The Keys to the Kingdom (21 page)

In Hollywood, speculation continued to swirl around Eisner's next move. Rumors had surfaced that he had been approached about working for Disney. He denied those reports. “I don't even know where Disney is,” he said at one point. And it could have been true. Disney was such a nonentity among the studios that there was little reason to visit its faded Burbank lot.

But as it happened, Eisner knew exactly where Disney was because he had been to the lot in Burbank more than once in the previous couple of years to talk about a job—running the studio or even the whole company. Those earlier talks had not borne fruit. But times had changed, and now, even as Eisner denied knowing where Disney was, he was hoping that he would be moving into a very nice office there in the near future.

 

WHEREVER EISNER AND
Katzenberg landed, one thing was clear: the dynasty at Paramount was over; the dream team that made it all happen
was about to scatter and the effects would be far-reaching. Top management was changing at Fox, Paramount, and Disney. The death of Charlie Bluhdorn had set into motion a chain of events that would transform the face of Hollywood and refashion the entertainment that America and the world watched.

At the age of forty-one, Diller was off to Fox, where he would eventually defy skeptics by launching the fourth television network. The man with the highbrow tastes would help bring the world
Married with Children
and
Beverly Hills 90210,
as well as the hit animated series
The Simpsons
. Those who worked for him, the so-called Killer Dillers, would do well, too—at least for a time. Dawn Steel would become one of the first women to run a studio when she took over Columbia Pictures in 1987. Later, she would become a producer. But she died at fifty-one from a brain tumor.

Don Simpson, in partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, would become one of the most successful producers of his day and create a string of megahits—
Flashdance, Top Gun,
the
Beverly Hills Cop
series, and
Crimson Tide
. The films grossed more than a billion dollars even as they advanced the noisy, high-concept approach to filmmaking that had worked so well at Paramount. But success would not satisfy Simpson. He continued his life of excess, gaining and losing dramatic amounts of weight, undergoing repeated plastic surgeries, patronizing prostitutes, and ingesting mind-bending quantities of drugs.

As for Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg and about twenty-eight other Paramount employees—they were soon to determine the precise location of the Walt Disney Company. There they would engineer one of the most dazzling corporate turnarounds in the history of business.

A
ROUND
6:30
A.M
., Frank Wells drove his blue Mercedes four blocks from his house in Beverly Hills to pick up his jogging partner, Stanley Gold. It was January 1984, and Wells, who had served many years at Warner Brothers, had just finished a sabbatical that he had spent mountain climbing. Now he was back home in Los Angeles, acting as a consultant to Warner. In other words, he didn't really have a day job.

He and Gold went to the UCLA track, where the two men jogged for a mile. Then, while Gold circled, Wells ran up and down the stairs to strengthen his legs. Finally the two returned to Gold's house for breakfast.

This was their routine on many mornings. They had much to discuss. Gold was an attorney who had once practiced law at Wells's old law firm, Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown. But they weren't reminiscing; they were hatching an audacious plan to take over Walt Disney Productions. Disney was a quirky place that shunned innovation. Its managers seemed to be so conscious of the value of the Disney brand name that they actually were afraid to exploit it. The film studio no longer ranked among the Hollywood majors. It was becoming apparent that the whole of the company was worth less than the sum of its parts. Even as Gold and Wells spoke, Disney was beginning to leave a trail of pungent blood in the water. Soon the sharks would be converging.

 

STANLEY GOLD, A
short man with a tendency to portliness, was outspoken and sometimes obnoxious. He was also smart. His star client was Roy E. Disney. Though Roy looked like Walt, he was not the son but the nephew. Roy's father, Roy O. Disney, had feuded bitterly with his brother, and as a result, Walt Disney Productions was split for many years between
“Walt” men and “Roy” men. But when Walt succumbed to cancer in 1966, Roy O. Disney became chairman. In those days, the younger Roy made nature films for the company.

After the elder Roy Disney died in 1971, his son became increasingly discontented with Disney management. He was convinced that too much focus was put on real estate and not enough on the film studio, which he believed was the company's soul. Indeed, following the 1969 hit
The Love Bug,
Disney suffered through sixteen long years without a single live-action success. And the company's signature animation division had not offered much to boast about, either.

But Disney's management, headed by chairman and chief executive E. Cardon Walker, was not especially interested in the younger Roy's opinions. Walker was a “Walt” man, and as the story went, Walt once told Walker that young Roy would “never amount to anything.” Roy was dismissed as “the idiot nephew.” When he tried to establish his own production deal at the studio, Walker turned him down. In March 1977, Roy resigned from his position as vice-president of the company. But he held on to his board seat.

