adversity, what is there left to do? Why, screw it all up entirely, of course.
DAVID BEGELMAN, STUDIO PRESIDENT
HOLLYWOOD, 1976
Robert Greenberger
In Hollywood you have to play along to get along. For the rich and famous and powerful, that was rule number one. For others, though, playing along was never an option.
Take Cliff Robertson for example. An actor best known for the film Charly, Robertson was surprised when the IRS went looking for their fair share of the $10,000 Columbia Pictures paid him on September 2, 1976. It said so right there on the 1099 form he received in January 1977. The actor had no idea what they were talking about and he asked his secretary to look into this.
A supervisor at Columbia’s accounting department checked Robertson’s file and saw the cashed check. He recognized the signature as looking more like studio president David Begelman’s than Robertson’s.
Robertson’s quest took him to Begelman’s office, where the veteran show-business executive had issued the check. Begelman told Robertson’s accountant that someone in the New York office cut the check and forged the signature. The unfortunate employee had since been sacked and this would not happen again. While the president was hoping that would end it, Robertson began to wonder how someone in the New York office could pull off such a stunt. His further inquiries led to the inevitable conclusion that Begelman himself forged the signature.
Commentator David C. Thompson described Begelman at Salon.com: “Begelman had been a show-business agent, a wheeler-dealer, a charmer, a liar, a gambler, a womanizer, an entertainer, a man who gave big dinners and picked up the tab, and good at all of it. He was widely liked, if not overly trusted.”
Normally, people reinvent themselves all the time, but Begelman seemed to make a career out of it, starting with his claim to having graduated from Yale, when the university had no record of his ever attending.
Begelman may have begun his career as an agent at MCA in 1948, but he rose to prominence in 1960 when he and Freddie Fields formed Creative Management Associates. The new talent firm rose in prominence from just four clients (Judy Garland, Polly Bergen, Phil Silvers and Kirk Douglas) to become one of the most powerful institutions in Hollywood.
In 1968 he joined Columbia Pictures as an executive and rose to power as president in 1973. While in the president’s office, he over-saw a renaissance that literally saved the financially strapped firm. Hits under his tenure included The Way We Were, Tommy, Shampoo and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It took five months for news of the check forging to reach CEO Alan Hirshfeld. Hirshfeld, Begelman’s superior at Columbia, was shocked by the admission of guilt. The news was still contained within the company to a handful of people. Hirshfeld decided to hush the entire thing up rather than fire Begelman outright and expose the company to a public scandal. He suspended his employee for two months, at full pay ($300,000 annually), while the DA continued to investigate. In all, Begelman was found to have embezzled $40,000 from Columbia, including checks to director Martin Ritt and restaurateur Pierre Groleau. Additionally, it was learned the president padded his generous expense account by some $23,000.
It became apparent that Begelman had a gambling problem and needed the cash to cover his bets. The gambling addiction continued for the rest of his life and went untreated.
During this time, Begelman was lobbying for reinstatement, and it came to a head during a board of directors meeting at a corporate retreat that Begelman was invited to, and he had many allies on the board. The agenda was overshadowed with corporate indecision. They asked themselves if it was