The Keys to the Kingdom (22 page)

“Apparently the tutor was not the least bit amused,” Jones says. “Frank came very close to getting thrown out of the university.” Though Wells later recounted his trip to Africa to many audiences, he didn't talk about the failed stunt.

 

WELLS LEFT OXFORD
in 1955 with a master's degree in law, did a stint in the army, and then went to law school at Stanford University, where he made law review and was in the Order of the Coif. He flourished as an attorney at Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown, with a client list that grew to include James Garner and Clint Eastwood.

One of his first major trials in 1960 involved Garner, who says he was introduced to Wells by senior partner Martin Gang. Garner claimed Warner Brothers had breached his contract by laying him off from his series,
Maverick
. Warner dropped him ostensibly because of a slowdown in production caused by a writers' strike. But Garner felt that the studio, which didn't offer him any other work, was paying him back for being a chronic complainer. “They could have used me for anything—opening delicatessens if they wanted to,” he says. “They were angry at me because I was vocal if I didn't like what they were doing. A year earlier I had gotten an ulcer and the doctor said, ‘Jim, you can't hold things in.' So I didn't.”

When the case went to court, Wells had to face the notoriously tough mogul Jack Warner, who was called as a witness. But Wells was unintimidated. “He was very smooth—you didn't see any of the novice in him,” Garner recalls. “He reminded me of Jimmy Stewart in court. He was tall and thin and he had this bearing—you just knew he was the good guy.”

According to Garner, Martin Gang advised Wells to ask Warner whether the studio had the money to pay Garner during the strike. “Jack Warner said, ‘Of course I had money. That's all I had was money. We couldn't get writers.' And the judge looked at him like, ‘You mean, nasty old man.'…We won the suit. We got Jack Warner on the stand and that's where they lost it.”

Another Wells client was Richard Sylbert, the distinguished production designer who later became an executive at Paramount working for Diller. In the mid-1960s, Sylbert consulted Wells about a pending divorce. “I had a house on Fire Island I had bought for $20,000,” Sylbert remembers. “My
three boys and wife loved the house.” He was willing to give them the house but Wells urged him not to do it. “This discussion went on for months,” Sylbert says. “He kept saying, ‘Don't do it.' This is the difference between Frank and me. Frank was tough. But you didn't know it until you ran across these things…. He was a really hard man.” While Sylbert was in Paris producing
What's New, Pussycat?,
he decided to ignore Wells's advice. Frustrated, Wells sent him a terse letter. It said simply, “Schmuck.”

“Twenty years later my ex-wife sold that house for $800,000,” Sylbert laments. “Frank knew that would happen.”

Wells also represented and befriended a quirky producer named John Calley, who was tapped by Warner chairman Ted Ashley to run production at the studio in the late sixties. Thinking that Wells would make “an astonishing executive,” Calley offered him a job as head of business affairs. Wells hesitated. This was 1969, years before attorneys routinely stepped into executive jobs at entertainment companies. “We talked about it a lot,” Calley says. “It was terrifying for him but he was ambitious.”

Wells took the job and soon found that he loved being an executive in the entertainment industry. If ever there was a risky business—a business that demanded spontaneity—this was it. Wells enjoyed the exercise of authority, the feel of making executive decisions and dispatching the troops to carry them out.

The era of the original movie moguls was ending in Hollywood as Wells arrived at Warner. A new generation of executives—men like Barry Diller and Michael Eisner—would soon bring enormous changes to the industry. But before this new guard was ushered in, the executive team of Ashley, Calley, and Wells made deals that transformed Warner into a powerhouse. While much of Hollywood was suffering through a slump in the early seventies, Warner's slate brought the studio that elusive mix of profit and prestige with films like
Klute, Billy Jack, A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance,
and
What's Up, Doc?
The stars had not yet discovered that they had the clout to demand shares in the profits and the studio's pictures, on average, cost less than $2.5 million. The Ashley team was minting money.

“Frank Wells had the best negotiating style in the world,” remembers Tom Pollock, then an attorney building a formidable client list that would eventually include George Lucas, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, and many other top executives and filmmakers. “He'd lay out the deal and he'd say, ‘You're going to ask for this. We're going to offer this. Here's where we're going to end up. What do you say?' It avoided a lot of rigmarole.”

