Nashville’s Baptist Hospital is a sprawling 38-acre complex of buildings, plazas, and parking garages. Like most other well-equipped modern medical centers, it has its own helipad and its own gift shop; its campus is a maze of hallways, elevators, and skywalks that connect new buildings to old buildings. Every day, the hospital’s campus swarms with visitors, patients, medical personnel, and a vast army of other employees.
Baptist describes itself as “Middle Tennessee’s largest not-for-profit medical center.” And Nashville’s other major not-for-profit hospitals can hardly dispute that claim. Here in the city, St. Thomas Hospital has 571 staffed beds, Baptist has 559, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has 553. But Baptist is not just a Nashville hospital. It also owns or co-owns hospitals in the towns of Waverly, Smithville, Centerville, and Linden. Those satellite hospitals give Baptist another 126 staffed beds and make it a virtually inescapable presence in Middle Tennessee. Its total workforce includes approximately 2,900 employees and 1,000 physicians.
But Baptist is different in other ways too. In every aspect of the hospital’s life, the very word Baptist looms large. In a recent, six-page hospital brochure, “A Report to the Community,” the word appears approximately 150 times. The mission statement of the Baptist Hospital Foundation, which supports charitable and humanitarian services in the local community, describes Baptist as a “Christian healing ministry.”
For years, however, rumors about Baptist Hospital—and its president, C. David Stringfield—have been a hot topic in Nashville’s health-care circles. No other not-for-profit local health-care institution—not VUMC, not St. Thomas—seems to attract such a fierce barrage of behind-the-scenes gossip and innuendo. To some degree, Baptist has obviously set itself up as an easy target for such talk. Using tie-ins with country music celebrities and sports stars, the hospital’s promotions have thrust it into the public eye and the public consciousness. Baptist wants to be talked about.
But much of the mumbling about Baptist relates to David Stringfield himself. To a degree unmatched at Nashville’s other not-for-profit hospitals, Stringfield’s identity is indissolubly linked with the identity of his institution. VUMC’s vice chancellor for medical affairs, Ike Robinson, and St. Thomas Hospital’s president, John Tighe, seem to have lives beyond their jobs, but Stringfield seems to live and breathe Baptist. His wife, Ruth, has frequently told her friends, “Well, you know David—he’s married to that hospital.”
Stringfield wields virtually autonomous power at Baptist, but that is not the only reason stories about him abound. He is also an odd character. Interviews with scores of individuals, including current and former Baptist Hospital executives, board members, and employees—some of them doctors, nurses, accountants, and attorneys, others of them cleaning ladies and security officers—paint a picture of a man who is easily threatened, obsessive, and ultra-competitive. By and large, members of his staff respect and fear him. They talk openly about his lack of social skills, the fact that hospital employees are expected to call him “Mr. Stringfield.”
The quirks abound: A health fanatic, he keeps a supply of fresh carrot juice on hand, and has been known to decline to shake hands for fear of picking up germs. A night owl, he sometimes goes into the office in the middle of the day and works until almost midnight. On a deeply personal level, Stringfield seems to be obsessed with matters related to health and personal hygiene. Hospital employees with first-hand knowledge of the situation say he once demanded that an Oriental rug be removed from his office because he was afraid it would collect germs. A cleaning lady assigned to his office says housekeeping personnel were told to clean the top of the door to his private bathroom every night. If Stringfield checked the door top and found dust, she says, they were severely reprimanded. Former hospital executives report that, whenever Stringfield was trapped into shaking hands with an employee, he often would return to his private washroom to scrub up.
But the story of Baptist Hospital’s David Stringfield is not just the story of a harmless eccentric. In a three-month investigation, involving more than 200 interviews, the Scene has learned that all is not well at Baptist. For four years Baptist has been the focus of an ongoing Internal Revenue Service audit that could result in the revocation of Baptist’s tax-exempt status. Documents filed in U.S. Tax Court last year say IRS officials conducting an audit at Baptist “reviewed evidence that indicated that the hospital failed to operate exclusively for charitable purposes and that portions of the hospital’s net earnings inured to the benefit of private individuals.” The same documents state that “such facts, if established, would cause the Hospital to fail to qualify for tax-exempt status.” (The documents were filed in U.S. Tax Court as part of litigation resulting from an audit of David Stringfield, not the hospital.)
