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Then Jay Moloney would call back for me, talk to Marty for an hour, and write up a buck slip explaining why Marty had called. The buck slips themselves would be ranked in order of importance—the rule was that if a buck slip contained a question, it had to be replied to by the end of the day—and I’d call whoever needed my attention most. If we were trying to transition a client whom I’d signed to the agent who’d be handling him day to day, I’d keep having that younger guy call back for me, and usually by the time I got back to Al Pacino, say, he was fine with having
growth. Warren Beatty once told me, “It’s smart of you guys to give so much work and support to the young guys—it makes you look that much more important.” He was right: it was self-serving for the agency’s leaders, but also agency serving. Those impulses felt synonymous, at least at that point.
Agencies are built on the lie that your agent will give you his total attention—but there simply isn’t anywhere near enough time in the day for that.
five minutes later: “You can’t do this! You’re putting the studio at risk for hundreds of millions of dollars! We’ll sue!” A lawyer by training, Sid viewed litigation as a profit center. He was my next-door neighbor in Malibu, and he later sued me when the ocean overran my sandbags and came onto his property. (It was dismissed.) He sued Sony (and lost) for abetting piracy with their Betamax technology. He almost seemed to prefer depositions to scripts. “Lew is here,” Sid said.
operatic invective, he and I had yet to face off. On speaker, Lew delivered the most articulate tirade imaginable. He was very loud but very calm. He laid down his argument like a stonemason, chiseling each point into place. How dare I do this, he said. Zemeckis should be working and I should not be stopping him. The studio made a good-faith commitment to finance the movie, and we were putting them in an impossible position. Agents were undermining the business, wrecking deals we were supposed to facilitate. He paused for breath and I began to reply, but then he started all over again. From
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this, Mr. Zemeckees owes us—” “Sid,” I interrupted, “I think we’ve said all there is to say. We’re around all weekend; you know how to reach us. We’re planning on Bob showing up on Monday, because we’re assuming you guys will do the right thing and come back with a fair offer.” I hung up and called Steven Spielberg before Sid could wedge him: “Let this be their problem, not yours.”
right?” He glumly assented. I went to Rupert Murdoch’s house for lunch once, and, always looking for an edge, asked who his internist was. When he said he didn’t have one, I immediately made an appointment for him with the head of internal medicine at UCLA. He got great care and became a donor to the institute.
giant TV set, which his wife told me he really wanted. Barry was one of my closest friends, but I would have done that for any client. That sort of when-the-chips-are-down reliability, that total focus on others when it’s life or death, reassures me that I can be a decent person. It reflects the best part of me to myself.
than anyone else and make my life so much easier. And he proved to be the finest assistant I ever had and one of CAA’s best agents. He had superior taste and instincts in complex situations; he was outstanding at follow-up and at putting clients at ease and making them feel everything was under control. Like all the great ones, Jay was a gifted manipulator. There was something about his transparent eagerness to have me warm to him that made me warm to him. When he told me he’d graduated from USC, I gave him
The next step was to get I.M. to Los Angeles. I flew him out in March 1986 and arranged a first-class visit; my assistant Dan Adler hovered near him the entire time he was in L.A., making sure his feet never had to touch the ground. I hosted a dinner where I.M. was surrounded by people like Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Costner, Terry Semel, and Michael Eisner. I had Eisner approach him about doing a hotel for Disney World, which was then a popular pastime for high-profile architects. I.M. didn’t warm to the idea, and I dropped it.
investments, so I don’t end up in my forties with nothing.” “I love watching you play, and I applaud that you’re thinking ahead—but we don’t work with athletes,” I said. He called to ask for another meeting, thereby passing my first test: he was determined. This time we talked about his Lakers contract. After his historic rookie season, owner Jerry Buss had given him the richest contract extension in the history of sports: $1 million a year for twenty-five years. It was a fabulous deal—for Jerry Buss. With
understand the fundamentals.” Just jump in, I said: “The only thing holding you back is overcoming the jock stereotype and sounding as savvy as I know you are.” I bought him subscriptions to the Journal, Forbes, and Fortune, and quizzed him weekly, over the phone, about current business deals and trends. A naturally charismatic speaker, Earvin studied tapes of his TV interviews to become more polished.
to join MoMA’s board, it was the ultimate validation—one of the great honors of my life. Watching how David worked taught me the efficacy of elegance and understatement, how to sell by not selling. When MoMA was launching a capital campaign, David took Judy and me to dinner, and during the three-and-a-half-hour meal never once mentioned a donation. He just talked about how great I was, how great Judy was, and how magnificent the museum was going to be. Somehow, by the end of the meal, we knew we had to give at least the minimum: $5 million.
you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you. . . . People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world. He was my wisest friend and the most steadfast; he was quiet when I succeeded but generous and comforting when I screwed up. As he liked to say, “There’s always another race and another racetrack.” I miss him every fucking day.
