The Keys to the Kingdom (7 page)

Despite his willingness to take risks, Diller showed discipline in financial matters. He stuck to a $350,000 budget for early
Movie of the Weeks.
The movies were such successes that by 1973 the network was programming three nights of ninety-minute films. These films helped keep ABC competitive through the mid-seventies.

The next huge innovation for ABC was the miniseries—another groundbreaking concept frequently credited to Diller. In fact, Starger came up with the idea, based on watching similar programming on British television. His proposal for “Novels for Television” was quickly embraced by top ABC management, and Diller was put in charge. The first miniseries,
QBVII,
was based on a Leon Uris novel about a slander trial in England. Diller knew the story—which involved the Holocaust and castration—was challenging material for television. But the project was a smash and Diller chose the second miniseries,
Rich Man, Poor Man,
“simply because I thought it was a good, good read.”

Years later, Diller would fully appreciate the freewheeling atmosphere that permitted him to exercise so much authority as such a young man. “The wonderful thing about ABC was that it allowed people like Michael Eisner, me—and an endless list of others—to take all the responsibility we wanted,” Diller said. “We could make almost any decision.”

As Brandon Stoddard had already discovered, Diller was both the best and worst boss imaginable. He didn't merely delegate authority, he rammed it down people's throats. If they couldn't handle it, they were gone. And despite his earlier humiliation at being taken for a secretary, he was not sympathetic to underlings. “Diller would never talk to anybody—especially lowly secretaries and assistants,” says a woman who worked as an assistant during this era. “He used to throw pencils at his secretaries.”

Executives felt his wrath, too. “I think I was taller when I started working for him,” Stoddard says wryly. And Diller wasn't much more communicative with Stoddard than he was with his secretaries. “Barry used to come in at the end of the day and he'd say, ‘Everything all right?' And I would have tried to see him seven times and was totally unable to, because he was busy. I think he used those words—‘Everything all right?'—like, ‘Good night,' but I would take advantage [to get] relatively quick answers to my desperate problems.”

Stoddard was “madly trying to learn” and Diller was a tough tutor. “Barry is a very hard boss. Very demanding and contrarian in many ways,” Stoddard says. “But once you kind of understood that, things got better…. He would be frustrating at times because I'd show him a promo that I had worked on and he'd look at it and say, ‘Boring,' and then turn and walk out of the room. And I'd run after him and say, ‘What did you mean by that? What part?' And he'd say, ‘It's boring,' and then continue to walk.” Ungently, Diller made Stoddard think for himself. “He kept just pushing decisions down on me—he was a really fine executive that way—he forced me to make recommendations and fight for what I believed in.”

Some outsiders who had to deal with Diller also found him hard to handle. Frank Yablans, who became president of Paramount in 1971, knew Diller because the studio sold films to ABC. Abrasive in his own right, Yablans says he never really liked Diller. (Diller contends that he and Yablans had “an extremely good relationship” at this time—especially because Diller was on such good terms with Yablans's boss, Charlie Bluhdorn.)

At one point Diller became ill and complained bitterly that Yablans didn't show any particular concern. Yablans says he went to considerable
trouble to send Diller the biggest gift he could think of: a live baby elephant. (One source says there was a rude note attached, but Yablans denies it.) Diller says he saw this gesture as “a friendly joke,” but Yablans remembers Diller calling to complain. Yablans then followed up by sending a baby pig (so that Diller wouldn't be lonely, he says). Diller complained again. This time, Yablans sent him a coffin. Diller doesn't recall this exact progression of events but says he and Yablans exchanged “a series of gifts over a period of months as the kind of silly things that executives would waste their time on—but entirely with no dark vein.”

While many wilted under Diller's gaze, those who could cope with his scathing style sometimes developed a deep affection for him. Zimbert forged a bond with him in the summer of 1970, when ABC moved both executives to the West Coast. For a time they stayed at the Bel-Air hotel. “My kids never forgot, he was so nice to them,” Zimbert says. “He was a wonderful human being. The fact that he was a son of a bitch to work for never really bothered me.”