As the audit of the hospital continues, problems are mounting. Cracks are emerging in Stringfield’s business empire, as a mass exodus of top management is under way. Of the 25 most senior administrators listed in Baptist’s March 1995 internal phone directory, nine are now gone. Numerous current and former employees say morale at the hospital is low, and worsening daily. Baptist Healthcare Group, described in Baptist literature as Nashville’s “first ‘integrated’ healthcare delivery system,” has fired about half a dozen doctors this year. With revenues of $22.2 million, Baptist Healthcare lost $9.9 million last year. And Health Net, Baptist’s preferred provider organization, has also experienced major defections from its management staff this year. Health Net lost $1.9 million last year on revenues of $13 million.
Several current and former hospital employees also told the Scene that they have firsthand knowledge of what they believe to be questionable financial dealings at Baptist. The vast majority of those interviewed requested anonymity, saying they feared Stringfield might retaliate against them or their families.
If there are cracks in Stringfield’s empire, however, Stringfield’s hospital has historically been strong. As a tax-exempt institution, Baptist Hospital does not technically make a “profit.” But in the fiscal year that ended in June 1996, the hospital reported revenues of $271 million, and posted a year-end surplus of $15 million. (The surplus is equal to revenues minus expenses.) In the rapidly changing world of health-care services, where the line between for-profits and not-for-profits is more unclear than it has ever been, Baptist Hospital is proof that it is hard to tell the two species apart.
In fact, many charge that right in the backyard of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp, the largest for-profit health care services company in the nation, Stringfield has run his not-for-profit hospital as if it were a for-profit facility. In the process, he has gotten rich. For his services to Baptist Hospital and its affiliated entities in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1996, IRS records show that Stringfield received a total compensation package slightly in excess of $584,000. By comparison, VUMC’s Ike Robinson made $462,564 that year, and St. Thomas’ John Tighe made $297,810.
Meanwhile, the announcement this week that Baptist and St. Thomas have signed a letter of intent to combine operations will only increase the focus on Stringfield’s management style and the financial operations of the hospital. (See sidebar, p. 28.) If the joint venture is successful, as many think it will be, Stringfield will become the most powerful player in not-for-profit care in Tennessee, and one of the most powerful exponents of not-for-profit care in the country.
The nerve center of the Baptist Hospital empire is the C. David Stringfield Building on 21st Avenue North. In its main lobby, a security guard is on duty 24 hours a day, screening all visitors, deciding who will, and who will not, pass through the double doors that lead to Baptist’s executive offices. To the security officer’s left is a large, three-quarter-length portrait of Stringfield. It is an image that would be perfectly at home in any industrialist’s company boardroom. Several years ago, a vandal, wielding a can of spray paint, defaced the portrait. That’s when the security guards went on duty, and they’ve been there ever since.
Beyond the double doors lies the office of Charles David Stringfield, Baptist’s president and chief executive officer. A notorious workaholic, Stringfield rides his employees hard. His employees give him credit for his accomplishments in building Baptist. But few say they trust or like him. “David’s intensity and focus on what’s best for Baptist Hospital may be misperceived by others,” suggests Don Arnwine, president of a Dallas-based health-care consulting firm that has occasionally worked for Baptist. Indeed, praise for Stringfield is grudgingly doled out: “Give the devil his due,” says one doctor who had a lengthy association with Baptist. “Stringfield may have a false façade, but he’s a successful hospital administrator.”
Under Stringfield’s leadership, Baptist Hospital has become a vast economic enterprise, reeling in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. A century ago, however, not-for-profit hospitals like Baptist were entirely different kinds of operations. Most large hospitals then were “poor houses,” operated by charitable institutions. When people of means became seriously ill, they were usually treated in their homes by doctors who made house calls. Hospitals were reserved for the destitute, people who needed a place where they could go to die. Many hospitals provided their services free of charge. The owners of many of those hospitals were churches.
