The Keys to the Kingdom (23 page)

With only weeks before the two men were to meet in Europe for the Elbrus climb, Wells had to hurry to get in shape and learn something about mountain climbing. He sought advice from Rick Ridgeway, a climber whom he met through Wheeler. The two tried to climb Sespe Gorge, a rock cliff north of Los Angeles. They took a route considered easy to moderate, but before he was halfway up, Wells was in trouble and wanted to quit. Ridgeway urged him on, telling him that Tom Brokaw had recently “zoomed” to the top on his first climb. Wells redoubled his efforts. When he finally made it, he had “sewing-machine leg”—a climber's term for limbs that vibrate rapidly from exhaustion.

Ridgeway walked away thinking that Wells had “absolutely no natural
ability as a climber.” And he sensed that Wells had no grasp of the danger that lay ahead, that he had “no real idea what it was like up there in what climbers call the death zone.” But Ridgeway continued to assist Wells.

When Bass and Wells attempted a practice run on Elbrus, an 18,510-foot challenge, Wells quickly fell behind. Their Russian guides were openly contemptuous. As Bass reached the summit, Wells collapsed in an abandoned hut hundreds of vertical feet below and would have died right there without the guides' prodding. Nonetheless, he was determined to pursue the seven summits. His wife, Luanne, was distressed that he would expose himself to such danger, leaving her at home with two teenagers. Undeterred, Wells told Bass that they should try to cram the seven summits into one year because they would find it difficult to stay in top condition if they took longer. They decided to go for it in 1983.

On a family vacation in Hawaii a few weeks after his Elbrus adventure, Wells tried a hike up Mauna Loa, a 13,680-foot mountain on the Big Island. He stumbled and plunged headlong into the jagged lava rock. With his hand over his face as it gushed blood, Wells had to drive for an hour to get medical attention. The gash required fifteen stitches. But Wells pressed ahead, joining Bass in a practice run at Mount Rainier. Meanwhile, they made plans to try Everest with a team that was attempting to carve an untried route. It was a bold plan considering that Wells had yet to reach a peak. And he fared no better on Rainier. Once again, Wells fell behind as Bass reached his goal.

Wells was convinced that he simply needed more practice. He and Bass turned next to Aconcagua in Argentina. It was January 1982, two months before they were to start a three-month expedition to Everest. At this point, with the seven-summits project taking up an increasing amount of his time and energy, Wells went to Daly and asked for a leave from Warner. But Daly told Wells that if he wanted to go for a year, he would have to be replaced.

A few months shy of his fiftieth birthday, Wells quit his job. He was as successful as any reasonable man could hope to be: he had a beautiful wife, two handsome teenage sons, a home in Beverly Hills, a house at Malibu, condominiums in Vail and Sun Valley, and a glamorous job as cochairman of Warner. But he wanted more and he was willing to risk his own life and the happiness of his loved ones to get it.

 

UNFORTUNATELY, WHAT WELLS
had in determination he lacked in competence. As Wells and a new team of mountain climbers took a pass at Aconcagua—at 22,835 feet, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere—one of his companions took note of this trait. Seattle attorney Jim Wickwire wrote in his diary: “He seems almost incapable of taking care of himself, and Bass has to look after him when we don't.” Once again Wells fell behind and failed to summit; Bass looked on in dismay as Wells ignored advice on how to correct his technique. Wells seemed to pose a risk to himself and the others. Still, the team went forward with plans to try Everest.

It was a disaster. Within a few weeks, Wells had lost more than thirty pounds. He had developed pneumonia and was ordered to rest in camp. “I guess I have to be honest and say it's a relief,” he wrote home. “[If] I leave feeling I have done my share of the work, and the team is successful, I will be completely fulfilled.” He allowed excerpts from this letter to be published in
Variety
. Wells may have been gone, but that didn't mean he wanted the industry to forget him. A setback for Wells turned into a tragedy when one member of the team—seasoned climber Marty Hoey—fell to her death. Foul weather ended the attempt.

