The Keys to the Kingdom (11 page)

Aside from the unappreciated
American Hot Wax,
Eisner had made his contribution to Paramount's dazzling 1978 lineup: on July 19, the studio released
Foul Play,
a screwball romp that teamed Goldie Hawn with Chevy Chase in his debut as a leading man. Eisner had quickly assembled the elements for the project to beef up the summer roster, little knowing at the time that the studio would become a veritable cornucopia of hits. The picture grossed $45 million.

There was more to provoke Picker. Paramount's official biography of Eisner proclaimed that “Mr. Eisner and his team of creative and marketing experts created the strongest group of releases in movie industry history.
Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Foul Play
and
Heaven Can Wait
are among the productions that led to Paramount's number-one position.”
Vanity Fair
published an adulatory profile of Eisner, listing
Saturday Night Fever, Grease,
and
Heaven Can Wait
as movies that Eisner “personally can take credit for.” It's true that Eisner had shepherded some of these films, but he hadn't put them into production. Finally Picker became so irate that he wrote to Diller asking him to set the record straight. Diller responded that someday he would try to correct the history books.

Twenty years later, Diller seems prepared to make a gesture in that direction. “Picker did
Goodbar, Saturday Night Fever, Up in Smoke,
et cetera, et cetera,” he says. “[And] Picker was very angry. Because what happened was that David never got the credit for most of those films.”

Eisner was hardly the first to grab credit, of course, and at the time he needed all the help he could get. “When Michael came in, the entire town was buzzing about how stupid he was,” remembers one producer who worked on the lot. “He was trying to do a movie and he met with Richard Lester, the director. And he said, ‘You know what I want? Who did those
Beatles movies?' And the guy who did them was Richard Lester, and he said, ‘Michael, I did them.' Michael said, ‘Oh—you know what I mean, then.' Everyone in town talked about that.”

The town also laughed when prominent agent Jeff Berg convinced Eisner to buy a script that had been floating for some weeks without attracting much interest. “The first week or two after Eisner was in the office, Jeff Berg told him, ‘Oh, I've got this great script, Michael, but I've got to have your answer in twenty-four hours.' And he bought it,” remembers a producer then on the lot. “And everyone said, ‘What a fool!'” Soon enough, Eisner found out the truth and called Berg to complain that he had been taken. Berg says he offered to excuse him from the deal. But Eisner stayed in. He hoped to get John Travolta for the lead, but at the last minute Travolta dropped out. The studio settled instead for Richard Gere in the role of a male prostitute.

American Gigolo
not only launched Gere's career, but it grossed $23 million at the box office. The town may have laughed at first, but Eisner got to laugh last.

 

IN THOSE DAYS
, Barry Diller muses, the culture of Hollywood was different: “There was no publicity about [the studio's performance]. There were no press reports about box-office results on Monday mornings.” But he remembers his satisfaction one afternoon during a lunch at Ma Maison with Marvin Josephson, who was then head of International Famous Agency. Diller was reviewing the studio's upcoming films and he told Josephson that all of the movies were going to be in profit no matter what happened. Josephson's jaw dropped. “What are you talking about—in profit?” he asked.

“We have been selling movies to television and tax-sheltering them,” Diller explained. “The entire cost [of the films] plus the marketing cost of the next year is paid for.”

“That's impossible.”

“Well,” Diller said, with deep satisfaction, “it's true.”

Just a few months earlier, Paramount's fortunes had been sinking. Now life was sweet for Diller, so recently maligned as a know-nothing from television. Though he couldn't have known precisely what the next year's budget demands would be (a film could easily get more expensive than anticipated), he was claiming to have pulled off a financial coup that would
be the envy of any other studio. Other film companies used tax-shelter and television deals but didn't come close to covering 100 percent of their costs. (An executive who worked for Diller at the time says he was exaggerating to some degree but confirms that Paramount pulled off impressive feats in financing.) Diller was enjoying himself at last.

“I wasn't leaving,” he says. “You couldn't have gotten me out of there with a crowbar.”

