The Hard Hearts

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!--Edmund, King Lear

Study these men. They are the men of the hour, heroes all. They may be tough and mean, but they are not villains. Some of these guys may be familiar to you, some not: Charlie Finley, Chuck Colson, Jim Aubrey, Judge Guinn and John Simon. They have worked hard, all of them, and they have gained power. They know how to use it, they know how to keep it and they know how to make you suffer. And you are not home free if you happen to steer clear of these five; there are thousands of others like them, smaller fry, of course, but nasty just the same.

So study these men, learn their ways, and then resolve to be like them.

Charles O. Finley

To his Players, to his managers, to his staff, to baseball fans and to all America, Charles O. Finley, owner of the Oakland A's, is a lulu, a crumb bum in a league by himself. He is ungracious in victory and a demon in defeat. This is a cad among sporting gentlemen, a tyrant who specializes in humiliating his men.

Hours after a woebegone Mike Andrews committed two errors that lost a world-series game, Finley was twisting Andrews' arm to sign himself onto the disabled list and thus off the team. Not even the ensuing public outcry daunted Finley. "It's my ball club, my money, and I don't appreciate anyone telling me how to spend my money to run my business," he said.

While this was going on, Finley was engaged in an unseemly tussle with his back-to-back-pennant-winning manager, Dick Williams. The long-suffering Williams had had feelers from the Yankees, but Finley was threatening court action to prevent him from accepting the job.

With an outlook like that, there is no room for the niceties of compassion. Finley once ordered a ball-park announcer to introduce the long-haired Joe Pepitone over the loud-speaker as "Josephine Pepitone." The announcer quit. Bill Rigney returned a week early from a scouting trip and was asked by a cantankerous Finley why he had come back so soon. Rigney said his wife was sick. Finley said, "You're fired."

He shouts, he ridicules, he bullies. Small wonder that in 13 years, Finley has gone through 13 managers, eight publicity men, seven farm directors and five general managers, finally winding up in the last job himself.

After Vida Blue had won 26 games in 1971, Finley put him through a long, demeaning contract struggle, making Blue miss all of spring training and forcing him, finally, to accept relatively low pay for his pitching value. "That man soured me on baseball," Blue says. "No matter what he does for me in the future, I'll never forget that he treated me like a damn colored boy."

For the record, player Dave Duncan pointed out that "Charlie treats his white players like niggers, too."

The heavy Finley touch is everywhere. He has made the A's wear gaudy green-and-gold uniforms with white shoes and, to be consistent, he suited up his hockey team, the California Golden Seals, in the same colors (which meant they had to wear white skates). Proudly he sports a matching blazer. And there, at every ball game, is the A's mascot, a mule named Charlie O. that stays in the Presidential suite of any hotel that will take him--better housing than the team gets.

During ball games, Finley watches from his box behind the dugout, barking commands into a green telephone to his hapless manager of the moment. Even when he isn't there in person, his presence is felt. Casey Stengel recalls riding with Finley in his limousine while they listened to the A's game on the radio. "Suddenly [Finley] yells: 'Stop the car,' gets out, goes to a phone booth, calls the manager in the dugout and yells into the phone: 'Get that donkey out of there.'"

"He just doesn't treat people like human beings," says Bob Elson, a radio announcer who used to work with the A's. Finley is the sports world's least popular man, deservedly. So, when he suffered a mild heart attack not long ago, one of the fans hung a bed sheet from the second tier that read, how could Finley have a Heart Attack? he doesn't have a Heart.

But Finley has a thick skin--an essential commodity for mean men. He worked in the steel mills and the butcher business before making a fortune in insurance and moving on to sports. And now, as San Francisco sports columnist Wells Twombly put it, Finley "doesn't give a damn what anybody thinks and doesn't give a damn who likes him."

Charles Colson

In a White House known for its arrogance and devious skulduggery, former special counsel Charles Colson served as the ranking heavy, the most hated and feared of all the President's men. The press used to call him "Nixon's hatchet man" and "head of the dirty-tricks department." Colson liked to think of himself as "chief ass kicker," and it was he who once said that he would "walk over my grandmother" to get Richard Nixon re-elected.

The roster of those who loathed Colson included several members of Nixon's inner circle, themselves no sweethearts. Bob Haldeman despised the man and complained that Colson was always doing things behind his back. John Mitchell wondered ruefully whether Nixon really knew what Colson was like.

