EXCLUSIVE: You haven’t really made it as a mogul until you’ve written a memoir. Few rise to that rarified space and have lasted there as long as has Barry Diller, a first ballot Hall of Fame exec whose Simon & Schuster memoir Who Knew I happened to lay hands on. It hits bookshelves tomorrow.
It takes a special set of skills and accomplishments to make one care enough to read one of these. Deadline has heard that Ari Emanuel, of WME, Endeavor, UFC and WWE fame, might be quietly writing one of these with J.R. Moehringer, the Pulitzer-winner who fashioned his life into The Tender Bar and who ghost wrote Prince Harry’s Spare. The agency has ghosted us on numerous inquiries, but if true, that tale would also qualify as a future must read. I’d buy it just for an honest explanation of how he got the brain trust at WMA to agree to let his minnow-sized Endeavor swallow the whale that was WMA, with that agency’s boss Jim Wiatt kicked to the curb before the ink was even dry. It became a catalyst for all Emanuel has done since, including turning himself into a billionaire entrepreneur.
Few would have seen Diller as a mogul in the making when he grew up in a cold monied household in Beverly Hills with a cruel brother who fell into heroin addiction early and stayed there until he was shot and killed in a drug related incident. Diller came of age with extreme anxiety issues, what he calls an “off-the-rack obsessive-compulsive disorder,” and harboring the guilt of what he considered his dark secret: the natural urges of a gay teen at a time no one could even explain to him. His story as a true industry pioneer is a compelling reminder that everybody in Hollywood, from executives to actors and filmmakers, wakes up with a puncher’s chance of doing something great. It is also a reminder that the best path is to be bold and not content with playing it safe. If the crowd was going one way, Diller was going in the other direction, if he believed in the idea.
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In caustic assessments of certain executives, from Martin Davis to Frank Yablans to Marvin Davis and others, Diller shows that sharp edges are also helpful.
Not much of a student, Diller still found himself in the Hollywood social mix, with weekly pool parties with the daughter of Lew Wasserman (Diller was once ‘arrested’ for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley), and most importantly becoming a family friend of Danny Thomas. He was one of WMA’s biggest clients, and was able to invoke the Make Room For Daddy star in a call to Abe Lastfogel that got Diller a job in the mailroom for $50 a week. Diller didn’t have the killer urges that other aspiring agents did, and he writes about the foibles of, for instance, completing a run to deliver graft to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, tripping over other graft that stocked her living room during the holidays, and knocking down her Christmas tree and setting it ablaze.
Thomas’s influence protected Diller several times, including when he drove Lastfogel and nearly hit a pedestrian, with Diller looking back to find the WMA mogul peeling himself off the floor of the backseat. It was his daughter Marlo Thomas, star of That Girl, who provided the path out of agenting and into the exec suites through her ABC exec boyfriend Leonard Goldberg.
He invited Diller to be his assistant, and before Diller left years later, he was running the show and basically invented the miniseries (Rich Man, Poor Man), and Movie of the Week (Brian’s Song and That Certain Summer). The latter was important personally for Diller because its gracious depiction of homosexuality eased his own torment as one who hid his sexuality. Also groundbreaking was The Glass Menagerie, in which star Katharine Hepburn personally barnstormed the offices of IBM with Diller and came away with the first single sponsored MOW, a badge of prestige despite only a single commercial.
Also key to Diller’s future was an unusually close with Charles Bludhorn, the Gulf & Western chief who was frustrated by being excluded by his Paramount charges Robert Evans and Frank Yablans. Despite Diller’s best efforts to protect Bludhorn, the mogul was excoriated in a New York Magazine cover story that characterized him as “the Mad Austrian, sequestered on the 42nd floor of the Gulf + Western Building, in the chairman’s office – cradling a tomcat in the crook of his elbow, with his back to the camera and his eye on the stock market.” The article gave full credit for Paramount’s success to Yablans and Evans. Bludhorn responded by plucking Diller from his junior exec position at ABC and making him chairman/CEO of Paramount, above both Evans and Yablans. Both would exit not long after, Yablans following a bitter power struggle and a run-in with Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak.
After unraveling the dysfunction at Paramount — $100,000 and half more than that in expenses to superagent Swifty Lazar simply for putting Yablans into the party social mix – Diller’s job was made easier in helping Francis Coppola find a classic movie from five hours of rough-cut footage of The Godfather Part II. Little else went right, though, until he brought in Michael Eisner to overhaul the movie business. Soon, edgy hits like Looking For Mr. Goodbye and Saturday Night Fever began to turn things around.
Travolta became an instant star, to the point that when Princess Margaret came to L.A., she told Diller the one she wanted to meet was the Welcome Back Kotter star, and Diller made Travolta head to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for high tea with the royal. His report back to Diller: “She hit on me!”
Travolta scored again in Grease, but his run at Paramount ended badly when he was held to a contract to star in American Gigolo, even though he was grief stricken over the death of his mother and girlfriend Diana Hyland. Though Travolta wound up not doing the film, Diller dug in and it cost him that relationship, something Diller regrets. Still, films like Heaven Can Wait, Foul Play, Days of Heaven, The Warriors, Meatballs, Star Trek, Friday the 13th, Ordinary People, The Elephant Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reds…the hits kept coming and kept Paramount on top for years.
