Indecent Exposure by David McClintick Page A

Hirschfield and Fischer like a thick, foul fog. The Begelman problem seemed surrealistic. Each question they asked themselves seemed to have no adequate answer and led only to a more perplexing question. Why did he steal? If he'd needed money he easily could have borrowed from any one of several friends and colleagues in the company, or from the company itself. He could have borrowed, that is, unless he needed a huge sum. Were the Cliff Robertson and Peter Choate transactions (assumin g for the moment that the Choat e matter was fraudulent) only a small part of the total? If they were, how much more had Begelman stolen, and by what means? Did Begelman have some secret, desperate need for a lot of money? Had he been gambling? Was he in hock to loan sharks? Mobsters?
    How would the company be affected? It seemed clear to Hirschfield that if Begelman had done what he appeared to have done, he would at the very least have to resign from Columbia. Even if the company could avoid the embarrassing public spectacle of having him prosecuted for forgery, there was no way he could stay in the company.
    On that Sunday, however. Hirschfield gave little thought to how he might replace Begelman . He still was intent on containing the problem, and still preoccupied with whom to tell next about the embezzlements. He longed to summon his friend Todd Lang, Columbia's chief legal counsel, who lived just around the corner. On the other hand, he dreaded telling Herbert Allen and the rest of the board of directors. Something like this reflected badly on the officers of the company above and around Begelman, including Hirschfield himself.
    Finally, he and Fischer decided to confer with Mickey Rudin as scheduled the next day before letting anyone else in on their secret.
    That evening. Hirschfield hosted a pre - release, VIP screening of the new Columbia film Bobby Deerfield, starring Al Pacino, at the Coronet Theater in Manhattan. Several Columbia board members, Allen & Company officers, and Wall Street brokers and investment bankers were on hand. At the film, and at the dinner afterward at Tavern-on-the-Green, Hirschfield managed to hide his gloom an d show nothing but his usual gre gariousness and good humor. He was adept at rising to such occasions. He genuinely enjoyed playing host at social events, and by the end of the evening he was in the best mood he'd been in since before Detective Silvey 's Wednesday call.
    Instead of going home to Scarsdale. Hirschfield spent the night at an apartment which Columbia maintained for visiting executives in the Carnegie House at Fifty-seventh Street and the Avenue of the Americas. The company leased the place—a spacious two-bedroom duplex complete with live-in butler—from Freddie Fields, David Begelman 's ex-partner. Appropriately enough, the butler had worked many years earlier for Harry Cohn, who cofounded Columbia Pictures in 1920 and ran it until his death in 1958. When Hirschfield arrived, he found a wry note from Jim Johnson, who was occupying the smaller of the two bedrooms over that weekend: "Dear Alan. When you get in, please don't make any noise. I'm upstairs working. How about breakfast?"
    Hirschfield left before Johnson awakened on Monday morning, but replied to his note in kind: "Jim. Sorry I missed you at breakfast. I wanted to discuss your becoming president of the studio."
    NINE
    Hirschfield juggled secrets all day Monday. After morning conferences about Begelman with Joe Fischer, he had to attend a luncheon meeting on an entirely different subject that was just as secret and sensitive in its own way as the Begelman affair. The IBM Corporation, which had never been in the entertainment business, had quietly been conducting research on a video system, involving laser and optics technology, which promised to be more sophisticated than other video-cassette and disc systems then being developed by other companies. Hirschfield, along with a young Columbia senior vice president, Allen Adler, had