So far, all these climbs had been a prelude to the official launch of the seven-summits effort. Before Wells set off, he had dinner with Michael Eisner. The two men scarcely knew each other but they had met on the slopes of Vail. Characteristically, Eisner grilled Wells on the arcana of mountain climbing, asking about everything from how he relieved himself in subzero temperatures to how he coped with altitude sickness. Eisner was amazed when Wells acknowledged how poorly prepared he was. Wells, he concluded, was a dangerously reckless man.

On New Year's Day 1983, Wells sat in his breakfast room at his Beverly Hills home and signed an updated will. His wife wanted his affairs to be in order. Luanne had assumed power of attorney and shouldered the burden of the family's financial affairs. She was preparing herself to be a widow. As he left, she was weeping.

Her worst fears were nearly fulfilled on the first climb. As Wells struggled up Aconcagua in Argentina, he fell and slid to the very edge of a cliff. This time, the danger was obvious even to him. His first question was whether anyone had recorded the tumble on film. “I don't want to have almost died for nothing,” he explained. Still, he forged ahead. To Bass's exasperation, Wells still expected others to watch out for him. “Frank, you've got to learn to bring your own things,” Bass told him as Wells borrowed a packet of
energy powder. “I swear, you'll go to your grave still not knowing how to care for yourself.” But on his second try at Aconcagua, Wells made it to the top. Leaning on his ax, almost unable to speak, he called back: “You mean this is it?”

The expedition returned to Everest. Bass set out first but turned back because of bad weather. Wells was next. “The team begged me not to try it because of my lack of experience, my weak condition at high altitude, and a deserved reputation for losing my footing at the wrong time,” Wells said later. “Understandably, none of the team would go with me. So I took two Sherpas, and with oxygen, I reached the famous South Call, 26,200 feet above sea level.” Only a day's climb from the top, Wells could taste success. “I'd be the oldest person in history to make it and making the seven summits would be practically assured,” he said.

When the weather took a turn for the worse, Wells bribed the two Sherpas with a year's wages to stay with him. But supplies and oxygen soon ran low and Wells was forced to turn back. Bass made one more run at the summit but the persistent bad weather foiled him, too. Undaunted, the two made plans to return after they had gotten a few of the other summits under their belts.

Wells and Bass went on to conquer McKinley, Kilimanjaro, and then Elbrus, where they strode to the finish in lockstep, reciting Rudyard Kipling's “Gunga Din.” Their next stop would be Vinson—a logistically challenging trip to the Antarctic. Meanwhile, they were planning another attempt at Everest. But this time, Luanne drew the line. As far as she was concerned, Wells had all but abandoned his wife and sons. “I'm not saying you can't go,” she told him. “But…if you go back to Everest again and are lucky enough to get home alive, I won't be here.” Wells decided to settle for six summits.

Vinson was a mere six hundred miles from the South Pole and, in Wells's words, “two thousand miles from anything that could possibly be called civilization.” In some ways, it was the toughest outing of all. The mountain had been climbed only twice before. Wells was incensed that the American military was actively discouraging would-be climbers from making the attempt. He worked the phones for a week to find a plane to make the journey and for six weeks to get special casualty insurance from Lloyd's of London. He took three trips to persuade the Chilean government to do a parachute fuel drop halfway down the Antarctic Peninsula. His hard work paid off when he made it through the climb, frostbitten and vomiting.

The trip was notable for another reason: it was the first time that Wells had actually “cooked.” He really just heated some leftovers during a layover on his way home, but he considered it a feat. He was so excited that he told Luanne about the marvelous “microwave thing” that he had used. “Darling, we've got to get one,” he said.

“Frank,” she replied, “we've had one for twelve years.”

Wells and Bass had an easy stroll up Mount Kosciusko in Australia, marking the sixth of the seven summits. Wells kept his promise to Luanne. Bass was left to conquer Everest alone, and at fifty-three, he became the first person to climb the seven summits. He and Wells later wrote a book about their adventures (coauthored by Rick Ridgeway), but Wells's part in the seven-summits attempt ended as he and Bass stood atop Kosciusko, reflecting on their achievements. “I just hope one thing,” Bass told Wells.

“What's that?” Wells asked.

