Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [18]
The big question was, would my personality be able to deal with Evey? I handled Stu as good as I could. I dealt with him the way I did because it was to the advantage of the company—my arm around him as we walked through the streets of New York or sitting at a bar: “You want to talk about ladies?” “Yeah, I’ll talk about ladies.” “You want another drink?” “Sure, I’ll sit here and have another drink with you.” I was doing that just to get the guy to understand what I wanted to do.
Am I a whore? Sure, I’m a whore. Evey had the money and we needed more of it. His number one thing was to deal with members of the board. God knows what he had on them.
CHUCK PAGANO, Executive Vice President of Technology:
Evey reminded me of Ted Knight in Caddyshack, with the freaking plaid sport coat, the ascot, and the hair slicked down.
ANDY BRILLIANT, General Counsel:
Stu had this place out near Palm Desert or Palm Springs, and we used to go out there for meetings a couple of times a year. There was a lot of drinking that went on there, a ton of drinking.
STUART EVEY:
I don’t have any excuses, but circumstances at Getty Oil Company were such that drinking was part of our work. We would meet for lunch upstairs in the private club, and we’d have a couple martinis. And when we’d have our budget meetings, we’d set up a hospitality room with all the booze and everything else. So it was a natural thing to be exposed to. When I was with ESPN, I went to all kinds of those things. Drinking was part of the deal there too.
CHET SIMMONS:
One of the things that really turned my stomach to bile was when we got over to the business side and I sit down with Rasmussen and their sales manager and they started to talk about how many homes are we selling? And one of them said, “Well, you know, we’ve given a guarantee of one million homes,” and I turned to that guy and I said, “Where?” And he couldn’t show me. I knew that they were lying. Then I’m sitting there with Anheuser-Busch ready to make this big buy, and I have to tell them that we ain’t got a million homes; maybe we can get five hundred thousand, maybe.
STUART EVEY:
Rasmussen trod on waters that were not acceptable, not only to me and my company, but to Chet Simmons. There was nothing operating-wise that he was needed for, and he tended to hype up “our huge bankroll” everywhere he went. My lawyers were very upset about that, and Chet Simmons was very upset that Rasmussen was getting all the publicity but not doing any work.
CHET SIMMONS:
There were a number of things that Rasmussen had already done, before me, that were really awful, including his plans for the actual launch of the network. He had begun planning a huge extravaganza, going so far as to hire Marty Pasetta to produce it. I mean, Marty did the Oscars and a bunch of really famous and costly openings, and here we were not able to identify any cable customers. I had to go talk to Pasetta and tell him there was no way that was going to happen.
ED HOOKSTRATTEN:
Stu was asking me, “What do you think of this, what do you think of that?” I said, “Let’s grab somebody good to lead our sports coverage.” I thought, we got Chet, a real sports guy running the place, now we need a real broadcaster.
JIM SIMPSON, Announcer:
I was with NBC, doing sports. My wife and I came home from being out somewhere about eleven o’clock at night, and one of my daughters said, “Mr. Hookstratten called and he wants to talk to you. You can call him back anytime because there’s a three-hour difference between the East Coast and the West Coast.” And I called Ed back and he told me about being on a plane going somewhere into California with the people from the Getty Oil Company. They were going to start a twenty-four-hour cable sports network, and was I interested?