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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 and management."
Perhaps because they are so different, rumors are rife that Jane appalls Fred and Fred appalls Jane. But insiders say the relationship is perfectly correct and functional so far. Says one: "There is no needling or irritation between them. If there were, I'd see it." In a recent interview with TIME's Mary Cronin and Laurence I. Barrett, the NBC executives occasionally finished each other's sentences, like a cozy married couple. Still, in an atmosphere of crisis, the notion persists that one must eventually knife the other.
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."
But all he really needs this fall is one runaway hit, a Charlie's Angels or a Mork and Mindy. With a smasheroo to help pull up other shows, and with the Moscow Olympics to build on in 1980, NBC could be right back in the thick of things in 18 months. ABC did it in 1976, and its pretax profits' vault would make even "Bottom Line Ed" proud: from $17 million in 1975 to $110 million in 1977.
But if Silverman's magic finally fails him, the mourning in television land will be decidedly restrained. "This is the most unforgiving medium in the history of Western man," says another former NBC vice president. "It makes its own heroes, and then if they don't keep delivering, it murders them."