The Keys to the Kingdom by Kim Masters

dissent. After the meeting, Eisner started to pace as he reproached Siegel for the ambush. “I have to explain to you why that drives me crazy,” he said. Carsey found this a rather low-key response to an issue that might have sent other bosses into a rage. “He was begging Andy to please understand,” she says. “It was not polished, it was not corporate, it was not a boss talking to an employee.”
    Carsey noticed another trait that Garry Marshall also had observed: the sense that Eisner saw himself as an outsider who ultimately stood alone. “Michael taught me that my job wasn’t about making friends and influencing people,” Carsey says. “It didn’t have anything to do with anything except getting a couple of hits a year…. He didn’t care whether the ideas came from the elevator operator or if they came from going to the right parties.” Carsey finds nothing surprising in the idea that Eisner shunned social relationships with colleagues. “Why would you have friends in this town?” she asks. She was more impressed that Eisner often went to Vermont to be with his family.
    Though they were not close, Eisner once spontaneously dropped everything to accompany her while she looked at a house she was hoping to buy. “Michael, it’s forty-five minutes away,” she said.
    But Eisner was always fascinated by buildings. “Let me go with you,” he urged.
    He hopped into her old Honda and offered his usual cornucopia of ideas about the property. “Michael and I were never friends,” Carsey says. “He was just curious and impulsive.”
    At first, Carsey was worried that she had been assigned a bunch of bad shows that would fail. “If they all get canceled, do I get fired?” she asked Eisner.
    â€œNo,” he replied. “By then, it’ll be somebody else’s fault.”
    Carsey plucked a pilot called The Life and Times of Captain Barney Miller out of the reject pile and asked permission to develop it. The show debuted in mid-1975 and ran for eight seasons. But if the show had failed, Carsey says, Eisner would not have reproached her. “I could talk him into something and he would never, ever come to us later and say, ‘I told you it wouldn’t work.’ He allowed us to fail. He’d say, ‘Give me at least one hit a year. I don’t care how you get there. I don’t care if you show me five pilots that are so horrendous that you have to leave the room, if the sixth one is great.’”
    Despite having the courage of his own convictions that Carsey, Goldberg, and others observed, Eisner also had a characteristic pessimism. Not only was he “always a bit of a hypochondriac,” Pierce remembers, but he always seemed to anticipate a professional disaster of some sort. “Even today he operates as if failure is always around the corner,” says Pierce. “I think that’s what drives him.”
    But at ABC in 1976, failure was nowhere in sight. A taped memo that Eisner made for his boss, Silverman, in July 1976 illustrates the wealth of commercial material that ABC was creating for viewers for the fall—and the myriad problems with script, casting, and star personalities that came with the hit shows. Eisner began by discussing movies: among Brandon Stoddard’s projects was a made-for-television project called The Love Boat, and Eisner said the network was “totally prepared” to make a sequel or a regular series if the first movie was a big hit. Stoddard was reviewing a script for another proposed Aaron Spelling–Leonard Goldberg picture called Fantasy Island .
    And there were high hopes for a nearly completed Spelling-Goldbergpicture called Little Ladies of the Night . “Brandon tells me that NBC is not only panickly interested as to when we are going to air the movie but exactly how far we went with the teenage prostitution,” Eisner said. ABC