SECRETS OF THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE : Testing Times for the Staff : Ueberroth’s Style: Intimidation and Pop Quizzes

Intimidation and inspiration were not Peter Ueberroth’s only ways of challenging Olympic employees. He had a whole series of tests, ranging from classroom-like examinations to more subtle exercises designed to check the ability of staff members to function under pressure and their loyalty to him.

The repeated examinations--most often, 20 questions relating to the Olympic movement and current events, given first thing Monday mornings--went almost unreported in the thousands of articles written about the Olympic committee over the years. Yet after the Games, as employees reflected on their experiences at the committee, they were among the most debated of all of Ueberroth’s practices.

Another of Ueberroth’s favorite tests was early international travel for new staff members. Bea Nemleha was part of a delegation that went to Spain for an assembly of European national Olympic committees just a few days after she had come to work. Alan Epstein was taken to Rome, Maidie Oliveau to Moscow, Scott Le Tellier to West Germany, and there were numerous other similar cases. Every employee, down to secretaries and runners, was required to have a valid passport. Phil Brubaker was hired away from the Long Beach city government in 1982 and eventually became one of the committee’s group vice presidents. Just weeks after he had been hired, though, he was assigned to lead the committee’s delegation to the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, Australia.

“I went to the reception when Prince Philip was there,” Brubaker recalled. “You jump right into that heady atmosphere.”

The point to Brubaker was clear: Ueberroth had sent him to Australia to see how he would do there.

Within two days of signing on as personnel director, Priscilla Florence was summoned to Ueberroth’s office and subjected to another kind of test.

“I thought that he was calling me in his office to meet someone, because I was in the process of an interview,” she recalled. “So I excused myself from the interview and I went running into his office.

“He said: ‘Come on in.’ And he looked at me and he said: ‘Where is your pad?’ And I said: ‘I was interviewing.’

“And he said: ‘You didn’t hear me. I said, where is your pad?’

“He said: ‘Don’t ever come in my office without a pad. You don’t know if I have one thing to tell you or 20 things to tell you.’

“Well, that was a lesson for me. And being around the committee, everybody you saw walked around with a pad. I would sit back and watch the newcomers. He would call somebody who had only been on board for a few days and they’d come running into the office and he would say: ‘Where is your pad?’ ”

Yet another tactic was close observation of a staff member’s reaction to one of his sudden job reassignments. David Simon, for example, said he had been a little nonplussed when he was suddenly moved from head of the fledgling government relations department in the early days of the committee to head of the planning department. Some of his colleagues at the committee got the impression that he was in Ueberroth’s doghouse.

But Simon accepted the position without complaint and 18 months later he was back in charge of government relations, which in the meantime had become much more important in the scheme of things.

Simon said that Ueberroth’s intimidating style and job transfers were tests. “Basically it’s how you pass that determines how you’re going to fare with him. Some people wilt under it. Other people will respond to it and if they can stand the heat, then he’ll let them be in the kitchen. It takes a certain temperament. He doesn’t want people who are going to get agitated. He likes people who can keep their cool.”

So, there were many kinds of tests. But the tests everyone talked about the most were the straight “Peter tests,” the classroom-like examinations. Ueberroth also had a habit of springing pop quizzes on staff members he met on his rounds through the committee offices.

Some employees thought the tests were great. Others were annoyed by them.

Ueberroth was proud of them and more than happy to explain them. “Everybody took them, so it was a common ground,” he said. “The most senior executive to the most lowly beginning clerk (or) floor sweeper.

“The real purpose was to realize that this was not a job. If they had wanted a job, they shouldn’t have come, because they could get a better job somewhere else that would pay more.

“What I was trying to do was let them know the enormity of the task and the international flavor of the task . . . (that) they were part of something much bigger than the city of Los Angeles, that it was important to know the difference between the DDR (East Germany, in the official Olympic initials) and the FRG (West Germany), that it was important to know where Mali was and what that was, it wasn’t an Irish girl’s name.

“Another reason it was good is I got a chance to physically, eye to eye, see every new employee and watch for sparks. The test would take 10 minutes and the session would be an hour and a half. It was a chance to get a group of people together and (see who they were).”

Ueberroth said that in an organization that was growing so fast, employees might otherwise have been lost in the shuffle and that giving the tests had provided him dozens of opportunities to become acquainted with employees who had talents he otherwise would not have known about.

