The Keys to the Kingdom (8 page)

“We were having a hard time with Michael,” remembers Leonard Goldberg, the former ABC executive who had become Spelling's partner. “This was, I guess, Michael's first real ‘I'm the boss' kind of stuff…. He was very-up-front. He wouldn't hide behind anybody. He was never afraid.” But apparently Eisner didn't grasp the scope of Spelling's influence. Goldberg says he and Spelling angrily asked themselves, “Who the fuck is he?”

Spelling knew how to deal with punks. He complained to his attorney, Bill Hayes, a dashing silver-haired figure who had served as a fighter pilot during the Second World War. He was at the epicenter of the old-boy network and was as connected as it was possible to be in a business composed of intertwined relationships. Among his friends was Elton Rule, the president of ABC. Hayes explained to Rule that Michael Eisner was causing problems and might need to look for employment elsewhere.

Hayes told this story to another client, a young producer named Larry Gordon. Gordon had started his career as Aaron Spelling's assistant and subsequently became head of production at American International Pictures, a low-budget movie factory that was then the home of B-movie king Roger Corman. Gordon had befriended Eisner when Eisner had relocated to the West Coast. “Your friend Michael Eisner is in trouble,” Hayes told Gordon. He hadn't just annoyed Spelling—others were complaining, too. But Spelling was the one who counted. Gordon told Hayes to hold off while he talked to Eisner. Gordon quickly warned his friend to switch his tack with Spelling because he was about to be fired.

Eisner reversed course and picked up the disputed show:
Starsky and Hutch
. Later, Silverman would pluck
Charlie's Angels
from Eisner's trash heap. Ironically, those were among the hit shows that helped establish Eisner's reputation.

Later, Eisner told Spelling's partner, Goldberg, that he had been tipped off about Spelling's ire. “Until he told me, I thought he was genuinely enthusiastic about our next three shows,” Goldberg says. In time, Eisner became adept at shifting blame when he wanted a project killed. “He's usually pretty positive,” Pierce says. “That's an art—that art of not saying no.”

Another associate at the time remembers watching Eisner phone a writer and tell him, “I read the script. It's fabulous!” But Eisner never addressed the question of whether the network would actually buy it. “I thought it was brilliant,” this associate says. “The writer was thrilled but still didn't know if the script would get picked up.” Getting to watch Eisner make such a call was a relatively rare treat, this individual remembers. “Normally, he didn't want anyone to see him in action.”

 

ALTHOUGH EISNER SOMETIMES
created the illusion that someone else was pulling his strings, he always liked to have his way. “He was
in charge of the West Coast and by and large I let him do his thing, I didn't interfere,” says Silverman, who ran programming from New York. “He was very sensitive about that.”

Silverman may not have thought much of ABC's schedule, but he had an eye for talent. He was particularly impressed that Pierce and Eisner—who, as he sees it, were left to mop up Diller's mess in prime-time programming—“really did a masterful job working together to create some shows and establish some building blocks for the network.” Among those shows were
Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter,
and of course
Starsky and Hutch
. Silverman says he appreciated Eisner's talent so much that he “just bent over backward to make sure he was happy.” Within six months of Silverman's arrival, ABC was in first place. The critics were unimpressed with ABC's crassly commercial, youth-oriented programming, but the public loved it.

Silverman also liked the strong staff that Eisner had assembled. In 1974, for example, he hired a young woman named Marcy Carsey as a program executive in comedy. She would prove to be a formidable talent in commercial television, later producing hits including
The Cosby Show, Roseanne,
and
3rd Rock from the Sun
. During her job interview, Carsey mentioned that she was three months pregnant and would resume her discussions with the network after she had her baby. “Why would we wait until after you have the baby?” Eisner asked.

Carsey, who knew that the television industry was not especially receptive to women—let alone pregnant ones—replied diplomatically that she thought people would be more comfortable with her after the baby was born. “I'm having a baby, too,” Eisner said. “Is this a factor? Why are we talking about this?” Carsey was amazed and grateful that Eisner was willing to hire her knowing that she was expecting a child. Later, Eisner allowed her to bring her baby to work and hold meetings with her child in a bassinet in her office. It was part of an informal but hardworking atmosphere that Eisner encouraged. He held working lunches in the office so frequently that, by one account, his monthly bill once ran to $12,000.

