Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

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  On January 8, 1993, John Agoglia called with NBC’s decision. Agoglia was unloved by agents, as he could be abrasive, even overwrought. But when I picked up, I heard ruefulness in his voice. Forced to make a one-eighty, he saw the humor in his situation.

  “We want Dave for The Tonight Show,” Agoglia said. But as he sketched the offer, it became clear that they didn’t want Dave all that much. NBC had no intention of matching CBS. The salary was much lower, the production budget tighter. Most disturbing was NBC’s proposed start date of May 1994, when Jay Leno’s contract expired. That gave the network sixteen months, an eon in television, to see how Jay’s ratings held up. If they cratered, Dave was plan B. If Jay rallied, NBC could stick with the status quo. Either way, Bob Wright would keep his two biggest stars in the fold.

  It was crafty work by NBC’s lawyers but a terrible deal for Dave. At best, he’d be perceived as the second man in on Tonight. At worst, he’d be the guy not quite good enough to get a shot. To me, Agoglia’s bid was a nonstarter. But what would Dave think? Years before, when asked about The Tonight Show, he’d said, “If I weren’t asked someday to do it, I’d feel kind of sad. Yet doing it—that’s my worst nightmare. . . . Maybe the prudent thing would be to let some other poor bastard walk into the fray for several months and then try doing the show.” NBC was leading us to precisely that point, with Jay Leno playing the poor bastard.

  We were encouraged by how weak NBC’s offer was; we could recommend against it without reservation. But even novice agents know that the first offer is never the best or final one. We could have shown up en masse at Warren Littlefield’s office and called Bob Wright with Agoglia in the room. Knowing how much Bob dreaded Dave’s departure, we could have shaved the sixteen-month delay and boosted Dave’s salary and production budget. I was a deal maker. I could have hammered home a deal to get Dave his dream job. But I didn’t do it, or even tell Dave that I could, because it wasn’t right for him. A late-night show wasn’t a one-off, like a book or a movie; his career hung in the balance. Sometimes, representing a client’s best interests means not getting him what he thinks he wants. The judgment part of the job requires knowing when to redirect a client’s desires.

  In a conference call with Dave and Peter, we told them what Dave was eager to hear: “We’ve got NBC if we want it.” But as we compared the offers for them, CBS won on every count. It also won on the crucial perception question. Jay Leno was pulling a 4.9 rating at 11:30, while CBS was languishing at 2.7. A 3.8 on CBS would make Dave a hero; the same number on NBC would be disastrous. For someone with Dave’s strong fear of failure, that was a weighty detail. Flipping the frame to emphasize the positive and to spark Dave’s competitive nature, I said, “If you go to CBS, you’ll have the chance to beat NBC’s pants off.” Peter backed us. But Dave was still agonizingly unsure.

  From the start, two summers earlier, Dave had asked for my unfiltered opinion. I’d told him everything, even the ugly stuff—the negative gossip about him at NBC, the concerns about his style at 11:30—that agents usually edit out. On each call I’d think, Is this the moment to push him over the cliff? I decided, now, that it was finally time. I told Dave The Tonight Show was dead for him. It had died six months before, the instant Jay Leno took over. From that moment, Dave was no longer the crown prince; he could only be Jay’s usurper. Their needling aside, they admired each other. If Dave bigfooted Jay, he’d have a hard time living with the fallout—and with himself. His self-respect was even more important to him than his childhood dream.

  Dave didn’t want to hear this, but he needed to. I closed by repeating our recommendation: CBS. There was a long pause. Then Dave said, “You know, it’s every race driver’s dream to drive a Ferrari. I need more time.” His heart was overwhelming his head.

  Playing for the time Dave needed, I asked Agoglia to come in over the weekend and start papering the contract. On January 9, a Saturday, he and his seconds met with Lee Gabler, Jay Moloney, and Steve Lafferty, CAA’s head of TV business affairs. I stayed away to preserve Dave’s option to bail. We orchestrated it that way because in a pinch I might have to disavow any agreement they came to.

