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...
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