“I just hope, now that this is over, you're able to go home and find yourself a job.”

W
ITH THE SEVEN
-summits adventure behind him, Wells threw himself into Stanley Gold's plot to take over Disney. It was starting to look as though he might not wind up in the unemployment line after all. In fact, Wells was already thinking about recruiting talent to help him when and if he got in the door at Disney. “Whatever else you do, get Michael Eisner,” Wells told Gold. Wells and Eisner were not friends, but Eisner was a hot talent and Wells undoubtedly knew that things had started to unravel at Paramount in the wake of Bluhdorn's death.

In early 1984, however, personnel matters were not the first priority. In February, Gold and Wells had gone to New York to line up a team of investment bankers and lawyers as they explored potential lines of attack. Roy Disney, who had been attending the company's annual meeting in Florida, flew up to join them. In a late-night meeting over a room-service dinner at the Ritz-Carlton, Gold and Wells pointed out to Roy that he had a looming conflict of interest. If he intended to launch a serious fight, Roy would have to resign from Disney's board of directors.

On March 9, the day that
Splash
opened, Roy sent Ray Watson a terse letter of resignation. He offered no explanation for his departure. Since Roy had hardly uttered a complaint about the company in recent years, Watson was stunned. He phoned repeatedly, and finally wrote, to see whether things could be worked out. Roy never responded.

The very day that Roy's resignation was made public, corporate raider Saul Steinberg started buying shares in Disney. The dominoes had been given the nudge that would topple them. By the end of the month, it was apparent that Steinberg was a potential hostile buyer. Sid Sheinberg, president of MCA/Universal, gave Ron Miller a sympathy call. What a pity it would be, he said, if Disney were snapped up so cheaply. He asked if there
was anything MCA could do. Unbeknownst to Miller, Sheinberg also covered his bases by calling Roy Disney. Maybe MCA would find an opportunity there, in the event that Roy went on the attack.

Those discussions came to nothing. But it was clear that Disney's managers had to act. Anyone who acquired the company would not only throw them out but possibly break up the company and sell it off in pieces. Disney started looking into a defense. Watson turned to the Bass brothers of Texas to help fend off Steinberg.

Bass Brothers Enterprises was a $4 billion conglomerate that had its origins in oil and gas leases. In some circles, the Basses were considered to be just as predatory as Steinberg. But Sid Bass, the eldest of the four Bass brothers, was determined to convince Watson that he was more than a quick-buck kind of guy. In fact, the Bass brothers had held significant stakes in companies like Church's Fried Chicken and Prime Computer for years. Over lunch at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Watson came to believe that the Basses might answer his problems.

On June 6, 1984, Disney and the Bass brothers got into bed together when Disney agreed to buy Arvida, a Bass-owned Florida development company, for $200 million in stock. The idea was to bring in a friendly new shareholder, beef up the company, and make it more expensive to acquire. The same day, Disney made a deal to purchase Gibson Greeting Cards for $315 million.

Steinberg didn't blink. He waited only two days to launch a hostile takeover attempt. He had more than a billion dollars in his arsenal from partners who were prepared to split up the company. In fact, Roy Disney had hoped to be one of them, offering to throw in his lot with Steinberg if he could get the studio, copyrights, and merchandising rights for $350 million after Steinberg took over. But Steinberg didn't need Roy and rebuffed him.

With that option closed, Gold and Wells went another way. Their only hope was to team up with the Walt forces and try to buy the company. The financing would require them to sell off some assets, but maybe not too many. The important thing, they agreed, was that Disney should not pay “greenmail” to Steinberg—in other words, the company should not buy back his shares at a premium just to get him to go away. That, they agreed, would invite a pack a jackals hoping for the same type of payoff to come at the company.

With this strategy in mind, Wells and Gold met with Watson and Miller
at Miller's home in Encino on a Sunday afternoon. Miller was not especially happy to see Wells, who was a friend but had never quite gotten around to telling Miller that he was a key part of Roy's “brain trust.” Wells tried to smooth things over by saying that Roy's team wanted to keep the company intact. Nobody mentioned that Roy's team had offered to help Steinberg break up the company.