But Colson--reputed author of the enemies list, leader of the White House political attack group, instigator of forged State Department cables, proposer of fire-bombing the Brookings Institution, honcho to the secret plumbers and drafter of the plan to nail Daniel Ellsberg--won the affection and trust of the President, despite the antipathy of Haldeman and Mitchell, who conspired endlessly to get rid of him. Tough is not the word for Colson; a distinct strain of sadism runs barely beneath the surface of his alleged operations.

Colson stands accused of more evil deeds than the rest of the White House gang put together--though he generally denies everything attributed to him. Nevertheless, he is given credit for: ordering a tax audit of a Teamster official who opposed the President; suggesting that demonstrators in the guise of antiwar activists disrupt the funeral services for J. Edgar Hoover; drafting the scandalous newspaper ads that attacked seven "radic-lib" candidates in the 1970 Congressional campaign; sending someone to pose as a gay activist who would donate money to Pete McCloskey's New Hampshire campaign and then turn over the receipt to the Manchester Union Leader; launching a smear campaign against Senator Lowell Weicker in order to undercut him during the Watergate committee hearings; hiring young men to pose as homosexuals in noisy support of George McGovern at the Democratic Convention; masterminding one of the dirtiest political campaigns in memory in order to trash the 1972 Congressional bid of antiwar veteran John Kerry; engineering the fraudulent telephone and mail drives supporting Nixon's Vietnam policies; leaking information to Life magazine in 1970 that destroyed the career of young Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland. "I'm kinda happy about that," Colson says of the Tydings caper.

It was Colson who first recommended E. Howard Hunt for White House employment, and it was Colson who pressed repeatedly for the adoption of Gordon Liddy's intelligence plan.

Possessed of fundamental hard-hat sensibilities, Colson arranged the Presidential commutation of Jimmy Hoffa's sentence, and Colson's Washington law firm now handles a lucrative bit of Teamster business.

Though he maintains his innocence, Colson refused to testify before the Watergate committee, saying he expected to be indicted. While he waits, he devotes himself to his law practice, his family and a new-found devotion to religion. ("If anyone wants to be cynical about it, I'll pray for him," he says.) His wife--who claims she was attracted to him because he was "so commanding; he says hop and you hop"--revealed that Colson likes to play The Marine Corps Hymn for background music at their dinner parties.

Colson is said by one former White House aide never to have been concerned about "ethical questions." He has three mortal heroes and one slogan. The heroes are Richard Nixon, John Wayne and Chesty Puller, "the greatest blood-and-guts Marine who ever walked." And to his heroes, Colson--in the words of his own father--is "viciously loyal.' Or, in the words of Richard Nixon (via the White House transcripts), the President's opponents may not have thought Nixon himself was involved in the Watergate operations, but "they think I have people capable of it. And they are correct, in that Colson would do anything." Colson's favorite slogan is engraved on a plaque over the bar in his den: When you've got 'Em by the Balls, their hearts and Minds will follow.

James T. Aubrey, Jr.

Not for nothing is James Aubrey called The Smiling Cobra. Throughout his tumultuous career, first as the shrewd and ruthless boy-wonder president of CBS Television and recently as the budget-slashing head of MGM, Jim Aubrey has spoken softly and smiled, savoring nothing so much as the kill.

"You're through," he told Jack Benny gently at CBS. "Not a chance," he murmured to Garry Moore, who had asked for a try at a TV comeback. Likewise, Arthur Godfrey, Danny Thomas, Red Skelton and Lucille Ball have their own private memories of quiet chats with James Aubrey.

"Under pressure, Aubrey gets colder and colder," says TV executive Alan Courtney. "I don't think anybody in the world--not anybody--means anything to Jim Aubrey. It's like he has a gland missing."

It was no secret at CBS that Aubrey was arrogant and cruel. Luckily for him, he was brilliant as well and possessed an intuitive sense of public tastes. Almost contemptuously he fed the nation Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hill-billies. CBS' ratings soared, its profits swelled and the company hierarchy pretended not to notice Aubrey's worst excesses.

Aubrey enjoyed firing people, for one thing, and he took strange delight in telling how he did it. Most notable was his dispatching of CBS programing vice-president Hubbell Robinson. Robinson had given Aubrey his first big break by accepting one of his program suggestions when Aubrey was a nobody in the CBS West Coast office. Seven years later, Aubrey was the head of the network and Robinson's boss. One day, the way Aubrey tells it, Robinson came into Aubrey's office with proposals for the next year's programing. Robinson talked for an hour, giving a detailed explanation of each program, while Aubrey listened silently. Then he cut in softly, "You're through, Hub."

"In a moment, Jim, I still have a few--"

"No," said Aubrey. "You're through."

