Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  It was hard for me to let up: by 1985 I was taking home more than a million dollars a year, and additional wealth and power seemed just around the corner. The fear of poverty had receded, but I was like an athlete who wanted to keep topping himself, setting new records. There’s an apt scene in Patton where George C. Scott says, “I don’t want to get any messages saying we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything. . . . We’re advancing constantly.” That scene when Patton slaps the shell-shocked soldier to get him back onto the battlefield—I wouldn’t have slapped him, but I would have talked him out of there somehow and back into the fight. Patton was a threatening motherfucker, and so was I.

  Or so I’d become, anyway. Over the years I’d split off most of my feelings and emotions, the human part of me, and let Ron display them for both of us—just as he’d off-loaded his cunning, ambitious side and let me express that for him. As a result I got the credit as the agency’s visionary, and he got to retain most of his soul and to serve as the caretaker of mine.

  In the mideighties, I thought we should launch a “B” agency that would handle the leads in TV series: unprestigious actors who made a ton of money. We had already signed a few, such as Bert Convy and Donna Mills, and I worried that we were going to become like WMA, a volume “sell ’em, don’t smell ’em” business. With a B agency, we need have no compunction about signing Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart, Bill Shatner in T. J. Hooker, and John Forsythe in Dynasty. The B agency would feed the A agency talent if those actors became film stars—as Johnny Depp later would from TV’s 21 Jump Street. And if an Erik Estrada never made it to the big leagues, the B agency would still profit handsomely from CHiPS. Ron was strongly against the idea, feeling it would tarnish our brand, so I dropped it. He was right at the time—it would have tarnished us. And I was right in the long run; today, with television and film equally important, you’d just expand the A agency to handle everyone.

  Every year I wrote up a one-year, three-year, and five-year plan for us. At year’s end I’d destroy the old ones—I feared another agency getting wind of our plans—and write new ones. The one-year and three-year plans proved to be the most useful: often we accomplished the three-year plan in two. But Ron and Bill had no strategic instincts for that kind of thing. Ron was a purist who just wanted to represent more and better clients, and Bill didn’t want the extra work of new challenges, though he always did the work, and superbly, once I’d cajoled him into it. By the nineties, I’d stopped showing them my plans because my unceasing ambitions just pissed them off. My thinking was that I’d go do what was best for us, and they’d be grateful later.

  Right.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHOWTIME

  Other than to publicize their films, we advised our clients to keep their heads low and their mouths shut. In those days, Tom Cruise’s profile as a Scientologist was minimal because we’d told him, “Keep your religion and your work separate, just like anybody else.” I read Dianetics, by Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, to better understand what we were up against, and then I went to see David Miscavige, Hubbard’s successor, and explained to him that we had a common interest: “We don’t want to see Tom’s name in the paper for anything but his career.” It was a warning phrased as a tip. We also worked with Tom’s publicist, Pat Kingsley—who was known as Dr. No because she refused almost every interview request—to clap a lid on the sort of tabloid gossip that would boil over once we were no longer in Tom’s life. Steven Spielberg told me that on the set of their 2005 film, War of the Worlds, Tom went so far as to set up a Scientology booth to proselytize the cast and crew.

  The agency adhered to the same button-your-lip posture. Outside Hollywood, CAA was almost entirely unknown, and that suited us fine. As a privately held partnership, why reveal our MO? Our agents were forbidden from taking reporters’ calls. A memo I sent around in 1985 noted that “no one (repeat NO ONE) should grant an interview with a reporter in any media (i.e., television, radio, newspaper, magazine, etc.) without first advising me.” If anyone advised me that they wanted to do an interview, I advised them not to. The only people preauthorized to speak to the press were me, Ron, and Ray Kurtzman—and we didn’t talk, at least not on the record. As a co-owner, Bill Haber had the right to talk, but fortunately that wasn’t his style.

