The Keys to the Kingdom (6 page)

Eisner's appearance didn't encourage Pudney to accept his dinner in
vitations. “I put off socializing with him for over a year,” he says. “I thought, ‘What is this going to be?' I kept seeing myself going to a sixth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village.” Finally Pudney yielded. By now, Eisner had moved from his one-bedroom apartment into a house that he had helped renovate. “I went to this brownstone on East Eighty-first, between Lexington and Third—this elegant, wonderful brownstone full of beautiful antiques,” Pudney remembers.

Though Eisner's parents may have been unimpressed, Pudney was astonished by the poise of Eisner's wife, Jane. “She was so attractive and had flowing red hair—then—and I remember one of the first things I said to her was, ‘You look like Rita Hayworth.'…Michael just worshiped her. He loved it that I thought she looked like Rita Hayworth.” Among Jane's many virtues, in Pudney's view, was that she “never got in the way” while Eisner put in extraordinary hours at work.

A former Eisner employee says the marriage seemed to be “a partnership about his career,” but adds, “I think she had a hard time. She wanted Michael to have all these wonderful [professional] things, but she also wanted a family life.” In later years, when their children's school activities were involved, she insisted that he attend parent-teacher meetings. Eisner managed to put in enough time as a parent to impress his friend Susan Baerwald, who sees him as “always concerned about being there” for his children. But he also liked to work hard.

Before the children came, it was common for Eisner to begin the day at 8:30
A.M
. and to stop at one or two o'clock in the morning. As always, Eisner was “full of zeal,” Pudney says. “I never had to ask him to do anything. He was willing to go anywhere, anytime, anyplace to pursue the deal. Then I discovered when I had him around talent, they really liked him.”

Even then, in the tumult of the late sixties, Eisner wasn't concerned about creating art or making socially important television. He had only a marginal interest in establishing his intellectual bona fides or showing off his taste. He wanted the kind of success that Wall Street understood. Pudney remembers that Eisner was attracted to programming with broad popular appeal—programming that would work for a company like Disney. “It was entertainment for the masses. Masses. Masses would translate to ratings,” Pudney says.

And early on, he remembers, Eisner saw a way to achieve the kind of synergy that studios have been talking about ever since. ABC had constructed an aquatic park outside San Francisco called Marine World and
Eisner volunteered to take on a special that was set there. “Somehow he got Bing Crosby—don't ask me how—to host the show,” Pudney says. Eisner booked the pop group the Young Rascals and got an unknown to direct the show. It was his first hint that paying top dollar for name talent wasn't always essential. “And Leonard Goldenson loved that show,” Pudney remembers. “So the Eisner boy did real good. They began to take notice in the company.”

Eisner moved up like a rocket. In 1968, the ad agency Foote Cone & Belding tried to hire him. He recommended a colleague at ABC, who took the job. Eisner slid into the vacant position at the network, becoming a director of prime-time development.

As Eisner ascended, the competition between him and Diller intensified. Starger remembers the two jousting for attention as they watched each other warily. “Each knew what the other made and what the other's office size was,” he says. Naturally there was friction between these two bright, ambitious young men. “They had shouting matches with each other but they got along in a strange way,” Starger remembers. “They were both combatants, but combatants get along. I think they respected each other's intelligence.”

“Michael was always in Barry's face—fearless,” Pudney remembers. “Barry could absolutely melt and wilt someone. Michael just didn't care.” Eisner was used to being berated by his father. And when it came to formal education he knew he had an edge over Diller, who had barely been to college. Eisner mentioned once that he liked Edith Wharton's gloomy novel
Ethan Frome,
and realized that Diller had no idea what he was talking about. A few days later, he caught Diller leaving the office with an armload of Wharton books.

Starger observed that whatever their stylistic differences, Diller and Eisner had one thing in common: “Neither of them came from a poor background. Barry came from Beverly Hills; his father was in the real estate business. Michael was from New York and Park Avenue. He lived in a brownstone, which he kept very quiet. No one knew that. So they were fiercely competitive, but money per se—money in the sense of what they earned—was never a major issue. It was what they made compared to the other.”

