“There are premieres,” said the actress Angela Bassett, “and there are premieres.”
The triumphal march down Black Panther’s purple carpet and into the Dolby Theatre signaled that this was the latter, clearly—an occasion not just for Hollywood’s cyclical ritual of self-celebration but to toast a presumptive billion-dollar blockbuster written, directed, and starring people of color, a bet no studio had dared make before. The rapper Kendrick Lamar, arriving with an entourage of about fifteen, had flown in that afternoon from New York along with Janelle Monáe; both had performed at the Grammys the night before. The tiered tassels of Bassett’s marigold jumpsuit swished every which way, the jewels sewn into the bodice of Lupita Nyong’o’s Atelier Versace gown trembled excitedly, and actors in dashikis greeted executives in suits as preadolescent Marvel Comics mega-fans in glittering orthodontia swirled around them.
As if by design, all this traffic seemed to flow toward Robert Iger, chairman and CEO of Disney, known far and wide as Bob, who was hanging at a safe distance from the step-and-repeat. In a dark Tom Ford suit with wide lapels and a waistcoat, Iger looked rather like the hero of the Ian Fleming novels he devoured in junior high. No, with his V-shaped chest (Iger is a famously fit 67-year-old) and well-drawn features, tinted by the violet light of the tent, he was a superhero himself: acquisitor, empire builder, and snagger of lucrative franchises.
“I badly wanted this movie,” Iger said with the gleaming, ineffaceable smile of a proud father. “To have a black director, a black producer, a black cast. Look around. It means something.” He greeted other stalwarts of Disney’s extended cinematic family, including Don Cheadle (Iron Man 2), Donald Glover (Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which opens next month), and Ava DuVernay, who with A Wrinkle in Time became the first African American woman to helm a $100 million movie. Iger had already seen Black Panther, in successive states of completion, six times, and on nights like these he doesn’t typically stay for the movie. But he was determined to hear the cheers as the credits rolled. So what if his trainer was scheduled for a quarter to five the next morning?
Black Panther was shot largely in Atlanta in April 2017. Exactly one year earlier, Disney had sent a warning to Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal, that it would no longer do business in the state if he passed a “religious freedom” bill that would permit certain businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people. Georgia is the top production center for movies anywhere in the world, and while every major studio films projects there, only Disney spoke up. This bears mention because it may be tempting to watch Iger ride a new wave of Hollywood inclusiveness and imagine that his motivations begin and end at the bottom line. Indeed, he has sometimes suggested that what appear to be principled positions are really just business decisions. And yet an unmistakable gravitas hovers around him. He is, by most accounts, what his mother’s friends would call a mensch.
“On the business side, there is a case to be made for your product reflecting the world you’re trying to do business in,” Iger tells me a few days later—Super Bowl Sunday, in fact—at his home in Brentwood. “But of course there’s also an ethical side. I felt that Marvel needed to turn its afterburners on in terms of developing movies based on more diverse characters, and that led directly to Black Panther and Captain Marvel”—Marvel’s first film about a woman superhero, played by Brie Larson, which debuts next spring. “It was time to take a leap forward, and I exhorted them to do that.”
The house, half-obscured by a massive, primordial-looking magnolia, was designed in the 1940s by Paul R. Williams, a California architect famous for the homes he built for Hollywood luminaries, among them Frank Sinatra, Tyrone Power, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lucille Ball. Williams was a friend of Walt Disney’s and the first African American certified to practice architecture west of the Mississippi River. “He had a sort of ‘beard,’ ” Iger explains, “a white architect who he’d have come in to meet the clients. People wouldn’t work with him if they knew he was black.”
We walk past Iger’s prolific vegetable gardens, where the first snap peas of the season have popped, and around the citrus trees, from which he has a tendency to pluck fruit prematurely, according to his wife, Willow Bay, the face of Estée Lauder in the 1980s who went on to become a television anchor and is now dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. We descend, finally, to his personal sanctuary, the screening room. If no one knows where Iger is, chances are he is here. The room’s ceiling, a programmable planetarium modeled after one at the offices of Pixar, which Iger acquired in 2006 (he pitched the idea to Disney’s board on only his second day as CEO), may be a Trojan horse in the polite battle for the most glamorously kitted-out home theater on Los Angeles’s West Side. The designers surprised him by asking NASA for a photograph of the night sky in New York City on the day he was born, which is now the planetarium’s default setting. But Iger can program sunrises, shooting stars, and the aurora borealis, and when his grandchildren visit from the East Coast, he can get Pinocchio to scamper across the heavens. “Kitschy, I know,” he says.