The institution now known as Baptist Hospital was founded in 1918. Then known as Protestant Hospital, it was established on 10-and-a-half acres of Church Street property purchased from the widow of Samuel M. Murphy, who had made himself a fortune selling whiskey. The original 80-bed hospital consisted of the Murphy house, with two three-story additions. In 1924, a new building was constructed, expanding the hospital’s bedcount to 210. In 1948, Protestant Hospital became Mid-State Baptist Hospital and was placed under the control of the Tennessee Baptist Convention. The next year the IRS granted the hospital not-for-profit status. In 1964 its name was officially changed to Baptist Hospital.
Before Stringfield’s ascension, the administrator most closely identified with Baptist was Gene Kidd, a husky former college football player who became the hospital’s administrator in 1954 and its president in 1970. During his 28 years at Baptist, the hospital grew to 724 beds, making it the largest health-care facility in Nashville by the time Stringfield took over. By all accounts, Kidd was regarded as a gentleman of the old school, admired and trusted by his staff. It was Kidd himself who effectively hand-picked Stringfield to succeed him in 1982.
Kidd died in 1994, but before his death, numerous friends recall, he regretted his decision. More than once, he was heard to state, “The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was selecting David Stringfield as my successor.” Two of the late hospital administrator’s acquaintances say they witnessed an incident in the early 1990s when Kidd was confronted by a box full of documents that raised questions about Stringfield’s financial dealings at Baptist. When the older man saw this evidence, both acquaintances say, he wept.
David Stringfield, 58, came to Baptist Hospital in 1968, serving first as the hospital’s administrative director, then as executive vice president, and eventually as Baptist’s president. Having sprung from relatively humble roots, his rise to power was no small achievement. A 1957 graduate of Isaac Litton High School, which was located just off Gallatin Road, he worked his way through Vanderbilt University. People who remember Stringfield from his Vanderbilt days recall him as “nerdy” and a “prankster.”
Nevertheless, he was popular enough to become a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. During summers, Stringfield worked as a cowhand on the 300,000-acre Four Sixes Ranch in West Texas. To this day, he dresses in a style that mixes business suits and cowboy boots. In 1986 he told The Tennessean, “I enjoy roping and branding and things like that.”
Stringfield graduated from Vanderbilt in 1961, and later joined the staff of the Tennessee Hospital Association, eventually moving on to become executive director of the Tennessee Nursing Home Association. Along the way, he earned two master’s degrees, one from Peabody College and a second, in hospital administration, from Washington University in St. Louis.
Once Stringfield arrived at Baptist, his progress was swift. Just five years after he became president of the hospital, a new building that now houses the hospital’s executive offices and other facilities was named in his honor. During his 15 years as Baptist’s chief executive, Stringfield has demonstrated an impressive talent for predicting upcoming health-care trends and positioning his hospital to take advantage of them. His accomplishments are all the more extraordinary since they have been brought about in the backyard of Columbia/HCA.
Under Stringfield’s visionary leadership, Baptist Hospital has grown into an integrated health-care network that offers services at more than 50 Middle Tennessee locations. Stringfield helped create Health Net, the preferred provider organization. Under his leadership Baptist built the area’s first outpatient surgery center, as well as the nation’s first facility dedicated solely to laparoscopic and laser surgery. Stringfield has helped develop Middle Tennessee’s largest community-education and corporate wellness program. He has been aggressive in recruiting top-flight doctors for his hospital’s team.
Stringfield’s hospital may have the word Baptist in its name, but it has had only limited connections with the Tennessee Baptist Convention since late 1990, when Stringfield quietly maneuvered the hospital out from under from the convention’s supervision. The move effectively gave Stringfield vast control over the hospital’s operations.
For decades prior to the 1990 split, the hospital was largely controlled by the Tennessee Baptist Convention, an organization of Baptist churches from around the state. The convention picked the hospital’s Board of Trustees, and Stringfield, like Gene Kidd before him, answered to the trustees. But interviews with several current and former Baptist Hospital employees suggest that Stringfield resented his lack of control and that he did not respect the trustees’ judgment. According to a former attorney for the hospital, Stringfield also “hated” having to answer to the Baptist ministers on the board, who, he believed, knew little about the hospital business. He confided to his staff that it was in Baptist’s best interests to separate from the convention.
