PROFILE

The Many Lives of David Geffen

Billions of dollars and decades of hits later, L.A.’s impresario of cool is reinventing the role of the Hollywood mogul.

From The New Yorker
February 23, 1998

I–The Relationship Economy

David Geffen peeled a Post-it from a pad that was sitting on the coffee table in front of him and folded it into a square. He performed this meaningless action with considerable care. The boredom in his eyes, which seemed on the verge of spilling over into other parts of his face, was held in check by his lively eyebrows. It was as though all the enthusiasm that those eyebrows have had to express over the years for all the talented people whom Geffen has absolutely adored had left run-off deposits of residual boredom in his lower eyelids.

Voices came from the outer office. Geffen raised his head. The boredom seemed to drain back into his skull.

“Does somebody want me?” he called out.

“David, we want you as badly as anything we’ve ever wanted in our lives,” said a DreamWorks executive named Terry Press (there are no titles at DreamWorks), striding into the room ahead of her boss, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the music-industry legend Mo Ostin, who now runs the music division of DreamWorks.

Geffen got up from his armchair, one of four identical white chairs around a low table. He has not worked behind a desk since his early days at the William Morris Agency, in the mid-sixties. In the presence of Katzenberg, a cheerful man dressed in preppy clothes, he became playful and affectionate. When I asked Geffen, on another occasion, why he wanted to be involved with running a movie studio (in 1991 he had said, “I would kill myself–I can’t think of a more horrible job”), he told me he’d done it partly out of friendship for Katzenberg. “I was standing up for Jeffrey.” Katzenberg had had a rancorous parting from his former boss, Michael Eisner, of Disney. “I’m a stand-up guy. I can be counted on by my friends. And I’m proud of that and I feel good about that.” Although the founding of DreamWorks SKG, which involved two billion dollars of other people’s money (and $33.3 million each from the three partners, Geffen, Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg), was, to be sure, an adult undertaking, there was a boyish spirit in the enterprise which seemed to be important to its self-image.

The two friends chatted about Bill Clinton, who had been in L.A. over the weekend and had departed that morning. On an earlier visit to L.A., the President had eaten dinner at Geffen’s house, in Malibu, an unpretentious series of small buildings on the beach, and on this occasion he had wanted to stay there. Geffen, for his part, had stayed at the White House more than once. The three-way relationship that is DreamWorks was, in a sense, consummated in the Lincoln Bedroom, after a state dinner for Boris Yeltsin in 1994, when Geffen was awakened at one-thirty in the morning by a call from Katzenberg and Spielberg–they had been relegated to the Hay-Adams Hotel for the night–who said to Geffen, “Let’s do this.” More recently, Geffen had attended the state dinner for the President of China, and his had been one of two names without affiliation on the Times’ list of guests: not David Geffen, DreamWorks, or David Geffen, art collector, or David Geffen, philanthropist, or David Geffen, prominent gay man; just David Geffen. That was oddly appropriate for the only man in the history of American cultural capitalism who has succeeded in three different industries–popular music, Broadway, and Hollywood–but whose only long-term project through the years has been himself.

I asked if proximity to the President was exciting. Geffen demurred, batted his eyelashes. Perhaps it had been, once. It was old hat now. “Let me put it this way,” he said, resting his hand on his heart, raising his eyes, and giving me his dead-on, sincere look. “I am delighted to have a relationship with the President of the United States. I can’t tell you I don’t value that greatly. But, I mean, you know, I’m not blown away by anybody.”

Geffen hadn’t been able to put the President up. “So I called Jeffrey and I said, ‘Jeffrey, I think the President should stay in your house,'” he told me. Katzenberg, who has a house a short stroll down the beach from Geffen’s, agreed. Then, on Saturday night, Geffen went over to Katzenberg’s for dinner and a movie (“The Rainmaker”) with the President.

Clinton had loved the house, Katzenberg now told Geffen, and he wanted to know whether Hillary could stay there next week, and he also wanted to talk to Charles Gwathmey (who built Katzenberg’s house) about designing the Clinton Library. Geffen recounted his morning phone call with the President for Katzenberg. “He said to me, ‘How come Jeffrey’s house is so much nicer than yours? I thought he was the one who doesn’t have any money.’ That’s what he said to me. ‘I thought he was broke.’ I said, ‘Well, “broke” is a Hollywood term!'”

