Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (34 page)

SEVENTEEN

Mark Kaline
Manager, Media Services
Ford Central Media

Mr. Brent Bozell:

I am writing you in response to the letter you sent to Mr. Jacques Nasser regarding Ford Motor Company’s participation in the UPN program “WWF SmackDown!” We share your concern regarding such programming and as such, Ford Motor Company does not participate in this program on a national basis. In fact, we steer clear of network wrestling programs overall
.

John G. Clark
Chief Advertising Officer
Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up

Dear Mr. Bozell
,

It is our belief that the placement of any of our advertising on any television program should not be equated with our support of any theme, storyline or content. However, your comments do greatly concern us. Since the beginning of the year we have discussed both sides of the issue at length. The programming is extremely targeted to reach the teen audience. On the other hand, the content of the show has steadily deteriorated in both its quality and entertainment value. As a result Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up made a corporate decision not to advertise its brands in any type of wrestling programming
.

Carol A. Sanger
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Federated Department Stores

Dear Mr. Bozell
,

Let me assure you that the day any of our stores sign on to sponsor world wrestling is a day to expect blizzard conditions in hell
.

On October 19, 1999, some of the best bankers in Manhattan clinked champagne glasses to celebrate a yearlong effort to take the World Wrestling Federation public. When the closing bell clanged on Wall Street, Vince and Linda assumed a paper worth of more than $1 billion while raising $170 million more to finance an expansion. Now that the McMahons were moving out of cable and into the world of network television and quarterly reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the question was how much further would corporate America let them keep pushing? Where was the line? Was there even one anymore?

In a small office building in Arlington, Virginia, fifty researchers spend their days videotaping every show in prime time for a weekly report published by the nonprofit Media Research Center, a creation of Brent Bozell III, a conservative commentator whose father was an adviser to both Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. Before he syndicated a newspaper column, Bozell had dabbled in politics as finance director of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign for president. After that he founded the MRC and its fax-happy cousin, the Hollywood-based Parents Television Council. Though tiny, the PTC made a minor splash targeting a syndicated show with Howard Stern. When UPN allotted 40 percent of its advertising budget for promoting
SmackDown!
in the fall of 1999, Bozell decided to go after the WWF, too.

An indication that Bozell would be more than a nuisance came when he sent out a mass mailing and received a reply from Coca-Cola, where there was already high-level concern about the WWF. The bottler, which had pulled its ad dollars out of
Raw
earlier in the summer, had been promised that
SmackDown!
would be a toned-down version of its cable counterpart. But the first few episodes left Coke’s executives feeling hoodwinked. There was the episode in which Mark Henry’s sexual travails took an inexplicably dark turn with the story-line admission that he’d been having incestuous sex with his sister since they were eight. And the match where Terri Runnels and recent arrival Ivory wrestled a “hard-core” match in a shower stall dressed in thong panties. (It ended with Ivory burning an iron into Terri’s back.) The reply to Bozell, from a lieutenant of chairman M. Douglas Ivester, expressed Coke’s dismay. It was severing its two-year relationship with McMahon’s company.

At UPN, Dean Valentine barely paid any attention to the flap because he’d been down this road before. While serving as the president of network television for Disney, he’d green-lighted the episode of
Ellen
in which Ellen DeGeneres kissed another woman on-screen. Between the Baptists that already hated Disney, the talk show demagogues who harped on the decline of American values, and the ideologues in Congress who loved bashing Hollywood because it helped them raise money, that show had become his gold standard for heartburn. Bozell was a hiccup by comparison. Valentine also didn’t have much of a financial stake in the PTC’s call for a boycott. In an unusual arrangement, he’d allowed the WWF to sell its own ads in exchange for giving UPN a guaranteed cut of the proceeds. UPN got the same money whether Coke came or left.

McMahon, on the other hand, had an enormous stake. Coke represented 3 percent of his advertising revenue; if other advertisers followed suit, he’d be left having to scramble to cover his UPN guarantees. At first he behaved badly, calling Coke’s move “discriminatory, hypocritical and an affront to free speech” and “its worst decision since New Coke.” But the publicity from his shoot-from-the-hip remarks only helped Bozell as he continued lobbying advertisers—from the U.S. Army to MCI. Not surprisingly, McMahon was more contrite by the time he spoke to the
Wall Street Journal
on November 29. He had heard the verdict of the advertising community, he said. “From now on you’ll see less aggression, less colorful language, less sexuality.” The concession wasn’t only designed to stem the flight of money out of the show. It was also timed to impact the talks that he was having about his long-term future in television.

WHEN THE
McMahons last re-upped with USA in early 1998, they were on the losing end of the battle with
Nitro
and the ground was shifting underfoot. Barry Diller was in the midst of taking over the USA Network and was sufficiently concerned about the ratings that he told his programmers he only wanted to renew the WWF for a year. Vince and Linda wanted three years. So a deal was worked out in which they agreed to a three-year contract with a caveat: either side could opt out a year early so long as they gave notice by November 30, 1999.

Diller naturally assumed that USA would be the one to pull the trigger. But thanks to Raw’s revival, it didn’t turn out that way. While Vince was drafting his statement about Coke, Linda was drafting a letter to USA saying that they’d decided to invoke the opt-out clause. It didn’t necessarily mean the end of the relationship. The McMahons would be happy to do a new deal with USA. But they wanted a bigger role, perhaps even an ownership stake.

The highest-ranking executive under Barry Diller at USA was a former St. Louis television mogul named Barry Baker. When he heard about Linda’s intentions, he was adamant that she not send the letter. USA’s stock was treading water, and he didn’t want it to take another hit on bad news about its top-rated show. So he relayed an urgent message to her, saying that they needed to talk.