Behind closed doors, Stringfield engineered the separation. He had his board amend the hospital’s charter so that Baptist trustees could elect their own successors. Officials with the Tennessee Baptist Convention were given no clue about what was happening. “I first found out about the divorce when a reporter from a Tennessee paper called me,” recalls D.L. Lowrie, who was executive director of the Tennessee Baptist Convention in 1990 and who is now senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas. Lowrie says convention officials “would have liked to contest [the separation] in court, but our attorneys told us it would have cost around $500,000, and we didn’t have the resources.”
After protracted negotiations with Tennessee Baptist Convention officials, Stringfield and his trustees agreed to give the convention $1.7 million. The sum roughly equaled the amount of money the convention had donated to the hospital over the years. Conveniently enough, $1.7 million was also approximately the amount of debt then outstanding on the convention’s new executive office building in Brentwood.
Since the 1990 split, Stringfield can, with some minimal restraints, pick his own trustees. According to a written statement from James Porch, current executive director-treasurer of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, the existing relationship between the hospital and the convention only requires, among other things, a Baptist chaplain to minister to patients at the hospital. Meanwhile, the hospital has a “commitment” to maintaining a majority of trustees who are Baptist on the board. “Above all,” Porch says in his statement, “is the Hospital’s commitment to provide quality health care in a Christian environment.”
The maneuver was classic Stringfield. As his supporters saw it, Stringfield had acted quickly and efficiently to rid the hospital of the encumbrance of the Tennessee Baptist Convention and to give himself greater power. His timing was good, they say, because he took action just as right-wing elements were gaining influence in organized Baptist groups. However, Stringfield’s detractors say he acted in a self-serving and underhanded manner. They say he snubbed the Baptists and then tried to make amends by throwing money at the problem. Now, according to several sources, he has effectively stacked his hospital’s board with yes-men. As a result, his critics say, Stringfield is largely free to do as he wishes.
Technically, Stringfield and his staff can only recommend prospective board members to the Board of Trustees’ executive committee, which then approves or disapproves these recommendations before presenting them to the full board, according to Willie Davis, treasurer of the Board of Trustees. He also says the board is an “independent” group that keeps “well-informed of issues at the hospital.” Baptist refused to give a copy of the organization’s bylaws to the Scene, saying the hospital was not “legally required” to do so.
It’s unclear just how independent and well-informed the trustees are today. The Scene contacted two trustees—former Metro Police Chief Joe Casey and former tire store owner D. Ed Moody Jr.—who were not even aware that the hospital was still being audited by the IRS. Most other trustees did not return calls. Another trustee, Rev. Roy W. Babb, said he had been “instructed” not to talk to the Scene.
A former trustee says that Stringfield “tries to intimidate any possible dissenters [on the Board] into silence.” If that is Stringfield’s strategy, it certainly appears to work. “In board meetings, we never had any dissension at all due to Mr. Stringfield,” recalls Rev. J. Harold Stephens, a trustee until 1994. “The meetings were very harmonious.”
Since beginning its audit of Baptist in 1993, the IRS has made more than 100 official requests for information from the hospital. According to Baptist Hospital officials who have firsthand knowledge of the audit, the IRS has asked for a wide range of information relating to, among other things, the purchase of physician practices, Baptist’s takeovers of other hospitals, employee benefits, contracts with building contractors, and Stringfield’s travel expenses. The IRS has even looked into Baptist’s purchases from a local mattress company.
This is not Stringfield’s only brush with the IRS. The IRStried to collect roughly $60,000 in additional taxes from Stringfield after auditors charged that he had under-reported his income on his 1991 and 1992 tax returns. One of the IRS’s major allegations was that Stringfield failed to report as “fringe benefits” more than $100,000 that the hospital paid in those years to process, mount, and frame Stringfield’s nature photographs in preparation for displaying them at the hospital. (Fringe benefits are a form of taxable income.) Stringfield contested the IRSruling, and the U.S. Tax Court ruled in his favor last March.
The Scene submitted to Baptist Hospital a lengthy list of questions relating to, among other things, the IRS audit of the hospital, Baptist’s relationship with the Tennessee Baptist Convention, and Stringfield’s management practices and personal style. Hospital spokesperson Debby Koch refused to respond to the list of questions, which she described, in a June 24 letter to the Scene, as “riddled with malicious gossip, gross inaccuracies and disgusting personal allegations.”