Starger bonded with Diller during walks to work through midtown Manhattan. He and his wife at the time would take off with Michael and Jane to spend sporty weekends on Eisner's family property in Vermont. “I was
not much of a rider. I almost killed myself a few times,” Starger says. “Michael would say—and this is very much Michael—‘Get on this horse. It's been in the family for years—it's not a problem.' And the horse would take off.” Eisner also gave Starger a rough introduction to skiing. “I guess that's how he was taught by his father—a dive-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool kind of thing,” Starger says.

 

WHILE EISNER MOVED
from job to job in the programming department, Diller had begun to flex his muscles in a bigger arena. One of his earliest assignments was acquiring films to air on the network. This was big business and Diller, still in his mid-twenties, was thrust directly into negotiations with moguls like Lew Wasserman of MCA (then Universal's parent company) and Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf © Western (the parent of Paramount). Though Diller would later say that this was “a remarkable load to put on a kid,” he was actually as tough as his adversaries. “He met the titans of the day,” Goldberg says. “Who else at his age could have been in one-on-one meetings with the giants of the entertainment industry?”

On some occasions, Goldberg walked by Diller's compact office and heard voices raised in anger. “[Barry] would say, ‘Charlie, if you're going to continue to yell, the meeting will be over,'” Goldberg remembers. “The truth was these guys loved dealing with Barry and they'd come out beaming like he was their son. They only respected strength and he could give it back.” Goldberg thought Diller had an aura of sophistication that eluded and impressed some of the less polished power brokers of the time. Charlie Bluhdorn, an Austrian immigrant who was considered something of a bottom-feeder in his quest for undervalued assets, seemed to find this quality especially appealing.

Another executive who also observed Diller's endless dickering remembers: “Bluhdorn could spend four thousand hours discussing a gnat's tail.” Diller was willing to battle long after others would have dropped from fatigue. “I could see that Charlie Bluhdorn was falling in love with Barry Diller,” that executive says.

In the mid-sixties, ABC was struggling in third place, while CBS dominated with shows such as
The Red Skelton Show
and
The Jackie Gleason Show
. ABC had significantly fewer affiliated stations across the country than its competitors and lacked any presence at all in some cities. For the 1966–67 and the 1967–68 seasons, the network had only two of the top twenty shows
on the air:
Bewitched
and
The Lawrence Welk Show
. Groping for something to prop up the sagging prime-time programming, ABC decided to gamble on something new: a weekly ninety-minute made-for-television movie would air from eight-thirty to ten, leaving the ten-to-eleven slot free for variety shows, which were popular then.

In Hollywood, wars have been waged over who deserves credit for any given hit. And
Movie of the Week
became such a stunning success that naturally various people laid claim to it. In articles in
TV Guide,
the
Los Angeles Times, Newsweek,
and elsewhere, Diller is routinely described as the man who launched the
Movie of the Week
. But though Diller shaped
Movie of the Week,
he did not invent it.

Programming chief Goldberg and his then-deputy Martin Starger both remember that they came up with the idea at an after-hours meeting. But a television producer named Roy Huggins, who created the concept for
The Fugitive
television series and later
The Rockford Files,
maintains that he originated the idea for a
Movie of the Week
while working at Universal. He pitched it around Hollywood without success. CBS and NBC also passed. But in March 1968,
Variety
printed a story laying out Huggins's idea of creating a series titled
Movie of the Week
.

According to Huggins, that article prompted Goldberg to ask Huggins to present the idea to ABC. Huggins agreed. “Barry Diller sat for almost the entire meeting leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands clenched under his chin, his eyes never leaving my face,” Huggins recalled later. Diller asked why ABC should buy a concept that NBC and CBS had rejected. Instead of sealing a deal, Huggins says, he heard nothing. In May 1968, however, ABC announced that it was launching
Movie of the Week
. Huggins says he called Goldberg in a rage. “How can you do that?” he demanded. “I brought you this concept.”

