Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  At the Governors Ball afterward, I walked in and was surrounded by well-wishers, a cluster that included Dustin and Tom Cruise. Tom Hanks, another Best Actor nominee, sauntered over to throw his arm around me (not long afterward, he, too, would become a CAA client). But off to the side I saw Gene Hackman and Alan Parker, the star and director of Mississippi Burning, both clients, and both losers that night. They were visibly seething. I had signed them, and though other agents represented them day to day, I felt a sense of responsibility for their successes and failures, just as I did for all our clients. I felt particularly sorry for Gene, Dustin’s old roommate, who had been superb in a tricky role as a conflicted FBI agent. I also felt like a father caught favoring one child over another.

  I was adept at palliating conflict—or at least I thought I was—so I walked over and congratulated them. They turned away, snubbing me dead. They were convinced that I’d somehow fixed it so Rain Man won. I had privately voted the straight Rain Man ticket, following my heart, but there was no way for me to influence the balloting, even if I’d wanted to. That was the problem with CAA: we only almost ran everything. Rain Man won—but Mississippi Burning lost. What should have been the greatest night of my life had just become one of the worst.

  Ron Meyer, my partner and closest friend, was standing ten feet away. Ron was the soul of CAA, to hear everyone tell it, and I was the ass-soul. He wore sweaters and jeans and Cole Haan loafers; I was buttoned up in a blue suit. He was perpetually tan and relaxed and charming; I was perpetually pale and tense and vigilant. He was the velvet glove; I was the iron fist. But we were like Siamese twins, with one brain and one heart. I went over and told Ronnie what had just happened, and he grinned wryly, which made me feel better, as always. “It goes with the territory,” he said. The year before, Michael Douglas and Cher, two of his best clients—people he thought of as great friends, and worked incredibly hard for—had won Best Actor and Best Actress. It was a very rare double for an agent, yet neither Michael nor Cher thanked Ron in their remarks. He was devastated.

  Cher did thank her hairdresser, though.

  * * *

  —

  As agents, we didn’t create anything. We were sellers; we sold our clients our time and expertise, and then we sold the buyers our clients. Our tenuous capital was the hours in the day, less the few we slept, and we spent that capital at a frenzied pace. I’d drop everything to get you the right cardiac surgeon, the right car, a place for your kid at the John Thomas Dye or Harvard-Westlake schools—whatever you needed. I was everyone’s chief psychiatrist, legal adviser, financial adviser, fixer, cultural translator, and shoulder to cry on. With so many clients’ very lives seemingly our responsibility, I obsessed about what might go wrong for them—and for the agency. At one point in the ’80s we found an operative rooting through our trash, and after that I was always checking to make sure that memos got locked up or destroyed and that our lines weren’t bugged. The phrase of mine that my assistants conspiratorially intoned to one another, with an eye roll, was “Is the line cleared?” I felt you could never be too paranoid, because our competitors were out to get us and our clients were weak and easily wooed.

  Though my ruling desire was for complete control, I often felt at their mercy. I had little knowledge of what went on in their homes, production offices, and dressing rooms, but I hated the rumors I occasionally heard. Hollywood has always been a ruthless business, a machine designed to exploit talent and beauty, and the word was that a few of my male stars were treating younger women as sexual objects. When I learned about abuse in our office, I could and did address it. When one agent’s assistant told me he was chasing her around her desk, I called him in, ripped him a new one, and suspended him for a week. Then I transferred her to my office, where she worked very productively for ten years. He returned noticeably chastened, and as far as I know didn’t repeat his mistake. But with clients the dynamic was different; it was they who could fire me. Because of that imbalance—I was the parent, but the children had all the power—and because my focus was frankly on our business rather than on social justice, I let the matter go. I deeply regret that. Now, in the post–Harvey Weinstein era, a reckoning has finally come led by women braver than I was. It is absolutely necessary and long overdue.

