CHAIRMAN OF ABC CALLS IT QUITS

ABC Board Chairman Frederick S. Pierce, who helped lead ABC-TV to prime-time ratings leadership in the mid-1970s, only to see the network drop to third place last year, resigned Thursday after nearly 30 years with the company.

His resignation, which had been widely predicted, was accepted “with regret” by Thomas S. Murphy, board chairman of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. It came six days after Cap Cities’ $3.5-billion takeover of ABC was completed.

Pierce, who reported to Murphy, was the third and highest ABC executive to resign before or after the Cap Cities’ takeover became official.

In a brief phone interview Thursday, he denied that he had been uneasy in his new role at the company or that Cap Cities executives had encouraged him to leave.

“The facts are that I walked in on Monday after three weeks of . . . reviewing the pros and cons, and resigned,” he said. “It was very gentlemanly. They tried to talk me out of it, but accepted my resignation with lots of regrets, as they’ve said.”

Pierce, 52, said that he never had intended to stay on simply to oversee the transition of ABC’s leadership to Cap Cities. “Not at all,” he said, adding that the plan always had been that he’d be active in the new company on a long-term basis.

Murphy, in a separate phone interview, agreed. Pierce’s resignation, he said, “disappointed us. We really wanted him to stay very much. We did everything we could to get him to stay, but the decision was his.”

Pierce said he finally decided to resign because “I had just reassessed the agenda and what I’d accomplished at ABC . . . and I felt the time had come to explore other opportunities.”

Murphy said that Pierce, who remains on the company’s board and will serve as a consultant on a “nonexclusive” basis, will be succeeded by John B. Sias, presently president of Cap Cities’ publishing division.

Murphy said that Sias may not be well-known but has 15 years’ experience in the broadcasting industry and worked at Metromedia and at Westinghouse before Cap Cities.

Pierce, who will have an office in Cap Cities’ New York headquarters, said that he hasn’t decided yet what he will do next, but said he was happy that he’ll be able to contribute as a consultant to Cap Cities/ABC Inc.

Murphy also said he was pleased that Pierce at least agreed to serve the company as a consultant.

Pierce said he had reached a settlement with the new company on his current ABC contract, which he said ran through August, 1989.

His resignation came after a day of rumors circulating in New York and Hollywood that he and others on his staff were about to be ousted by ABC’s new owners as part of a general housecleaning of ABC’s current management.

Murphy denied those rumors, saying “there are no plans for that,” and that Pierce’s resignation wasn’t the start of such a move. “This (the resignation) was abolutely a decision on Fred’s part,” he said.

No other changes were announced Thursday.

Speculation about the future of Pierce and other senior ABC executives began last year when Cap Cities proposed buying the company.

The president and chief operating officer of ABC Inc. since January, 1983, Pierce had been wearing two corporate hats since the Cap Cities takeover--as vice chairman of the Capital Cities/ABC Inc. board and as ABC’s chairman and chief executive officer.

His resignation ended an ABC career that began in 1956 when Pierce, a New York native and a graduate of Baruch College, joined ABC-TV as a research analyst. He rapidly rose through the executive ranks in sales and planning posts and became the network’s president in 1974.

While in that post, one of his major accomplishments was to lure programming expert Fred Silverman away from CBS. The two quickly established ABC as a leader in prime-time ratings with such series as “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Barney Miller.”

Although not directly involved with ABC News, Pierce also was credited with playing a part in negotiations that brought Barbara Walters from NBC News’ “Today” show to ABC News in 1976 as the first female co-anchor of a nightly network news show.

(Walters no longer co-anchors ABC’s evening news program, but is a chief correspondent for ABC News’ “20/20” news-magazine series. She also does generally high-rated prime-time interview specials produced by ABC Entertainment.)

A hard-driving, sometimes short-tempered man, Pierce had enjoyed the confidence of ABC’s founder and former chairman, Leonard Goldenson. But that confidence reportedly had decreased somewhat in recent months as ABC slumped in prime-time ratings.

Goldenson is no longer directly involved with ABC and now serves as chairman of the executive committee of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. The new company’s top officers, Board Chairman Murphy and President Daniel B. Burke, formerly ran Cap Cities.

Despite persistent efforts last season, Pierce and his subordinates at ABC-TV were unable to revive the network’s fortunes in prime-time ratings. The network wound up in third place for the first time in a decade.

Hoping to avoid a recurrence of that, ABC replaced more than a third of its prime-time schedule with 10 new series for this season. But halfway through the 30-week prime-time season, it is still third in season-to-date Nielsen averages with a 15.3 rating. CBS is second with 16.8 and the revived NBC network in first with a 17.6 average.

Each rating point represents 859,000 homes, and, say network officials, can be worth more than $45 million over the course of a season.

One of Pierce’s last major management decisions last year was to dismiss 350 ABC employees to ready the company for its takeover by Cap Cities, a smaller corporation known for its lean, cost-conscious style of management.

In a statement last August, he called the layoffs “a difficult business decision” prompted by an uncertain economy, but said that “the reduction will streamline our organization and ultimately result in improved productivity and a significant cost reduction.”

By the end of 1985, ABC Inc., in addition to its 350 layoffs, had eliminated 250 other jobs by early retirement or by not filling vacancies. It now has 12,500 employees and Cap Cities about 7,500, spokesmen for the two companies say.

The two other top ABC executives who resigned before Pierce’s departure are Anthony Thomopoulos and Everett C. Erlick, former president of the ABC Broadcast Group and chief counsel for ABC Inc., respectively. Neither cited the Cap Cities takeover as the main reason for his exit.

Erlick, ABC’s chief attorney since 1972, announced his plans to leave last August, when he said he thought it was time for him to do other things. He stepped down after completion of the Cap Cities-ABC merger, and now is a consultant to the merged companies. He also is in private practice in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Thomopoulos resigned in November, citing a desire to relocate to Los Angeles to be closer to his family. A Pierce appointee who joined ABC in 1973, he has been named as head of production with United Artists here, pending the sale of MGM/UA to Ted Turner and the subsequent spinoff of UA.