Introduction

“Mr. Flower? Please hold the line for Mr. Eisner.” It was a phone call from Michael Eisner, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company.

Eisner, the man who walks in the shoes of Walt, was calling me, it turned out, to tell me why he was not going to talk to me for the biography that I planned to write—a commitment, he said, to another author, if he should ever do a book. And he wasn’t doing a book. With anybody. Not now, not for a long time. It wasn’t time for a retrospective, he felt, because he wasn’t finished yet.

In a dozen years as a writer I had interviewed thousands of people. I had done scores of stories on business executives. I had done many stories on people who, for this reason or that, would not talk to me. Michael Eisner was the first person ever to call me up to tell me that he would not talk to me.

His words strangely echoed those of Bill Novak over scones and coffee in Watertown, Massachusetts. Novak had coauthored the wildly successful Iacocca. He had ghost-written Tip O’Neill’s book, and Nancy Reagan’s book, and coauthored Mayflower Madam. His agent had been after him to write about Eisner. “I can’t do Eisner,” he said. “He’s too young. He’s not finished.”

Every story has a story behind it, the kind of stories writers trade when they get together to complain about their dismal, grinding, oddly romantic business. But the call from Eisner was just the beginning of the strange contradictions coiled in the heart of the Disney story.

There was, for instance, the question of access, of getting people to talk. It was far from the simple matter it had seemed at first. I had grown up with Disney, like any child of the ’50s, and more closely than most. I was four when Disneyland opened, and went to it often enough as a child to track its changes, to still think of It’s a Small World as “that new ride” two decades later. My father, an artist, had tried to get a job at Disney, and had often pointed out the Disney studio standing just off the freeway. The Corcoran brothers, who played Davy Crockett’s kids, and the kids in Old Yeller, and numerous other “kid” characters in Walt’s movies, went to my grade school.

More important, the Disney mythology had helped shape my way in the world of dream and nightmare and imagination, and had introduced me to the deep pull of myth long before Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly let the word out.

So, for me to write about Eisner and Disney, as I turned 40, would not be like any other story. It would be an opening into innocence, into the child within.

Tracking the story down, I found that part, at least, to be true. There was something magical about Disney. I met people who swore they could never work anywhere else, people whose job it was to spin fairy tales into reality, to build giant toys, space ships, miniature worlds.

But I met something else as well—a corporation intent on the bottom line, a global entertainment conglomerate that could be as grasping, as controlling, as juiceless and impersonal as any company in America. This strange mix of the magical and the ruthlessly practical, of creativity and ferocity, took on, for me, a new sense of intrigue.

Eisner had told me, “I won’t discourage anyone from talking to you. If anyone tells you different, they have reasons of their own.” But Eisner is the boss, and once they heard that he was not talking to me, few of those who worked for him would talk to me. Of the scores of people in and out of the company who replied, “Let me check with Michael,” or “Let me check with Erwin” (Erwin Okun was Eisner’s vice president of communications at Disney) not one later agreed to an interview. Many in the company, those who would never think to ask permission to speak their minds, did talk to me, in their offices, on the lot, in the animation buildings in Glendale, on the job in Orlando. Others, more circumspect, would talk only anonymously. One met me in front of a supermarket and drove 30 miles with me to a public beach for the interview. Others would talk only in their homes or apartments, or only if I turned the tape recorder off.

In the end, I relied on a wide variety of sources, written and oral, inside and outside the company. I conducted scores of interviews, and augmented them with stock analysts’ reports, plus the company’s own annual reports and SEC filings. I personally explored the extensive Disney properties in Orlando, Anaheim, and Long Beach, the animation workshops in Glendale and North Hollywood, and the company lot in Burbank, and culled published reports from the United States, Japan, and Europe. I sent associates to sift the court records of Los Angeles and Orlando, and using computers, tapped into public database systems. The obstacles posed by Disney’s lack of involvement forced me to be more resourceful, but in no way dried up my sources of information.

Disney is a strangely closed corporation. At the time I began work on this book, Walt Disney World had just celebrated Mickey’s 60th birthday by inviting hundreds of journalists from all over the world, providing them with free hotel rooms, tickets, behind-the-scenes tours, meals, and an avalanche of information. Yet when I flew to Orlando myself, the press office would not even provide me with a basic press packet of information, much less arrange interviews for me, let me behind the scenes, or answer any of the accusations that the local press had leveled at them. It was a level of controlling paranoia I had never encountered in my years of writing about American business.