Even as the meeting was under way, Miller and Watson had dispatched Disney's lawyers to negotiate with Steinberg. On Monday, Disney agreed to exactly the type of greenmail deal that Gold so vehemently opposed. Having pocketed a $32 million profit, Steinberg took his leave.

Wells and Gold were outraged on several fronts. They were incensed over the greenmail. They had disapproved of the deal to buy the Gibson greeting-card company. And Gold had angrily told
Business Week
: “Disney needs those 20,000 acres of Arvida land like they need another asshole.” The Roy team decided to retaliate. They would demand several seats on the board and a high-level job for Wells. If Disney didn't come across, they would attack. They would sue to block the greenmail payment and the Gibson acquisition. They would launch a proxy fight to unseat the board.

At first, Disney declined to meet their demands. But the day before the Roy team was going to file a notice of its intentions with the SEC, financial columnist Dan Dorfman reported that Roy was about to start a war against Disney management. That prompted the company to call, wanting to make a deal. Watson agreed to give Roy a bloc on the board—including seats for Gold and Roy's brother-in law—but the company still refused to give Wells a job. Wells said he would not let the settlement collapse over the issue.

Gold accepted the verdict but insisted on reshaping the board's executive committee, which took the lead on key policy matters. Former Disney chairmen Don Tatum and Card Walker had to be dropped. This gesture would humiliate the two Disney career men and Wells advised Gold not to insist on it. But Gold was relentless. He thought it would establish that Roy was back with real clout. Reluctantly, Watson gave in.

That evening, when the exhausted Roy team went to dinner to celebrate, Roy fainted in a hallway outside the dining room. Moments later, Gold fainted, too. Some said he keeled over at the thought that Roy Disney—with whom he was making such a splendid career—was no longer among the living. Both men, however, were apparently suffering only from exhaustion and recovered rapidly.

Soon after he was installed on the board, Gold got a call from Sid Bass.
“In thirty seconds, I knew it was going to be a natural alliance,” Gold said later. Gold's colorful denunciation of the Arvida deal was quickly forgotten. Gold and Bass started to call the shots. Both agreed that the Gibson Greeting Cards deal should be scuttled. After putting up a brief fight, Watson went along. Before the Disney board even had a chance to ratify that decision at an August 17 meeting, Gold and Richard Rainwater, a key man at Bass Brothers Enterprises, began to install their own management.

Gold first had to convince Rainwater that his candidate, Wells, was right for a top job. Gold may have been defeated earlier in his attempt to put Wells in place, but he did not intend to let the matter rest. Wells flew to Nantucket to visit Rainwater at his vacation home there. Wells was on his way in, and Ron Miller, the weak chief executive, was going to be the first one out the door.

By now, Disney's board was prepared to accept that Miller could not survive. At the August 17 meeting, the Gibson deal was canceled and a committee was appointed to study options about the company's future. Miller was the only one who seemed not to understand that the committee was set up to search for his successor. After the meeting, board member Phil Hawley took Miller aside and told him that the study would probably result in a request for his resignation. As he absorbed the news, Miller began to weep.

 

THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY
night, Gold and Wells invited Eisner to join them in Gold's study, where they were drinking grappa as they mulled over their next move. By now, it was August 19—just about three weeks before Diller announced his departure from Paramount. Eisner knew an ill wind was blowing at Paramount. A few months earlier, he had asked Roy Disney if there was any opening at the company. Roy seemed responsive and Wells had subsequently assured Eisner that he might indeed find opportunity at Disney if Roy's plans worked out. In July, Roy kept Eisner warm by calling him in Vermont, where he was visiting his children at Camp Keewaydin. Despite Eisner's efforts to engineer his way into Diller's job at Paramount, Eisner knew Davis was unlikely to give it to him. So by the time Wells finally invited Eisner to join him in Gold's study, Eisner was seriously on the job market.

The meeting went well—Eisner spewed forth ideas for reviving the studio, making movies, getting into television production, putting cartoons on
Saturday morning. Gold told Eisner that the front-runner for the Disney job was Dennis Stanfill, a buttoned-down former head of Twentieth Century Fox who had won the favor of board member Phil Hawley. Like Wells, Stanfill had been a Rhodes scholar. Hawley was convinced that Stanfill, an investment banker, could command respect on Wall Street.