He said that it was at one of his tests that he met Agnes Mura, the Romanian-born young woman and skilled linguist who eventually assumed the sensitive position of envoy to the Romanians when they broke with their allies and sent a team to Los Angeles despite the Soviet boycott.

Ueberroth’s answer would seem to imply that each employee took the Peter tests only once. But actually, in the early stages of the committee, most staff members took them repeatedly, usually about once a month. Indeed, protocol chief Joel Rubenstein recalled that a group of four soon emerged as infallible in the tests.

“Peter was always suspect of the group,” he said. “It was Amy Quinn, Rich Perelman, David Simon and me.

” You know, (he used to say): ‘What is this, the Jewish Mafia here, dominating our quizzes?’ ”

Perelman remembered the tests as joyous occasions where those being examined sometimes razzed Ueberroth for not knowing the right answers to his own questions. One day, Perelman said, Ueberroth’s first question was: “What was the last time the People’s Republic of China competed in the Olympic Games?”

“Most of us wrote down, never, because the People’s Republic of China was formed in ‘49,” Perelman said. “It was impossible. (They) couldn’t have competed. Peter says 1932. We were just all over him. ‘Peter, get your facts right. If you’re going to ask people who . . . know about the Games.’

“He asked about six more questions. Five of his answers were wrong. So we were just on Peter, and he just left, and Jamie Schoenfeld (one of Ueberroth’s assistants) came back with a revised test three, four days later, which was better, but still had a lot of wrong answers in it. And we were just all over her. We were throwing wadded up pieces of paper at her.”

Even so, the tests were intimidating. Valerie Steiner, who liked the idea, said that when she took one “I was so scared, my hands were frozen. I could barely write.”

One reason for anxiety was that, although no one apparently ever got fired for failing a test, it was well known that Ueberroth was inclined to make adverse remarks about those who did poorly on the tests. Robert Montgomery recalled: “So often, Peter would say in a little aside that so and so is a dumb so and so, he only got so many questions right. The constant belittling of some people, I thought, was a little overly stressful.”

David Simon said that department supervisors of persons who did poorly “would hear from Peter that this was a person to watch out for.”

John Fransen said that in his time as public relations director, he remembered Ueberroth showing him Ed Steidle’s test after Steidle had come on as a senior vice president. “He reviewed it with me,” Fransen said. “He said, ‘Ed missed those.’ ” Ueberroth, he added, had even given Harry Usher a test.

Very few were the employees who could resist the pressure to take a test. Even Charlotte Hyde, despite her 20 years of association with Ueberroth, finally succumbed. “I was terribly irritated by being treated like a preschooler,” she said. “In fact, I didn’t want to take the damn test. He said, ‘Oh, you have to.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to.’ (But) I did.”

Ueberroth’s pop quizzes, given in committee hallways or even elevators, tended to be less popular than the regular tests. Andrew Strenk, another writer in the publications department, said that on one occasion he became annoyed when Ueberroth accosted him in an elevator and asked him to name the six provinces of Yugoslavia. When he was able to get only five, he said, Ueberroth “tauntingly spit out” the sixth, Macedonia.

Strenk said he responded by asking Ueberroth a number of questions seeking to see if he could identify a famous Olympian from Southern California, Gen. George Patton. Despite numerous hints, Ueberroth, he said, could not name him until he was told.

Ueberroth responded the next day, Strenk said. “I was sitting in my office and in comes Wayne (Ichiyasu), his bodyguard, and he walked right up to my desk and he said: ‘About yesterday, Mr. U. told me to tell you that he didn’t think that was very funny, and don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ ”

Ichiyasu declined to be interviewed. Ueberroth said he could not remember such an encounter with Strenk. “I don’t say it couldn’t have happened,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t (think so).”

The Peter tests were quintessentially Ueberroth. They were something very few executives would have done in any business. They were controversial. But they allowed Ueberroth in a very definite way to put his imprint on the committee and added to his mystique there.

Another kind of test that Ueberroth occasionally employed was an impromptu competition between employees. Marilyn Wyatt told of two instances in which she was summoned to Ueberroth’s office and told to vie with press aides in writing a news statement, the aim being to see which one Ueberroth would find most suitable to issue publicly.

