EASY AS ABC

On that sweet, dry July night in Manhattan, after his board approved creation of the biggest entertainment company in the world, Disney chairman Michael Eisner had dinner with his mom. Margaret Dammann Eisner has often been described as a world-class competitive woman, which suggests that her son's triumph last week owes something to genes. When young Michael was growing up in a Park Avenue apartment, his parents borrowed a Picasso from an art-dealer friend to hang in Michael's room. It was called Bullfight. The man who would come to influence, perhaps more than anyone else alive, what Americans see at the...