Word: silverman
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...milk was growing watery. By the end of 1978, NBC's pretax profit contribution dropped to 17.6%, less than two other RCA divisions. So Griffiths-"Bottom Line Ed," as he is known at RCA-went out and hired "the man with the golden gut," Fred Silverman...
...first jobs undertaken by Jane Cahill Pfeiffer when she arrived last fall as NBC's new chairman, Silverman's second in command, was to get to the bottom of the scandal. The former IBM vice president has also stepped on toes trying to straighten out the network's tangled management structure. Said one executive: "She has a Mother Superior complex." Chipped in another: "I understand that at IBM they don't fire people, they just reorganize in such a way as to drive someone out. That is exactly what is going on here...
Pfeiffer answers to Silverman, but it is widely assumed that she has a clear line to RCA Chairman Griffiths. Her main areas of concentration are government relations, legal affairs and employee relations, and she has also been what Silverman calls a "third eye," or a disinterested critic, in prime-time programming. Naturally enough, Silverman has devoted almost all his attention to programming. Says an NBC executive: "Fred is like an eager little boy with a highly developed feeling and sense of how to fix programs, and he couldn't care less about all this monkey business about corporate skill...
Griffiths unequivocally denied that he had lost confidence in his top tandem, and told stockholders: "They need your support." Says Silverman: "I don't feel even an unstated deadline." Some industry watchers think that Silverman will have through 1980 to turn things around. But others are not so sure. "I'll take the odds and say he won't be there after the fall," a former NBC vice president told TIME's James Willwerth in Los Angeles...
...Silverman is already showing the strain. He has been working and living at a furious pace, and tales of his temper tantrums are common on both coasts. Says a sympathetic West Coast television consultant: "He's like the guy in the porno movie who has to deliver all the time. That's damn near impossible...