Katzenberg chortled. Geffen cried “Ohhh!” in a pained way, as though the effort of enduring such happiness had exhausted him. He sank back into his chair, spent.

Then Terry Press turned to Geffen and, with an air of getting down to business, asked, mock coquettishly, “Are you going to be my date in Washington?”

The DreamWorks movie “Amistad” was to have its première in the nation’s capital in early December, a few weeks away, befitting what Spielberg had described as “an extraordinarily important film, perhaps my most important film ever.” Geffen seemed to me to be keeping his distance from the movie–perhaps his gut was telling him that “Amistad” wasn’t going to be the “Schindler’s List” the company was counting on, or perhaps it was simply his old strategy of remaining in the background of the talent. Although Geffen’s relationships with moguls have by and large replaced the relationships he used to have with artists, he plays the same role he always played–little David Geffen from Brooklyn, catering to the needs of moody and petulant stars. He uses the reversal of authority to his advantage.

“I’m not going,” Geffen said.

“What do you mean, you’re not going?” Press asked, her smile brightening ironically.

“I don’t want to go. I’m going to Acapulco for a vacation.” Geffen’s job at DreamWorks did not seem to take up an inordinate amount of his time. With Spielberg to supervise the live-action movies, Katzenberg to manage the company and oversee animation, and Mo Ostin to handle the music, Geffen could work with the investment bankers, play devil’s advocate, and float.

“What the hell do I have to be in Washington for? You don’t need me. Let Jeffrey be there with Steven. I was there with Jeffrey last time.” Geffen’s eyes were turning the color of deep umbrage, and his face showed a flash of the quality that makes him, in the words of a friend, “one of the worst people in the world to get into an argument with.”

Press looked over at Katzenberg and gave him a “Whaddaya want me to do?” look, and Katzenberg gave her a “Whaddaya want me to tell ya?” shrug back.

Press turned to Geffen again. “So, basically, what you’re saying,” she went on, “is that you’ll go to Washington for the Chinese dinner but you won’t go for the company.”

“Yes!” said Geffen, almost yelling. “There’s a big fucking difference between going to the première of a movie and–“

“The premier of China?” Katzenberg put in brightly, putting his hand on his cheek and smiling, Jack Benny style. “They’re both premiers. What’s the big deal?”

The matter was unresolved. After they departed, Geffen peeled another Post-it and performed the same meditative folding ritual as before. “I know how to quiet my mind,” he had said on another occasion, when I had asked if he meditated. “I do it at different times. When I find myself becoming–what’s the word?–out of sorts.” He also spoke about learning to silence “the voices in my head,” which I understood to be the old desire for personal advantage–an instinct that he could never entirely turn off, no matter how generous and selfless he was trying to be.

Geffen sat upright in his chair, back straight, head up. He was dressed in his usual uniform: Reeboks (Classics), jeans, and a Puma T-shirt under a flannel shirt. His flannel shirt actually looked nicer than something you’d find at the Gap–a relative sartorial flourish. (“One thing about David,” the producer Lynda Obst says, “he made it impossible to be underdressed in Hollywood.”) Nothing in the room seemed fancy or rich-looking. The aura of extreme power was made even stronger by the absolute absence of any of the trappings of power. “David doesn’t respond to his environment the way most people do,” the author Fran Lebowitz, who is one of Geffen’s friends, told me. “Like, he lives on the beach, but he never swims in the ocean. And yet when he goes on vacation it’s almost always on boats, and we’ll go, like, eight million miles just to get to a beach that looks like the one he just left. And he still doesn’t swim in the ocean.”

