The Keys to the Kingdom (44 page)

Unlike Johnson, Wells didn't seem to take in the information. He gave Hoover a quizzical look. “Frank, the engine is out,” Hoover repeated. “We're going to crash-land. Brace yourself.” Wells still looked baffled.

Hoover leaned back. He was calm. He didn't think the emergency landing was especially dangerous; he just expected a sharp jolt. But the impact was much greater than he anticipated. Everything went black.

When he regained consciousness, Hoover was aware of a volcanic pain in his elbow. The helicopter had crashed and Hoover could hear the voices of rescue workers. From the hushed tones, the lack of urgency, he knew the situation was bad. “I didn't hear anybody saying those words that they always say, even when things are horrible,” he says. “Those words—‘You're all right, you'll be okay'—I didn't hear anybody saying that. Just very hushed, quiet, almost like they were in shock with what they were seeing.”

The helicopter—its mechanisms clogged with snow—had hit a tree, then smashed into the hillside. Someone wrenched Hoover out of the
wrecked chopper. “Take care of Beverly,” Hoover pleaded. He was aware that she was being pulled from the mangled machine and laid on the ground. He could hear her moan. Hoover also heard other rescuers tending to Wells, Walton, and Scannell and he could tell that the situation was bleak. Then he heard someone murmur, “She's gone.”

Hoover was literally smashed to bits. His skull was cracked, his neck was broken, his ribs were fractured, and at the elbow—the only place where he felt pain—bone protruded from the skin. As he was flown to the hospital, he asked no questions about the others. He already knew. He knew but he didn't want to hear the words. Only Scannell, the guide, lingered briefly. Hoover alone would survive.

M
ICHAEL EISNER HAD
been eating dinner at his son's home that Sunday night when he got a call from his secretary, who told him the terrible news about Wells. “There are no words to express my shock and sense of loss,” Eisner said in a statement released that night. “Frank Wells has been the purest definition of a ‘life force' that I have ever known…. The world has lost a great human being.”

On the Monday after Wells's death, as Disney executives reeled from the shock, Katzenberg awaited Eisner's call. It was a suspenseful time. Katzenberg says he was devastated by Wells's death, that he had never fully expressed his affection and gratitude, though he had written him a note some months earlier acknowledging his patience and tolerance as Katzenberg agonized over his future at the company. Now Wells was gone. Though these were hardly the circumstances that Katzenberg might have wanted, it seemed that the uncertainty about his future at the company might evaporate. As things stood, Katzenberg was supposed to leave in October 1994. But Katzenberg was also convinced that he had been promised a promotion if Wells were not around.

Surely Eisner would turn to him now. Surely he would remember their conversation in Aspen. On Sunday, Katzenberg had told Eisner that he would arrive at work at six
A.M
. on Monday. But as he sat in his immaculate off-white office and the minutes ticked by, he heard nothing.

At midday, with the staff gathered for the usual staff lunch, Eisner passed out a press release. A glance told Katzenberg its contents: Eisner would assume Wells's responsibilities. No successor would be named. Katzenberg was paralyzed with shock. “I don't think I blinked for the entire lunch,” he said later. If Eisner had said something to him in private about the move being only temporary, he would have been fine. But Eisner hadn't spoken to him at all.

Perhaps Katzenberg should not have been surprised. Nearly ten years earlier, when he was leaving Paramount to follow Eisner to Disney, a colleague had warned him, “Eisner doesn't want a partner. Michael will never accept you as a partner.” But Katzenberg had replied with his usual determination: “He will if I'm good enough.” After all the Walt Disney Company's success, Katzenberg surely felt he had been good enough.

That night at their weekly dinner at Locanda Veneta, Eisner and Katzenberg didn't touch on the topic. The next morning, Katzenberg demanded a lunch with Eisner. He vented his anger and disappointment and demanded that Eisner make good on his promise to give him the number-two job. Now it was Eisner's turn to be furious. How could Katzenberg hand him an ultimatum at a time like this? The company had just been through a trauma and Katzenberg's departure would only make things worse, both in terms of morale and media scrutiny. “Are you telling me that if I don't do this, you'll leave?” Eisner asked in amazement.

“I want you to do what you said you wanted to do,” Katzenberg replied.

“You're putting a gun to my head,” Eisner said. With that, he walked out.

Later that afternoon, Eisner sent his general counsel, Sandy Litvack, to talk to Katzenberg. “You can't do this to Michael,” Litvack said. Katzenberg replied that he was very upset and would stay only until his contract expired in October 1994.