  Tom Johnson, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, was proud of his newspaper’s card file, a compendium of everything written about L.A. for the past half century. When we met at his office one day, Tom said, “Let’s see what we have on Michael Ovitz and CAA.” He typed my name into their UNIVAC computer and, to his dismay, it spit out just a single listing: a photo of the CAA partners, with no text.

  In December 1986, the Wall Street Journal blew our cover. A sharp-eyed reporter named Michael Cieply caught me working the room at Chasen’s after a premiere. I used parties as a way to return about twenty-five phone calls, and Cieply watched me move among groups of execs like a bee pollinating flowers. His page-one story was headlined HOLLYWOOD STAR: AN AGENT DOMINATES FILM AND TV STUDIOS WITH PACKAGE DEALS. It began, “By some accounts, the most powerful individual in Hollywood is neither a star nor a studio chief. He is an agent, Michael S. Ovitz.” Under my leadership, Cieply wrote, CAA had “emerged as the predominant broker of Hollywood talent and story material.” Though I’d declined to cooperate with the Journal, I thought the story could help our business. But how would my partners feel about it? Throughout CAA’s first decade, Ron and I had been perceived as equal partners and the company’s coleaders. Ron told me, “The story will be good for us,” and insisted the spotlight on me didn’t bother him. But I’m sure it planted a seed of resentment.

  Once journalists deduced that I was the quarterback, more coverage followed. I made Fortune’s roll of “Most fascinating business people” and People’s “Most intriguing” list, whatever that meant. And then, beginning in 1990 and for three years running, I topped Premiere’s “Power List” of the one hundred most powerful people in Hollywood. The first time I saw the rankings, anxiety shot through me, head to toe. Mystique is ten times better than publicity; it’s much better to be thought of as the great and powerful Oz than to be revealed as merely another schemer behind a curtain.

  Whenever I walked into a room, execs began saying, “There he is, the most powerful man in Hollywood.” I’d go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” trying to get rid of it, and they’d go, “C’mon, you love it!” I really didn’t because there was no way to make it work for me. I felt watched every moment. I felt I couldn’t be too silly with my kids in public or too lively at a party.

  CAA seeped into the public consciousness as a kind of jeweler’s window for the stars: every time there was an awards show on television, tourists would drop by our building the next day, hoping to spot a celebrity or two. The day after the 1990 Academy Awards, an attractive woman in her thirties approached our reception desk. She was wearing a Chanel suit and Chanel shoes and carrying a Chanel shoulder bag, and she wore a gold Rolex. “Is Tom Cruise here?” she asked, politely. One of our three receptionists said, “No, I’m sorry.” The woman said, “Is Madonna here?” Our security guard, Hank, who sat alongside the receptionists, began to pay closer attention.

  The receptionist explained that Madonna wasn’t there, either—and then, in response to the woman’s further inquiries, that Paul Newman and Robert Redford also weren’t around. The receptionist explained that the building wasn’t an actors’ home or clubhouse—it was just where their agents worked. The woman nodded and said, “Well, then, is Michael Ovitz in?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s not. Can I take a message?”

  The woman shook her head and turned away. As she turned, she let her shoulder bag slip into her hand, and then turned back and swung the bag with all her might at Hank, clobbering him in the head. The bag held a brick, and Hank was knocked into the wall behind him. Somehow he was able to shake off the blow, vault the counter, and tackle h
er as she ran for the exit. Her screams reverberated through the building until the police arrived.

