The Keys to the Kingdom Read Online Free Page A

Green, the chairman of the theme parks and a nineteen-year veteran at the company, resigned in April 2000. Green’s division had shown the most consistent success during Disney’s difficult years. But he had been eclipsed by rising executive Paul Pressler, who was named president of the theme-park division in 1998. And he was said to have become frustrated with Eisner, whom he considered to be impulsive and manipulative.
    Sandy Litvack resigned in October 2000. Litvack had suffered some more high-profile losses in court before he departed. There was the litigation involving GoTo.com, and more. In April, a jury ruled that Disney had no right to deny $2.8 million in benefits to executive Robert Jahn, an executivethen dying of AIDS. Litvack testified in the trial that Jahn had admitted taking payoffs from vendors who made movie trailers and television ads for the studio. But the jury said Litvack should have gotten a signed confession. Jahn had died in May 1994.
    And in August, a Florida jury socked Disney for $240 million, finding that the company stole the idea for Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex near Orlando from a former baseball umpire and his partner, an architect. The two had shown Disney plans and a model of such an attraction in 1987. Disney had denied the allegation. Louis Meisinger, Disney’s executive vice president and general counsel, said the sports complex was “independently created by Walt Disney employees” and that the verdict “was driven by [an] appeal to the jury’s prejudices against corporations and business in general.” Disney is appealing the decision.
    When Litvack resigned, it was not perceived to be as a result of any loss of confidence relating to these court cases. Rather, Litvack was said to have been restless for some time, while Eisner was believed to have prevailed on Litvack to stay until the company started showing some better results (as it did by October)—when the departure of yet another high-level executive might not alarm investors. Given Iger’s ascent, there was no hope that Litvack might ever rise to second in command. And a Disney executive said Litvack had grown tired of the game. “Bob is the future; he’s not,” that executive said. “Why fight it? It’s a tough business and a tough company and you’ve got to be on your game every minute.”
    In an interview at the time, Litvack reflected on his relationship with Eisner. “Michael can sit and create and react to creative thoughts in a nanosecond,” he said. “He’s also charismatic—very charismatic…. Those are his skills. I am definitely more deliberative than Michael…. I brought a deliberate approach and I would restrain, at times, his impulses.”
    Litvack also indulged in some musings over the Katzenberg trial. “I wish [that] had come out differently,” he said. “We all—certainly Disney and Michael, and Jeffrey to a lesser extent—sustained a lot of pain in that one…. I wish that damn thing had been handled by both sides quicker and easier and without the cost to everybody.”
    But Litvack still didn’t think Disney could have done anything different. “In my judgment—and I think it was a failure on both sides—the thing could not have been reasonably resolved…until we were able to make some headway in the trial,” he said. (In the second phase of a two-part trial,Disney was able to chip away at some of Katzenberg’s projections about the company’s future profits. Those estimates were key to the amount of money that the former studio chief was owed.)
    Pressed on the company’s decision to go through a public and sometimes embarrassing trial despite an earlier agreement to pay Katzenberg a minimum of $117 million, Litvack said the decision was justified by circumstances that he declined to discuss in depth. “You can either believe that we are