and Purple Rain ended up being huge. That’s a move I still make, getting people’s kids to tell their influential parents what’s really going on. After you hit thirty-five, maybe even thirty, you no longer have any idea what’s coming next, assuming you ever did. I only became convinced Madonna was a true superstar when my daughter, Kim, started dressing like her.
upbeat, unflappable kid who always made sure everyone else was getting along. In the late nineties, I met Rickson Gracie, the Brazilian jujitsu star, and became curious about his dynamic brand of martial arts. I was soon working out seven days a week with Rickson’s protégé, Marco Albuquerque, a twenty-three-year-old kid from the favelas of Rio. Marco was five foot nine, with a twenty-inch neck and a scarred, shaved head. Despite his formidable appearance, he was remarkably sweet tempered, and he became like a son to Judy and me and like an older brother to our kids. He was always watching out
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CAA came to subscribe to nemawashi, the Japanese style of bottom-up consensus. We didn’t hire anyone from outside until they’d met with and been approved by the whole department. The process made onboarding smooth, easing new talent into the company. (It helped that we promoted two people for each one we imported.) No one questioned our calls because they’d already signed off on them. It may seem like
was all a loss of focus and a waste of time. With no real platform—I wasn’t representing CBS or Sony or even Michael Eisner—I put myself in the middle of the situation. I was a connector; it’s what I did all day, and now I decided to try to connect the parties and learn what I was supposed to be doing as I went along. Through a mixture of confidence and silent observation, I kept my place at the table. No one ever said, as they would have been perfectly right to do, “What the fuck are you doing here?” I set up a meeting between Walter and Larry Tisch. “This doesn’t have to be antagonistic,” I
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millions of dollars in Tokyo real estate, an item somehow overlooked by CBS’s auditors. After this first exposure to corporate mergers, I made a list of M&A specialists—the right lawyer, the best accountant, a top public relations firm—and met with them to learn their craft. As I absorbed the nuts and bolts of making a deal, it struck me that it wasn’t that different from assembling a movie package: you had to put all the elements together first, get the buyer and seller in sync, then strike a price. With talent agencies barred, through
He rose before 5:00 a.m., had dinner at 6:00 p.m. sharp, and was in bed by 9:00. One time I was at his Wyoming ranch when a phone call made me half an hour late to the cookhouse. Three courses were lined up at my place setting. Herb looked at me and said, “When I say 6:00, I mean 6:00.” He was smiling, but I took his point. Herb was a model of integrity. After Sumner Redstone broke a promise and engaged another investment bank, he sent Allen & Company a token check for $1 million. I was in Herb’s office when it arrived. He took out his scissors, cut the check into tiny pieces, and returned
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half a dozen staff members, Sandy compiled hundreds of pages of manually typed spreadsheets on Columbia’s library. It was painstaking, deeply researched work. There was no one-size-fits-all algorithm; we reviewed each film or TV show, line by line. What contracts were out on a given title and when did they expire? What was the current cash flow, and what did the future hold? The variables were complex. One big hit in syndication could drag six less popular movies along behind it. With Tootsie as a hook, for example, a local station could program a Dustin Hoffman weekend. The trickiest part was
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basically my dream country. One of our hosts asked, “Is there anything special you want to do?” I said, “We want to learn about the country. We are your students. Teach us.” We accepted every invitation—a tour of the Imperial Palace or a Shinto temple, a side trip to Kyoto. I saw my hotel room only to sleep. Give me a spare hour and I’d peel off to a sushi bar in the Ginza, bow to the chef, and point to what I wanted. Or I’d visit Shibuya, Tokyo’s SoHo, where teens wore Rolling Stones T-shirts and the latest Nikes. My enthusiasm for the culture seemed to make an impression,
floor with him. My final task on the deal was presiding over a session to sort out any regulatory issues. It took an hour to run through Coca-Cola’s checklist: the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, SEC concerns, and so forth. Then I turned to Sony and asked about loose ends on their side. A company representative said, “Nothing, it’s all done. The appropriate parties have blessed the deal.” Akio Morita was a keystone member of his keiretsu, an interlocking business association under the aegis of the Japanese
how glad we were to be working together. Then we all bowed and left. As we drove to the airport, it occurred to me I was out on the longest limb of my life. If the deal fizzled and we didn’t get paid, I’d get pilloried—with my partners at the head of the line. I’d be the Wizard of Oz after the curtain rose and the mic died. But I was never one to dwell on the downside. CAA had gotten where it was by blazing new trails. Besides, we knew where Matsushita could start shopping. —
hotel and fall into bed. I rose at 3:30 a.m. to roll through my normal calls at the normal time, patching through my office to make it appear I was in L.A. At 9:00 sharp we were delivered to Matsushita’s campus. The administration