Of course, it wasn't always quite so simple. In 1970, Wells was faced with a project that was foundering. Warner had developed a script about a tough-cop character for Frank Sinatra. But just as the movie was ready to roll, Sinatra withdrew. Wells called his former legal client, Clint Eastwood. The two negotiated but reached an impasse over one arcane provision that the star demanded. With Eastwood ready to break the deal, he visited Wells at his Beverly Hills home.

Wells had a tennis court in his yard—or, strictly speaking, half a tennis court. When Wells had decided to build a court, he found that his property wasn't quite deep enough. He persuaded a neighbor to put half the court in his yard. Spotting this palpable example of Wells's negotiating skill, Eastwood proposed a match. If he won, he would prevail on some minor deal points; otherwise, Wells could set the terms. Eastwood won and became
Dirty Harry
. Not only was the film a major hit, but Eastwood became a fixture at Warner, earning the studio hundreds of millions of dollars (as well as four Academy Awards for
Unforgiven,
his grim and unconventional 1992 western).

By 1973, Wells had become president of the studio. While Calley's tastes were eclectic, Wells was more a businessman than a connoisseur of film. Calley recalls sitting with Wells while they watched a rough cut of British producer David Puttnam's film
Chariots of Fire
. Both men were riveted by the story of the rivalry between two British runners—a Scottish missionary and a Jewish student at Cambridge—who competed in the 1924 Olympics. As the film wound to its moving conclusion, Wells was weeping. But pragmatism dominated—this was artsy fare, not blockbuster material. Through his tears, he turned to Calley and said, “You want to release this?…Who would want to see it?” Fox eventually released the picture after the Ladd Company, which had a deal there, agreed to acquire it. It grossed a strong $59 million and won the Oscar for Best Picture.

As Warner soared, its top executives prospered. Steve Ross, the legendary chairman of the studio's parent, Warner Communications Inc., had instituted a system of bonuses so lavish that they elevated his key men above their peers at rival studios and sometimes even above Ross himself. Calley recalls that Wells balked at accepting these outsized offerings. “He thought it was inappropriate,” Calley says. “I had to threaten him to get him to take the same [amounts] that we did.”

Wells was even disdainful of that most coveted and closely watched symbol of power in Hollywood: the reserved parking space. He had the
names of the company's top executives painted out of the circular driveway in front of the studio's low-slung main building. It wasn't a particularly meaningful move because only the top men were allowed to park in the area anyway. One day, he drove onto the lot to find that a spot had been repainted to read “Reserved for Frank Wells.” Wells went inside to complain that his instructions had been ignored. In fact, Steve Ross was playing a prank. While Wells was in the building, Ross had the sign quickly painted over again. Ross then accused Wells of being so obsessed with the issue that he had imagined the “reserved” sign. Wells got the joke—but still refused to paint the names on the driveway.

Wells rebelled against the corporate hierarchy so relentlessly that Ross dubbed him “the company socialist.” But in fact, he was deeply ambivalent about the perks of power. Wells was a bundle of contradictions, but the complexity of his character went largely unnoticed in Hollywood, where denizens like to grab onto outsized stories and archetypal personalities.

Most saw Wells as an unpretentious and plainly honest man who didn't crave the power and luxuries that he in fact relished. But others believed he was capable of pride and hypocrisy. “He had the most charming combination of genuine humility and genuine arrogance of any man I've ever met,” says Herbert Allen, the industry's most prominent investment banker. Another close associate from the Warner days remembers that Wells “hated for people to think he was rich,” even while making millions. In some ways, says this executive, “he was tortured” by his own contradictions.

Though men like Calley admired Wells's sense of modesty, others thought it seemed somewhat studied. Vince Jones, his Oxford schoolmate, says Wells “felt it was classier to be overmodest.” Wells's sense of integrity was complicated, too. Steve Ross once observed that Wells believed he was “100 percent right on everything and…100 percent honest.” Obviously, Ross knew that the truth was more complex. Another high-level Warner executive who worked with Wells closely shared that appraisal. “He was very diabolical in many ways,” that executive says. “He was not a religious man but acted like one. He would act righteous and proper, and then people would feel, ‘Where did that deal come from?'”

