Another Life (58 page)

Stories were told about Bluhdorn’s blossoming into a full-blown man of the world, one of them being that when Bluhdorn swept into the Plaza Hotel on his way to the Oak Room (then his favorite place for lunch, before he started using his own dining room at the top of the G+W tower), followed by his entourage, he saw a very beautiful young woman sitting on a taboret, and gave her the once-over. Turning to one of his PR men, he told him to invite the woman to lunch, then swept on.

A few minutes later, the PR man returned from his mission empty-handed. It wasn’t his fault, he explained—she was waiting, in fact, for her husband, so there was no way he could have persuaded her to accept the invitation. Bluhdorn ignored the man and glanced at the table setting in front of where the PR man was to sit. “Take all that away,” Bluhdorn told the maître d’. “He won’t be eating with us.”

Stories of abrupt dismissals like this were rife, but most of the people at the core of G+W were fanatically loyal to Bluhdorn and he to them. Once he had decided that you were “my boy” or “a genius” or both, he was endlessly supportive, though you had to be able to withstand his ferocious attempts to persuade you to accept his point of view. In truth, the quickest way to gain his respect was to disagree with him, if you had your facts right and were willing to stick up for them. “Goddamn Snyder,” he once said, speaking affectionately of the head of S&S, “he
never
agrees with me!”

On occasions, it sometimes seemed as if G+W really was the heartless and monstrous mega-conglomerate trying to take over the studio in Mel Brooks’s
Silent Movie
, in which the corporate motto was “Engulf and devour,” and the inscription chiseled into the marble wall of the
corporate bathroom read, “Our bathrooms are nicer than other people’s homes.” I remember a whole day spent in the Paramount movie theater (apparently sited below the G+W tower so that you could hear the rumble of the subway trains, by the same architect who put the sway into the building) in which each division’s numbers were projected onto a screen, while the head of the division was spotlit in his seat so that Bluhdorn could praise or excoriate him, as the case might be, and another, at a time when he was incensed by a series of muckraking articles about G+W in
The New York Times
, written by Seymour Hersh, when Bluhdorn tore a copy of the
Times
into pieces and flung them out at the audience of G+W executives, the climax of a speech of self-justification so violent, frenzied, and incoherent that everybody was in a state of shock by the end of it.

That was the public man, of course, who rather cherished his reputation for tantrums and high drama. At closer range, he could be far more subtle.

I
WAS
drawn into Bluhdorn’s circle of interest when in 1980 I published
The Fifth Horseman
, a novel by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre that foretold a terrorist attack on New York City by Palestinians using a smuggled atomic bomb. Collins and Lapierre were journalists, graduates of
Newsweek
and
Paris-Match
, respectively, and they therefore managed to give the book a certain scary realism. I do not know whether he had actually read
The Fifth Horseman
, but something in the book sparked him off in the spirit of Paul Revere. Over and over, with mounting passion, he held up meetings by explaining to startled and terrified financial managers how New York City could be blown to pieces—all of it, even the G+W tower, for chrissakes—by terrorists, and (his voice rising in pitch like an air-raid siren) NOBODY IN AUTHORITY WOULD LISTEN, NOBODY WAS PREPARED, NOBODY WAS TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY! It could be happening, he cried, at this very minute!

The only way to make people aware of the danger, Bluhdorn finally decided, was to make
The Fifth Horseman
into a movie, a
big
movie, which he figured would be a huge international box-office hit. It became his mission to get the movie made.

Unfortunately, there was one obstacle, even after Bluhdorn had
managed to buy the rights from the authors’ agent, Irving Lazar: Barry Diller, who was then running Paramount (and doing a brilliant job of it), didn’t want to make it. Bluhdorn never stopped arguing with Diller about
The Fifth Horseman
(and the more Bluhdorn argued, the more Diller dug his heels in), but he would not, under any circumstances,
order
Diller to make the picture. Whenever things got out of hand, Diller, whose ability to handle his mercurial boss smoothly was legendary, would simply remind Bluhdorn that all he had to do was send a memo ordering him to make
The Fifth Horseman
and sign it. The picture would then be made.

But of course that was the one thing Bluhdorn couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. He believed in delegating authority. Besides, if the project failed, he wanted to be able to say to Diller that it was
his
decision, not Bluhdorn’s, that if he wasn’t man enough to stand up to Bluhdorn, he wasn’t man enough to run the studio. Diller was secure in the knowledge that however much Bluhdorn might rant and rave at him, his boss would never send that memo. The only people who didn’t understand that were the authors, who assumed that when Bluhdorn wanted something done, it happened.

As the editor of the book, I was dragged into this imbroglio because of my knowledge of the story—I was, after all, the one person who could be certified as having actually
read
the book, unlike Lazar, who didn’t even pretend to have read it.
^*
Thus, I was summoned one Saturday to Bluhdorn’s country home for a “story conference,” the purpose of which, I soon discovered, was to persuade Milos Forman to sign on as the director of
The Fifth Horseman
. Bluhdorn figured that if he could get a treatment, a director of real stature, and a couple of stars committed to the project, Diller would find it harder to say no.

Bluhdorn’s country home was vast, rambling, and handsomely landscaped, but its most notable feature was a parking lot big enough for a good-size motel. Bluhdorn’s car and driver, Forman’s car and driver, and the car and driver that had been provided for me were drawn up in it as I was conducted to the pool house, where Forman, casually dressed, and Bluhdorn, in the kind of matching short-sleeved pool shirt and shorts that men used to wear poolside in Miami Beach hotels in the 1950s, were sitting under an awning, lighting up cigars.

The pool itself was huge, glamorous, and empty. As I sat down, I remarked politely on what a nice pool it was.

Bluhdorn seemed startled. “Pool?
What
goddamn pool?” he asked. “We’re not here to swim, goddamn it,” he barked. “We’re here to talk about the goddamn
Fifth Horseman
.”

Having put me in my place, Bluhdorn gave Forman, who had probably heard it a dozen times before, his set piece on the dangers facing New York and the need to wake the country up—the whole goddamn world, in fact. Forman nodded at appropriate moments, his eyes half closed. He did not attempt to interrupt Bluhdorn, not so much out of deference but because Bluhdorn never seemed to pause for breath. Bluhdorn was the only man I had ever met who could talk while he was inhaling. Occasionally he stuffed his cigar in his mouth, but that didn’t slow him down either.

Eventually, he finished, lit another cigar, and asked Forman to comment. Wearily, Forman proceeded to explain the many difficulties of turning
The Fifth Horseman
into a movie. He shared Bluhdorn’s enthusiasm, of course, he said, with an expression so devoid of enthusiasm as to appear almost blank, but the ending was weak, a real letdown. The cop who is the good guy finds the bomb at the last moment and defuses it. It’s predictable, Forman said.

Bluhdorn nodded. This was apparently not the first time he’d heard this criticism of his baby. He pointed his cigar at me, “What do you say to that?” he asked, as if the ending were my fault.

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.