In her letter Koch stated that “Baptist Hospital and its management, including David Stringfield, have acted in a lawful and appropriate manner.” She also charged the Scene with “purposely attempting to destroy the reputation of this Hospital and the many fine people who have worked hard to make it great.” As the Scene’s investigation proceeds, Koch insists, the hospital is keeping its “focus on what we intend to do...provide the best health care available to our patients under the most secure and comfortable possible conditions for them and their families.”
In a prior interview, Koch said that the IRS audit is “winding to a close.” Trustee Davis says it is his understanding “that an agreement has been reached with the IRS” and that “nothing serious” has been uncovered after four years of investigation.
The Scene’s probe into financial operations at Baptist Hospital has uncovered various incidents of questionable financial dealings. A number of well-placed sources allege financial improprieties on Stringfield’s part. Some of those sources say they have shared their allegations with the IRS as well.
Admittedly, not everyone is qualified to judge the propriety of a hospital administrator’s financial decisions. In fact, many of the questionable financial dealings that Stringfield’s detractors charge him with seem quite petty. And most of their charges relate to incidents that allegedly occurred in the 1980s and the early 1990s, before the IRS audit got under way.
Among the minor charges leveled against Stringfield is an allegation from a former hospital executive who says Stringfield tried to save sales tax by asking Baptist’s finance officers to under-report the cost of a car he purchased from the hospital for his family’s use. Hospital employees also say that, years back, the hospital’s maintenance supervisor and an electrical supervisor complained that they had to send hospital workers to do odd jobs at the Stringfields’ private residence. Several former officials in the hospital’s finance office say Stringfield, years ago, refused to pay sales tax on personal items purchased through the hospital. And even today, when he makes well over $500,000 a year, a Morrison Health Care Inc. spokesperson says her company provides Stringfield with $15 and $20 restaurant gift certificates. Morrison Health Care Inc. has a lucrative contract to provide food and nutrition services at Baptist. According to a spokesperson for Morrison Health Care, it is “routine practice” for vendors to provide their customers with gift certificates. On the other hand, a former Morrison Health Care executive says Stringfield’s frequent use of the free-food certificates is “far beyond customary.”
Allegations of questionable financial dealings, even if minor, have nonetheless proven to be a headache for Stringfield in the past. In fact, one list of charges that was circulated around the hospital led to an internal investigation into his possible abuse of authority.
In March 1990 a two-page letter was sent anonymously to 13 persons with high-level connections to the hospital. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Scene, alleged that Stringfield had used hospital funds to pay for cowboy boots intended for his personal use. (Paul Bond, a custom bootmaker in Nogales, Ariz., acknowledges that Stringfield has been a client, but he adds that, to his knowledge, “Stringfield always paid for his own boots.”) The letter also alleged that Stringfield had abused his long-distance telephone privileges and that he had used hospital funds to finance personal photography excursions. (Hundreds of Stringfield’s outdoor photographs line the Baptist Hospital walls.)
A special committee of the Baptist Hospital board asked Timothy Flesch, who was then executive vice president for corporate finance at Baptist, to investigate the financial allegations contained in the letter. Sources say Flesch confided in them that he had found compelling evidence of questionable financial dealings. But other sources familiar with Flesch’s report say it clearly showed bad judgment but included no clear proof that Stringfield had done anything outright illegal.
Board treasurer Davis says that, for his own part, he did not actually read Flesch’s report. But Davis says he does not recall anything “derogatory” in a summary of the report that was presented to the trustees. To protect its interests, Baptist called in Aubrey Harwell, the high-powered local attorney. Harwell says attorney-client privilege prevents him from disclosing the results of Flesch’s investigation.
Nevertheless, Flesch later resigned his job at Baptist under pressure from Stringfield, according to a hospital associate in whom he confided. He now works as a regional vice president for the Daughters of Charity National Health System East-Central in Evansville, Ind. At the time he left Baptist, Flesch apparently signed a confidentiality agreement that prevents him from discussing any matter related to the hospital, but two well-placed sources say he was convinced that Stringfield had tossed him out because of damaging allegations included in the report.
