SECRETS OF THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE : Ueberroth--Man in Charge : His Controversial Style Brought Fear, Inspiration

Patty Patano, who worked for Peter Ueberroth at both his travel agency and the Olympic committee, probably knew him as well as any employee. She stressed the importance he put on control.

“Control is his life force,” she said. “If I had to say Peter Ueberroth equals something, it would be control, because his whole life is run on that basis.”

Although they inevitably had to delegate many responsibilities as the Games approached, Ueberroth and Harry Usher kept the major decisions to themselves, and when he wanted to, Ueberroth controlled Usher, too.

Usher was free to choose the look of the Games, the color and design scheme that won so many plaudits. He was left free to make many staffing and management decisions. But planning aide Lee Aurich had little doubt as to who ruled the committee.

According to Aurich, Ueberroth’s “high degree of control weeded out people that were not going to put up with that kind of abuse. . . . It encouraged people to go along with whatever it was that he wanted, which allowed him to build an organization that was very responsive to his desires.”

Glenn Wilson, coordinator of the Olympic coin program and a man for whom Ueberroth expressed high personal regard, agreed that the Olympic president called the shots. “He laid out some tough rules all the time,” Wilson said. “At no time did I have a feeling of real freedom, even (in) the program I was administering. Anything that was even a little off center, I had the feeling I should clear it.”

The politically powerful in Los Angeles soon were impressed with the force of Ueberroth’s actions and personality.

Said Mayor Tom Bradley: “He was one who could be arbitrary, and he could be tough, I think to the point where some people would say, ‘He’s a bastard. He’s just absolutely impossible.’ That was a part of his personality.”

But the committee’s government relations aides noted that City Council members who had initially complained that Ueberroth was not coming to City Hall often enough to see them, were ultimately pleased just to get an invitation to visit him at Olympic headquarters. He quickly became a bigger celebrity than they were.

Outside, there was almost universal acclaim for the Olympic president. After the Games, the respected Field poll in California showed that 25 times more people surveyed had a favorable impression of him than a negative one. There was considerable talk about Ueberroth’s possibly running for the U.S. Senate, and a New York Times columnist even mentioned the possibility of Ueberroth running for President of the United States in 1988.

But among the Olympic committee staff, in the words of his longtime friend and colleague Charlotte Hyde, there was an ambivalence about him.

Hyde said that even those who admired Ueberroth had some disquieting impressions of him as well, figuring that on the one hand he had inspired them but on the other he had intimidated them. Even after the Games, many of them were still groping for a final, balanced impression of him.

Sometimes, those views were expressed positively. Ueberroth’s old business associate, Richard Sargent, a kind of senior jack- of-all-trades around the committee, put it this way:

“Peter’s management style is to keep you off balance. Now, off balance doesn’t necessarily mean a negative. It could be pushing you forward. It could be pushing you backwards. But he never dealt in complacencies. If you weren’t moving, you weren’t growing.

“And I think that’s the ambivalence that most people felt, was that Peter continued to make everybody not take the path of least resistance. When Peter stopped talking to you, that meant he’d written you off. As long as he was prodding you and pushing you, he still had confidence and the desire to make you do a better job for yourself and for the committee.”

Others were more critical of some of his styles. Ed Smith, the committee’s director of ticketing, said:

“Everybody was in the doghouse at one time or another. At the time, it was very hard to go through some of the things. Peter had a bad habit, which I never cared for and still don’t. He would chew people out in front of others, which I personally think is not a good thing to do, but he did it for effect.

“Peter did a lot of this terrible, terrible berating of people. In my opinion, it was primarily a growth thing (for those involved).”

Within the committee, Ueberroth’s intimidation was a frequent topic of uneasy conversation. Some even said they tried to avoid encounters with Ueberroth, which wasn’t always easy because the president, insatiably curious, frequently walked through committee departments or sat down for meals in the employee cafeteria, the Cafe de Coubertin, with staff members.

