Chapter 1109: Everybody Reads the Bow Wrong
June 1997
At 11:40 Tokyo time the photograph went out on the wire. By two in the afternoon on the American east coast it had come off the machines in every newsroom that mattered.
By four it had been faxed, without anybody asking for it, to a whole lot of men who didn't subscribe to anything Japanese. In that business a picture like that went from desk to desk, with somebody's handwriting scribbled across the top.
David Geffen got it on a deck in Malibu with the fax in one hand. "He bowed. Eight days out of a hospital bed, in front of a room full of Japanese reporters and two American crews, he bowed to an electronics company that just walked out on a contract with him, and then he cried about it on television! Ha!"
"He didn't get out of the wheelchair, David. The Japanese press shot it from the front, and that's the one that ran."
Geffen didn't sit down for it. "So he bowed from the wheelchair. That's worse."
He put the fax on the table and weighted it with a glass. "Now every guy who sits across a table from him knows he'll do that. And it went out on the wire. Every lawyer in town is going to have it in a file by Monday."
The other man was his business-affairs guy, who'd driven out from Beverly Hills on a Saturday and wanted to be home in time to see Steve Kerr's jumper from last night on the highlights again. The Bulls had closed out Utah in six at the United Center, Jordan had passed it to Kerr at the top of the key with five seconds left, and Chicago had its fifth title in seven years. "David, I've been sitting across tables from that kid's people for three years. He cried, the stock went to thirty-six, and I'd bet you lunch somebody at Sega just got promoted. Can I go now?"
"No. Sit down. Ha. Thirty-six, huh?"
Geffen looked at the water for a while.
He'd bought this kid's half of A+ Records in March for forty-one million dollars, a very good price, from a lawyer with a power of attorney and a plane to catch, and he still hadn't had a single conversation with the kid himself about it.
"Did he sign anything in Tokyo?"
The text of it was on the second page of the fax. "A joint statement. Two paragraphs, all very polite, the partnership continues, everybody loves everybody. And the countersuit's dropped. Both sides."
"Two paragraphs and a photograph. Hah! 3dfx was suing Sega for twelve million over the Katana design. Twelve million dollars of litigation, and he threw it away for a contract nobody's even written yet." Geffen turned the glass a quarter turn on the fax. "Don't get me wrong. I don't think the kid's soft."
"You called him soft thirty seconds ago, David."
"I said every lawyer in town is going to have that picture in a file by Monday. That's not the same thing. Ha — you look at where that stock closed and tell me he's soft."
He looked at the water. "Get Edgar on the phone. Before lunch."
"He'll ask what you want. Edgar always asks what you want, and then he doesn't listen to the answer."
"Tell him I want to know what a guy like that does next. And tell him I own all of the kid's label now, so he should be nice to me."
Edgar Bronfman Jr. told everybody he had lunch with.
Doug Morris ran Universal's music side for him. Morris had walked out of Warner in 1995 ahead of the FTC, and Edgar had hired him within months.
He told Doug Morris, who didn't call back. He told his father.
"Does the boy have a father?" the old man asked.
Edgar had the clipping folded in his jacket. "He's an orphan. There's an aunt who raised him."
The old man took his time with that one, and Edgar got impatient. "Dad, is that relevant? I'm asking you about a stock."
"Of course it's relevant. Who's he going to embarrass? No father at the club, no family firm, no mother calling him on Sunday asking what the neighbors said." The old man sounded almost envious. "I had to call your grandfather every time I sneezed on Wall Street. Did you pay the Montreal people yet? Don't make me ask twice, Edgar." Then he changed the subject, and Edgar spent the rest of the call on the Montreal people.
Edgar told two board members and a banker. Then, at a dinner in New York, he told the man on his left. "You have to understand what that photograph is. That's a man announcing, in public, on a wire, that there's nothing he won't do. No floor at all."
The man on his left had stopped eating some time ago. "That's a very good line, Edgar. Do you mind if I use it?"
