The Keys to the Kingdom (5 page)

H
AVING DESPAIRED
OF advancement at CBS, Eisner wrote dozens of letters in his quest for a new job. With Jane's help, he sent résumés to television stations and movie studios but received more than seventy-five rejection letters. In the fall of 1966, he finally got a call from ABC. His résumé had been plucked from the pile by a young assistant named Barry Diller. Thus began the complicated relationship between Eisner and Diller—the love, the hate, the competition. Both men were young and at the time ABC was barely an also-ran, struggling to keep up with its far bigger rivals.

Diller had come to ABC through Leonard Goldberg, the head of programming at the network. In 1966, Goldberg was dating a vivacious actress named Marlo Thomas. She was the sitcom star of
That Girl
. “You must meet my agent,” she told Goldberg. “He's just out of the mailroom. He's the lowest agent at William Morris, but he's sensational.”

One evening, Thomas gave a party at her Hollywood Hills home and in walked her agent, the twenty-four-year-old Barry Diller—already bearing himself with a leonine sense of self-possession. Goldberg, curious to test the mettle of the young man who had so impressed his girlfriend, picked a fight with him. He launched into an attack on the William Morris Agency's practice of “packaging” television shows. If a network wanted to make a show using a star or writer represented by William Morris, the agency not only took 10 percent of the talent's remuneration but demanded that the network fork over 10 percent of the license fee that it paid for rights to air the show. Goldberg thought this was simply a rip-off. “What does your agency do [for this money]?” Goldberg demanded. “What is the service you provide?”

Diller tried to defend the practice, but Goldberg was convinced that his heart wasn't in it. “He was very, very smart, he was very articulate, and
although I sensed that he didn't believe [in] it, he defended it because he worked there,” Goldberg says. “And I liked all those three things.”

Born in San Francisco in February 1942, Diller had been raised in Beverly Hills. His father was a real estate developer who built thousands of tract houses in Southern California. “He is a noisy man, hypercritical, and he loves to argue,” Diller told one interviewer in 1984. “From a very early age, I loved to incite him and then do battle. It drove my mother crazy.” Diller never lost the impulse to bait those around him.

The Diller clan apparently was a chilly one, the type of family that didn't assemble for holidays. And the marriage of Diller's parents apparently hit some ice floes. His mother, Reva, filed for divorce in September 1949, when Barry was seven years old, citing “extreme cruelty.” His father disputed her contention in court papers and ultimately she remained in the marriage. Barry's older brother, Donald, was a wayward youth, scrapping with the law and battling a heroin addiction starting at age seventeen. (By the time Barry assumed the top job at Paramount, his brother was in Tehachapi State Prison for selling drugs. About a year later, he was found murdered in a cheap motel outside San Diego. Barry paid $555.94 for the funeral expenses and never asked police about the status of their investigation.)

Barry was also rebellious, though less of an outlaw. He rejects the notion that he was a loner in school but also concedes that he wasn't especially popular. “I was
compelling,
” he says of himself. “People noticed me.”

In high school, Diller's nickname was “the old man.” Terry Melcher, a classmate, says Diller did, in fact, stand out from the crowd. “He did seem in many ways to be twenty years older than the rest of us,” Melcher says. “It turns out he was.” Melcher remembers meeting Diller on a rainy day for an outing. “I had on jeans and a T-shirt and tennis shoes. Diller appears with rubber galoshes over his shoes. When's the last time you saw anything like that? He had a raincoat, a rain hat, and an umbrella. It was very—mature.” Diller also hated rock music and cigarettes, so Melcher sometimes made sure that his car was smoky and the radio was blaring when he picked Diller up for school.

Melcher says Diller was also very attentive to parents—including Melcher's mother, who was Doris Day. “If there were four or five kids at my house and my mother and dad came home from the studio, the other kids would say, ‘Hi, Mrs. Melcher. Hi, Mr. Melcher.' Barry would say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Melcher! I just saw your new movie and it's a triumph! You looked so beautiful!' He got started early.” Diller was far more aware than other
kids of “whose names were connected to high places in the entertainment world,” Melcher says.

