Image by afagen via Flickrby Andrea Peyser, New York Post
In the end, it wasn't Keith Olbermann's wacko politics, bipolar tantrums, or the Comcast takeover that set his MSNBC career on a col lision course with an iceberg.
It was Ben Affleck.
A source formerly with the cable network said the end began in April 2009, when Rachel Maddow booked Hollywood's darling to appear on her show. Olbermann wanted the star for himself on "Countdown."
It was the first battle Keith didn't win.
"In protest, he refused to go on the air," said the ex-colleague.
It wasn't his first meltdown. A year and a half earlier, MSNBC had moved studios from the Jersey boonies to Rockefeller Center. When Olbermann discovered that his new office door had a built-in window, he went ballistic, phoning network President Phil Griffin and threatening to walk.
"I mean literally, Andrea. Over the door!" said the source. "Keith made such a fit about it. He was ugly and mean. But no one came to his defense.
"Part of me feels sorry for him. He can't blame alcoholism. That was just a normal thing for him to throw tantrums." The door was replaced.
But it begs the question: Can Keith Olbermann be saved? Or, like Norma Desmond, will he fade, screaming, into the sunset?
After he lost Affleck, Olbermann staged a three-day sickout. He later claimed that he vanished from the air to mourn his mother (and attend baseball games). But Olbermann's mom died nearly two weeks earlier, CityFile reported, and he didn't miss a day of work. Until Ben.
Last April, Olbermann went nuts when Donny Deutsch was hired as a guest host on MSNBC. He got Deutsch bumped.
"Donny was p- - -ed," said a source.
Shortly after that, Olbermann first proposed walking away from more than two years on his $7 million-a-year contract, as The Post reported. Then, just as suddenly, he stayed put. In November, he was suspended two days for making political contributions. But he never apologized. He truly believed he was being persecuted.
So earlier this month, when Olbermann again whined that he wasn't happy, MSNBC brass couldn't wait to be rid of him.
"He has no friends, nobody to go to," said one former pal. "He said, 'I can't take this! This is too much for me!' Well, guess what. Nobody cared."
Tales of Olbermann's unhinged behavior go back almost to the beginning of his career. In the '90s, he anchored ESPN's "SportsCenter." "He didn't play so nicely in the sandbox," said an ESPN source.
"He was condescending to those who didn't see things his way. What recently happened was a blast from the past, as far as we're concerned."
After a female ESPNer wrote a book, "one day," said the source, "Keith counted how many swear words were in it." He sent the results to the entire newsroom. "Why? To embarrass her? To draw attention to himself? It did not add to the workplace."
In 2004 -- seven years after he left -- Olbermann was the only on-air personality excluded from SportsCenter's 25th-anniversary reunion week.
His fits of pique are wearing thin. He was fired in a fury from Fox Sports in 2001. Last year, he quit writing for Daily Kos, apoplectic that an online commenter suggested he'd criticized President Obama to improve his TV ratings. Any journalist who's leveled even mild criticism was likely to be named Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World," as Jeff Bercovici learned when he wrote in DailyFinance.com that Olbermann's ratings nose-dived because of such outrages as his calling Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown a "racist."
"As he's gotten more strident and more lost inside his own navel, the segment became less of a joke," said Bercovici, now at Forbes.
Well, guess what. Maddow's and Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC ratings have soared since Olbermann's departure.
Who loves Keith? Olbermann, who turned 52 Thursday, has never married. He lived three years with WNBC newsblonde Katy Tur, half his age. So I e-mailed Katy, a reporter I might run into on the street, not expecting an answer. I was floored when NBC Universal's director of communications responded, saying "Ms. Tur" wasn't talking.
One diva deserves another.
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