The Keys to the Kingdom (28 page)

T
HROUGHOUT THE YEARS
of Disney's astonishing resurgence, Wells was ubiquitous, yet relatively invisible to the public because he was so often in Eisner's shadow. From the beginning, he involved himself primarily in various corporate affairs while Eisner focused on the creative aspects of reinvigorating Disney's theme parks and film studio. “For Michael, I make life easier,” he said in a 1991 interview with
Fortune
. “For me, he makes life more fun.”

A Disney board member says Wells functioned more as Eisner's consigliere or chief of staff than as a hands-on manager running the company. And Wells frequently was involved in major negotiations across the board. He was responsible for the bargaining over executive contracts, including Katzenberg's. He attended important previews and showed up at studio retreats, exuding a bit of nostalgia for his days as a movie executive at Warner.

Employees like Pete Clark, the longtime executive who oversaw Disney's corporate partnerships, remember Wells with great affection. Clark thought Wells was an impressive emissary for the Disney company in meetings with the heads of global companies, such as Don Keough of Coca-Cola. Despite a manner that sometimes was aloof or even brusque, Wells could be a compassionate boss. Clark remembers him attending the funeral of a colleague's son. “Michael was less concerned about the staff—people, what they were doing,” he says. Clark also remembers that Wells worked closely with the First AME Church in Los Angeles to set up a loan program for minority-owned businesses after the 1992 riots.

Wells was not great at setting priorities, so he had to put in exceptionally long hours. Eisner remembers that Wells was routinely so exhausted that he would doze off whenever he was required to sit still for more than a
moment—in meetings, for example, or even when trying out a theme-park ride that went through a darkened structure.

Wells drove the company's general counsel, Joe Shapiro, to distraction by trying to outlawyer him. As a joke, Shapiro had a fake letterhead made up describing Wells as an “attorney-at-law” specializing in everything from patents and copyrights to personal injury and archaic forms of pleading. To his credit, Wells thought it was hilarious.

In the early days, when Paramount had complained about Disney's constant raiding of executives, Shapiro proposed a terse response stating that the company was acting within its rights. Wells drafted a four-page letter which stated, among other points, how much Eisner and Katzenberg cared for Paramount and how loath they would be to hurt the company. “Michael looked at this and said, ‘We could never send this,'” remembers one executive. In several instances, this executive says, Wells would indulge in “flowery” and unlawyerlike language and “you could drive a truck through what he was trying to say.”

And Wells allowed himself to get bogged down in the minutiae of running the company. Roland Betts of the Silver Screen partnership remembers that when the two men traveled to a meeting of stockbrokers, Wells's secretary delivered a duffel bag full of letters to the jet. During the flight, Wells began to dictate: “Dear Mrs. Armstrong, I'm sorry your son got sick on the roller coaster…”

Initially, Wells kept up his quest for exotic extracurricular adventure. In the late eighties, he teamed up with Betts and Tom Bernstein of the Silver Screen partnership to help finance the recovery of the
Whydah,
a pirate ship sailed by Black Sam Bellamy that had sunk off Cape Cod in 1717. Sometimes Wells showed up for weekend dives to explore the wreck. “We'd stay at a run-down house with a dank, disgusting basement and Frank would always volunteer to stay down there,” Bernstein remembers. “Word would go out [to the crew] that Frank Wells was in town and dinner was on Frank Wells.”

Eventually, Wells's appetite for more extreme experiences seemed to diminish. In the early nineties, he and his son took a trip to South America with the intention of climbing Aconcagua again. “He called me from Argentina [and] he had decided he didn't want to do it,” says Clark. “I think he got down there and said, ‘I don't have the passion for this.'”

In fact, chief financial officer Gary Wilson quit Disney in 1989 when
he realized that Wells's plan to leave and take another run at Everest was no longer on the agenda. Having concluded that Wells would not be making way for him anytime soon, Wilson and Al Checchi pulled off a successful bid to take over Northwest Airlines. (Wilson was later moved out of the line of direct command after he was busted at an airport for possession of marijuana.)

