Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  One of my best trainee assistants, David O’Connor, got a call one afternoon from a furious Micheline Connery. Her rental car had stalled in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, and David was surely to blame, as he’d brought her the vehicle that morning. After rushing to Micheline’s aid, David discovered she was out of gas; she had driven all day and drained the tank. It had never occurred to Micheline that even a car provided by CAA might, eventually, need gas. David found a gas station. Problem solved.

  Clients would often ask to be set up with other clients, but I had no interest in being the house pimp. One of the most excruciating requests came from a movie star who wanted me to set him up with a woman he’d spotted in our mailroom. I temporized, put him off, hoped he’d forget about it—but he kept hounding me. I finally said, “It would look like I was asking an employee to go out with a prized client. You can see why I can’t do that, 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. Years later, in the early ’90s, I had a problem when one of our top stars had been caught on video being chased by a disgruntled husband. It seems the star had slept with the guy’s wife on one of his films. A Fox entertainment show was planning to run the video, and our client, who was also married, was very upset. I called Rupert and explained the situation and said, “I would be eternally grateful if this problem went away.”

  He said, “Michael, I cannot interfere with any of our shows or magazines—you better than anyone should understand that.” He paused, then added, “But I will look into it.” He called back the next day and said, “We have looked high and low for any such video in the Fox library, and we simply cannot find it.” Then he hung up. I owed Rupert forever after that, and contributed to every charity and political candidate he asked me to.

  The most urgent personal asks were medical. One day Dustin Hoffman called me and said, “I’m sitting in an emergency room with Barry Levinson at Santa Monica Hospital. Barry’s son had a bad fall and keeps blacking out.”

  I said, “I am sending you an ambulance right now to take him to UCLA to be looked at by Dr. Warwick Peacock, the leading child neurologist.” We sent a mobile ER over to pick up Barry’s son, and when it got to UCLA, Peacock and twelve of his residents were waiting at the door. I had reached him at home, where he told me he was recovering from a bad flu, and insisted he go in, saying, “You’re the only guy I’d trust to lay eyes on him.” As I kept Barry company all night, Peacock decided, at 3:00 a.m., not to operate on Barry’s son’s brain, which was a giant gamble. But the kid pulled through. And then Peacock collapsed and he went into the ER. When he got out, I sent him a 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.

  Yet treating my clients like family was hard on me and my actual family. I was up at 5:45 a.m., and fifteen minutes later I’d be riding the bike in my gym and making calls to Europe and skimming five newspapers, marking articles for my assistant to strip out and distribute to the firm. After forty minutes on the bike, I’d do thirty or forty minutes of martial arts, working to exhaustion. By 8:00 a.m., after showering and eating a fast breakfast, I’d be on the car phone en route to the office. After our morning meeting, I’d take meetings, have lunch, a drink with a colleague, and a working dinner, all in between “running calls,” up to three hundred phone conversations a day—Spielberg to Kubrick to De Niro to Hoffman to Murray, each call as important as the rest. I had all these brilliant and talented children as clients, and I could never give them enough time and attention. And unlike with my actual children, I could never make a mistake, or they’d fire me.

  After being a chameleon all day at work, it took me an hour or so to figure out who the fuck I was when I got home. And all the time the phone would keep ringing, which drove Judy crazy. She would want to discuss my day, to feel closer to me, but I was exhausted by my day and didn’t want to talk about work in front of the kids; I wanted them to feel normal and safe. I tried to structure our lives so we could maximize our time together. Once I even flew in from the Allen Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to see Chris in his Little League all-star game, watched a few innings, then flew back. We bought a place in Malibu so the kids would join us at the beach, and later a place in Aspen so we could all go skiing together—so they would have no excuse to go elsewhere for vacation. They knew that missing a Thanksgiving would be sacrilegious.

  When the kids got old enough, I’d bring them along to client dinners, to normalize our family as much as I could. You know, the standard family dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But after the kids went to sleep, I worked every night, skimming through a couple of the three or four VHS cassettes I’d brought home and chipping away at the stack of screenplays. Then I’d fall asleep to Johnny Carson at midnight.

  For years I worried that the stoniness that agenting required of me would make our children hard, too. But my kids viewed my world less as something to aspire to than as something to lure me away from. They often noticed that though I was playing with them (when they were young) or asking them about their days (when they were older), my attention was elsewhere. “Could you come back to reality?” they’d say, or just “Earth to Dad!” I used the car as a place to return phone calls, viewing travel time as dead time. They, quite rightly, viewed it as family time, and they’d regularly disconnect me or grab the phone from my hand.

  I found it impossible not to answer the call, even if only to say “I’ll call you back”; a large chunk of my life was given over to calling someone back to tell him I’d talk to him later to schedule a time when we could really talk. But I worked at being around for my kids, if not always fully present, as much as a workaholic could be. And they knew I’d drop everything for them when it mattered.