Eisner was not so openhanded with Lee Wedemeyer when he asked her to work for him as his secretary. “In five minutes, we knew this was good,” she remembers, describing their immediate rapport. “Michael really wanted me to go to work for him…. He needed a classy front and I provided that.” But Wedemeyer had already been offered the chance to go to Europe on
a four-week working trip for someone else. She asked Eisner if he would wait four weeks for her to start. “As much as he wanted me, he said he couldn't wait a month,” she says. “It was interesting to me that he was willing not to have it unless he could have it on his terms. That's Michael.” Wedemeyer gave up the trip in favor of the job.

Wedemeyer, who worked for Eisner for several years, says her stint at ABC was the best part of her career, even though she later made more money and acquired more power. Carsey also remembers those years fondly.

“Michael is by far the best executive I ever worked for,” Carsey says. “With great courage and a sense of humor, Michael would stand up in front of his bosses at the scheduling board and give his rationale for the schedule he was pushing.” Eisner would say, “Either it's going to work or it isn't. If it doesn't, get some other jerk to do this.” If he was caught unprepared in a meeting, he took a brief run at his subject before saying, “I don't know what I'm talking about.” The effect, she says, was “hugely disarming.”

Eisner didn't handle conflict with explosions or confrontations. Once, she remembers, Eisner and a group of his staffers were meeting with Silverman when an executive named Andy Siegel disagreed with one of Eisner's points. Eisner was startled, Carsey says, because he had met with his executives beforehand and had not heard a word of dissent. After the meeting, Eisner started to pace as he reproached Siegel for the ambush. “I have to explain to you why that drives me crazy,” he said. Carsey found this a rather low-key response to an issue that might have sent other bosses into a rage. “He was begging Andy to please understand,” she says. “It was not polished, it was not corporate, it was not a boss talking to an employee.”

Carsey noticed another trait that Garry Marshall also had observed: the sense that Eisner saw himself as an outsider who ultimately stood alone. “Michael taught me that my job wasn't about making friends and influencing people,” Carsey says. “It didn't have anything to do with anything except getting a couple of hits a year…. He didn't care whether the ideas came from the elevator operator or if they came from going to the right parties.” Carsey finds nothing surprising in the idea that Eisner shunned social relationships with colleagues. “Why would you have friends in this town?” she asks. She was more impressed that Eisner often went to Vermont to be with his family.

Though they were not close, Eisner once spontaneously dropped everything to accompany her while she looked at a house she was hoping to buy. “Michael, it's forty-five minutes away,” she said.

But Eisner was always fascinated by buildings. “Let me go with you,” he urged.

He hopped into her old Honda and offered his usual cornucopia of ideas about the property. “Michael and I were never friends,” Carsey says. “He was just curious and impulsive.”

At first, Carsey was worried that she had been assigned a bunch of bad shows that would fail. “If they all get canceled, do I get fired?” she asked Eisner.

“No,” he replied. “By then, it'll be somebody else's fault.”

Carsey plucked a pilot called
The Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller
out of the reject pile and asked permission to develop it. The show debuted in mid-1975 and ran for eight seasons. But if the show had failed, Carsey says, Eisner would not have reproached her. “I could talk him into something and he would never, ever come to us later and say, ‘I told you it wouldn't work.' He allowed us to fail. He'd say, ‘Give me at least one hit a year. I don't care how you get there. I don't care if you show me five pilots that are so horrendous that you have to leave the room, if the sixth one is great.'”

Despite having the courage of his own convictions that Carsey, Goldberg, and others observed, Eisner also had a characteristic pessimism. Not only was he “always a bit of a hypochondriac,” Pierce remembers, but he always seemed to anticipate a professional disaster of some sort. “Even today he operates as if failure is always around the corner,” says Pierce. “I think that's what drives him.”

