How Barry Diller Stayed on Top
Throughout, Diller occasionally muses on the excellence of a script—“Raiders of the Lost Ark” was, he says, “perfect from the first word”—but he is, appropriately, far more preoccupied with the deal. “Raiders,” despite its script and box-office sales, still enrages him, because, as Diller tells it, George Lucas, having secured a cleverly negotiated sequel arrangement, quickly reneged. “But you made a legal and moral commitment to honor these sequel terms,” Diller protested. “Yeah, well,” Lucas replied, “it’s just not worth it for me unless I get more money.” Lucas, Diller insists, was a sanctimonious hypocrite. Like many moguls, Diller casts himself as the naïf in a room full of operators. Recalling a dubious stock transaction, he writes, “I was too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to even know about, much less consider, such a manipulation.” One somehow doubts that the others in the deal thought of him as too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, partly because the others in the deal thought that they were Rebecca. Injured innocence is the favored pose of the tycoon class; assumed naïveté, its pet intoxicant.
His gay life, sadly, is mostly a source of early misery and bitter feeling—a reminder of how recently, and how blessedly, homosexuality has been normalized. He was certain, for a time, that being gay was a kind of disease; facing an AIDS test in the eighties, he was seized not just by the rational fear of illness but by a larger dread of losing control. His tentative steps toward self-acceptance are touchingly cumbersome. Fully coming out was the work of years. He speaks of an affair with, among others, Johnny Carson’s stepson. As it happens, the mainstreaming of gay culture was one of the engines of his creative era. Diller doesn’t say this, but it’s striking that “Saturday Night Fever” took a gay subject, disco dancing—adapted from a New York magazine story about a working-class subculture now known to be fictional—and played it straight, projecting onto the hero an improbably heterosexual life.
When Bluhdorn died suddenly, in 1983, Martin Davis—who had helped engineer Paramount’s sale to Gulf + Western back in 1966 and had risen through the ranks as Bluhdorn’s shrewdest lieutenant—took over the company. Davis had little patience for the executive freedom Bluhdorn had allowed Diller. With the two men mismatched in temperament and direction, Diller was gone in a year and a half—fleeing one sinister Davis (Martin) for the arms of another, equally sinister one (Marvin), who controlled Twentieth Century Fox. Diller quickly discovered that Marvin Davis, an oil and real-estate billionaire, had hired him less as a long-term leader than as a temporary beard for a studio already in trouble. Diller soon struck a deal with Rupert Murdoch—then posing as an ingenuous newcomer to America—to buy Fox and merge it with Metromedia, a group of television stations owned by John Kluge.
Fox—though not yet Fox News—was born. From such small radioactive acorns do poisonous oaks grow. Once again, the law of serendipitous imponderables ruled: after much travail, the new network was saved solely by “The Simpsons,” while Murdoch himself was later pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy almost entirely by the success of “Home Alone.” Matt Groening and Macaulay Culkin have much to answer for.
The second half of the book, though far less glamorous—and far less entertaining—than the first, is arguably more significant, if only because it describes changes that, for good or ill, reshaped more of the media world. In the early nineties, in addition to launching a bid for Paramount, Diller fell, almost by accident, into running a cable outfit even he considered faintly ridiculous: QVC, a home-shopping network. “The shows,” he writes, accurately, “looked as if they were produced in Poland in the 1950s.” But he spotted, early, the latent power of interactivity: the mostly middle-aged women who shopped through the channel called, wrote, and participated in the QVC world. He moved to southeastern Pennsylvania, where the network was headquartered, staying in one of those “workmanlike hotels built around suburban malls,” and commuted to New York on weekends: “Sometimes I’d go by train. I’d work late, then wait in the vast hall of the Philadelphia train station, in the cold, wearing my overcoat.” Greater love hath no tycoon than that he goes to live in southeastern Pennsylvania in pursuit of a new empire.