"Use it where? You're in shipping, aren't you?"
"No, I'm at the Financial Times," the man on his left said, and Edgar put his fork down.
So it got into the FT. Alex read it there, laughed until his stitches hurt, and had it framed.
At Roc-A-Fella on Twenty-Fifth Street the paper was open on the console. The Post had run it at two columns: APOLOGY TOUR.
"Yo, he bowed to the Japanese."
"He bowed to a company."
"He bowed. Big man from the South Side, got a bank and a movie studio, flies thirteen hours to put his head on a table."
A chair went back from the console. "Man got six holes in him."
"I know he got six holes in him."
Nobody was looking at the paper now. "So what you saying?"
"Nobody's saying he ain't tough. I'm saying he bowed."
"My uncle worked thirty years at Con Ed and bowed to a white man every Friday."
"That's different."
"How's that different?"
"It's different because nobody took a picture!"
Jazzy came through with a jacket over his shoulder and looked at the photograph for about four seconds. "How much was the lawsuit?"
"Say what?"
"The lawsuit. The one that went away."
He put the jacket on. "Twelve million, I bet. Something like that. Y'all argue about it. I got a session in Jersey and I'm already late, and if one of you touches my chair while I'm gone I'll know." He went out. Nobody picked the paper back up.
At a table on the patio at the Ivy, the Robertson Boulevard restaurant where half the deals in town got talked through over chopped salad, a producer who'd turned Sherilyn Fenn down twice in eighteen months turned the magazine round. "Well, there's your man."
The woman across from him tilted the page toward herself. "That's the boyfriend?"
"That's the guy who's getting her a picture made."
"Fifty-five million," Nastassja Kinski said, two seats down, to her glass.
"What?"
"The Civil War thing. Cold Mountain. The new Atlantic Monthly Press novel. His people are going after the film rights, Universal wants them too, and his side is telling agents the picture will cost fifty-five million to make." She put the glass down. "And Sherilyn's the producer. Not starring in it. Producing it."
Cold Mountain was Charles Frazier's first novel, a wounded Confederate soldier who walks away from a hospital at the end of the war and heads home across North Carolina to the woman he left behind. It had only just come out, and the booksellers were already pressing it into customers' hands.
"Producing? Sherilyn?"
"Mm-hm. The job you told her, in a restaurant, that women in this town don't get."
The producer set his glass down on the tablecloth. "I never said that."
"Oh, you said it. At that table right there. I was sitting at it," the woman across from him said.
Kinski turned her glass by the stem. "You turned her down twice, and now she's about to have a fifty-five-million-dollar picture, and you're reading about the rest of it in the trades like everybody else. Heh."
The producer laughed. Nobody else at the table did, and a waiter showed up at exactly the wrong moment with four plates, asking if anybody wanted pepper.
On the Musical America boards the thread ran for pages and crashed the server twice.
A user in São Paulo posted the photograph over and over with nothing under it until a moderator banned him. A user in Osaka translated the Japanese caption, badly, and the bad translation became a joke on every board on the site.
Somebody started a poll called WAS IT REAL and somebody else started a poll called DOES IT MATTER, and the second one buried the first.
if a white ceo did this he'd be on the cover of Fortune next month with the word HUMILITY on it lol
he is a CHAIRMAN. chairmen do not cry on tv
my whole office watched it twice
The longest post was from a woman in Evanston who'd been at the candlelight vigil outside his house in Hyde Park in January. It went on and on about her family, and somewhere near the end it said: my father bowed to a bank manager in 1981 and we kept the house. By the weekend it had two hundred replies.
Hideki Sato was drinking at a place in Ota, down by Haneda, with four men from the hardware side.
"He wept. On a table. In front of the press!"
Sato refilled somebody's glass and didn't refill his own.
"All these years they tell us the American way is to sue."
"Sue and threaten and sue again."
"And then sue the lawyer."
