The Clowns

While the circus was playing in Manhattan last week, some of the nerviest sideshows took place in the halls and armories where the nation's big corporations held their annual meetings. The plague of annual meetings in recent years has been the silly antics of exhibitionistic stockholders, mostly women, who buy a few shares in a company and use them as licenses to disrupt the meetings. They have made it so difficult for officers to get on to company business, and have so exasperated the mass of stockholders, that serious suggestions have been made that a way be found to curb their antics. Last week they were out in force.

"Throw Them Out." CBS Chairman William S. Paley had not even gaveled his overflow audience to order in Manhattan before a woman stockholder in red-feathered hat and raffish earrings got up to make a loud complaint: she had, she said, been issued a subpoena to keep quiet at the meeting. (Subpoenas are not issued for such purposes, and CBS said it had sought no order against her.) When he could finally get a word in, Paley proceeded to the meeting's business, which included the abrupt firing two months ago of CBS-TV President James T. Aubrey Jr. and a drop in first-quarter earnings. Before he could get far, red feather was at him again, and she was soon joined by a gaggle of other hecklers.

Names flew like a cast of characters. Had CBS paid $15,000 for the leopard coat that Actress Barbra Streisand wears in this week's CBS spectacular? No. Had CBS ordered the firing of Manager Yogi Berra when it bought control of the New York Yankees? No. Did CBS intend to enclose Yankee Stadium with a dome similar to Houston's new Astrodome? Emphatically no. Had CBS bought Comedian Jackie Gleason's $300,000 circular home as "a reducing spa for tired executives?" No, said Paley, it had bought the house to "induce Mr. Gleason to stay on CBS." Paley kept calm, but the audience was clearly irritated. When Paley asked at one point, "Does anyone in this audience have any idea how to handle this situation?", there was a shout from the audience: "Throw them out."

Sticky Windows. The larger corporations seem to attract the brassier corporate clowns. At Chrysler Corp's meeting in Detroit last week, President Lynn Townsend was forced to listen patiently while a stockholder complained that his Chrysler transmission had dropped out after only 2,000 miles and another beefed about a sticky car window. A.T. & T.'s 80th annual meeting in Philadelphia was interrupted by a woman who raced down the aisle in clown's costume to protest that Chairman Frederick R. Kappel had opened the meeting improperly. "Keep still long enough," barked Kappel, "and I'll answer your questions. This meeting is not being run by Robert's [Rules of Order]; it's being run by me." Three guards and a policewoman finally restrained the clown, but Kappel was constantly interrupted by other troublemakers as he announced a year in which A.T. & T. earned $1.6 billion on revenues of $10.3 billion--and promised "maybe a little better" this year.

Uninhibited stockholders acting as a group occasionally can dominate a meeting. At the Peabody Coal session in Chicago last week, stockholders unexpectedly replaced an executive vice president who had been slated for the board of directors with a nominee from the floor. And stockholders of the struggling Curtis Publishing Co. howled down a financial vice president whose overly rosy pronouncements irritated them, though they kept silent when Don Schanche, the editor of Holiday, announced that Buddhists in Viet Nam were praying for Curtis.

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