He called this his walk-around management style.

It was not at all an infrequent occurrence for committee employees, working late or on a holiday weekend, to look up and see Ueberroth strolling into their department. Often, he would take special notice of whether they were observing the dress code in all its particulars.

What was so difficult for people at the committee, and many of those who dealt with Ueberroth frequently from outside, was that they scarcely knew how they felt about him, they had such contradictory and rapidly changing impressions.

They also did not know what to expect from him.

Larry Lemoine, an assistant controller at the committee, said: “You never knew how you stood walking in his office. He had a poker face. He could chew you up one side and down the other, or hand you a bonus check, which did happen from time to time.”

Hyde agreed. “One day he was all sugar and spice and charming and sunny,” she said. “And the next day you would meet him in the hallway, he would hardly recognize you.”

Joan Gilford, liaison for Committee Chairman Paul Ziffren, had mixed feelings about Ueberroth, veering abruptly from positive reactions to negative and back again.

She said that she liked Ueberroth because she thought she could talk to him and he would listen, and she was enthusiastic over his willingness to give her challenging tasks when all she had ever been before was a paralegal. But she was exasperated by the way Ueberroth could turn around and “devastate” her, sometimes in front of others.

Gilford said that she thought sometimes in such instances that “he was teaching you a lesson, and that was good. Other times, I think he was just totally in a bad mood.”

She cited as an example of his varying temper the day he suddenly informed her that she would be flying with him and his wife in a private plane to San Jose, where he would give a speech. Then she would hire a car and drive to San Francisco to pick up Ziffren and drive him to San Jose so the two men could confer on the plane ride home. Gilford gave this account of the trip:

“We’re late leaving the office 20 minutes and then there’s a little traffic getting to Santa Monica airport. . . . The plane’s all ready to go, and Ginny is like maybe a minute and a half behind us. And he’s already, like, ‘Where is everybody?’ I mean, he’s like up tight.

“We get in the plane and then . . . the flight is longer than Peter had said it would be. By the time we get to San Jose, I now have 20 minutes to get Paul. No way can I make it. But, anyway, we get out of the plane and here is this huge stretch limo waiting for me, and I think it was (press aide) Rich Levin waiting for Peter with this little Lynx, or whatever it was, and Peter’s not real pleased that I’m getting in the limo, he’s getting in the Lynx.”

She drove to San Francisco as fast as possible and picked up Ziffren, returning with him to San Jose.

“We get to the airport and there’s Peter. The veins are sticking out on (his) neck. But as soon as he sees Paul he calms down and he’s like Mr. Nice. We get in the airplane and meanwhile I said, ‘Rich, how long were you waiting?’ He says, ’12 minutes.’ Peter looks at me and out of the side of his mouth, he says, ‘We’ve been waiting here a half an hour. Where have you been?’ I mean, which is typical Peter. It makes me laugh. Once you get to know him, it’s OK.

“We get on the plane. They do their confidential stuff, which I love sitting in and listening and everything, and Peter’s now in a great mood. Everything’s going great. Paul (Ziffren) has given him some definite good advice . . . about the Soviets coming, not coming, whatever, and Peter is like, really up, OK? He’s going to go act on whatever this is. We get out of the plane (in Santa Monica). Paul’s driver is there. . . . I wave to them.

“I get in the car with Peter, he turns at me and he says, ‘That was a terrible day. You didn’t do anything right. Everything was off schedule.’

“And there you are. He just devastates you for no reason. But that’s what he would do to you. You could be up one minute, and he’d put you down in the toilet the very next.”

Working in such an environment was stressful. Travel manager Donna Fenchel said: “I would say he had a great ability to keep people off balance, and that really kept you on your toes, teetering. I don’t like it. I’d like to know which Peter I’m going to meet when he’s coming into my office or I’m going into his office.”