Writing about the difficulties of writing is usually a sophisticated type of whining. Writing is my job, it’s my passion, and nothing worth doing is ever easy. But the story of the roadblocks that I encountered writing this book points to something fundamental about Disney. The contradiction between the magical charm of the Disney image and the aggressive abandon of the Disney company points to something deeper, a dichotomy at the core of Disney, a spit in the seed that may yet be its undoing—the split between, on the one hand, imagination, energy, boldness, and the power of myth, and, on the other hand, the mindless greed of a major American corporation. The difficulty of writing this story rose out of Disney’s still-troubled inner spirit.

This is not a corporate history.

It is a history of a deeply human struggle over ideas, values, and hopes for which men and women were willing to give themselves over, values at times so evanescent that some people could dismiss them as silly, values so deep that others became students of them, dedicated their careers to making them come alive, became enraged and embittered when they seemed to be violated, and turned poetic and inspired in their defense.

This is what is impressive about the name “Disney”: no one is neutral. To a surprising degree, almost everyone I talked to in the course of writing this book had an opinion about Disney. Most people had a strong opinion, vividly expressed. Walt Disney was a genius or a charlatan, a hypocrite or an exemplar, a snake-oil salesman or a beloved father figure to generations of children, as well as to the child in generations of adults.

Those who managed the company after Walt’s death were incompetent fools or skilled men who suffered only by comparison with the founder; they were dedicated to Walt’s memory or they were witless slaves to a formula; they were risk-takers of an unusual scale or they possessed no vision. Michael Eisner and “Team Disney,” as the new management called itself, were heartless money-grubbers, or they were prudent developers of latent corporate assets; they were merely in the right place at the right time, or they were prodigiously talented; they were taking Walt’s vision to the next stage, or they were strip-mining an American legacy.

Few American institutions, and certainly no American corporation, can command anything like the place in the public mind occupied by Disney. Most Americans do not have strong opinions about other companies of Disney’s size, such as Xerox, National Medical Enterprises, or Rockwell; or even about other successful entertainment and media companies, such as Time Warner, Universal, or Paramount. Certainly no other American company carries the mix of expectations that Disney does, or has been able to carve itself such a strange, deep-setting hook of myth, magic, and values. No corporation is “about” something in so full and personal a way as Disney is. No corporation has excited so many letters to the editor, so much media coverage and even public demonstrations over its essence. For reasons rooted in mass psychology, the history of myth, and the changing face of America, this country cares deeply who is in charge of the Walt Disney Company and what they do with it.

At the center of this storm of opinion is Michael Eisner, one of the most peculiar men ever to run a major American corporation. The tall, gangly man with the lovably toothy, what-me-worry face charmed many people who saw in him a reincarnation of the beloved Walt. Others loved the exterior but distrusted the man behind it, seeing the “family man” image as a front for a voracious and arrogant global entertainment combine out to chum the money machine as fast as humanly possible. As Disney doubled and tripled in size, and the value of the stock increased 1,200 percent, Wall Street became enamored of Eisner, even while some analysts were privately reluctant to credit him with most of Disney’s success.

Their reluctance stemmed from the same fact that had nearly blocked Eisner’s rise to the chairmanship: he rose through ABC and Paramount, not through the “hard business” ranks, not from the financial sphere, not even from marketing, but from the creative side. He was a “story” man, whose skill lay in recognizing and developing creative ideas and people.

The Walt Disney Company had been founded by a charismatic creator, a ‘‘story” man. Walt Disney had laid down a theme and variations as solid as the opening lines of a Beethoven symphony. He had left a great many ideas and possibilities to be carried out by others—ideas that would need artists, sometimes even magicians. But he handed them to an orchestra of highly competent followers—sorcerer’s apprentices who had the book of secrets, but not the inner wisdom to read its arcane symbols.

Walt Disney’s theme was the structuring of mythic worlds. His variations led off into synthetic high adventure, future cities, structured environments, manufactured experiences, and the repeatable real moment. The reigning intellectuals of his time thought him a peripheral person, a talented hick with a knack for family entertainment. But his themes would turn out to be highly appealing to millions in the rapine and chaos of today’s world.

