The Ride of a Lifetime Page 3
I don’t carry much pain with me from those early years, other than the pain that my dad didn’t live a happier life, and that my mother suffered, too, as a result. I wish he could have felt prouder of himself. My sister and I were never deprived of love as kids. We always had a roof over our heads and food on the table, but there was little or no money for much else. Vacations were usually spent driving to mundane places in our car or going to the beach a few minutes away from our house. We had enough clothes to look presentable, but nothing extra, and when I tore a pair of pants in the fall, I was typically told to wear them with a patch until we had the money to replace them, which could be months. I never felt poor, and no one viewed me as such. Things were a lot thinner than they looked, though, and as I grew older I became aware of that.
Late in life, after I’d become CEO of Disney, I took my father to lunch in New York. We talked about his mental health and his perspective on his life. I told him how much I appreciated everything that he and my mom had done for us, the ethics they instilled, and the love they gave us. I told him that was enough, more than enough, and wished that my gratitude might liberate him in some small way from disappointment. I do know that so many of the traits that served me well in my career started with him. I hope that he understood that, too.
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I STARTED MY career at ABC on July 1, 1974, as a studio supervisor for ABC Television. Before that, I’d spent a year as a weatherman and feature news reporter at a tiny cable TV station in Ithaca, New York. That year of toiling in obscurity (and performing with mediocrity) convinced me to abandon the dream I’d had since I was fifteen years old: to be a network news anchorman. I’m only half-joking when I say that the experience of giving the people of Ithaca their daily weather report taught me a necessary skill, which is the ability to deliver bad news. For roughly six months of the year, the long bleak stretch from October through April, I was far from the most popular guy in town.
I came to ABC thanks to my uncle Bob’s bad eyesight. My mother’s brother, whom I adored, spent a few days in a Manhattan hospital after eye surgery, and his roommate was a lower-level ABC executive, who for whatever reasons wanted my uncle to believe he was a big network mogul. He would fake taking phone calls in his hospital bed, as if there were important network decisions that only he could make, and my uncle fell for it. Before he was discharged, my uncle mentioned to his roommate that his nephew was looking for a job in television production in New York. The guy gave him his number and said, “Tell your nephew to give me a call.”
He was surprised and a little confused about who I was when I actually followed through. Based on what my uncle had described, I was expecting a powerful network executive whose influence was felt at the highest reaches of the company. He was far from that, but to his credit, he did manage to get me an interview in the small department he ran at the network, Production Services, and not long after that I was hired on as a studio supervisor.
The position paid $150 per week and was about as low as you could go on the ABC ladder. There were a half dozen of us who did all manner of menial labor, on game shows and soap operas and talk shows and news shows and made-for-TV specials—basically anything produced at ABC’s sprawling Manhattan studios. I was assigned to a whole gamut of programming: All My Children and One Life to Live and Ryan’s Hope, The $10,000 Pyramid and The Money Maze and Showdown. The Dick Cavett Show. Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America. The ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner.
The job description was pretty simple: Show up whenever they needed me, for whatever task. Often that meant being at a studio at 4:30 A.M. for “lighting calls.” Soap opera sets were set up the night before a shoot, and my job was to let in the lighting director and stagehands long before the sun came up, so the lights would be in place when the director and actors arrived for their first run-throughs. I coordinated all the carpenters and prop masters and electricians, makeup artists and costume people and hairstylists, checking everybody in and making sure they had their marching orders for the day. I kept track of their hours and their grievances and their violations of union rules. I made sure catering was in place and the air-conditioning had cooled the studios enough to begin shooting under the hot lights. It was the opposite of glamorous, but I learned the ins and outs of all of those shows. I spoke the lingo. I got to know all of the people who made a TV show work. Maybe most important, I learned to tolerate the demanding hours and the extreme workload of television production, and that work ethic has stayed with me ever since.
To this day, I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over. Those hours aren’t for everyone, but however you find the time, it’s vital to create space in each day to let your thoughts wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities, to turn things over in your mind in a less pressured, more creative way than is possible once the daily triage kicks in. I’ve come to cherish that time alone each morning, and am certain I’d be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn’t also spend those first hours away from the emails and text messages and phone calls that require so much attention as the day goes on.
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IT WAS A very different industry back then. In some ways it was better. The competition was simpler, the world less atomized. Certainly there was a mostly shared American narrative, organized around a general societal belief in basic facts. In many other ways, though, it was worse. For one, there was a shrugging tolerance of a level of disrespect that would be unacceptable today. It was without a doubt much more difficult on a day-to-day basis for women and members of underrepresented groups than it ever was for me. But even in my case, being low on the food chain meant exposure to the occasional, casual abuse that people would be fired for now.
