ABSOLUTE MONARCH
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's inside look at Walt Disney Co. and the Magic Kingdom's evil emperor, MICHAEL EISNER
chicagotribune.com
By David Greising
Tribune chief business correspondent
Published February 27, 2005
DisneyWar
By James B. Stewart
Simon & Schuster, 572 pages, $29.95
When Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz signed on to become president of Walt Disney Co. in 1995, it should have been a crowning moment of a super career.
Disney Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner had lured what many considered to be the most powerful man in Hollywood--and one of his best friends--with a pirate's chest of inducements. His title would be president, but Ovitz would be a kind of co-CEO. Together they would run Hollywood's hottest studio, the world's most-successful theme parks and a growing list of business ventures, from Broadway shows to the ABC-TV network.
But in Ovitz's first informal Disney meeting with Eisner and two top lieutenants, the trouble ahead was written on a neon sign. " 'Welcome to the company. I just want you to know that I'll never work for you,' " said the company's chief financial officer. The general counsel said the same.
And Eisner? He kept mum.
At home that night, Ovitz told his wife how his day had gone: " 'I just made the biggest mistake of my career.' "
Nobody ever said life near the throne of the Magic Kingdom was a fairly tale. Now, thanks to James B. Stewart's new book, "DisneyWar," we know what it re-ally is: a Tower of Terror.
Stewart gets deep inside the Eisner empire--so deep, in fact, that in the book's prologue he offers a sweaty, klutzy, first-person account of an afternoon inside a Goofy costume at Walt Disney World. It is the one heartwarming moment in the book.
The rest is a tale of corporate intrigue and back-stabbing, of Eisner's larger-than-life ego and an almost mythic refusal to anoint a successor. Stewart evenhandedly depicts the thrilling ups and scalding downs of Disney's business performance. And in the book's final act, he chronicles the struggle between Eisner and Roy Disney, nephew of founder Walt, for control of the Disney empire and custody of the company's soul.
All along--as Disney shareholders have watched with growing amazement over the years--Eisner demonstrates an almost pathological urge to destroy any subordinate who shows any yearnings to become his successor: first Jeffrey Katzenberg, the talented but abrasive studio chief, then Ovitz, then a list of others with lower profiles but high talent, as Eisner maintains a death grip on his position.
Today it is all but official that Robert Iger, Disney's president who came to the company as chief of the ABC network, will succeed Eisner. But now Eisner has damaged even Iger, thanks to Stewart's report of a comment Eisner made to Disney's board about Roy Disney and fellow board member Stanley Gold during the battle with Roy Disney:
" 'They don't think I can run this company. But who do you think can? Bob? . . . Bob can't run this company.' "
It is a measure of the culture of snitching at Disney that when Roy Disney sent Iger a compassionate note after the meeting, encouraging him to keep his head high, Iger reported it to Eisner.
Many of Eisner's shortcomings were well-known long before Stewart's book. For Stewart, the biggest challenge was to take the reader beyond what we already know from the lawsuits Katzenberg and Ovitz filed after their ousters and Roy Disney's anti-Eisner campaign. Cinderella could have scrubbed all her life and still not cleaned all the dirty laundry aired in those public battles.
With all that history, and with the Roy Disney campaign in its early stages, it is a wonder that Eisner agreed to cooperate with Stewart when the two met for dinner in early 2003.
Stewart was not just any curious author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his Wall Street Journal coverage of the 1980s insider-trading scandals. His book on those times, "Den of Thieves," is a landmark in business journalism. And Stewart's dissection of the Clintons' Whitewater escapade, "Blood Sport," is a showcase of dogged investigative reporting. (Stewart and I have served together as trustees of DePauw University, our alma mater, where he succeeded former Disney theme parks Chairman Judson Green as chairman of DePauw's board of trustees.)
At the time Stewart approached him, Eisner had led Disney to unprecedented levels of financial success. But the court fights with Katzenberg and Ovitz were in full bloom. ABC's prime-time programming lineup had dropped from first to worst in the ratings, and Eisner's big-bucks in-vestments in Internet and cable-TV ventures had proved to be costly flops.
Unable to find a counterweight since his alter ego, Disney President Frank Wells, had died in a helicopter skiing accident in 1994, Eisner seemed adrift and isolated. Disney's stock had lost half its value since its peak in 2000. Even as he pondered whether to cooperate with one of the nation's most capable investigative journal-ists, Eisner was increasingly criticized for a lack of judgment and artistic instinct and, as ever, his unwillingness to share power.