  Lee called afterward and said, “John’s not looking to make a deal.” He’d offered a few small concessions but refused to put them in writing. A seasoned agent like Lee could read his body language. Agoglia was following Bob Wright’s orders against his own inclinations, and he didn’t want to close.

  Agoglia followed up not by faxing the deal points to us, as arranged, but by reading them over the phone. NBC was temporizing like crazy, which meant one of two things:

  They weren’t sure they wanted Dave. A faxed deal memo, initialed by Dave and messengered back, was binding.

  They weren’t sure Dave wanted them. They feared we might turn them down, leak their offer to the press, and drive an embittered Jay Leno to quit.

  At Peter Lassally’s urging, Dave called the one person who’d truly understand his dilemma, the one person with no ax to grind. Johnny Carson told him he couldn’t decide what was best for someone else. But if NBC treated him the way they’d treated Dave, Johnny said, he “would probably walk.” The king gave Dave permission to relinquish his long role as the prince-in-waiting. When Dave and I spoke that evening, Dave said, “Let’s proceed with CBS.” He sounded at peace.

  Before we could inform NBC, Agoglia pulled the network’s proposal. We guessed that Carson had told someone he had spoken with Dave, and the grapevine did the rest. To cover its ass with Leno, NBC then held a press conference to deny any offer had been made. Uh-huh.

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  The Late Show with David Letterman debuted on CBS on August 30, 1993. I came to New York for it with my thirteen-year-old son, Chris, who wore a suit for the occasion. Standing in the glass-walled control room at the back of the Ed Sullivan Theater, we heard the audience erupt when Dave came onstage. As the applause washed over him, I felt real satisfaction at having gotten him his own show. You couldn’t know what Dave was feeling deep down unless he told you, and he’d never tell you, but he looked assured in a double-breasted suit—a pointed departure from his old blazers—and he nailed his monologue. Bill Murray, a client and great friend of mine, was Dave’s first guest, and Paul Newman, another client and great friend, did a cameo from the audience. The show went over like a dream.

  Afterward, in his office backstage, Dave was characteristically self-lacerating—he told me the taping had been a disaster, and when Howard Stringer called to offer congratulations, Dave muttered that he’d call him back. Seeming embarrassed by all the attention, he focused on my son. Apropos of nothing, he reached into his humidor and offered Chris a cigar, which cracked him up. As we left, Dave caught my eye and nodded, just once.

  Howard Stringer underpromised and overdelivered. Within three years, CBS reached an affiliate clearance rate of more than 90 percent. With two to three guest spots per night, Late Show with David Letterman gave the film business an additional venue for promoting new releases, which helped all of our film clients. Worldwide Pants became the producer of CBS’s The Late Late Show and Everybody Loves Raymond, and Dave was set for life.

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  In the middle of this long, tense process, on Christmas Eve, 1992, my family was in Aspen playing board games. I was going upstairs for a deck of cards when the phone rang in my bedroom. I was annoyed, because Christmas week is a hall pass for agents. What now?

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Dave. I’m sorry to call you on Christmas Eve.”

  “Dave, I’m Jewish.” I often tried to make him laugh, but this was one of the few times I succeeded.

  He cleared his throat. “I have something I wanted to tell you,” he said. “Um . . . I was in a bad place, and you’re helping me get to a good place. You’re really savi
ng my life.” He went on in that sweet, generous vein for three or four minutes, a long time for such a reserved guy.

  I was stunned. After saying good-bye, I sat alone for a while. In my twenty-five years as an agent, through thousands of transactions, I had never heard so much heartfelt sincerity and gratitude. This—this—was what I had always secretly hoped the business would be like.

  It was the last time it ever was.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE FIRST VALLEY

  My life is a story of three valleys. I began in the San Fernando Valley, wound up in Silicon Valley, and spent the intervening decades in a Valley I’d dug for myself.

  I was raised in Encino, a nondescript part of the San Fernando Valley, the most nondescript part of greater Los Angeles. I loved Encino until I knew better, and then I hated it. We were on the wrong side of the hill from all the action.

