Like a modern-day Othello, Zucconi loved Brown not wisely but too well, and his excessive zeal on its behalf was his downfall. Among other duties, he was executive director of—and raised millions of dollars for— the Brown University Sports Foundation, a booster club that helps finance the school's athletic teams. In 1999, he was caught offering Sports Foundation money to Brown sports recruits regardless of financial need, a violation of Ivy League rules. Ivy presidents imposed on Brown the harshest punishment ever meted out in the league's history—including ineligibility for the football championship in 2000—and specified that Zucconi could have no further contact with prospective athletes. He was reassigned to the development office.

  The scandal exposed the long-simmering resentment within the admissions office over Zucconi's interference. In a letter to the Brown Alumni Magazine published early in 2001, former director James Rogers wrote, “I am amused that Zucconi has been barred indefinitely from ‘providing any services to Brown student athletes.” This is a joke; Zucconi has made a career of disobeying direct orders from his superiors at Brown. Good luck to whoever must monitor his activities.” The next edition published letters from eight alumni defending Zucconi, including one that accused Rogers of “jealousy” and “insensitivity to qualified sons and daughters of alumni.”

  On January 22,2003, Zucconi died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine. On one of the coldest days of the year, two thousand people thronged the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul for his funeral. As his coffin was carried out, name tags of attendees were collected to be buried with him, and the organist softly played “Ever True to Brown.”

  At the funeral, Mario Zucconi recalled, “at least a dozen people said to me, ‘If it wasn't for your brother, my son or daughter wouldn't have gotten into Brown.’”

  THROUGH AN intermediary, Michael Ovitz let Brown president E. Gordon Gee know in 1998-99 that his son Christopher wanted to enroll there as a freshman. Although it's not certain, the go-between was most likely Dave Zucconi, on whom Gee relied for such sensitive missions. According to people familiar with the president's thinking, Gee was understandably enthused. Like Zucconi, Brown's new president had an aggressive, can-do attitude and a certain impatience for convention. Despite his propensity for bow ties, Gee was an outsider to the Ivy League, a Mormon who graduated from the University of Utah and arrived at Brown in 1998 after presiding over three public universities, most recently Ohio State. Eager to make a splash, he felt hamstrung by Brown's modest endowment and began planning a fund-raising campaign.

  To Gee and his development staff, Ovitz's overture offered a rare opportunity not just to net one prize fish but to harvest a whole sea. Ovitz was a catch himself; he was famous, his income at Creative Artists Agency had reached $20-25 million a year in the early 1990s, and he had a track record of educational philanthropy, most notably a $25 million pledge in 1997 from his family foundation to the medical center at UCLA, his alma mater. (Ovitz has since suffered a number of financial reverses and fallen behind on fulfilling the pledge. From fiscal 1997 to fiscal 2004, the foundation gave UCLA less than $5 million, public records show. His lawyer, James Ellis, says the pledge was intended as a long-term commitment.) He was also generous on a smaller scale to his children's private schools, typically giving each of them between $5,000 and $30,000 a year. Even more significantly, he could open doors to a vast array of Hollywood talent and executives, what one former Brown administrator called the “high-end California market.”

  “Some people are rainmakers, some people are rain-givers,” the former administrator added. Potentially, Ovitz was both. And while Brown officials did not spell out what they would expect of him, they didn't have to. Ovitz, the consummate deal maker, knew how to unlock doors at educational institutions; he once offered to help place the children of the New York Times Hollywood reporter, Bernard Weinraub, in private school, an offer Weinraub passed up.

  “He was as enamored of having an affiliation with Brown as Brown was of him,” one insider said. “This was mutually advantageous to both parties.”