"My brother-in-law was in Detroit in 1985. He says they don't apologize even when they crash your car."
"This one crashed the car and then came crawling to the house. Ha!"
"Today an American came here and cried, and Irimajiri-san gave him the contract. Tomorrow they'll tell us it was a victory," one of the engineers said. Nobody at the table argued with him. "It wasn't a victory."
"Of course it wasn't a victory, idiot," Sato said. He put the bottle down. "Now I have to put his chip next to mine for another six months and smile. You know who has to smile? Me. Not you. Me. Pour."
They poured. Somebody asked about Katana's memory budget, and after that it was an ordinary evening.
Ballard read it on the plane, in the trade edition somebody had brought aboard at Narita. THE KNEELING CHAIRMAN.
"Hey, that you?" said the man across the aisle, who'd been trying to start a conversation since the gate.
"Mind your own business."
"Jeez, pal. Looks like the fella standing behind him, that's all I'm saying."
Ballard folded the paper, jammed it in the seat pocket and when the cabin crew came round for the trash at Anchorage he let them have it. Then he sat a while with his hand over his eyes, doing sums about a stock he'd been given options in at four dollars. At thirty-six they were worth more than he'd made in his whole career.
At Burbank the memo was one line long, in the handwriting everybody in that building could read from forty feet away. Who is this working for?
It went down to three people before nine, and none of them had time to take their coats off.
"He wants to know who APLUS is really working for," the first one said. "Whose interests. Before he's back at our table on Metropolitan."
"Answer it how? Working for who? The chip company? The record company he doesn't even own anymore? The magazines?"
"Michael wants a one-page answer by Friday. That's what the memo means."
"Then it's a hell of a memo!" the third one said bitterly, and went to find a copy of the photograph, and couldn't find one, and had to send out for the Post.
Nobody in the building had an answer for Eisner.
Disney was Alex's partner in the Metropolitan joint venture, and Eisner didn't like partners he couldn't read.
Song Zecheng watched it in a hotel room on Lexington Avenue at ten at night, with his suitcase packed and standing by the door.
He sat on the end of the bed in his shirtsleeves and watched a thin young man on a Japanese news feed lower his upper body onto a table and stay there.
He watched the four people behind the chair go down after him, unevenly. He watched the blonde woman at the man's elbow go almost to ninety, half a second before the rest, with her jaw set.
He watched the whole segment again when it came round on the half hour.
Song had been a San Francisco lawyer for nine years. He'd come east on a retainer, and he'd spent the whole flight deciding how long to give it.
He could put a number on what that bow had gotten back: the Sega contract, a twelve-million-dollar lawsuit gone, and a stock that had gone from nine dollars to thirty-six in a day. None of Song's rich clients in San Francisco would have done it.
He turned the television off. The message light on the phone was O'Grady, from Chicago, who'd been told Song was coming onto the account: Without the Sega deal 3dfx runs out of cash by September. Icahn's funds were short the stock and waiting for it.
Song picked up the phone and dialed Highland Park, and got a South African at a gatehouse who wouldn't put him through to anybody.
"He's asleep, sir."
"Then wake him. I'm his new lawyer."
"Sir, last week a man told me he was his new lawyer, and he was from the National Enquirer. The old man would skin me."
"Look, if you don't, he'll be the one asking you why in the morning."
"Then he can ask me, sir. He'll be very happy I didn't wake him."
Song had spent nine years being told no by receptionists, and this one was better at it than most. He laughed despite himself. "Fine. Then give Ms. Sloane a message. Yes to the first question, and no to the second. I land on the nineteenth."
"Which questions, sir?"
"She asked me two things. Will I take the job for good, not just the retainer, and can I start Monday. She'll know."
"Yes to the job, no to Monday, lands the nineteenth. I have it, sir. Good night."
Then Song called the front desk and kept the room until the nineteenth. He'd packed to fly home to San Francisco in the morning.