DisneyWar

by James B. Stewart

  Despite Eisner’s sense that he had little in common with Walt, there were certain elements of the Walt story that especially appealed to him. As he later wrote, “I was fascinated, at a personal level, by Walt’s resilience, optimism and relentlessness in the face of the endless obstacles that began with a very difficult childhood and continued in his work life right up until his death in 1966. I was awed, at a professional level, by Walt’s immense creativity and originality, both as an artist and businessman stretching over a remarkable forty-year period.”

  Eisner, too, thought of himself as creative, like Walt, a storyteller at heart. He had majored in literature in college, dabbled in playwriting, and prided himself on his ability to evaluate a script. Walt relied on Roy to oversee the more mundane tasks of finance and administration; Eisner now had Frank Wells.

  But Eisner was also well aware that his affluent Park Avenue upbringing was very different from Walt’s. Eisner’s maternal grandfather, Milton Dammann, was a self-made multimillionaire who became president of the American Safety Razor Company before selling it to Philip Morris. (For a time, his grandfather was the second-largest individual shareholder in Philip Morris.) The Eisner side of the family was also wealthy. Michael’s great-grandfather had made his fortune manufacturing uniforms for the army and the Boy Scouts. Michael’s father attended Princeton and Harvard Law School and his mother grew up on an estate in Bedford Hills, New York, with fifteen servants and staff.

  Despite the family wealth, Eisner’s grandparents displayed a frugality often associated with Old Money. The young Eisner was once riding in a taxi during a snowstorm when he spotted his grandmother, in her eighties, boarding a bus outside Bloomingdale’s department store. He had the taxi stop, intercepted his grandmother, and insisted she join him. “Why are you wasting money on a cab?” she demanded. His grandfather insisted on crossing into Manhattan on the Willis Avenue Bridge rather than the Triborough Bridge to save the twenty-five-cent toll.

  Michael, his sister Margot, and their parents divided their time between an apartment on Park Avenue, the Bedford estate, and a farm in Vermont. Michael knew from a young age that his family was wealthy, especially his grandparents. But discussion of money was taboo, as off-limits as sex. His family had an aversion to people who flaunted their wealth or called attention to their charitable donations—attitudes common in old-line, wealthy, Establishment families, but not in Hollywood or Beverly Hills.

  In many ways Eisner idolized his father, Lester, who was handsome, athletic, charismatic, and energetic, though remote from his son. In the summer of 1949, when Michael was seven, his father put him into the family Buick for a drive to Camp Keewaydin, near Middlebury, Vermont, the first time Eisner can remember being alone with his father. Michael’s father, grandfather, and uncles had all gone to Keewaydin, founded in 1910 as one of America’s first summer wilderness camps for boys. The camp fireplace had been donated by Michael’s grandfather, and bore a plaque commemorating his uncle Jacques, a Keewaydin alumnus killed in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Other trophies and plaques cited various Eisners for their prowess in swimming, canoeing, and as “best athlete.”

  It was dark when they arrived, and a nervous Michael was left alone to sleep in a “wigwam” with other boys. After a day of touring the camp and joining in activities with other campers, the camp leader conferred with Michael’s father, and then asked if Michael wanted to box with another boy at Saturday night’s wrestling and boxing matches. “Sure,” Michael replied, dubious that there was any alternative. He had never boxed. When time for the event arrived, he stepped into the makeshift ring to face an opponent two years older and, it seemed, twice his size. Eisner was soundly beaten in two minutes. He didn’t cry.

  Eisner spent many summers at Keewaydin, both as a camper and later as a counselor, later calling it “by far the most important experience of my life.” As he later wrote in a manuscript for a book called Camp, “Team unity is the critical component of our success (it’s no accident that the building where I work is called Team Disney), and it was at Keewaydin that I came to understand that success comes when the whole group is paddling in the same direction.”

  Curiously, Eisner was never allowed to call his father “Dad,” “Daddy,” or even “Father,” but was required to address him by his given name, Lester. This proved embarrassing for Michael when other children questioned whether Lester was really his father. When Michael asked his mother why he had to call him Lester, she explained that his sister had had difficulty pronouncing “Daddy” as a toddler, so had been encouraged to refer to him as Lester. This explanation struck even the young Eisner as highly implausible.