  There was only one drawback: Chris Ovitz. By all accounts, his qualifications were well below Brown's usual stretch for development and celebrity cases. Classmates at Harvard-Westlake, the elite prep school in Los Angeles where he attended the seventh and eighth grades, say he did have one distinction: he carried a cell phone, then a rarity for a middle schooler. When a classmate in seventh grade grabbed his phone, he chased her into the school gym, picked up a baseball bat, and swung it—missing her but denting the wall. According to the girl's father, a Los Angeles real estate attorney, she was “terrified.” He said the school suspended both students for “a couple of days,” and afterward made sure they stayed away from each other. He added that his daughter also tore up Chris's prepaid lunch card—and that the Ovitzes later asked for reimbursement.

  “He and my daughter received equal punishment—her for her mouth, him for his bat,” the father said. “He should have been kicked out. But we were not in a position to do what the Ovitzes could do for the school. We sat down with the middle school headmistress, she talked about my daughter's mouth, how she provoked it.”

  Thomas Hudnut, Harvard-Westlake headmaster, said he remembers the incident “only dimly. It's much more sensational in the telling than it was at the time.” Chris, he said, “was very socially mature, and got along well with adults. He was physically and academically immature. That's a very tough combination for a boy to have, particularly a boy who wants to be competitive and comes from a competitive family. He swam against the tide some. His father was in the paper every day. It was not easy being Chris Ovitz.”

  Hudnut said he encouraged the Ovitzes to send Chris to boarding school, where he would be under less of a microscope, but “they weren't ready to do that.” Instead, Chris transferred after middle school to the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, a progressive, arts-oriented school where students call teachers by their first names. (Hudnut said Crossroads called him before accepting Chris, and he assured its headmaster that Chris was a “good kid,” just “a little out of synch.”) Crossroads graduates include actress Kate Hudson (Goldie Hawn's daughter) and Robert Belushi, James's son, as well as Dustin Hoffman's sons Jake and Max and daughter Alexandra. Max and Alexandra Hoffman both enrolled at Brown.

  Crossroads classmates and teachers say Chris was an average student who took few if any advanced placement courses, evinced little interest in learning, and did not excel in extracurricular activities. Chris “didn't have the drive to succeed,” said a former Crossroads faculty member. He described Chris's attitude this way: “You don't really have to do anything because it's going to be taken care of for you.”

  Hudnut, the Harvard-Westlake headmaster, suggested that Chris may have aspired to Brown because Jessica Capshaw, Steven Spielberg's stepdaughter, had gone there. “The Spielbergs and the Ovitzes were tight,” he said. “There's a well-trod path between Los Angeles and Providence.”

  But hardly anyone with Chris's academic record had trodden that path. Chris's test scores and grades were “egregiously uncompetitive,” said a former Crossroads staffer. “Brown bent over backwards as far as any university could.”

  Of his five Crossroads classmates who would enroll at Brown, four were inducted into the Cum Laude Society, signifying that they ranked in the top 20 percent of their high school class. Chris was not inducted. One of those four classmates, Erin Durlesser, told me, “He definitely was not academic in my opinion. When he was admitted to Brown, the mood among some of the students was surprise and confusion. The ones who also applied to Brown felt it was inappropriate competition.”

  Brown passed over at least one Crossroads classmate who was a Cum Laude Society member: Arielle Reinstein. Wait-listed at Brown, she enrolled at Stanford, where she was named to Phi Beta Kappa and collected two degrees and a prize in essay writing. “I… hold no animosity towards Brown University,” Arielle told me in an email. “While I don't agree with all of their admissions practices, I understand that a school's endowment is of great significance and money can buy some things I was surprised it could as a high school senior.”

  Michael Goldberger, then Brown director of admissions, balked at Chris's lack of credentials. According to people familiar with the internal conversations between admissions, development, and the president's office, he cautioned Gee that accepting Chris would damage the university's credibility with high schools in southern California. In admissions parlance, Chris Ovitz was so far out of “context” with other Ivy League applicants that his admission might upset counselors and parents of rejected students. But the president pressed the issue, and, understanding his boss's priorities, Goldberger compromised. Chris was admitted conditionally, as a nonmatriculating “special student” allowed to take classes at Brown. If he proved his mettle in those classes, he would be granted status as a regular student.