“The first time I think it was just Steve (Montiel) and me,” Wyatt said. “(Ueberroth) told us: ‘OK, this is what I want said. I want both of you to write it and I’m going to pick the one that I like best.’ And he said: ‘You have 20 minutes to write it,’ and he put us in a room together and gave us the information, and we sat there and just looked at each other, sweated, started writing, went back to him, and I don’t even think he read both of them.

“He had me read mine and said: ‘OK, that’s OK,’ and sort of took it and walked out of the room and poor Steve was left there, I’m sure, feeling miserable.

“The second time it happened, I was called up there with Rich Levin and we were supposed to both write statements for him saying that he did not, nor did he ever intend . . . to ever accept the position of baseball commissioner.

“I wrote a statement which was very formal and then Rich wrote one which was very conversational, and he wound up liking Rich’s a lot better. And so he used it, and it was released as a news release, appeared in the paper the next day saying that he did not intend to accept the job as baseball commissioner. And then five days later I read in the newspaper that Ueberroth was the new baseball commissioner.”

Ueberroth also frequently challenged the ability of a single staff member to get something done, assigning an extremely difficult task.

“I think those were definite Peter tests (too),” said Joan Gilford, who told of one:

“He, one time, 7 o’clock in the morning, called me up and said: ‘I’m leaving town,’ and he needed gifts. He hadn’t thought about bringing gifts with him. He said: ‘I want you to get down to the office, pick out some gifts, put them in a bag and get them to me. I’m leaving at 8:30.’

“OK, I’m not even dressed, he woke me up, and he’s leaving from LAX (Los Angeles International Airport, 23 miles across town in rush hour). So then the final words to me were: ‘Now, if you can’t do it, don’t worry about it.’

“But it was that tight voice. I said: ‘Fine.’

“Actually, I got it done for him. I was real fortunate. I called the office, there happened to be someone there who I gave exact instructions to on how to do this, and I said, ‘Get over to Peter. He will reward you.’

“It turned out to be Greg Cornell. And Greg, of course, would do anything to have Peter recognize him. So he was out there in, like, minutes.

Do you think Peter smiled, said: ‘Thank you!’? No, nothing. He came back. You think he said: ‘Joanie, great job!’? No, I didn’t expect it, but then in other ways, Peter would make it up. Peter paid me well. Peter would give me tickets to go see something, or he would include me in dinners. . . . He just did it by making you feel good about yourself. I think sometimes he didn’t want you to feel too good, because then he’d just knock you down a little.”

Donna Fenchel told of another instance in which Ueberroth suddenly informed her that he wanted Budget Rent-A-Car, with which the committee had just concluded a contract, to get the credit cards to committee employees within five days. Budget normally took three weeks to produce such cards, but Ueberroth had used one of his favorite expressions to his travel manager: “Make it happen!”

Fenchel did. “I called and in my own (quiet) way told them that it was very important, and I used Mr. Ueberroth’s name of course, that we had those.

“They said: ‘Well, it will take three weeks.’

“And I said: ‘Well, we’d be happy to get the material to them or cooperate in any way to see that we had the cards by Friday.’ And it happened.”

On that Friday she received all the cards she had requested and that she sent Ueberroth’s card in with his secretary on a gold plate.

Other times, she said, Ueberroth would call and demand that the travel office come up with intricate round-the-world schedules within two hours. “He may not have actually needed them in two hours, but it certainly put my staff at full bore, getting it done, and producing for him,” she said.

In the beginning with Ueberroth, she said, she had talked back when she thought he was making unreasonable requests. “He didn’t want to hear my opinion, he just wanted me to ‘make it happen,’ ” she said.

She added, however, that through such episodes as the one with Budget Rent-A-Car, she had gained tremendous confidence in her own ability to make things happen.

Scott Le Tellier, who went with Ueberroth to the world Olympic Congress at Baden-Baden, West Germany, in the fall of 1981, told how the Olympic president seized on a small miscue committed by Le Tellier himself to captivate the membership of the International Olympic Committee, a group that could be very difficult to handle and on this occasion was primed to be critical.

