NBC's Mrs. Clean

She is known variously as "the Ayatullah," "St. Jane" and "Attila the Nun," a reference to the six months she once spent in a Berkeley, Calif., convent. As those sour nicknames show, the rise of Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, 46, chairman of NBC, has produced a predictable mix of envy, admiration, fear and resentment, laced with a dollop of old-fashioned male chauvinism.

Not that anyone doubts Pfeiffer's ability to hold her own in the rough-and-tumble of network politics. She is not just attractive and intelligent. Thomas J. Watson Jr., her boss and mentor at IBM, calls her "brilliant and practical." A West Coast producer, less admiringly, terms her "conservative, moralistic, businesslike and hard." A liberal arts major at the University of Maryland, the Washington, D.C.-born Pfeiffer joined IBM soon after leaving the convent at the age of 23. In her two decades there, she rose from a trainee job to a vice presidency, with a reputation for quick decisions and no false moves.

On leave from IBM, she became a White House Fellow, worked for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver, and began to collect powerful friends in Washington. Pfeiffer left IBM in 1976, after marrying fellow V.P. Ralph Pfeiffer Jr., the divorced father of ten children. She turned down several job offers, including one from President Carter, who wanted to make her Secretary of Commerce. Her reasons: she needed time to recuperate from a thyroid cancer operation, and she was reluctant to spend so much time away from her husband. Pfeiffer then worked as a top-drawer consultant to several major companies, including NBC. Last fall, in a surprise move, she became the $225,000-a-year (plus up to $200,000 a year in bonuses) chairman of NBC, responsible to the network's new president, Fred Silverman.

As an administrator, Pfeiffer is reluctant to delegate authority. Her style runs more to mastering all the minutiae herself and plunging into an array of meetings to keep on top of the corporate scene. Instead of long memos, she scratches out terse notes to staffers on file cards, many of them dashed off during her commute from Greenwich, Conn., in her chauffeur-driven $46,000 gray Cadillac.

Much of the current gallows humor at NBC eddies around the relationship of Silverman and Pfeiffer, a.k.a. "the Odd Couple" and "Mr. Tough and Mrs. Clean." By most standards, the two top executives are indeed mismatched. Silverman is rumpled and raffish, a volatile high roller, known for his seat-of-the-pants decisions on programming. Pfeiffer is formal and controlled, a superb administrator, known for her idealism and belief in "high programming standards." Where Silverman's language is direct and often unprintable, Pfeiffer's fluctuates between girls' school ("Oh gosh, gee whiz") and "high IBM" ("I am on a steep learning curve").

One of Pfeiffer's problems could be her idealism. According to a friend, "She always believed in making a better world. Corruption is totally alien to Jane, and she wants to clean it up right away. She's a nun." Says another source: "I have the feeling that she thinks television is a dirty business, period, and she has to save us from ourselves by cleaning house." Another opinion is that her IBM training will be of limited use at NBC. Says a former executive at a TV production company: "Jane Pfeiffer is a virgin who comes out of the structured school. I'm not sure the structured school works in the entertainment business."

So far the critics do not seem to have ruffled Pfeiffer. "The pressure doesn't get to me," she insists. Somewhat defensively, she also says of her role in handling the unit managers' scandal, "I'm not the avenging angel. I'm not Joan of Arc." Her edgy employees would probably accept those statements. Trouble is, they are not quite sure yet just who she is.

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