 

IN THE SUMMER
of 1969, Eisner had become director of feature films and program development. For the first time he had to report directly to Diller, who was head of prime-time programming as well as
Movie of the Week
. Eisner was upset that Diller had become his superior and considered quitting. But his bosses persuaded him to stay.

But the following year, Leonard Goldberg left the top programming job and Marty Starger took over. Eisner was named his executive assistant, which put Eisner on a more equal footing with Diller. Even today Starger seems amazed that he survived being boss to Diller and Eisner. “Imagine having the two of them, side by side, and they're working for you,” he says.

Starger soon sent Diller to the West Coast—in part, according to Eisner, “because Barry was difficult to manage and Marty wanted some breathing room.” No doubt, Eisner was glad to have Diller out of Manhattan. Diller had his offices on Sunset Boulevard done in a cool minimalist style, with white oak floors and white rugs. There was a patio and Diller had an extra-long cord attached to his phone so he could sit outside while he vented at his adversaries and underlings. Diller's rise to head of prime-time programming had been based largely on the strength of his success with
Movie of the Week,
and his attention still continued to be engaged primarily by these made-for-television films and miniseries.

In 1971, Eisner became head of children's and daytime programming. ABC was in last place in daytime, and even though his new job was not as prestigious as a position in prime time, Eisner saw some advantages. Not only was he overseeing a major profit center for the studio, but he had an opportunity to garner more attention for himself. The network was already performing poorly in daytime, so he concluded, “The risks were minimal.”

“Barry built a new area,” says Zimbert. “Michael took a disaster area—daytime—and suddenly there was this tall, gangly, kind of goofy guy who brought tremendous energy and focus.”

“He had very good instincts and he has confidence in those instincts and that is a very rare quality,” says Stoddard—who respected Eisner without especially liking him. To some degree, Eisner was swimming upstream in this division, Stoddard says. “He had to stand up in affiliate meetings and talk about what would happen with
General Hospital
or
All My Children,
and the audience was mostly guys [who ran small television stations] who could care less.”

Eisner also turned around children's programming at ABC. At the time, Stoddard recalls, the networks were facing one of their periodic bouts with parents over the lack of quality children's shows. Eisner held a workshop and invited teachers, parents, and opinion leaders—even the other networks, which declined to participate. ABC's award-winning
Afterschool Specials
emerged from this meeting. Eisner also took up a suggestion to air
Schoolhouse Rock,
short animated films that “cost a bloody fortune,” as Stoddard remembers, but were well-produced educational features. In a more commercial vein, Eisner put an animated series based on the Jackson Five on the air.

Over at CBS, Fred Silverman noticed Eisner's innovations and still praises them in a somewhat backhanded manner. “To his credit, if he saw that
Scooby Doo
was working on CBS, the next season there would be a show that looked an awful lot like
Scooby Doo,
only it would be a ghost dog,” he says. “He had a very commercial sense. The first area where he really excelled was the Saturday-morning kid's stuff. It just happened to use a lot of the ideas and basic concepts that originally started at CBS.”

Eisner had yet another area of responsibility: game shows. At one point he and Jane flew to Los Angeles to attend what turned out to be an unexciting run-through of a program that was being pitched to the network. From the pack of William Morris agents who were present, one young man emerged and introduced himself as Mike Ovitz. When Eisner returned to
his hotel, Ovitz phoned him there. “I was just wondering how you liked the show,” he asked. Eisner hadn't much liked it but told Ovitz that his wife had loved it. In fact, he had been annoyed by the call and was even more irritated the next day when, on returning to New York, he found that Ovitz had sent Jane two dozen roses. “Glad you loved our show,” read the card. “Thanks for the help.” Eisner called to complain that Ovitz's attempt to enlist his wife's support was inappropriate. Ovitz apologized and took the opportunity to make some jokes that Eisner found disarming. Beneath his annoyance, he said later, he was impressed by Ovitz's nerve as a salesman.