  Part of the reason I let the rumors slide is that I had a powerful need to take care of my clients; I thought of them as a very large, very fractious family. But when clients tried to reciprocate, I got embarrassed. I forbade toasting at the two birthday parties I allowed my friends to throw me; I liked giving gifts, not receiving them. I always wanted credit for everything I accomplished, the small and large miracles I achieved, and I was upset when I didn’t get it—but I was mortified on the rare occasions when I did. So, for the most part, I gave, and people took. Every day I felt like each of my clients had installed a spigot in my gut and turned it on full blast. With 1,350 spigots in my gut, I often felt drained by noon. It’s a thankless business, but you can’t say that. You’re getting paid, and that’s your thank-you.

  I always told our agents, “Make your clients think they’re your friends—but remember that they’re not.” Yet it would be my clients who’d stay loyal, for the most part, and my friends who’d betray me.

  Jay Moloney, the agent I thought of as a son and as my eventual successor, a man who modeled himself on me, down to the Armani suits he wore and the Lichtenstein painting he bought, would join the agency’s posse of Young Turks who disowned me after I left CAA.

  Michael Eisner, my great friend who ran Disney, would hire me as his number two, then publicly humiliate me and fire me after fourteen months.

  And Ron Meyer, the blood brother I started CAA with, would leave to take a big job at Universal after I’d negotiated for us both to go there—and then disparage me all over town for twenty years.

  I’d made it my life’s work to understand people, to grasp what made them tick. I’d been certain that I was too wary to misplace my trust and too smart to be duped. So I’d like to think that these betrayals were random, and flagrantly unwarranted, and that I was the victim of some perverse instinct that destroys all human intimacy. I’d like to think that the problem was just that the tools and stratagems I’d used to get to the top inevitably created resentment, even among those who shared my success. That everyone hates a winner. That just because I sought money and power and intimidated everyone to get them didn’t change me.

  But I did change, of course. Because I could get movies that no studio would touch released and celebrated (Stand by Me), make stars out of nobodies (Steven Seagal, who’d been my martial arts instructor), even broker the sale of studios (Columbia and MGM once each, and Universal twice). With CAA’s power behind me, I could, for a time, make almost anything in Hollywood happen through leverage, acumen, and sheer self-belief.

  Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give a gift.

  CHAPTER ONE

  IS THE GODFATHER HERE?

  I met David Letterman in 1973, when I was in New York pitching TV shows for the William Morris Agency. Dave was a born comedian who for years had labored behind the scenes writing for crap like The Starland Vocal Band Show, but to me he’d always stood out. His humor was goofy but razor sharp. I tracked him as Johnny Carson’s recurrent guest on The Tonight Show, and then on Late Night with David Letterman, which debuted in 1982 in the time slot after Johnny’s on NBC. Dave excelled at the toughest job in show business: making people laugh, five nights a week.

  No one could replace Johnny, the coolest, most charming host ever, but it was an open secret that Johnny wanted Dave to succeed him. Yet NBC made Jay Leno Johnny’s permanent guest host, and seemed to be leaning Leno’s way. In February 1991, during Johnny’s twenty-ninth year at the helm, I was stunned to read a headline in the New York Post: NBC LOOKING TO DUMP CARSON FOR JAY LENO. Clearly, Helen Kushnick, Leno’s hyperaggressive manager, was behind this ridiculous claim. She thought NBC owed Jay
The Tonight Show—now.

  The Post story made me take a closer look at late night. At CAA we kept a “dashboard” of every project under way in film, TV, music, and books. A copy was placed in each agent’s black binder, together with the latest box-office data, TV ratings, bestseller lists, and other pertinent data that might give us an edge at our 8:30 a.m. staff meetings (which were themselves scheduled to give us an edge—we started sixty to ninety minutes ahead of our competitors). Our rule at staff meetings was “No idea is too stupid.” I consulted the dashboard several times a day, looking for opportunities for clients, potential film packages, or new business, the crazier-sounding the better.