"Jim Aubrey treats friends and enemies the same," says one former TV associate, "so at least you always know where you stand."

Friend David Susskind started production on a dramatic series called The Outsider, only to have Aubrey deny he'd ever made a commitment. "I guess I was rough as hell on the talent," Aubrey admits.

He was no more gentle with his women, according to stories widely circulated in the early Sixties. The details of his raucous partying and his rough treatment of ladyfriends appeared regularly as blind items in the gossip columns. It was all too giddy-making for Jacqueline Susann, who conferred a special status upon Aubrey by using him as the model for Robin Stone, the villainous power-and sex-mad title character of The Love Machine.

Aubrey, true to form, is known for his sardonic formula for getting rid of women, rather than winning them. "Always do it in the daytime," goes the often quoted Aubrey advice, "because at night your heart takes over. Take her to lunch, to a very chic place like the Colony, where she will see famous people and where it is against all the rules to cry or scream or throw crockery. Buy her a drink and tell her that the train has reached Chicago and you're getting off at Chicago."

After one particularly energetic party in Miami in 1964--gate-crashed by the local police--CBS got off Aubrey's train and he was fired.

A quietus of four years followed and then Aubrey and MGM came together, married, as it were, by Las Vegas impresario Kirk Kerkorian. MGM was in deep trouble, $80,000,000 in debt. Operations had to be cut, overhead sliced, hordes of (continued on page 182)Hard Hearts(continued from page 116) people fired. What better person to do it than Jim Aubrey?

Aubrey canceled 15 movies, some already in production, and he let the film makers sue for money owed them and then wait years to collect. MGM property was sold and auctioned, and 3500 people were fired. One memorable coup de grace was delivered by Aubrey in person to a very highly paid top man with a long contract: "We want you to go to India and Nepal," Aubrey cooed, "to solve an important problem--converting blocked rupees into dollars." The man understood, He quit.

Aubrey did manage to turn the ailing company around by sheer force, and brilliance, and then he walked out late last year in a policy dispute with Kerkorian. "Don't worry about Aubrey," said an old CBS associate upon hearing the news. "He's not really out of work. He's lurking."

Judge Ernest Guinn

Crusty old Judge Ernest Guinn never eats lunch. At noon he goes across the street from the Federal courthouse in El Paso, Texas, stops in at the Church of the Immaculate Conception and then goes back to his courtroom, where he devours the remaining defendants on the docket. "You just can't win in his court," says one prominent lawyer. "He's the most flagrantly proprosecution judge in America."

Lawyers in El Paso charge that Guinn will do anything to coerce a guilty plea, and failing that, he'll bend over backward to help the prosecution get a conviction. "He's brilliant and he understands power; that's what makes him so vicious," says one court observer. "Guinn uses the bond system to force guilty pleas. For instance, if a man pleads guilty, he can count on Ernest's letting him out on his own recognizance. But if he wants to stand trial, never; Guinn will either throw the guy in jail or make him post bond."

Guinn's conduct has raised eyebrows, particularly in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has reversed him with uncommon frequency, and often in sardonic, "instructive" terms. It has found more than once that he has taken a position of advocacy--his charges to the jury often presenting a better summation of the prosecution's case than the prosecutor himself has made. (In one such case, he told the jury that a defendant's background "would justify you in not believing anything that he said because of what he has done in the past." The appeals court, in reversing the decision, said of Judge Guinn that "he practically directed a verdict of guilty.")

But Guinn couldn't care less. In one case he was seen in the jury room during deliberation, a shocking impropriety. In another, he had the jurors come into his own chambers. And on other occasions, he's been spotted conferring with the district attorney, helping him process a case, "He's a cop with a robe," says on lawyer. "A superprick," says another.

"The tragedy," adds an attorney, "is that he's driven good lawyers out of his courtroom. Nobody wants to take a case there and lose." Small wonder the Justice Department commended the U. S. Attorney's office for its record of convictions. Said one Assistant U. S. Attorney, "They don't know we've got old Judge Guinn out here." Of 30 or 40 cases that are tried each year in Guinn's courtroom, only one or two at most end in jury acquittals.

Young lawyer Clarence Moyers is so bitter about Guinn he's doing what others have not dared do: He is preparing to submit a brief to the Court of Appeals asking for the judge's removal. "I thing he's the meanest man in America," Moyers says. "I had one client who'd been set up on a marijuana bust an I found the informer who'd given him the grass to sell. This is a clear violation, and it would have gotten my client free, but Guinn refused to let the agent testify, for no valid reason.