 

IN
1973,
ABC
moved Michael Eisner to the West Coast as vice-president for prime-time programming. Despite Diller's success with
Movie of the Week,
ABC's regular prime-time programming was weak. The fall schedule for the 1973–74 season included soon-to-be forgotten new shows like
Toma
. ABC scrambled to line up new shows to plug into its weekly grid. The joke in the industry was that no one could find kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst because she was on ABC at eight o'clock on Friday night.

“Barry never liked series programming,” says Fred Pierce, who became president of ABC Television in 1974. “Series programming is about having likable characters. It's about relationships. Movies are more about specific ideas.”

Diller says that he was only beginning to get the hang of his job. “I screw everything up before I get it right,” he says. But he did not dally at ABC much longer. Gulf © Western chairman Charlie Bluhdorn wanted him to come to Paramount and initially suggested that he could be an executive vice-president, reporting to Frank Yablans. When he made that proposal over dinner one night, Diller replied, “I'd sooner work for the waiter.” Finally Bluhdorn said, “I'll give you my job at Paramount—chairman.”

Martin Davis, then a no-nonsense Gulf © Western executive working closely with Bluhdorn, later remembered the impression Diller had made. “We clearly were infatuated with him,” he said. “Was I enthusiastic? Absolutely. We were super-impressed with Barry, and on talent, we weren't wrong.”

But this was a dark day for Yablans—the man who had sent Diller the elephant, the pig, and the coffin. Though he had taken a hand in bringing such films as
Love Story
and
The Godfather
to the studio, Yablans had fallen
from Bluhdorn's favor. Many industry observers say Yablans had simply failed to show Bluhdorn sufficient respect. Yablans was noted for mimicking Bluhdorn's Austrian accent, which made his boss livid. A September 1974 article in
New York
magazine, in which Yablans likened himself to Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Warner, L. B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn, was widely perceived as fatal. That account maintained that Yablans had “managed to beat [Bluhdorn] back to a largely supervisory role.”

But Diller says Bluhdorn was reacting to a far more serious problem than a wounded ego. “People didn't understand Bluhdorn well because he was so theatrical,” he says. “Bluhdorn did not want to ‘slap' Frank Yablans because of the
New York
magazine story. Frank Yablans was simply spinning out of control—truly out of control…. An executive of a corporation simply could not maintain his position in these out-of-control ways. It had been going on for more than a year.”

Bluhdorn called ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson to ask the network to release Diller from his contract. Goldenson conferred with his top executives and concluded that he had better give in. If he didn't, he reasoned, Diller would become an unhappy and problematic employee. As head of a studio, Diller might at least give ABC first crack at promising television shows that Paramount had in the works. Diller was released and took the chairman's title. He was thirty-two years old.

Robert Evans, the head of production under Yablans, had enjoyed his own long and emotional relationship with Bluhdorn while the studio made such enormous hits as
Love Story
and
The Godfather
. When Diller came aboard, the two sat down. “Congratulations, Barry,” Evans said. “I'm going to enjoy working together.”

“Let's get something straight,” Diller replied. “We're not working together. You're working for me.” Evans's career as an executive was over; it was time to become an independent producer.

Yablans says Bluhdorn tried to keep him working alongside Diller, talking about the “impossible dream” of assembling the ideal team of disparate executives to run the studio. The impossible dream was one of Bluhdorn's favorite themes, and as an immigrant who was running an enormous conglomerate, he certainly had savored the realization of many impossible dreams. But Yablans says that for him, remaining at the studio seemed like “an impossible nightmare.” Diller concurred. Before long, Diller had the place to himself.

W
HILE DILLER ASCENDED
a steep learning curve in his new job at Paramount, Eisner was enjoying a honeymoon during which he got to run ABC's prime-time programming. By now Eisner lived at 1357 Belfast Drive, just above Sunset Strip. He and Jane entertained often; one friend said Jane was the first woman she knew who had two dishwashers in her kitchen. The Eisners were close friends with Neil and Marsha Diamond, though when that marriage split up, only the relationship between the wives survived.