  * * *

  —

  A few younger agents stood out. They became known as the Young Turks: Richard Lovett, Kevin Huvane, Bryan Lourd, David O’Connor, and Jay Moloney. I mentored each of them, but I felt closest to Jay, who’d come to us as a summer intern in 1983. He was tall and handsome and gregarious and remarkably likable. He promised that he’d work harder 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 $10,000 to buy some suits so he could work for us as an agent. It turned out he hadn’t quite graduated from USC, but minor details like that didn’t trouble him.

  Jay had Ron’s charm and my instinct for how to frame a situation; in a strange way, he was like our child. He went up to Meryl Streep at a party and said, “You should definitely be my client!” She laughed and said, “Why?” He grinned down at her: “Because it would be great for me!” He could get away with stuff like that. I moved him into the lives of Dustin Hoffman, Sean Connery, Marty Scorsese, Mike Nichols, and Bill Murray, and they all loved him. He took things off my plate, anticipated, made my life easier even as he expanded his own clout. He’d look at my schedule, see that I’d just had lunch with John Calley, and call him to say, “I hear the greatest things about you, John, and I know you just had lunch with my boss, Michael Ovitz. If there’s anything I can do for you, it would be an honor. . . .” He talked himself into, and then
out of, relationships with several CAA actresses, including Jennifer Grey and Gina Gershon.

  Jay took up martial arts training, like me; he’d later buy a Lichtenstein, just like me (he had me help him with the transaction); and he spent so much time at our home that he felt like one of the family. Knowing that I collected watches, he gave me a gold Chronoswiss with MSO LOVE AND GRATITUDE JM engraved on the side. It felt like the gift of a son to a father. Privately, I thought he would make a natural successor to Ron and me.

  Yet once Jay grasped that his charm could extricate him from sticky situations, he got into more than his share of sticky situations. He was constantly using my name with clients, saying I’d said things that I hadn’t, pushing, overreaching. Almost every day I heard something about him that annoyed me, momentarily, before I let it go, because I, too, was nothing if not an overreacher, and because manipulating people was a big part of the job. If he was agenting me, then it meant he could become a great agent. I held him to a lower standard than anyone else—and I dearly wish I hadn’t.

  * * *

  —

  As CAA grew, Ron and Bill and I were the unquestioned rainmakers. We generated 90 percent of the agency’s business. All of our agents sold the CAA creed: “You don’t have one agent, you have five”—and, later, “ten,” “fifty,” “one hundred.” But signing clients and steering the agency really came down to the three of us, and, often, to me. My evenings and Saturday mornings were swallowed by the demands of a growing service organization, from tax planning and pensions to training programs. Human resources and legal and accounting all reported to me. When it came time to buy a new Xerox machine, I chose the model—one-sided printing or two? Each time I walked through our front door, I felt a physical chill like the chill you felt in high school before a final exam. How much did we have to earn today to cover our costs and overhead? What if the business shifted and the money dried up? The feeling would recede, for a time, once I sat down at my desk and began to work, but I carried those fears to my last day there.

  By 1985, I was running most aspects of our business and I was responsible for the lion’s share of our income. Ron had a crew of reliable earners, including Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, Cher, and Sly Stallone, but after him the other earners at the agency fell off dramatically, and I got tired of carrying so much of the load without due reward. With our packages generating millions, it didn’t feel fair to me that Rowland was sharing in that when he wasn’t keeping the pace that Bill, Ron, and I were. Marty had helped us enormously over the years, but the fact was that he wasn’t signing new clients, and his mainstays, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews and Bo Derek, were earning less and less. In 1986, we got Rowland and Marty to sell us their equity in return for a million dollars each and lifetime contracts paying $500,000 a year. After that, I owned 55 percent of CAA, with Ron and Bill splitting the balance, 22.5 percent each.

  That same year I bought a Learjet 35A with Sydney Pollack for $750,000, with just 10 percent down. It was CAA’s plane, and I used it so I could visit two widely separated sets in one day and still be back for work the next. Over the years, I kept upgrading the plane. One of Ron’s complaints was that I didn’t let him use it enough, and he was right. But the last thing I wanted was for CAA to become Warner Bros., which ran a wasteful fleet of five planes, and I knew that if anyone but Ron and me realized we had a plane, they’d all want to hop on it. So when I booked it for any of our other agents to fly to a set for an emergency, I always said that it was Sydney’s plane, and that he was just letting us borrow it. The Young Turks were furious, later, when they found out about it. But I always felt it was none of their business.

  * * *

  —

  Ron and I spent all our time together. We shared everything, from mundane work issues—should we fire this guy or can he learn on the job?—to the deepest secrets about our marriages and our kids. We finished each other’s sentences. And increasingly, as I played different roles with different clients, becoming the man with a thousand faces, the font of power and granter of dreams, it was comforting to know that there was one guy, in the office just below mine, who liked me for who I really was, warts and all. I was convinced that, decades hence, we were both going to end up divorced but living in retirement side by side at the Motion Picture Home, still going through the old routines, like Walter Matthau and George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

  Ron and I vacationed together with our families, going to Venice, Lake Como, the Kahala Hilton in Hawaii. We had the same raw sense of humor—outside the Guggenheim in Venice, in 1987, we took a photo of ourselves with The Angel of the City, a Marino Marini sculpture of a man with a huge erection riding a horse. Knowing that the producer Ray Stark had the same sculpture, only in a version lacking the erection, we sent him a Tiffany box containing the photo, with the caption “Ray, we found your dick!” We then prevailed on the Guggenheim to help us cast a model of the penis, and presented it to Ray as a dinner gift.