A Beverly Hills High School yearbook from 1959 shows a deceptively affable-looking Diller, a smiling young man with a hairline eager to recede, sitting cross-legged on the floor as a member of the school newspaper staff. He was also on the varsity football team, which was shellacked throughout that season. But Diller was hardly the all-American boy he appeared to be. He started at UCLA but dropped out after only four months at the age of nineteen.

At that point Diller's ideas about a career in show business started to gel. He had been a childhood friend of Marlo Thomas and he started pestering her famous father, Danny Thomas, to help him get into the William Morris training program. Thomas was a huge client of the agency and he got Diller an interview. For once, the young man missed his mark: he didn't get an offer. “I began to drive Danny crazy,” Diller said. “I remember calling him at the Sands in Las Vegas, between shows. I could tell he wasn't listening. Finally I said to him loudly, ‘Listen to me. Please call. Here's the name. Please call tomorrow.'” He did, and this time Diller was hired the next day.

Diller started, like many others with an appetite for a corner office, in the mailroom. The year was 1961. Trainees were encouraged to read correspondence, deals, and memos, and Diller immersed himself in the material. He borrowed files on clients from Sophie Tucker to Elvis Presley and mastered their contents. By 1964, he was promoted to junior agent, but by then he had concluded that “There was nothing left to learn.”

Despite Diller's sense that he had absorbed all the wisdom that could be gleaned from the agency, he wasn't that quick to jump when Leonard Goldberg tried to hire him as his assistant at ABC. Diller was comfortable on his home turf and the new job required a move to Manhattan. “He said, ‘I want to be an agent,'” Goldberg remembers. “And I think I probably said, ‘Nobody
wants
to be an agent. That can't be your goal in life.' I finally took him to an ornate pizza parlor on La Cienega Boulevard and convinced him.”

Notwithstanding his lowly title, being Goldberg's assistant meant exercising considerable clout. Goldberg assigned Diller the task of reorganizing the programming department as well as myriad other duties. Diller wrote down Goldberg's orders on a card that he carried in his pocket, and once an entry was on the list, Goldberg found that he never had to worry about
that matter again. “Barry could get it done,” Goldberg remembers. “I could say, ‘A station in Kansas has a problem,' and once he wrote it on his card, I could forget it. I never had to ask how he did it. Barry got it done. He's a closer.”

Martin Starger, who became the number-two man in programming several months after Diller arrived, also thought Diller was a sort of corporate Terminator. “If you asked him to do something, it was done,” he says. “You never knew how it was accomplished—what walls he walked through and what bodies laid behind him. But it was done…. People would call me and say, ‘Christ's sake—what's with this Barry Diller? The guy comes in here like he's Bill Paley.' He would not go in bashfully and say, ‘I happen to be the lowest man on the totem pole. I'm going to ask you a favor.' That was not his style.”

“He was nothing—except you could see he was a genius,” says Dick Zimbert, then a business-affairs executive at the network. “He was just a dynamo, an absolutely brilliant analytical mind. So many Hollywooders can be very bright and can go through the minutiae, but Barry has the ability to get to the essence, to see people's motives, to create a conflict and get the truth out of that conflict being discussed. If I walked in and said, ‘It's seven o'clock,' he'd say, ‘It's eight o'clock.' That was how he worked.”

Goldberg was delighted with his new protégé, but Diller quickly became restless. One night, the two went out to dinner and Diller complained that he was unhappy. “Everyone calls me your secretary,” he said. “They laugh at me.”

Goldberg leaned forward. “I assure you,” he said, “within a short time no one will laugh at Barry Diller.”

 

EISNER FIRST MET
Diller without realizing it. He had gotten a call from ABC and thought he was going to an interview with Leonard Goldberg. This seemed like a piece of luck. Eisner had found that his future brother-in-law, Norman Freedman, had grown up in the same Brooklyn apartment building as Goldberg. Before his meeting at the network, Eisner lapped up all the information he could, hoping to charm his prospective boss. When he arrived at ABC, Eisner's first thought was that the head of programming had a very expensive-looking suit and a surprisingly small office. A no-nonsense interview began and Eisner tried to work his boyish charm: “The Knicks have a great team this year,” he offered.

