Eyes Wide Shut

Wealth, applied with intelligence and charity, can do a lot of good. It also has the power to write history. Yesterday’s robber barons, amassing immense personal fortunes at everyone else’s expense, are today’s philanthropic foundations. Henry Ford might have been the most important businessman in American history, but he was also a notorious anti-Semite whose labor practices included recruiting murderous anti-union goons right out of the Michigan prisons. Who could blame him or his heirs for preferring to link the family name with research grants, museum exhibits and PBS programs? It’s not difficult to find a man who believes you don’t succeed in this life unless you’re a son of a bitch; it’s impossible to find one who wants to be remembered that way.

Hollywood kingpin David Geffen takes his legacy and the heft of his life and wealth seriously: He once suggested to a reporter that only Robert A. Caro, perhaps America’s best and most celebrated biographer, could do justice to his life story, and though that pairing would have been as out of place as Vladimir Horowitz on Asylum Records, it speaks eloquently to Geffen’s sense of self and his dreams of aggrandizement. Still, the mogul found a serious and appropriate biographer when he agreed to tell his story to Wall Street Journal reporter Tom King in 1996. And although Geffen later grew leery of King’s line of questioning and stopped cooperating with him, it’s unlikely he expected the results to read anything like the exhaustive and distressing 674-page chronicle of greed and misanthropy that “The Operator” turns out to be.

For anyone with even a passing knowledge of the modern entertainment business, the trajectory of Geffen’s career is already a familiar story. Over the course of the last four decades, he has proved himself a brilliant businessman,made one of the biggest fortunes in Hollywood by starting and selling first Asylum Records and then Geffen Records, and he is a partner with director Steven Spielberg and film executive Jeffrey Katzenberg in DreamWorks SKG. His endless machinations and Machiavellian penchant for making friends and enemies in both the film and record industries are equally legendary, and he has, at various times, counted Steve Ross, Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin and Ted Ashley as mentors and adversaries while alternately courting and denigrating a cast of artists and executives that appears to have included everyone in the business at least once. The contours of his personal life--from his childhood in Brooklyn to his emergence later in life as an openly gay man and a major financial supporter of AIDS charities and fund-raiser for Bill Clinton--have also been widely chronicled in several books and dozens of magazine profiles. For the most part, the press--including such major outlets as Vanity Fair, 20/20, the New York Times, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times--have treated him with kid gloves. King has not.

If all that media coverage supplied the road map of Geffen’s life, then “The Operator” provides a topography of the landscape. From the Brooklyn classmate who recalls him as a teenage backstabber--”a lying cheat obsessed with taking credit” in King’s words--to the more recent unreported and unbidden acts of kindness, such as the rekindling of a dormant relationship with agent Sue Mengers at the time of her husband’s death, King offers a great deal of detail. But it’s plain to see why Geffen would ultimately disassociate himself from this book: Though the executive is willing, even eager, to show the world how awfully relentless he is, more often he just seems relentlessly awful. By the chilling end of “The Operator’s” second chapter, when Geffen’s brother recalls how the 18-year-old David’s first-ever limousine ride--a trip to the cemetery to bury their father--was an occasion to fantasize that people passing them on the road might think them rich, it’s easy to wonder whether anything that comes after will make David Geffen sympathetic.

A disagreeable subject is not a minor obstacle for a biographer to overcome. King’s strategy is to focus on a simple question: Why David Geffen? Why, of all the people in the entertainment industry, did he succeed so extraordinarily as a businessman? The answer, as King presents it, is a gift for recognizing the path to success and plotting a sometimes Byzantine strategy to achieve it. More important to King, Geffen sticks to that path with a sometimes superhuman determination which “The Operator” attributes to a nearly pathological fear--fear of failure, fear of ridicule, fear of dying his father’s anonymous death.

That’s not always a satisfying answer. As a reporter, King proves extremely adept at providing the facts of Geffen’s life, but the context and the reasons often remain elusive. Few unhappy childhoods have produced such Napoleonic consequences, and this portrayal of Geffen’s youth is too ordinary to explain why he is so unhappy and insatiable. Conducting 300 interviews, King has learned a tremendous amount about what Geffen has done in his life, but with the notable exception of Geffen’s driven and emotionally troubled immigrant mother, Batya, few of the people in “The Operator” are presented as more than stick figures.

For example, Geffen has a strained relationship with his brother, Mitchell. Yet though Mitchell is angry enough to suggest David doesn’t merit being the subject of a biography--and King showcases the remark to great effect--neither the source of their conflict nor his thoughts on why his brother became such a successful businessman are ever spelled out. We are told in passing that David did not attend his niece’s bat mitzvah, and there are few things Geffen could have done that would have been more insulting or hurtful to his brother. Yet no reason is given. Like much in “The Operator,” it’s one more rude action offered up without explanation.

