The Keys to the Kingdom (4 page)

Patrick Hart, whose father was superintendent of the Dammann estate,
Cedar Knoll, suggests that Maggie's later insistence on turning off the lights came from her parents. Though the Harts lived in a separate superintendent's house, he says, “We'd have to be careful, too, not to keep the lights on because they could see it from the big house.” (On the other hand, Hart says, the Dammanns were generous when his father died in 1945. Patrick was only sixteen years old, but the Dammanns bought the family a home in the area, and his mother remained fast friends with Reta Dammann.)

Michael remembers that his grandfather was chauffeur-driven to work in a station wagon, but Hart says the Dammann family was driven in Cadillacs except during the Second World War. According to Michael, Milton would even go out of his way to save a twenty-five-cent toll on the Triborough Bridge. (Hart says he never witnessed that but finds it credible.)

The Dammann estate had horses, a few cows, poultry, and ducks. There was a pond where the children could swim and a grass tennis court that Patrick had to groom on Sunday mornings. Milton was “a strong person who commanded respect,” Hart remembers. Once, young Patrick told the very Republican Dammann that his father had voted for Roosevelt. “My father almost killed me for that,” he says.

As a boy, Patrick attended the wedding of Margaret Dammann and Lester Eisner. Massive tents were erected on the lawn near the big wood-frame house. The young “Miss Margaret,” as Hart knew her, and her groom made an exceptionally handsome couple. But there was a definite sense that Maggie could have done better. “He was the one who was talked about,” Hart says. “He was not looked up to.” By the time that vows were exchanged, the Eisner family business was headed toward decline. And despite his Princeton and Harvard degrees, Lester Jr. lacked his father's savoir faire. Even to Hart, it seemed obvious that Maggie was the stronger of the two. “Poor Lester never called any shots,” he remembers.

During summer months, Maggie and Lester lived in the chauffeur's cottage—rooms above the three-car garage. Patrick drove little Michael and Margot to their riding lessons. To Patrick, they seemed like run-of-the-mill little kids. But young Michael remembers being so frightened by his grandfather that when Milton took him on a tour of his razor factory, Michael wet his pants—twice.

Meanwhile, Lester set about confirming everyone's worst suspicions. It is unclear why he didn't put his law degree to use, but instead, he started to dabble. He invested in a doomed Ecuadoran airline and then worked unhappily as a soap salesman for his intimidating father-in-law. His next
move was to produce sports-and-vacation trade shows—an interlude that his young son, Michael, found vastly entertaining. But Lester lost that business, too, and even as a teenager, Michael wondered why his father had bungled matters so badly. Lester then turned to the public sector. He was a Republican who held several positions with the state and federal government.

Meanwhile, Lester told Michael that Lester's uncles had mismanaged the family uniform business—particularly his uncle Monroe. (When Monroe died in 1973, however, his obituary in the
Red Bank Register
said that his “success in business was parallel to his philanthropy.”) Whoever deserved the blame, the Eisner family business was shuttered in the mid-1950s. Lester told his son so many cautionary tales about his great-uncles' supposed arrogance and overconfidence that Eisner developed a lifelong fear of taking success for granted. The lesson that loss might be imminent was so deeply inculcated that Eisner always obsessively anticipated doom even when he had become wealthy and powerful in his own right.

 

EISNER'S PARENTS MAY
have been content to send him to an unpretentious summer camp, but their ambitions were not so modest when it came to college. The plan called for Princeton and then law school—presumably Harvard, which was the alma mater of his father, grandfather, and two of his great-uncles.

Margaret and Lester packed fourteen-year-old Michael off to Lawrenceville, an expensive and elite boarding school that was supposed to feed bright young men to Princeton. Founded in 1810, Lawrenceville boasted a grassy commons, tennis courts, and a golf course. It was also homogeneous in terms of color, gender, and for the most part, ethnicity. Eisner remembers getting his first bitter taste of anti-Semitism when another boy called him a “kike.” In a school that required attendance in chapel, Eisner learned what it meant “to be ethnic, going to a school where when you leave the room you can feel that they're talking about you.” Even though he had received no religious training as a child, the other boys teased him about temple and bar mitzvahs.