One example that captures so much of that time: The Evening News was broadcast at 6:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The moment we wrapped, the anchorman Harry Reasoner and his stage manager, a man called Whitey, would walk off the set and park themselves at the bar of the Hotel des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street. (The Evening News was broadcast from a converted ballroom in the old hotel.) Every evening, Harry would down a double extra-dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist.
One of my responsibilities was to wait while the producer reviewed the show, then pass on word to Harry and the studio crew if any updates or fixes needed to be made before it aired in later time zones. One night Harry was ready to move on to martini number two, and he asked me to run back to the studio and find out from the producer where things stood. I ventured into the control room and said, “Harry sent me to find out how it looks.” The producer looked at me with complete disdain. Then he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and replied, “I don’t know. You tell me how it looks.” Forty-five years later, I still get angry when I recall that scene. We’ve become much more aware of the need for fair, equal, non-abusive treatment in the workplace, but it has taken too long.
In the fall of 1974, I got assigned to work The Main Event, a Frank Sinatra concert at Madison Square Garden that ABC was televising live in prime time. I was the studio supervisor onsite, which meant that I had to be on hand to run errands for the enormous Madison Square Garden stage crew. This was a plum assignment, and it was a big deal for me, personally. My father played Sinatra records endlessly on the turntable in our house. To this day, I can remember perfectly the image of my dad standing in the living room, blowing on his trumpet in accompaniment as Frank crooned.
To be in the same building as Sinatra, attending rehearsals and doing my small part to make sure the production went smoothly—I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The high point came a few hours before the concert was scheduled to begin, when I was told by an associate producer to run out and get a bottle of mouthwash and deliver it as fast as I could to Mr. Sinatra’s dressing room
. I ran a few blocks to a pharmacy uptown and bought the largest bottle of Listerine I could find, thinking the whole time that Frank was having throat issues and the entire broadcast rested on my shoulders!
Nervous and out of breath, I knocked on the dressing room door, mouthwash in hand. The door swung open, and I was greeted by an imposing bodyguard, who wanted to know what the hell I was doing there. “I’m delivering Mr. Sinatra’s Listerine,” I said. Before he could respond, I heard that familiar voice, from somewhere deep in the room: “Let him in.” Moments later I was standing in front of the Chairman of the Board.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Bob.”
“Where’re you from?”
For some reason I said, “Brooklyn,” which is where I was born and lived until my family moved to Long Island when I was five years old. I think I must have wanted to seem more real to him in some way, and “Oceanside” didn’t quite have the same romance.
“Brooklyn!” Frank said, like it was the next best thing to Hoboken, and then he handed me a crisp hundred-dollar bill. When the show ended, he gave every member of the crew a sleek gold cigarette lighter, inscribed LOVE, SINATRA. I spent the hundred dollars almost immediately, but the lighter sits in a drawer in my desk to this day.
The Main Event was produced by Jerry Weintraub and Roone Arledge, then the brash forty-three-year-old head of ABC Sports. By 1974, Roone was already a legendary television executive. He’d stacked the crew with various producers who worked for him at Sports. The night before the concert, they rehearsed the entire show. Howard Cosell kicked it off, introducing Frank onto the stage like a prizefighter (the stage itself was made to look like a boxing ring in the center of the arena), and then Frank came on and performed for nearly two hours.
It was the first time I’d ever seen Roone in action. He watched it all, and when the rehearsal was over he decided that more or less everything needed to be scrapped and redone. The set needed to be redesigned, Howard’s intro needed to be reworked, the lighting needed to be radically changed. The entire way in which Frank interacted with the audience, Roone said, needed to be reconceived.
I did my small tasks and watched as it all came down and went back up, to no small amount of swearing and moaning from the crew. There was no denying that the show that aired less than twenty-four hours later was of a different order than the one that had been rehearsed. I didn’t understand how he did it, but I’d later learn that this was classic Roone, absolutely unwilling to accept “good enough,” and completely comfortable pushing right up against an unmovable deadline (and exhausting a lot of people along the way) to make it great.
The thrill of working on The Main Event wore off as soon as I returned to my mundane world of soap operas and game shows. Before long I had my own drama to contend with, however. The head of the small department I worked for was a corrupt bully who was paying vendors and suppliers out of our department’s budget to do work (“government jobs,” he called them) for himself and other executives at ABC, then filling his own pockets with the kickbacks. He was also buying furniture that he claimed was for soap opera sets, then using stagehands to move it all into an apartment in Midtown that he’d set up for a mistress. I’d been asked to go along with all of this, either by helping out or by looking the other way, and it irritated me to no end. I started asking some people in the department if there was anything I could do about it, and word got back to him.
One day he summoned me to his office. When I walked in, he immediately accused me of violating company rules. “What are you up to?” he said. “I hear you used our truck to move in to a new apartment.”