But at ABC in 1976, failure was nowhere in sight. A taped memo that Eisner made for his boss, Silverman, in July 1976 illustrates the wealth of commercial material that ABC was creating for viewers for the fall—and the myriad problems with script, casting, and star personalities that came with the hit shows. Eisner began by discussing movies: among Brandon Stoddard's projects was a made-for-television project called
The Love Boat,
and Eisner said the network was “totally prepared” to make a sequel or a regular series if the first movie was a big hit. Stoddard was reviewing a script for another proposed Aaron Spelling–Leonard Goldberg picture called
Fantasy Island
.

And there were high hopes for a nearly completed Spelling-Goldberg
picture called
Little Ladies of the Night
. “Brandon tells me that NBC is not only panickly interested as to when we are going to air the movie but exactly how far we went with the teenage prostitution,” Eisner said. ABC went far enough to earn the picture one of the highest ratings for any made-for-television movie.

Filming had been completed on
Twenty-one Hours at Munich,
a movie about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics. “One thing that we discussed here…because the heat on this whole Israeli terrorism story is so immense—is to make sure that we have
Twenty-one Hours at Munich
early enough to take advantage of that,” Eisner told Silverman.

Eisner addressed a number of complaints on the taped message to Silverman: The New York office was interfering too much with decisions that should be made in Los Angeles and needed to be brushed back. “Otherwise, we will kill ourselves,” he said in a brief, semihumorous but pointed warning. Another Spelling project in the works—a film named
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
—needed script work and a cast. Eisner wanted a teenage actor named Gary Frank from the series
Family
. If not, he said, “one of the kids from
Kotter
is a possibility, Robbie Benson is a possibility.” The kid from ABC's hit series
Welcome Back, Kotter
—John Travolta—got the part.

The seminal miniseries
Roots,
based on Alex Haley's book, was also in the middle of shooting. The only disappointment, Eisner told his boss, was actor John Amos as the central character, the mature Kunta Kinte. Amos is “strong, powerful, and not a good enough actor to match the rest of the people in the cast, but that won't be a problem 'cause we'll cut around him and so forth,” Eisner assured Silverman. Others appearing in the miniseries included LeVar Burton, Ed Asner, Cicely Tyson, Lorne Green, Ben Vereen, Leslie Uggams, Chuck Conners, Louis Gossett Jr., Sandy Duncan, and O. J. Simpson. “So that's a pretty good cast,” Eisner said. The same group, he joked, would also put in a guest appearance on an upcoming episode of
The Streets of San Francisco
.

Eisner also used the memo to provide a night-by-night update on ABC's regular series.
The Six Million Dollar Man
—the Lee Majors show about a bionic man with superhuman powers—was in its third season and Eisner said an October episode would feature a guest appearance by Farrah Fawcett, the lavishly maned former model who was red-hot in the new series
Charlie's Angels
. “Farrah is a little flat 'cause she's not the greatest actress in the world, but it's going to be an excellent episode with flashy holographics—whatever those are,” Eisner reported.

Eisner also fretted about
Baretta,
a Roy Huggins series starring Robert Blake as a streetwise cop who lived with a cockatoo named Fred. Blake had started running the show “in his kind of insane way,” Eisner said, and was now said to be “an inch from cracking.” Eisner had also been told that Blake—who had a problem with substance abuse at this time—“looks drawn and sullen and strange and noncommunicative and very, very weird.” The show was behind schedule. “They've got to catch up,” Eisner said. “He's letting the producers take over and he's running scared. I don't know what's going to happen…. We're exercising as much control as possible without putting Blake away.” Blake later said he was doing what was necessary to maintain the show's quality. It lasted for one more season.

Whatever his initial misgivings, Eisner now said he was thrilled with
Charlie's Angels
. “Whenever the girls are on-screen, the screen lights up and they are beautiful and sexy and in character,” he said.
Welcome Back, Kotter
was rolling along and
The Streets of San Francisco
was in good shape. Carsey's pet project was having problems with the actor who played a popular character named Fish. “
Barney Miller
is not quite as smooth as it should be but it never has been,” Eisner said. “Abe Vigoda did not show up and he has been put on suspension…. We cannot fold to Abe Vigoda—it's that simple.”