But by the end of the day, the two combatants had decided to put questions about Katzenberg's future on hold until passions could die down. True to his word, Katzenberg got back to business as usual. The Broadway version of
Beauty and the Beast
was about to open.
The Lion King
movie would premiere in a couple of months. “What impressed me is he was acting as though he had a full new contract,” Eisner later conceded.

In the coming weeks, Eisner weighed hiring a variety of others for the Frank Wells slot, from Warner cochairman Bob Daly to George Mitchell, the retiring Senate majority leader. Certainly both men had a gravitas that Katzenberg lacked. It was difficult to imagine that Daly, rich and autocratic, would have any interest in working for Eisner. As for Mitchell, his experience seemed ill-suited to the task that Eisner had in mind. Neither deal came to be.

Katzenberg continued his campaign of mending fences with the creative community and others in the industry. Within a few weeks, even his old enemy Michael Ovitz told the
Los Angeles Times
: “Jeffrey is a pleasure to do business with.”

 

JUST A COUPLE
of weeks after Wells died, Katzenberg decided he could not continue protecting Ricardo Mestres. Even though he had spent ten years with Mestres at Disney and several more before that at Paramount, Katzenberg pushed the thirty-six-year-old Mestres out of his job as president of Hollywood Pictures. He was given an independent production deal at the studio. Mestres's old rival, David Hoberman, was promoted to run the division as well as Touchstone and the Disney family label.

The decision to put one man at the top of Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone was perceived as a ramping back—an admission that Disney had failed with its “product is king” strategy of releasing as many as sixty films a year while rival studios issued as few as fifteen. Ironically, other studios, including Warner and Sony, had also geared up production. But no Disney live-action film had grossed more than $100 million since
Sister Act
in 1992. Hollywood Pictures never had a film reach blockbuster status. (Its top grosser was
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,
at $88 million.)

Disney was keeping up its volume thanks in part to a rich, five-picture-a-year deal with producer Joe Roth, the former chairman of the Fox studios. Roth, with his dark hair and sleepy eyes, was by far the best-looking of Hollywood's clutch of top executives. He had a deceptively casual style, smooth and charismatic. As the only top executive who had ever directed a film (the 1990
Coupe de Ville,
a comedic road movie with Alan Arkin, Patrick Dempsey, and Daniel Stern), Roth had enjoyed a certain distinction among the suits even though the movie hadn't done much business.

His track record as a producer and executive was wildly mixed. At Fox, he had picked up the huge sleeper hit
Home Alone
when Warner, to its lasting sorrow, dropped it. He had also rushed a
Die Hard
sequel into production, giving Fox a needed hit for the summer of 1990. But he had been the champion of such expensive bombs as
Shining Through
and
For the Boys
. Eventually, he and Barry Diller, then chairman of Fox, had parted ways and Roth again became a producer.

Katzenberg had recruited Roth and his Caravan Pictures production company to Disney in 1992. The deal was discussed over a lunch at Ca'brea, a restaurant in Los Angeles, in the private upstairs dining room. Eisner and Katzenberg were there, of course, and Roth brought Michael Ovitz to represent him. At the time Roth was poised to make a deal at Sony and went into the discussion thinking that Ovitz was simply using Disney as a prod
to close that deal. But as the meeting progressed, it seemed clear that Ovitz and Eisner were in serious deal-making mode. After the lunch, Roth pulled Katzenberg aside. “From the body language between these two guys, I've got the feeling they want to park me at your place, and I'm not sure that's good for you,” Roth said.

“Don't worry about it,” Katzenberg replied. “It was my idea.”

From Katzenberg's point of view, Roth could succeed him at the studio when he ascended to the number-two job. But it was obvious to everyone inside the studio and in the industry at large that Roth could also succeed Katzenberg if something less positive happened to him. With Katzenberg's future in constant doubt, every move that Eisner made with respect to Roth was closely scrutinized by the staff.

And indeed, not long after Roth set up shop at the studio, Katzenberg arrived with his troops at the Mighty Ducks arena for a company outing to a hockey game. When the group arrived, they could see Eisner sitting in his box with Roth at his side. To one Katzenberg loyalist, the moment was unforgettable and its meaning was clear. Katzenberg was the one on thin ice.

 

EISNER MAY HAVE
been impressed with Katzenberg's demeanor in the wake of their quarrel after Wells's death, but he also believed that Katzenberg was taking his case public, with articles in the
New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and
Los Angeles Times,
among others, that proclaimed his importance to Disney. To Eisner, the articles seemed to be part of putting a gun to his head. “I said a couple of times, ‘You're doing a massive lobbying job for a constituency that has one vote,'” Eisner said later.

