New Boss at the Music Center Has a Liking for Leadership

On The night of the announcement of her election as president of the Music Center on April 26, Esther Wachtell was showing the place to executives of important philanthropies who were in Los Angeles for a Council on Foundations convention.

It was the dinner hour, and before the group split up--some to hear the Schubert recital by pianist Alfred Brendel at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, others to see “The Colored Museum” in preview at the Mark Taper Forum and still others to catch Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” at the Ahmanson Theatre--Wachtell decided to give a private tour of the Pavilion.

Then she realized she didn’t have the key. But she knew that Jim Dunavent, executive vice president of the Music Center Operating Co., which runs the buildings in conjunction with Los Angeles County, was having dinner upstairs at the Pavilion restaurant. He had a key.

As she noted last Wednesday in her office at the Music Center Annex amid ever-arriving baskets of congratulatory flowers, “I asked him to get up from his dinner to take them (the guests) down to see the building--which he did.”

Is it tough for her to give orders? she was asked.

“I didn’t give an order,” Wachtell corrected easily, “I asked him.”

“I’m very comfortable in a leadership role,” noted Wachtell, who will remain as executive vice president until June 1. “I’ve been in leadership roles all my life. If you’ve been a volunteer leader, you don’t lead by ordering, you lead by consensus. And so I hope that what I do is share a vision and have other people buy into my vision.”

Sitting in a new, high-backed black leather chair the staff recently presented her, the 52-year-old executive in red-and-white silk is a study in contrasting motions, playfully twisting her string of opera-length pearls, then suddenly tapping hard on her desk for emphasis.

As president, Wachtell becomes the chief operating officer of the Music Center--currently budgeted at $65.9 million--encompassing the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Center Theatre Group (the Taper and the Ahmanson), the L.A. Music Center Opera, the Joffrey Ballet, the Music Center Chorale and the Music Center Education Division. She succeeds Francis Dale, whose contract ends May 31. The fiscal 1989 budget, beginning July 1, is currently projected at more than $70 million. Even as she prepares for the succession and interviews potential replacements for her current job, she still has to oversee completion of the Music Center’s $13-million United Fund campaign.

“She will carry on a lot of the responsibilities she already has,” says F. Daniel Frost, chairman of the Music Center Board of Governors, who calls Wachtell “one of the very top fund-raisers in the country. . . . In her new job she will have a greater responsibility to represent the Music Center--the campus as a whole--in the community and the country, to speak for the center and to preach the gospel of the performing arts.”

“The president of the Music Center will always have to have a major role in fund-raising,” Wachtell said, “because in fact the primary responsibility is the financial health of this place, but I am intending to separate the functions so that I do not have to concern myself with the day-to-day operations.

“The switch for me, really in a lot of ways, is from the inside person to more of the outside (person). And I will need time to think long-range policy and planning that I haven’t had to do. But I’m a very good dreamer,” she added with a smile. “I’ve been a good dreamer all the time.”

Meanwhile, in order to avoid any hint of a conflict of interest, her husband, Thomas Wachtell, chairman of Frontier Oil Co., will soon leave the chairmanship of the Opera board. As Music Center president, Esther Wachtell must juggle the needs of the varying resident companies. “He is not going to stand for reelection. We absolutely agree,” she said.

In a sense Wachtell grew with the Music Center, having moved to Los Angeles from suburban New York in April, 1964, with three small children and her husband, who had taken a job as executive assistant to Armand Hammer. The family arrived five months before the dedication of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

On the surface, Wachtell is a volunteer who made good--one of the former “buck bag” volunteers who carted around fabric bags (designed by Walt Disney) to raise the money that capped the building fund drive.

But Wachtell is also a 1957 summa cum laude , Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Connecticut College with a major in philosophy. She earned a master’s in English literature, concentrating on Shakespeare, from Cornell University in 1959, while her husband was finishing law school there. And to augment her volunteer services, prior to being named a member of the Music Center Board of Governors 18 years ago, she took accounting courses at UCLA.

“Logic is a very important part of philosophy--you take a lot of logic classes,” Wachtell said. “When I finally decided I needed to try out the real world, and I couldn’t read financial statements, I took classes. In those days I wasn’t particularly good in math, but I found accounting a cinch.”

She also took courses in financial management, financial planning and marketing. “Actually, I was giving lectures at their arts management graduate school, and I took the courses in exchange.”

As Wachtell describes it, she had been “a real ‘50s woman. It never occurred to me that I was going to do anything other than get married and have children. So I looked at education for its own sake. I didn’t think of it as anything I would do. And to be perfectly frank, if I did think I was going to do something with it, it was going to be a college professor.” She paused: “Truthfully, I thought I would marry a college professor.”

“She was a woman of the ‘50s who grew,” says her daughter Wendy Wachtell, 26, a planning editor at KCBS. (Roger Wachtell, 28, and Peter Wachtell, 24, are both investment bankers.) “As we grew up and became more independent with each step, so did she.”

As a volunteer-- her mother had been a president of the Metropolitan Opera Guild--Esther Wachtell launched the Peninsula Music Fair in 1970, raising money for the Philharmonic. She became a member and officer of The Blue Ribbon, board member of the Philharmonic and the Education Division Council. In 1972 she became coordinator of volunteer activities. She had been a docent at the County Museum of Art and active with KCET volunteers but she gave those up, because “I didn’t want to fragment myself.”