  We were also united in how we treated our enemies. We never forgot how William Morris had tried to put us out of business or how they had behaved toward Phil Weltman. (Indeed, we put up a plaque to Weltman in our offices, dedicating the agency to him.) So we punished the agency, taking first a number of their agents, then more than seventy of their clients in the first few years, mostly television writers, producers of daytime television, and character actors. As we grew, so did our appetites. After the death of Stan Kamen, WMA’s top film agent, in 1986, we picked off Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, and Chevy Chase. Even as late as 1989, I dogged their client Kevin Costner hard to get him to come over. He was a big star, and I believed I could make him into Gary Cooper, but it certainly added to his allure that he was with WMA. People called it a war, but it was an unrelenting conquest: Morris didn’t take from us.

  Even minor misdeeds got punished severely. After Bob Shapiro at Warner Bros. stopped returning our agent Laurie Perlman’s calls, Ron and I told everyone in a staff meeting, “No one call Bob back.” After a week or two of this, Bob’s wife, Sandy, phoned me in a panic and I explained, “We’ll be happy to call Bob back when he calls Laurie.” He immediately called her, apologized, and life went on.

  A little while later, I grew incensed at the talent manager Bernie Brillstein, who had gotten a job running Lorimar without telling me he was angling for it. As we handled a number of clients together, I would have appreciated the heads up—and, more important, I wanted to look like I was involved in every executive hire in the business. So before Bernie next dropped in for a meeting, I told everyone that no one should speak to him. Ron backed me, but we both knew it was a radical step, because Bernie’s daughter worked for us as an agent, and he and I had been close. Bernie came in and started chatting, pitching a few ideas—into dead silence. It was a very short, very uncomfortable meeting. Bernie called me afterward, humiliated, and said, “That was horrible!” He was right, but nonetheless I told our agents that Lorimar shouldn’t get any CAA material while Bernie was there—and his tenure lasted less than two years. Wounded in my pride, I totally overreacted, I’m ashamed to say. (I should have done the opposite: sell Lorimar everything we had that we couldn’t sell to anyone else.) Our relationship was never the same, and Bernie described it as a feud, though I can’t say I gave it that much thought.

  When Judy Hofflund and David Greenblatt left us to start InterTalent, in 1988, Ron got furious at them, particularly after he came to believe that Judy, his former assistant, was the source of an unflattering story about him that had appeared in Variety. They took Ari Emanuel from us, one of our greatest trainees, as well as a few smaller clients, and Ron decided to crush them. First he fired Tom Strickland because Tom had known about the impending defection and hadn’t told us, and because he assumed Tom was going to InterTalent anyway (which he then did). Then Ron unloaded in a staff meeting—one of the few times he sounded like me—and told everyone to bad-mouth them all over town. We were breaking our own f
ourth commandment, but we no longer cared.

  Our agents began calling studio and network execs, in the guise of being friends of the court, to subtly disparage InterTalent’s lawyers, leaning on the execs to make lowball offers, saying InterTalent’s business affairs guys wouldn’t push back. Ron set up hit teams of five agents to call each of their clients, seeking to rattle, undermine, and poach. Within four years, he put InterTalent out of business. For once, I had little to do with it—but I totally supported him. If you hurt us, we counterattacked with all our might and fury.

  When an agent named Peter Grosslight, the head of the Triad Agency, tried to poach Eric Clapton from us by kissing up to Clapton’s manager in 1987, I called Peter and set him straight. As I wrote later in a memo to Tom Ross, the head of our music group, Grosslight “stated that he is friends with the manager and that Clapton did not have a strong prior relationship with us and therefore it created an insecurity. I explained to him that I did not expect him to take advantage of any insecurity and for the matter it would not make sense for him to continue his ‘friendship’ with Clapton’s manager.” Knowing that we could destroy his agency if he didn’t back off, Grosslight backed off.

  Ron deployed these same moves—albeit with a friendlier, easier manner—but he never appeared quite as concerned with money and the aura of invincibility as I was. At night, after busting his ass till 9:00 p.m., Ron was going out with beautiful women like Ali MacGraw while I’d be having a working dinner with John Calley at Warner Bros., laying plans on the agency’s behalf. Ron was the Warren Beatty of agents, able to cut a wide swath and never get called out, and I envied his lifestyle. For his part, Ron thought I was too uptight. He would have been a great talent agent at William Morris if I hadn’t come into his life, but without me he’d never have reached the heights, as he often acknowledged. Ron used to introduce himself as my keeper, my agent—half in jest, but with a buried, wounded sense that he was born to be a number two. Of course, without him I never would have reached the heights, either. We rose in tandem and amplified each other. I counted on Ron’s candor, and he periodically reined me in: “You’re pushing our people too hard. Ease off on the gas a bit.” He was always right.