The Keys to the Kingdom Read Online Free Page B

total fools, that the collective IQ is forty, or you can believe that there’s something more that you’re not seeing,” he insisted.
    He declined to elaborate.

[1]
POOR LITTLE RICH BOY
    I T MUST HAVE been difficult, even frightening, for a poor little rich boy whose parents wanted so much for him and demanded so much from him. But a boy who had a lively imagination yet a very short attention span did not necessarily possess the qualities that ensure a brilliant academic career. And in fact, Michael Dammann Eisner had to get used to trying hard without always succeeding. The son of a wealthy New York family, he had grown up on Park Avenue, spending weekends in wealthy Bedford Hills at his maternal grandparents’ estate.
    The Eisners were wealthy but not extravagant, and Michael was inculcated with a sense of thrift bordering on cheapness. His mother constantly admonished him to turn out lights when he left a room. If the family went to dinner and Michael wanted a shrimp cocktail that wasn’t included in the prix fixe menu, his father complained that this indulgence was “ridiculous and unnecessary.” Early on, Eisner was taught to believe that money was to be taken very seriously. The message that his father drilled into his head was that “you do not spend capital.”
    For the first three years of Michael’s life, his father, Lester, was away flying transport planes in the Second World War. Being the only boy (he had one older sister), Eisner was his mother’s young prince and he learned that by being “clever and playful and likable” he could almost always have his way. To the young boy, Lester’s return seemed a change for the worse. It wasn’t a happy dynamic. A longtime Eisner associate says that his father was weak and vacillating with his wife, but self-righteous and overbearing with others, including his children. Relentlessly dissatisfied with them, Lester insisted that they call him by his first name. In his mother, Maggie, Michael had a powerful ally. Complain as Lester might, Maggie saw to it that her boy got to savor his a` la carte shrimp cocktail.
    Eisner says his father was popular, charming, and funny—but also recallsthat his best friend, John Angelo, was “terrified of him.” An avid sportsman, Lester was highly competitive and demanded much of his children. When he took them galloping on cross-country rides every weekend, he hardly noticed that they were scared to death. Both children learned to hate and fear riding.
    Michael’s sister, Margot, liked to figure-skate. Lester pushed her hard and she became a capable little technician, laboring at her performances with such grim determination that she failed to win over the judges in competitions. Her brother knew better how to have his way. “Smile,” he told her. “Play the game.” It was a natural gift for Michael, but for Margot, it was not.
    Michael attended the exclusive Allen-Stevenson School on East Seventy-eighth Street, a school known for its children’s orchestra. (Eisner played glockenspiel.) He set out each morning dressed in a blue uniform with a blue cap. He was relatively happy there, not because of a love of learning, but because he was one of the best athletes in the relatively small school and got to be quarterback of the football team from the fourth through eighth grades. He found that he liked calling the plays. Academically, he never really distinguished himself—much to the unconcealed disappointment of his father. “I wanted to please him, and it was nearly impossible,” Eisner said later. The anxious and protective Maggie did her best for her son, even forging his homework for him when he fell behind.
    Eisner portrays himself as an insatiably curious child whose father begged for relief from his incessant questions. He also saw himself as having had a fairly adventuresome youth. “‘Give me a subway station and I will