The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood - Hardcover

King, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679457542 ISBN 13: 9780679457541

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

Complex, contentious, and blessed with the perfect-pitch ability to find the next big talent, David Geffen has shaped American popular culture for the last three decades. His dazzling career has included the roles of power agent, record-industry mogul, Broadway producer, and billionaire Hollywood studio founder. From the beginning, though, Geffen's many accomplishments have been shadowed by the ruthless single-mindedness with which he has pursued fame, power, and money. In The Operator, Tom King--the first writer to have been granted full access to Geffen and his circle of intimates--captures the real David Geffen and tells a great American story about success and the bargains made for it.

The extent of Geffen's accomplishments is extraordinary. As a manager in the 1960s, he made the deal for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to appear at Woodstock. He discovered 1970s superstars Jackson Browne and the Eagles and masterminded Bob Dylan's famed 1974 tour; Joni Mitchell, Geffen's roommate for a time, memorialized him in her song "Free Man in Paris." He produced Risky Business, the movie that made Tom Cruise a star, and was the moneyman behind Cats, the longest-running musical in Broadway history. One of the most brilliant dealmakers ever to work in Hollywood, he became a billionaire shortly after selling Geffen Records in 1990, and he made movie history when he founded, with friends Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks SKG, the first new Hollywood studio in fifty-five years. And Geffen's influence has extended far beyond show business and into the worlds of Wall Street, art, real estate, and politics.

Geffen's personal journey is as compelling as his business machinations. Although he knew from an early age that he was gay, he hid his true sexual urges and for years attempted to lead a heterosexual life. In the mid-1970s, he dated--and almost married--Cher. Not until 1992, when being honored for his extraordinary financial contributions to the fight against AIDS, did he open the closet door. His coming-out was national news.

Beneath this phenomenal life story has always been a ferocious drive to succeed, a blind ambition that has left onlookers astounded. Geffen learned from his earliest days in the William Morris mailroom that he could cheat and lie his way to the top, and he has ever after lived unconstrained by traditional notions of right and wrong. Geffen has demonstrated time and again that he is willing to sabotage any relationship, business or personal, to get what he wants.

At his best, David Geffen is a fiercely devoted friend and a bountifully generous man, both privately and publicly. At his worst, he is a vindictive bully who lashes out at loved ones and colleagues with irrational screaming fits that leave his victims shaking and sweating. And though he has periodically attempted to better himself through psychotherapy and self-help programs like est and Lifespring, he seems always able to find new enemies to rage against.

For years, David Geffen has managed his own life story and rewritten history. But in The Operator, Tom King has set the record straight. Written with Geffen's cooperation--though not his authorization--The Operator is an explosive, illusion-shattering story that details the mogul's indisputable contributions to entertainment history while also baring the man behind the legend.

About this title

About the Author

Tom King has been a reporter at The Wall Street Journal since 1989 and has reported on the entertainment industry from the paper's Los Angeles bureau since 1991.

From the Back Cover

From The Operator

Geffen told Cher about the sexual encounters he had had with men and how he was struggling with his sexual identity. He hastily added that his relationships with men had been about sex and nothing more. He was afraid of the opposite sex, he told her, but said that he believed a relationship with a woman would offer him the best chance to find true love. Cher had been surrounded by gay men her entire professional life, and Geffen's confessions left her unfazed.

"What is it that you do?" Cher finally asked Geffen.
"I am the chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records," he told her.
"Oh, well, you don't look like it," she said. "You look just like a little schlepper."

Geffen was charming, offsetting his usual braggadocio with vulnerability. The two stayed up well into the night, exchanging the stories of their lives. Geffen told her he had become a millionaire more than five years earlier. He told her that he thought he had accomplished everything he wanted to achieve, but that somehow the fame and the money was unfulfilling.

"I'm not alone anymore," Cher thought to herself. She had never known anyone in her life who made her feel so comfortable.

During his therapy session the next day, Geffen made a startling admission to Dr. Grotjahn. "I think I'm in love with Cher," he said.

From the Inside Flap

ex, contentious, and blessed with the perfect-pitch ability to find the next big talent, David Geffen has shaped American popular culture for the last three decades. His dazzling career has included the roles of power agent, record-industry mogul, Broadway producer, and billionaire Hollywood studio founder. From the beginning, though, Geffen's many accomplishments have been shadowed by the ruthless single-mindedness with which he has pursued fame, power, and money. In <b>The Operator</b>, Tom King--the first writer to have been granted full access to Geffen and his circle of intimates--captures the real David Geffen and tells a great American story about success and the bargains made for it. <br><br>The extent of Geffen's accomplishments is extraordinary. As a manager in the 1960s, he made the deal for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to appear at Woodstock. He discovered 1970s superstars Jackson Browne and the Eagles and masterminded Bob Dylan's famed 1974 tour; Joni Mitchell, Geffen's ro