  That kind of thing ramped up my already acute paranoia. Trying to modulate my image, to make it softer—Good Ol’ Uncle Michael—I sought to cultivate the press. I began taking time to talk to reporters off the record, explaining what we were doing, ingratiating myself, offering myself as a background resource on the business. If a press release was going out at 5:00 p.m. with news, I’d let a trade reporter know at 3:00 p.m. But all the spinning and massaging didn’t do much: my image was fixed, largely through my own maneuverings, as the Machiavellian master of the dark arts. For the first time it struck me how vulnerable I’d be if I ever lost my perch at CAA.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. I had never longed for the bright lights, the grinning photo ops with a coterie of stars. But I should have realized that celebrity follows power, just as celebrities do. When Judy and I bought a house on an Aspen ski run in 1986, we just wanted to keep our kids coming in for family vacations as they grew. Michael Eisner bought a house in Aspen at the same time, for the same reason—and then many of our artists began renting or buying there: Ivan Reitman, Chevy Chase, Michael Douglas, Kurt Russell, and Goldie Hawn. CAA Aspen was born. Before long we were hosting daily lunches for dozens of clients and their extended families, up to two hundred people at a time. We had visitors for fourteen straight days one Christmas, the house open to all from noon to 3:00 p.m., though many guests would stay till dinner. One afternoon the guests included our usual locals as well as Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone, and Barry Levinson, all huddled around Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as she recalled her days on Laugh-In, and he told a story about pouring elk urine over himself before going hunting.

  Work always came into it, but the atmosphere was jollier in Aspen than in Los Angeles. Eisner and I shared a ski instructor, a charming young man named Patrick Hasburgh. As a lark, almost as a practical joke, we got him a job writing for Stephen Cannell on the TV show The A-Team. It was like, “Can we create a Hollywood player out of thin air?” Within a few years, Patrick had cocreated Hardcastle and McCormick and 21 Jump Street with Cannell, and become one of the biggest TV producers around.

  Make of that what you will.

  * * *

  —

  From the start of CAA, any unencumbered cash went into our building fund. Artists’ careers are in constant flux, so it reassures them—as well as the buyers of their talents—if their agency projects solidity. Owning our own space would certify our permanence. That was my belief, anyway, and my partners rolled their eyes and went along.

  By the mideighties we had $10 million in the bank. And after I saw I. M. Pei’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and his East Building of the National Gallery of Art in D.C., I narrowed our list of architects to one. In 1985, just ten years after we’d started, I called Arne Glimcher, whose gallery the young Pei had designed years earlier, and asked a favor: “I have to get in to see I. M. Pei.”

  He said, “Sure, what about?”

  “I want him to build the CAA headquarters.” As Pei was then at work on the Louvre Pyramid and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, I’m sure I sounded delusional.

  “It’s a bit small for him, but you never know,” Arne said, diplomatically.

  “Don’t ask for a meeting; ask if he’ll give me fifteen minutes. Make it just before lunch.”

  Arne set it up. When I entered Pei’s office, on Madison Avenue, I laid my watch on his desk to acknowledge that I was on the clock. I.M. was the most sophisticated man I’ve ever met. He spoke Mandarin and French and better English than I did. Nearly seventy, he was polite, reserved, clearly skeptical. I knew that his sole Los Angeles work was an apartment building from 1965, which suggested that he wasn’t a fan of our city.

  I began by telling him about CAA, and then I said, “We’re in L.A., and I know you don’t want to be there, but I’d like to talk to you about our headquarters and why we need you.”

  I pitched my heart out. Fifteen minutes turned into thirty, then forty-five. I.M. said, “Why don’t we get some lunch?”

  Perfect.

  At the restaurant he kept telling me why he couldn’t do it. He had so many projects and so little time. The Bank of China building was eight hundred thousand square feet, and I wanted something a tenth that size. But I talked up our location at Wilshire and Little Santa Monica, the central business intersection of Beverly Hills. Then I told him I wanted a mural in our atrium.

  He said, “How are you going to do that?”

  And I said, “I want outdoor space indoors,” an idea I’d appropriated from his National Gallery. It would be unoccupiable space, an extravagance that gave architects great freedom.

  The lunch lasted three hours. At the end I said, “I can’t do this without you. There is no second choice.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Then I guess I won’t build the building,” I said. At that moment, it was true.

  He frowned. “You know, I can’t do this.”