A
MONG CHARLIE BLUHDORN'S
favorite movie ideas was a historic fiction that involved an encounter between Adolf Hitler and Sitting Bull. That project was never made. But he was also enthusiastic about a more promising notion: making a movie based on the television series
Star Trek
.

Diller emphatically states, however, that the
Star Trek
idea did not originate with Bluhdorn. “The credit for
Star Trek
goes to Arthur Barron, Paramount's chief financial officer,” he says, and adds, as if to answer some unarticulated challenge, “That's the truth. I don't give a fuck what Mr. Eisner or anyone else says.” Diller's vehemence is surprising considering that no one had said Eisner took credit for
Star Trek
. Perhaps the simple truth is that Barron originated the idea and Bluhdorn liked it.

In July 1968, the struggling
Star Trek
television series was about to begin its third season when NBC dealt it a deathblow by moving it from a high-profile Monday-night slot to make room for the popular variety show
Laugh-In
. Consigned to a Friday-night graveyard, the series stumbled along until December, when NBC finally pulled the plug.

The series creator, Gene Roddenberry, had packed up and moved off the Paramount lot after NBC bumped the show from its Monday-night berth. Meanwhile, the studio sold the seventy-nine
Star Trek
episodes for reruns. In syndication, the show began to air five nights a week in small-and medium-sized markets. And then, in one of the more famous examples of the capriciousness of public taste that bedevils the entertainment industry, it caught fire. The defunct
Star Trek
was a hit, and the more the shows were repeated, the more fans seemed to love them.

Paramount soon started asking Roddenberry to bring the show back, either as a made-for-television movie or a low-budget feature film. He held off until 1974. The studio hired him to work on a script for a film that
would cost no more than $3 million. Some months later, when William Shatner (also known as Captain Kirk) was on the Paramount lot starring in a television series called
Barbary Coast,
he dropped by the former
Star Trek
soundstages. He found them empty and strewn with trash. Then he heard the sound of typing coming from Roddenberry's old office. When he went to investigate, he was shocked to see Roddenberry pounding at the keyboard with an unfiltered Camel cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Hey, Gene!” he called out. “Didn't anybody tell you? We got canceled!”

Shatner concluded that “Gene had finally lost his mind.” But it was the executives at Paramount who were going to be driven insane—especially a young, ambitious newcomer named Jeffrey Katzenberg, upon whose slender shoulders the responsibility for this venture would fall.

 

JEFFREY KATZENBERG GREW
up at 1125 Park Avenue in New York, just a short stroll from Michael Eisner's home at 1085 Park Avenue. His father was a stockbroker and the family was well-to-do, although not nearly in the league of the Eisners.

Katzenberg doesn't know if he was ever really a child. At age six or seven, he asked for a piece of rope for Christmas. “As a joke we bought him a hank of laundry line,” his mother, Anne, said later. “He felt every other present, left the other presents alone, unwrapped the rope, and played with it all day. He always knew exactly what he wanted.”

“I'm the kid who had a lemonade stand, who shoveled snow off the sidewalks on Park Avenue,” he says. He wasn't particularly interested in buying things with the money he earned, he says. But his pleasure lay in the “hustle,” the sense of getting things done.

When he was fourteen years old, Katzenberg found the prospect of another summer at Camp Kennebec in Maine especially unappealing after he took a fall and hurt his knee while playing tennis. “I was going to end up limping around the camp for the entire summer,” he remembers. Instead, Katzenberg got up an illegal card game. The stakes were each player's weekly candy allowance. When a junior counselor caught the boys, Katzenberg claimed that the camp director had given him special permission to play cards. It was pure fiction.

“Everybody was so terrified by the director of the camp—campers and counselors alike—that I couldn't imagine this new, junior counselor would ever ask him whether that was true,” Katzenberg says. But the kid asked.
Katzenberg was told that as punishment, he had to stand by the flagpole. He refused. “That was why I got kicked out of camp,” he says. “It escalated. It got to be this ego thing.”

So young Katzenberg found himself with time on his hands. He heard that some kids were volunteering for John Lindsay's mayoral campaign. “I had no idea what Lindsay's politics were,” he said later. “But it was a better camp than the one I got thrown out of.”