In fact, I’d briefly had access to a company pickup, and I’d joked to some colleagues that maybe I should use the truck to move in to an apartment I’d just rented. I never did it, and I told him so, but it dawned on me in that moment that someone must have told him I was a troublemaker.
“You’re spreading rumors about me,” he said. When I didn’t deny that I’d been talking about him, he stared me down for a while before telling me, “You know what, Iger? You’re no longer promotable.”
He gave me two weeks to find a job in another department or I was done at the company. I was twenty-three and certain my career in television was already over. But I went to the ABC job-posting site—in those days it was a clipboard hanging on a wall—and there, in a list of about twenty-five other jobs I wasn’t qualified for, was the description of an opening at ABC Sports. I immediately called one of the guys I knew from the Sinatra concert and explained that I was in a tough spot. He told me to come down to 1330 (ABC’s corporate headquarters, 1330 Avenue of the Americas), and a month later I was hired as a studio operations supervisor at ABC Sports. If you squinted, this new position was slightly more illustrious than the job I’d just lost. But it was the break that made all the difference, part of which I like to think I owe to Frank Sinatra, and part to a guy who later got fired from the company for embezzlement.
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DURING ITS HEYDAY in the ’70s and early ’80s, ABC Sports was one of the network’s most profitable divisions, largely because Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports were so wildly popular. It also had a great lineup of college football and Major League Baseball and many of the major golf tournaments and boxing championships, and programs like The American Sportsman and The Superstars. Plus every four years, ABC was the “network of the Olympics,” having covered most of the Olympic Games from 1964 to 1988.
The guys who worked in Sports were the “cool kids” at the company, a status reflected in pretty much everything about them, the way they dressed (tailored suits and Gucci loafers with no socks), what they ate and drank (expensive wine and scotch, often at lunch), and the Hollywood stars and famous athletes and politicians they fraternized with. They were always off to somewhere exotic, often flying the Concorde to our European office in Paris, and then going from there to cover events in places like Monte Carlo and Saint Moritz.
Eventually I rose high enough in the ranks that I had a seat on the Concorde, too. The traveling I did, especially for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, changed my life. I hadn’t been out of the country before then, and suddenly I was flying all over the world. (As Jim McKay’s opening voiceover intoned week after week, we were “spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports.”) On any given weekend, I might be at a surfing championship in Hawaii or a figure-skating event in Prague, a weight-lifting competition in Budapest or the Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne. There was cliff diving in Acapulco and downhill skiing in Kitzbuhel, gymnastics in China or Romania or the U.S.S.R….
ABC Sports showed me the world and made me more sophisticated. I got exposed to things I’d never contemplated before. I remember exactly where and when I ate my first fine French meal in Paris, the first time I ever uttered the word Montrachet, and my first experience driving through Monaco in a luxury sports car. For a kid who’d grown up in a split-level house in Oceanside, New York, it all felt a little head-spinning. It was much more than the high life, though. I traveled regularly to the developing world and arranged for coverage of events in the Communist bloc, negotiating with intransigent governing bodies and navigating often corrupt and byzantine systems. I witnessed firsthand how people lived behind the Iron Curtain, and got a sense of the daily challenges of their lives. (I can still remember looking out over darkened Bucharest during the nightly brownouts when the government shut down the electrical grid in winter.) I also saw the ways in which their dreams were no different from the dreams of the average person in America. If politicians had an urge to divide the world or generate an us-versus-them, good-versus-bad mentality, I was exposed to a reality much more nuanced than that.
As for all the glamour, there is (and eventually there was) a convincing argument to be made that living that high off the hog was irresponsible. However, at that time ABC Sports existed in its own
orbit, often immune from the laws that governed the rest of ABC. Roone Arledge was at the center of that orbit. Roone had been tapped to run ABC Sports in the early 1960s, and by the time I arrived he was already television royalty. More than anyone in the history of broadcasting, he changed the way we experience televised sports.
He knew, first and foremost, that we were telling stories and not just broadcasting events, and to tell great stories, you need great talent. He was the most competitive person I’ve ever worked for, and a relentless innovator, but he also knew that he was only as good as the people he surrounded himself with. Jim McKay, Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson. Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, Chris Schenkel, Bob Beattie in skiing, Jackie Stewart in auto racing. They all had magnetic broadcast personalities, and Roone turned them into household names.
“The human drama of athletic competition”—to cite another line from that Wide World of Sports opening—that’s really how Roone saw the events that we covered. Athletes were characters in unfolding narratives. Where did they come from? What did they have to overcome to get here? How was this competition analogous to geopolitical dramas? How was it a window into different cultures? He reveled in the idea that we were bringing not just sports but the world into the living rooms of millions of Americans.