AOL-Time Warner Merger: A Two-Man Network

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Swallow. "I'm sorry. Wait a minute." Swallow. "Can I add something?" Time Warner chairman Jerry Levin is speaking. It is 9 a.m. on the day after Levin and Steve Case, the CEO of America Online, have inked the biggest deal in corporate history. Levin is nibbling on pieces of fruit, sipping room-temperature mineral water and projecting a becoming tranquillity. He looks as if he's just stepped in from Harvard Yard, wrapped in a forest green corduroy jacket with an open-necked plaid shirt tucked underneath. When he speaks, his voice has the delicate cadence of a professor singing out the most violent passages of Macbeth with a studied calm. He has, it seems, left his globe-striding, Gulfstream-riding, options-exercising CEO persona somewhere on the other side of this megadeal. The only flaw in this picture, frankly, is a fist-size interactive pager that is dancing between Levin's palm and his pocket. The pager chirps from time to time, and Levin pops it from its slate-gray plastic case, uses a thumbwheel to scroll through a few messages and then slips it back into its case. Occasionally, he pokes out a quick message on the device's Chiclet-size keys. Chirp. Pop. Click-click-click. It's almost a Macarena rhythm. 1-2-3-4-5. Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM, sends Levin a congratulatory e-mail. Chirp. Pop. Click-click-click.

As all this has been going on, almost as if it were scripted, Case, sitting at Levin's left elbow, has been doing a little samba of his own. The Steve Case dance will be familiar to anyone who has been within two feet of a mailbox in the past decade, where Case's dance card came along with a disk inviting the recipient to join AOL. So far, 20 million have taken him up on the offer. Case, who was raised in Hawaii and is partial to batik shirts, seems to have ditched his old look wherever Levin left his Gulfstream. Besuited and betied, Case is also clearly bewitched by a vision of a world where consumers are constantly connected to a web of entertainment and information. It's a world, he says, where cell phones, televisions, computers, cars, maybe even refrigerators, will all be tapped into a data network that makes it as easy to talk to Singapore as to call your next-door neighbor. And AOL Time Warner, he begins to explain, will be the company that makes all that happen. But now Levin has something to say, so he puts the pager aside and begins to tell a story.

The gist of the tale is that back in 1972, when Levin started his first job at what was then Time Inc., he worked in the company's cable-television division on 23rd Street in Manhattan. At the time, in those Pleistocene cable days, some genius had the idea of building a real-time TV news service that would allow Time Inc.'s cable subscribers to have direct access to the headlines, as opposed to having to wait for Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite or even, God forbid, the morning paper. To do this, Time Inc.'s wizards came up with a solution that would have done a kindergartner proud: first they purchased an AP teletype machine (the kind with the clattering printer and bells). Then they jacked it into the wall of Levin's office. Then they pointed a camera at it. The result: Headline News, circa Nixon. And a love affair--between Jerry Levin and technology. "I thought," he said last week, "'This is terrific.'" Levin had become a geek.