Flesch was not the only senior Baptist executive who was concerned about the specter of possible financial improprieties on Stringfield’s part. In the mid-’80s, Flesch, along with Paul W. Moore, who is now the hospital’s executive vice president, and Evelyn S. Springer, Baptist’s current senior vice president for patient care services, decided to seek outside help after collecting evidence of possible abuses of hospital funds. Convinced that Stringfield was in control of the hospital’s trustees, the three executives took their evidence to outsiders with strong connections to the hospital and the Baptist Church. Before acting, they consulted with local attorney Jack Robinson Sr.
Flesch, Moore, and Springer met at various times with Rev. Bill Sherman, pastor of Woodmont Baptist Church, and H. David Smith, a partner in the Peat Marwick accounting firm and one of the few hospital trustees with a reputation for resisting Stringfield’s control. In their discussions with Sherman and Smith, the hospital delegation expressed concern that Stringfield had refused to pay sales tax on goods he bought for personal use through the hospital’s purchasing office. They were also worried about what they believed to be a widespread perception in the local medical community that Stringfield had been involved in extramarital affairs with hospital employees. Flesch, Moore, and Springer gathered their evidence into a blue binder, which has been passed along to Larry Howlett, an agent in the Exempt Organizations Division of the IRS. Howlett is the agent who oversaw the IRS examinations of evangelists Tony Alamo and Jim Bakker. He has also been the driving force behind the IRS audit of Baptist Hospital.
For whatever reason, nothing came of the hospital officials’ meetings with Sherman and Smith. Sherman says he bumped into Stringfield in a hallway at Baptist and asked him about these issues. He recalls telling Stringfield, “If you’re going to serve a Baptist school or a Baptist convention or a Baptist religious institution, you must live your life with professionalism and ethics that are beyond reproach.” Otherwise, the allegations withered away. Robinson, Moore, Flesch, and Smith all declined comment, but sources familiar with the situation say the hospital employees became fearful that, if they went public with their accusations, they would find themselves embroiled in a power struggle with Stringfield, a struggle they felt they would almost certainly lose.
Some of the allegations against Stringfield may seem petty—a pair of cowboy boots here, a cafeteria certificate there. But some well-placed sources charge him with more serious infractions. Specifically, several sources allege that Stringfield has repeatedly tried to use his power at Baptist as a means of gaining favors and special treatment from some of the hospital’s major suppliers. “David’s attitude is, ‘If you’ve got the leverage, use it,’ ” says one former Baptist Hospital senior executive.
Consider the case of Morrison Health Care Inc., until recently a division of Morrison Restaurants Inc. In a letter, Stringfield wrote to then-Morrison’s chairman Sandy Beall, asking for stock options in Morrison Restaurants. In April 1995 Beall wrote back, explaining that his legal office was researching the “option issue,” according to a copy of the letter that Beall read to the Scene. Sources who have seen the correspondence say Beall then followed up with a “curt” letter informing Stringfield that it would be against company policy to issue stock options to anyone outside the firm. Glenn A. Davenport, current chief executive officer of Morrison Health Care Inc., said in a prepared statement that he does not “recall the details” surrounding Stringfield’s letter, but he insisted that no stock options have ever been tendered to Stringfield. According to Davenport’s statement, Morrison’s dealings with Stringfield have “been on the utmost professional level.”
Stringfield also spoke to Marguerite Sallee, chief executive at Corporate Family Solutions (CFS), about obtaining stock in her company, which is tentatively scheduled to go public later this year. CFS, a Nashville-based firm, has a sizable contract to provide child-care services at Baptist.
Sallee confirmed that Stringfield asked about the possibility of obtaining CFS stock “when the time was appropriate.” She cautioned, however, that she has had many requests for her company’s stock from “friends, colleagues, and business associates.” Sallee said that, in her opinion, there was nothing “unusual” or “inappropriate” about Stringfield’s request.
The IRS, however, might disagree. Domenic J. LaPonzina, a spokesman for the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division in Baltimore, said that, “depending on the facts and circumstances,” requests for stock could represent “inurement,” which is banned by the federal tax code for all executives of not-for-profit organizations. LaPonzina cautioned he was speaking about exempt organizations in general.