Le Tellier had forgotten to deliver to the IOC meeting advance copies of the annual Games preparation report Los Angeles was required to submit. He confessed this to Ueberroth just minutes before Ueberroth was to lead the Los Angeles delegation over to make its oral report. He thought Ueberroth would be furious, but instead Ueberroth saw an opportunity. “He says: ‘That’s all right. C’mon, let’s all pick them up and carry them.’ So he grabbed one of the boxes and Harry (Usher) grabbed one and Joel (Rubenstein) had one and I think I had one.

“We march into this thing with the books in our possession and we set them down on the table in front of us . . . and while the IOC is still shuffling around up in the front, Peter taps his microphone and he says, ‘President Samaranch . . .’ and launches into this speech and says that we have spent thousands of dollars at the request of the IOC to publish an official report of our activities for the last year. This book has been done in French. It has been done in English. It has pictures. It is as thorough a report as you would ever want to see. We have gone to expense to have these reports shipped over to Baden-Baden. They have remained in our office. We have waited for instructions from the IOC secretariat as to whom they should be delivered and how they should be delivered, as we’ve always been asked to do. We have heard nothing from the secretariat. We have now brought these over so that your members may read about our preparations and may not be kept in the dark any longer. We’ve physically had to carry them in here ourselves. And he just went on.

“It changed the whole tone of the meeting. It started off that they were on the defensive and Samaranch wound up apologizing to Peter that this had not been done, but we’ll take care of it, we’ll get these things distributed immediately. . . . And they’re running them out, handing them to all the IOC (members) and these guys are all (saying), ‘This is nice. We should have had this before. Yes, we should have had.’

“It was one of the damnedest things I’ve ever seen. . . . You’ve got to imagine the esprit de corps that that created in us.”

On the way out, Le Tellier said, Ueberroth told the Los Angeles staff members with him, “That is a little lesson about how you never let anybody put you on the defensive.”

The Olympic president seemed determined to take charge in any situation, regardless whether he was confronting a new employee, a meeting of commissioners, the IOC, a commercial sponsor, a reporter, the governor of California or the President of the United States.

One of his abiding disappointments in five years at the Olympic committee, indeed, was that his entreaties to meet with then-Soviet president, Konstantin Chernenko, to try to talk him out of boycotting the Los Angeles Games were not accepted. He had great outward confidence that if only he could have gone to Moscow in the spring of 1984 and gotten in to see Chernenko, he would have had a fighting chance.

Ueberroth was no shrinking violet with either Gov. Deukmejian or President Reagan.

John Fransen recalled Ueberroth’s first meeting with Deukmejian:

“He made a lunch arrangement . . . and it was to be at the (exclusive) Jonathan Club. And (his friend, State Sen.) Ken Maddy and Peter were going to go together. I was meeting them down there. And it was at noon. I got there at about 10 till. Next one to arrive was the governor. So for a few minutes we go on into the dining room, sit down and chat, and chat for a little while longer. And Peter and Ken Maddy still haven’t gotten there.

“I was thinking: ‘This is going to be a one-on-one lunch with the governor. . . . And, lo and behold, they came in, fashionably late. But that’s not by accident. That’s the way he positioned himself with a number of the people he came in contact with.”

Hank Rieger, who served as the committee’s first press secretary for more than a year before being fired by Ueberroth and Usher, said that the first time Ueberroth and Reagan met was before Reagan became President. At the time, Reagan was the Republican presidential candidate and the meeting, supposed to last five minutes, was set up at a swimming meet in Mission Viejo.

It lasted about 30 minutes, instead of five, and Ueberroth apparently charmed the future President. But Rieger said that Ueberroth had been “very unhappy” that he had to walk over to the other side of the stadium to meet Reagan, rather than the other way around.

Five years later, when the White House wanted permission for Reagan to greet the American team outside the Coliseum before it marched into the Opening Ceremony of the Games, Ueberroth said no. He gave the President a choice between greeting the American team on the USC campus, across the street, several hours earlier, or greeting all the 140 national teams represented at the Games at once, just before the parade of nations began.

The President’s advance men grudgingly accepted the suggestion of the earlier rendezvous with the American team only and the President had to cool his heels waiting at USC for two hours afterward for the Opening Ceremony to start.

Ueberroth also rejected a White House request for a pool reporter to sit in the Presidential box.

