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His weight goes up and down, and he frets about diets. "I put on weight a couple of months ago because of the furor about Soap," he complains. "I ended up eating, drinking and smoking too much." His eyes are strangely hooded, like Bert Lance's, as if he has just awakened—or is about to go to sleep. He is graying early, and he could easily be mistaken for someone ten years older than he is. In person, Silverman is affable but tentative. He does not shake hands but thrusts forth his fingers instead, as if afraid that the full package might not be returned. At CBS he was known as a hypochondriac who would run off about once a week for an EKG at Roosevelt Hospital. "He just doesn't have the capacity to relax," says a former CBS colleague. Just being around him "can make you break out in little beads of perspiration," adds the otherwise cool ABC vice president Ed Vane.
He has worked, if that is conceivable, even harder at ABC, determined to put it on top and keep it there. "He's fearful and panicked and fixing and playing, as if he were losing not winning," marvels one friend. A puzzle? Not really. "To Freddie," explains Dann, "it isn't enough to succeed. The other guy has to fail." Silverman says somewhat the same thing, but less bluntly: "I think there is a philosophy that is good no matter what you are doing. That is to always act as if you're in last place. You just shouldn't take success for granted, because you can turn around one day and say, 'My Lord, it is all gone.' "
These days, Freddie is at pains to dispute the stories of his driven nature. "You really have to start separating the man from the myth," he says. Far from watching the set every waking hour, he says, "I look at very little TV at home, unless I have to or unless a cassette comes in and it is an emergency." Yes, he admits, there is a three-TV unit in his new apartment overlooking Central Park, but it has not even been hooked up yet. Really, he says, his family—Cathy, to whom he has been married for six years, and his children, Melissa, 5, and William, 8 months—are far more important to him than his job.
There is, doubtless, truth in what he says. His closest friends have noticed a mellowing since Freddie became a family man; by all accounts, he is a devoted husband and father, and he will often break off conversations to the West Coast with a sigh: "Gotta go home and tell the kids a story."
Aside from tales for the kids, Silverman rarely reads anything but scripts; when he does, his tastes run to popular bestsellers like James Clavell's Shogun. Though he now has the use of a company limo, he and Cathy, an attractive woman with short, dark hair, live in most ways like Middle Americans. Their apartment is furnished like a suburban split-level, and when they buy paintings, they try them out first on the walls, just to make sure that they like the colors. Freddie is vague about the artists' names.
Still, what seems mellow to Silverman would send most people rushing for the Valium, and Freddie cannot walk past a TV set without stopping. Like Captain Caveman, everything he sees he devours, and nearly everything is yum, yum, yum.