AROUND THIS TIME, John Kluge met Rupert Murdoch at a television conference, and in that meeting Murdoch expressed his interest in buying Metromedia. John pursued it and for some reason kept the sale a secret from me. I think that he was worried that if I knew about it, I would be devastated. When I actually found out about it, I was not very pleased.
In 1986, Fox bought Metromedia for $2 billion, and I was for the first time in a very long time, out of a job. My only solace was the remuneration for the amount of stock I held in Metromedia.
As I look back on John Kluge’s career, his success seems to have been built on one very specific mission: to buy a license in a major market at a reasonable price, wait for the market to evolve, and then sell at a high multiple. It has apparently worked just about every time for him, and he built one of the most successful media companies in the world. I like to think that I, and many others who worked there, helped John build Metromedia into the great success story that it was.
Roger Brown, roommate from Staunton, writes:
“One day, Bob’s secretary, Maria Morales, called me and told me that Bob was a little depressed because he was not informed in advance by upper management that Metromedia was going to go private and asked if I would call him to try and cheer him up. I called him and suggested that with the sixty million (a number I made up at the time) he was making from the transaction, that he would never miss sending me over a million or two. As was typical style for him, and in keeping with the way we were highly competitive, he told me that the number wasn’t sixty million, it was a hundred million (now he was making the number up) and that a hundred million just doesn’t go that far nowadays. Thus he would be unable to send me over any money. When Bob went into retirement, my wife Lea and I were with him and Marjie in California on their boat The Celebration. I will never forget the dialogue between Lea and Bob that day:
“Bob, I thought we were going to go out deep-sea fishing today.” “We are,” was his answer. “When the crew gets one hooked, they’ll call us.”
Honorable Bruce Selya, friend, writes:
“Bryant University figured prominently in perhaps the most memorable day I ever spent with Bob and Marjie. The Bryant Board voted, on my nomination, to give Bob an honorary Doctor of Business Administration degree, which of course, considering his history in the business world, he eminently deserved.
When commencement day came, we stood side-by-side on the dais in front of an audience of roughly 10,000 people, and the flowery but accurate account of his many accomplishments, was read. As I personally presented to him his honorary degree, tears began to swell up in his eyes and run down his cheeks. It’s a side of Bob that very few people have ever seen, but for me bespeaks the humanity that so characterizes him.”
In 1987, to my surprise and great honor, I received an honorary Doctor of Business Administration from Bryant University. Receiving this honorary degree had a very profound affect on me and is something that I will never forget.
Back at our Fourth Network, the Small Wonder program was achieving some success. We had produced twenty-two shows and needed to strategize more as to how we might get it to seventy-five shows. I decided to call in all of the station group partners to talk about it. I also decided to invite Barry Diller, who was at Fox, to come to the meeting.
“Barry, I’d like you come to a meeting about Small Wonder.
“Okay, I’ll come. When is it?”
“It’s going to be at 9:30 on Tuesday morning,” I told him.
“Well, I can’t get there until 10:30,” he said.
“Well then you’re going to miss an hour and a half of the meeting. I can’t ask all of these people to fly in from all around the country and then wait around for you to show up. The meeting starts at nine sharp.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
The meeting did start at nine-thirty and Barry did not show up until ten thirty. He walked in, sat down, and appeared to be rather grumpy and uninterested. At this point I asked the group to put up more money to do forty-four new shows. Barry looked at me and said, “You can’t ask for forty-four new shows. What’s the matter with you? That’s impossible. Thirteen shows maybe, but not forty-four more.”
“Well Barry, thirteen more doesn’t help us. Forty-four does. We’ve got to get up to seventy-five to be strippable.”
“Look, let me tell you something, the show is lousy and it’s a piece of crap. You should pull the plug on it.”
With that remark, he stormed out of the room.
The group did give me the go-ahead to do an additional forty-four shows and Small Wonder turned out to be an enormous success. The following year I ran into Barry at the NAPTE convention. We exchanged greetings and then I could not wait to say to him: “You know Barry, that piece of crap show Small Wonder you told us to pull the plug on? It’s now the highest rated show on your L.A. station.”
He looked at me and muttered: “Yeah, I know,” and kept walking.