Barry Diller. Courtesy of Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times
Dear Commons Community,
If you have any interest in Barry Diller, his life, and his role in the media, Maureen Dowd had an extended article yesterday in The New York Times that is for you. She starts with his autobiography, Who Knew, that was just published. Here is an excerpt.
“ Barry Diller has only just started his book tour, but he’s already trying to sneak away.
“I’m shortening the tour part,” the 83-year-old mogul said recently in his sonorous baritone, the “Killer Diller” voice that intimidated and intrigued Hollywood for more than half a century. “I am not up for interrogation on aspects of my personal life.”
As we sat on cappuccino-colored couches in his gorgeous Art Nouveau aerie in the Carlyle hotel, I reminded Diller about the bewitchingly candid first paragraph of his bildungsroman, Who Knew:
The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional. My parents separated often and came a day short of divorce several times before I was 10; my brother was a drug addict by age 13; and I was a sexually confused holder of secrets from the age of 11.
And there it was, Hollywood’s worst-kept secret spilled: Barry Diller is gay. Or rather, bisexual — or bi with Di, since, as he writes, “While there have been a good many men in my life from the age of 16, there has only ever been one woman.” The sultry Princess of Wrap, Diane von Furstenberg, swept him away back in the Studio 54 days. She’s proud of being the first woman he ever slept with, in a torrid romance that later unfurled into a long, happy, sexually liberated marriage.
Von Furstenberg and Diller’s friends are watching, wide-eyed, as Diller talks publicly for the first time about his unorthodox private life. The gruff, point-blank executive is known, as the Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos said, as “one of the very few who doesn’t care what people think in a town full of people who do care.” That is true in business. But for most of his lifetime, Diller did care about what people thought of his sexual orientation.
“I wanted to tell the story,” he said about his alienated childhood and dazzling career. “And I knew if I told the story, I had to tell the truth.” That doesn’t make it easier. He’s kept his private life shrouded for so long, it’s hard now to rip off that shroud.
Even though he early on created what he calls his own “Bill of Rights,” where he would not tell many people in his business world that he was gay but would also not pretend to be heterosexual and act like “one of the boys,” he now says he was just “chicken.”
“So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived,” he writes. “Consider if you can what such a daily drip of that kind of dysfunctional life does to one’s sense of self.”
In his big, sprawling life, Diller has helped shape the culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, traversing the world of entertainment from a heady time for Hollywood studios to a bleak time, deftly surfing the shifts from networks to movie theaters to cable to VCRs to streaming. He was early to see the artificial intelligence revolution coming and to predict that the upstart streamers would swallow the grand old studios — the death knell for Hollywood as we knew it.
“It’s interesting that Barry spent the first part of his career building Hollywood,” The Ankler’s Janice Min said, “and the second part talking about what a disaster it is.”
But that culture has also shaped his life. His memoir is blunt, like him, with a vulnerable story about coming of age in America that stands in stark contrast to the manosphere and the cartoonish, chest-thumping, cat-lady-hating “masculine energy,” as Mark Zuckerberg termed it, being projected in Washington by President Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.”
I found Dowd’s entire article most interesting.
Tony
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