  “The Ovitz case was a strange case,” a person familiar with Brown admissions told me. “We all found it very trying. There were a lot of factors beyond his ability to do the work. There were issues of focus and motivation. The hope was that admission as a special student would jolt him into readjusting his perspective, and that he would do better out of his father's shadow.”

  “Special student” was an existing admissions category at Brown, but it was not intended as a loophole for low-achieving celebrity children, nor as a roundabout route to a Brown diploma. Every semester, Brown admits one or two students under this status who want to take a particularly esoteric course that isn't available elsewhere. Special students are not degree candidates, and if they later seek regular admission, they aren't supposed to be given any advantage over other applicants.

  By designating Chris as a “special student” rather than a regular freshman, the admissions office preserved a shred of its integrity. But it also made Chris a one-of-a-kind case, and prep school counselors who heard about the arrangement wondered why Brown had singled him out instead of one of their students. “It's highly unusual,” one complained. “I've never had that option granted to me.”

  Students, parents, and teachers at Harvard-Westlake and Crossroads were in the dark. As far as they knew, Chris Ovitz had gotten into Brown, and there could be only one reason why: his surname. “Brown did pay for it in this community,” said a prep school administrator. “It reverberated here. People were horrified. Brown lost some credibility.”

  Michael Ovitz and his children declined comment for this book, as did Simmons, Goldberger, and former president Gee. James Ellis, a lawyer for Ovitz, defended Brown's admission of Chris Ovitz on the grounds that he contributed to the university's diversity. “If diversity in terms of background and experience that kids bring to a college campus has any meaning at all, having spent time with Chris and Kimberly … these kids have perspectives and experiences and backgrounds that I just think are tremendously valuable and unique and would be a benefit to any campus,” Ellis said.

  Whether due to his provisional status or not, Chris Ovitz kept a low profile at Brown. He was omitted from the freshman photo album, known as the “facebook” or “pig book.” He left the university within a year and eventually enrolled at UCLA, his father's alma mater. “He thought Brown was boring, nobody knew how to party,” a Brown classmate said. According to Harvard-Westlake headmaster Hudnut, Chris received his bachelor's from UCLA and became a graduate student in its film school. Gee soon departed Brown as well, becoming president of Vanderbilt University in 2000.

  But the mutually beneficial relationship between Brown and the Ovitzes has outlasted them both, anointing the university with glamour and the family with prestige. Kimberly Ovitz followed Christopher to Brown in 2002, after one year at New York University. Fishman of the Creative Arts Council said Kimberly “didn't want help from her parents. She applied on her own.” Brown's current president, Ruth Simmons, courts the onetime Hollywood kingmaker just as avidly as her predecessor did. As Ovitz told the spellbound throng on Parents” Weekend, Brown is truly an “amazing institution.”

  The University of Notre Dame's football team has tumbled in recent years from its traditional number-one spot. But the South Bend, Indiana, university, which has 8,300 undergraduates, does lead the nation in a more obscure category—legacies. Every year, between 21 and 24 percent of Notre Dame freshmen are alumni children, more than at any other major U.S. university, even though admission there has become increasingly competitive in recent decades.

  Along with football, legacy preference is at the heart of Notre Dame's identity, helping to boost alumni donations and loyalty and preserve the university's Catholic culture. Notre Dame's legacy policies may be as responsible as its pigskin exploits for its rise from a little-known Catholic school in the middle of nowhere into one of the nation's premier universities. Its two traditions intersect in the 1993 movie Rudy, about a working-class underdog who fulfills his dream of playing for the Fighting Irish. While Rudy strives to make the squad, a teammate assured of a spot confides, “The only reason they keep me on here is ‘cause I'm a legacy.”

