The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  Sharon Stone was in tears?

  In fairness to me, Howard Stern made her cry in the greenroom—it wasn’t me. What a baby.

  The Talk Show Wars were first made a gruesome spectacle when NBC fired Leno’s irascible manager-producer, Helen Kushnick. Did you ever feel the effects of her hardball tactics?

  It was mostly just something in the air that we’d rather have done without. We were closely tied to it because we’re back-to-back on the same network and booking a lot of the same guests. But it was more of a nuisance in theory than in reality. She was just trying to do the best job she could possibly do for Jay and for the show. People operate in different ways.

  Life at NBC turned especially ugly before the holidays. You labeled it “the Happy Network.”

  That last day it just seemed like the sky had opened up. There was all this friction—and it had little to do with me. Even if Johnny were still hosting The Tonight Show, I’d do myself a great disservice if I didn’t explore other possibilities after ten, eleven years in one spot. The thing that’s made it so dramatic is the situation with The Tonight Show and my alleged bitterness. But I was disappointed that I didn’t get the show. I would have loved to try to follow Carson.

  If you had aggressively campaigned for the job—which Jay reportedly did with NBC big shots—do you think things might have turned out differently?

  Well, in regard to The Tonight Show when Johnny was still there, it would have hurt my feelings if he’d thought that I was politicking for his job. I mean, Carson was still sitting up and taking solid food—who am I to be sliding up and saying, “Oh, by the way, Johnny, when you step down—and we’re not saying you’re close, you understand—let’s grease it for me to step in”? Who could be that presumptuous? So what I did was take every opportunity, if asked, to go on record as saying, “Yes, I would like to be considered for the job.” I wasn’t comfortable with anything more than that. Because in essence what I would be saying was, “John, the clock is ticking, it’s time to go.”

  Have you spoken to Jay amid all this stuff?

  I speak to Jay now with the same regularity that I have always spoken to Jay. Which is not much. There’s no ill will personally. If I felt I was deprived of something that was rightfully mine, if I had fantasies about being hoodwinked or misled—then there might be ill will. I’m not the kind of person that wants to see somebody else fail on television. Whatever the future holds, I’m in pretty good shape. So, no, I’m not upset with NBC, I’m not upset with Jay.

  I guess a case could be made that maybe Bush is upset with Clinton, because George didn’t get the job and Bill did. So what? Who among us hasn’t endured disappointment in our life? But for me to be upset with Jay, you would have to suppose that he did something hurtful and awful to me by being hired as the host of The Tonight Show. And I would guess that you could look long and hard and not find evidence of that.

  Your relationship with him has great ironic overtones in that you’ve credited him with being among your primary comic inspirations.

  Oh, without question. As he’s probably been for a whole batch of other guys who came after me. He was the best—and still is—as far as stand-up comedians go.

  On the flip side, he’s said repeatedly that he wouldn’t be where he is if you hadn’t given him a showcase on ‘Late Night.’

  Well, he’s being gracious, because he did as much for us as we did for him—maybe more. He could have accomplished for himself what he did here on any other show. But for us, like I said earlier, to find a regular guest who could always come out and who really could deliver, jeez, that was money in the bank.

  On the first day outside parties were permitted to bid for your services, you opened your monologue by saying, “I feel like a million bucks!” Just how does a million bucks feel?

  Beats me. I’m just tickled by the phrase.

  You’re saying you’ve yet to feel like a million bucks during any of this?

  No, no. I’m embarrassed by all the attention.

  So what kind of dollar value would you place on how you feel?

  I feel like a million bucks.

  DAVID GEFFEN

  by Patrick Goldstein

  April 29, 1993

  Did you always want to be in the entertainment business?

  I couldn’t wait to be old enough to move to California. I wanted to be where the movies are made, in that land of sunshine and Gidget and surfboards and convertibles and green lawns and beautiful houses. The day after I graduated high school, I moved to Los Angeles.

  You were fascinated even as a little boy?

  I remember the first time I went to Radio City Music Hall, I went out to get chocolate cigarettes, and when I came back into the theater and opened up those big doors, it was at the end of a Rockettes number, and I was walking down this aisle, and people were applauding like crazy. And I had this fantasy that I was walking down to get my Academy Award. I remember that clearly.

  And were you interested in the business of show business?

  I used to read everything I could get my hands on about the entertainment business. When I was nine years old, I knew what was in Hedda Hopper’s column and Walter Winchell’s column too. My brother used to say that I was a wealth of worthless information.

  And what did you envision yourself doing?

