Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street

Chapter One

Evelyn Christel, a slim woman of forty-one with short blond hair, eased her brown Pinto from Van Nuys Boulevard into the rush-hour crawl of the Ventura Freeway and headed east. She squinted into the sun, which had just cleared the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains on the far horizon straight ahead.

It was 8 A.M., Friday, February 25, 1977, clear and bracing -- one of the chilliest mornings of the brief, subtropical Los Angeles winter.

Evelyn's drive would take thirty-five minutes if she was lucky, forty-five minutes if she was not. Like thousands of logs glutting a river, the traffic crept past Bullock's and I. Magnin, Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Twenty miles an hour, then fifty, then ten. Evelyn negotiated a careful merge with the southeast-bound Hollywood Freeway. Universal Studios on the left. Cahuenga Pass through the scrubby hills, green from the winter rains. Hollywood Bowl on the right. Off the freeway at Vine. South on Vine down the hill, stop-and-go, through Central Hollywood. The Capitol Records Tower. TAV Celebrity Theater Presents the Merv Griffin Show. Art City.

Vine becomes Rossmore at Melrose. Along Rossmore, gently curving, past the Wilshire Country Club and the grand old homes of Hancock Park, all the way to Wilshire Boulevard. A long light, then across Wilshire to the stone gates of Fremont Place, an elegant and very private residential enclave. Another wait while the guard located Evelyn's name on his list. Over the speed bump, around the corner to the right, and into the driveway of the first house, 97 Fremont Place West, where Evelyn's employer, Cliff Robertson, the motion-picture actor, was in temporary residence.

Evelyn might have preferred a commute as short as those during Cliff's previous extended visits to Los Angeles. He had rented houses in Coldwater Canyon and Brentwood, which were much closer to her home in the working-class San Fernando Valley community of Van Nuys. But in nineteen years as Cliff Robertson's part-time secretary, Evelyn Christel had grown used to, and actually quite fond of, just about all of Cliff's eccentricities, mainly because they weren't really eccentricities at all but quite normal traits that seemed eccentric only in Hollywood. One of them was a strong preference for living near where he was working. Most movie celebrities, no matter how remote the location of the studio that might be employing them at a particular time, insisted on living in Beverly Hills or Bel Air. Any other place would have threatened their self-image. Cliff Robertson, however, wasn't so insecure as most in Hollywood (another of his "eccentricities").

Although he sought out luxurious comfort wherever he went, it didn't necessarily have to have a chichi name like Beverly Hills. And since he was making a movie at Paramount that winter, the real-estate agent had suggested to Evelyn Christel that Cliff consider Fremont Place, which was only five minutes from the Paramount lot.

Most of the seventy-three houses in the half-century-old enclave were as elegant as many in Beverly Hills. But only three celebrities lived in Fremont Place -- Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxer; Karen Black, the film actress; and Lou Rawls, the pop singer. The majority of the residents were lawyers, bankers, and businessmen who drove east to offices in the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles instead of west andnorth to the show-business factories of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Burbank. Fremont Placers tended mildly to disdain the entertainment industry; its products occasionally were amusing, but its people and ambience were too gaudy and often too vulgar for the modest and somewhat smug sensibilities of Fremont Place.

As it happened, this was an attitude which was privately shared by the new resident of Number 97 West -- still another of Cliff Robertson's atypical traits. But as people close to Cliff were aware, his choice of temporary abode and his attitude toward his industry were not isolated quirks. They were broad hints of the kind of person Cliff Robertson was -- a maverick, usually a benign one, but by Hollywood standards nonetheless a maverick, whose determined independence manifested itself multifariously, from the way he handled his money, to the way he handled his career, to the way he handled his life.

Although he had grown up in Southern California, Robertson had always found the Hollywood community somewhat claustrophobic and more than a bit tawdry, and had chosen to live in New York City for much of his adult life. He didn't depend on Hollywood for financial security, though he had earned a great deal of money there. He was independently wealthy in his own right and was married to one of America's richest women, Dina Merrill, the actress, socialite, and daughter of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post and the late E. F. Hutton. Unlike many movie people who found it chic to spend their money freely but ignore its management, Robertson watched his money and investments carefully. And instead of using one of the big, flashy financial-management agencies in Beverly Hills,which were status symbols themselves to many in the community, he chose to have his finances handled by a small, staid CPA firm on Sunset Boulevard in old Hollywood.

At deeper levels of personality and character, too, Cliff Robertson was something of an alien. In an industry populated by sizable numbers of loud, slick, bullying maneuverers, Robertson came across as the complete gentleman -- kind, pleasant, deliberate, not especially temperamental, not unreasonably demanding toward people around him, a man who was never more content than when he was spending time with his family in the privacy of their home. ("The last of the hearth huggers," Dina called him.) Moreover, in a community where erratic and unethical human behavior were common enough to require constant vigilance, Robertson seemed to live by a traditional moral code -- simple and staunch -- forged in his strict Presbyterian upbringing.

First published in 1982, Indecent Exposure is the classic story of the greatest scandal and most vicious power struggle in the history of Hollywood. Beginning with what seemed like a serious but contained incident of embezzlement, Columbia Pictures studio head David Begelman is caught forging a $10,000 check with Oscar-winning actor Cliff Robertson's name on it. Soon the lives of dozens of Hollywood's most powerful figures are engulfed in the most controversial and painful episode of their careers. Wall Street is also drawn in as the powerful financier owners of Columbia struggle for control of the studio.

With an updated "where are they now?" chapter and a new chapter following Begelman's post-Columbia career in Hollywood, this updated edition ends with a dramatic and tragic denouement in a Hollywood hotel room.

When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street. Soon powerful studio executives were engulfed in controversy; careers derailed; reputations died; and a ruthless, take-no-prisoners corporate power struggle for the world-famous Hollywood dream factory began.

First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud . . . until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.

David McClintick, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal for eleven years, is an award-winning author and journalist. His other books include Swordfish and Stealing from the Rich. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.