Hell No, I Won't Go!

Jane Cahill Pfeiffer is the latest casualty at NBC

It was an executive-suite execution acted out like a daytime soap opera. Scanning the newspaper last Tuesday morning, NBC Chairman Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, probably the nation's highest-paid woman executive, saw a story that she had been asked to resign. Pfeiffer, 47, then wrote out an indignant statement and phoned the press. Said she hotly: "It is apparent that there are some who are trying to use the media to get me to quit. I won't quit."

Two hours later, NBC brought down the hatchet. Under pressure from the RCA Corp., NBC'S parent, Network President and Chief Executive Officer Fred Silverman announced that he had relieved Pfeiffer, a longtime friend, of her duties. But less than two hours after, Pfeiffer was back on the phone to the press with another venomous dart: "Yesterday Fred Silverman told me that there was no way we both could stay. He didn't ask for my resignation then or ever. He simply stated that the RCA people play hardball and that he would probably follow me out the door in six months." Finally, two days later, Pfeiffer agreed to go quietly in return for a termination-of-contract settlement said to be worth more than $700,000.

The Pfeiffer firing was among the messiest in recent American business history, and the departures at NBC may not yet be over. Silverman, an industry legend since he was programming chief at CBS, was also rumored to be on the way out. The latest sacking made RCA Chairman Edgar H. Griffiths, 59, look especially bad. Pfeiffer's executive decapitation came just three weeks after Griffiths summarily dismissed RCA President and Heir Apparent Maurice R. Valente, 51, whom he had recruited from I.T.T. only six months earlier.

Though Griffiths has been credited with making RCA competitive once again in television manufacturing and other electronic products, his record with NBC hardly merits a peacock. In 1976, when Griffiths assumed the throne at RCA, the corporation earned $106.9 million, of which 32% came from the network. Last year RCA earnings totaled only $105.6 million, with NBC accounting for a mere 17%. Said John Reidy, a broadcast-industry analyst with Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc.: "If the broadcast division is not the premiere division in that company, then it is a problem."

Griffiths thought the problem was Pfeiffer. Formerly vice president in charge of corporate communications and government relations at IBM and Jimmy Carter's first choice to be Secretary of Commerce, Jane Cahill Pfeiffer had helped lure Silverman to NBC in 1978, while acting as a management consultant to RCA. After signing on with NBC for a reported $1 million a year, Silverman admitted that his managerial experience was limited and hired Pfeiffer, whose salary and bonus last year came to $425,000, to handle mundane corporate affairs.

Pfeiffer's troubles at NBC began almost as soon as she arrived. She was quickly faced with a nasty $1 million scandal involving expense-account fraud and kickbacks among field-unit managers. Pfeiffer, who once spent six months in a convent, earned herself the sobriquet "Attila the Nun" by rooting out the wrongdoers with the wrath of God and a team of lawyers and accountants that ran up a tab of more than $2 million. "It looks like you sent in the whole damned Marines to rescue a cat," Vice Chairman Richard Salant reportedly quipped at a staff meeting.

Pfeiffer's iron glove was felt elsewhere around the company. In the past two years more than 55 vice presidents have left or been fired from NBC. She reportedly ended one Friday afternoon meeting of top executives by smiling at them and remarking lightly, "We may have a great surprise next Friday when we have our next staff meeting. It'll be interesting to see who isn't there then." Said one of her victims: "She loved to confront people."

Still, Pfeiffer's problem was not just her insensitivity in personnel matters but also a lack of experience in the broadcasting business. Says one executive who survived her reign: "She came in with the attitude of a consumer advocate toward television." Added another top NBC official: "The most important thing in television is the morale of the egomaniacs who make it work. She didn't know how to massage those egos."

Pfeiffer's days at the network had been numbered for several months. Griffiths wanted to fire her, but Silverman made it clear that if Pfeiffer went, he would leave too. Silverman's own clout within the network had slipped in recent months, however, and he was no longer able or willing to protect her.

After promising to put NBC at the top of the ratings pile by the end of 1980, Silverman is presiding over disaster. This past season NBC lagged far behind its competitors in ratings, finishing the season with 17.4 Nielsen points, compared with 19.6 for CBS and 19.5 for ABC. The morning Today show, once an NBC stalwart, now trails ABC'S Good Morning America. Silverman's new daytime offering, the David Letterman Show, has fared so poorly that Silverman has already fired three producers. The latest executive calamity comes at the same time as the start of the 1980 Olympics, which NBC was to have covered and which promised to be one of the network's greatest achievements. Silverman hoped to repeat his performance of four years ago, when he used the Games to help catapult then lowly ABC to No. 1 in the ratings.

A nervous Silverman has been renegotiating his NBC contract, even though it still has almost a year to run. Reportedly, one of Griffiths' major conditions was that Silverman get rid of Pfeiffer. Griffiths was demanding immediate action, in part, because he wanted to stop two splashy company parties that she was planning to hold at the Republican and Democratic conventions.

But the rumpled, impulsive Silverman is notoriously clumsy at firing subordinates. Two weeks ago, he sent cigar-chomping Hollywood Lawyer Milton Rudin to Pfeiffer's porticoed house in an exclusive, guarded section of Greenwich, Conn. Rudin reportedly made it clear that Pfeiffer was finished. The following Monday, Silverman called Pfeiffer into his Rockefeller Plaza office and told her that she would have to resign. Yet she apparently left thinking there was still some room for negotiation. Then, when she learned that her resignation had been requested, she turned livid and picked up the phone.

The spotlight is now on Silverman. Some industry insiders say his future at NBC is riding on the network's success in the first few weeks of the fall TV season. But one West Coast producer says: "Freddie's fall schedule is a disaster. His presidency will be short-lived." Freddie Silverman last week beat Jane Cahill Pfeiffer in the rush to the executive lifeboats, but he may not make it next time.

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