With a personal fortune of more than two billion dollars, much of which came from the sale of Geffen Records to MCA, and the subsequent sale of MCA to Matsushita, Geffen is perhaps the most powerful man in Hollywood, both widely admired for his entrepreneurial spirit and widely feared for his guile and his anger. He is not a strategic or a systematic thinker. Like the old-time moguls, Geffen makes decisions as much with the gut as with the brain. In the increasingly corporate world of global entertainment, Geffen is a throwback to a more individualistic era. He’s the free man in Paris, in the words of the song Joni Mitchell once wrote about him. Jimmy Iovine, who has enjoyed Geffenesque success at Interscope Records, told me, “David’s not afraid. We all know that he’s really smart and really talented, but he’s also not afraid, or if he is he doesn’t show it. He’s more than willing to put all the chips on something he really believes in. And that doesn’t exist in the record business anymore. Because most people are afraid for their jobs, of the impact someone else can have on them.”

The phone rang. With a slight, smooth turn of his head, Geffen took in a little green screen that displayed the caller’s name and number, then looked back at me. On the phone were twenty speed-dial buttons, next to which were the names of people Geffen speaks to every day, often between six and nine in the morning L.A. time: Katzenberg; Spielberg; Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and Ron Meyer, of MCA; Calvin Klein; Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft; Allen Grubman, an entertainment lawyer; and Barry Diller, among others. If Geffen may be said to have invented anything, it is an economy based on the rapid exchange of information across a network small enough to fit on a speed dial–a network in which you have a market interest in the information but are also motivated by a genuine personal connection. “David would never say, ‘I’m in business with you,'” says Tom Freston, the chairman of MTV Networks. “He would say, ‘We’ve got a relationship.’ He got started in the music business when it was much more of a personal business. And one of his strengths is that he’s a very personable guy. As the world has conglomerated, David has carried on making personal relationships. And it works.”

What Geffen puts into his relationship economy is advice. He combines a mogul’s long view with a music-industry macher’s sense of competition and the bottom line. “There’s no one alive that I know who has more of an ability for focussing and intuiting business than David Geffen has,” I was told by Barry Diller. “He has as close to perfect pitch as anyone I know. His ability to focus and his instinct for what business is, across almost any range of businesses–certainly not limited to entertainment or music, or whatever–is remarkable.” When I asked Diller if Geffen had any weaknesses as a businessman, he thought for five seconds and then replied, “No. None. Zero.” When Calvin Klein’s business got into a “terrible jam,” in the early nineties, Klein told me, Geffen analyzed the company and told him how to restructure it. Among other things, he advised Klein to sell his underwear-and-jeans business, and personally negotiated a deal with Linda Wachner, of Warnaco. Geffen also bought the immediately outstanding bonds, to give Klein time to regroup.

Geffen even shares his advice with competitors. Guy Oseary, a twenty-five-year-old partner in Maverick Records, which is Madonna’s company, told me, “I don’t make too many decisions without calling him. Whether or not I agree with him, I’d like to know his take on things. He’s definitely my guru in many ways. Why not? He’s the smartest guy who has ever touched this business. He doesn’t mind giving me the info. I’d say it’s thirty per cent about the business and seventy per cent personal. Advice on personal relationships, seeing a movie, having dinner–it’s not, like, just about work. I call him Rabbi Dave.”

When you become part of Geffen’s relationship economy, however briefly, it seems as if there were nothing he wouldn’t do for you. Geffen is always available to friends. “Hold on, I’ll get him,” his assistant says, and then there is a short pause while the call is transferred somewhere, maybe to the beach, maybe to Paris, maybe to the middle of the ocean, where Geffen is sitting very quietly on the back of a yacht with a cell phone and a trashy novel.

But if you displease Geffen you find yourself immediately denied his munificence, and may also find yourself on the outs with his innermost circle of friends. Rose Tarlow, an antiques dealer who has worked on several of Geffen’s houses, says, “If David’s been your friend, and then you do something and he’s no longer your friend–I feel sorry for those people. He withdraws his love, and you’re missing something precious.” Howard Rosenman, a Hollywood producer who is a former Geffen friend, says that Geffen never practiced any kind of active vengeance against him; he simply cooled. “David hates me,” Rosenman said to me over breakfast one morning, “but I love him. He was good to me, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. David felt that I betrayed him, and he was right. I let my own anger and resentment stand in the way of all he had done for me.” He took a bite of his bagel and lox, and went on, “David is very Old Testament. He’s not New Testament. He’s trying to be New Testament. Lifespring, est, and A Course in Miracles are all part of David’s attempt to temper the god of vengeance and anger with forgiveness and mercy. And it’s worked, to a degree.”