  I had an epiphany when I bought a biography of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther called Hollywood Raja. I read this book and I thought, “I want this job.” To me, it seemed like the greatest job in the world.

  But when you finally had a big job in the movie business at Warner Bros. Pictures in 1975, you hated it.

  I didn’t find it satisfying at all. The worst job in the world is running a movie studio. It’s very hard when every piece of product costs thirty or forty million dollars, and every day you have to read two gossip-column items in the trade papers which talk about what a schmuck you are for the decisions you’ve made or not made.

  Most studio executives seem trapped by this awful malaise.

  I don’t think it’s malaise. I think it’s fear. The operative word in Hollywood is “fear.” Most people are afraid they’ll make a mistake, be humiliated and lose their jobs. They want to be safe. I don’t think that’s true in the record business. People don’t lose their jobs because they sign an artist whose record comes out and flops.

  You still think the record industry is free from Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality?

  You just can’t compare them. You can still make a record for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today you can’t make a movie for less than $18 to $25 million, so the failure of one of those movies has a profound effect on the lives of the people involved. The failure of any record doesn’t have a profound effect on any record company, so there’s a tremendous leeway given for failure. And I think if you don’t give people the opportunity to fail, you don’t give them much chance to succeed either, and so what you end up with in the film business is a lot of shitty movies.

  You’ve been involved with a lot of artists, from David Crosby through John Lennon to Axl Rose, who lived on the edge, whether it was drugs or primal screams or throwing tantrums onstage or urinating on your A&R executives’ desks. Why are creative people caught up in so many psychodramas?

  Because there are lots of voices speaking in their heads, very often at the same time, and it can be very confusing. I have complete respect for the insanity of what it was like to be fifteen or sixteen or nineteen or twenty-five. I couldn’t have been more fucked up myself, going through all those years. I may not have been peeing on someone’s desk, but I was certainly driving myself or some other person crazy. I think it’s a miracle that certain people can survive the fame they get at an early age. I mean, Axl Rose—one minute he’s sleeping in doorways, a minute later he’s a multimillionaire and every girl wants to fuck him. That’s very hard to deal with. I think it’s a miracle that people survive becoming big stars. As we well know, many don’t.

  Yet there’s a thril
l to being a celebrity. I remember seeing a wonderfully striking Annie Leibovitz photo of you, lying in bed in the morning, on the phone—and you were completely at ease. It didn’t look like you had any clothes on. Do you normally sleep in the nude?

  I do. The truth of the matter is I’ve known Annie for many years and I trust her completely. So I’ll do anything. I once posed in 1971 in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel naked with a leaf in front of my dick because she dared me to do it. Jackson Browne has it framed in his living room.

  What I found intriguing about the photo of you in bed was that all the books on the shelf were biographies of people from dysfunctional families. ‘The Hustons,’ ‘The Binghams of Louisville.’ You came from a complicated family yourself. Your mother fled the pogroms in Russia and never saw her family again. And when you grew up in Brooklyn, she was the real breadwinner in the family.

  She was an amazing woman, one of those kinds of classic people who survived incredibly difficult lives. My father didn’t have a job, so she took in sewing and ended up developing a business where she made corsets and brassieres for people in her apartment. Then she had a store and finally bought the building the store was in.

  So your mother always worked?

  I grew up in an odd family. When other kids came home at three p.m. for milk and cookies, my mother wasn’t there. When you’re a kid, you don’t quite understand. You kind of wonder—is there something wrong with you? I don’t know how to describe my mother except to say that I admired her, although there were times in my growing up that I wanted to kill her.

  Why? Was she domineering? Overprotective?

  When I was fifteen, she said: “Okay, that’s it. No more allowance. You want money, you go to work.” That’s the way it was in our family. My mother was going to teach us to take care of ourselves. I can remember my mother ironing my shirts, and she said to me: “Come on, I’ll teach you how to iron a shirt.” When it was finished, she said: “Okay, that’s it. I don’t have to iron any of your shirts anymore. Now that you know how to do it, you do it.” I wanted to kill her.

  You’ve said your father fancied himself an intellectual. He spoke many languages, but he never really worked much.

  He read a lot. He was scholarly. He traveled the world. In Yiddish there’s an expression: schvare arbiter. Hard worker. He wasn’t one of those. As a kid, it made me resentful.

  Did you consider him a failure because he didn’t work?

  Yes. I was angry with him for what I saw as his failure in life. But he died when I was seventeen. So I never really got to resolve my relationship with him. That’s always been a sad thing for me.

