One Man’s Network : BEATING THE ODDS: An Anecdotal Memoir of Paramount and ABC-TV, <i> By Leonard H. Goldenson with Marvin J. Wolf (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $24.95; 495 pp.)</i>

Leonard Goldenson, for 32 years the chairman of ABC, got into the broadcasting game more than two decades after the rulers of CBS and NBC, William Paley and David Sarnoff, did. With “Beating the Odds,” Goldenson, now 85, has once again brought up the rear with an authorized life story. But in an effort to set himself apart, Goldenson has produced a curiously bland hybrid: part memoir, part Festschrift, part corporate history.

A kinder, gentler man than his more powerful rivals, Goldenson offers an amiable, episodic rumination interspersed with extended reminiscences of colleagues, friends and relatives. The book professes to be “the untold story behind the rise of ABC,” but many of the tales are not only oft-told but woefully short on specifics. Collectors of TV trivia will find nothing new in the perfunctory descriptions of the origins of dozens of shows from “Batman” to “Soap.” The best bit is from ABC executive Brandon Stoddard, who calls the network’s long-running hit “Dynasty” the place “where everyone goes just before they become an interior decorator.” Ultimately, the anecdotes never produce a complete picture of ABC’s success or Goldenson’s contributions.

Still, there’s something appealing about Goldenson’s willingness to give over so much of his book to the often self-congratulatory recollections of others. Even Goldenson’s dentist gets into the act, recounting how he brokered a movie deal for ABC while filling the boss’ teeth and took a 10% commission for his trouble.

Like Sarnoff and Paley, Goldenson’s forebears were immigrants who fled Russia for America in the late 19th Century. But instead of making it in the bruising urban ghetto, Goldenson grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father owned a clothing store. There were only four Jewish families in town, and as early as first grade, young Leonard felt the sting of anti-Semitism. When classmates called him a “sheeny,” he silenced them with his fists. He held tightly to his Jewish heritage, even though he attended Presbyterian summer camp and Baptist Sunday School.

A lenient admissions policy for students in rural schools secured Goldenson a place at Harvard, where he nearly flunked out. Determined “never to allow myself to be humiliated for lack of effort,” he doggedly applied himself through his undergraduate years and Harvard Law School. When he grew bored by the work at a New York law firm, he jumped in 1933 to Paramount Pictures, which was suffering through bankruptcy proceedings.

Goldenson made his mark by straightening out the finances of Paramount’s 300 theaters in New England, and was tapped by Barney Balaban, the tight-fisted president of Paramount, to head the company’s entire theater operation. This was the era of the legendary Hollywood moguls, and here Goldenson manages his most vivid characterizations. Harry Cohn, he says, “kept Frank Capra in line for years by playing on his insecurities. He denigrated his talents, often calling him ‘dago’ to his face, even in public.”

In 1948, after the United States Supreme Court ruled that Hollywood studios no longer could exhibit as well as produce pictures, Goldenson became president of the newly divested United Paramount Theaters, which also inherited Paramount’s fledgling television station in Chicago. Through his contacts in the television business, Goldenson bought the American Broadcasting Co. for $24.5 million in 1951. ABC at the time operated a successful radio network and a money-losing TV network of only 14 stations.

For the next quarter-century, Goldenson labored to pull his network out of last place. ABC changed TV entertainment from live programs staged in New York to adventure series and comedies filmed in Hollywood, successfully launched sports in prime time with Monday Night Football, and popularized big-budget mini-series with “Roots” and “Winds of War.”

But despite the odd hit over the years--”Marcus Welby,” “Peyton Place”--it wasn’t until late 1976 that ABC’s team of programmers headed by Fred Silverman and Fred Pierce built a schedule that catapulted ABC into first place in the ratings. Although the network lost its prime-time dominance several years later, ABC had established parity with CBS and NBC. By the late 1980s, ABC had even supplanted CBS as the most innovative and popular network for news programs.

Goldenson held the reins at ABC lightly but steadily. He stepped up to tough decisions such as appointing maverick sports programmer Roone Arledge as president of news. The ABC chairman made understatement a virtue and took pride in his paternalism. Eventually ABC lost Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and other key creative executives, and the survivors--Fred Pierce and his protege Tony Thomopoulos--grew high-handed, insular and complacent. But unlike Paley at CBS, Goldenson recognized ABC’s weakness and wisely understood when it was time to bow out. In 1985, the ABC chairman orchestrated the sale of his company to Capital Cities, operated by Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke, two highly respected media executives.

At one point in “Against the Odds,” ABC anchorman Peter Jennings observes tantalizingly that Goldenson is a “complicated man.” Yet the reader gets scant sense of what makes him tick. He became a founder of United Cerebral Palsy drive after his daughter Cookie was born with the disease. His wife Isabelle is outspoken and strong-willed, but she’s given only a cameo role. Aside from letting slip that he has a house in the New York suburbs with a deck and a pond, Goldenson says little about his personal life.

Goldenson’s own words and the testimony of others show a down-to-earth, folksy fellow. He’s a teetotaler with moderate appetites who buys two economy seats so he can tote a canvas and easel to paint pictures during long airplane flights. (He has, he reveals unself-consciously, “stepped away from realism to find an impressionistic style.”) His one vice is high-stakes poker, and he confesses to having spent some time in the 1970s painting prostitutes and other denizens of New York City’s “seamier side.”

In the spirit of a testimonial dinner, the many other voices in the book offer nothing but praise for their leader. Even his tennis game invites effusive comment. “Good gravy,” says longtime ABC president Elton Rule, “his lob shot was the most destructive thing I’ve ever encountered.” One suspects that it was Rule who was pouring on the gravy.

Could these aw-shucks guys really have presided over the cutthroat world of network TV? Goldenson surely was more driven and ambitious than he appears on these pages. He suffered a massive heart attack in 1971 that he managed to conceal from all but a few trusted associates at ABC. Fully capable of carrying a grudge, he’s still fuming about the time in 1954 when ABC spent $3 million to bankroll a production company for Frank Sinatra, who then “kissed off” his television show for the network and refused to meet with the ABC chairman.

But Goldenson glosses over his dealings with other important characters such as Paley, who regarded the ABC man as his social inferior. Goldenson certainly sacked his share of executives, and he takes a few tame swipes at those who disappointed him. Onetime network president Oliver Treyz, he says, was “brilliant” but “headstrong.” Another president, Thomas Moore, “made rosy forecasts, but we didn’t seem to be making progress.”

One longs for the sound of the clashing egos that over the years made the action behind the tube more interesting than the banal programs on it.