"Another time, he threw two of my clients in jail awaiting sentencing on a drug charge. I had an appeal ready, but Guinn called me into his chambers and said, 'If you plead them guilty and drop the appeal. I'll give them only five years and make them immediately eligible for parole. But if you persist in this appeal, I'll give them ten years and send them up to Leavenworth."

In another case, Judge Guinn told Moyers, in clear hearing of the jury, "Mr. Moyers, your client is an old con man from way back."

Guinn's conduct, by all accounts, is outrageous. An unserious man, he has not even taken the trouble to hire the two law clerks he's permitted. Will he ever be removed? Before that happens, he'll reach retirement age: The last time a Federal judge was impeached was back in 1936. Which proves that a Federal judgeship is a comfy place for a truly pernicious misanthrope.

John Simon

John Simon is a film and drama critic of unsurpassed venom. As if the malevolence of his reviews we. e not enough, Simon conducts himself in person like one of his most poisonous diatribes come to life. He sneers rather than speaks, and the does so with a sharp Germanic accent that prompted Hollis Alpert to describe him in a thinly disguised novel as "a Martin Bormann type," and Peter Bogdanovich to satirize him in the character Hugh Simon, the nasty Yugoslav in What's Up, Doc?

It has been noticed that when angered, which is often, Simon actually froths at the mouth. He was asked about it once and he claimed it was caused by "gastric hyperactivity" rather than ferociousness.

Simon cackles out loud during screening of movies he does not like an once, after a strange episode of hissing had disrupted a showing of A Safe Place at the New York Film Festival, Simon went up to the film's director in the lobby and bragged that he had brought the people to do the hissing and that "I'll do it every time you show this piece of shit." Nice.

What distinguishes Simon's reviews, and makes them meaner than the usual run of dour notices, is the element of sadism common to them. Readers of New York Magazine, The New Leader, The Hudson Review and Esquire get a load of it every issue. Simon has little patience with the unbeautiful:

Miss [Zoe] Caldwell is fat and unattractive in every part of the face, body and limbs, though I must admit that I have not examined her teeth. When she climactically bares her sprawlingly uberous left breast, the sight is almost enough to drive the heterosexual third of the audience screaming into the camp of the majority. Colette had sex appeal; Miss Caldwell has sex repeal.

Miss [Shelley] Winters is a disaster, or, considering her vast expanse, a disaster area. She looks like a tea cozy surmounting a sack off flour.

Miss Streisand is blithely unaware of her ugliness.... I find [her] looks repellent.... I cannot accept a romantic heroine who is both knock need and ankleless, short-waisted and shapeless, scrag-toothed and with a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi's Rooster cast in liverwurst.... And she is no actress....

Miss [Judy] Garland plays herself, which is horrifying ... her face has become that of a wizened child ... and her figure resembles the giant economy-size tube of tooth paste in girls' bathrooms: squeezed intemperately at all points.

Georgie [played by Maureen Stapleton] is meant to be a still young. extremely handsome woman of considerable depth who pretends to be simpler, older, homelier than she is. Conversely, Miss Stapleton is all three of those things, and cannot even begin to pretend to be otherwise.

Simon called one Anna Massey "the homeliest of actresses," and he said Lynn Redgrave "carries" unattractiveness to heroic proportions." But his most fiendish vituperation is saved for those who, in his mind, contribute to what might be called blurring of the sexes:

Miss Susan Browning ... [is] a simpering, loping, squawking, bunny-hopping, bosom-waggling and eyeball-caroming travesty, my nomination for the worst female impersonator now sashaying across our boards.

William Hickey ... repeats his perennial bit: part croaking female impersonator, part mumbling two-year-old, part shuffling half-wait.

Miss [Angela] Lansbury looks like an aging female impersonator gone sloppy ... a bisected androgyne, woman below, man on top.... She is that most degraded thing an outré actress can decline into: a fag hag.

Hermione Gingold continues her career as our leading fag hag, senior division.

This mugging, mouthing little butterball [Bernadette Peters] is already a full-fledged fag hag, midway between a shrunken Angela Lansbury and a megalomaniacal noodle.

Christopher Walken struts about like a male model showing off the latest Bill Blass collection while mumbling his lines in a barely audible, breakneck monotone, like some lobotomized valedictorian at an idiot school.

Few actors ever find the chance to get back at Simon. One who did was Sylvia Miles, who encountered Simon in a restaurant after he'd written her up as a party girl "whose very acting technique is a kind of theatrical gate-crashing." She dumped a plate of lasagna in his lap.