  The late-night math seemed simple. There were two candidates to replace Carson, and Helen Kushnick had one. Letterman was the other. Dave had a top attorney in Jake Bloom, an able manager in Jack Rollins, and a nightclub booker who had nothing to do. Unlike Jay, who relentlessly played club dates on weekends, Dave never did stand-up. He shunned personal appearances. He didn’t go out much, period. And he didn’t have an agent. Dave was a star at 12:30, but I thought he could be a much bigger one.

  Because it’s human nature to resist being sold, I avoided cold-calling prospective clients. Better for them to come to me; better to be wooed than to pitch. I dispatched Jay Moloney on a recon mission to Peter Lassally, Late Night’s executive producer. Jay listened carefully to Peter’s woes, then offered his opinion: “Dave is naked against all the forces lined up behind Jay. He needs help.”

  Afterward, Jay told me: “Dave is floundering.” Dave’s problem was that he was a regular guy from Indianapolis who didn’t lobby or whine or throw his weight around. He thought that he’d inherit the biggest seat in late night on merit: he was clearly a more original talent than Jay, and therefore a more natural heir to Johnny. But that’s not how the business works. Behind that biting sense of humor Dave was an innocent.

  Warren Littlefield, the president of NBC Entertainment, favored Leno. But the man on the spot was Bob Wright, the canny finance executive who’d become NBC’s CEO after General Electric bought the network in 1986. We sold NBC ten pilots a year and I held Bob in high regard. Optimistically, Bob hoped to retain both Leno and Letterman, one on Tonight and the other in the bullpen. He thought Dave would do as he was told, because where else could he go? Ted Koppel was entrenched on ABC’s Nightline, and CBS seemed whipped after a string of failed challenges to Carson. Its latest pretender, Pat Sajak, had been canceled after just fifteen months.

  In May, three months after the Post story, Johnny announced that he’d retire in a year. At sixty-five, he wanted to go out on top. After waiting a respectful two weeks, NBC announced that Jay Leno would take Johnny’s chair. Jay’s mainstream appeal made him the safer bet for the $100 million franchise—corporate thinking, cautious but understandable. I was stunned, though, to hear that the network had kept Dave in the dark until two days before the announcement, particularly as Leno’s latest contract had secretly locked him in as Carson’s replacement. No one at NBC was looking out for Letterman, who brought the network $55 million a year. (Then, as now, the networks made most of their profits from late-night and daytime programming.) Indeed, the network’s bean counters had been hassling Dave on expenses, going so far as to reject his invoice for a car phone. Even when Dave told Warren Littlefield to his face he’d have to quit if he didn’t get Tonight, Littlefield made no real effort to assuage him.

  NBC was driving Dave into our arms. After Peter Lassally called the agency that summer to suggest a meeting, we scrutinized Dave’s contract. It was ugly. “It’s like he’s in prison,” said Lee Gabler, our number two in television, a tall, judicious man our clients instinctively trusted. Dave was barred from negotiating with anyone else for a year and a half, until February 1993, two months before his contract was up. Even then, NBC retained the right to match any offer. If Dave turned them down, the network could keep him off the air for another year.

  Agents used to be like firemen: they ran from one crisis to the next, reacting to offers and ultimatums, never knowing what tomorrow would bring. At CAA, we prided ourselves on making tomorrows. Could we create a more brilliant one for Dave? We put five people on the project under Lee, and I asked them to analyze Nielsen ratings and late-night time slots and every conceivable bidder for his services. All the data I needed was distilled into three pages of single-spaced type, and we spent hours and hours discussing the game theory of how to play the networks against each other. By late summer I was ready for our one shot at Dave.

  * * *

  —

  Our focus on first impressions won us many new clients before we’d uttered a word. When Dave and Peter Lassally pulled into CAA’s underground garage that August, one of our five parking “concierges” welcomed them by name. Dave and Peter then walked to the elevator through a gallery of vibrant prints—Johns, Stella, Close, Rauschenberg. I’d chosen those pieces to compel attention and announce our values. When I gave visitors a tour, I’d stop by the prints and talk with actors about composition and mood, with directors about the power of the images, and with execs about being well rounded and having a life outside the business. The art works were secretly my favorite feature of the building because they always made me pause, made me feel something, made me remember the person I kept hoping to become—a man very different from the personage Dave and Peter had come to see.