“I have more time than most people would imagine, and that’s a dirty little secret,” Iger confesses. “People think I must always be scheduled and therefore don’t try, and I like that. It’s protective.” If that’s hard to believe, it’s because Iger has spent the last thirteen years relentlessly growing Disney, announcing plans to retire on four occasions, only to extend his reign each time. His reputation rests on three critical purchases—first Pixar, the computer-animation studio; then Marvel, the comic-book publisher and moviemaker; and finally Lucasfilm, holder of the priceless Star Wars and Indiana Jones libraries. Pixar provided a technologic boost to the sagging cornerstone of Disney’s business, animation, while all three acquisitions have brought the company vast catalogs of content not only for the big screen but for pajamas and lunch boxes and ice shows and, of course, Disney’s theme parks. In his time as CEO, Disney’s annual profit has tripled, its stock price has quadrupled, and sixteen of its films have earned more than $1 billion globally. To get the measure of Disney’s might, consider that during that same period, the other major studios—Universal, Paramount, Sony, Fox, and Warner Brothers—have collectively produced only thirteen billion-dollar movies.
But despite his success, Iger and his venerable brand face an existential threat from Silicon Valley, in particular from companies like Netflix and Amazon. Disney has wagered on content, beloved but mutable stories with loyal audiences; meanwhile, Netflix has made so much money on subscriptions that it suddenly gets to spend billions on content of its own. (Maybe even more menacing is Amazon, which, as long as it keeps selling toilet paper, can afford to make as many movies as it wants.) Iger has watched two of his once powerful brands, ESPN and ABC, flounder in the era of cord cutting. So, last summer, with his retirement looming, he conjured another deal, likely his last and certainly his biggest: the $52 billion acquisition of the lion’s share of 21st Century Fox, a mega-merger that, if it passes regulatory muster, may help to stem the tech tide and will keep him at Disney through 2021, undoubtedly disappointing friends who hoped he’d run for president in 2020.
“Disney is in an interesting place because we’ll be 95 years old this October, and we’re striving to maintain relevance in a world that doesn’t look anything like the world that the brand was created in,” Iger says. “It doesn’t even look like the world the brand existed in five years ago.”
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, first met Iger in 2005, after the Disney chief offered to sell two then-popular ABC television shows, Lost and Desperate Housewives, to iTunes. “Bob was the only one in the industry at that time to sort of lose sight of the way things had always been done,” Cook explains, adding that it does not surprise him that Black Panther emerged out of Disney. “That film makes the point of nudging the world along a bit, and I credit Bob with his leadership there. Brands should stand for something.”
The Fox sale is far from a sure thing. Some industry analysts have suggested that Iger is risking his legacy to win a battle in a war that has already been lost, while others believe he would never have agreed to stay on at Disney unless he viewed the deal as his master chess move. “The status quo, to me, is a joke,” he says. “When I was growing up, you could protect the status quo and do reasonably well for decades. General Motors, for instance. TWA and Pan Am. Holiday Inn. Xerox. You look at these brands, and the business models lasted most of our lifetime. But the speed of change is much faster than we ever imagined it would be. What’s happening is that we’re seeing mass disruption in our lives, whether it’s politics, where Donald Trump is a disrupter, or warfare with ISIS. You look at Uber and Airbnb and Netflix, and you should quickly conclude that disruption has never been more apparent or more profound. If you want to thrive in a disrupted world, you have to be incredibly adept at not standing still.”
Iger makes me an espresso and offers a scone he picked up at the end of his early-morning bike ride, an antidote to restlessness and a weekend tradition that began in Central Park more than 20 years ago, when he was an ABC executive living in New York. That’s around the time when Iger and Bay had their first date, at Alison on Dominick, a famously romantic little restaurant in a desolate stretch near TriBeCa, now shuttered. “We haven’t been apart since June 13, 1994,” says Bay. The couple spend an enormous amount of time with their children—at home, watching The Crown, for instance, or at school basketball games—but Iger’s commitment to his weekend group ride is, to borrow his wife’s word for it, religious. The original group has swelled to four or five, and their hair has gone silver. Though it’s a gentleman’s ride, Brentwood has some considerable hills, and Iger is known to take them hard, particularly on his birthday, just to prove he can. Sometimes he can be seen riding with no hands. Few profiles of Iger have failed to mention his predawn relationship with his cardio machine, the VersaClimber, as if somehow his power originated there.
“The seven secrets of successful people—or is it ten or twelve?” he asks with a laugh. “I do get up at 4:15 every day of the week, and weekends if I’m lucky I get up 30 minutes later. I do it for a variety of reasons. Some of it is just time management. I like to work out—it not only clears my head but serves a vain vein in me. And I like quiet time, the time to be still, to think, to reflect. It’s meditative. Morning has served me in that regard all my life.”
