The Keys to the Kingdom (51 page)

Another view holds that even if Eisner didn't quite buy the Ovitz legend, he did relish the idea of being the boss of the person once known as the most powerful man in Hollywood. In truth, Eisner was probably not that impressed with Ovitz, the son of a liquor salesman from the San Fernando Valley—any more than he ultimately felt much respect for Katzenberg, who lacked a college education. Neither man could touch the credentials of Frank Wells, who was literally a Rhodes scholar. The marriage between Ovitz and Eisner had been a long shot from the start.

“It really was a lunar eclipse,” says a high-level Disney executive. “If Frank doesn't die, if Michael doesn't have the heart thing, if he doesn't get alienated from Jeffrey, if he doesn't buy ABC, if the MCA negotiation doesn't fail, if Ronnie doesn't leave [CAA], and if the wives aren't best friends—if any one of those things doesn't happen, it doesn't go down. It was Jane trying to protect her husband. It was Michael Eisner taking five hundred calls a day from Ted Koppel and Diane Sawyer—and he's not that comfortable with talent. The
Wall Street Journal
is giving him a hard time about succession. If those things didn't line up, this doesn't happen.”

Ovitz soon sank into a situation of prolonged and increasingly public humiliation. His enemies, who had waited for years for him to falter, pounced. “He's not Michael Ovitz anymore,” gloated David Geffen. “He's a guy who has a job working for Michael Eisner.”

During Ovitz's tenure, Bollenbach said that Eisner was sometimes plainly impatient with his number-two man. But at first, they always seemed to make up, as they had done before Ovitz came to the company. “Eisner can really get after him, you know: ‘Mike, that's not it! You don't get it! Forget it!'” Bollenbach said at the time. “And Ovitz gives it right back: ‘Bullshit! I get it!' Then, later in the evening, you'd see them practically holding hands.”

 

EARLY ON, OVITZ
tried to fix one of Disney's lingering problems. Immediately after he started at Disney, he approached Jeffrey Katzenberg at ABC chief Bob Iger's wedding on Long Island in October 7, 1995. He told Katzenberg that he would resolve Katzenberg's contract dispute within
two weeks. This was the kind of matter that Ovitz was used to settling at CAA. But as the unpleasant months went by, it became clear that Ovitz lacked the clout to carry out his agenda. He and Katzenberg met on a couple of occasions. Seeking neutral turf and anonymity, they even met in the emergency waiting room at St. Joseph's Hospital across from the Disney headquarters. But it soon became obvious that the parties were miles apart. “I was at a trillion dollars and they were at forty-two cents,” Katzenberg remembers. But in fact, the parties were closer than that. At one point, a knowledgeable source says, Geffen—who got involved on Katzenberg's behalf—said his side would come to terms for $100 million. Disney had been willing to offer $80 million, this source says. Ovitz told Eisner that Disney could settle for $90 million, but Eisner refused to make a deal.

Indeed, Eisner did not seem inclined to patch things up with Katzenberg. The two men had barely spoken since Katzenberg's departure from Disney. Their first meeting came at a wake. Don Simpson, the onetime Paramount executive who had so admired Eisner and befriended Katzenberg when he was in that studio's marketing department, had been found dead in his bathroom on January 19, 1996. Simpson's demise had long been predicted: he had died obese, reclusive, and with a veritable pharmacy of drugs in his system. Simpson's friends had been aware of his decline; indeed, Katzenberg had attempted an intervention. Turn over your life to me for six months, he had urged, and clean yourself up. It was a cold-turkey approach that other Simpson friends, including agents Jim Wiatt and Jim Berkus, thought was hopelessly naive. Neither Katzenberg's efforts nor Wiatt and Berkus's go-slow approach had prevented Simpson from drugging himself to death.

The industry came together to mourn Simpson at Morton's, a restaurant that Simpson had frequented in better times. There were stars—Warren Beatty, Will Smith, Michelle Pfeiffer. Several of the old Paramount guard were reunited—Dawn Steel, Barry Diller, and of course, Katzenberg and Eisner. In this very public setting, Katzenberg was the one who crossed the room and greeted Eisner. It was an awkward moment. “Well,” Katzenberg said, gazing about at the throng that had gathered to see Simpson off, “he's happy tonight.”