  After taking an elevator up one floor, they stepped into the atrium of our I. M. Pei–designed building, which was fifty-seven feet high and topped by a glass hemisphere. Other agencies looked like accounting firms, and as Dave and Peter crossed the travertine floor to the reception desk and took in the massive Lichtenstein on the wall, I hoped they’d be thinking, Wow! As they checked in they couldn’t help but notice the traffic on the open bridges of our upper floors, a constant churn that suggested CAA’s high metabolism.

  En route to the next bank of elevators, Letterman yelled out, “Is the Godfather here?” Which was pretty funny, and also the first and last time anyone yelled in our lobby.

  My third-floor office was modest in size and flooded with sun from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Gigantic offices are stupid and counterproductive. Personal meetings should be intimate; larger ones belong in conference rooms. On one end of my office sat a half-moon desk of French ash with two Giacometti chairs. A sitting area held a couch and two Josef Hoffmann chairs. The single canvas, Circle in a Square by Robert Mangold, echoed the core elements of the building’s design.

  As I shook Dave’s hand, I did a rapid scan. I always scanned people head to toe. Was their hair dyed, did they wear a wig, did the elements of their outfits match? Were they clean-shaven? (This was before the scruffy look pervaded the business.) Someone with hair curling out of his ears or dirty fingernails wasn’t someone I wanted to cultivate. If a guy walked in with a huge gold chain and gold watch, he’d better be a hip-hop artist. Otherwise, he was announcing his insecurity.

  Anyone who scanned me would see a thoughtful dresser in a blue suit, with a white or blue shirt and black shoes—never brown—accessorized only by a leather-strapped watch. I wore no jewelry, not even a wedding band. I sat up straight, I was sympathetic, and I focused intensely on you, always turning the conversation away from myself. As I discovered by seeing my persona reflected in the eager eyes of my clients, that focus drew them in. And the contrast between the relaxed demeanor and the humming engine underneath, which people felt subconsciously, was comforting if you were on my side of the table, and curiously alarming if you were across from me. It suggested untapped power.

  What I saw in Dave was a preppy midwestern man who wore white socks with penny loafers, was ill at ease, but was candidly seeking aid and comfort. I saw someone who felt alone, vulnerable, and lied to. When I smiled at him, he grinned back. Noting that we both had that distinctive gap between our front teeth, he said, “Are we related?” In a way—in our wariness, our skepticism of human motivations�
��we were. One reason I became so determined to help Dave was that he reminded me of myself. Of course, he was more trusting than I was, easier to read, and much, much funnier. Also, he truly believed he was going to get The Tonight Show, while I knew better.

  When Peter Lassally launched into their tale, I cut him off. I understood their problem; I needed every minute to convince Dave I could solve it. “Peter,” I said, “I know Dave’s circumstances. And so I know why you’re here. Dave is a star of such compelling stature that, frankly, it makes me personally angry he finds himself this abused. We pride ourselves here at CAA in developing a career plan for our clients that protects them as much as enriches them. David has had such an incredibly high professional standard, and yet he’s going disturbingly unrewarded. That just doesn’t make sense. It’s bad business practice. Obviously,” I continued, “we have an intense interest in establishing a business relationship with you, Dave. And with you, Peter. Frankly, we have worked out a career plan for David, and it includes securing everything for Dave that he wants. Everything.” I let that sink in. “Of course, that means an 11:30 television show.” However, I added, “The geometry of the deal will be far larger. The studios will be in, the syndicators, the full range of the entertainment industry. We’ll frame a deal that will make you one of the giants. And if you give us the privilege of working with you, CAA will take care of everything your talents deserve.”