Iger was born in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, where both of his parents had also been born and raised, and grew up in Oceanside, Long Island, a post–World War II insta-community of 500 identical houses. His father was an intelligent man who had attended Wharton, a voracious reader, a jazz trumpeter, and, at least officially, an advertising executive. But he suffered from bipolar disorder, and his episodic rages made it impossible for him to sustain a consistent income. Incidentally, Iger was not permitted to read comic books as a child; these were considered too frivolous. (His children—two adult daughters living in New York, from his first marriage, a fifteen-year-old son at home, and a nineteen-year-old son at the University of Texas at Austin—do not read comic books either, though they were never discouraged.) “My father did turn me into a serious reader, but with a tremendous amount of confrontation,” Iger explains, “meaning his efforts to force it early didn’t work. In fact it resulted in my being more of a rebel than a reader. But interestingly enough, whether it was due to him or not—he died in 2011, and I like to think it was due to him—I not only learned how to read for pleasure on a regular basis, but I learned to really enjoy it.”
Iger conveys the angstless placidity of a man who has his life sorted, and it’s hard not to wonder if his calm has been fashioned, over time, in opposition to the volatility of his father (or, for that matter, to the bluster of his Disney predecessor, Michael Eisner). “I guess you always think about what traits you’re going to inherit from your parents,” he says, “but for the most part I’m fortunate that a lot of who I am today came directly from them. They were politically involved and aware. Dinner conversations often brought the world into our kitchen, the news of the day. They believed in things. They had passions.”
He recalls the time when his father, who was on the school board, interceded on behalf of his fifth-grade teacher. “He was my Mr. Chips, my favorite teacher of all time,” Iger says. “This was 1960, and he was discovered to be having a relationship with the art teacher. Of course, no one used the term gay then. He was called a fag. And my father came to his defense. So he brought me into the whole thing, and we had a discussion about the need to not only be tolerant but to understand that just because something was unusual, that didn’t make it bad. This was true of race. I remember him bringing black people who didn’t live in our neighborhood to dinner, and I was convinced that it was purposeful, to show his kids that the world was made up of many different kinds of people.”
In high school, Iger had a significant knee injury that not only prevented him from playing competitive sports but kept him out of Vietnam. Instead he became the announcer for the school’s football games, which grew into an ambition to do television news, to be the next Walter Cronkite. He attended Ithaca College (to his father’s great disappointment, he did not have the grades for the University of Pennsylvania—his wife, Willow’s, alma mater, coincidentally), but in college he learned to be an excellent student. His first job was as the weatherman at a local station, but when he realized he had no talent for it, he pivoted over to production. “By the time I entered the workforce, particularly my early jobs at ABC, I discovered that I had in me—I was going to say vicious, but that’s not the word—a prodigious work ethic, which I think has never left me,” he says. “It’s served me very, very well.”
Stu Bloomberg, a retired producer, has known Iger for 30 years and is an original member of the bike-riding gang. “When I first started at ABC, we had to wear suits,” he recalls. “We were expected to be the power in the room. Bob, who by the way really loves clothes, insisted on being more casual. He works and plays in the titan stratosphere, but he just never bought into the pretense.”
It’s easy to argue that Disney has built its brand on underdogs and outcasts, the misfit and the marginalized, from Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Dumbo to Ariel, the Beast, and Elsa. If this is true, then representation is one of the company’s enduring values, even if it is writ newly large. “Traditional Hollywood entertainment looks a certain way, and over time it calcifies,” says Ryan Coogler, Black Panther’s director. “What I’ve learned about Bob is that he’s all about shifting the structure, proving that the old idea that business can’t be progressive or inclusive is a falsehood. Under Bob, Star Wars is now fronted by a young woman Jedi and two characters of color. Before I met him, I’d never met somebody who was the president of anything before. The closest I came was Michelle Obama, and she has a thing about her, a confidence or charisma that she sort of lends to you when you’re around her. Bob has it too. You spend time in a room with him and then you feel you can go out and conquer the world.”
Even before the last election, Iger started to think about running for president himself. “Willow initially not only hated the idea,” he says, “but put her foot down because she thought it would be highly destructive to our family and to our lives.” But the thought nagged at him, and with his wife’s reluctant permission, he was in the process of seriously exploring a run when the Fox deal sealed his fate. “The thought I had was coming from the patriot in me, growing up at a time when we respected our politicians not only for what they stood for but because of what they accomplished. I am horrified at the state of politics in America today, and I will throw stones in multiple directions. Dialogue has given way to disdain. I, maybe a bit naively, believed that there was a need for someone in high elected office to be more open-minded and willing to not only govern from the middle but to try to shame everyone else into going to the middle.”
