WHO KNEW, by Barry Diller
The yachterati’s worst-kept secret is now billowing in the wind. Barry Diller is gay, and yet also married — like, really married — to Diane von Furstenberg, a woman.
After the carefully meted-out release of this news, is there still value in paying $30 for Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew”? I don’t know.
Certainly, there’s something reassuring about Diller believing it’s worth his while, and ours, to issue entertainment in such an old-fashioned delivery unit. So many of his 83 years have been about challenging established formats.
As a junior employee at then-struggling ABC in the late 1960s, where it was joked darkly that the way to end the Vietnam War would be to air it as a show, he created the hugely successful 90-minute Movie of the Week. Then, what the late producer Julia Phillips in her tell-all classic “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” joked was the Week of the Movie: epic mini-series like “Roots.”
As chairman and C.E.O. of Paramount in the early 1980s, Diller plunged headlong into the home video business from which many film executives shrank, releasing “An Officer and a Gentleman” on cassette when it was still in theaters, which counterintuitively revved the box office. (Generous of him, as its star, Richard Gere, had a brief affair with von Furstenberg that “lit the spark” for a breakup.)
At the QVC home shopping network a decade later, Diller had the epiphany that “screens could and would be used for something other than telling stories,” coming up with among other innovations the prescient ad “BUY UNDERWEAR IN YOUR UNDERWEAR.”
His current corporate home, the holding company IAC, for which he had Frank Gehry design a building inspired by sailcloth, owns many of the apps that have, for better and worse, transformed human romance. He persisted with a deal to buy Expedia even though the closing was right after 9/11 and he could have backed out, declaring, “We’re betting on life.”
Even in his emeritus era, he presides as the chairman of the bored.
Diller’s story is hardly rags to riches, like that of his best friend and yet-unmemoired fellow tycoon, David Geffen, of whom he writes admiringly, “No artificial intelligence will ever exceed his ability to go faster from problem to solution, or from poverty to so many billions.”
As if explaining alien life, he describes being raised in the Beverly Hills flats, “an overly plush forest,” by a successful but generally joyless housing developer and his wife, who suffered from migraines and came close to divorcing him. Funds were always on tap — Diller was almost fired from his first real job for not cashing his checks — but feelings were never discussed and extended family members were strangers.
His older brother, who bullied him mercilessly, once striking him unconscious with a Bakelite telephone, was addicted to heroin by age 16 and shot dead in a drug-related incident 20 years later. Wanting to spare his parents the shame of two “bad” sons in the repressive midcentury, Diller kept his sexuality, which he sensed by the time he was 8, under tight wraps.
He loved reading but was indifferent to formal pedagogy; his friend Nora Ephron even bounced him from the high school newspaper. You can see the seeds of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” which began during his tenure at Fox, scattered in that plush forest: Pool parties at moguls’ mansions; joy rides in their fancy cars. Another school friend, Cheryl Crane, was arrested for the murder of her mother Lana Turner’s lover.
At 19, as his peers made plans for college, Diller had a nervous breakdown. But yet another high school friend’s father, Danny Thomas, the star of “Make Room for Daddy,” arranged for him to start in the fabled mailroom at William Morris — the “Jewish Vatican,” Diller calls it. He obsessively studied the files, attentive to detail and adept at discretion. With his terror of being outed obliterating most others, he was on his way to somewhere. Everywhere.
Detail and discretion (or maybe the limits of memory) do a funny kind of battle in “Who Knew.” It’s a tell-some, garnished with a few management bromides like “never compromise” and “if you like the idea, get on with it.” Diller dishes, or really more small-plates, on friendships with Katharine Hepburn, who gave him no-nonsense urological advice, and Warren Beatty, there waiting on the tarmac to embrace him after his father died.
Media overlords collide in power summits and backstabbings. We meet one snarfling two pounds of caviar during a half-hour meeting; another ferried by helicopter shortly before his death to see Sinatra sing; a third with a sad urine stain on his trousers. One moneybags is a “satyr,” another a “skunk.”
“Little dummkopf,” Otto Preminger nicknamed Diller. “Dunce,” he smites his own forehead, for turning down a stake in Pixar.
No ghostwriter is cited in this project of 15 years, so give the author full credit for rich phrases like “that seller’s gleam in his little Germanic nugget eyes” (about John Kluge), and rich scenes like vomiting a quart of lobster bisque over Yves Saint Laurent’s white suit on vacay in Normandy with D.V.F., “through some wondrous revenge à l’americaine.”
When the couple funded Little Island, the mushroomy park on the Hudson River, an environmental group worried that the American eel fish would be deprived of sunlight.
“Couldn’t the eels go a few blocks north for their sunlight?” Diller responded sharkily. He will eat lunch in not only this town, but all the ports, damn it, and make a meal of it too.
WHO KNEW | By Barry Diller | Simon & Schuster | 336 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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