Cover Story

In the ten years between January 1, 1987, and December 31, 1996, the Aaron Diamond Foundation gave away over $220 million to more than 700 New York City organizations. These funds were the bulk of the estate of the foundation’s namesake, a successful New York City realtor. After his sudden death in April 1984, Aaron’s wife of 42 years, Irene, stepped in to guide the foundation as president, with the assistance of Vincent McGee as executive director. Irene Diamond is this year’s recipient of the Council on Foundations Distinguished Grantmaker Award.

Shortly before Aaron’s death, the Diamonds had decided on a ten-year lifespan for the foundation, and on a formula for giving that allocated gifts to medical research (40 percent), minority education (40 percent), and culture (20 percent). As the country’s largest supporter of AIDS research, the foundation is best known for starting the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center for the City of New York, which has been credited with the breakthrough discovery of protease inhibitors—drugs that seem to suppress the virus.

Before her days as a philanthropist, Irene Diamond was a talent scout—she gave Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglass and Robert Redford their first breaks—but she’s best known as a script editor. That’s when she recommended the purchase of a script called "Everybody Comes to Rick’s," which became the film classic, "Casablanca."

Irene Diamond is also legendary for something else: a direct, no-frills style that characterizes both the person and her grantmaking. When this interviewer stood ringing the bell at the wrong door of her apartment with the misguided expectation of being received by an assistant, Diamond opened another door down the hall herself, and said simply, "Down here."

Before you were a philanthropist looking for talented grantees to fund, you were a talent scout of a different kind. What was it like working in Hollywood’s heyday?

It was the golden years . . . It was probably the perfect time. In those days, in the big studios, we all had contracts, so, we had a certain amount of security. But, at the same time, Hollywood paid me much less than it would a man.

I think there were a lot of people in the entertainment business like me—I'm a scrapper. I mean, I stand up for what I believe. I think people respected my record because I was honest and committed to doing good, interesting films.

How did your Hollywood experience prepare you for grantmaking?

In a way, [grantmaking is] not unlike being a story editor—you find a good project, research it, and then you do it. You have to have an instinct for it. It’s like any other talent in that it's a feeling—not something you can train for.

I learned that when you want to do something, you have to know your stuff and what you really want. You have to ask the right questions and you have to follow them through. I did that with the foundation. That's why I think it was smooth for me.

Did you agree with your husband’s decision to make the foundation he established spend out in ten years?

Yes, I think it was a very good thing and I think more people may follow that example. I think it gave us a feeling of urgency and we did a great deal in those ten years. I wanted to follow his wishes.

When you were getting the Aaron Diamond Foundation started, what were you looking for in a staff and board of directors?

I didn't want a big staff. I may have annoyed many foundation people [by saying this], but I don’t believe in having these huge offices and huge groups of people. I would rather see the money go to the programs than the perks of huge offices and that sort of thing. I don’t want to sound like the goddess of wisdom, because I’m certainly not. But I think that foundations should provide desperately needed help that can’t come to people any other way.

I also think that when you really want to get something done, you do much better if you have a smaller group, where each person in that group has something to contribute. My board was superb. I looked for people who would not always say yes, but people who would bring their own questions and ideas, and who really cared about what they were doing. Our board meetings were interesting and exciting because everybody took part. It wasn’t just routine things. I think that’s one of the most important things in a foundation, to have an atmosphere where everyone can contribute and everyone can disagree. I wasn’t voted down very often, because we pretty much agreed on most things. But occasionally I was and that’s as it should be.

How did you get involved in funding AIDS research?

Actually I just started reading the newspapers. I had a hunch that this was going to be very, very important. In 1985, there wasn’t enough research going on in New York about AIDS.

There was one modest program in Boston that Alvin Freeman Kien had about karposi sarcoma. He was noticing that young men were coming in with these big spots. So, in the first year, I funded two AIDS programs in Boston. I have been involved in the field ever since—but mainly in New York.

One of the worst things that happened in AIDS is, they started off by saying it was a homosexual disease. It has never been a homosexual disease. A great many homophobics said, ‘we don't care what happens to those people. They deserve what they get.’ We have even had senators and congressmen who have said that, believe it or not. But, this disease has encompassed every phase of our lives—morally, socially and economically.

How did the vision for the Diamond AIDS lab develop?

Steve Joseph, Commissioner of Health in New York City, called me one day and said that he would like for me to come down and talk about the necessity for an AIDS lab for the city. He wanted Vincent McGee to get all of the other New York foundations together and see if we could come up with the money to build a lab. I said, if we do this, it will take forever. I think we should do it ourselves and that's what we decided to do. We completely financed our own program. I didn’t want anybody else to have scientific control over our lab—we have that.

Were there areas that the foundation took flack for in terms of the programs you decided to fund?

Well, when I chose David Ho to run our lab, he was very young. He is only 44 now. When he came to be interviewed, I just liked him right away. I was impressed with his knowledge and his total commitment to doing something about this disease. I wanted somebody young who was really committed and had a drive to do good research. Most of my search committee of eminent doctors and scientists did not agree with me at the time—they wanted me to take somebody who was already very well known, and that’s just what I didn't want. David turned out to be a wonderful choice—he’s also a very good administrator.