Press aide Valerie Steiner said: “I’d never work for Peter again.” But she added: “I loved working with him. I learned a lot from him.”

Howard Allen, a board member responsible for running a huge business himself, remarked after the Games:

“I don’t think that any perpetual or long-term organizational endeavor could have been managed the way Peter managed the Olympics. I think there would have been an uprising on the board. There would have been a revolt.

“I don’t think a lot of people would have stayed. But that great mystique of the Olympics, that almost religious visionary attraction to these people, drove them, in spite of some of what appeared to be ruthless, arbitrary management decisions that were made.”

A frequent target of Ueberroth’s criticism at the committee was Daniel Greenwood, a man so close to him that he had once, during his divorce, lived in Ueberroth’s home for an extended period. Greenwood called the Olympic president a tough man to work for, but added, “I don’t know many worth their salt that aren’t.

“Peter was as tough on me as (on) anybody in the committee. No one will dispute that. And I have been a friend of his for a long time. I am a friend of his now.

“Classic story: 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, he hit me on something and I have no idea what it was. Jumped me mean and hard and in front of people and the kind where you walk away just destroyed. You know, I’m a grown man. I don’t, but just . . .

“I’m at home, it’s now a quarter to nine at night, phone rings. Voice on the other end says, ‘Green Danwood (sic), can I get a ride to the golf course tomorrow?’

“It was four hours later. I said, ‘Noooo, you S.O.B,’ and he says, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘You just did a number on me four hours ago.’ ‘Oh, that doesn’t bother you.’ And that’s the way it was.

“I said, ‘I’ll be there at 7 o’clock in the morning. Goodby.’ Picked him up at 7 o’clock in the morning. We’re friends. Absolute at ease.”

Amy Quinn, Ueberroth’s press secretary and one of his most loyal assistants, assessed what he was trying to accomplish.

“I was a target on more than one occasion of Peter’s anger; some cases justifiable, I think, others not. A lot of times Peter would use that to make a point to the people around him that you can never lose sight of what you’re trying to do. Issues where he would criticize somebody publicly, he would be trying to make a point to the group.

“It wasn’t a personal attack. It’s like the Mafia says: ‘This is professional, not personal.’ It would be to say to the group: ‘You know, here’s somebody that’s really smart that has overlooked the obvious.’

“One time he did it to me and and we discussed it in loud voices at length, privately, but more times than not he did it to make a point to a group, not to hurt somebody. And I think that when he felt that he had (hurt someone) he would always come back and take time to explain it to them.”

Patano, who suffered through humiliating episodes of her own, was by no means amused.

“It’s a style that involves a personal attack on a person, which always is going to throw you off guard, because you don’t expect it, nor ever want it as a human being, especially in a business situation,” she said. She told of this incident:

“I was in a car with Peter, his driver-bodyguard, Wayne (Ichiyasu), and three other people and we were on our way to a big meeting with the sponsors and ABC television. On the way to the meeting, Peter had Dan Greenwood and I do a lot of research about the sponsors and their advertising agencies, which I had done as thoroughly as could be done.

“And then Peter started asking me questions about sponsor negotiations, of which I knew nothing, that Dan Greenwood was handling totally. Well, I couldn’t respond intelligently and Peter started, instead of asking Dan the questions, Peter started yelling at me and putting me down for not knowing, and really laid into me, in front of some people.

“You know, I was really more than being in a learning posture, I was ready to choke everybody in the car and just get me out of there, because it was a very humiliating experience and it was a very unnecessary experience. I was so totally beaten down, after getting out of the car, and I was absolutely furious. I couldn’t even speak when I walked out of the car, because I was so upset by what had happened.

“And we were waiting to go in and Peter came up to me and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Now, Patty, you have to understand. I only do these things because I want you to do the best job possible.’ And I’m looking at this man like he is totally bonkers. And I just looked at him square in the eye, and I said, ‘Peter, I always do the best job that I know how to do.’