Despite his complaints, Roy wasn't especially interested in business matters. In 1974, he had handed over his own affairs to Stanley Gold, who had served him well: his net worth had doubled to about $200 million. Roy's diversified holdings included cattle ranches and radio stations as well as 1.1 million shares in Walt Disney Productions. But now Disney was adrift. In January 1984, Gold advised Roy that the value of his stake in the company had declined from about $80 million to $50 million in the past year.

Roy had to make a choice, Gold said. Either take a run at unseating Disney's management or sell. The risks involved in attacking management were obvious. “You and I are going to be described as a know-nothing producer and a shyster lawyer,” Gold warned. But Roy was ready to enter the fray. Gold increased Roy's stake in Disney to 4.7 percent—just below the level that would have required him to report his holdings to the public. He also had lunch at Wells's house, and asked Wells whether he wanted to be part of a run at Disney. If things worked out, Gold said, there might be a job for Wells in it.

 

IT WASN'T AS
if Disney's management was invulnerable to cruel characterizations. The chief executive, Ron Miller, was Walt's son-in-law—a good-looking former football player. Miller was not a particularly assertive
fellow but he had recognized that the film division needed revitalization. When he was president of the company, he had tried to make some films with adult appeal while maintaining his vow that wholesome Disney would never make an R-rated movie on his watch. Disney was so conservative that he still faced considerable resistance from within. As it turned out, Miller's efforts failed. The most visible of his miscalculations was 1982's
Tron,
a $21 million science-fiction adventure about a programmer who gets caught inside his own video game. The film bombed resoundingly.

The same year, Walker retired after presiding over the opening of Tokyo Disneyland. The new theme park was a missed opportunity because Disney didn't own it. It belonged to the Oriental Land Company, a Japanese railroad and real estate concern. Disney licensed its name and characters and received only 10 percent of admissions and 5 percent of food and merchandise sales. Disney made millions but missed out on many more millions.

With Walker's exit, Miller was promoted to chief executive officer—a decision that didn't sit especially well with several board members who lacked faith in his experience and abilities. The company tried to bolster Miller by naming a strong new chairman: Ray Watson, a board member who had been an important adviser on the just-opened Epcot Center. Before long, Watson was essentially running the company.

By now, Disney was grossing more than $1 billion a year. But Watson was astonished to find that the company was so out of sync with the times that it lacked even a business plan. The company's health was failing. In fiscal 1982, net income dropped 18 percent. The following year, profit fell from $100 million to $93 million. The studio wasn't helping. In 1983, Disney's film division released only three movies and lost $33.4 million (including more than $28 million that went toward starting the Disney Channel). A year earlier, Miller had approached Michael Eisner about running the film division, but when Eisner asked to run theme parks as well as the studio, Miller had passed.

Instead, he hired Richard Berger, a former Fox executive, to launch a new film label, Touchstone. The idea was to release more adult-oriented fare without risking the sterling Disney brand name. But Berger turned out to be too Hollywood for Disney—executives at the company were annoyed when he admonished them to “go to the movies more often” and horrified that he had an automatic door-closer, just like Eisner's. He didn't get along with Miller, either.

Eisner had talked to Disney again early in 1983—around the time of
Bluhdorn's death. This time, he met with outgoing chairman Card Walker. He had trimmed his sails a bit; now he was willing to start as president with a primary responsibility for film and television. He could take over the rest of the company later, he must have reasoned. Walker seemed receptive to giving Eisner the studio job, at first, but after the meeting, Eisner became convinced that Walker saw him as a typical shallow Hollywood executive, “slick, self-promoting, and obsessed with power and status.” Eisner sensed that Walker would always look down on him. He called Ron Miller and said he wasn't taking the job, which was just as well because Walker had already concluded that Eisner was wrong for Disney.

In March 1984, Touchstone opened Disney's first hit movie in years.
Splash,
starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, was a mildly racy tale about a romance between man and mermaid. The director was young Ron Howard, who had not allowed the success of
Happy Days
to deter him from his dream of becoming a filmmaker. But
Splash
was too little, too late. Wall Street had taken note of Disney's falling earnings and the company was ripe for a takeover.

 

BORN IN MARCH
1932, Frank Wells came from a prominent Mormon family that traced its presence in North America to the days before the American Revolution. (Thomas Wells was the colonial governor of Connecticut.) Frank's great-grandfather, Daniel Wells, was a polygamous Mormon leader who had six wives and fathered thirty-six children. Among them was Heber Wells, Frank's grandfather, a brilliant conversationalist and a talented stage actor in his youth. Heber was elected Utah's first governor in 1896. From his forebears, Frank Wells would inherit a taste for politics, a reverence for the environment, and a hearty appetite for women.

Frank's father was a career naval officer who raised his family on military bases in California and on the East Coast. Tall and rangy, Frank looked more athletic than he was. He had played water polo and basketball as a young man but his real gifts were academic. He had left Pomona College in Southern California with a summa cum laude degree, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a Rhodes scholarship.