  My father, David Ovitz, had grown up in the Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. He never made it to college. He married my mother, Sylvia, another second-generation American, and worked as a Seagram’s salesman, wholesaling to liquor stores in Chicago, where I was born in 1946. As the local liquor market flattened, the company encouraged its salesmen to transfer to Los Angeles, which was booming. When I was five years old and my brother, Mark, was a baby, my parents traded in our third-floor walk-up for a $3,000 tract house in Encino.

  My father was a sweet, hardworking, conscientious man who was fabulous with people. He kept broken cases of Seagram’s bourbon, gin, and vodka under a blanket in his garage, and he’d hand out bottles to the local cops, the plumber, the laundress—everyone got one. In return, he got great service and endless good will. But even though he worked weekends selling patio furniture in Santa Monica, in a good week he made just $400. He’d give my mom $50 out of that to feed a family of four, and she was always running short. Our one luxury was Sunday dinner out, usually at a Cantonese joint called the Samoa House. Dress-up occasions were at the Smoke House, where my dad made sure we got in for the early bird discount. It wasn’t until I was in college that I went to a restaurant after six p.m.

  My dad’s dream was to open his own liquor store. “You need to be in charge of your destiny,” he drummed into me. “It’s no good working for somebody else.” I remember him pointing to the display of Seagram’s Seven in a store—at eye level, the best position. “Power is all about shelf space,” he’d say. “And to get shelf space, you’ve got to be big.” But even his modest dream was out of reach; a liquor license cost $25,000. He wanted the license nearly as much as he wanted one of the big Fleetwoods in the window at the Casa de Cadillac on Ventura Boulevard. My father was not a superficial man, but it killed him that my mother’s uncle, Sam, always had a gaudy new Fleetwood. Sam ran the two small Westwood hotels he co-owned with his nine siblings, and somehow he seemed to live higher than the others. He made my dad feel small.

  A big weekend for us was to drive five hours to Las Vegas, stay in a thirty-five-dollar room at the Sands, and take in the shows. The Rat Pack was on the marquee, and you might see Sinatra in his tux at the tables. “Look at this place,” my dad would say. “Did we pay admission?” I’d shake my head. “See those girls coming around with free drinks? Seagram gets paid for that booze. Where do you think the casino makes its money?” He’d nod toward the crowds around the roulette wheels and craps tables: “From all those stupid people, Michael. Maybe one in a hundred leaves a winner.” Once or twice, to prove his point, he had me watch him play blackjack. He’d lose a little, then quit. “Just remember,” he’d say. “The house always wins.”

  I absorbed the lesson, at least as far as gambling went. In every other way, I bucked the house. Because while I loved my father, I hated his boxed-in life. Like many who’d grown up in hard times, he feared risk. My mother’s mother, Sarah, was a blunt-spoken widow who lived with us for years. She played on my mother’s resentments, telling her, “You deserve more.” My mother took good care of us, but when the mood came on her, she was a fuzzy Xerox of Sarah, just as querulous and demanding but less forceful. Sarah would gather me on her lap to watch Days of Our Lives together, and she’d protect me from getting spanked. She paid attention to me and seemed to think I was special—she was my second mother—and I felt horribly conflicted when she’d tell me, “You can be better than your father.”

  On certain Sunday afternoons, my father and Sarah and I would go to one of Uncle Sam’s Westwood hotels and listen in an auditorium, with the other relatives, as he gave an update on the family holdings. These were really just occasions for him to demonstrate his acumen and to receive adulation. He was a cold, distant figure, a dictator who’d entertain petitions and grant favors. We’d stand in the back—I think because my dad hated being there at all. Indicating Sam, Sarah would whisper to my father, “Why can’t you be like that? Why don’t you own a hotel?” She was agenting him, brutally. And, like Malcolm McDowell’s character being forced to watch scenes of violence in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, I couldn’t turn away.

  Sarah kept dosing me with this poison until I was fourteen, when my father finally kicked her out of the house. By then her incantations—a dark version of the immigrant’s creed that in America you can be anything you want—had cast their spell. Instead of trying to emulate my father, a kind and loving man, I would be what Sarah expected of me. I would succeed at all costs. She was depressed, of course, sunk in her own miseries, so I’d save her by taking extraordinary measures to reward her faith in me. Later in life, I’d go the extra mile for anyone who seemed sick or lost. But when Sarah left our house, she took the most feeling and hopeful part of me with her.