Along the way are anecdotes of thriving in a sketchy business in the high-flying ’80s, like when Diller found out why so many stars insisted on having Diller’s personal driver shepherd them around. The driver was running a drug business out of the trunk of the limo. Or when Paramount’s top marketing execs Gordon Weaver and Steve Rose, were found to be taking brides from vendors. According to the book, Weaver told the CFO that if his indiscretions were presented to the DA, “he wanted it clearly understood that his eleven-year old son was going to say that Barry Diller has molested him in an elevator. I was beyond shocked by this betrayal and unhesitatingly instructed our lawyers to give all our evidence to the authories. In April 1990, Weaver was indicted for conspiracy and filing false tax returns. He ultimately pleaded guilty. A further irony is that Weaver, who was married, soon came out as gay himself. It was hard to believe that this person I was so fond of and thought so highly of could commit such thievery. It was morally reprehensible and personally unforgivable to me that someone who was gay and knew its particular vulnerabilities would himself threaten to make such an ugly accusation.”
Diller’s fire at Paramount would snuff, first with the death of Bludhorn, and then with him backing the wrong horse in choosing Martin Davis to run the show over company president Jim Judelson. Of Davis, Diller is unsparing: “While he busied himself dismantling Charlie’s empire, he began month by month to reveal himself as the rat he was.” That included petty acts like cutting off the direct line to the G+W switchboard that Bludhorn’s widow Yvette had forever. “Martin Davis was that kind of person,” Diller writes. “He turned out to be cruel and sadistic, just a little man with little talent, in over his head. With every new revelation of his evil, I felt not only stupid but also guilty for having helped anoint him.” When Davis became determined to get rid of Eisner, Diller had enough. That’s when 20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis called.
What’s refreshing about Diller’s recounting is the number of times he looks back with regret. He was good at embracing groundbreaking ideas, not so good about assessing people.
Here’s his comparison between Martin Davis and Marvin Davis: “The two Davises were as opposite as Lauren and Harty. One was uptight, string-bean thing, with a popping Adam’s apple; the other was buffalo fat and over-the-tent-top showy.”
Diller took that Fox job with the promise of 25% equity, though his assessment of the oversized mogul soured as he found out the truth about his empire: “As six feet four and weighing more than three hundred pounds, Marvin Davis qualified as a big man…except in terms of honesty and integrity. He claimed to all that he owned 20th Century Fox. That’s the title he took for himself: owner. As if he had put up all the money. In fact, he put up only $25 million, got the fugitive Marc Rich, on the run from an indictment on charges of tax evasion, racketeering and wire fraud, to secretly put up another $25 million, and borrowed the rest of the purchase price. He fashioned himself as a Denver oilman, but he wasn’t the kind of westerner you’d imagine an oilman to be: he was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the Bronx.”
Securing Diller after his long Paramount win streak, kept the banks off of the broad back of Davis, who Diller refers to as playing a long con. “Marvin Davis gave me this extraordinary deal for 25 percent of the company to get out of having to put in any new cash. It was certainly check if not checkmate. Pasty was not an adequate word for how I felt. ‘Fucked’ was a lot closer.”
It didn’t matter, though. Soon, Davis sold half the company to Rupert Murdoch, who proved compatible to Diller’s embrace for gambling on great ideas, and ambition. A chance meeting with Michael Milken and John Kluge after they took the latter’s Metromedia station group private was fortuitous, as it would lead to the launch of the Fox Network.
Soon, the film studio’s fortunes turned with films like Die Hard – the explanation that producers Joel Silver and Larry Gordon gave in getting permission to use the Fox headquarters for Nakatomi Plaza for one night, only to stay weeks and wreck the place – is hilarious.
Diller found that out by doing a drive by, following an ominous report from an exec.
“The first five stories of the building’s windows had been boarded up,” Diller writes. “I saw Joel, and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing to this building?’ He admitted, ‘It’s a little more complicated than I said.’ ‘A little more complicated? You’ve destroyed our thirty-story building! And you said you’d be out of here in one night!’ He said, ‘Actually, I think it’s going to be about two weeks.’ I was insane with anger, but there was nothing I could do. They’d already wrecked it.”
That film became a huge franchise for the studio, as did Home Alone, which Fox acquired when Warner Bros declined to give John Hughes a couple extra million he would need. “A little Christmas comedy saved Rupert Murdoch and allowed all that followed.”
There is a lot more here, including what Diller saw that led him to the risky stake in QVC, and threaded throughout is the complicated relationship with the Belgian fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, until he realized she was the love of his life. They are still together, but there are plenty of those professional opportunities that qualify as ones that got away. Like the time Steve Jobs showed Diller scenes from Toy Story and asked him to join the Pixar board. Diller just was not impressed.
“I completely underestimated the company and the man,” Diller said. His assessment of himself?
“What a dunce.”