  Yet as it solidifies its status in the top echelon, Notre Dame is grappling with the question of whether it has outgrown legacy preference— whether it can afford to turn away high-caliber applicants while accepting lesser candidates whose parents happen to be graduates. Its heavy reliance on the preference has also strained relations with alumni children whom it has rejected—and with cousins, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and other extended family who resent that they are not considered eligible for the boost.

  Alumni children are the biggest group receiving admissions preference at Notre Dame, outstripping African Americans (4 percent of the student body), Hispanics (8 percent), athletes (9 percent), international students (4 percent), and faculty and staff children (3 percent). While nearly one out of four Notre Dame freshmen is an alumni child, fewer than one out of ten comes from a family in which neither parent went to college.

  At Notre Dame and other elite private universities, legacy preference provides affluent families with a form of insurance against a decline in educational status from one generation to the next, which might in turn lead to a decline in wealth and power. Just as English peers hold hereditary seats in the House of Lords, so the American nobility reserves slots at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other august universities. Based on pedigree rather than merit, legacy preference strikes at the heart of American notions of equal opportunity and upward mobility.

  The power of legacy preference at Notre Dame is exemplified by its admissions decisions on two high school classmates, John Simmons and Kevin Desmond. Simmons and Notre Dame seemed like a match made in college admissions heaven.

  John earned a straight-A average and was valedictorian of the 173-member class of 2004 at University of Detroit Jesuit High, a traditional Notre Dame feeder school. His test score on the ACT college entrance exam—31 out of a possible 36, equivalent to a 1360-1400 on the SAT— met the average for applicants admitted to Notre Dame, one of the nation's premier Catholic universities. Moreover, John's devout Catholicism and good works—he tutored other students, checked in surgical patients at a hospital, and distributed food to the homeless at a soup kitchen in downtown Detroit—appeared to suit a university where every dormitory has a chapel and four out of five students participate in community service. And the inability of his divorced parents—his mother is a preschool teacher, his father a hard-luck businessman—to afford Notre Dame's tuition, fees, and room and board, now $42,140 a year, would not deter a university that proclaims itself to be “need-blind.”

  By contrast, his high school classmate Kevin Desmond's credentials were borderline. Kevin was a good student at Jesuit High but not an outstanding one. His SAT score was 1290, about 90 points below the average for Notre Dame admits. He ranked in the top 15 percent of his high school class, while 84 percent of Notre Dame freshmen are in the top 10 percent. He played three sports—golf, lacrosse, and skiing—but none well enough to be a college recruit. He was wait-listed by another Catholic school, Boston College, which accepted John Simmons.

  Notre Dame went the other way. It rejected John, while Kevin drove home from lacrosse practice one day to find an acceptance letter.

  Kevin benefited from the preference for alumni children. His maternal grandfather, his father, his father's three brothers, and Kevin's five older siblings all graduated from Notre Dame. His father, Terry Desmond, owner of two funeral homes in the Detroit area, is past president of the Notre Dame Club of Detroit and is in the process of endowing a scholarship at the university.

  Reinforcing these connections, Kevin referred to his family's close ties to Notre Dame in his college application essay. His maternal grandparents, parents, and two of his sisters were married on campus, his father's business has enlisted fellow “Domers” as clients, and Kevin has been going to Fighting Irish football games since he was a toddler.

  “I don't know if I would have gotten into Notre Dame” without legacy preference, Kevin told me. “My family ties would have helped. I still had pretty good grades and test scores. I wasn't a lot below the Notre Dame average.” He added that Notre Dame “was my first choice, partly because of my family. Up until I got the [acceptance] letter, there was a lot of anxiety,” because he didn't want to let down his father and siblings.

  Terry Desmond justified Notre Dame's admission of his six children on the grounds that they were all “top-notch” students, and that legacy preference bolsters school traditions and rewards alumni for financial contributions. “We didn't want one of them to be the first one turned down. The two or three months waiting for the letter to come are the worst months to go through.”