If legacy is a form of immortality, then entertainment and business powerhouse Barry Diller might just be eternal. While some people are about breaking molds, the Jewish boy from Beverly Hills is about creating new ones.
Diller’s recently published autobiography, Who Knew, is a chronology of his accomplishments and a tell-all of the Hollywood personalities he met along the way. The book is a historical gem for any film lover and a master class in business with his scrimmages woven throughout. He writes of loyalty and friendship as well as treachery and deceit. While he names names, he also bares his soul.
Although his career successes may be the through line of the book, like my favorite movies, Who Knew is a character-driven story.
At 27, Barry Diller pioneered the made-for-TV movie and miniseries genres, reshaping the small screen in America.
Under his reign at Paramount Pictures, the studio produced box office hits like Saturday Night Fever and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Academy Award winners Terms of Endearment and Ordinary People, crowd pleasers Heaven Can Wait and An Officer and a Gentleman, and groundbreakers like Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Teaming with Rupert Murdoch in 1986, he launched FOX Broadcasting Company, breaking the Big Three’s (ABC, NBC, and CBS) stranglehold on network TV.
Today, his InterActiveCorp (IAC) empire spans digital markets – from travel (Expedia, Hotels.com) to dating (Match.com), home services (Angi), news (The Daily Beast), and streaming (Vimeo). Few executives have rewired both Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
A private and closeted gay man since his teens, he writes about his early shame and terror of discovery. He also shares his much-publicized and passionate heterosexual relationship with his wife, fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg.
Lonely childhood and struggles with sexual orientation
Diller had a lonely childhood with a mother and father chronically on the edge of divorce. Their seeming indifference to his whereabouts and emotional life lies in sharp contrast to the stereotype of the overprotective and meddling Jewish parent. Abuse at the hands of his bullying older brother, along with confusion about his sexuality, heightened his isolation and solidified his defenses.
He developed his own “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy around his sexual orientation he calls a “code of conduct.” He would never pretend to be something he wasn’t, but he would keep his personal life to himself. His sexual orientation, however, was an open secret in Hollywood. How does he reconcile his homosexuality with his happy marriage? Well, Diller doesn’t feel the need to explain it.
Unlike von Furstenberg, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and speaks openly about the impact of her ancestry on her life, Who Knew shares almost nothing of his Jewish roots. His father was Jewish, he tells us, “but he spurned any religiosity because his family had been so oppressively observant.” Relationships with his extended family were nonexistent. So much for noisy Passover dinners.
Launch of his career
Despite being an unworldly and directionless teen, Diller had advantages that he readily acknowledges. He was born into a wealthy family and lived in the flats of Beverly Hills – the real Hollywood homestead – where his connections launched his career.
His best friend was the son of actress Doris Day – the movie star of the time. Diller and friends would watch new release movies at the house of Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA and Universal. He went to school with Lana Turner’s daughter and was close friends with Marlo Thomas, a future TV star, and her father, actor-singer Danny Thomas, who was William Morris’s biggest client. A favor from Danny landed young Barry a coveted position in the mailroom of the most powerful agency in Hollywood.
His next break came via Marlo’s then-boyfriend, Leonard Goldberg, VP of programming at ABC, who hired him as an assistant in 1966. Although Yiddish was sprinkled in meetings all over Tinsel Town in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the only time Diller mentions the Jewish presence in show business is to describe the hierarchy at ABC.
“Although the top bosses were all Jewish, the actual operations and running of the networks had white Anglo-Saxon presidents. Lower down on one side were the sales departments, populated primarily by gentiles, who interacted with the ad agencies and sponsors, where almost no one was Jewish. But on the other side were the program departments, and they, like most entertainment businesses, were mostly staffed with Jews.”
The job at ABC was a great opportunity for a young man who had finally found his mojo. The network was in last place at the time, scrappy, and freestyling. “One of the many wonderful things at ABC was that if you wanted responsibility, you could simply take it,” he writes. “There were few rules, little governance, and almost no bureaucracy.”
One of the themes of Who Knew is Diller’s “free-rein” leadership style. “I like to give people [his staff] ‘too much’ responsibility because I took on ‘too much’ when I was at ABC in my early 20s. I liked my process of drowning until I could figure out where the current was moving.”
His management approach was very close to Leonard Goldberg’s. I ran Len’s TV department when he had his own production company in 1984/85 following his tremendous success with partner Aaron Spelling, producing hit television shows like Charlie’s Angels. He let me develop the shows I wanted, which was both liberating and empowering.
Diller’s approach to working with filmmakers, however, was extremely hands-on. His background in television, where the network was involved in every detail, dictated his approach. “I abhor the popular concept that the filmmaker should be left alone to do their work.” And unlike other studios, he prioritized story over stars. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from doing business with some of the greatest talents of the time.
Diller worked with actor/writer/director Warren Beatty on Heaven Can Wait and the historical romance Reds. Working with Beatty, he writes, “was always the beginning of a topsy-turvy ride. He has an extraordinarily interesting mind; his point of view on almost anything will surprise you.” But it was exhausting: “He is not a confident or consistent decision-maker; he’s subject to constant self-revision.”
Diller failed to break the ice with the famously taciturn actor/director Clint Eastwood when making Escape from Alcatraz. “The total number of words exchanged between us from the start of production to the release of the movie was probably between thirty-six and fifty-two. It was a perfectly proper but distant and cold experience.”
He turned TV actor John Travolta into a movie star (it was unheard of in those days for television actors to transition to feature films) with Saturday Night Fever and Grease. When Travolta passed on American Gigolo, Diller spun Hollywood gold again casting Richard Gere.
There are stories and tidbits about other big-name celebrities like Robert Redford, Jessica Lange, Katherine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson, and Diane Keaton, as well as behind-the-scenes A-listers like Robert Stigwood, Elaine May, and director Billy Friedkin.
Despite his professional success, Diller describes a somewhat disconnected life. “Looking back on those golden years at Paramount… I wasn’t able to enjoy it as a whole, to live in it rather than just plow through it. Living in the moment, whether high or low, has always been hard for me.”
Until von Furstenberg, he had been splitting his time between hotels in New York and Los Angeles with few possessions and fewer intimate relationships. When he moves into her apartment, his emotional life begins, and he writes almost poetically, “For the first time, I entered an abode where I wasn’t the first person to turn on the lights… there were children’s noises and birthdays to celebrate… all the family activities I’d never experienced.”
Much of the second half of the book is about his business adventures outside of Hollywood told with twists and turns and a pressure-cooker pace that kept me engaged despite my lack of interest in the world of big business and technology.
Who Knew has three acts like a screenplay. The third act is the shortest because it is still being written. I recommend this book.
The reviewer is a veteran of the entertainment industry and the author of Artists Under Fire: The BDS War against Celebrities, Jews, and Israel. Her column “Hollywood Stories” appears in the Magazine.
WHO KNEW
By Barry Diller
Simon & Schuster
336 pages; $17