The Keys to the Kingdom by Kim Masters Page B

show up and he has been put on suspension…. We cannot fold to Abe Vigoda—it’s that simple.”
    Happy Days was going along well and Eisner tried to emphasize the positive about the new spinoff, Laverne & Shirley . Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were getting a good grip on their characters. “The one problem we have—and I’ve had calls from Cindy’s agent—is that she’s very unhappy that Penny has all the jokes and all the scenes and all the relatives and that she’s sitting there as the straight man and it’s the Penny Marshall show,” Eisner said. This had been a scenario that Williams had feared from the start, since Garry Marshall—Penny’s brother—was producing the show. At the time, Eisner noted, Williams was in the hospital suffering from pneumonia—an illness that may have been “emotionally caused” in part because she was so upset after filming the first episode. Eisner said he would try to get Marshall to beef up Williams’s role. It was a dispute he could not settle.
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    BY THE TIME Eisner recorded that memo in the summer of 1976, his relationship with Silverman had started to deteriorate. Eisner knew that Silverman would get all the credit for turning ABC around and he knew that he wasn’t going to advance as long as Silverman was in place. Networkpresident Fred Pierce, who had been trying to make these two strong personalities complement each other for the previous year, found that he couldn’t keep Eisner happy. “Fred [Silverman] was a pretty tough taskmaster and would call at all hours,” Pierce says. “At that point Eisner had begun to say, ‘I think I’ve had enough.’”
    â€œOnce in a while Michael wanted to get home earlier, wanted not to go over the same thing eight times,” Carsey remembers. “Michael had a style that was very efficient, brisk, and energetic. Fred [Silverman] was more obsessive about time spent at work, the details—every aspect of every show. Michael was always the first to want to say, ‘Fred, it’s all going to be here tomorrow morning. I have a wife and kids at home.’” Once, she remembers, Eisner abruptly stood during a meeting and declared, “Fred, I can’t do this anymore. I have to go.”
    In a similar vein, Eisner’s assistant, Lee Wedemeyer, recalls: “Fred needed no sleep, so he would call people at two in the morning because he was up and he was working.” When Silverman wanted Eisner to linger at the office, she remembers, Eisner said, “I’m going home or I’m going to have a divorce.”
    Silverman doesn’t remember any friction with Eisner. “We agreed about almost everything,” he says. “If we were wrong, we were really wrong together. We put a show on the air called Mr. T and Tina with Pat Morita—it was a really bad show. We both went in thinking it was going to be terrific. At least we were wrong together. I can’t think of something he wanted to do that I said no to.”
    Carsey says Eisner wasn’t just annoyed by Silverman’s compulsive attention to detail. He also felt that Pierce never appreciated his successes. “Pierce never appreciated any of us,” she says. “Pierce operated out of a fatal flaw in his thinking. He believed it was all luck.”
    Feeling harassed and undervalued, Eisner was ready to move on. And there was more. He was being courted by David Geffen, who was then briefly vice-chairman of the Warner studio, to run Warner’s television division. At the time Geffen was close to Marlo Thomas, Diller’s childhood friend. According to Geffen, Thomas let Diller know that Geffen was courting his old rival. Diller moved aggressively to hire Eisner to head television at Paramount.
    Geffen and Diller were longtime friends but deeply competitive. “Barry didn’t want Michael [but] he couldn’t stand