Alan Hirschfield

"I had told the outgoing CEO, Alan Hirschfield, that he could stay in his office, that he didn’t have to leave right away. I hadn’t emotionally let go of Paramount and found it hard to get up much enthusiasm for Fox. Another day, another studio to run. I was still officially at Paramount for the three-week interregnum before I was to begin the new job, but I regularly went over to Fox to meet some of the executives. All their offices were in this three-story art deco–style building that Darryl Zanuck had erected. Huge wide hallways from one end to the other, with even more cavernous offices on the first floor for the top four executives. Each one had a private staircase going down to the basement, where there were two private projection rooms, a gym, a cold pool, a sauna, and a massage room. Zanuck, who reigned from the 1930s to the 1950s, would have a daily massage, a jump into the cold pool, and then a further jump onto the starlet of the day. Zanuck’s office had a trophy room with a bed next to the fifty-foot-long main office."

"For the last few years, Fox had been run by Alan Hirschfield, a finance man who’d previously run Columbia Pictures. Davis was very direct with me. He wanted me to take over Fox; he’d give me 25 percent of the studio and anything else I needed. A desperate offer from a desperate man to another quietly desperate man. What I didn’t know then was that there was a darker reason for his extremely generous offer. I told him disingenuously that I might be interested and we ought to have our mutual lawyers get into the details. *Might be interested? Please.*"