But Wells still used his swashbuckling image to advantage at Disney. He donned scuba gear to cut the ribbon to the Living Seas exhibit at Epcot. On another occasion, he surprised an annual gathering of two thousand Disney employees on a soundstage at Burbank when he followed Tinker Bell down a two-hundred-foot wire to the stage.

Wells also remained an avid environmentalist and drove an electric car specially fitted with solar panels. Once, when he left the car at the Van Nuys airport, thoughtful Disney employees moved it inside a hangar, not realizing that it needed to be exposed to the sun to recharge itself. They pushed it back into the lot before Wells returned from his trip. When he found the car dead, he called in a troubleshooter from Disney Imagineering, and eventually contacted the manufacturer, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Finally the staff confessed that their efforts to do Wells a favor had backfired.

As a matter of routine, Disney executives say, Wells and Eisner wandered in and out of each other's offices. “They completed each other,” Clark says. And Clark is one of several executives who say Wells functioned as a governor on Eisner's engines.

“When we had a grievance list, going to Frank was like going to the Supreme Court,” says Bernstein. “You felt you got a fair hearing and you got justice.”

“Frank Wells was totally discreet,” says a prominent industry figure who frequently quarreled with Eisner. “Whenever there would be a situation that involved Michael lying and I would confront Frank, he would say, ‘Let me try and take care of this.' He was no Saint Frank [but] he was very conscious of Michael's foibles.” Another former insider concurs: “He was a conscience but he never took [Eisner] on in public. It was always in that back room.”

And many other observers in and out of the company believed that Wells was actually the one who kept the vaunted “Team Disney” operating as a team. Wells was one of the few people who could command Eisner's respect at all, said Don Simpson, who eventually became a producer on the Disney
lot. “Frank Wells was a Rhodes scholar,” Simpson said. “He was the highest of the high goyim. He represented everything Michael wanted to be.”

Another critical factor was that Eisner never felt Wells's breath on his neck. Wells may have had dreams beyond his job; certainly he gave serious thought to running for governor of California, though he ultimately decided against it, possibly because it would have brought too much scrutiny to his private life. (Wells had been rumored for years to have strayed during his marriage.) But there was no ambiguity about his future at the Walt Disney Company. That issue had already been resolved before he and Eisner started working together. Wells was comfortable letting Eisner have the spotlight, and Eisner, in turn, was comfortable with Wells.

“When they were hired, Frank maybe had more status,” says Betts. “From the beginning, Michael wanted the attention. He wanted to be the public figurehead. Frank said, ‘Fine. I'll stay in the background.' Michael was never threatened by Frank.”

This is confirmed by Eisner's recollection of his reaction when Wells agreed to take the number-two spot. As Eisner later explained, “I knew it was going to be a great partnership—not because I got to be number one, which I wanted to be, but because I was going to be with a person who was completely selfless…. It was kind of like a marriage where you completely trust your wife and you know that when everything else is bad, at least your wife is there.” Later, he put the same feeling in different terms. “We had trust,” Eisner said. “If you look at the difference between him and others, who I am not going to talk about…I could say anything to Frank about the way I felt.” This was a rare sentiment for Eisner to express about anyone with whom he was in business.

“Frank definitely was the glue,” says Pete Clark. “He was the one unselfish member of that group.”

Another former executive who worked closely with Wells sees the equation a bit differently. For all his loyalty, that insider says, Wells did not necessarily perceive himself as doing Eisner's bidding. “Frank felt he could figure out a way to control Michael,” he says. “Frank always felt he could pull the strings.”

 

ONE DIVISION OF
Disney that particularly appreciated Wells was Imagineering. Wells was in much closer touch with the division than Eisner, who was greeted by some of the Imagineers with contempt. “When we
presented [ideas] to Eisner,” remembers one, “we were always shocked that this guy doesn't have a clue what was going on.” One of Imagineering's top research-and-development executives boasted to staffers that he “had to walk Michael through operating his microwave oven” and claimed that Eisner once called him to find out how to load his camera. Wells seemed much more in touch and hands-on. At one budget review meeting, there was a proposal to replace an air-conditioning unit. “Frank said, ‘Well, let's go take a look,'” remembers an executive. “They went and got a ladder and climbed on the roof.”