At the office, Eisner maintained an erratic schedule. He often canceled appointments as more important meetings took precedence. Young agents like Mike Ovitz used to loiter outside his office because they couldn't get their calls returned. Ovitz even gave one of Eisner's secretaries a bottle of perfume to win her favor.

Despite his capacity for switching course, Eisner didn't like being labeled as erratic. “The word ‘mercurial' came up in the office,” remembers Lee Wedemeyer, who became Eisner's secretary at ABC. “He looked at me and said, ‘I am
not
mercurial.' That was a word he did not want used to describe him. Because he was.”

Eisner conducted business behind a round glass table that served as his desk. “We must have had to clean it fifty times a day,” one of his assistants remembers with a sigh. The furniture was contemporary—black leather couches and chairs.

Martin Starger, who had been Diller and Eisner's boss, left ABC soon after Diller's departure—eased out by Fred Pierce, the recently named president of ABC Television. Like Starger, Pierce was impressed by Eisner's “boyish enthusiasm,” and he also quickly saw that Eisner had “mile-a-minute ideas, many of which were not usable.” For some months, Eisner worked directly with Pierce on the prime-time schedule. Together they
rushed six shows into production for the midseason schedule beginning in January 1975. Three of these—
Baretta, Barney Miller,
and the extraordinarily violent
S.W.A.T.
—became morale-boosting hits.

One night around Christmas, just weeks before these shows were to debut, Pierce ran into Fred Silverman at the ‘21' Club in New York. Silverman had risen to head of programming at CBS, which was riding very high with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, All in the Family,
and
Hawaii Five-O
. But Pierce knew that Silverman was feeling underappreciated and he made his move. In May, ABC announced that Silverman would become president of ABC's programming division.

Chain-smoking and obese, Silverman was not an especially pretty picture at the time. One assistant remembers that during meetings at his beach house, he would hold up an empty pack of Marlboros and bellow for more. She stayed in his good graces by learning to make a good martini. At three
P.M
., another associate remembers, Silverman always checked his watch, announced that it was cocktail hour in New York, and started drinking. But Silverman was the most brilliant television executive of the time. For ABC, hiring him was a stunning coup.

For Eisner, it was not welcome news to have the man who had been head of daytime programming at CBS when he had been a lowly commercial coordinator slide into a job that Eisner was already doing. Though ABC was having a bad season, Eisner had started to engineer a comeback and that must have made Silverman's arrival much harder to take. “He probably had a right to feel that way,” Pierce concedes. But considering the severity of the network's problems, he says, “I felt it was worth the risk of recruiting Fred Silverman.” Eisner made a stab at getting a new job, but finding no eager buyer, made his peace with the situation.

Despite the handful of hits that Eisner and Pierce had put on the schedule, Silverman was hardly excited by what he found at the network. “Barry left ABC in ashes,” he says. “It was absolutely terrible…. There were a lot of shows with the letter
K—Kolchak, Kodiak, Nakia
—it was really a disastrous year. So the timing was very fortuitous for him, that he got the offer to go over to Paramount.”

Diller says he doesn't really deserve blame for the “K” shows and says Starger was responsible for them. He acknowledges, however, that Silverman is “correct enough,” that “ABC was a wreck.” He continues: “I think if I had stayed I would have pulled it out of the fire. Maybe I wouldn't
have. I'm not defensive about it. Had I stayed, I would have had a lot to do.”

 

FRED SILVERMAN SOON
became the beneficiary of a project that Eisner had developed a couple of years earlier. Eisner had been stranded at Newark Airport during a snowstorm with his wife, his three-month-old son, and Tom Miller, the head of development for Paramount. Eisner suggested that he and Miller use the time to think of new ideas for programming. “What was your favorite show?” Eisner asked.

“Father Knows Best,”
Miller replied without hesitation.