Eisner also experienced a ten-inch growth spurt and found that suddenly he was a gangly teenager who had lost much of his skill as an athlete. Academically, he struggled, too (and reverted to the less-than-honest methods followed when his mother helped him cheat on his homework). It must have been a lonely, painful time for him. Lawrenceville students saw their
parents at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and during four weekends throughout the school year. Given Eisner's lackluster report cards and the negative letters from his housemaster about the boy's predilection for shortcuts, he undoubtedly was berated by Lester. He yearned to go to a less demanding public school.

Young Eisner sampled from Lawrenceville's extensive menu of activities, serving on the school paper one year and the yearbook another. He joined the Periwig drama club but missed out on his only chance to play a major role in
The Caine Mutiny
when he was sidelined by a serious case of spinal meningitis.

By November 1959, it was clear that Eisner was not bound for Princeton. And Eisner was determined not to follow in his father's footsteps at another high-pressure, all-male institution. He talked about going to college in California, but his father objected. It was too far and the travel expenses would run too high. One can only imagine his parents' feelings when their only son secretly applied to Denison, a sixteen-hundred-student liberal-arts college in Granville, Ohio. To Eisner, however, Denison represented an escape to a simpler America—the wholesome place he had glimpsed on television. Eisner enrolled as a premed student but quickly realized that he was out of his element in the demanding science classes. He changed his major in his junior year to English. If there was poetry in Eisner's soul, this was when it tried to express itself.

One day Eisner approached William Brasmer, a professor in the drama department, and asked to have a play that he had written produced. He did not get a warm reception. “I just didn't think it was a good play,” says Brasmer, now retired. But Eisner wasn't to be turned away. Brasmer handed it over to a more junior professor, Dick Smith, and the play was presented. “Mike Eisner kept on my back and he complained about the fact that we weren't setting the play right,” Brasmer remembers. “And he demanded that we get six open caskets. He got 'em. I had to go out and get 'em for him. I thought it was preposterous.”

In rehearsals, Eisner sometimes disagreed with drama professor Dick Smith. “Michael would have a very clear idea about how he wanted a scene and Dick would say, ‘No. It won't play,'” says Barbara Eberhardt, who starred in some of Eisner's productions. “And Michael would sometimes sound like he was agreeing but he would always have his way.”

Despite Eisner's powers of persuasion—especially impressive since he wasn't even a drama major—Brasmer says he was “just a minor cog of the
wheels around here.” Nonetheless, Eisner seemed to appear at various times all over campus—and then he would vanish again. “He wanted to know what was happening all over the campus,” Brasmer says. “He was like a snoop. He would go to classes where he wasn't registered.” Brasmer concluded that Eisner made these explorations “to feed his own imagination, to feed his own knowledge about things.”

One of Eisner's more ambitious theatrical efforts was entitled
To Stop a River
(originally called
To Metastasize a River,
until Eisner figured out that the word was usually linked with cancer). Alan Shevlo, who as a freshman performed in the play, says the heroine is kicked out of school for fooling around with boys. She then returns home to “a very unhappy mother-father relationship,” he says. The father (played by Shevlo) runs a bar, and in the family, “everybody is fighting with everybody,” he remembers. Meanwhile, the daughter had started a relationship with a young man whom she met on the train home. The young man arrives unannounced at the bar when the daughter happens to be away, and winds up sleeping with her mother. When the mother realizes what has happened, she commits suicide.

Shevlo's character tells his daughter, “Every day your mother was alive was a living hell for me because she was not satisfied with anything…. Ina way, I envy your mother. I've been getting kicked in the face all my life but I never thought I'd live to see you do it.”

How much these themes of marital discord and betrayal were drawn from Eisner's experience at home is open for speculation. Shevlo says that Eisner came to rehearsals and listened quietly. Eventually, the drama teacher told the students that the play was too talky and instructed them to read the first line of every speech and delete the rest. The play had a short run and was well received by a local paper. A reviewer wrote that it created a “river of enthusiasm and popularity,” though “at times [it] lacked the continuity necessary to make the mission apparent.”