Gold was backing Wells and Eisner as a team, and he invited Watson to meet Eisner. Watson drove to Eisner's house in Bel Air and the two sat in the living room and talked. It is easy to imagine Eisner explaining that any of his hit shows at ABC or Paramount—
Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Taxi
—would be perfect for Disney. He also sang the praises of Walt. And he explained that Marty Davis was demanding a rate of growth at Paramount that simply could not be achieved. Disney, on the other hand, could only get better. “If I go somewhere, I want to go to a place that's on the mat and build it up,” Eisner said. “That's how Paramount was when I came in. That's how ABC was when I went there.” Eisner's intelligence, humor, and disarming candor worked like a charm on Watson.

Without even meeting Stanfill, Watson wrote a six-page memo to the board recommending Eisner as chief executive. He would recharge the studio while Watson stayed as chairman and focused on Disney's real estate holdings. Several board members, including Hawley, were unconvinced. They didn't believe Eisner had sufficient business experience. Many industry observers also believe that some of the old guard felt that as a Jew, Eisner would make an inappropriate choice to run the Walt Disney Company. The board members were willing, however, to consider him for a lesser job.

On September 5, Watson once again visited Eisner at home. Unbeknownst to Watson, Paramount was about to explode. Marty Davis was visiting Los Angeles that very week. But Eisner was not prepared to take what Watson offered now—the number-two position, chief operating officer. Eisner knew what he wanted: chief executive or nothing. He would be perfectly happy if Watson remained as chairman. Watson promised that he was going to get the board to approve exactly that arrangement.

Watson went into the next board meeting, on Friday, September 6, expecting Eisner to get the nod. Meanwhile, Eisner had an interesting day ahead of him. That evening, he was attending Diller's dinner party for Davis. But before then, he met with Davis, even as the Disney board convened, to say he was probably going to be offered the top job at Disney.

But Phil Hawley wasn't ready to give up on his choice, Dennis Stanfill. To Gold's dismay, he argued that the board should not act quickly. There
should be no vote at the board meeting that day. The question should be studied by a committee, and the committee should pick someone with solid business experience. Gold was astonished when Watson, who had been Eisner's advocate, merely said, “Okay.”

While this was going on, Eisner was sitting in his office nervously waiting for the phone to ring. It didn't—not until the middle of the afternoon, when Wells told him the result of the board meeting. Eisner now felt that he was a man who had crawled out on a limb that was unexpectedly slender. “What kind of an organization is this?” he demanded. “Don't you have any management? Stanley, I thought you were running the company.”

“I've barely got my oar in the water, kid,” Gold replied.

Quickly, before Diller's dinner, Eisner went back to Davis. Maybe he wasn't going to take this Disney job after all, he said. Davis didn't seem to care.

 

WHEN DAVIS CALLED
Eisner the following Tuesday and asked him to come to New York for their final showdown, Eisner said he couldn't leave at once because his children had their first day of school. The real reason was that on Wednesday, Eisner was supposed to meet at eight
A.M
. with Phil Hawley. Unlike Watson, Hawley was not bowled over. He kept returning to the question of corporate experience. It wasn't just Eisner. Hawley thought Wells, who had been an attorney before going to Warner, also lacked the kind of corporate stature that would impress Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Watson seemed to be taking Hawley's side. Wells told Gold that Watson had invited him over and asked him to take a relatively inconsequential business-affairs job at the film studio. “Schmucks,” Wells said to Gold. “Can you believe it?…It's over.”

But Gold wasn't ready to quit. When the screening committee met at the end of the week, Gold attacked Stanfill as a martinet. “You see guys like Eisner as a little crazy or off-the-wall,” he told Hawley. “Every great studio in this business has been run by crazies. What do you think Walt Disney was? The guy was off the goddamned wall.” Hawley countered that Eisner and Wells had “never run anything but a division.” Gold replied that Paramount may be a “division” but it was a billion-dollar operation, as was the Warner studio.