Tartikoff’s official explanation was that he had quit to spend more time with his daughter, Calla, 9, who hasn’t fully recovered from head injuries suffered in a January 1991 jeep accident in Lake Tahoe, Nev. (Tartikoff, tragically, was at the wheel.) Around Labor Day, when it became clear she wasn’t improving, Tartikoff and his wife, Lilly, bought a house in New Orleans to be near one of the country’s top therapists. “I need to assist my wife in this critical stage of my daughter’s ongoing rehabilitation,” Tartikoff told a group of Paramount executives.
Insiders confirm that his daughter’s medical treatment was the primary reason Tartikoff left. But it wasn’t the whole story. For months, Tartikoff had clashed with his bosses, Paramount Communications chairman Martin Davis and president and COO Stanley Jaffe. Notoriously hard-nosed, hands-on managers, they’ve expressed displeasure with Tartikoff’s inability to quickly duplicate his NBC success. Tartikoff, who replaced Frank Mancuso as chairman in July 1991, had a mixed record: one blockbuster, “Wayne’s World,” decent performers such as “Boomerang” and “Patriot Games,” and one disaster, “1492: The Conquest of Paradise” (which cost $45 million to make and so far has grossed a pitiful $6 million). Jaffe and Davis were annoyed, sources say, that Tartikoff was spending so much time promoting his recently published autobiography and chewed him out for posing bare-chested with Lilly in their Beverly Hills swimming pool for a People magazine spread. They thought he hadn’t mastered the mechanics of moviemaking and was too preoccupied with his daughter’s health to concentrate on the job. “He’s an absentee chairman,” says one leading agent. Tartikoff ultimately tired of the confrontational atmosphere, and asked out. “This was 80 percent about Brandons daughter,” says one source close to him, “and 20 percent his problems with Stanley.”
NBC’s sagging fortunes, meanwhile, date back to the departure of Tartikoff in May 1991. He left protege Warren Littlefield with a schedule cluttered with aging hits, including “Cheers” and “L.A. Law.” Their decline has been coupled with the poor performance of youth-oriented shows developed by Littlefield. The network has lost 10 percent of its prime-time audience from a year ago, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., and is barely breaking even.
In recent weeks Cosby has aimed some withering criticism at NBC. Cosby excoriated TV portrayals of African-Americans in an industry speech (NEWSWEEK, Oct. 26), and he has been at odds with Littlefield over NBC’s interference on the Cosby-produced series “Here and Now,” starring Malcolm-Jamal Warner. (NBC, Cosby told NEWSWEEK, “began to move in a subversive way to feature a character” who was a poor role model for African-Americans.) About two weeks ago his longtime agent Norman Brokaw arranged a meeting between Cosby and NBC’s Wright about a possible purchase of the network. (General Electric’s public line is that NBC is not for sale, but many analysts and insiders say the company would be happy to unload for an offer of at least $3.5 billion.) Cosby’s main motivation? He wants prime time to reflect a greater “social conscience,” says his publicist David Brokaw (Normans son). “Take Fox’s ‘The Simpsons’,” says Brokaw. “They make it attractive to be lazy, to be a dysfunctional family. [If it were his show], Cosby’d structure the story line to provide more insight-asking, ‘Why doesn’t Bart Simpson want to do his homework?’”
Who knows: maybe Bart could marry Murphy Brown? More relevant, Cosby has no certain financial resources other than his $300 million fortune, and may have difficulty finding much in the current climate. Besides, General Electric, which paid $6.4 billion for NBC’s parent company RCA in 1986, reportedly won’t budge from its $3.5 billion asking price. Analysts say that value is inflated, one reason possible suitors, including former Fox chairman Barry Diller and Paramount’s Davis, haven’t closed a sale. Any chance of a Cosby-Tartikoff alliance at some point? Not likely. Tartikoff considers the Cos, whose recent projects have ranged from the movie bomb “Ghost Dad” to “You Bet Your Life,” an erratic judge of material.
