Ace in the Hall

“Wanted: Enthusiastic individual to spearhead effort to save Walt Disney Concert Hall, new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The spectacular Frank O. Gehry-designed white limestone structure will join the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theater and Mark Taper Forum as part of downtown’s Music Center of Los Angeles County. The project--instigated by a 1988 gift of $50 million from Walt’s widow, Lillian B. Disney, now in her mid-90s--stalled in the summer of 1994 when skyrocketing cost estimates caused panic in the Music Center boardroom and at the County Board of Supervisors. The county threatened to terminate the project in 1995 and is currently stuck with a $110-million concert parking garage built at county expense. Benefits include stress, distrust, finger-pointing, bad press and total blame if the project fails. No salary. Note: project boasts a fund-raising gap of $149.5 million.”

Even in today’s tough job market, it is likely no one would apply for a position that could have no upside except, perhaps, a really nice place to park.

No one, that is, except Harry L. Hufford.

While such a job description never appeared in the classifieds, it describes the task taken on by Hufford, 64, an investment executive and former county chief administrative officer. Hufford took over leadership of Disney Hall’s fund-raising committee in early 1995, just before the county threatened to default on the project because of an unmet construction deadline.

Hufford remains a salaried executive at Bear Stearns & Co., but right now Disney Hall takes top priority over his “real” job. While Hufford receives no salary from Disney funds, the committee pays Bear Stearns for Hufford’s time.

The Disney problem is huge but simple: By next June, the Disney Hall fund-raising committee--which consists of Hufford, Disney family representatives and Music Center leadership--must come up with at least $50 million toward the looming funding gap for $260-million Disney Hall.

Otherwise, the county calls the whole thing off.

Realistically, Hufford says, the deadline is sooner. By January, the fund-raising team needs $10 million to $12 million to commit to its first contracts. That can’t be done without new major donation pledges.

In addition to, and independent of, Hufford’s committee, Mayor Richard Riordan and millionaire developer Eli Broad have formed an eleventh-hour volunteer effort to find a first heavyweight donor or donors.

“I think Harry has been great--he picked up the pieces when things had gotten very disjointed, and I think he’s done a wonderful job of pulling people together,” says Riordan, who has been playing his role on the sidelines for almost a year.

“[Hufford] took over something that needs someone to take it over,” Broad agrees. But the project, he adds, “also needs someone, frankly, that has the ability to convince major foundations or wealthy families they have not been able to convince as yet to make some very major commitments.”

That effort is welcomed by Hufford, who looks very much like he could be your accountant, translates fierce civic pride into folksy baseball metaphors (let’s get out on that playing field and step up to the plate) and prefers working behind the scenes.

“The reason I’m in this is I thought it would take somebody who could work with local government, who could work with the media, who handles finance, who is credible, who is willing to work and is stubborn. That’s me,” he says.

But Disney Hall also needs the mega-rich and powerful--and Hufford is not a member of the club.

“I can’t meet with people and say, ‘I’m in for this, are you in for this ?’ That’s where the rubber hits the road,” he says. “I leave that part to the mayor and Mr. Broad. It’s a lot more powerful if they’re the ones doing the calling.”

(Broad, who recently donated $1 million to downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art, denies persistent rumors that he plans a personal donation to Disney Hall; Riordan, who has been an active supporter and regular donor to the Music Center, declines to say whether he plans to make a donation to the project--though he does say there are no city funds forthcoming for the hall.)

His own job, Hufford contends, is to handle the “white elephant issue.” With the aid of a formal study commissioned by the committee, Hufford is busy with a series of “quiet meetings” with potential major donors. He declines to reveal names, for fear of scaring off donors, but he said the committee is concentrating on local business leaders.

The Disney committee must persuade naysayers that Gehry’s all-curves design is buildable (he points to a similar Gehry design, the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art under construction in Bilbao, Spain). The committee also must prove that Disney Hall is not just a pretty building but will increase revenue for the Music Center, not only through Philharmonic ticket sales but by opening up the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the orchestra’s current home, for other types of performances.

Finally, the committee must persuade the community that today’s downtown is not a scary, desolate place but a welcoming cultural hub.

Walt and Lillian’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, says: “Harry is a sound and knowledgeable and experienced guy. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be; of course, I hope the thing is going to happen. I’m very pleased he decided to take this on. Whatever happens now is fate.”

Since his days at the county, it’s become kind of a Hufford tradition: Somebody asks him to do a job nobody else wants to do, and he does it. Hufford tends not to volunteer--he just starts talking and people start listening, and the next thing he knows, he’s in charge. This may explain a brief period in 1982 when Hufford became the county’s interim dogcatcher.

Disney Hall is a very big dog. As Hufford nears traditional retirement age, some wonder why he wants to chase it.

Hufford sometimes wonders that himself. In fact, when first offered the opportunity, he tried his best to turn it down. In 1994, Hufford, who had left his county post in 1985 to become chief administrative officer at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, was happily preparing to leave the firm for a new career in investment when Disney family attorney Ron Gother, also with Gibson, Dunn, approached Hufford and said: “There’s a problem with the concert hall.”

