BOOK REVIEW : Speech Writer Spins Out a Corporate Kiss-and-Tell About ABC

Beyond Control: ABC and the Fate of the Networks by Huntington Williams (Atheneum: $19.95, 291 pp).

One of my noontime haunts is the B. Dalton bookshop in Century City, where I often stop to see how many of the books I’ve reviewed in these pages have actually reached the shelves. I’ve noticed that “Beyond Control” by Huntington Williams has been in plentiful supply for weeks--but, then, a book that consists of high-grade ABC office gossip is probably a must-read for the network executives who work nearby in the ABC Entertainment Center. The real question is how many other readers will be quite so captivated by a corporate kiss-and-tell.

The author is quite honest about his fascination with ABC office politics as an executive-suite insider. After completing an impressive education at Groton, Yale and Oxford--and authoring a monograph on “Rousseau and Romantic Biography”--Williams found work as a speech writer for top ABC management, including Leonard Goldenson and Elton Rule. “The posts were not grand, but they offered a small foothold on a high network ledge,” the author confesses. “After being handed a pair of binoculars, I didn’t have to be told to watch.”

Williams watched closely, and he does his best to enliven his story of network infighting with as many juicy details as he can muster. “As the profit spigots opened, an exuberant, free-spirited raunchiness percolated through the company,” he writes of ABC’s glory days in the mid ‘70s. “The network had turned into a vast horny Babylon, an excuse for on-the-job mating, and an oasis of promiscuity. John Severino, who now ran KABC-TV in Los Angeles, liked to go on dates with blond viewers who called him up after his on-air editorials; the libido of the dark-haired Severino was so strong and indiscriminate that his subordinates, borrowing Sylvester Stallone’s much-publicized nickname, called him the Italian Stallion.”

All too often, however, the prurient stuff in “Beyond Control” is just filler. For example, the author reveals exactly who was drinking too much at the taping of the network’s 25th anniversary special in 1978, including Vic Morrow (who, Williams insists on reminding us, “would later be decapitated by a helicopter rotor blade”). Almost immediately, I started asking myself: Why do I need to know this? And I asked the same question all the way through the book.

The author sets out with the laudable goal of surveying the Sturm und Drang of ABC’s corporate history and the entertainment industry in general, including the recent shattering of the network monoliths, the revolution in satellite and cable technology, the politics of deregulation in the broadcast media, and the take-over fever that afflicted one network after another in the ‘80s. But Williams returns again and again to what he apparently knows best--the personalities and the politics of network television.

He gives us the rise of sports-and-news czar Roone Arledge; the travails of former network president Fred Pierce (whose place in television history is secure if only because he once put a psychic on the network payroll to help pick hit shows); the early years of movie-moguls-to-be Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, whom he characterizes as ABC’s “in-house . . . crazies”; a particularly catty account of the romance between Cristina Ferrare and network executive Tony Thomopoulos, who “gave every appearance of being interested in John DeLorean’s money,” and a few supposedly shocking examples of programming blunders, including ABC’s failure to pick up “All in the Family” or “The Cosby Show.”

Williams is transparent on the subject of his own heroes and villains. He is impressed by one of his bosses, former network chief Elton Rule: “He brought something new to the network: the confidence, look and feel of a winner.” But he regards Fred Silverman, the storied programming wizard of three networks, as a “walking paradox.” Williams writes: “At bottom a blue-collar worker, he exercised all his privileges to the nth degree and acted out the role of a network prima donna with a bulldozer style.”

The author’s self-appointed mission, it appears, is to insinuate ABC pioneer Leonard Goldenson into the network television godhead that now includes only NBC’s David Sarnoff and William Paley of CBS. Williams does a good job of explaining how Goldenson, after working in the motion picture industry in the ‘30s and ‘40s, took over a cast-off division of NBC and turned it into a rival to CBS and NBC. He credits Goldenson with, among other things, bringing about “a programming watershed” by proving “to Hollywood that network TV was a viable buyer of studio product.” Even at the age of 80, when ABC found itself the target of several corporate raiders, Goldenson “proved that his old skills as a deal-maker were still intact.”

“Beneath his puritan exterior, Goldenson was a warm, sensitive, full-blooded animal,” Williams writes of his former boss, comparing him at length to character of Sim Rosedale in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” And he asks us to believe that Goldenson was in the habit of addressing the chief programmer of ABC each spring with the same colorful and evocative words: “Remember, all we have to sell are flickering images on a screen.”

The unstated assumption of “Beyond Control”--and all the other breathless books on miscellaneous media moguls--is that these corporate in-fighters are somehow more interesting and important than, say, the chief executive of a soap company, mostly because their product is so much more glamorous. And it’s perfectly true that the stock-in-trade of ABC and all the other purveyors of what passes for “news” and “entertainment” is the very stuff of our popular culture, the font of our values and aspirations. But that’s all the more reason why the networks and the people who run them are worthy of sharper and more penetrating treatment than we find in “Beyond Control.”