Sources allege that Stringfield’s power plays against CFS have sometimes taken a more personal bent. In 1996 one of Stringfield’s executive secretaries was offered a new job in the executive offices at CFS. Soon after the secretary told Stringfield about the offer, he announced in a meeting with senior Baptist executives that Corporate Family Solutions’ child-care contract was “being reviewed.” When word got back to Sallee, she confided to friends that she was worried about the future of the CFS-managed child-care center at Baptist.
Sallee withdrew the job offer, but sources say a senior hospital executive was deputized by Stringfield to inform the secretary that she had no future at Baptist. The secretary resigned.
Sallee declined to comment about the incident.
Former Baptist Hospital officials say Stringfield is obsessed by the meteoric growth of his cross-town rival, Columbia/HCA. As Stringfield and Baptist battle against the giant for-profit corporation for dominance in the Middle Tennessee market, these sources say, Stringfield’s competitiveness approaches “paranoia.”
Some of his concerns are strictly professional, but insiders say he is particularly irked by the fact that he remains a salaried employee while his counterparts at Columbia/HCA have the chance to amass huge piles of company stock. Sources say Stringfield’s jealousy is specifically directed at Dr. Thomas F. Frist Jr., the billionaire vice chairman of the board at Columbia/HCA and a son of Hospital Corporation of America cofounder Dr. Thomas Frist Sr.
On June 6, 1995, Stringfield, along with several of his hospital’s senior executives, met in Baptist’s corporate board room with Linda B. Miller, president of Voluntary Trustees of Not-For-Profit Hospitals, a Washington D.C.-based lobbying group. According to detailed notes taken at the meeting, a copy of which has been obtained by the Scene, the agenda was “to develop an anti-Columbia strategy.” The notes indicate the beginnings of a plan to “trash Columbia in the newspapers.” It was noted that Miller had connections with The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. “Peaches [Simpkins, wife of Nashville Banner publisher Irby Simpkins] controls Banner,” the notes said. “Mention amount of advertising done to Tennessean—pressure them to attack Columbia. Papers will print anything—make accusations—let Columbia have to prove otherwise.”
The notes indicate that Stringfield called for “any negative items” every week on Columbia, the Frists, and Richard L. Scott, chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia/HCA. Stringfield closed the meeting, according to the notes, by saying, “This is secret—don’t tell your wife.”
In a prepared statement, Miller said she met Stringfield once in the spring of 1995, that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss Baptist’s membership in her organization, and that she has never been party to any discussion of “trashing” Columbia.
Stringfield is also known to treat his employees with the same animus he reserves for the hospital’s business competitors. Former employees say that he is ready and willing to retaliate against his adversaries, both real and imagined. And they describe a suspicious man with a deep-seated fear of plots against him. “Stringfield stroked us for ratting out our fellow colleagues,” says one former Baptist executive.
Despite what many consider to be his apparent ruthlessness, Stringfield still maintains a public image of Christian humility. A biographical sketch of Stringfield, included in a 1991 calendar of his landscape photographs, stated that he gives “primary credit to God” as “the inspiration and support that has made it all possible.”
And he is not ashamed to pray with the small and the great. When then-Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler was at Baptist recovering from knee surgery in 1989, Stringfield held the newsman’s hands and prayed with him. Once, while attempting to persuade WSMV-Channel 4 general manager Mike Kettenring not to run a negative story about Baptist, Stringfield suggested that the two of them say a prayer. They prayed. Channel 4 ran the story.
Stringfield has been known to pray with the country music stars who come to have their babies at Baptist, and he’s been known to pray with employees, even as he’s firing them. Rev. Paul Baggett, the self-described “happy pastor” of Millersville Assembly of God Church in Goodlettsville, describes Stringfield as “a good Christian friend.” On the other hand, while praising Stringfield’s skills as a hospital administrator, a former Baptist Hospital senior executive says, “David is the most hypocritical person I have ever met.” Another says that Stringfield referred to people he did not like as “fucking idiots” and “fucking morons” and also spoke disparagingly of local Baptist ministers when they were out of earshot.
Some of Stringfield’s alleged retaliation against his putative enemies seems small-minded. A former telecommunications department employee said the hospital president had a recording device installed in his phone that allowed him to tape telephone conversations, unbeknownst to the person on the other end of the line.