Iger’s good friend Oprah Winfrey believes he would have been the ideal candidate. “Bob is one of the people I respect most in the world,” she says. “That’s a very short list. He is infinitely capable of multiple categories of expertise, and he has created an environment where you can disagree with him—and that’s not just because I’m Oprah. I really, really pushed him to run for president, so much so that I said to him, ‘Gee, if you ever decide to run for office, I will go door to door carrying leaflets. I will go sit and have tea with people.’ ” I ask if perhaps there will be a place for Iger in her Cabinet. “Um, I’d have been happy to be in his Cabinet.”
Though a political next act is unlikely, Iger continues to stick his neck out. Last June he left Trump’s Advisory Council after the president decided to withdraw from the Paris climate deal. He has expressed support for athletes who kneel in protest during the national anthem and spoken out against Trump’s decision to rescind DACA. “We have hundreds of employees who are Dreamers,” he says. “They didn’t grow up in the places they were born; in most cases their entire families have left; often they don’t speak the language. They’re hardworking contributors to our company and to society, and it seems incredibly cruel to force them back. As for the Advisory Council, I thought that being given access to the president of the United States was a privilege regardless of who he was or what he stood for. You can argue about just how valuable the Paris climate accords were, but I thought the principle of countries getting together and declaring that the world was potentially in peril was right. And when the president decided to pull out, I thought, An unhealthy world, a fragile world, is not good for society, and it’s not good for business. And just as a small thing—if you try to build a theme park in a city where the air quality is terrible”—he is presumably referring to Shanghai Disney, which opened two years ago—“people aren’t going to want to go, because they’re not going to want to be outside.”
Iger has been publicly quiet, though privately less so, about the #MeToo movement, which entangled Pixar’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, last November. “Two things need to occur,” Iger says. “We need to figure out as an industry how to prevent this behavior from happening again, and we have to make sure that we create environments for people, particularly women, to be able to speak up if they have been victimized by this or if they have seen others being victimized by it. I love that people are speaking up, and I hope—and I’m actually optimistic—that change is occurring.” We make our way up to the main house, where his son William has just emerged from a geometry tutoring session and is contemplating a few minutes on the basketball court. Iger was a coach himself in the local rec league, and a generation of Brentwood girls, now in high school, can recall the times he taught them to shoot overhanded or to practice zone defense. The house is consistent with the reserve of its occupants; there are no outsize trophies. Iger and Bay collect early photography, and it’s hard to miss Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic 1907 picture The Steerage or, for different reasons, an ominous 1962 Diane Arbus night photograph of Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland. In his office there’s a photograph of Paul McCartney, shot by Linda McCartney and dedicated to Iger by its subject. McCartney is a hero who became a close friend, just as Steve Jobs did.
“Bob has really close friendships,” says Bay, “which I love watching because frankly it’s rare to see men committing so much time and attention to them. Bob does not have a lot of walls and barriers up. He’s psychologically not that complicated. And let’s be clear, I mean that as a compliment.” Soon a group of William’s friends will arrive to watch the game, and he has designed a classic Super Bowl menu. (“Not cooked by me,” Bay says. “I’ve never made wings in my life, and I’m not going to start today.”) The model Karlie Kloss is also dropping by to get some advice from Bay, who has been mentoring her on the transition out of modeling. William’s friends will try to contain their excitement.
Days like this one are what Iger wants more of when Disney ends for him, or days on his sailboat, preferably floating somewhere off the coast of Italy. Of course, there’s much to do before then. As this story went to press, Comcast had launched a bidding war with Disney for some of Fox’s assets. And Iger and his board have still not settled on a successor. “I honestly have no vision of what my life after Disney will be,” he says. “I don’t have the desire to run another company. I don’t believe I’ll have the desire to work. Even when it was looming last summer, I was never thinking, What happens when I don’t have this title, these trappings that you suddenly give up? I remember someone who had retired telling me about the concept of staying an extra day. You go to a place, a lodge in the country, for a weekend—the greatest place you’ve ever been—and Sunday comes and you’ve got to go back to work. When this woman retired, all of a sudden she discovered she could stay an extra day. Why not? Where do you have to go?”
In this story:
Sittings Editor: Lawren Howell.
Hair: Kevin Franco-Machain; Makeup: Christy Coleman; Grooming: Sonia Lee.
Set Design: Robert Doran. Produced by Kristen Terry at Rosco Production.