A Charitable Role

Almost every night, it sometimes seems, Hollywood’s top performers, producers and moguls don black tie and Versace gown and gather in a hotel ballroom on the West Side to salute the humanitarian accomplishments of one of their own. Piles of money are raised for charity, and the image is conveyed to the public that Hollywood is generously giving back to the community some of the billions it collects for keeping the nation entertained. But the deeper truth of this scenario, as in so many movies, is not quite what it at first appears.

“The disease people started this,” explains Marge Tobankin, an experienced nonprofit administrator who oversees private charitable foundations for Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg. “It works like this: You find a celebrity who agrees to be honored and attract a crowd of professional peers. Twenty-five percent of the audience will be there because they believe in the organization, and the rest are there because they feel it’s part of doing business,” commonly paying up to $2,500 a table. “It’s a quid pro quo. Everybody knows the honoree is a shill to bring in their friends. It’s just a matter of, do they care enough about the cause to let themselves be used?”

For thousands who work in the industry, the tidal pull of charity dinner invitations is the practical necessity of remaining in favor with anyone who might make your next movie or TV show happen. To the charity being served, the varied motives of those assembled may not matter, but to anyone assessing Hollywood’s nontraditional way of giving, it’s another story: the difference between true philanthropy and cause-related marketing.

“Philanthropy is underrepresented in Hollywood,” says Torie Osborn, executive director of the local Liberty Hill Foundation, a progressive organization committed to “social and economic justice” that carries the slogan “Change Not Charity” and whose Hollywood donors tend to be younger writers and directors. “There’s not enough long-term, sustained giving. The giving here is so often event-driven, tied to individual people’s causes and trendy charities, built around a particular star.”

Liberty Hill, by contrast, gave out $1.4 million in grants last year to small organizations like the Bus Riders Union and the Living Wage Coalition and sponsored briefings for its members on gang violence and “politics and spirituality.”

People disagree about whether Hollywood as a whole is more or less charitable than other sectors of wealth in America (a total dollar comparison is impossible because of the factor of anonymous giving), but some would say the entertainment industry reflects the vehement individualism and undeveloped noblesse oblige of its home state, recently ranked 48th in the nation in charitable giving by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

“It’s a very generous industry, though a lot of gifts you will never hear about,” says Lisa Paulsen, president of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, Hollywood’s answer to the United Way, a payroll-deduction agency maintained by the studios and networks that raised $14.8 million last year for 220 Southern California charities.

Yet except for Walt Disney Co.’s corporate donation, the Hollywood community was notably absent from the long and arduous fund-raising campaign for the new Philharmonic home, Disney Hall. It’s hard not to contrast this with the days when Lew Wasserman marshaled his considerable resources and those of his friends in support of the “hospital to the stars,” now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

High Salaries and High Profiles

When accusations of stinginess are heard, the excuse is given that even “old” Hollywood money is comparatively new by East Coast standards and that entertainment fortunes are notoriously insecure. Still, with actors like Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey pulling down $20 million a picture and Disney chief Michael Eisner earning in one year a salary of more than $500 million, the public is apt to wonder what percentage of those sums is being earmarked for good works.

Two years ago, Eisner did divert $89 million in Disney stock to start his own family foundation with the stated goal of providing financial support for children with learning disabilities. Thus far the foundation is still in its infancy, but its president, Laura Hobart, says that in 1999 the Eisner Foundation will give away at least 5% of its assets, as required by law and the IRS.

Eisner’s former second-in-command and former Creative Artists Agency chief Michael Ovitz two years ago pledged $25 million to his alma mater, UCLA, but critics have asked why he didn’t just write a check after bagging a reported $100-million settlement from Disney when he and Eisner parted ways.

Unlike most industries, where the leading moneymakers are not public figures, the charitable involvement of Hollywood stars and their studios also carries the awkward (or not) possibility of self-promotion, undercutting the notion of pure virtue associated with philanthropy. Lavishly catered studio premieres have doubled as nonprofit fund-raisers, raising the question of who benefits most from such “benefits.”

When a Hollywood name flies over a cause, the cause presumably benefits, but so can the star, especially if he or she is not creating lines at the box office at the time. One wonders where on the entertainment radar Jerry Lewis would have been in the last 30 years if not for the annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon (which raised more than $51.5 million last Labor Day).

Ranking publicist Dick Guttman, whose clients have included Warren Beatty, Streisand and James Woods, says that stars and charities share a two-way street.

“Sometimes publicity is involved,” Guttman says, “but publicity generates money. Celebrity is a tremendous engine, and it can make charities go.”

“Charitable involvement, when used in a conscientiously applied program of moral hygiene and regular professional care, has become a staple of the celebrity’s existence,” says Barry M. Greenberg, a celebrity broker who for two decades has been matching up the famous with both nonprofit and for-profit organizations seeking their endorsement.

Charities pay him a finder’s fee to line up stars to headline dinners and become spokespersons.

