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anti-Semitism when another boy called him a “kike.” In a school that required attendance in chapel, Eisner learned what it meant “to be ethnic, going to a school where when you leave the room you can feel that they’re talking about you.” Even though he had received no religious training as a child, the other boys teased him about temple and bar mitzvahs.
    Eisner also experienced a ten-inch growth spurt and found that suddenly he was a gangly teenager who had lost much of his skill as an athlete. Academically, he struggled, too (and reverted to the less-than-honest methods followed when his mother helped him cheat on his homework). It must have been a lonely, painful time for him. Lawrenceville students saw theirparents at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and during four weekends throughout the school year. Given Eisner’s lackluster report cards and the negative letters from his housemaster about the boy’s predilection for shortcuts, he undoubtedly was berated by Lester. He yearned to go to a less demanding public school.
    Young Eisner sampled from Lawrenceville’s extensive menu of activities, serving on the school paper one year and the yearbook another. He joined the Periwig drama club but missed out on his only chance to play a major role in The Caine Mutiny when he was sidelined by a serious case of spinal meningitis.
    By November 1959, it was clear that Eisner was not bound for Princeton. And Eisner was determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps at another high-pressure, all-male institution. He talked about going to college in California, but his father objected. It was too far and the travel expenses would run too high. One can only imagine his parents’ feelings when their only son secretly applied to Denison, a sixteen-hundred-student liberal-arts college in Granville, Ohio. To Eisner, however, Denison represented an escape to a simpler America—the wholesome place he had glimpsed on television. Eisner enrolled as a premed student but quickly realized that he was out of his element in the demanding science classes. He changed his major in his junior year to English. If there was poetry in Eisner’s soul, this was when it tried to express itself.
    One day Eisner approached William Brasmer, a professor in the drama department, and asked to have a play that he had written produced. He did not get a warm reception. “I just didn’t think it was a good play,” says Brasmer, now retired. But Eisner wasn’t to be turned away. Brasmer handed it over to a more junior professor, Dick Smith, and the play was presented. “Mike Eisner kept on my back and he complained about the fact that we weren’t setting the play right,” Brasmer remembers. “And he demanded that we get six open caskets. He got ’em. I had to go out and get ’em for him. I thought it was preposterous.”
    In rehearsals, Eisner sometimes disagreed with drama professor Dick Smith. “Michael would have a very clear idea about how he wanted a scene and Dick would say, ‘No. It won’t play,’” says Barbara Eberhardt, who starred in some of Eisner’s productions. “And Michael would sometimes sound like he was agreeing but he would always have his way.”
    Despite Eisner’s powers of persuasion—especially impressive since he wasn’t even a drama major—Brasmer says he was “just a minor cog of thewheels around here.” Nonetheless, Eisner seemed to appear at various times all over campus—and then he would vanish again. “He wanted to know what was happening all over the campus,” Brasmer says. “He was like a snoop. He would go to classes where he wasn’t registered.” Brasmer concluded that Eisner made these explorations “to feed his own imagination, to feed his own knowledge about things.”
    One of Eisner’s more ambitious theatrical efforts was entitled To Stop a