“I walked away and all I could think of was, ‘How could any human being ever think (he was) helping me to do a better job by humiliating me about something that had nothing to do with my job?’ ”

Patano told of another time that she met Ueberroth walking with Usher in the hall at the committee offices. “And he puts his arm around me and he says, ‘She’s really a hot woman.’ ”

Patano said she was annoyed. “But it was like his way of playing with you,” she added. “It was like you never knew if he was going to say, ‘This is really a jerk,’ or ‘This is really a hot woman.’ That was the way he always liked to keep you hanging, so you never knew where he was going to come from.”

On yet another occasion, a party for European broadcasters, she said that Ueberroth “had quite a bit to drink . . . and he came up to me and he put his arm around me, and he said, ‘I’m sorry for the way I always treat you.’ ”

Ueberroth’s own explanation of his public criticisms of employees was essentially that it was a necessary managerial technique in the special environment of the Olympic organizing effort. He also said that he had never gotten personal with his criticisms.

“It was for effect, because there’s nothing better,” he said. “As long as you don’t personalize it, as long as you don’t say, ‘You son of a gun,’ or ‘You dummy’ or you anything, and never personalize it. “There’s never an incident, never, where I would berate anybody individually or personally, ever. But if there is a problem or a . . . major mistake that could cause an awful lot of continuing problems, in something like the Olympic Games you don’t have time to try and take someone in and give them counseling and explain and work out the problems. You need to make an example of the problem at the very time it happens, so that everybody that’s involved, who might also be making the same kind of mistake, can learn from it.”

Ueberroth cited the instance where someone at the committee might have sent a letter to all the national Olympic committees around the world without checking with other staff members who had already handled the issue involved. “I would take that individual, not berate them personally, I would say: ‘Dan, this act is horrifying, and this act is inexcusable, and let’s get your department here and let me use this example, an actual example, of how bad this could be.’

“Now, if I do that with a closed door with Dan, Dan would not do it again. But there were--by that time we’re growing so fast--there’s 20 people reporting to Dan, all with authority, and I would (otherwise) have to go out to 20 individual meetings.”

So, Ueberroth said, he would make an example of the act in front of all the others.

“Yes, it might have been humiliating to the individual that had committed the act, and I would normally . . . try and explain quietly to Dan later on a golf course, I had to do it,” Ueberroth said. “But if you’re making a mistake that broad, (maybe) all those people reporting to you (are) making a mistake that broad. They’ll all have to learn by that act in order to not have it happen 10 times and get out of control.

“If it was not consequential, I didn’t even care. But if it was one that had domino effects, I wanted everybody to know it at that time.

“Normally, the people that I criticized were those I had the greatest faith in,” Ueberroth added. “Usually, the closer the friend, the tougher the complaint.”

He described criticism as a learning process. “And the best time to criticize is right at the act,” he said.

If Ueberroth could be intimidating, he could also be thoughtful, and many persons at the committee, including some of those who said they had been subjected to his caustic criticism, also told of that thoughtfulness.

When Joan Gilford’s mother died months after the Games were over and after Ueberroth had moved to New York to become baseball commissioner, he sent flowers. When he and his wife sold their San Fernando Valley home, he went out of his way to call Gilford and ask her if she could use any of the furniture.

When Glenn Wilson suffered a heart attack in the weeks preceding the Games, Ueberroth called him at the hospital. “You and I were in this thing together at the beginning and I want us to be together at the end,” Wilson recalled Ueberroth saying. “So, I want you to be my guest at the Opening Ceremonies and sit with the President (Reagan) in the box. I’ll send a limousine for you and your wife.”

On opening day, the limousine arrived on schedule and when Wilson and his wife, Kathryn, arrived at the Coliseum they found that their seats were exactly on the 50-yard line, marked personally for them by Amy Quinn. “We didn’t sit with the President,” Wilson recalled. “But we sat very close.”