Katzenberg immediately brought his energy to this latest pursuit and started organizing little armies of teenage volunteers to distribute campaign flyers by day and stuff envelopes by night. Lindsay's aides started noticing this ubiquitous kid who seemed to want to know everything; they gave him the nickname “Squirt.”

“He would go from office to office and listen in on meetings for hours and hours,” says Sid Davidoff, then a Lindsay aide. Even the mayor recalled: “If you needed six cups of coffee at three in the morning, Squirt could get them.”

“He was sort of like a weasel; he was everywhere,” says Richard Aurelio, who became deputy mayor in Lindsay's second administration. “You had the feeling he was absorbing it all—how people govern, how people operate…. Normally, someone of his age—we would have said, ‘Get lost.' But over time it became uncomfortable if he wasn't there. It was, ‘Jeff is loyal, he won't betray us, and we might need something.'”

Work agreed with Katzenberg; school didn't. It is easy to imagine that Katzenberg, small in stature, might find it a struggle to fit in with other children, but he says that was never the case. At the same time he concedes that he always gravitated toward the adult world. “He was a very weird kid,” says producer Craig Baumgarten, who worked for Lindsay at the time. “He had no adolescence at all. He went from ten to twenty-three in one leap.”

Katzenberg was still in his teens during the late sixties—a crackling time in the city—and Lindsay's team was credited with reaching out to tinderbox urban areas—neighborhoods that were going up in flames in other cities around the country—and minimizing the unrest. Davidoff remembers the fire commissioner telling him that Katzenberg kept a scanner by his bed so he could turn up at major fires. “I think Jeff just wanted to be part of the city,” he says. “If it was a happening, a meeting, an event, Jeff was there.”

If Katzenberg wasn't much of a student at the exclusive Fieldston School, he was a superstar when it came to carrying out Lindsay administration chores. Loyal and efficient, he was entrusted with all sorts of tasks—
including handling large sums of cash. “Standards have changed dramatically,” Aurelio says. “In those days, it was very traditional to pay workers to go to the polls and be poll watchers—and pay them in cash.” Katzenberg also accepted cash campaign contributions. He was trusted implicitly, and such was the mayor's gratitude that on Katzenberg's twenty-first birthday, he issued an edict: the nickname “Squirt” was never to be used again.

Aurelio had his own reasons to be grateful to Katzenberg. One night, he was having dinner with staff at the Old Homestead, a downtown steak house, when he got word that his daughter, who was recovering from a horseback-riding accident at Mount Sinai Hospital, had taken a sudden turn for the worse. “I said, ‘My God, Jodie is in a coma,' and Jeff said, ‘I'll drive you to the hospital,'” Aurelio remembers. “We picked up my wife en route.” The enterprising young Katzenberg kept a siren in his car. “He just went through red lights and got us to the hospital in incredible time,” Aurelio says. “I got to the hospital just before she died and he made it possible. He stayed with us all that night.”

For days, Katzenberg stuck by Aurelio's side. “I don't know how we would have gone through the funeral without him,” Aurelio says. “He handled the cars, made sure the right people were taken care of. He took over. My wife and I were in no condition to deal with it. Every morning when I woke up, the doorman would say, ‘Jeff Katzenberg is waiting downstairs if you need him.'”

Aurelio, who still hears from Katzenberg regularly more than twenty-five years later, says he'll never forget how he felt that night when he received the news about his child. “There were other people around but I knew that Jeff was the one who would take me to the hospital,” he says. “It's obvious that I love the guy.”

 

KATZENBERG SAYS HIS
parents fretted as it became clear that he was not going to start college. “I don't want to say it didn't scare them,” he acknowledges. But Katzenberg thinks his parents saw him as “a little bit like a wild stallion” that had to have wide boundaries. And given the upheaval of the times, they recognized that what was happening to their son wasn't all bad. “This is the Vietnam War,” he says. “The college campuses are shutting down. This is the dawning of the drug age and free love. I was a student during that time and I actually found myself in a very structured
and nurturing environment in which these [Lindsay administration] people took an interest in me.”