It was Diane von Furstenberg whose interest in promoting her dress brand on QVC led Diller to the channel, and Diller writes persuasively, even affectingly, about his relationship with and eventual marriage to her. However improbable the married love of a gay man and a straight woman might seem, their survival as a couple is proof, Diller says, of its reality, and the endurance of their loving relationship seems entirely authentic. (When she did break up with him, for several years, she chose to do it at the Pool Room of the Four Seasons—the power-lunch epicenter of the period—presumably so he could turn and greet his rivals even as he got the news. The very rich really are different from you and me.)
Before long, QVC became so profitable that Diller was able to parlay it into a series of bigger ventures—not all successful—and eventually acquired the Home Shopping Network. Though he had grasped early on that the future lay in talking back to the screen, he briefly resumed the old-media-tycoon game. We are led through the intricately improbable negotiations by which the Bronfman family, from Montreal, eager for a piece of Hollywood, managed to wrest Universal away from Lew Wasserman. The dealmaking grows so tangled that it begins to sound like something Gilbert and Sullivan might have set to marching music: one agreement “stated that all future cable channels owned by either Universal or Paramount were to be equally shared, so when Viacom bought Paramount, Universal took the position that it was entitled to own half of Viacom’s cable networks, which included MTV and Nickelodeon.”
In the long run, though, Diller kept faith with the interactive screen. And eventually—who knew this?—he became the father of Expedia, and of the first online-dating service. These days, he has taken up the two go-to occupations of the retired super-rich: yachting and architectural philanthropy. Much of his energy now goes into building and maintaining Little Island, the odd but compelling floating flower-world moored just off the West Side Highway. Like his Morris mailroom mate David Geffen, he is admirably inclined to play the classic plutocratic role in New York, building, or at least naming, public amenities.
Throughout the book, one senses a tireless energy applied to dealmaking—and has a lingering impression that the thing being made, whether entertainment or dresses, is always a little less interesting than the money made by making it. And since, past a certain point, there’s not much more money to be made, the only thing left to innovate is the way you make it. This is, of course, the first principle of capitalism, and one can hardly fault the capitalist for following it. You see this in the company that, for all the talk of disruption and new frontiers and interactive whatsits, Diller admires the most. “I don’t think there’s a business like it in all the world,” he writes. “It operates in 196 countries and has been doing so since many of those countries were founded. It’s usually the first commercial business that gets formed in emerging markets, and its worldwide political sophistication is unrivaled.” This is the Coca-Cola Company, whose business, as it has been for more than a century, is putting sugar into carbonated water that has been colored brown. It is a great business.
Turning the pages—strewn with inexplicably failed as well as serendipitously successful projects—one begins to suspect that William Goldman’s famous line, though it originally referred strictly to the chaotic movie business of the nineteen-seventies, may be the essential truth of all commerce. Do the people at Lindt headquarters, in Kilchberg, really know anything? Or are they, too, just guessing—prey to rumor, surprise, and the unknowable public? A brief dive into chocolate journalism reveals that among the most successful of Lindt’s line extensions was, in fact, the Dubai bar: the “Grease” of premium chocolate. Taste, though not disputable, is certainly negotiable. That is the core truth of consumer capitalism.
Who really knows anything about anything, when it comes to that? Was “Hitler vs. Sitting Bull”—Bluhdorn’s obsessive idea—really so crazy? After all, Hitler did model his brutal invasion of the Eastern Front on America’s expansion into the Western frontier. And one of the only military leaders who ever reversed the latter assault was Sitting Bull.
So what if, at some dire moment in the war—late 1941, say—someone had the crazy idea (stick with this; it may call for a few minutes of, uh, tough Socratic processing) that our last hope for defeating Hitler lay in reanimating Sitting Bull and his army through their salvaged DNA? And what if an amazing Jewish émigré scientist—Richard Dreyfuss, say—had already invented the technology? No weirder than the atomic bomb, right? And what if the only person who believed him was a lowly Army captain, played by Jessica Lange—a brilliant biologist forced to lead morning calisthenics? And what if the reconstituted Sitting Bull fell in love with Jessica but still led his army of reanimated warriors into the Ukraine to defeat the Nazis? Voilà: “Hitler vs. Sitting Bull,” the movie. Just make a decent deal for the sequel—“Sitting Bull 2: Custer’s Revenge”—and this time don’t let them wriggle out of it. ♦