Reviews

It's easy to see why David Geffen hates this book. King, who has written about the entertainment business for the Wall Street Journal for nearly ten years, portrays Geffen as a mixed-up, tantrum-prone, greed-driven, Machiavellian huckster. King clearly got a good deal of access to friends and past associates as well as Geffen himself before the mogul decided to withdraw authorization from the project. And Geffen apparently has plenty of enemies willing to tell tales of infantile and brutish behavior. King carefully orders these to reveal the chronology of Geffen's rise and subsequent manipulations; and plentiful personal anecdotes will satisfy readers looking for cocktail-party small talk. It may all even be true; but truth is not the only measure of biography. King's journalistic training is his biggest problem. His unnuanced, just-the-facts style does not sustain interest through more than 500 pages of narrative, and his insistence on resolving inconsistencies and explaining behavior with formulaic psychology results in a cardboard cutout of his subject. Most surprisingly from a WSJ reporter, Geffen's skills as a deal-maker are left relatively unexplored beyond retellings of who were the players and who got what out of the deal. There will be demand for the book, and King's early access means it will be the most fully researched source on Geffen for years to come, but most libraries can make do with a single copy of this workmanlike effort.
---Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 12

"I GOT YOU BABE"

The Roxy had its grand opening on September 20, 1973. It was to be a major success and broke Doug Weston's monopolistic hold on the Los Angeles club scene. It was quite an achievement for a man who was only thirty years old.

But on that night, something happened to Geffen that was far more important than any business deal he had ever consummated. He found true love, but one that would eventually almost crush him.

The Roxy's partners were besieged with requests for tickets to the sold-out opening with headliner Neil Young. "I made more enemies today than in my whole life," Geffen told the Los Angeles Times. Geffen's own group that night included Bob and Sara Dylan and Robbie and Dominique Robertson.

Although Neil Young had demanded that the majority of the tickets be made available to the general public, the crowd gathered that night included some of the biggest stars in the record business. Geffen stood outside and greeted Elton John and Carole King as they arrived amid a flurry of flashbulbs.

One glitch sent the Roxy partners into a momentary panic that afternoon: Nils Lofgren, the opening act, developed laryngitis. Lou Adler hooked his clients Cheech & Chong, and Geffen pulled in Graham Nash to open the show instead.

Geffen, with the Dylans and the Robertsons, had an early dinner before heading to the Roxy, well in advance of the nine o'clock curtain. The club had a capacity of only a few hundred, and it was indeed the kind of place where the performers were nearly on top of the audience. Geffen and his group took their seats at a table right in front of the stage. As the club filled up and the last few people squeezed inside, the temperature in the room rose to an uncomfortable level.

Just after Neil Young started his set, something magical happened to Geffen. Cher, wearing a straw cowboy hat with a big feather in it, stepped into the club. Seeing an empty seat at Geffen's table, she asked the group if she could join them. Geffen looked up and stared into her eyes. To him, it seemed as though violins, not electric guitars, had started to play. Suddenly, he could not concentrate on Young's performance.

Geffen had met Cher more than ten years previously at Phil Spector's studio, where she was a backup performer. As her star ascended, he had once tried unsuccessfully to convince her to record a Jackson Browne song. But tonight he was seeing her in a different light, and love was in the air.

Sonny Bono and Cher were at that moment the most popular TV couple in America, thanks to the success of their CBS variety series, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Now in its third season, the show was a ratings powerhouse, and the couple was wowing viewers with silly sketches and rollicking renditions of their saccharine hit "I Got You Babe." They broke box-office records when they played Las Vegas and had earlier that year appeared on the Academy Awards. Cher's sultry solo hit "Half-Breed" was leaping up the pop-music charts, and tonight she was out on the town without Bono.

At a break in the set, Dylan pointed to Cher's hat.
"Can you get me one of those?" he asked dryly.
A man who worked backstage approached the table and addressed Dylan and Robertson. "Hey, Neil's backstage, if you guys want to come back and hang out, you'd be welcome," he said.

In fairly standard fashion, Dylan, expressionless, offered up a non sequitur that he thought was funny: "No thanks, we just ate," he said. Geffen howled with laughter. A look of confusion fell over the man's face as he backed uncomfortably away from the table.
The break was soon over, and Geffen and Cher did not have much of an opportunity to talk. But he scribbled down his address and asked her to join him for dinner the next night. David Geffen was going to have a date with Cher.

Geffen had not previously made much of an impression on Cher, twenty-seven. She did not know who he was or what he did for a living. She did not even know that he was one of the owners of the Roxy.

Cher drove a white Porsche Daytona that had been customized with her name in large red script on the driver's door. The next evening, as she pulled out the slip of paper with Geffen's address on it, she was surprised to see that his house was just a couple of blocks from where she and Bono lived.