Overall, says a former Imagineer, Disney often seemed split between “warring factions,” with one side pushing for unbridled creativity and the other arguing for fiscal restraint. When it came to the theme parks, Eisner and Wells encapsulated this struggle. Eisner churned out ideas often without realizing the financial consequences and Wells applied the brakes. “I think Michael probably learned some pretty tough lessons waving his arms around and then realizing that people were trying to scurry around and do what he said,” Scanlon remembers. “And then—where's the money for this? Michael kind of played a bit and caused some results he didn't expect.”

But Scanlon says Wells often kept Eisner in line. “Michael had 100 percent confidence in Frank,” he recalls. “In a certain way, Frank was Michael's keeper. Frank was the only guy who could ignore Michael or take issue on things…and Michael knew he was kind of flighty at times and he relied on Frank to make sure the ship steered a steady course.”

Another former Imagineer shares the same impression. “Michael and Frank would walk the parks on a regular basis,” he says. “Michael would say, ‘I don't like the color of that bench. Change it.'…Frank would grab people and say, ‘What did he ask you to do? Don't do that! Tell me how much that's going to cost.'…Michael would speak ideas out loud and people would write them down and think he meant for them to [follow through]. Frank would say, ‘[We] aren't doing that.' I think Michael knew this was going on. It probably made him more comfortable knowing he was going to have some base in reality…. With Frank Wells by his side, there was a governor there.”

Sometimes, of course, Eisner's ideas worked beautifully. Someone once snapped a picture of him hitting the drop on the Splash Mountain ride. “I want every guest to have the opportunity to buy this,” Eisner said. The Imagineers set up cameras that took high-resolution, Disney-quality photos
of visitors on the ride (pictures were snapped every thirteen seconds). The pictures were processed and displayed for guests to buy on their way out—with enough time to censor unseemly shots (some riders mooned the camera or exposed their breasts, leading to the nickname “Flash Mountain”). The photos were wildly popular, low-cost, and extremely profitable.

The mantra inside Imagineering was to enhance the guest experience, and Eisner also pushed for bigger, faster rides. With the Typhoon Lagoon ride, remembers an Imagineering executive, “Michael wanted nine-foot waves, twelve-foot waves. We said, ‘Michael—we'll drown people.'”

Wells enjoyed Imagineering's toys and liked to get reports on ski conditions in Asia in the days before the Internet was on every personal computer. And Imagineering had plenty of toys. The unit had an eccentric research-and-development division that toiled in secrecy on all manner of ideas, from the notion of developing a potato chip shaped like Mickey Mouse to figuring out how to launch a giant billboard into geosynchronous orbit with the earth. Another proposal was to project Mickey's image onto the moon—using a laser powerful enough and bright enough to do the job. A former scientist in the division says the Imagineers actually got access to secret military laser technology to see if it could do the trick. The idea was rejected as impracticable.

Getting access to military secrets wasn't especially unusual, though. Disney was the first non-NASA contractor to gain access to the agency's database. And an insider says Disney frequently made extravagant requests of other companies—asking them to develop technologies or loan machinery with no quid pro quo. “My boss would say, ‘Tell them we're Disney.' [He] expected them to give us half a million dollars' worth of equipment. We just took advantage of them in any way we could. What they got in return was ‘a whiff of the mouse,'” says the former employee.

“I was one of the best at that and I was always surprised at how easily I could pick up the phone and have [a company] bring over a $100,000 instrument that we had no intention of buying but just wanted to play with,” acknowledges another former Imagineer. “It was Disney magic…. It was not that we were taking advantage of people outright. People wanted to be taken advantage of.”

When the idea of beaming Mickey's image on the moon was dropped, another Imagineer proposed setting up huge mirrors in the desert that would reflect light from the sun. “They were picturing paving the Saudi desert,”
a former insider says incredulously. But another says the research unit was “a blue-sky think tank” that was supposed to explore seemingly far-fetched ideas.