After Walt’s death, the company employed many creative people, but none of them were in charge, and the enterprise stuck to playing out the ideas Walt had been developing at his death. Over time, the company’s development slowed, it attracted corporate raiders, and suddenly, in 1984, a decades-long deterioration became a crisis. In what amounted to a “friendly takeover,” Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney teamed up with outside investors to install a lawyer, Frank Wells, as president, and a “story” man, Eisner, as chairman of the board. The men making this decision were not creative crazies. They were some of America’s preeminent deal-makers, money men of the first water. In their opinion, Disney was one company that didn’t need one of their kind at the lop. It needed a kiss of craziness. It needed a creative spark.

What that decision meant for Disney was years of unprecedented growth and profitability, some of it in unexpected and un-Disney-like directions. What it means for the rest of American business is less clear. It may be here—in creativity, in risk, in the urge to do something new—that American business has the most to offer the world, and that the example of Disney has much to offer American business.

I like Michael Eisner. I’ll admit that right up front. No one told me to like him. Disney didn’t publish this book or sponsor it in any way. I’m not trying to sell them a script. In fact, Eisner, and most of his Team Disney, wouldn’t even talk to me.

My publisher didn’t tell me to be nice to Michael Eisner. When you write about someone famous (especially someone rich, famous, and successful), publishers usually like it if you can dig up some dirt—alcoholism, sexual peccadillos, financial sleight-of-hand. If you can’t find that, if your subject seems to be completely clean and above-board, the next best thing publishers hope for is that you can lambaste what he’s doing. Publishers call it “controversy,” and marketing departments love it.

Michael Eisner has made some mistakes. Some of the effects of Disney’s success are worrisome, and the company’s attitude toward labor has seemed, at times, insensitive. Yet I can’t help but like Eisner as a human being.

This is not because he’s famous. Famous people are just people, and their fame is at best a necessary evil of the career they have chosen, at worst a destroyer of all that is personal and treasured.

It’s not because he has made sacks of money. If you think money defines life, then you might admire someone who has made a lot of it. But money doesn’t define life. Rich people are not happier, more noble, more attractive, or easier to be around than anybody else. On the other hand, if you think people only make money by ‘”ripping off” other people, then you might despise someone who has made a lot of it. Certainly many of the success stories of the ’80s were stories of men who came to great wealth by impoverishing others, milking great corporations, shrinking enterprises, and destroying jobs. But it’s equally possible to make money by creating new wealth, nurturing new enterprises, new jobs, new ideas. And I believe that is the case with Eisner and Disney.

It’s not because he is powerful that I enjoy Michael Eisner. Power is reach. A powerful person affects a larger part of the world. We all have power of one sort or another—in our family relationships, at work, in our communities. What is truly interesting is not the fact that people have power, but how they use that power. Do they make their world better, stronger, gentler, more varied, more interesting, more humane? Do they create wealth or hoard it? Do they foment wonderfulness or hideousness?

I like Michael Eisner because he has done something unimaginable: he has become rich, famous, powerful, and admired at least in part by bringing the child inside him out into the open, by fighting for his instincts, often against the conventional wisdom.

In America, business is our field of struggle and play. It’s the ground on which we choose to have our contests. Too often, we seem to think there are only two models for the person who wants to make a success on that ground. One model is the cool technocrat, full of formulas and case studies, the MBA working alchemy with numbers, chi squares, moving averages, and statistical filters, cerebral and Apollonian. The other model is the corporate buccaneer, rapacious, a gambler, visceral and Dionysian. Neither model is particularly cuddly. And more important, they do not stake out all the possibilities between them. Yet to be successful in business, we tell ourselves, means being either calculating or piratical. If you care about the heart, if you want to build things, if you have humane values and would like to improve some portion of the earth, business is not your field of play. Business is not for the creative or the sensitive. It is not possible, we tell ourselves, to mix ambition with a heart that is still beating.

Michael Eisner’s career displays a third possibility, a possibility that is creative and powerful, that combines the traditional capabilities of powerful business leadership—such as a clear vision, the ability to communicate that vision, and the intelligence to process vast amounts of information from many sources at once—with the mind of a child—direct, fascinated, innocent, intuitive, enthusiastic, and capable of being astonished. Like a child, Eisner has a steep learning curve. Like a child, he will pursue an idea not because he has some scheme in mind, or because it was the most outrageous thing he could think of, but simply because he likes it.

So Michael Eisner’s story, like many a classic Disney tale, has a moral, a model that we could profit from: in ourselves and others, competence is important. So are intelligence and vision. But equally important are fascination, intuition, innocence, and a path with heart.