Michael Eisner
&
Coronary Bypass Surgery

Michael Eisner is probably not the kind of executive who finds it lonely at the top --- or at least he didn't until he had a coronary bypass surgery. I had had the same surgery some years earlier, and discovered that, for several years, there was darkness and void in the chambers of the self, with only a faint echo now and then to suggest that my old self was there somewhere, calling out.

I wrote to Michael Eisner, describing this void, and he wrote me back, cautiously, as was only fair. I was just a writer, with no reason to conceal my troubles, but he was the CEO of a twenty-billion dollar company. The slightest suggestion that anything was wrong and the wolves would have been on him in a second. But he did put some of my letter in his autobiography, and even gave me a free copy.

--- Larry McMurtry in review of
The Big Picture,
NYRB, 7 April 2005