Short Cuts: Episode I 
The Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of Marcy Rogers
In the name of charity, she maneuvered her way to the top of Dallas Society—then came those inconvenient questions about money. Twice.
s mariness says: It’s easy to question everyone’s motives but in reality it appears that she actually did some good for some needy people and the dollar figures cited related to her alleged abuses are trivial. Her detractors seem particularly vicious-is it jealousy or just negativity at work here... (February 5th, 2012 at 3:58pm)
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In December 1988 Marcy reached what outsiders might have considered the pinnacle of her success. First, the foundation was touted in a Dear Abby column. Then, that very same week, Marcy flew to New York City to be on Donahue. Appearing alongside her were Jermaine Gardner and a two-year-old boy from Moscow who had been born with trigonocephaly, in which the sutures at the base of his skull were fused, leaving no room for the brain to grow. Without surgery, the child would have been brain-damaged. But smiling and capering around the stage during the broadcast, he was the ideal advertisement for the miracle of craniofacial surgery. Together, the newspaper column and the television show were a public relations triumph, prompting thousands of people to call the NCF office in Dallas.
Marcy got home on December 18. The following day the chairman of the NCF board called to inquire about an $86,000 deficit in the budget. It was the beginning of a swift decline for Marcy. All the money she had been dishing out to promote her image in society came back to haunt her, as did her careless, inattentive management style. Over the next few weeks she was accused of wasting foundation money on extravagant gifts and entertainment, of diverting restricted patient funds to meet payroll and to pay overhead, of using the foundation’s van as collateral on a loan, and of hiring one of her boyfriends as a bookkeeper. Marcy denied having done anything wrong and blamed Ken Salyer. Split on whether to fire her, the board came up with a compromise that would allow her to step down as executive director yet keep her fundraising role. She declined and resigned in February 1989, calling the attacks against her “a witch hunt.” To some on the board, she behaved like a stubborn child. “It could have been salvaged,” said one, “but she didn’t do it. ‘It’s my foundation. It’s my my my my my’—that’s what her attitude was.”
Just three weeks later, Marcy did what no one expected her to do, indeed, what no one believed she could do—she started over with a completely new organization, the International Craniofacial Foundations. To fund it, she used the first installment of her divorce settlement and a $150,000 pledge from her friend G. Ray Miller, a Dallas entrepreneur and a loyal NCF backer. Because ICF was struggling and undercapitalized, Marcy decided not to draw a salary. But five months later she started accepting $2,000 a month from Miller in exchange for her help as a consultant to his physicians’ bill-processing company. But by working for profit as a consultant in the health care field while running a nonprofit organization, Marcy began the dangerous practice of mixing up her personal business with that of the foundation. Keeping the two separate, for someone as ill-disciplined as Marcy, proved to be impossible.
ICF was patterned after NCF, which folded in August 1989. But ICF was broader in scope; its goal was to set up craniofacial centers around the country. But in terms of financial stability, it was in no better shape. Although Marcy put in a substantial amount of her own money, it is not at all clear how much. Marcy herself didn’t seem to know. In one letter to a prospective donor dated July 20, 1990, she wrote that she had “personally invested well over $150,000 of my own funds in ICF.” Four days later, in a different letter, she wrote that she had “donated well over $200,000.” The confusion extended to the ICF offices. A former employee recalls that when she was hired in February 1990, “everything was in boxes, just in no organized fashion, no filing system—just scraps of paper in boxes.” Employees say bills were never paid on time. “It was a constant struggle,” says one. “The bank was always calling, or American Express, or the gold MasterCard.” Marcy began writing hot checks, one after another; sometimes she would come in after everyone else had left and write them on the sly.
It wasn’t as if she was unaware of the need for a firmer financial grasp. From February 1989 until January 1991, she brought in six different bookkeepers. But she preferred to hire weak people—those who crossed her didn’t last long. She would fire them. “I was looking for quick fixes,” Marcy says. “I never checked references. I never looked into their backgrounds. I never took the time to find a good person.”
Above all, Marcy needed to be in control. The new board—which included her father and a sister—merely rubber-stamped her decisions. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t ask for financial statements. The people who worked with her for any length of time learned to dodge her interference. “She’d come into the office and pull things off people’s desks and start making notes,” says one employee. “You would never leave anything on your desk that you wouldn’t want her to fool with.” She also had ICF employees doing her personal business for her. She hired an office courier, for instance, who also picked up her prescriptions and dry cleaning. “Well, he’s going that way anyway,” she would say. But going to her house and walking her dogs wasn’t exactly on his way. Marcy still had an incredible ability to charm money from contributors. She dispensed warmth to a lot of the kids and their families. But sometimes she hurt the very people she intended to help. “She would tell a child, ‘Come spend the night with me,’ and the kid would believe her,” says one ICF employee. “And then, of course, it would never happen.”
Since their divorce, Marcy and Ken were locked in competition. In early 1990, Ken Salyer had formed his own nonprofit charity, called Childworks. Now he and Marcy had competing organizations, which they used to try to outdo one another. Their parallel push to the Soviet Union was the most obvious example. During the fall of 1989, Ken Salyer and Marcy Rogers flew separately to Moscow to meet with Soviet doctors and set up training programs. They brought Soviet children needing surgery to the U.S. and took American doctors to the Soviet Union to teach their methods. The Soviet gambit was excellent for public relations, but the truth was that there was a lot more valuable, less flashy work to be done in the United States. And it was costing Marcy a fortune she didn’t have. In April 1990 Marcy invited the Soviet minister of health and a team of Soviet doctors to visit five craniofacial centers in the United States, a trip that cost ICF $38,000. Repeatedly, friends cautioned her to scale back. “She was warned—why not wait?” says one. “But you couldn’t stop her.”
From appearances, life had never been better for Marcy Rogers. It would not be unusual for someone to arrive for an appointment at ICF and find her at her desk, jabbering on the speaker phone while getting a manicure. She still dressed with exquisite taste. In August 1990 she signed a $215,000 mortgage on a three-bedroom house in far North Dallas, then spent $30,000 on renovations. “It was another big mistake,” she says. “Another example of one of my impulsive desires.”
On the interior, her life was a wreck. Lonely and unhappy, she flung money at friends and acquaintances, including loans of $35,000 to one boyfriend and $10,000 to a friend, and an $18,000 investment with a guy who convinced her that he was going to start a movie-production company and give the profits to ICF. “I was a disaster,” she says. Behind her back, people wondered how she pulled it off. “I don’t think she was any more flamboyant than the rest of us,” says one ICF volunteer, “except she always complained she never took a salary and didn’t have any money. So how did she do it?” Once the gossip got started, it damaged her reputation and money was harder to raise. Marcy spent almost all of 1990 trying to stem one crisis after another, “trying to buy credibility,” as she put it. She hired Arthur Andersen to do an audit for 1989. “That was expensive,” she says, “but somehow I thought that would stop the rumors.” She hired the high-profile law firm of Geary, Stahl, and Spencer at $250 an hour. “I couldn’t afford that either,” she says, “but I thought, ‘People will think you’re a credible person.’ I was very adept at looking like I had a lot of money.”
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