The sun faded on the palm trees outside the window. Geffen used the phrase “at the end of the day” a lot in talking about his life. “At the end of the day, no one’s powerful. You know? If you work for Rupert Murdoch, you can say he’s powerful, but he’s not powerful to me. I don’t give a shit about Rupert Murdoch.” At fifty-four, Geffen was like the Woody Allen and Tony Roberts characters in “Annie Hall” rolled into one. He was a hybrid of East Coast and West Coast manners. Geffen is not actually laid back–one makes that mistake at one’s peril–but his years of pursuing New Age experiments in consciousness-raising have burnished him in the copper-colored light of a guru. When Marianne Williamson was in vogue, Geffen rode around town listening to an audiotape of her lectures. “David has an untrained mind,” one longtime observer of Geffen told me. “And he’s a searcher, like all his friends. He’s searching for control. When Werner Erhard came along, he went for that hook, line, and sinker, and a lot of his psychology comes from est. Gurus come to town, and if you’re rich enough you can get private access. After all, if you’re a mogul you should be able to buy enlightenment.”

On this late-fall day in Beverly Hills, Geffen’s thirty-five years in the culture industry, from agent to manager and on to label owner and movie mogul and billionaire, seemed but a distant sound of lyres and flutes. Unmoored from all institutional responsibilities, Geffen seemed on the verge of floating away. He had reached a level of capitalism so pure that it was almost evanescent. “You know, it’s hard for me to explain to you what I’ve done, even in the past, let alone today,” he told me. “You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it’s not that way at all, it’s something else.”

As the end of this particular day arrived, Geffen bounded out of his chair.

“So, we’ll talk,” he said, making a slight, suggestively inviting curling gesture with his hand, which meant “Call me.”

II–Know How to Get Paid

Entertainment moguls usually come from the film business, sometimes from TV, almost never from the record industry: never before Geffen has a man emerged from the scrum of cigar-chomping fatties with shoe polish on their heads to become one of the élite of the American mogulocracy. The skills required of the pop-music man tend to be local, fungible, and untransferrable. You may be temporarily blessed with a “gut” for what will sell, then you get older, the fashion changes, and the gut betrays you. Only Geffen has combined an exquisite sensitivity to pop-cultural fads with the cast-iron stomach of a businessman. Danny Goldberg, the head of the Mercury Records Group, told me, “There have been great A.&R. men in the record business, and great businessmen, and some great investment-banker types, but there has never been anyone except David who could do it all. He is the only person like that which the record business has ever produced.”

Geffen’s mother, who ran a corset-and-brassiere-making business out of the family’s home, in Borough Park, Brooklyn (where young David slept on a couch in the living room), was his hero and role model. Geffen’s father, on the other hand, was a scholar, who could not support the family and disappointed David. “After I realized my father didn’t take care of the family, he sank somewhat in my eyes,” Geffen told me. Some believe this to be the original wound that has driven Geffen in a series of complicated relationships with powerful men throughout his career, from Ahmet Ertegun to Steve Ross and on to Lew Wasserman.

A poor student, Geffen dropped out of both Brooklyn College and the University of Texas. But when he was twenty he said that he had graduated from U.C.L.A., in order to get a job in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency. Upon getting the job, Geffen heard that the agency checked résumés–some other guy who lied had been fired recently–so Geffen came into the office at 6 A.M. every day for six months until he saw an envelope from U.C.L.A. He opened it, altered the letter, and then put it back in the mail. The fact that Geffen has tinkered with the details of this story over the years–in one version he takes the letter to a printer and has the letterhead copied–adds a nice layer of varnish to this postmodern Sammy Glickian fable of self-invention.

Once inside William Morris, Geffen had perhaps the only epiphany of his life. “I’m delivering the mail to people’s offices and I hear them on the phone, and I think, I can do that. Talk on the phone. This I can do.”