  Despite his Princeton and Harvard Law School education, Lester drifted through a series of jobs without notable success or fulfillment. The Eisner family uniform business, run by Lester’s brother, failed, though it had no discernible effect on Michael’s family fortune. Lester ended up as a government bureaucrat, the head of public housing under New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, but resigned rather than comply with a state requirement that he disclose his financial investments, deeming the requirement an invasion of privacy. Lester imposed a strict work ethic, rousing his children early on weekends to perform chores and insisting they work at summer jobs. While Michael and his sister were regularly taken to Broadway musicals, they were oddly deprived of more traditional cultural fare. Michael must have been one of the few children of his generation who was never taken to see any of the Disney animated films; he later said his mother wasn’t interested in them. Lester stressed competitive athletics. He regularly woke Michael’s sister at 5:00 A.M. for ice-skating practice, and she bore the brunt of Lester’s competitive drive as she competed but narrowly missed qualifying for the 1960 U.S. Olympic figure skating team. He paid less attention to Michael, who was a natural athlete and team leader, at least until he got to prep school.

  Michael’s best friend was a boy named John Angelo, whose father had been killed in World War II. Angelo’s and Michael’s mothers were best friends, and Lester was something of a surrogate father to John. On one occasion when Angelo came to spend the night with Michael, the boys were put to bed at 9:00 P.M. Michael boasted to his friend that he often stayed up much later, a claim Angelo refused to believe. When his mother came to check on them, Michael asked her to back up his assertion. Instead, she sided with Angelo. “Michael, you know you always have to be in bed by nine,” she replied. Michael, feeling betrayed, flew into a tantrum. Years later he asked his mother to recall the episode and correct the injustice by admitting she hadn’t been truthful. By then she couldn’t remember what he was talking about. But Michael never forgot the incident.

  When he entered the ninth grade, Michael was sent to boarding school at Lawrenceville Academy in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, a prestigious, academically rigorous prep school that traditionally fed many of its graduates to nearby Princeton, Lester’s alma mater. After a relatively easy time at the nurturing Allen-Stevenson School in Manhattan, Michael found the transition to Lawrenceville difficult. He was away from home for extended periods, the sudden growth spurt to a height of six feet three had undermined his athletic coordination (he failed to make both the varsity football and basketball teams), and he was an indifferent student. His native intelligence and quick mind had always compensated for a short attention span until Lawrenceville, which put a premium on sustained academic inquiry.

  It was at Lawrenceville, too, where Michael first felt any discomfort at being Jewish. He’d grown up in a strictly secular household, and Lester was an avowed atheist. It hadn’t made an impression on the young Eisner that the family of one of his classmates at Allen-Stevenson changed its name from Lipski to Lipsey. His family had always stressed that the Eisners were of German descent; he’d never seen any irony in the fact that during World War II his family had employed a German housekeeper, who was a surrogate mother to Michael and his sister. But at Lawrenceville, Michael felt the sting of prejudice. He got into a fistfight after another
boy called him a “kike,” and he overheard plenty of comments and jokes characterized by thinly disguised anti-Semitism. He hated the sense of being different, not just because he was Jewish, but also because his family was wealthy and privileged. He daydreamed about a more “normal” life, like the ones he saw on television—a regular mother and father, a modest house with a yard and picket fence, and a coed public school—just like the lives he saw portrayed on “The Donna Reed Show,” and in Doris Day movies, which he loved.

  It was exactly this kind of idyllic, bucolic, all-American setting that Eisner spotted on the cover of a college catalog for Denison University in Granville, Ohio. A respected coed liberal arts college whose nineteenth-century, tree-studded campus looks like a stage set for higher education, Denison was nonetheless hardly in the league of Princeton, which Michael’s parents hoped he would attend. He didn’t tell them he’d applied until after he was accepted. He enrolled there in the fall of 1960.