“We're going to do twenty-six of these and we think it's too much for any one producer, but we would like you to do a lot of them,” Goldberg replied—according to Huggins. “How many would you like to do?”

“Twenty-six,” Huggins said.

ABC offered him eight, instead. And Huggins says he came to regret that he didn't accept Goldberg's offer. But decades later, Huggins still says that Diller falsely positioned himself as the creator of the
Movie of the Week
—a development he refers to as “the first lap of Barry Diller's Marvelous Marathon.”

“Barry Diller took credit for it,” Huggins complains. “The luckiest thing
that ever happened to Barry Diller was
Movie of the Week
. It paved the road.”

Diller disputes Huggins's entire account. “The concept of doing the movie for television on a weekly basis has no father that I know of—any absolute original claimant does not exist. Certainly [it's] not Roy Huggins,” he says. “The concept we adopted was hatched with Len Goldberg, Marty Starger, and myself.” But he acknowledges: “It certainly wasn't my idea. What I will claim mightily is the concept of what it was going to be, its financing, its extremely complex underpinnings…and every inch of its creative birth happened in my office and in Jerry Isenberg's office, who worked for me.”

Goldberg also does not remember events as Huggins describes them. But Starger says “it could very well be” that Huggins had a movie-of-the-week concept, though he doesn't remember attending a presentation about it. In his memoir, however, former ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson says Huggins originated the concept. But he adds, “Len Goldberg, Marty Starger and Barry Diller took Huggins's idea and jump-started ABC's television network with their efforts.”

When ABC couldn't get a studio to make the films on its terms, Diller boldly persuaded the network to announce that it would make a couple on its own. At the same time the network made a deal with television producer Aaron Spelling to produce a number of the films. At the time the future powerhouse producer of soapy programming from
Charlie's Angels
to
Melrose Place
was just “a guy with an office,” Starger says. Eventually, the
Movie of the Week
helped transform Spelling into a formidable power who virtually controlled ABC. Meanwhile, he helped ABC win control over its made-for-television movies. The studios began to fall into line—asking to make at least some of the films, on ABC's terms. “The phone started ringing off the hook,” Goldberg remembers. “The studios started calling and saying, ‘Where are ours?'”

Diller took charge of the
Movie of the Week,
exerting a level of control that shattered precedent in the television world. “Barry set the rules, Barry controlled the casting,” remembers Zimbert. “He ran it. He didn't wander onto the set to meet girls or guys. It was business.” With particular relish, Diller also took charge of advertising, which previously had reported to the head of the network rather than to the programming chiefs. This taught Diller an important lesson: it helps to sell something that can be summarized in a thirty-second television spot.

But Diller never confined himself to high-concept commercial programming. Among the pictures produced for ABC was the classic
Brian's Song,
the story of terminally ill pro football player Brian Piccolo (played by James Caan) and his friendship with Gayle Sayers (Billy Dee Williams). It won an Emmy for Best Film in 1971.
That Certain Summer,
with Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook, was one of the first films dealing with homosexuality to be broadcast in the U.S.; it won a Golden Globe and Directors Guild Award in 1972. “Barry would force something that had meaning onto the schedule,” Zimbert says. “It might not have ratings but it was Barry Diller doing what was right.”

Another project nurtured by Diller was
Love Among the Ruins,
a film that brought Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn together in a television project. Legendary as the two stars were, the project was a tough sell because of their advanced ages. But Diller “worked and worked and it was his vision to make that movie,” says Brandon Stoddard, a new Diller employee at the time. Diller gave Stoddard a lot of responsibility from the start, ordering him to represent ABC at a meeting with legendary director George Cukor. “I said, ‘Barry, I can't. It's George Cukor. I just [got] here. I don't know where the men's room is.' And he said, ‘Oh, you can handle it. It's no problem.' It was kind of typical—push me into the pool. And I went there. I had been in movie development for maybe five days, and I had a meeting with Katharine Hepburn and George Cukor about this script. I mean—I didn't say a lot.”