In the late fifties and the early sixties, record companies had much more control over the way pop music sounded than they have today. The label generally chose the music, the producer, the arranger, and the band. The “artist”–the person who wrote and/or sang the song–had relatively little to do with the process. As the rock revolution swept aside these institutional controls, the singer-songwriters replaced the producers and arrangers as power centers in the industry. The artists’ advocates, who were the agents and managers, got more powerful, while the labels’ advocates, the lawyers, declined in influence. It was during this unsettled period that David Geffen first came to power as an agent and manager.

Geffen’s sympathy with the pre-rock world of Broadway divas drew him to intense, difficult women like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. Mitchell shared a house with Geffen, in accordance with a characteristic of his early career: total absorption in the client’s life. (Later, when Geffen moved to L.A., he had a sexual relationship with Cher. “David wanted to marry me,” she told me. “He proposed to me in Hawaii–he had a ring, and everything.”) Nyro became his client after a disastrous performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, when her then manager dropped her, and Geffen proved a fierce champion of her quirky but genuine talent. David Crosby–who, along with the other members of what became Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, was also a client of Geffen’s–told me, “David was always very ambitious for himself, but there was one interesting, unprotected place in him–he really loved Laura Nyro. That was a window into something in him that was not primarily about money.” However, Geffen was not so besotted that he neglected to arrange for himself a half share of Tuna Fish Music–Nyro’s publishing company–and that deal netted him more than two million dollars in 1971, the first big score of his career.

Geffen differed from other agent-managers in that he never lived the rock life. Unlike Albert Grossman, who was Bob Dylan’s manager, Geffen did not become a hippie; he almost never used drugs. For anyone trying to understand Geffen’s success in the rock business, it is worth keeping in mind that at crucial moments in the careers of rock stars, when millions of dollars in royalties hung in the balance, Geffen was the only person in the room who wasn’t high.

Jackson Browne was Geffen’s first discovery. Geffen had thrown Browne’s demo tape away, but his secretary saw the boy’s picture in the trash, thought he was cute, listened to the tape, and then made Geffen listen to it. Geffen invited Browne to his office. To Browne, Geffen was like a new being: a businessman who really liked music. “He seemed to be one of us, in a way,” Browne told me. “That was the sort of word about him. He was like one of us, but he was sort of superior, because he was a very savvy businessman. Guys who had record companies would say, ‘Shit, he’s just so damn fast. He can make the computations so fast.’ David takes a very direct route to the bottom line.”

For Browne, it was a relief to find a record guy who did not want to squeeze him into a marketing concept. “To have someone who saw your songs were unique, and got what they were and said, ‘Yeah, keep doing that’–that was great.”

Browne told Geffen about a young musician living in the apartment upstairs from him. He turned out to be Glenn Frey, who became one of the Eagles.

In 1971, Geffen established a record company called Asylum. “I had no desire to start a record company,” he told me. “But I was challenged by Ahmet Ertegun when nobody wanted Jackson Browne. I said to him, ‘You could make millions with this kid,’ and he said, ‘I already have millions.’ It was like, ‘Oh, thank you very much, I already have money.'”

Geffen rented a faux château on Sunset Boulevard, and that is where Geffen Records is now. Jay Ferguson, the lead singer of Jo Jo Gunne, Geffen’s second Asylum signing, told me, “The name reflected exactly what David wanted it to be–an asylum for the artists.” Asylum became the house of the L.A. sound in the early and mid-seventies. Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell of the “Court and Spark” period, and the Eagles. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, says, “That whole California folk-rock scene, or whatever is the right term for it–I think David really understood that this was just something that was going to be huge.”

The rock critic Robert Christgau, reviewing the Eagles’ first album, in 1972, wrote that the Eagles were “brilliant but false.” In a sense, this was true. The “peaceful, easy feeling,” which became the sound of California, was made by a guy from Detroit (Frey), a guy from Texas (Don Henley), and a guy from Brooklyn (Geffen). The rock that the Eagles played did not draw on the historical reality of black music, or the political legitimacy of folk, or the social energy of the class struggle. Their music worked as style alone.