  “Okay, I hear you,” I said. “No pressure.”

  After that, I asked to see him every time I was in New York, and we’d meet for twenty minutes or an hour at his office to talk about art and my building plans. At the end of one lunch, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said about outdoor-indoor space.” He pulled out a sheet of onionskin and set it on his desk. “I don’t have the time to do it, but were you talking about this?” He drew a rectangle with a curved form on either side. As his pencil moved, he kept asking, “What do you think of this . . . and that . . . and this?”

  I tried to contain my excitement as I studied his drawing. “I like this, and this,” I said casually, pointing out details. “And I love that. This is exactly what we want.”

  “I still can’t do it.”

  “I’m going to assume you can’t do it, but let’s start anyway. Let’s do some drawings.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Okay, we’ll get somebody else to do them for your approval. But you have to do the first one.” That was the drawing he’d started sketching in front of me. (The completed version now hangs in my library at home.)

  The next step was to get I.M. to Los Angeles. I flew him out in March 1986 and arranged a first-class visit; my assistant Dan Adler hovered near him the entire time he was in L.A., making sure his feet never had to touch the ground. I hosted a dinner where I.M. was surrounded by people like Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Costner, Terry Semel, and Michael Eisner. I had Eisner approach him about doing a hotel for Disney World, which was then a popular pastime for high-profile architects. I.M. didn’t warm to the idea, and I dropped it.

  The next day I.M. asked to be left at our building site with a folding chair. With my assistant waiting in the car, he sat there in his Hong Kong suit. The lot was vacant except for the tiny Western Federal branch, shuttered years before. I.M. stayed for four hours, just looking and thinking. After his trip, he wrote me a letter laying out a schedule for the project, and it began with words that warmed my heart: “Dear Michael: You are without a doubt the most thoughtful man I know.” All the attention to detail had paid off.

  Three years later, the critic Paul Goldberger would write in the New York Times:

  The CAA building positively brims over with conservative good taste: in the context of Los Angeles, it is a Chanel suit among polyester jumpsuits, a BMW amid Hyundais, a Mont Blanc amid Bics. . . .

  Indeed, for all its small size this is one of I. M. Pei’s best buildings. . . . CAA may be the most beautifully made modern building Los Angeles has ever seen.

  The three-story building was criticized in the industry as being over the top, a cold monument to power, but to me it felt exactly right. I found the light amber façade and glass-and-aluminum curtain walls to be warm, almost cheerful, even as t
he stone walls and turrets underscored the fortress mentality I’d repeatedly discussed with I.M. Inside these battlements, you’d be protected. Outside, you were on your own. Us versus them.

  The capstone was the atrium mural. We needed someone who could work on an outsized scale, and I.M. shared my enthusiasm for Roy Lichtenstein. Armed with a cardboard architectural model, I pitched the idea to Roy’s dealer, the legendary Leo Castelli. Roy loved the building and revered I.M. We struck a deal.

  Over the six months or so before Roy started on our commission, I was privileged to visit his studio on Washington Street in the West Village. I would sit for an hour over coffee and just watch him paint. For those precious minutes no one could reach me, and I would emerge reborn, my stress drained away. Long after the project was completed, I continued to make visits to Roy’s studio a fixture of my trips to New York.

  Finally I was summoned to view a scale model. When Roy pulled off the draping, I knew I was looking at a masterpiece. Roy had reimagined a painting that hung at the Museum of Modern Art, Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway, in reference to the open stairway in our building. “Any suggestions?” he asked. “Changes?” He had a wry sense of humor.

  “No changes,” I said.

  The deal we made with Castelli called for Roy to paint the mural on-site. He and his wife, Dorothy, hung out with us for four weeks, most of which Roy spent perched on scaffolding. We were privileged to watch the twenty-six-foot-tall mural take form, to watch an extraordinary creative act, in the midst of making our phone calls and closing our deal points. It was a reminder of what we could aspire to.