Eisner looked at Katzenberg as if he were talking gibberish. “Jeffrey,” he said pointedly, “he's
dead
.” With that, the conversation pretty much petered out.

A few months later, Eisner called Katzenberg and proposed a meeting
to discuss the television deal between DreamWorks and ABC. The meeting, brokered by ABC chief Iger, was to take place at Eisner's Aspen home. Anticipating an opening to settle the brewing legal dispute, Katzenberg rearranged his schedule so he could make the trip. But the day before the meeting, Eisner's office canceled. Livid, Katzenberg called Ovitz to complain. “He can't do this to me anymore,” he said.

Katzenberg decided it would be a cold day in hell before he would jump through hoops trying to make things straight with Eisner again. Eventually, inevitably, this matter was going to wind up in court.

 

BY THE SPRING
of 1996, Ovitz was already so concerned about his future at the company that he had written Eisner a memo proposing ways to salvage his position. It produced no effect. In August, when Eisner canceled plans to take off the month, Ovitz was even more downhearted than ever. It seemed that Eisner would never let go for a minute. Ovitz eventually came to believe that Eisner had instructed all his division chiefs not to follow any Ovitz directive without first clearing it with Eisner.

Ovitz felt strangely optimistic, however, at a Disney conference for senior executives in September. Believing that perhaps he could outlast his detractors and recalling some words of encouragement that he had heard from Eisner, Ovitz pleaded with his colleagues to stop leaking damaging information to the news media. His remarks were instantly reported in the press. “That's when I said this is stupid,” he said later. “It was a stupid idea that I could come in and change this culture. The insanity of my thought process overwhelmed me.”

He wrote a letter to Eisner, saying the job wasn't working for him and that the two of them needed to talk. But weeks passed and no conversation took place. Meanwhile, the press was having a field day at Ovitz's expense. Perhaps most painful for Ovitz, at least initially, was a broadside in the
New York Observer
headlined
POOF
!
MIKE OVITZ, FROM SORCERER TO SCHMO
. The piece not only took the
Wall Street Journal
to task for using the adjective “powerful” to describe Ovitz, but described him as being “Mr. Eisner's whipping boy” with nothing much to do. Worst of all, to Ovitz, the article ended with an anecdote about a sleep-over party for children from the Thomas Dye School, which Ovitz's young son Eric attended. According to the story, one of Eric's classmates surprised his parents by saying, “Eric's father used to be powerful but now he's the number-two guy over half of
Disney.” To Ovitz, who frequently accused his adversaries of attacking his family even when no such thing had occurred, the mere mention of his son's name must have driven salt deep, deep into his wounds.

Worse yet, Eisner was doing nothing to defuse the media attention. “He could have stopped it in his tracks,” Ovitz says. “All he had to do was give a definitive quote, which I asked him to do.”

On September 30, about a year after he started at Disney, Ovitz and Eisner attempted a public appearance on
Larry King Live
. Eisner said the talk of problems at the company was “just all baloney. The fact of the matter is that we together have almost as many enemies as Saddam Hussein, and so it's very difficult not to have this kind of gossip.” Ovitz said he and his new boss “talked about a two-year learning curve…. I probably know about 1 percent of what I need to know.” The interview was a flop. Both men looked uncomfortable and out of sync. Despite Ovitz's request, at no point did Eisner give him a ringing vote of confidence. In fact, the two barely made eye contact.

As the drumbeat grew louder that Ovitz was on his way out, Eisner offered
Vanity Fair
another pallid defense of his number-two man. “There is always a period of learning the business, the lingo,” Eisner said at one point. “He understands the entertainment business…and I am very satisfied with his performance.” He also dismissed the idea that Ovitz was a roving president without a portfolio. “He had been extremely helpful outside the United States, specifically in Europe and Asia. And in corporate governance, in cheerleading, in strategy for the whole company.” Asked who reported directly to Ovitz, Eisner said: “Every division reports to Michael Ovitz. Some of the heads of divisions report to both of us. It's completely clear inside the company. Michael Ovitz is the number-two guy.”

But within the walls of Disney, few were buying that scenario. “It's what we sit around talking about all day,” said a Disney staffer at the time. “The betting is it's like
The Godfather Part II
. You've got Hyman Roth, who says he's going to die and pass it all to Michael Corleone. But in fact it turns out that Hyman Roth thinks he's going to live forever; he isn't going to give Michael Corleone anything and in fact ends up trying to kill Michael Corleone.”