Katzenberg doesn't say so, but according to a close friend, he didn't have the happiest of relationships with his parents. His father, in particular, was competitive with his son, says this longtime Katzenberg associate. It is not surprising, therefore, that Katzenberg perceives his relationship with a number of Lindsay aides as the first in a series of mentoring relationships with older men that have continued throughout his life—including his stint with Michael Eisner and culminating with music mogul David Geffen. He views these men as a series of “older brothers.” He describes such relationships in nurturing terms. Rather than compete with his mentors, he seemed simply to want their approval and love. Men like Davidoff “took me in,” he says, or “took me under their wing.”

At the same time he seems to believe that these mentors have a proprietary right to inflict torment. “David Geffen is very protective and God forbid anyone would ever say anything bad about me, let alone try to hurt me,” Katzenberg says. “There is no one other than my wife who would come more to my defense than David would. But he loves to beat the crap out of me—trying to make me better, bigger, and smarter.”

In the years when Katzenberg would normally have been going to college, his mentors moved him from job to job in the Lindsay administration. He was a traveling gofer, moving from one agency to the next, from consumer products to real estate to investigations, learning what he could about city government and getting to know “every corner of the five boroughs of New York.”

By the time he was eighteen years old, Katzenberg was living in a brownstone at 151 West Eighty-eighth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. The house was known as Gracie Mansion West because the roommates included Davidoff, the number-three man in city government and Lindsay's political adviser, and Ted Gross, the flamboyant commissioner of youth services, who made a dramatic appearance in red trousers, fur coat, and floppy cap. Lindsay aide Craig Baumgarten also lived in the house.

All four were single or in the process of becoming single and the brownstone was “essentially a frat house [and] a bachelor's paradise,” Baumgarten says. Gross had a black chow chow, Davidoff had a white Samoyed, and Baumgarten had an English sheepdog. Only Katzenberg was without a pet.

Dozens of women came through each week—Katzenberg says Gross was
particularly voracious and “was with three women a day, every day, 365 days a year.” When it came to women, Katzenberg again was the odd man out. “They had them and I thought about them,” he jokes. But his attention seemed absorbed by work. When Katzenberg and Davidoff left the office late at night, they'd head off to a midnight double feature. “We never seemed to sleep, as I look back at it,” Davidoff says. “We both loved the movies.” But Katzenberg says he didn't especially love film—he mostly sat waiting for his beeper to go off.

Katzenberg had become an increasingly skillful and aggressive card-player, and New York's political establishment—commissioners of various city departments—came to the brownstone for high-powered card games. “Jeff was a terrific poker player,” Aurelio says. “He was just difficult to read. He bluffed well. Conservative poker players fold if the first couple of cards are not good, but not Jeff. He loved the action. Most of the time he won.”

In this pleasant environment, no one asked a lot of questions when stereos and other high-end electronic equipment materialized in the house compliments of Gross. “Gross was stealing left and right and we all kind of knew it and we all kind of looked the other way,” Baumgarten says.

“I'm not sure I actually put two and two together,” Katzenberg says. “There did come a time when Sid said, ‘This is not kosher.'”

The state of New York did not avert its gaze, however. In 1973—a year after the roommates in the brownstone had split up—Gross was indicted and charged with accepting $41,400 in kickbacks from contractors. He pleaded guilty to taking a bribe and served sixteen months of a three-year prison term. “They tried to squeeze him into turning in the higher-ups,” Baumgarten remembers. “I always say the difference between Watergate and Lindsaygate is that John Dean talked and Ted Gross didn't.”

In 1976, the forty-four-year-old Gross was found murdered, execution-style, in Brooklyn—slumped in the driver's seat of a four-door Citroën sedan. His female companion survived the attack. The killer was Kenneth Gilmore, the twenty-one-year-old night manager of a bowling alley. Gilmore worked for James Mosley Jr., the alleged bagman in the kickback scheme that had sent Gross to prison. At trial, it also emerged that Gross and Gilmore had been involved in drug trafficking.