London, Paris, and Frankfurt. The letters asked for the privilege of guiding Matsushita through the wilds of the movie business. They listed their services, each one with a fee. They charged for everything but continental breakfast. Hirata’s smile grew wider as I leafed through them, and I understood: CAA was the only one to forgo a fee letter. In all our dealings in Japan we never had a written contract. Our attitude was, We know you will do the honorable thing. For an old-fashioned businessman like Hirata, that gesture was definitive. Despite his limited English and my nonexistent Japanese,
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On the next trip, we began Teaching our seminar on Hollywood. My associates at my side, I stood all day to present at a pair of whiteboards and six-foot screens. Hirata asked us to assume they knew nothing, which was close to the truth. We began with an in-depth history of the American film industry, from the old studio system to the present. We did the same for television. After answering questions, we ended with a factory visit. That was my favorite time, hanging out with the engineers. I had never seen a workplace so neatly organized. Workers wore company jumpsuits, a
the lowest figure that would safely keep things moving. Formal talks began later that morning at Trump Tower, where Sid co-owned an apartment with Steven Spielberg. As I led people through the agenda, the atmosphere was quiet but tense. We made short work of the agreed-upon points. Lew and Sid got five-year deals; if Lew couldn’t finish his term as CEO, Sid stepped in. Finally, I addressed the price. First I noted that external conditions—war in the Middle East and the rising price of oil—had hurt MCA’s value since Matsushita’s initial overture. When I delivered the number, Lew professed
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well, which really made it seem like we were done. But the Japanese didn’t leave, a good sign. And Lew remained at the Sherry-Netherland. That was his tell that he wanted to close, and Bob Strauss read it like Amarillo Slim. He stayed to keep Lew company, just in case. I had barely made it home when Herb Allen checked in with an update: Lew was at the 21
I said. “Let me earn my money. I’ve built a relationship with these people and they trust me. Let me help you.” Lew listened, but I could tell he had no interest. When I did business overseas, I took my cue from Akio Morita. I tuned to the local environment as soon as I stepped off the plane. But Lew was an American from the old school. He expected the world to adapt to him. And he never forgave me for saving him on someone else’s terms. After the deal closed, I brought Tanii and Hirata and Toyonaga to the Universal lot to take formal possession of MCA. I pulled up to the front gate by
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At Eisner’s surprise fortieth birthday party—and it was a genuine surprise because I threw it on his forty-first birthday—the producer Larry Gordon gave a toast to Eisner that, in passing, noted that I was always telling the studios how to run their business. The truth is I had learned, over the years, that creative people were much better at taking candid criticism than businesspeople. A Bob Towne would thank me for my notes on his scripts, but execs got intimidated and thought I was telling them I could run their businesses better than they could. I wasn’t telling them that, exactly, but
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agrees with you.” I stayed impassive, but my heart leaped. In any multiplayer contest, you want to be the outlier. I told Gille, “Everyone you’ve met with is in the business of selling assets. But I’m in the business of building assets, and I think you are, too.” “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said.
times Jeff’s offer. Of course, Jeff had a fair point about our work on MGM: CAA was, by design, a confluence of conflicts. Whenever CAA packaged a movie or a TV show, we represented a producer (who wanted the tightest possible budget) as well as the artists (who deserved the market rate). A week after we paved the way for Les Moonves to go to CBS, we were pitching our clients’ pilots to him. The conflicts were all out in the open, known, factored in. That’s how Hollywood worked. But I assured the guilds we’d keep hands off MGM’s creative management and off any privileged information. (It made
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had been eclipsed by Mercedes and BMW, never to regain its luster. But it wouldn’t do for me to come on with a hard sell. I mirrored Roberto and Don’s behavior, which was foreign to Hollywood—courtly, Southern, restrained. Don’t hype me, don’t sell me, just tell me. When I confided my plan to expand CAA into marketing, Roberto said, “What do you need from us to get started?” I said that first I needed time
Figure that out, and fast.” I called Don: “Here’s what we propose. We’ll bring a group of our executives for an all-day meeting with your division heads. We want to know their issues on the ground, what they think of their competition, what they like about your ads and what they don’t. We want to hear it all.” We put together a team of in-house experts in movies, television, music, and books and we combed every Coca-Cola print ad and commercial
than Saturday Night Live and much younger than ABC’s Sunday Night Movie. Why not trade the shotgun for a rifle—why not customize ads for each group? My first big idea for Coke was to make different spots for 60 Minutes and The Simpsons. Our challenge was to restore Coke’s cachet with young people, but
trailers. Why couldn’t Coke do the same? Ads were expensive because Madison Avenue bankrolled its own commercial houses and then marked up each fee by as much as 18 percent. CAA could undercut them by going straight to the talent. Our directors worked on big, draining movie projects. Many of them would jump at the chance to make a miniature film with total freedom for a six-figure paycheck. I grabbed a legal tablet and jotted down our manifesto: Holiday relay race. More commercials. Demographically stimulated. No “one sight, one sound.” New music, new graphics. Hire creative people.
