Bob Iger took a seat on a balcony outside the Perelman Performing Arts Center, in lower Manhattan, the other day and ran a hand gently over his right knee. He was unshaven and dressed casually, in a black V-neck over a white T-shirt, black pants, and black-and-white Nikes. “It’s my second knee, and it’s a slog,” he said, alluding to recent surgery. “Not to complain, but it’s kind of barbaric—they literally saw the top of your tibia off, and the bottom of your femur. They replace what was there with metal. And they tell you to walk that day, and they send you home. So there’s a lot of pain management.”
Iger, who stepped down as the C.E.O. of Disney in March, votes and pays taxes in California, but he has long maintained an apartment in New York. “I have four adult kids,” he said. “They all live here—and five grandchildren.” He had spent the previous day at the apartment, watching football with two twentysomething sons and noticed, with a veteran media man’s weary resignation, that their attention was “somewhat diverted,” as he put it, by the rectangles in their hands.
Iger was soon to receive an Icon of Culture award from PAC, and that achievement, plus a looming acquisition of the Los Angeles Lakers, gave him occasion to reflect on what he viewed as an unlikely career. It began in 1973, after he graduated from Ithaca College with dreams of becoming an anchorman. “Who wouldn’t want to be Walter Cronkite?” he said, recalling his habit, as a preteen on Long Island, of devouring the Times before school. “Air-raid drills, the Kennedy era and assassination, the birth of the Beatles, and the Vietnam War and free love. It was a very, very rich time.”
He started, instead, as an Ithaca weatherman. “It was a great experience, because it taught me how to give people bad news,” he said. A roof over the balcony shielded him from gusting wind that left commuters turtling their necks into sweaters. “If we were in Ithaca, it would probably be a little bit colder and a little bit wetter.”
Ithaca was on a lot of minds for a different kind of bad news, involving an alleged gang rape at Cornell that had become another proxy battle in the culture wars. “We don’t have to talk about it,” Iger said. He meant this not just as an evasion but symbolically. Too many opinions. He had turned out to be better at delivering bad news off camera than on: a quiet consensus builder with a ruthless streak. Ten years ago, like not a few executives of his generation, he thought about going into politics, as a pragmatic centrist. “I sensed that there was a disillusionment with the state of political affairs and that people were looking for more outsiders to get involved,” he said. Then, having missed his Trump moment, he watched as politics invaded the theme parks, the airwaves, and the boardroom alike, with everyone spouting off. “I spent a lot of time not just reminding people but exhorting people to focus on what our No. 1 goal was, which was to entertain,” he said. “Walt Disney created Disneyland in part to enable people to put their daily frets aside and just cocoon themselves in a happy experience.” He added, “The company had to pull people back and remind them that, in a way, you give up your private-citizen status.”
He brought up a recent Times story about political polarization across the globe and contrasted it with what he’d seen during the World Cup—foreigners happily drinking their way through American cities. “There’s something about sports that’s a uniting factor,” he said. This brought him to the Lakers deal, worth a reported $12.5 billion, with Josh Kushner as a business partner. “My relationship with Josh began with his then girlfriend, Karlie Kloss, asking me if I could spend some time with her boyfriend,” Iger marvelled. Kloss, a supermodel, was friends with Iger’s wife, Willow Bay, a former model and the dean of the journalism school at U.S.C. Kushner showed up to their first meeting with a list of annotated questions—“I can’t remember if there were Post-it notes, or whatever”—about leadership techniques.
Iger’s hand returned to his knee. Sitting left it behaving like a “rusty gate,” he said. He stood and glanced toward the reflecting pools in the footprint of the old Twin Towers and recalled that his best friend from Ithaca, Jay Fischler, had become a battalion chief in the New York City Fire Department. “I spent seventy-two hours listening to his answering machine, hoping that he’d pick up,” he said, thinking back to 9/11, but in the middle of the crisis there was no one to deliver the good news that Fischler was alive and well. ♦