MORT: MORT MEYERSON GETS RECRUITED, THE

Dallas is the city where, not so many years ago, the symphony went broke. Now, Dallas is home to one of the great concert halls of the world and to a symphony that shows every sign of belonging there. The unlikely story of how Dallas transformed itself from a musical back-water to a cultural star is chronicled in The Meyerson Symphony Center: Building a Dream, a new book by Laurie Shulman due out this month from University of North Texas Press.

These excerpts from Shulman's book reveal the inside story of the critical moments when the hall's future, not to mention its very existence, hung in the balance.

Thirty years ago, the reputation of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was well established: It was financially inept, chaotically managed, and musically undistinguished. After a series of disasters in the 1973 season, including a musicians' strike, the board declared bankruptcy--a first in the history of any American symphony orchestra.

The emergency--and the embarrassing headlines-awakened the Dallas civic leadership. Longtime cultural stalwart Henry S. Miller, Jr. suddenly found himself and the symphony besieged with offers to help. With a renewed commitment from the business community, the symphony was reorganized, refinanced, and rejuvenated. An exciting young director, Eduardo Mata, was hired and ticket sales began to percolate. Inevitably the question arose: How can we conceive of building a great symphony without first constructing a hall to house it?

The answer to this question fell in 1979 to young Robert Decherd, scion of the Dealey family (now chairman of Belo Corp., publisher of the Morning News) who had been handed the symphony's reins. Decherd, in turn, started looking for someone to organize the building campaign. He needed someone organized enough, well connected enough, business-minded enough, savvy enough, charming enough to carry it off. He knew just who to call. And his know-who paid off.

MORT MEYERSON GETS RECRUITED

Morton H. Meyerson remembers the conversation clearly. "Robert started the breakfast by saying that as president he'd been talking with the board's executive committee. They had decided it was mandatory that the symphony get out of Fair Park, and that, to ever become what we should become, we'd have to get a new symphony hall. I replied, 'That's nice.' He said that they really didn't know what to do with that idea; that was the whole idea. That was the beginning and the end."

Then Decherd dropped the bomb. "I'm here to see if you will chair the committee that figures out what to do, and then goes and does it."

Meyerson thought, that's the whole thing? Figure out what to do, get the people to do it, supervise their doing it. Then he thought again. "I don't think that you're talking to the right person."

"Why not?"

"Well, number one, I've just become president of EDS, and I've got my hands full. Number two, and most important, I am very nonpolitical. I'm used to working in an environment where we get things accomplished. We spend little time on pomp and ceremony. We spend most of our time trying to do something. Everything that I know about symphony politics and what you have to do, and you have to get the players, and you have to get the city council, all this stuff, is going to require a dance, which I am not emotionally or intellectually suited to do."

Decherd asked, "Why is that?"

Meyerson replied, "Because I'm too impatient. I think I would come at it with too big a force."

He said, "You have just described why I have asked you."

"What do you mean?"

"We don't think that we can take the normal, politically safe chair and give it to him or her, because there's too much at risk here. Nobody knows what this is. Nobody knows what the purpose is other than we can't stay in Fair Park. And, we think this project will be big and complicated. We thought [of you because of] your background with computer systems, etc., plus your personality, plus you happen to know music."

"How do you know that?" Meyerson demanded, taken aback.

Decherd said, "Well, I've done a little background checking, and I know that you play classical piano, and that your mother is a pianist, and that you've sung in choirs, that you were a choral singer at the University of Texas. So you know classical music, therefore you would be sensitive."

Meyerson said, "OK, so you're willing to take the risk. You don' mind if I'm going to be hard-nosed about it?"

He said, "No. If you were other than that, I wouldn't have selected you."

"What do you think it entails?" Meyerson asked.

"You'll be the chairman of the committee. You form a committee, you select the members, you work together, you meet twelve, fifteen, eighteen times over the next few years. That's it."

"Oh, I bet it takes more than that." He said, "It might take a little more."

"OK," said Meyerson, "I'll do it." Right then on the spot. They shook hands. Meyerson returned to his office and said to himself, "What in the name of God have I done?"

ROSS PEROT GETS HIS WAY

Not realizing that he was undertaking a ten-year project, Meyerson met with Leonard Stone [general manager] to discuss who would be invited to serve on the committee. Leonard Stone opines, "In Mort, you had a guy who knew how to make things happen. He knew how to move things off a dime. I think the genius of Meyerson was the way he put the committee together and the reasons that he invited certain people. You had academics, people who knew music, the quintessential administrator: Mort. You had the elder statesman: Stanley Marcus. You had two ladies--Nancy [Penson] and Louise [Kahn]--who were diametrically opposite; one demure and ladylike, the other strong as battery acid. It made for interesting chemistry. What was good was that Mort did not fashion a group of people who were going to be 'yes men."'