The effect was not what Eisner had hoped. Unbeknownst to Eisner, he was talking not to Goldberg but to Goldberg's young assistant, Diller, whose interest in such banter was limited at best. Still, the twenty-four-year-old Eisner made a sufficiently favorable impression. Goldberg gave him a job as the assistant to Ted Fetter, who was in charge of specials.

At a glance, Michael Eisner and Barry Diller had little in common. Everything about their affect and style was opposite. Diller had exchanged his old high-school nickname—“the old man”—for a variation: associates at ABC now called him “the ice man.” Eisner, on the other hand, was ebullient and charming. “Michael was a little scattered,” Goldberg says. “As opposed to Barry's very precise mind, Michael's mind was a little more circular.” In meetings, Eisner literally bounced out of his chair.

And while Diller presented a razor-sharp appearance in immaculate starched white shirts and suits, Eisner was something of a slob. “The tie was always a little askew. Something always was a little bit wrong—a slight element of disarray,” says Brandon Stoddard, who worked with Eisner at ABC.

“Every time I see Michael, his hair is all messed up,” Goldberg complained to Diller at one point. With typical bluntness, Diller asked Eisner about the problem and reported back to Goldberg that Eisner came to work on a motor scooter and his hair was blown about by the wind. “Maybe he should wear a helmet,” Goldberg griped. Diller explained that if he wore a helmet, his hair would be mashed down. This was odd dialogue for Diller, whose own hair was a fading memory. “Just figure it out,” Goldberg ordered.

If Diller had been a mannish boy, Eisner was a boyish man. Inwardly, however, Diller and Eisner shared a titanium toughness. The difference was that Diller was more confrontational and direct—he attacked from the front. Eisner was friendly and attacked from the rear. “Michael was hard in a much different way,” recalls Zimbert. “He had more warmth. He would say, ‘Can you do this?' and if you said, ‘I can't,' or ‘It won't work,' it would be a discussion. With Barry, he'd say, ‘I'm telling you to do it.' Right away, there was a hostility…. Barry made it really hard. Michael made it fun.” Still, Eisner was as effective as Diller at getting his way. “Michael was not a beater-upper—he was a manipulator,” Zimbert says. While Diller left bruises, Eisner tried not to leave fingerprints at all.

 

AS HE ROSE
in the ranks, the young Michael Eisner was the anti-Diller. “Instead of sitting there like a sphinx, he would react,” remembers Brandon Stoddard. How compelling was Eisner's charm? As Stoddard puts it, “He could make Barry laugh.”

While Diller used other people's ideas for target practice, Eisner spewed his own suggestions like a fountain. “Michael would come in with ten ideas a day and seven of them would be absurd, like, ‘Let's turn the building upside down so the thirty-seventh floor will be the first floor.' But three of them would be sensational,” says his former boss, Martin Starger.

In 1966, before ABC created an entertainment division on the West Coast, programming executives occupied offices in New York at the network's new headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas. There Diller and Eisner became competitors in the freewheeling atmosphere that allowed those who were capable to succeed. “Nobody cared what I did as long as we were successful and responsible, as long as we didn't do junk,” Eisner remembered later. In a typically off-center analogy, he continued: “We were all in a fish tank, but there was nobody above saying, ‘This fish, that fish.' So the strongest fish dominated, the most creative.”

Within a year Eisner was promoted to a manager of talent and specials. “I realized within a couple of weeks that I really had somebody very extraordinary in the brain department,” remembers Gary Pudney, who had taken over the specials department and became Eisner's second boss at ABC. “He was using words I had never heard.” Pudney found that he had a hardworking underling—though Eisner was outspoken with his opinions and showed absolutely no fear of authority figures. Once, Pudney remembers, “I barked at him and he took me on. He said, ‘Don't talk to me like that. You have no right to talk to me like that.'” Pudney was more careful to regulate his tone after that.

Even at that lowly level, Eisner made an impression on ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson. “He used to say to me, ‘How's the Eisner boy doing?'” Pudney recalls. Pudney had no idea that “the Eisner boy” was from a privileged background. Having seen him riding to work on his motorbike, he thought, “Poor thing. Can't afford to take a cab.” And then, there was his disheveled appearance—the subject of constant comment by other ABC executives as well. Pudney remembers: “They always came to me and said, ‘Do something about him. Fluff him up.'”