Later in life, Eisner liked to say that he wrote his plays in hopes of attracting the young woman who starred in them, Barbara Eberhardt. But Eberhardt, who now teaches in Maine, says Eisner was a friend—someone she never regarded as a potential boyfriend and who didn't seem to have any romantic interest in her. The two were serious about Eisner's writing efforts and planned to remain partners after graduation. “I think he had aspirations to be a playwright and I was going to be his star,” she remembers.

Eisner had escaped the rigors of Lawrenceville, but Eberhardt knew him
as a “serious” young man. “I wouldn't call him a party person at all and Denison could be a party school,” she says. “He was very low key and private. I don't think many people—even his frat brothers—knew that much about him.”

Al Bonney, who played the feckless boyfriend in
To Stop a River,
was a member of Eisner's frat, Delta Upsilon, and shares Eberhardt's appraisal. “We were a well-respected group of young men, socially active and acceptable, but we were not the jocks and we were not the rich pretty boys,” Bonney says. Eisner had a car and Bonney rode along with him to New York on school holidays. But he didn't get particularly close to Eisner. “He wasn't a loner,” Bonney says, “but he was private…. We drank together. We did stuff together. Did I know him real well? No.”

Eberhardt felt that Eisner had a more spontaneous, less controlled side but kept it under tight rein. “Maybe that was from his parents,” she says. “He learned to toe the mark.” It may also have been that Eisner, following his experience at Lawrenceville, wanted nothing more than to blend in. There was only a handful of Jewish students at Denison, but they weren't singled out for teasing, and Eisner appreciated that.

Eberhardt got to know the Eisner family and visited the farmhouse that Maggie and Lester had bought in Vermont. Like many others, she came away impressed by Michael's mother. “His mother was a very strong woman,” she says. “She was the matriarch. I always experienced her as very warm and generous but watchful…. She always appeared to be taller than Lester, but I'm not sure if that's true. She had large bones. Very smiling, but those eyes—whoa. She was alert and a watcher.”

Eberhardt also remembers that Eisner seemed self-conscious about attending Denison in the first place. “There was always a sense that this was not the most prestigious place to go,” she says. But even if he couldn't fulfill his parents' hopes for a Princeton education, he could try to make them proud of his achievements. “He had certain standards for himself—whether it was an expectation of how a scene would work or to be president of his fraternity,” Eberhardt says. “He was a very determined person…. He was competitive and controlling and needed to be the one who was on top, or knew exactly what was going on.”

Eisner later said he made valuable connections at Denison—not with fellow students, but with the country. In nearby Columbus, Eisner went to his first drive-in movie. Such experiences, he said, were “the reason I'm comfortable in America.”

 

AFTER HIS JUNIOR
year, Eisner had gotten a summer job as a page at NBC through his family's connections with Robert Sarnoff. Conducting tours of the studio and ushering audiences to their seats, Eisner was not immediately mesmerized by the world of television. The next summer, after he graduated, he sailed to Paris, hoping to live the life of a bohemian playwright. The experiment lasted just weeks. “There were a lot of Americans in Paris who were hiding their American Express checks under their mattresses and going around acting real poor,” he said later.

Eisner returned to New York in the fall of 1964 and, with his mother's help, found his first apartment (a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up on Sixty-fourth Street). He went though a difficult job search, sitting through an array of fruitless interviews arranged by his parents. He made a stab at finding an agent to represent him as a playwright. Finally, in November, he was hired as a logging clerk at NBC, tediously recording what commercials were broadcast. Restless, he took a second job doing weekend traffic reports for WNBC Radio.

Three months later, he moved on to a somewhat more elevated position at CBS. Eisner worked as a commercial coordinator, screening and scheduling advertisements that would run during children's Saturday-morning programming. Eventually, he was transferred to the game-show division. Rising television executive Fred Silverman, who ran CBS's daytime schedule, remembers Eisner as “this big gangly kid with program ideas”—a young man with “a very aggressive personality.”