that culture.” I flew to Atlanta for Roberto’s benediction—which was disappointingly vague. “We need a new direction in our advertising,” he told me, “and I’m glad we’re discussing what that might be.” At big companies, nobody wants to own a new idea before it’s clear whether or not it’s a stroke of genius. After someone complained to the Screen Actors Guild about our apparent conflict as agents and producers, we told the New York Times on background
times we felt puny compared to McCann, we had some advantages, too—no bureaucracy to zap our riskier ideas, no protocols to smother us. We didn’t want safe ads. We wanted great ads. —
ended each spot with our “Always Coca-Cola” theme song. The October shootout was our title fight. McCann owned the legacy relationship, so we couldn’t just beat them on points—we had to knock them out. I bought Armani suits for Shelly and Len, who’d be presenting. We packed white shirts and bright ties for a uniform look, like Hoffman and Cruise taking on the casinos in Rain Man. The day before the event, breaking
breakfast and a final run-through before changing into our freshly pressed suits. We looked and felt unbeatable. We arrived fifteen minutes early. Up front were two tables for the combatants and a third for the Coke executives, with several rows of seats in back. Haber and I sat at CAA’s table with Shelly and Len standing to our right. Roberto, Don, Peter, and Doug Ivester took their stations. Eleven a.m. came and went with no sign of McCann. Ten minutes later, two dozen disheveled ad people filed in. Next to our lean, mean team, they were corporate bloat personified: a mistake. After flying
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While I played to the Coke executives and referred to them by name, I occasionally turned to bore my gaze into McCann’s rank and file, the dazed and disoriented group at the rear. No harm in trying to intimidate them. In closing, I said, “Pretend you’re
that my presentation “was so charming that I almost started applauding.” Two young McCann creatives shuffled forward like death-row convicts, dead men walking. They made their first pitch, a stiff recitation off handheld notes. They began a second one—and then they crumbled. They broke off in the middle and sat down. Bergin said, “We’re done.” And they all filed out. We had literally driven them from the field. The world’s marquee ad account belonged to CAA.
edgy, yet fun-filled feeling absent from Coca-Cola advertising since the ‘new’ Coke fiasco in 1985.” Time wrote: “To the ad industry’s dismay, nearly all the new commercials introduced last week were produced by CAA. Even worse, they are terrific.” A few weeks later, Phil Dusenberry walked up to me at a New York cocktail party and said, “I don’t know where you came from, but my hat’s off to you. We’ve had to reassess everything we’re doing.” Shortly after our first spots aired, Roberto Goizueta paid a visit to CAA. He strolled through the office passing out custom Hermès ties with a polar bear
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and that Kodak was basically doomed. The overarching issue, and the reason I slow walked a lot of these inquiries, was that I had a plan with Teddy Forstmann to buy J. Walter Thompson, the huge multinational ad agency. That was my exit strategy. We’d give the Young Turks day-to-day responsibility for CAA, Ron would be its CEO, and I’d run the conglomerate, building it out to acquire other media properties. I’d floated the idea with the guilds, telling them we were interested in an ad agency, and their reaction was
should have just gone ahead with the J. Walter Thompson plan as a minority shareholder. CAA would take 49 percent, Teddy 51 percent, and I’d ease into the majority ownership later. It’s exactly the move Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell made recently at William Morris Endeavor; they’re now producing ads. Of course, times have changed; the guilds, now eager to have work for their clients, didn’t fight WME. At the turn
We went into the den, where Steve whipped out his omnipresent legal pad.
I told the president, “Sure, I’d be happy to.” Taking a deep breath, I added, “But I have a couple of conditions.” We both laughed, recognizing that I was living up to my reputation. “One, I want to see the speech beforehand, to make sure you don’t unintentionally say something that will get you into hot water out here. And two, I’d like you to consider announcing some sort of major legislative initiative. It’s show business; your audience will want something theatrical.”
Meanwhile, the agency was firing on all cylinders. In 1993 we signed a deal with Nike to develop and promote sporting events together, the result of my barraging the company’s founder and chairman, Phil Knight, with schemes and suggestions for six months.
And yet our seams were beginning to fray. Ron and Bill were making well over $12 million a year—and in some years, many millions more from our M&A work—which papered over a lot of problems. But Ron still wanted Bill out. I kept telling Ron, “Look, I hear you, but I don’t feel that strongly. If you want to do it, you should do it.” Ron seemed as cheerful as ever, but my stonewalling on this point would eventually drive him, oddly enough, toward Bill Haber. In later years, they’d become very close friends, united, at least in part, by their growing distrust of me.
