Free The Keys to the Kingdom by Kim Masters

for Television” was quickly embraced by top ABC management, and Diller was put in charge. The first miniseries, QBVII, was based on a Leon Uris novel about a slander trial in England. Diller knew the story—which involved the Holocaust and castration—was challenging material for television. But the project was a smash and Diller chose the second miniseries, Rich Man, Poor Man, “simply because I thought it was a good, good read.”
    Years later, Diller would fully appreciate the freewheeling atmosphere that permitted him to exercise so much authority as such a young man. “The wonderful thing about ABC was that it allowed people like Michael Eisner, me—and an endless list of others—to take all the responsibility we wanted,” Diller said. “We could make almost any decision.”
    As Brandon Stoddard had already discovered, Diller was both the best and worst boss imaginable. He didn’t merely delegate authority, he rammed it down people’s throats. If they couldn’t handle it, they were gone. And despite his earlier humiliation at being taken for a secretary, he was not sympathetic to underlings. “Diller would never talk to anybody—especially lowly secretaries and assistants,” says a woman who worked as an assistant during this era. “He used to throw pencils at his secretaries.”
    Executives felt his wrath, too. “I think I was taller when I started working for him,” Stoddard says wryly. And Diller wasn’t much more communicative with Stoddard than he was with his secretaries. “Barry used to come in at the end of the day and he’d say, ‘Everything all right?’ And I would have tried to see him seven times and was totally unable to, because he was busy. I think he used those words—‘Everything all right?’—like, ‘Good night,’ but I would take advantage [to get] relatively quick answers to my desperate problems.”
    Stoddard was “madly trying to learn” and Diller was a tough tutor. “Barry is a very hard boss. Very demanding and contrarian in many ways,” Stoddard says. “But once you kind of understood that, things got better…. He would be frustrating at times because I’d show him a promo that I had worked on and he’d look at it and say, ‘Boring,’ and then turn and walk out of the room. And I’d run after him and say, ‘What did you mean by that? What part?’ And he’d say, ‘It’s boring,’ and then continue to walk.” Ungently, Diller made Stoddard think for himself. “He kept just pushing decisions down on me—he was a really fine executive that way—he forced me to make recommendations and fight for what I believed in.”
    Some outsiders who had to deal with Diller also found him hard to handle. Frank Yablans, who became president of Paramount in 1971, knew Diller because the studio sold films to ABC. Abrasive in his own right, Yablans says he never really liked Diller. (Diller contends that he and Yablans had “an extremely good relationship” at this time—especially because Diller was on such good terms with Yablans’s boss, Charlie Bluhdorn.)
    At one point Diller became ill and complained bitterly that Yablans didn’t show any particular concern. Yablans says he went to considerabletrouble to send Diller the biggest gift he could think of: a live baby elephant. (One source says there was a rude note attached, but Yablans denies it.) Diller says he saw this gesture as “a friendly joke,” but Yablans remembers Diller calling to complain. Yablans then followed up by sending a baby pig (so that Diller wouldn’t be lonely, he says). Diller complained again. This time, Yablans sent him a coffin. Diller doesn’t recall this exact progression of events but says he and Yablans exchanged “a series of gifts over a period of months as the kind of silly things