Stewart had his first good anecdote even before Eisner agreed to open Disney's gates. In their first get-to-know-you meeting, Eisner speculates aloud that it might be possible to turn one of Stewart's New Yorker magazine articles into a movie.
" 'I see this as another "Mr. Holland's Opus," ' " he exclaims. Stewart sees it as an effort to compromise him so he might not write the book.
Such illuminating details are the real Eisner story that the news reports often missed. Stewart shows us all sides of Eisner: The good, the bad, and the worst.
During the good era, the early turnaround of Disney, Eisner feeds off his rivalry and creative tension with Katzenberg to build one of the great success stories in Hollywood history. We see Eisner conducting rollicking weekly brainstorming sessions, impulsively approving major investments and graciously telling Roy Disney, who helped him win the job, that he would resign as CEO if he ever lost Disney's confidence.
Stewart's fairness is displayed in the way he shows the duplicitous or overbearing sides of Katzenberg, Ovitz and other Eisner foes. " 'I'm the Walt Disney of today,' " Katzenberg boasts at a point when his masterpiece, "The Lion King," is in production. Indeed, as villainous as Eisner becomes in the book, the people he vanquished are nearly as unpleasant.
The bad Eisner who emerges from the narrative is transformed by the success of his early years into a domineering, egocentric and sometimes even paranoid chief executive. It's the Eisner who calls Katzenberg his " 'golden retriever' " in a published interview, or " 'little midget' " to another writer. This Eisner sends inaccurate and unfair assessments of his subordinates to a Disney board member, and cavalierly changes his mind on issues that affect the lives and fortunes of those around him.
When at long last Eisner appoints Iger as Disney's president, in 1999, a vanquished Eisner loyalist who didn't get the job congratulates the winner. " 'I always felt like I wanted to be a member of Michael's club,' " general counsel Sandy Litvack tells Iger. " 'And then I discovered there wasn't any club.' "
Telling as such details are, though, the book's greatest strength is also its singular flaw: There are just too many details.
Stewart seems to want the reader to know everything he heard--not just the really good stuff. Minutiae about long- or soon-to-be-forgotten events like the failed "Black Cauldron" movie or Hillary Duff's protracted contract negotiations compete for attention with what really matters.
Stewart, an accomplished piano player, seems to have forgotten in his writing the technique that turns piano playing into art: dynamics. Too often, he unfolds events for us with the steadiness of a metronome. Had he varied tempo, loudness and syncopation, he might have given the reader a still-greater pleasure.
And just as a great player has a point of view on music, Stewart might have directed us through the narrative a bit more. Stewart's epilogue recalls key moments from the narrative to summarize Eisner's gravest faults: his dishonesty and vanity, his overreaching and, ultimately, his lack of appreciation for the Disney heritage. Those points might have framed the story better as an overture to the book, or as phrases within the composition, rather than as its coda.
Stewart's best ongoing commentary throughout is embodied within Eisner's newfound nemesis, Roy Disney. He opens the book with a scene in which a fellow board member tells Disney that Eisner is about to oust him from the board.
It is a fitting prologue. In pushing out Disney, a man scoffed at all his life as the " 'idiot nephew' " of founder Walt, Eisner was cutting ties with the company's moral compass. Eisner's Walt Disney Co., a cultural and business icon worldwide, seems to be a company with no moral center at all.
As detail after telling detail piles up, Stewart fixes in the reader's mind an impression of Eisner as a manipulative and vain person, dismissive of the legacy he inherits and strutting his way toward an immortality that he alone imagines.
Eisner made it clear he had Walt envy the moment he chose, over a brave subordinate's misgivings, to host the "Wonderful World of Disney" TV show on Sunday nights. Just as Walt had done.
In the last encounter between author and subject, Eisner grabs a notepad to show Stewart how Disney's French ancestral name would have been written. "D'Isner," he writes. Eisner is convinced that his own name translates as "Disney" without the "D."
But he is gravely confused. Eisner isn't "Disney" without the "D." Exposed by Stewart's telling, he is Walt, but without the magic.
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Tribune chief business correspondent David Greising is a survivor of three family vacations to Walt Disney World. |