The irony of Eisner's reaction was that years earlier, he had defied his own boss, Barry Diller, and pursued coverage in the media when things began to destabilize at Paramount. (The widely read
New York
magazine article hadn't helped Eisner with Martin Davis at Paramount, but Sid Bass had said it impressed him when he decided to back Eisner as chairman of Disney.)

But now it was Eisner's show to run. Annoyed as he may have been, however, he had no reason to fear that Katzenberg's good press coverage would prove influential with the Disney board. Roy Disney's feelings toward Katzenberg had not warmed, and as Roy went, so went Stanley Gold. No one else on the board was likely to challenge Eisner on any subject.

If anything, Katzenberg's relationship with Roy Disney was about to get worse thanks to the stunning triumph that Disney was about to achieve with
The Lion King
. The problem was typified in May 1994 when
Wall Street Journal
reporter Rich Turner was writing a story about the making of
The Lion King
. As he pursued his research, the article began to focus on Katzenberg and his contribution to Disney's flourishing animation division.

Eisner never believed it, but Turner had initiated the story on his own—without prompting from Katzenberg. In fact, Katzenberg asked Turner to shine some of the spotlight on Roy Disney—as he had asked
Premiere
magazine to do in an earlier article about
Beauty and the Beast
. But Turner saw that Roy was at best a “marginal figure,” and refused. In fact, Roy was frequently out of the country at his refurbished castle in County Cork, Ireland. He wasn't available for consultation during the making of the film, or for the extensive publicity blitzes the studio planned around its opening. Katzenberg tried to keep him in the picture, making sure he was visible, for example, in an Elton John television special created to promote the project.

One can only imagine how infuriated Roy must have been by passages like the one in Turner's article that said: “Prominent in the Disney formula is Mr. Katzenberg…who, if not exactly the re-incarnation of Walt Disney, brings his own blend of passion and obsession to Disney's mission of creating Disney animated ‘classics.' Unlike most studio chiefs, who typically confine creative input to a few suggestions at screenings, the 43-year-old Mr. Katzenberg has made Disney's animation efforts a deeply personal mission. Tweaking, tinkering, bullying, cheerleading, his frenetic presence looms over virtually every aspect of [
The Lion King
].”

This put Katzenberg in a peculiar situation. He was enjoying his biggest success ever, but his bosses were mad at him. The tension was obvious at a summer evening party thrown at the National Zoo after
The Lion King
's premiere in Washington, D.C. (The site was chosen, according to a former Disney executive, to curry favor for the embattled Disney's America.) While members of Congress milled about enjoying food and games, Eisner and Katzenberg sat at a table together. “You flew all the way across the country to throw this party and you sit with each other?” one guest teased.

A studio publicist standing nearby spoke up. “It's to show that they still speak,” she said loudly.

When the film's opening foretold huge grosses, Katzenberg dutifully phoned Roy to congratulate him. He was stunned when Roy simply replied,
“Thank you,” and rang off without even a mention of Katzenberg's efforts. Katzenberg soldiered on, calling all six hundred people who worked on the film to thank them for their efforts. Grossing $313 million,
The Lion King
became the most successful animated film ever made, and the biggest hit in Disney history.

 

IT WAS TWO A.M
. on Friday, July 15, and Eisner was becoming alarmed. He was experiencing pains in his arms, and he wasn't within striking distance of a large, well-equipped Los Angeles hospital. He was in Sun Valley, Idaho, spending a couple of days at investment banker Herbert Allen's annual retreat. Now he was bolt awake in the quietly elegant Sun Valley Lodge—a magnet for the rich and famous since W. Averell Harriman had it built in 1936.

Herbert Allen was the leading investment banker in the entertainment community, and every summer he gathered a who's who of the media world to discuss business in the mornings and to broker deals over tennis and golf in the afternoons. Eisner had arrived for his first visit to the Allen retreat on Thursday afternoon; Katzenberg had been coming for years, as had Frank Wells. Eisner recognized that Wells enjoyed “the purposeful posturing, the subtle gamesmanship, the camaraderie of shared interests, and the fierce underlying competitiveness” of the event. With Wells gone, Eisner now felt compelled to go himself. He was reluctant, in part, because it was counter to his superstitious nature to talk about what Disney had accomplished or might accomplish in the future.

And he avoided events that he considered “clubby.” He always felt like an outsider, even among these powerful men who were now his peers. “On a rational level, I had no reason to feel out of place, but I did,” he said later. He noticed that guests at the very top of the pecking order got to use the condominiums on the property while he and Jane were assigned to one of the smaller rooms in the main lodge. Nonetheless, he and Jane were among those invited to take their meals at Herb Allen's condo.