“I liked
Mama,”
Eisner said. That series had been based on a warmhearted 1948 film about a Scandinavian family in San Francisco.

Eisner wrote a four-page paper based on this brainstorming session called “New Family in Town.” Miller suggested that Garry Marshall, an established television writer and producer with
The Odd Couple
series under his belt, would have the perfect sensibility for the program. Marshall liked the concept but made a few modifications. “They talked about a sweet, sentimental show like
Mama,
” he says. “I vaguely remembered it. It seemed to be about a Norwegian family with a lot of people named Lars.” Marshall suggested setting the show in the Bronx—his home turf. The network rejected that idea (it was considered “too ethnic”). Eisner proposed making it more Midwestern, and since Miller was from Milwaukee, the program was set there.

Marshall had another idea. “The fifties are back,” he told Miller. Miller liked the idea of setting the show in an earlier era and called Eisner. “I love the fifties!” Eisner exclaimed.

“I'm glad you do because you're the one who has to tell us to go to script,” Miller replied.

Marshall wrote a script that was everything Miller had wanted. When Eisner read it, he called to say that he loved it, too. “Let me give you the go-ahead,” he told Miller. “Let me call you right back.” But when he called again, Miller could hear the disappointment in his voice. The network didn't want to pay for a pilot.

Eisner tried another approach. Paramount was making
Love, American Style
for ABC and Eisner said the network could pay an extra $100,000 to make
New Family in Town,
now retitled
Happy Days,
as an episode.
Love,
American Style
presented a series of unrelated stories each week so the
New Family in Town
pilot would fit right in.

“What's it going to be,
Love in the Happy Days
?” Miller asked. But Eisner was hoping that his bosses would like the episode so much that they would approve the series and never even air it on
Love, American Style
.

Meanwhile, Miller got in touch with Ronnie Howard, who had been the child star of the long-running
Andy Griffith Show
. “Ron had just gotten his driver's license,” Miller remembers. “He was so proud. He said, ‘I just started in cinema school and that's what I really want to do.'” But he liked the script and agreed to take the part of Richie Cunningham. The episode was shot and a test audience loved it. As Miller waited outside an executive screening room, Eisner once again tried to convince his superiors to make the show into a series. He emerged with a long face.

“They thought it was wonderful and charming but they just felt it was a little too soft,” he said. “Look, you have no idea how much I love this show. Damn it, I know we're right.”

But Eisner and Miller were defeated. Several months later, Miller got a call from an upcoming filmmaker named George Lucas, who asked if he could look at some footage of Ron Howard as a fifties teen to see whether he was right for an upcoming film. Based on the television performance, Lucas cast Howard in
American Graffiti,
which became, in turn, one of the top-grossing films of 1973. “Thank God, George Lucas is a genius and he made a wonderful film,” Marshall says. “At the same time
Grease
was coming out on Broadway.” Now the fifties were indeed back. Miller called Eisner to remind him about
Happy Days
. With the Zeitgeist turning his way and his own star on the rise, Eisner finally got a green light for the show. “Don't get scared but I'm prepared to put this on in five weeks,” he said. “Let's meet.”

“So fast he's moving?” Marshall asked when Miller told him the news.

“They don't have hits,” Miller replied.

Inspired by
American Graffiti,
Eisner told Marshall, “I love that movie! We need a gang!”

Marshall didn't like the idea of blatantly ripping off
American Graffiti
. “We'll have one guy and he'll give you the illusion that there's a gang,” he said. Miller came up with an actor named Henry Winkler. Even Winkler thought he was wrong for the part. “This is my Fonzie?” Marshall asked Miller after Winkler left the audition. But Miller convinced him to give Winkler a try.

Happy Days
debuted in the middle of 1974 as a midseason replacement facing the stiff competition of two top-rated shows:
Maude
and
Adam-12
. “Michael went crazy. The minute we got any footage at all, he started making promos, promos, promos,” Miller remembers. “I was actually embarrassed…. He was so completely obsessed that this was going to work—he insisted that the American public tune in against two of the top five shows.”