  At Denison, Eisner shed the insecurities of Lawrenceville and rediscovered his inherent optimism, self-confidence, sense of humor, and leadership skills. Eisner was one of only a handful of Jewish students, but he fit in easily with his sixteen hundred mostly white, affluent fellow students. He joined a fraternity, Delta Upsilon, where he was elected president (several fraternities, such as Sigma Chi, barred Jews at the time, though there was little of the overt anti-Semitism that had bothered him at Lawrenceville). More important, he abandoned tentative plans to become a medical doctor and discovered literature and drama, inspired by a professor of nineteenth-century literature, Dominick Consolo. Eisner was creative but not especially scholarly: he wrote a thesis on the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in the form of a one-act play. In his literature and drama classes he found it easy to construct scenes and write dialogue.

  Jonathan Reynolds, a playwright and food writer at The New York Times, was Eisner’s friend and classmate at all three of Eisner’s schools. Reynolds grew up on Fifth Avenue and had play dates with Eisner as a child. He recalls Eisner as a natural athlete and leader and an average student. When he spotted Eisner on the Denison campus, he assumed his grades hadn’t been good enough to get him into an Ivy League school. But Eisner impressed him at Denison, both as a fraternity president and a budding playwright. Eisner had a play produced on campus, and the subject matter was controversial for the time. “It was about an Irish girl who was expelled from school because she’d written a paper about Walt Whitman alleging that he was a revolutionary and gay,” Reynolds recalls. “So she goes back to work in her father’s Irish bar. And in the second act, there’s a death and a funeral and Eisner insisted that a life-size coffin be placed on the bar.” Eisner’s play drew a sizable local audience, and Reynolds says he sat there watching and thought, “Wow, this guy has gone and written a play.”*

  After years of all-boys schools, attractive young women surrounded Eisner at Denison. He gave the starring role in his Walt Whitman play to Barbara Eberhardt, a budding actress he was hoping to date. That gambit failed, but he soon met his first serious girlfriend, Judy Armstrong, from Hamilton, Ohio, who embodied the all-American virtues that had drawn Eisner to Denison. By the time he graduated in 1964, he and Armstrong were “pinned,” a serious step just short of engagement.

  Eisner moved to Paris to explore the glamorous existence of a young expatriate playwright, but he didn’t stay long, moving back to Park Avenue with his parents before getting his own apartment on Sixty-fourth Street. Armstrong had stayed in Ohio. Michael’s Christmas gift to her that first year after graduation was returned to him unopened. When he called to find out why, her mother answered. “I guess I should tell you,” she said, “that Judy got married yesterday.”

  Eisner was stunned. He couldn’t eat anything at dinner that night. Still, he went out to a party a friend was having. He tried to turn his heartbreak into a funny story, regaling the other guests with a dramatic rendering of his rejection. One of the guests, an attractive, down-to-earth redhead from small-town Jamestown, New York, named Jane Breckenridge, listened politely, but found him self-centered and boorish. When Eisner called the next week to ask for a date, she refused. He persisted. After repeatedly spurning Eisner’s requests, she relented and agreed to go to the theater with him. They were married in 1967.

  Paramount had produced such legendary critical and box-office hits as the Godfather films, Chinatown, and Nashville, but the studio was adrift and losing money when Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of Paramount’s owner, Gulf+Western, named Barry Diller the studio’s chairman in 1974. He and Eisner had worked together at ABC, and Diller hired Eisner as president two years later. “I hear you’ve really matured as an executive,” Diller said wryly. “You even return your phone calls.”

  Though they were the same age, Diller had ranked above Eisner at ABC, and their relationship was a mixture of competitiveness, wariness, and mutual admiration from the start, honed during the period that Diller produced movies for ABC’s Movie of the Week and Eisner worked under him as director of feature films and development. ABC’s movies became a hugely successful feature under Diller, and Eisner eventually rose to head of primetime programming of ABC, responsible for such hits as “Welcome Back, Kotter,” “Happy Days,” and “Laverne & Shirley.”