  What made your mother a big influence on you?

  No matter how badly I did in school, no matter how little faith I had in myself, my mother always said, “You have golden hands. Whatever you want to be, you’ll succeed at.” And I thought she was a nut, because I was a complete fuck-up and I didn’t think I could do anything. But my mother’s belief in me gave me a level of confidence that enabled me to succeed in life.

  Michael Apted has made a series of documentaries that follow kids as they grow into adulthood, based on the maxim “Give me the child at seven, and I’ll show you the man.” What were you like at seven?

  When I was seven, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized, and my grandmother was taking care of the family. I was confused. I didn’t understand what was going on.

  What happened?

  When I was six, in 1949, my mother got a letter from a sister in Russia who she didn’t even know was alive. They hadn’t seen each other since 1917. And she told her that everyone in the family had died and that she was the only survivor. And my mother had a nervous breakdown.

  Had they been killed in the Holocaust?

  No, they had lived in the Ukraine. And when the Nazis were marching across Russia, the Ukrainians didn’t wait for the Germans to get there. They rounded up all the Jews in the neighborhood and killed them. In the case of my mother’s family, they threw everyone down their wells. Eleven people. My mother’s mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and seven brothers and sisters. My mother’s sister survived because she wasn’t home.

  And when did your mother tell you all this?

  She never did. No one knew what had happened. The day after my mother died, her sister told me she had written her all about it. No one ever saw the letter. Not my father and my brother. All they knew was that Mom had gone crazy. My mother was very secretive. Before she died, she had a series of strokes, and the last stroke affected her ability to use her right hand and to speak. But she worked and worked on it, and she regained her ability to speak and the use of her hand. And the last time I spoke to her before she died, I said, “Mom, to what do you attribute this miracle?” And she said: “I have no envy. I have no jealousy. And I have no hate.” And she died two days later.

  What kind of advice did she give you as you grew up?

  It was advice tinged with a lot of suspicion and fear, because my mother lived a life that would encourage suspicion and distrust. I learned how to be careful.

  Careful in your relationships with people?

  Careful in business, careful in everything. I acquired a healthy amount of my mother’s suspicion.

  Has that in some ways cut you off from people?

  I don’t think so. I’m a person who’s been in therapy, analysis, Lifespring, est, Course in Miracles, for the last twenty-five years. I’ve been working on myself and my demons and my nonsense and my fucked-up-ness for a long, long time. Which is not to say that I’m still not a little fucked up. I think you get better and better in tiny increments, and you die unhealed.

  To use your mother’s words: No envy, no jealousy and no hate. How far along the road are you to those three?

  At my mother’s funeral, I told [Hollywood agent] Sue Mengers, who is a good friend, what my mother had said, and Sue looked at me and said, “Well, they’ll never be able to say that about us.”

  There’s a famous story about how you got your first real job, working in the William Morris mailroom, by faking your résumé and saying you’d graduated from UCLA. And you watched the mail every morning, waiting for the letter to come saying you hadn’t graduated. And when it came, you steamed it open and replaced it with a letter on fake university stationery saying you had. What does that say about your level of ambition?

  It’s about survival. If you want this job and the only way you can get it is to be a college graduate and you clearly aren’t—I made it up. It just seemed like the practical thing to do.

  And is that what it takes to get ahead in show business?

  Let’s not kid ourselves. I could have done that and been untalented, and I would have failed. The reason I succeeded in my life is not because I have chutzpah. I succeeded in life because I’m smart and I’m talented.

  What initially made you want to launch Asylum Records [in 1971]?

  I started the record company because I couldn’t get a record deal for Jackson Browne. I had taken him around, and everybody had passed. Nobody wanted him. I told Ahmet Ertegun, “Listen, I’m doing you a favor.” And he said: “Don’t do me no favors. If he’s such a big star, why don’t you do it yourself?”

  You once said that everywhere you went in 1970 you found somebody talented—Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Tom Waits, Steve Martin. It’s a long list. Is it really true nobody wanted to sign them?

  I could’ve signed twice as many people if I really had an idea of what I was doing. They’d all been around. Linda Ronstadt was on Capitol—she’d had a hit with the Stone Poneys and her career went nowhere. Jackson Browne had already been signed and dropped by Elektra without ever making a record! Don Henley and Glenn Frey had been signed by a company called Amos Records. I bought their recording contract and their music publishing rights, which were owned by Amos, for $5,000. And gave them back half their publishing. People just didn’t recognize these people’s talen
ts.