Here was the deal: Eisenberg had agreed, says Pannell, that "we could have the baby at the office with us, with a nanny." Come January 1989, the baby took an office -- with no caretaker in sight.
Eisenberg wasn't thrilled. "I tried to put up with it," he says. But Eisenberg hated it when Ben's blubbering pierced the air at Tuesday morning management meetings. He fumed when he found that the only thing some art directors were drawing was baby-sitting duty.
By the time a nanny came aboard, Eisenberg was inconsolable. "The nanny left at 4:30, anyway," he grouses. Instead of approaching Pannell with his many complaints, he mainly shared them with others. Pannell, who admits to having "a hard time saying what is on my mind," seemed to be hoping Eisenberg would mistake the baby for an unusually fresh-faced employee. "We should have responded sooner," admits Pannell. "We made a mistake." Bigger than they knew.
* * *
* The outsiders: allowing pseudo-partners to change the balance. Given that her name was one of the three above the receptionist's desk, most people assumed Carol St. George was a partner. She wasn't -- at least not on paper. Let's just say she held special privileges among employees, as the only one, for instance, who didn't have to do kitchen cleanup. "She was perceived as an owner," says Todd Hart, a designer. "Nobody ever said otherwise."
Pannell thought of her as co-creative director. "We were a team," he says proudly.
The distinction might not have mattered, were there no differences between a partner and an employee. But partners need to huddle on various decisions. And every time Eisenberg called Pannell into his office, Pannell brought St. George with him. Feeling outnumbered, Eisenberg dragged in Brinkman. "He felt so ganged up on that he pulled me into meetings so it would be two against two," recalls Brinkman. It was an excellent formation for a round of Red Rover, but hardly productive for decision making.
Given that tension, it was inevitable that Eisenberg should start to feel hostile toward the woman whom he perceived as wrecking the balance between him and his partner. "In the old days," Eisenberg says in chilly tones, "Cap and I seemed able to work out anything."
Not really, of course. But that's how Eisenberg felt. And the role he finally found for St. George was that of scapegoat. "I saw Cap's wife as a great asset," says Eisenberg. "But I didn't think of her influence on him. I think she resented me."
St. George, for her part, simply regrets allowing the unspoken hostility to grow. "Early on, Arthur made noises about how difficult it was to have a married couple there," she recalls. "But I don't think it registered with us. That was kind of dumb on our part."
* * *
Gradually, these differences and others convinced Eisenberg that his fears were well founded: Pannell was stomping all over the kindness he had shown in taking him in. Of course, he never expressed his feelings to Pannell; by the time he tried, he was so choked with frustration that he couldn't control his anger.
In May 1990, about 18 months into their partnership, Eisenberg called Pannell and St. George into his office for a parley. Four or five things were bothering him, Eisenberg said, and he had made a list.
It started with Eisenberg -- the omnipresent and awkward Brinkman at his side -- demanding that Pannell do more hands-on creative work. Sure, Arthur, Pannell said, if that's what you want. From there, the dialogue deteriorated into a rambling tantrum. "I'm trying to do everything you want me to do," Pannell pleaded. "I stay up late at night trying to figure out, What does Arthur want?" Eisenberg went on to accuse the two of coasting. It was time, he yelled, that they proved themselves worth the equity they had received.
That did it. Pannell was tired of feeling he was being tested. He simply threw up his hands, shouted, "I quit!" and stormed out.
He would have done well not to come back. The next morning Eisenberg apologized. Eisenberg didn't feel especially bad, but he says he was somehow convinced that apologizing was the thing to do. "In some way, it got resolved that the things bothering me shouldn't bother me," he says.
Nevertheless, those feelings hadn't changed at all -- well, maybe a tad. For the worse, though. What Pannell had said about pleasing Eisenberg, in fact, inflamed him more. "That is not how a partner thinks," says Eisenberg.
Pannell, Eisenberg began telling himself, was simply not partner material. And now the injustices piled up faster and faster. Partners are grateful for any clients they have; they don't complain that "only great clients will enable us to do great work," as Pannell said. Partners don't refuse, for any reason, to go to client meetings. And if there's one thing that partners never, ever do, it is this: they don't ask for vacations. Possibly it goes without saying -- it did, of course, in this case -- that partners don't take one of the company's other top people with them when they do go away.
At first Pannell asked for three weeks last August. After some negotiations with Eisenberg, Pannell and St. George settled on two. In Eisenberg's mind "things had been deteriorating" since he had unleashed his garbled list of demands, four months earlier. Aside from the constant irritations, the company wasn't doing so hot. "We were pitching new business and not getting it," he admits. "I was trying to analyze why." One possible explanation: the quality of the work. And the creative force behind that work? "I lost a bit of confidence in the way Cap was directing creative," he says.