In the summer of 1980, after a serious illness, Wachtell said she made a pledge to herself: “I was going to live my life my way. I decided that I would work full time, I would focus my life in areas that pleased me. I really did lie there (in the hospital) and think, ‘I’m going to focus my life in an area that’s important, in whatever time I have, I will make a difference.’ Fortunately,” she added softly, “I’ve had a lot of time.”

In 1981 she was part of the triumvirate that started the Mercado, that biennial marketplace on the plaza that in successive even years raised $450,000, $750,000 and $600,000 for the Music Center’s United Fund. In 1981 she also became a member of the Executive Committee of the Music Center Board. Wachtell served as vice chairman of the Music Center’s fund campaigns in fiscal 1985 and 1986. That April, four months after the late Michael Newton was forced to leave the Music Center’s presidency because of illness, Wachtell went on staff, and on salary, as executive vice president.

She said last week that it took her a long time to realize that power--and position--went together. She recalled that the day she went on staff was the first time Ernest Fleischmann, executive director of the Philharmonic, crossed the street to visit her office.

Among Wachtell’s dreams are fashioning Grand Avenue into a second Champs Elysees and bringing zarzuela-- Spanish music theater--to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She would also like to see the Music Center use television to raise money.

“The single largest problem we face,” Wachtell said, “is figuring out how to keep up with the growth of Los Angeles, which imposes growth automatically on the Music Center. Either you choose not to grow, or you grow with the community, and I certainly don’t want to choose the first alternative.

“How do we allow our artists to develop fully,” she asked, “and how do we make these art forms accessible to a population that is going to be 1 1/2 times what it is today in the very near future? We are going to incorporate by the year 2000 a city the size of Houston into this city. We have to serve (that population).”

As an example of ever-expanding needs, she pointed to the $1.3-million Education Division, which she considers the least-heralded organization in the Music Center, sending 6,000 performing arts programs a year to about 2,000 schools in 125 school districts (including the Los Angeles Unified School District) and nine counties. Last year, the staff of eight was “literally sitting on top of one another,” Wachtell said. “We couldn’t find any more space here so we got ourselves a trailer and stuck ‘em out in the parking lot.” Now the staff numbers 10, “because we had so many requests from schools that we were hiring additional staff, and the trailer is already crowded.

“Since 1979,” she said, “we have been hiring and working with community-based arts organizations--about 76--Korean Classical Dancers being one of them, where in many cases we are their largest single employer.

“We are a very multicultural, multilingual community,” Wachtell added, “and these buildings now are the most heavily utilized buildings of any comparable (center) for the arts. We use these buildings about 125%. And that means we have really not been able to present performing arts organizations from around the world. With the opening of Walt Disney Hall (by 1992), we’ll be able to do that.”

Asked the kinds of organizations she’s talking about, Wachtell immediately deferred to administrators such as Fleischmann and Peter Hemmings, general director of the opera company, but she suggested that “there are orchestras in Tokyo or in Korea that our Asian populations” might want to hear.

“There are zarzuela companies in Mexico--musical theater for the Spanish-speaking population,” she added. “Placido Domingo (artistic consultant of the opera company) comes out of the zarzuela tradition and would very much like to create zarzuelas for our Spanish-speaking population. I can imagine we might have an opportunity to bring a great Kabuki theater here. . . .

“Another thing that we are working on very carefully with the County of Los Angeles is to have Walt Disney Hall cap off the top of the world’s greatest city,” Wachtell added. “I would like to see us create a Champs Elysees that leads people off the freeways and down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and to Walt Disney Hall and to MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and to have Grand Avenue really become an entryway into the city. I’d love to have cappuccino shops and poster shops and wonderful memorabilia shops and performing arts libraries and banners all over and street performances, people-oriented spaces. . . .”

As for the Music Center plaza area, Wachtell talks about expansion of the Music Center gift shop. In eight months the shop already has generated a net of $150,000, which goes toward completion of the fiscal 1988 fund campaign. On Friday, the first of four TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) free concerts begins on the plaza at noon.

What irritates Wachtell is any suggestion at large that the Music Center is elitist. “That’s not fair because we do so much for the very broadest population in the community. The major issue that we need to get out is about the outreach in education that is coming from this place. I’m not just talking about the inner city, but rural communities, non-English-speaking communities, everything.” She also pointed the thousands of tickets distributed free or at reduced prices to seniors, students and low-income people through the Reachout Committee, which is a volunteer support group of the Education Division.

“I want to elevate the status of the Music Center,” Wachtell said. “I want people’s perception of the Music Center to be that in fact this is an extraordinarily large, all-pervasive-community kind of activity that touches everybody’s life in one way or another. It is that, but people don’t know that’s what it is. . . . It’s my responsibility to make people aware.”

What also bothers her are corporations with a considerable number of employees here who do not give to the Music Center. In particular, she cited ITT Corp., headquartered in New York. “They have 300 employees in New York and they give $25,000 a year to Lincoln Center. They have 3,000 employes here in Southern California, and so far they give nothing to the Music Center. That has stuck in my craw.

“When I came to Los Angeles, I really thought that the most important thing I could do for this community was to develop the arts,” Wachtell added. “This city was large, it was exciting, it had gorgeous weather, wonderful people, beautiful beaches, but it didn’t have a distinctive personality. And in my opinion, it is the arts that have given Los Angeles the kind of distinction that is required to be a great city.”