A reluctant Hufford agreed to sit in on a few meetings only. As the first step in damage control, he helped the existing Disney Hall committee draft a discreet August 1994 letter to the mayor and county officials explaining that the project was in trouble. Next, the committee asked him to recommend possible choices to replace the outgoing chief, developer Fred Nicholas. Hufford suddenly found himself on the list--and ultimately accepted the job. It was something of a trial by fire: Hufford had barely gotten past the letter-writing hurdle when the county threatened to default on the project in early 1995.

This wasn’t the first time the Music Center had solicited Hufford’s aid. In 1985, he was asked by law firm colleagues on the Music Center board to serve as volunteer acting president of the Music Center’s Performing Arts Council, filling in for several months for Michael Newton, who was ill with cancer.

“People have said to me, very distinguished people, that this project [Disney Hall] has risk associated with it,” Hufford says, with massive understatement, in a recent conversation. “But I did it because that’s what I’ve done all my life.

“If I get into these can’t-win situations, it’s also something that can’t lose. What happens in those situations is that people give you authority--they just get out of your way. I take on these tasks that nobody else wants to take on, and I get a big kick out of doing it. That’s my ego trip.”

Hufford has always been comfortable working two jobs. He was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Pittsburgh, the son of a druggist who entered the maritime service as a pharmacist during World War II and was transferred to Catalina Island when Harry was 10. After the war, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Hufford attended Garfield High in East Los Angeles. He worked his way through UCLA as a Thrifty drugstore clerk, graduating in 1953 with a degree in political science.

After graduation, Hufford was tagged for advancement in the company but wanted to be an administrator, so he instead took a trainee’s position with Los Angeles County, where he was to make his home for the next 30-odd years. He earned a USC master’s degree in public administration in 1966 through night and weekend classes.

Hufford, of Pasadena, is married to Jan Pollard Hufford, the general manager of county purchasing services. He has two sons, both physicians, from a previous marriage, and four grandchildren.

Rising through the ranks with a series of special project assignments, Hufford became the county’s chief administrator in 1974, at age 43. Even before assuming the post, he was credited with engineering the city-county health merger in 1964 and saw the county through passage of Proposition 13, the controversial 1978 property tax measure.

Hufford left the county in 1985 for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In 1993, he was once again tapped for county service, when Ed Edelman, then chairman of the Board of Supervisors, asked Hufford to temporarily return after the forced resignation of then-chief administrator Richard B. Dixon. Hufford arrived just in time to steer the county’s by-then $13-billion bureaucracy through what news reports called the county’s “worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression.”

“He likes to put out fires,” Edelman now says of Hufford.

Sally Reed, who recently resigned as county chief administrative officer to head up the state Department of Motor Vehicles, was with the county in February 1995 when Hufford’s committee was able to structure a fund-raising plan strong enough to persuade the county not to veto the project.

“I think we have structured, in the last year and a half, a program that is realistic . . . but also recognizes that at some point, one can do no more,” Reed says.

“Sure, I think there are some who have less confidence in Harry. I’m sure there are those who felt that we needed a heavy money person [with] particularly strong connections to the wealthy community, the kind of connections a Riordan has. I’m sure that there are some who don’t feel he is ideal--but I felt that he was, and I know most people thought that he was.”

When you’ve managed a $13-billion county budget, what’s another $150 million? Hufford has condensed Disney Hall’s financial goals neatly on a 3-by-5 card that he carries in his pocket: June 1997, $52 million. December 1997, $89 million. December 1998, $142 million.

“There is a real deadline. It can’t go on forever, and I think that’s how I feel,” Hufford says thoughtfully. “I do like crisis management, but I also don’t like long-term maintenance jobs. I don’t believe, and I don’t think the [Disney] family believes, that any more Disney money should be spent. They need some response from the community. We’re not going to get this thing off dead center without some mega-gifts.”

Hufford hopes that diverse and sprawling 1990s Los Angeles can somehow muster up the same sense of civic responsibility and ownership that led Dorothy Chandler and others to organize and invest in the Hollywood Bowl back in the ‘50s and later in founding the Music Center.

“I like Los Angeles. I’ve spent most of my adult life helping Los Angeles in one way or another--getting paid for it, yes, but also giving a lot of time and service,” Hufford says. “That’s where I’m coming from. Probably because I’m Irish, there’s a certain rebellion in me, I suppose.

“There has been something of a loss of vision. . . . I used to defend the flood control district. Nobody could get excited about flood control except Harry Hufford, but look at it--without flood control, there wouldn’t be any San Fernando Valley! In the 1950s, somebody invested in the infrastructure--for building a flood control system for Southern California, putting in the freeways, the universities, the port. The concert hall is clearly one of those opportunities.

“We shouldn’t miss those opportunities. We have a shot now.”