"How can he live around the corner from me?" Cher thought to herself. "I live in the richest section of Los Angeles. What's he doing here?" Sonny and Cher lived in a gated mansion at the end of Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, a swank enclave of Los Angeles that borders Beverly Hills. The couple had bought the fifty-four-room estate, a fixture on maps of the stars' homes, from actor Tony Curtis a few years earlier.

After Cher rang the bell, Geffen opened the door with a telephone in hand.
"Oh, hi," he said. "Oh, God, I didn't get a chance to take a shower. I'm on the phone. . . . Come in."

After a moment, Lou Adler arrived, and soon joined Cher and Geffen in the dining room. Geffen was funny, Cher thought, and she laughed at his jokes. Adler soon excused himself to check on things at the Roxy.

After dinner, Geffen and Cher retired to the living room. There, America's beloved TV comedienne opened up her heart and spilled a host of painful secrets she had been keeping for months. Her marriage to Sonny Bono, she said, was in tatters. On television, Sonny and Cher appeared to be the perfect couple. Off camera, however, they were barely civil to each other. They had moved into separate wings of the Carolwood house and now exchanged few words.

Cher told Geffen that Bono was a dictator who had made her life a living hell. He had destabilized her to the point that she could hardly eat or sleep. She was anemic and had been driven so hard by the grind of TV tapings, Las Vegas engagements, and recording sessions that she frequently fell ill. From time to time, the exhaustion forced her to be hospitalized.

It had all gone sour starting with a blowup at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas ten months earlier. One night after their act, Cher told Bono that she was in love with their guitar player, Bill Hamm. Bono freaked out as Cher informed him she wanted out of their marriage. He convinced her that the two were bonded inextricably in a highly profitable business. It made sense, he told her, to keep up the facade of a happy marriage if only for the sake of their bank accounts.

Cher's only escape was to shop, and it was an art she had perfected. It was the only time, she told Geffen, that Bono allowed her to go out unsupervised. She had now grown fed up with the charade and wanted a divorce.

Cher told Geffen about the treasure of her life, her four-year-old daughter, Chastity. Sonny and Cher now took Chas, as they called her, onstage each week during the closing moments of their TV program to sing "I Got You Babe." Cher told Geffen she worried about the impact the split would have on the little girl.

That Cher showed Geffen her most vulnerable side made him comfortable in sharing his deepest secrets with her, too. He told her about the sexual encounters he had had with men and how he was struggling with his sexual identity. He hastily added that his relationships with men had been about sex and nothing more. He was afraid of the opposite sex, he told Cher, but said that he believed a relationship with a woman would offer him the best chance to find true love. Cher had been surrounded by gay men her entire professional life, and Geffen's confessions left her unfazed.

"What is it that you do?" Cher finally asked Geffen.
"I am the chairman of ElektraAsylum Records," he told her.
"Oh, well, you don't look like it," she said. "You just look like a little schlepper."

Geffen was charming, offsetting his usual braggadocio with vulnerability. The two stayed up well into the night, talking and laughing and exchanging the stories of their lives. Geffen told her he had become a millionaire more than five years earlier. He told her that he thought he had accomplished everything he had wanted to achieve, but that somehow the money and the fame was unfulfilling.

"I'm not alone anymore," Cher thought to herself. She had never known anyone in her life who made her feel so comfortable.

As Cher was about to say good night, Joni Mitchell walked in. Geffen had not told Cher that he had a roommate, so the appearance of another music-industry superstar surprised her. Mitchell and Cher worked at near-opposite ends of the music industry, but for each it was kind of a thrill to meet the other. They chatted a while longer, and then Cher returned home.

During his therapy session the next day, Geffen made a startling admission to Dr. Grotjahn. "I think I am in love with Cher," he said.

That night, Geffen asked Cher to go with him to Robbie Robertson's house in Malibu. Geffen was still trying to sign Bob Dylan and the Band to ElektraAsylum, and he thought having her along might be an asset.

Cher left her car at Geffen's house, and he did the driving. On the way, they stopped for gas. As they sat in the car, Geffen said, "I told my therapist today that I think I am in love with you."
Cher was quiet. "Oh," was all she could manage, thinking to herself, "All right. This is a different wrinkle."

At the Robertsons' house, Robbie was puzzled as Geffen pulled him aside and enthusiastically told him that he was infatuated with Cher. Geffen had been candid with Robertson about his liaisons with men. In fact, when he had come to visit him and Dominique in Woodstock, Geffen had dragged them to a gay bar. "This is very interesting," Robertson told his wife, "that at this stage in his life he is taking this position."

Despite her attraction to him, Cher was not ready to consummate her relationship with G...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679457542
• ISBN 13: 9780679457541
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688