And when White House aides suggested that Reagan deliver more than the 16 words set aside in international Olympic rules for formally opening the Games, Ueberroth dissuaded them, in part by seeing to it that they learned that the last head of state to seek to deliver more than the ritual 16 had been Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Ueberroth declared after the Games that his own relations with Reagan’s representatives had become so fractious that “the White House wasn’t even speaking to me.”

A man willing to stand up to the White House on such details would surely not hesitate to stand up to commercial sponsors, many of whom, after they had signed up, contributing a total of $126.7 million to the committee’s revenues, found Ueberroth extraordinarily demanding.

“Everybody has their Ueberroth story,” said Sandy Silver, marketing director for McDonald’s, the hamburger chain that built the Olympic committee its new swimming stadium. “Mine is about the time we inadvertently missed paying our second-half installment on tickets. I was on a ski trip when all of a sudden I received a message on a slate board, saying that Ueberroth was calling and that if we didn’t get a check in within 24 hours, our tickets would be canceled.”

It was a most serious matter for McDonald’s, since it had promised many of its franchise-holders Olympic tickets.

The check was delivered within the deadline, Silver said, but a short time later, when he was in Los Angeles for dedication of the stadium, Ueberroth, arriving on the site and seeing him, turned to his corporate relations manager, Daniel Greenwood, and asked: “Did Sandy pay for the tickets yet, because if he hasn’t, I’m turning around and leaving right now.”

Silver said he regarded Ueberroth as “absolutely serious,” and hastened to reassure him.

Ueberroth said that he was certainly serious with the first message to Silver on the ski slope, but he said he had been jesting at the stadium dedication.

Another frequent ploy by Ueberroth in personal contacts was to share what he would assure the other party were strict confidences about something he felt or something that was about to happen. He would demand first a vow of silence. But then, often and very soon thereafter, Ueberroth would be talking publicly on the same subject. Sometimes, it was impossible to check out a Ueberroth story. A few months after he was made Olympic president, for example, he told a number of Jewish leaders, both inside and outside the committee, that when he began hiring staff he was approached by members of the board who warned him that he was hiring too many Jews. He said he had refused to knuckle under to such pressure.

Some accepted the story. Others wondered, in a city like Los Angeles with its large Jewish population, whether any board members would have risked the inevitable furor if they had been identified as making any such representations.

Ueberroth never identified the people he said had made the approach.

Ueberroth also gave, at different times, two versions of a supposed poisoning of his dogs at his San Fernando Valley home, a story that naturally increased understanding for the need for the stringent security that surrounded him.

At first, he said a community newspaper had printed his home address when he was named Olympic president and that shortly thereafter someone had thrown poisoned food over the back fence to the dogs. Later, he said the incident had occurred after a somewhat later rally of people in the Valley who were opposed to the construction of Olympic facilities there. Brochures, he claimed, had been circulated with his home address.

In the first version, Ueberroth said that both dogs had survived. Later, he said one of them had died.

There was a minor flap over an initial claim in Olympic committee press releases that Ueberroth had been an alternate on the American Olympic water polo team in 1956. When that turned out not to be the case, Ueberroth blamed overzealous press aides for the entry.

Rieger, the former press secretary, said, however, that Ueberroth had directed the false entry. Rieger also said that on at least two occasions he had warned Ueberroth about “white fibs” that he had told in speeches. He said that Ueberroth’s response had been, “Oh, they’ll never pick up on it.”

Added Rieger: “He was right. Son of a gun, nobody ever has picked up on him on any of these things.”

In one of the more exotic speeches Ueberroth ever gave, he implied that he had found a mystical connection between himself and the French Baron, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games and the IOC.

He said he had discovered one night while reading de Coubertin’s biography that he had been born “at the same hour, virtually the same minute” that de Coubertin had died. The date of both events was Sept. 2, 1937.

When Los Angeles Times reporter Bella Stumbo was doing a long profile on Ueberroth in the spring of 1984, she questioned him rather sharply on his perceptions of it. Ueberroth then backed off, telling her: “It’s a coincidence is all. Just a numerical coincidence. But I was surprised by it . . . I mean, wouldn’t you be? . . . I mean, numerically, the odds are . . . “

Asked by Stumbo whether he thought it had been divinely ordained that he was to come to be in charge of an historically unique Olympics, Ueberroth laughed and exclaimed: “Come on!”