The two connected by cell phone while Baker was on a train to Baltimore, where his wife was going into labor. Trying to sound engaged yet casual, he said, “Go out into the marketplace and come back to me with the offer you get.” He even said he’d give her more time to shop for the best deal and extended the deadline for terminating their contract to March 31, 2000. Between now and then, he’d try to work up a new offer. If she found something better, they’d certainly try to match it.

But to dampen her expectations, Baker added this: “I can tell you right now, nobody is going to give you a network.” As Linda hung up the phone, she thought he was one of the most arrogant-sounding men she’d ever done business with.

At the Paramount lot in Hollywood, Kerry McCluggage was only too happy to hear that the McMahons might be shopping for a new home. The forty-five-year-old head of Paramount’s television production group knew all about the relationship they had with USA. In the incestuous world of Hollywood, Paramount had briefly held a stake in USA, and he’d been selected to sit on its board of directors in the early nineties.

In the eight years he’d been at the helm of Paramount, McCluggage had developed a not altogether flattering reputation as one of the industry’s more cautious programming executives. Though he could claim successes such as
Frasier, Entertainment Tonight
, and
Star Trek Voyager
, Paramount’s rivals had gone into the 1999 season with better winning streaks. Warner Brothers, for instance, was producing
ER
and
Friends
for NBC. Twentieth Century Fox produced
The X-Files
and
Ally McBeal
for Fox. And Sony was a rising power with shows like
Party of Five
and
Dawson’s Creek
, both hits on the WB.

McCluggage tried to shake his reputation by launching UPN and putting Valentine in control. But the internal turmoil there had only served to make both of them laughingstocks. The only thing that was keeping the 1999 season from being a complete disaster at UPN was
SmackDown!

All of this left McCluggage in need of a bold, profile-raising move, and when he heard about the McMahons’ restlessness, he thought he’d found it. The WWF’s stable of shows represented what studio chiefs like to call beachfront property, and McCluggage knew exactly how he wanted to use it. The corporate sands were shifting again in Hollywood. His studio’s parent, Viacom, had just paid $37.3 billion to merge with CBS. Given the enormity of the megadeal, few took much notice of the low-rated cable station that CBS threw into the pot as part of it: the Nashville Network.

Mel Karmazin, the powerful new president of the merged behemoth, cared deeply about TNN, however. Though critics snickered at its lineup of country videos and
Dukes of Hazzard
reruns, TNN had 70 million subscribers. In the war over the fracturing cable universe—one in which tiny networks would do anything to get picked up by bigsystem operators—that was enormously valuable. Karmazin’s idea was to relaunch TNN as the National Network, filling it with enough broad-based entertainment to make it a “mini-CBS.”

Unfortunately, TNN was at a crossroads. It had just lost its rights to NASCAR and needed something that had a high profile to keep those 70 million subscribers tuning in while Karmizin put his plan into effect. As an executive there put it, “If we didn’t get something big fast, we were going to die faster than any cable network in history.”

The politics of the situation were obvious to McCluggage: If he could wrest the WWF’s shows away from USA and bring them to TNN, he could knock USA down a notch while giving TNN a lift. It was just the kind of power play he’d been looking for.

ON DECEMBER 2
, McCluggage invited the McMahons to his office on the Paramount lot to talk about their future. Because he wanted them to see instantly that this was going to be a different atmosphere, he welcomed them warmly, almost theatrically. Then he proceeded to spell out his vision for weaving them through every fiber of Viacom—from MTV to UPN to CBS. He watched as a broad smile crept across Vince’s face and was pleased to hear the wrestling promoter keep saying, “This is fantastic. Just fantastic.” Indeed, Vince and Linda were still giddy the next day when they wrote McCluggage to say that they thought they could make “a dynamic tag-team combination.”

Still, Vince wasn’t ready to leave his television home of seventeen years on the basis of that one meeting. So a few days later, he went to his biggest ally at USA, a Harvard M.B.A. named Steven Chao.

Barry Diller made no bones about the fact that he didn’t understand wrestling. He summered in East Hampton and hung out with Calvin Klein. But Chao was something else altogether, a man who loved to talk about how he sat on his grandmother’s lap while she watched her favorite wrestler, Gorilla Monsoon. He made his reputation creating the first wave of reality-based shows at Fox in the early eighties, including
Cops
and
America’s Most Wanted
. (He also cut a legendary figure on the L.A. party scene, once throwing a dog belonging to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch into a pool because he’d heard it had webbed feet. When the dog started to sink, Chao jumped in fully clothed to save it.)

The years since hadn’t mellowed Chao much. He was the last one at USA who would be inclined to complain about the episode of
Raw
that had just aired, featuring Mark Henry lying in bed beside the seventy-six-year-old Mae Young, acting as if they’d just had sex. Nor would he moralize about the pay-per-view in which a Sable wannabe named Stacy Carter flashed her breasts at a crowd of kids in Fort Lauderdale. (McMahon would try to top that the next month by having Mae Young flash her septuagenarian breasts to a packed crowd at Madison Square Garden. Only later would he admit that she had been fitted with a prosthesis, as if that somehow made it better.)

Chao understood that the WWF was an important part of USA’s future, which was why he listened carefully as Vince explained that he wasn’t just going to talk about wrestling in this negotiation. The WWF was serious about wanting part ownership of a cable channel. Even more immediate, Vince had a project that would make him a player in the legitimate sports world. He wanted to start his own football league.

If USA wanted to do a long-term renewal, Vince told Chao, the network had to step up. It had to take an ownership stake in his new league. It was going to be a wedge issue. Chao dutifully passed that message up his chain of command. But to his irritation, Baker and his chief negotiator, the network’s president, Stephen Brenner, still seemed to be taking a relaxed, wait-and-see approach.