  At nine, I got a paper route and raced my Schwinn through the neighborhood. Then I asked for a second route, cutting my free time to the bone. But I always felt free inside my head. As a kid, I’d drive my dad and my teachers crazy with questions: “How can gasoline explode if it’s a liquid?” When I was in fourth grade, I saw a scoop of melting lemon custard on the sidewalk of Balboa Boulevard, near a Baskin-Robbins. The scoop was fast becoming its components, and I explained to Mark, who accompanied me everywhere, “It’s ice cream—but it’s not ice cream.” I went home and looked up ice cream in our World Book, and then I went to a Cornet dime store and bought a four-dollar machine to make some. It tasted horrible. But that was the kind of mind I had: observe, analyze, then reverse engineer.

  I was a head shorter than my classmates and annoyingly curious, so I was bullied in elementary school. My father had saved me from older bullies once, in the stairwell of our building back in Chicago, but he wasn’t around at recess or in the deadly hours right after school let out, when it was open season on outliers. I absolutely hated that feeling of powerlessness, of cowering and being craven and hoping just to pass unnoticed. I couldn’t bear it.

  I always stood out academically, even if none of my teachers took particular notice or encouraged me. I read everything I could, but my favorites were biographies of successful men: Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Nathaniel Rothschild. I also did a lot of drawing and model making. I wasn’t a gifted draftsman or builder, but I’d construct model boats and planes in my room and entertain dreams of commanding flotillas and squadrons. If I built a fighter plane, I’d promptly draw a futuristic version of it, projecting what the next model should look like. Alone in my room, I’d try to see around the corner to what the 1960s would bring. I was always fascinated by what was coming next.

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  At nine, I discovered motion pictures. Four blocks from my house, behind a chain-link fence and a security shack, sat a place of mystery—the back lot for RKO Pictures, the studio owned by Howard Hughes. The first time I eluded the watchman and snuck through a hole in the fence, I came upon another world. Mounds of lighting equipment, cameras, microphones, and cables, and row upon row of false-fronted buildings, from old western towns to gritty urban streets. Hundreds of actors in ma
keup: cowboys, Indians, policemen, spacemen. And hundreds more people in street clothes who peered through lenses, strung lights, hammered and hauled and ran about until a director yelled, “Action,” and the fantasy began to take shape. The first production I saw was the schlocky serial Queen of the Jungle, but I was hooked.

  My parents desperately wanted me to become a doctor, but the movies became my obsession. I tried to catch every new release, and I became a student of the business, both the creative side and the bottom line. In high school I subscribed to the weekly Variety. I loved Fort Apache, an RKO western about the cavalry and a great leader (John Wayne) who overrules an incompetent one (Henry Fonda). I became obsessed with building forts, and with the Spartan idea of the phalanx, the battle formation in which you’re only as strong as the guy on your left. I was also impressed by an Errol Flynn western where he drew a line in the dirt during a mutiny and said, “You’re either with me or against me.” That formulation—you’re totally in or totally out—became my mantra. It helped me enormously later. And it hurt me in equal measure, because it didn’t allow for shades of gray. Most of life turns out to be in shades of gray.

  When I was thirteen I was bowled over by Cash McCall, an otherwise mediocre film about a businessman named Cash, played by James Garner, who lived in a hotel penthouse, flew around in his own plane, bought failing companies, and resold them at a profit. “I’m a thoroughly vulgar character,” he explained. “I enjoy making money.” As a negotiator, his stance was “You can either take my very generous offer or go home and cut your throat.” The concept of private equity was far beyond me, but I was struck by how Cash conceived a plan to fit his companies together into a conglomerate, then put his plan into practice with a band of specialist associates. I was also struck by his thesis that life was more than just business. I could run the world like Cash and still be home at six p.m., just like my father, to enjoy my family. He was a romanticized version of Uncle Sam: all the good parts, and none of the bad.