The parrot lived in a gilded cage inside the gilded cage of Trump Tower. From their twin perches 49 stories above Fifth Avenue, Chuck Blazer and his tropical bird surveyed Central Park and the world beyond it. Up there in the clouds, the white-bearded Blazer, a parrot summoned to his shoulder, “looked like Zeus,” thought John Skipper. Vladimir Putin once told the 300-plus-pound Blazer he looked like Karl Marx. Either way, bearded and birded, Blazer cut an arresting figure.
Skipper had ascended to Blazer’s lair because he needed the parrot—or rather its owner—to vanquish a peacock. The peacock was the mascot of the National Broadcasting Company, headquartered in the art deco landmark six blocks away at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The chairman of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol, was so long identified with that network that he’d come to resemble, in Skipper’s mind, an actual peacock, looking down with feathers fanned on ESPN, the cable sports arriviste based in a former industrial park roughly 107 miles north of midtown Manhattan, in Bristol, Conn.