 

A SIDE FROM THE
sheer impossibility of his position, several blunders marked Ovitz's tenure. His attempt to bring producer-manager Brad Grey
to Disney backfired. Grey had a number of television shows on the air, including
News Radio
and
Just Shoot Me
. ABC already owned half his production company under a deal that predated the merger with Disney. To make a deal with Grey, Disney would have to buy the other half.

Ovitz offered Grey a number of jobs at Disney, even suggesting he might be right to succeed Bob Iger at the helm of ABC. But to Grey's surprise, Ovitz wavered when it came time to follow through on his own suggestions, especially regarding the price that Disney might pay to buy the rest of the production company. “The clear sense was Michael was trying to get Eisner's approval on every beat of what he was trying to do,” says an executive close to the negotiation. “Michael [Ovitz] didn't have the wherewithal to follow his instincts without having to double-and triple-check.”

When Grey flew to Aspen to talk with Eisner at his home there, it was clear that Eisner had no interest in making a deal. This was just one example of a pattern that would frustrate Ovitz: Eisner would allow him to start exploring an idea and not express his disinterest until Ovitz had already gotten himself involved in a negotiation. In retrospect, it would seem to Ovitz that Eisner enjoyed embarrassing him.

The parties continued to talk through their lawyers, but the situation turned nasty when Grey refused to lower his price. At one point, when the
Wall Street Journal
published an article suggesting that Brillstein-Grey was having financial problems, Grey accused Ovitz of spreading the story. The two men, once the closest of friends in the Hollywood style, engaged in several heated phone conversations including one in which Ovitz allegedly threatened to destroy Grey. Brillstein-Grey subsequently struck an extremely lucrative deal with MCA, and ended up under Ron Meyer's corporate roof instead of Disney's.

The most visible of Ovitz's moves was his wooing of Jamie Tarses, NBC's then-thirty-one-year-old senior vice-president of prime-time programming, to run programming at ABC. In an effort to get free of her contract, Tarses was rumored to have threatened NBC's West Coast president, Don Ohlmeyer, with charges of sexual harassment. Though she denied ever making such a threat, Hollywood rallied to Ohlmeyer's defense. Many blamed Ovitz, though there was no proof that he had supported Tarses's alleged tactics.

Insiders said Eisner had serious reservations about hiring Tarses, a young woman whose flirtatious, sometimes erratic manner definitely did not appeal to him. But he failed in his own play to get producer Marcy Carsey,
whom he had known since his own salad days at ABC, to take the job. Tarses finally got the position as president of the entertainment division in June 1996. From the start, Eisner made it clear that his support for her was lukewarm at best. She dangled for months amid unfounded rumors that she was about to be fired. And just as the episode was fading from memory, the fight got another charge from the media. Ohlmeyer referred to Ovitz as “the Antichrist” in a
Time
magazine interview.

Another problem arose from the deal with Martin Scorsese, which turned out to be something of a Trojan horse for Disney. Scorsese brought with him a project called
Kundun,
the story of the Dalai Lama. Universal had decided against making the film because of concerns about how the Chinese government would react. But Ovitz, whose loosely defined job included opening China to all things Disney, apparently did not anticipate what was to come. In 1997, the Chinese government said it would ban new Disney ventures in China if the film was released under the studio's banner. Disney could hardly be seen as buckling to the Chinese government and proceeded with the film. Eisner was concerned enough to hire Henry Kissinger to try to smooth things over. “We cannot be intimidated to not distribute this movie,” Eisner said at the time. But he added that he hoped “the Chinese'll understand…in this country, you put out a movie, it gets a lot of momentum for six seconds, and is gone three weeks later.” In the case of
Kundun
—a film with only limited, art-house appeal, that is precisely what happened.

 

LIKE KATZENBERG, OVITZ
slowly and painfully came to accept the fact that Eisner would never share with him. “[Eisner] was my best friend for 25 years,” Ovitz said later in an interview with author Robert Slater. “To this day I don't know why he brought me in there…. He was supposed to be less hands-on. He says I didn't know what I was doing, but he didn't give me the opportunity to do anything. We were going to be partners. We were going to run the company together. He brought me in as his successor. I thought there would be a two-or three-year learning curve. But it didn't work from the day I started.”