Beyond Control: ABC and the Fate of the Networks.

• Author: Eisendrath, John

Beyond Control, ABC and the Fate of the Networks Beyond Control, ABC and the Fate of the Networks. Huntington Williams. Atheneum, $19.95. "A vast horny wasteland, an excuse for on-the-job mating, and an oasis of promiscuity." Hmmm. Let's guess: The Playboy mansion? Barney Frank's Washington townhouse? Heritage USA? Would you believe the ABC television network circa the late 1970s?

Huntington Williams does. In his book, he alleges that ABC News President Roone Arledge "seemed to like giving male renditions of the song, 'I'm Jist a Girl Who Cain't Say No.'" So "strong and indiscriminate" were certain executives' libidos that, according to Williams, "working at ABC. . . was like making love in front of a mirror." Say it ain't so, Roone.

Williams worked at ABC from 1981 to 1985 and is currently editor of the Gannett Center Journal, the quarterly publication of the Gannett Center for Media Studies. He knows the corporate players well and captures the network's ebb and flow from also-ran to number one and back. Although his peevish, overblown rhetoric (which seems directed mainly toward executives he did not interview for the book) undercuts some examples of a network truly out of control, the examples are still striking. For instance:

In 1976, a year of then-record profits, ABC gave free commercial time to United Airlines in exchange for free use of the airline's 17-room triplex suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

For two years, one of the network's chief programmers kept a psychic on the payroll in order to help him select what shows the network should air.

In 1983, Jim Abernathy, vice president in charge of Wall Street relations, spent over $500,000 of the network's money in a botched attempt to buy ABC chairman and founder Leonard Goldenson an honorary degree from Harvard for his 80th birthday.

Ah, Goldenson. His is a story Williams tells well. It is part pluck: Son of a Scottsdale, Pennsylvania department store owner, Goldenson graduated from Harvard Law School at the height of the Depression and had to wait six years before getting a chance to work in the one field that ever interested him--movies. Part luck: the job he finally got, helping to reorganize a bankrupt Paramount Pictures, afforded a smart young attorney unimagined upward mobility, so much so that by the age of 32 he was president of Paramount's theater division. And part guts: in 1951 Goldenson paid $25 million for ABC, which at the time had no source of programming and was...