  Eisner seemed to have a sixth sense for American popular taste. Though he liked to quote Willa Cather and Shakespeare, and mention that he had been a literature major in college, it was Diller (who never graduated from college and got his start in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency) who aspired to higher culture. When Eisner and Diller were young assistants together at ABC, Eisner had once mentioned that Ethan Frome was one of his favorite books. Diller said something noncommittal. Eisner subsequently spotted Diller in the elevator carrying several Edith Wharton novels and a Wharton biography.

  Coming from television, neither Eisner nor Diller knew much about the insular world of theatrical motion pictures before they arrived at Paramount. But their collaboration produced a now-legendary string of commercial and critical hits: Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Flashdance, Footloose, 48 Hrs. Eisner often told how he’d had the idea for Beverly Hills Cop, another big hit starring Eddie Murphy. He was stopped for speeding the first day he drove his new Mercedes convertible through Beverly Hills, and as the officer wrote up his ticket, Eisner had wondered what it must be like to be a cop in such an affluent enclave.

  Soon after he arrived at Paramount, Eisner met Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had worked as Diller’s assistant and was rapidly establishing a reputation for prodigious energy and hard work. When Katzenberg met Diller and recording industry impresario David Geffen at the airport, he whisked them through customs and baggage claim so efficiently that Geffen turned to Diller and asked, “My God, who the hell is that guy?” Geffen was so impressed that he wanted to hire Katzenberg, but ended up becoming his best friend instead.

  Diller warned Eisner that Katzenberg had been so aggressive, abrasive, and relentless as his assistant that he had moved him into marketing so he could learn to function better in an organization. Short, lean, with glasses and prominent teeth, Katzenberg exuded restless energy and ambition, which Eisner was happy to harness. Like Eisner, Katzenberg had grown up in a luxurious Park Avenue apartment, though his family wasn’t nearly so wealthy or cultured as Eisner’s. His father was a self-made stockbroker. While Eisner revered his experience at Camp Keewaydin, Katzenberg had been expelled from a camp along the Kennebec River in Maine for playing poker. He attended one year of college, at New York University, before joining the New York mayoral campaign of John Lindsay. He rose rapidly through a series of jobs, and was willing to handle any task. He eventually served as treasurer for Lindsay’s unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign. After dabbling in casino gambling, a talent agency, and working for a film producer, he was hired as Diller’s assistant in 1975.

  Katzenberg was smart, intense, and in Eisner’s view, unpolished. Eisner cringed when he mentioned he wanted to remake Hawthorne’s classic novel The S
carlet Letter and Katzenberg asked what it was. Still, Katzenberg got things done. He never had to be told something twice. Katzenberg developed a sixth sense for what Eisner wanted and anticipated his needs. He could finish Eisner’s sentences after Eisner had said just a few words. Not that Katzenberg always agreed with Eisner; he could be quite critical, and the two often argued. But he was fiercely loyal. Eisner reprimanded Katzenberg once for criticizing him to an outsider, and never had to do so again. Eventually Eisner promoted Katzenberg to head of production at Paramount. Katzenberg saw Eisner as a mentor and confidant, though the two almost never socialized.

  At Paramount, Eisner’s touch also extended to television production. Like most of the major studios, Paramount had a television production unit on its lot. FCC regulations barred the networks from producing their own programming, so they bought it from the studios for the initial broadcast, and then the syndication rights reverted to the studios, an enormously lucrative windfall to Hollywood, and one the industry lobbied fiercely for in Washington. Under Diller and Eisner’s leadership, Paramount Television had five of network TV’s top ten hits: “Taxi,” “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Angie,” and “Mork & Mindy.”

  Eisner prided himself on keeping costs modest; some thought it bordered on obsession. He preferred to develop ideas generated internally at Paramount rather than high-priced agents and “packagers,” a strategy aimed at hitting “singles and doubles,” as he put it, rather than home runs. For Eisner, the quality of the story was all-important, not high-priced directors and stars. He looked for stories with compelling characters, clear conflict and resolution, three easily identifiable “acts,” and universal themes that could be summarized—that is, marketed—in a sentence or two. This approach, dubbed “high concept” in the parlance of Hollywood, spawned many imitators, but few were as successful as Eisner and Diller.