When Ueberroth heard second-hand that the father of Jay Moorhead, head of the committee’s Washington office and occasionally the target of some of Ueberroth’s barbed comments, had suffered a heart attack, he telephoned Moorhead and told him: “Take three days off and go take care of your father.”

Moorhead said that Ueberroth was sympathetic: “I don’t want you anywhere near the office. Some things are more important than the Olympics or business, and your father is much more important. So just take time off.”

Ueberroth also had flowers sent to the hospital room.

When Daniel Cruz, head of the committee’s youth department and its liaison with the Latin community, suggested to Ueberroth on the Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday that it might be good to do something to mark the holiday with the Latin staff members, Ueberroth quickly decided to take all of them to lunch.

The occasion at Tampico Tilly’s in Santa Monica now is one of Cruz’s fondest memories. He told how Ueberroth had committed himself to hire “your (Latin) superstars and friends who can meet the needs of the committee” and expressed his dedication to that end.

“I think he was a great man to work for,” Cruz said. “He was tough, but he was very fair, and if you had something to say he’d listen, and then he’d react.”

Patty Patano might not have appreciated Ueberroth’s “hot woman” remark, but others at the committee often were pleased by his offhand comments.

Arnold Schwartzman, then the committee’s director of design, said: “I always remember, just shortly after joining the committee I was going down an elevator, and there’s (Phil) Brubaker and Sargent and several others, and just as I was leaving, (Ueberroth) pointed to me and said, ‘Nobody makes a decision in design unless he says it’s OK.’ ”

Schwartzman said he gained a great deal of confidence from that, and even when he was unceremoniously fired nine months later, he blamed Usher, not Ueberroth.

Sometimes, Ueberroth’s thoughtfulness to staff members followed closely behind unpleasant episodes. Scott Le Tellier, who as a committee lawyer was seated just outside Ueberroth’s office, said he was the recipient of the Olympic leader’s harshness and benevolence. “Something had come up where he’d yelled at me for some reason,” Le Tellier said. “And two days later, there’s this thing that the Romanians had given him--it’s on my desk . . . this really beautiful little folding box. He just shipped it on over to me.

“And that happened on a number of occasions where, surprise, there’d be a little note, with a personal memo to me: ‘Here’s something that I thought you might enjoy,’ or, ‘I heard that you did a tremendous job with this the other day and keep up the good work,’ whereas two weeks before that, you’d have been in there, maybe with some others and maybe alone, having him go through 15 minutes not finding a single thing that you’d done right for the last six months that you’d been around him.”

After Ueberroth joined the committee, he sold First Travel, and one of his long-time partners, Wallace Smith, was allotted some of the proceeds from the sale.

“Peter treated me almost as his equal in the little companies that we had,” Smith said. “At times, I think I made more money than he did in the early years. He allowed that.

“After about three or four years into the public company, I told Peter that I felt that I should have more ownership, more stock, more equity, and he said, ‘Yes, you’re entitled to it, but I can’t give it to you. I can’t give you anything in writing, but I’ll take care of it.’ We talked about a dollar amount.

“A number of years went by and we sold the company. I did not have to even ask or remind Peter Ueberroth when we went to Minneapolis, he and I and a couple of other guys, including Harry Usher, to sell the company. Peter Ueberroth, without any prodding from me, saw to it that out of what was his became partially mine. I don’t think there are very many people around who will tell . . . a story like that.”

If Ueberroth could be thoughtful, he could be even more inspiring, and later many staff members said that a lot of the success of the L.A. Olympics could be traced to his inspiration.

The director of the Olympic Arts Festival, Robert Fitzpatrick, saw other dimensions to the inspiration as well. “He could be brutal, and if you were not strong, you withered under some of his remarks,” he said. “But the guy also cared, and managed to communicate that, not just to the top level but several steps down. And I think, strange as that sounds, that was a very principal factor in the success. I think he was also a principal engineer in having people perceive a sort of personal stake in the success of these Games and a patriotic stake, without it being flag-waving Americanism, that it was important that these be able to be pulled off.”