A local attorney, formerly an outside counsel to the hospital, says Stringfield asked him in the mid-1980s to get the home phone records of a young woman who worked as a patient representative at Baptist. The attorney refused, explaining that phone records are private and that he was unwilling to break the law to get them. He was fired shortly thereafter for “disloyalty,” but not before Stringfield showed him that he had already obtained the young woman’s home phone records. The attorney says Stringfield boasted that he’d gotten the records with help from his lawyers at the Chicago firm of McDermott, Will & Emery. A partner for the Chicago firm declined comment, saying it could not ethically divulge information about a client.
Other stories reinforce Stringfield’s reputation for paranoia. Well-placed sources say Baptist Hospital security services consultant Ed Creamer spent $2,000 to $3,000 in hospital funds to fly in a representative from Intelco, a Hollywood, Fla.-based technology consulting firm, to sweep Stringfield’s offices for listening devices. No bugs were found. (Creamer did not return repeated phone calls. A spokesman for Intelco declined comment.)
Former operations officials at Baptist say Stringfield grilled them about whether outsiders could ever eavesdrop on his phone calls. He ordered that a private line be installed in his office to circumvent the main hospital phone system. According to Baptist Hospital telecommunications department employees, when he thought his speakerphone system wasn’t up to snuff, he ripped the phone out of the wall, severing the wires.
Stringfield fits the public profile of a solid, clean-living Christian. A program booklet distributed at the 1987 dedication of the Stringfield Building described him as an “active” member of both the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and First Baptist Church. His wife is a nurse with Baptist Hospital Home Care; the couple has two grown sons, David and John.
In the dedication to the calendar of his photographs published in 1991, Stringfield stated, “The photographs in this book are humbly dedicated to the beauty of God’s world, which I have been privileged to photograph.” According to one Baptist minister who has worked closely with Stringfield and who requested anonymity, “He clearly talks the talk.”
However, at one point in the 1980s, Stringfield became the subject of unsubstantiated rumors of extra-marital affairs with hospital employees. According to numerous doctors and executives who worked at the hospital at the time, he became convinced that Bill Day, then the hospital’s chaplain, was spreading the rumors throughout the Nashville community.
When Stringfield confronted Day for his supposed “lack of loyalty,” the sources say, the chaplain vehemently denied the charges. Stringfield did not fire Day, but well-placed observers say he made the chaplain’s life so miserable that Day resigned a few months later. Day, now director of pastoral services at Memphis’ Delta Medical Center, declined comment.
For years a rumor—perhaps the ultimate David Stringfield rumor—has circulated throughout the local medical community. It is a rumor that well-placed sources now confirm to be fact.
On a night in late 1993, the well-known local portrait artist Ann Street got a phone call from a senior Baptist Hospital administrator. The call was urgent: Street’s portrait of Stringfield, the one in the lobby of the Stringfield Building, had been defaced. It was bad enough that the painting had been vandalized—a Street portrait even then could cost well over $10,000. For the caller, however, the nature of the vandalism made it even worse.
Street had painted Stringfield as a slender, bespectacled Gary Cooper type. She had depicted him against a romantic background of stormy skies and windswept mountains. He gazed upward and out into the distance. The portrait’s message was clear: This is a man of vision, a man totally and absolutely in charge.
But taking a page from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a classic tale of adultery and puritanical repression, someone had spray-painted an enormous red A across Stringfield’s image.
Street declined comment about the incident. But reliable sources say that in short order, the portrait was picked up. Just a few weeks later, it was back in place, and security guards were stationed, around the clock, in the lobby.
At the time the vandalism took place, news of the incident raced around town, and it was widely assumed that it was inspired by rumors of Stringfield’s alleged extramarital affairs. But when the portrait returned, the big red A was gone. David Stringfield was once more staring, undefaced, into the distance.
Today Stringfield’s portrait hangs unblemished. It is a picture of a supremely confident executive, a decisive man in control of his surroundings, a man unthreatened by the world, a benevolent monarch surveying his realm. It is, however, only a picture. Like so many other royal portraits, it may not tell the whole truth about its subject.
Today Stringfield’s portrait hangs unblemished. It is a picture of a supremely confident executive, a decisive man in control of his surroundings, a man unthreatened by the world, a benevolent monarch surveying his realm. It is, however, only a picture. Like so many other royal portraits, it may not tell the whole truth about its subject.