Happy Days
wasn't an instant hit. “Fred Silverman seemed to understand that shows evolve—they're not really created,” Marshall says. Soon, however, it began to catch on. Winkler's finger-snapping gang of one—the Fonz—was the show's most popular character. The series rose to number one in the country, where it stayed for several years. Even today it still plays in syndication, continuing to throw off cash. It also begat other top-rated spinoff series:
Laverne & Shirley
and
Mork & Mindy
.

“The only thing I felt bad about was that everybody thought
Happy Days
was a ripoff of
American Graffiti,
” says Miller, who felt that he had graciously sent the unaired pilot of
Happy Days
to Lucas as a favor. “I saw Lucas on a talk show and he was asked, ‘How does it feel to be ripped off?' And he said, ‘What are you going to do?' And I thought, ‘You know the real story.'”

Happy Days
is just the sort of commercial fare that Eisner always enjoyed—a show hardly substantial enough to be analyzed. Marshall told Eisner that he always identified with Ron Howard's fresh-faced character, Richie Cunningham—the innocent and somewhat introspective youth. Eisner responded that he identified not with the thoughtful Richie or the cool Fonz, but with Potsie—a character distinguished mostly by a lack of distinction. Pleasant-looking, not too bright, the character, even Marshall concedes, never developed much of an identity. The idea that Eisner found something sympathetic in the unformed Potsie was puzzling. “I didn't quite get it,” Marshall says. “Potsie was the friend who got taken along. The Potsies are part of the group, they're not leaders.” Maybe, he concluded, Eisner saw himself as a friend of the “centers,” rather than being part of the center himself.

But another former colleague from the years at ABC suggests that Eisner's offhanded remark about this
Happy Days
character reveals Eisner's own lack of a center. To that executive, Eisner seemed as undefined as the sitcom character with whom he identified—always ambivalent and hard to pin down. “Part of Michael, in addition to the good stuff and the talent, is
a chameleon capacity,” he says. “He can be whatever he needs to be at any moment. I've seen him adjust in seconds to whatever person is around him.”

Others who worked closely with Eisner early in his career also say they don't quite know who he is. After knowing Eisner for some thirty years, Pudney acknowledges that he's not even certain who Eisner's friends are. Another longtime acquaintance says he finds Eisner “opaque.” Eisner has even kept a physical distance in the often touchy-feely entertainment world. “You don't see him kissing people,” Pudney observes. “He shakes hands and he kind of backs off.”

Lee Wedemeyer, Eisner's secretary at ABC and subsequently at Paramount, says Eisner wasn't even comfortable shaking hands—partly because of hypochondria. When he broke a finger playing basketball, she reflected that he was probably glad to have an excuse for avoiding contact. She noticed Eisner's aloofness on other occasions. Once he sent her a note and signed it “L—Michael.” It wasn't lost on Wedemeyer that he “almost let himself say, ‘love,'” but didn't. She pointed it out to ABC executive Bob Boyette. “Bob and I got together and took it to him and said, ‘Finish the word,'” she remembers. “He would not. And he didn't think it was funny.”

 

EISNER LEARNED THE
limits of courage early on, when he ran afoul of Aaron Spelling. ABC owed a debt of gratitude to Spelling, who had played an important role in the network's efforts to launch
Movie of the Week
. Spelling continued to provide ABC with major hit shows—his
Mod Squad
was a staple for four years—and in exchange, he won increasingly favorable deals from the network. He became dominant to the point that the industry joked that ABC stood for “Aaron's Broadcasting Company.”

In the mid-seventies, Spelling had a guarantee that the network would pick up at least one pilot a year. He discussed a number of proposals with Eisner, who didn't like any of them. Eisner instructed his staff to tell Spelling that ABC would pay his fee but would pass on a pilot for the year. This was hardly the sort of respect that Spelling was used to commanding.