Wells applied his peculiar brand of humility to personal matters as well as business dealings. In 1992, he decided to install a waterfall on his Malibu property. A dedicated environmentalist, Wells knew that using water this way was frivolous in arid Los Angeles; on the other hand, he was a wealthy man and he wanted his waterfall. He decided to balance the scales by
making a contribution to support nearby Pepperdine University's water conservation efforts.

No doubt, Wells enjoyed the fruits of his labors. Longtime friend and business associate Roland Betts remembers that on ski trips, Wells always hired an instructor—but not because he wanted lessons. “The instructor would say, ‘Okay, what do you want to work on today?'” Betts remembers affectionately. “And he just wanted to cut the line.”

 

IN
1975,
ASHLEY
and Calley both astonished Hollywood by retiring from Warner, leaving Wells as the top man. But Wells couldn't come close to replicating the success of Ashley and Calley. “It was a lot for Frank to do,” says Terry Semel, then head of distribution. “He had basically been responsible for the business side of the company. This was a big leap.” The studio quickly reshuffled its talent. In less than a year, Ashley and Calley were lured back and music mogul David Geffen was brought in as vice-chairman. Wells kept the president's title.

Things still weren't working well. Geffen and Ashley clashed and Geffen left after less than a year. By 1980, Ashley—who confided to his colleagues that he was having personal problems—said he was leaving again, and this time for good. In a particularly shrewd piece of corporate recruiting, Warner hired Bob Daly from CBS to be chairman of the studio. Wells was now awkwardly situated and before Daly was fully engaged in his job, Wells said he wanted to take a sabbatical for a year to pursue an old dream.

Wells had been increasingly distracted by a personal project. He hadn't done much mountaineering since his nausea-inducing visit to Kilimanjaro, but Wells had never forgotten his plan to climb the tallest mountain on each continent. He had mentioned this idea to his friend Clint Eastwood, who introduced him to a man named Jack Wheeler, a self-styled professional adventurer who had helped Eastwood scout locations in the Arctic for an upcoming film,
Firefox
.

Wheeler was slightly acquainted with Dick Bass, another successful businessman and ambitious amateur mountain climber who, at age fifty-one, was only slightly older than Wells. Bass had recently climbed Mount McKinley, the tallest peak in North America. One afternoon in July 1981, Wheeler called Bass to ask if he would give Wells a few tips. “He wants to climb the highest mountain on each continent,” Wheeler explained.

Bass was stunned. He already wanted to try the seven summits himself.
No one had ever done it. Faced with pressing business problems, he had put the idea aside. Now he saw his chance. Wells was a man of means who could share the costs of a seven-summits expedition, which in Bass's estimate might reach $650,000.

With oil interests in Texas and coal interests in Alaska, Bass was such a zestful talker that some called him “largemouth Bass.” His passion and obsession was the Snowbird Ski Resort, which he had spent years developing in Utah. Despite his devotion, Bass complained that projects like Snowbird took so much labor that he sometimes felt as though he were “on a treadmill in a dark tunnel.” Mountain climbing presented a clear goal that depended primarily on his own physical skill and stamina.

But when it came to experience, he didn't have much more than Wells. To make the seven-summits dream come true, Bass and Wells would have to climb Aconcagua in South America, Everest in Asia, McKinley in North America, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe, Vinson in the Antarctic, and Kosciusko in Australia. They seemed unlikely candidates to set a record: they didn't even rate as decent amateurs. “I was a total novice as a climber and a klutz to boot,” Wells acknowledged later.

Bass flew to Los Angeles for a lunch meeting in Wells's private dining room on the Warner lot. To his dismay, Wells was determined to do all the talking. Standing as Bass sat at the table, Wells delivered a twenty-minute monologue before abruptly seating himself and devouring his lunch. Wells wanted to attempt Elbrus in the Soviet Union first, offering to have Jack Valenti, the motion-picture industry's silver-haired man in Washington, contact the Soviet ambassador about arranging a permit. Wells seemed a bit full of himself but he had cash, energy, and ideas. Bass agreed to a partnership.