There’s little doubt that King is correct in believing Geffen has a real talent for recognizing value, whether it is in a Tiffany lamp, a piece of art, California real estate, an up-and-coming executive or a young unknown artist like Jackson Browne. But the executive is hardly infallible. Looking at some of his mistakes and bad bets--whether it’s selling Asylum Records to Warner Bros. for $7 million, grabbing a low insurance settlement on a stolen Picasso or launching Geffen Records with a slew of high-priced, under-performing superstars such as Donna Summer and Elton John--they seem the miscues of a man in search of a quick score, not the residue of a grand strategy.

Rather than credit Geffen with a gift for complex tortuous schemes, it may make more sense to view him as a first-class juggler, keeping as many balls as possible in the air in hopes of being able to snatch the right one at the right moment. Geffen is the best of a generation of executives who made up the rules of the record business as they went along, and it’s unlikely he or anyone else harbored a complex plan; they were just trying to figure out how to succeed.

It is only the occasional moments when the most labyrinthine versions of events are promoted that “The Operator” seems off the mark. The portrayal of Geffen’s back-and-forth tussle with Clive Davis, then the president of CBS Records, over the value of a stock deal for Laura Nyro’s music publishing, is well documented and excellently told. It shows a pair of gifted deal makers improvising on the fly as Geffen screams for an adjustment when the stock price falls but expresses outrage that Davis should expect a similar consideration upon its rebound.

Less well chronicled is a previously untold story of Geffen insulting the wife of Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin. According to Geffen, he said the cruelest things he could think of to Evelyn Ostin so he wouldn’t be on speaking terms with her husband--a tightfisted negotiator--and would therefore have to renegotiate his Geffen Records contract with Warner Group chairman Ross, whom Geffen knew he would have a better chance of badgering into submission. The story may be true, but the footnotes suggest Geffen is the only source for the notion that the attack was premeditated. Considering the plethora of other vendettas and gratuitous attacks chronicled by King, it’s just as likely Geffen was frustrated or in a foul mood, rather than spinning a web of Machiavellian intrigue. The person the story may reflect most unfavorably upon, however, is Ostin, who now works for Geffen as the head of DreamWorks Records. It’s horrifying to consider that Ostin, widely viewed as one of the classiest and most savvy executives in the record business, could want to work for a man who caused his wife tremendous pain as part of a business scheme.

But then, one of King’s well-observed points is that there’s no shortage of people willing to take abuse for the chance to get rich. From Ross and Atlantic Records founder Ertegun down to the lower rungs of Geffen Records employees, Geffen’s ability to make money keeps him a sought-after commodity, no matter how ill-mannered or overbearing he gets. Viewed from a distance, Geffen’s behavior provides its own cyclical impetus: Screaming like a maniac helps him get rich; once he’s rich, he can scream like a maniac.

Through its well-documented detail, “The Operator” unearths more than a few juicy new David Geffen stories. Particularly noteworthy is the recounting of how Geffen, accompanied by his then-boyfriend, spent 45 minutes in the pre-Monicagate Oval Office of 1994 lecturing President Clinton on how to spin the press. “Imagine,” Geffen later says to his companion. “Me . . . giving the president advice!” To which his friend wryly replies: “It’s a little scary actually. As a citizen of the United States, it’s not something I wanted to see.”

King suggests time and again that the incredible drive, brute competitiveness and acts of cruelty are an indication that Geffen is, at heart, not just terrified but terrified that the world will notice and that he has turned this fear into the ferocious front that allows him to achieve so much. “The liabilities are the assets,” says Barry Diller, Geffen’s nearly lifelong on-again, off-again friend. “He’s gone through a lot, and goes through a lot, for what he gets.” It’s the most insightful and sympathetic remark in the book.

Still, the way King tells his story, it may not be enough to make you care what happens to Geffen. When Geffen is shown sobbing after Nyro concludes he’s not working in her best interests and refuses to see or speak with him or vomiting after reading an unflattering profile of himself in Esquire, it’s impossible not to think of all the people King shows him treating callously. The book keeps a good record of the body count of those Geffen targeted for public relations assassination--including Michael Ovitz, Michael Eisner, Ross, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Stephen Stills, Cher, Robert Towne, Davis, Irving Azoff, Don Henley, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Ertegun, as well as his own financial manager, former employees and many of his closest friends--and it’s just too impressive. Geffen is very rich and getting richer, but at the moment his glory days are feeling a little distant: Celebrity capitalism’s hot zone has moved from Hollywood to the Internet, and DreamWorks has yet to live up to the promise of its founders. Indeed, Geffen seems oddly disengaged from the company here, preferring, like Charles Foster Kane shut up in Xanadu, to sit around his Malibu beach house with Mengers, circa 1995, eating and watching the O.J. Simpson trial unfold on television. All of that is subject to change, of course, and if previous history is any indication, Geffen won’t miss the chance to capitalize on any future success.

The bright spot in Geffen’s life, of course, has been his generous charitable donations, particularly for AIDS research. Like some previous American tycoons, he might ultimately make a significant impact on the national culture through philanthropic works. With any luck, historians working 50 years from now may assign a different meaning to this life than Tom King. In the meantime, regardless of where David Geffen spends this summer, it’s a safe bet that “The Operator” will put him on the beach at both Malibu and the Hamptons. *