Does the foundation feel responsible for the work that Ho’s done, work that led to his being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year?

His talent is his talent. There’s no question about it. I think that he would be the first to say that it’s wonderful to have such a lab to work in and it’s wonderful to be financially secure, which most researchers are not. Most researchers can’t always do what they might want to do in their work.

What would you say were some of your other successes?

We were the first foundation to financially support an AIDS education condom program, and that’s something else that we took a great deal of flack for.

The school board was enormously against it. Chancellor Joseph Fernandez stuck his neck out and he paid for it. I woke up one morning, looked at the New York Times, and the front page said Fernandez is going to distribute condoms in the schools. He just did it. And the board got rid of him.

Whether we like it or not, kids in high school are at the age when the sex urge is most powerful and they are having sex. I'm not going to be a moralist and decide whether it is terrible for young people to have sex or not. The fact is, nature has a great deal to say about this, and if they are going to do it, why shouldn't they be protected—especially when there's a disease like AIDS running around?

What were some of your biggest accomplishments in the arts?

One of my biggest contributions is to [the music program at] Julliard, probably the greatest school of its kind in the world. Young Concert Artists has done a fabulous job of finding new talent and supporting them. The Diamond Project at the New York City Ballet is also giving young choreographers a chance to be developed. I think foundations are enormously necessary, particularly in the arts.

How do you see foundations responding to the severely cut-back government support of the National Endowment for the Arts? Can foundations step in to fill that void?

I don't know if they can fill that [void]. It was a very sad day when the National Endowment for the Arts was [cut back]. It would be even worse if there weren’t foundations.

Young artists speak for all the things that make countries great. That is why arts education programs interest me. Any artist can have an enormous amount of talent, but there is a great deal more that's necessary. Take what I'm doing at Julliard. Julliard is difficult to get into—you have to be extremely talented. You also have to be able to audition and do certain technical things.

We started a program there to help get talented people ready to audition. Opening the doors for quite a few people is much more important to me than just doing it for one.

Given what you’ve learned from spending out, what would you say to others who are starting up foundations now and deciding whether to go on in perpetuity or not?

You can't make any strict generalizations about that. It depends. Foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and those started by George Soros are huge, international institutions and they have a different way of operating. There is, obviously, a place for that. There are very few people, of course, who have that kind of money or who can have that huge an organization.

It is up to each foundation to decide whether they want to spend down or not. There are as many different views of foundations as there are of every other kind of industry, and you can’t make only some of these [views] laws. They have to work the way they see fit.

What will become of some of the small nonprofit groups that have been supported by the Diamond Foundation?

We called a lot of those people in and tried to talk to other foundations about giving them support. It was like we gave them a start up. We did try very hard to see that they were taken care of. To stick to the three things that we started [the foundation] out with, I had to stick with things that were really going to survive and do something.

You can be much more effective if you hit hard. If you spread yourself too thin, you're totally ineffective. I don't have as much money [with my own fund] as I did [with the Aaron Diamond Foundation]. I don't want to have as many programs, either. I want to concentrate much more and I want to be hands-on. You cannot personally be involved in hundreds of programs.

FN&C recently got a letter from a reader who was upset because her organization has had problems getting foundation funding—recently waiting over a year for a rejection (see "Amen to That,"). How did the Diamond Foundation avoid this type of thing?

Naturally, if you have a huge foundation, you have so many more people to deal with. There are echelons one has to go through. One of the things I have against big foundations is, when somebody has to ask for money in order to do something good, I don't think they should be made to feel like supplicants. If somebody is doing good work and you consider helping them, there is no reason why they should have to wait around [that long].

The letter’s author thinks there should be a foundation watchdog organization. Would you agree?

Who watches the watchdogs? That is the problem. Who do you get that is so pure? I'm not sure [that it can be done] at all.

If you had a chance to do everything over again, what changes would you make?

Well, there are a couple of things that I would have loved to have done—one is gun control. We did support things like the Brady Bill, but I think guns should just be banned. Another one is daycare. Daycare centers are just too expensive. Also, the race problem is one of our great problems I don't think is being addressed at all.

What’s the focus of the Irene Diamond Fund?

My new fund is smaller and more personal. But smaller doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t be as powerful. Now I’m doing mostly medical science, the Diamond AIDS lab and other medical research programs. I'll be involved with both AIDS and human rights as long as I'm around. If you are going to ask me whether I'm going to [make my fund a spend-down], at my age, I'll just say that I think I shall work as long as I feel that I'm able and as long as I have something to contribute.

What lessons learned from the Diamond Foundation will help shape your fund?

Well, just the experience of running a foundation. The more experience you have, the better you are at it. I have enjoyed both of them. My hope is that we make a difference for people who are trying to accomplish good things. I think that would be my slogan for any foundation.

What would you like to be said or known as a tribute to the lives of both you and your husband?

That we did good work.