Fitzpatrick cited Ueberroth’s role in the transcontinental torch relay as an example of his inspirational leadership.

He said that the entire senior management of the committee was totally against Ueberroth’s idea of selling kilometers for $3,000 each, giving the money to charity, and running the torch for nearly three months on an elaborate zigzag course across the nation.

The objections kept coming up in management meetings, but, Fitzpatrick said, Ueberroth just said, “We’re going to do it, and this is the way we’re going to do it.”

The torch relay ended up being a tremendous psychological boost for the Games and it demonstrated, in the Arts Festival chief’s view, Ueberroth’s “good gut instinct for what are the symbolic gestures, both with individuals and with the larger public.”

Rich Perelman, press facilities chief, said: “I think Peter was very effective in that he had a strong hold on me. He’d get me to do whatever he wanted, because he’d say, ‘I don’t think you can do this.’

“Well, I took that not as a putdown, but as a challenge. ‘He doesn’t believe in me; I’ll show him.’ And it made me work harder.”

Perelman said that Ueberroth “didn’t push that button with everybody” but only with those for whom he found the tactic effective. And he said that when he responded, “the compliments you got back were really amazing. You would get compliments back third or fourth handed, and those were the best kind.”

Perelman said he thought many of those humiliated by Ueberroth brought it on themselves. Some people, he said, would tell Ueberroth, in effect, “I don’t know what to do; tell me what to do.” Perelman said that Ueberroth, when confronted by such a person, would just “chew him up and spit him out.”

Robert Montgomery, the senior vice president who had many discussions with Ueberroth, saw yet another component to Ueberroth’s ability to inspire--that of putting employees into competition with one another. “One of his (management) tenets is survival of the fittest,” Montgomery said. “I mean, he would move somebody in right alongside the other person without defining the job descriptions or what they were responsible for. He moved Bea Nemlaha right alongside (Joel) Rubenstein (in the protocol department).

“That’s one of his techniques, to do that, and then not communicate what’s going on, so everybody gets antsy, everybody gets nervous, and his notion is, and we talked about this a lot, that somehow that stirs your juices and you now work harder and you’ve got to prove yourself.

“This is one of the things I find somewhat distasteful, but that was one of his basic philosophies.”

Usher had another, quite different view of Ueberroth’s inspirational qualities.

“One of the great accidental matchups of our day was Peter as president of the LAOOC,” Usher said. “He was the perfect man for the job at the right time in our society. I suspect that if you had even taken the man at the same age and put him back in the late ‘60s, when we were talking about social conscious things and revolting and all this stuff (it wouldn’t have worked).

“What we were talking about from ’80 to ’84 was entrepreneurship. What are the shows on television? ‘Dynasty.’ The rich. You want to focus on the rich . . . and you want to focus on the high life and you want to focus on profit making and money making and these are the heroes.

“The hero of today is the baseball player who gets the $2 million plus salary. Take all that, and you take the environment in which the Olympic Games found itself and you wrap it all together and you take Peter in this particular environment of Los Angeles and it was absolutely magic.”

Usher added: “As we go through the ‘80s, it will be very interesting to see what happens to Peter, because Peter is the ‘80s. He almost, to me, embodies what the ‘80s are about.”

‘There’s never an incident, never, where I would berate anybody individually of personally, ever. But if there is a problem or a . . . major mistake that could cause an awful lot of continuing problems, in something like the Olympic Games you don’t have time to try and take someone in and give the counseling and explain and work out the problems.’

--PETER UEBERROTH

‘One of the great accidental matchups of out day was Peter as president of the LAOOC. He was the perfect man for the job at the right time in our society . . .As we go through the ‘80s, it will be very interesting to see what happens to Peter, because Peter is the ‘80s.’

--HARRY USHER