“Because woe be unto you,” Greenberg explains, “if you’re the executive director of the American Cancer Society in Orange County and the American Heart Assn. got Ricardo Montalban to show up for their benefit and you didn’t get anybody for yours. There’s a lot of keeping up with the Joneses.”

If Hollywood figures benefit from their alliances with charities, it must be said they also often have to endure hostile, even assaultive, demands from fans and organizations expecting to get some of their money.

When Clint Eastwood goes on location, he routinely gets about 60 requests a week for endorsements, contributions and appearances, according to his longtime assistant, Marco Barla. He cannot satisfy all of them, and the phone calls from the unrequited get nasty.

“Everybody wants a piece of the cake,” Barla says.

“We’re magnets for people who need,” says Mike Farrell, who played Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt for eight years on “MASH” and has given both time and money to human rights organizations. “Whether it’s people who need financial resources, money for their kid’s iron lung, organ transplants--the mail is astonishing, heartbreaking. And the idea that everyone here has a lot of money and therefore a lot of money to give away is notoriously untrue with actors--or with many actors.”

“We get thousands of requests every week,” says Andy Spahn, who also serves as a corporate spokesman for DreamWorks SKG. “Just to handle the paper, just to open the mail, let alone investigate the different groups, is an enormous job.”

“A lot of organizations have become so jaded toward celebrities that all they want is Jim Carrey or Brad Pitt,” says Greenberg, the celebrity broker. “Now, think about it: How often are these few people who everyone wants free to just pick up and fly across the country, spend a day floating around with people they have no relationship with and then fly back?”

Media and public attention is one reason for the “silent philanthropy” in Hollywood, the purpose of which is not to get noticed. Lara Bergthold, executive director of the Lyn and Norman Lear Foundation, an endowed fund begun with $10 million 12 years ago, says, “We don’t promote that Norman’s philanthropic. It allows him to give without being inundated with requests.”

Other Industries Are Drawn In by Glamour

Acknowledging the public marriage of philanthropy and commercial self-interest, Hollywood has helped develop the concept of “cause-related marketing,” in which corporations outside the entertainment industry make donations to a celebrity-associated charity and get the benefit of glamour (and advertising) by association.

The Entertainment Industry Foundation has set an example, producing events like the Revlon Run/Walk for Women to raise money for breast and ovarian cancer research, drawing sponsorships of as much as $750,000 from Visa, BMW and Lexus. For the second year in a row, the Foundation produced “Look Cool, Fight Cancer,” a two-hour cable television program broadcast on QVC from the Cannes Film Festival, pitching designer sunglasses with the proceeds going to cancer research. The event raised $600,000 last year and was expected to do the same this year.

“Money flows differently here,” says Andy Spahn, president of the David Geffen Foundation, which has given out roughly $40 million over the last eight years, making Geffen perhaps the most conspicuous Hollywood philanthropist of the moment. “A lot is spent buying tables at events, as opposed to making grants. A lot is given to less-traditional charities” spurned by large corporations, in particular AIDS organizations, where Hollywood and Geffen have played leading roles nationally.

Marge Tobankin, who previously ran a family foundation in Washington, D.C., and was head of Volunteers in Service to America under President Carter, moved here 12 years ago to establish a foundation for Streisand that would funnel revenues from the singer’s 1986 Malibu backyard concert to selected Democratic senatorial campaigns. The concert raised $1.6 million for those candidates. Subsequently, proceeds from the video and album brought in an additional $10 million, which has been disbursed to more than 300 nonprofits, including $250,000 each to the ACLU of Southern California and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Similarly, Spielberg established the Righteous Persons Foundation, funded with his ongoing portion of “Schindler’s List” profits, more than $50 million to date, and defined as “a grant-making organization dedicated to strengthening Jewish life.”

Famous Names, Diverse Causes

Somewhere below these peak earners, other Hollywood figures who have raised the curve of generosity include former “Cheers” star Ted Danson, who a dozen years ago founded the American Oceans campaign, dedicated to cleaning up the U.S. coastal waters. At the height of his “Cheers” success Danson almost single-handedly financed the organization’s nearly $1-million annual budget.

Jane Fonda, before she became Mrs. Ted Turner and moved to Atlanta, gave the revenues from her workout videos--$17 million--to fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy.

Former 20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, throw the charity party nonpareil every two years at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to benefit the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver. The guest list ranges from Rod Stewart to Gerald Ford to Sophia Loren. Tables go for up to $50,000, though it is said Davis will promise that much to a star’s favorite charity to get certain ones to show up.

The engine of celebrity has clearly raised millions for charities in Southern California and the nation, but the factor of fame often obscures the real from the promissory, the glitz from the cash.

“The real challenge is how to develop a broader-based culture of giving,” says Osborn of Liberty Hill, whose largest contributions come from lesser-known Hollywood players who expect no publicity in return. “You can’t prove it, but I would bet for the most part the biggest givers here are not the people making $20 million a year.”