At Pomona, Wells had an audacious dream of being the first to scale Mount Everest. His entire climbing experience had been a relatively easy trip to the top of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada, but that didn't perturb him. Then one day in 1953, a frat brother told him that “some guy
named Hillary” had beaten him to Everest. That led Wells to consider another plan. He could be the first to scale the highest mountain on each continent. Before he had a chance to attempt such an undertaking, he was off to Oxford.

Having arrived with shining academic credentials, Frank wasn't ready to immure himself in an ivory tower. He and his schoolmate, a Dartmouth graduate named Vince Jones, hatched a plan to fly their own plane from London to South Africa. Later, Wells said they made the trip during spring break, but Jones says they really took off during an independent study period when their fellow students were cloistered with their books. “If you're an American and you're not in class, you're on vacation,” Jones says. “We didn't study a bit.”

Jones had three hundred hours of flight time under his belt. “I've got my pilot's license so we'll pool our money, buy a cheap plane, and fly from here to Cape Town and back,” he suggested. They took out a loan against their scholarships and bought themselves an Auster Aristocrat three-seater for $600. They named it the
African Queen
.

Wells was in charge of obtaining visas and landing permits. The two added an auxiliary fuel tank to extend the plane's limited range, but they still needed to make stops in dozens of countries or principalities. Later, Wells would say that the night before the two departed, Jones handed him a book on navigation. “There's one more thing you'll have to be in charge of because I haven't had time to learn how,” Jones said—or so went Wells's recollection. Wells stayed up all night frantically studying the book and finished only after they were airborne. But Jones dismisses this account. They were well prepared, he remembers, but Wells liked to create a certain aura of impulsiveness. “Frank thought being spontaneous, somewhat scatterbrained, and adventuresome beyond good judgment was some sort of sign of—not manhood, but being noteworthy,” Jones says.

The two young men made their way into North Africa. In a memoir, Wells recalled seeing Kilimanjaro's snowy peak through the plane window and making an on-the-spot decision to stop. “Let's climb it,” Wells remembered saying to Jones. But again, Jones says they had planned to attempt Kilimanjaro all along.

The climb up Kilimanjaro took six days, and by the last leg, the adventure must have seemed less than splendid. Wells and Jones had chosen a comparatively easy route and Jones, an asthma sufferer, was striding along. But, plagued with altitude sickness, Wells doubled over and threw up every
ten minutes or so. “I was amazed he made it,” Jones says. “That was just sheer determination. He was just miserable and yet he had a goal.” Wells's nausea didn't detract from the thrill of reaching the summit. It was a feeling he would remember for years.

The two resumed their adventure, stopping to visit Nairobi. A classmate at Oxford was the son of the governor of Kenya, who invited them to accompany a hunting party to the Serengeti Plain. When they arrived, the guides wanted to be sure the two young Americans could shoot a gun. They set up targets on enormous anthills, eight or nine feet tall, and asked them to fire away. “Frank thought he was going to be great because he was in the ROTC at Pomona,” Jones remembers. But after a couple of tries, it was clear that neither Jones nor Wells could hit the broad side of an anthill. “You could just see the perspiration on the guide's brow,” Jones says. “They made us practice for a couple of days.”

Both became proficient enough to gun down some wildebeests. The next challenge was getting the trophies home. With all their baggage, they feared their plane would be too heavy to get off the runway at Arusha, south of Nairobi. They considered dumping their long-range fuel tank but then decided to attempt a takeoff fully loaded. They got airborne, but as they passed over a small range of mountains, they were caught in a downdraft. Jones knew the plane was going to crash.

“We survived, thanks to Vince's quick-mindedness in cutting the switches and finding a field to crash in,” Wells remembered years later. On this, they concur. “It was a masterpiece,” Jones says. But even though he landed so the wheels would run in the direction of the furrows plowed into the ground, Jones soon discovered that the furrows changed course midfield. The plane bounced into ruts cutting across its path and flipped. Wells and Jones escaped with barely a scratch but the plane was wrecked.

Wells remembered hitching a ride back to England on a military transport. But Jones says they actually caught a flight chartered by a construction company in a plane filled with rowdy workers. The flight attendants, anxious to stay as far from the men as possible, made Wells and Jones earn their passage by serving drinks.

Back at Oxford, Jones remembers, Wells decided to pull a prank by disassembling a professor's car and rebuilding it in his office. To Jones, Wells seemed less caught up in the joy of the stunt than in spinning his legend at Oxford. Wells was mulling a future that might include politics—hardly surprising, given his ancestry. He liked the idea of doing “harmless
things that would set him apart,” Jones says. But in this case, he almost went too far.