Hilton Corporate Nomad Bollenbach Leaves Mark

A restless corporate nomad, Hilton Chief Executive Stephen F. Bollenbach has held senior jobs with five separate companies during the 1990s alone.

At each one, he’s stopped off long enough to engineer a deal that makes a lasting impact on the company before jumping to the next job.

In 1990, Bollenbach was hired from Promus Cos. to help bail New York real estate mogul Donald Trump out of his financial woes, leaving less than two years later to engineer the splitting of operations of hotelier Marriott. He ended up heading Host Marriott, a hotel owner and operator of concessions in airports and along toll roads.

In 1995, he landed at Walt Disney Co. as chief financial officer, leaving for Hilton after just 10 months when Michael Ovitz was given the president’s post that Bollenbach coveted. Still, Bollenbach stayed long enough to be the principal financial architect of Disney’s $19-billion acquisition of the ABC network.

After 11 months at Hilton, Bollenbach has had a similar kind of brief, high-impact tenure. On Monday, the company bid $10.5 billion for ITT Corp. That follows the company’s $3-billion acquisition last year of rival Bally.

Although the number of job shifts has raised eyebrows in some quarters, Bollenbach is viewed on Wall Street as a top-notch, creative financial strategist who belongs in the hotel industry.

The son of a milkman, Bollenbach, 54, grew up in Lakewood, and once described his ‘50s childhood in a Times interview as “the California equivalent of ‘Happy Days.’ � After graduating from Lakewood High School, Bollenbach’s father got him a job scooping ice cream at Disneyland, where he stayed long enough to get a sore wrist and enough money to buy a surfboard.

Bollenbach’s highest-profile job was probably his brief tenure at Disney. He was brought in by Chairman Michael Eisner, who was looking for a first-rate chief financial officer well thought of on Wall Street.

Bollenbach’s abrupt departure from Disney was unexpected, and there remains some hard feelings on both sides. Disney sources privately criticized Bollenbach’s leaving at the time as yet another example of his job switching.

Although Bollenbach never pretended to be the heir apparent to Eisner--the two are the same age--he is known to have believed that he was more qualified than Ovitz to be Eisner’s second-in-command. He is also said to be bitter over some compensation he believed he was owed when he left.

Bollenbach later vented some of that anger in a Vanity Fair article late last year in which he trashed the corporate performance of Ovitz, who left Disney in December after a rocky 14 months. Some at Disney questioned the wisdom of the head of a huge hotel chain speaking out about a major entertainment and leisure company that it inevitably does business with.

At Hilton, Bollenbach appears to be setting down some roots. He is said to be buying an 8,000-square-foot mansion on four acres in Bel-Air for $6.5 million.

He also has a lucrative five-year contract at Hilton that makes it worth his while to stick around. According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents, Bollenbach earns a base salary of $540,000 and is eligible for an annual bonus of up to 100% of that figure. He also has 1.5 million stock options and a clause that kicks in three years into his deal, giving him a minimum $20-million payment--minus gains he’s made on his options--if he leaves after that time or is fired.