Fred Goodman, in his recent book about the rock-and-roll business, “Mansion on the Hill,” writes, “If the acquisition of wealth and influence is rock’s ultimate meaning, then the most meaningful figure it has produced is the billionaire mogul, David Geffen.” It is clear from the context that Goodman means this sardonically. Like many of the rock writers who came of age in the sixties, Goodman believes that businessmen corrupted rock, and in his book he paints Geffen as a principal devil in this larger cultural transaction. Goodman quotes Paul Rothchild, a producer whom Geffen outfoxed in a deal involving Crosby, Stills, and Nash: “When David Geffen enters the California waters as a manager, sharks have entered the lagoon. And the entire vibe changes. It used to be ‘Let’s make music, money is a by-product.’ Then it becomes ‘Let’s make money, music is a by-product.'”

But Geffen was not always so sophisticated about money. He made a terrible deal when he sold Asylum to Steve Ross for seven million dollars in 1972, and became the head of a new Warner-owned label, Elektra-Asylum-Nonesuch, for three years. Seven million was the highest number Geffen could think of. Every Eagles record sold more than that. And Goodman downplays the artists’ own greed: Geffen may have led them to this tree of knowledge, but they did freely eat from it. Jimmy Iovine says, “Most people don’t know how to get paid. That’s an art. Geffen taught people that.” Jackson Browne says, “Money does corrupt. God, as soon as you have a lot of money, you’ve got to figure out how to stay in touch with what you write and why you write. And if you always had the idea that money was going to make a difference in your life, now you have to contend with the idea that it doesn’t. But David Geffen didn’t do that. I mean, come on. Why not say the Beatles did it?”

Today, Geffen is bored by discussions about meaning and rock. He told me, “Most of the artists were trying to make a living, trying to get laid, trying to figure out who they were. They weren’t trying to change the world. That’s what other people put on them. I knew all those people. I knew them all, intimately and well. Bob Dylan. I would say that Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life. That’s just the truth.”

III–Hollywood Godfather

Geffen did not go to Washington for the “Amistad” première. He was, however, dragooned into going to the L.A. opening of the movie, on a Wednesday night in early December. It was dark when I walked into his office in Beverly Hills. Geffen had put on a blazer and leather shoes, but not a tie. He wore jeans and some kind of soft cotton shirt. His jaw was somewhat pushed out, which is the way it gets when he is unhappy. The night before, Rose Tarlow, much against his will, had dragged him to a party at a Richard Meier-designed house in Malibu, because Richard Meier was her boyfriend and it was important that David come. Now Geffen had to endure this opening, when all he wanted to do was “go home, watch a movie, and go to bed.”

The news that “Amistad” might have been plagiarized from a book by Barbara Chase-Riboud, a black writer, seemed to be on TV every half hour that day. This added to a swarm of rumors going around town that some important DreamWorks backers were getting nervous.

Founded at what may have been the peak of the content-is-king mania, in 1994, DreamWorks had received a tremendous amount of publicity, thanks to the aura of its three stars, and the company had attracted more money by far from outside investors than any other startup in history. Obscured in the excitement was the difficulty of launching a studio in the current marketplace. The costs of making movies are so great, and the risks so high, that it is almost impossible to turn a startup studio into a viable business. Most record and theatrical businesses rely on their backlists to make money–or, at least, to get them through the precarious period between hits. But DreamWorks would be starting from scratch.

In order to pay for the vicissitudes of hit-making, the DreamWorks business plan relied heavily on the income that would be generated by Katzenberg’s animated-film division, where the merchandising and rental markets are extremely lucrative. In 1994, with animated films still pretty much a Disney franchise, this scenario seemed more viable than it does today. Now Fox is in the animated-film business, with “Anastasia,” and other studios are getting into it; the market is becoming crowded. A lot is riding on DreamWorks’ first animated feature, “The Prince of Egypt,” which is scheduled to be released in November. “Ants,” the company’s first computer-animated film, is due in the spring of 1999. People who have seen parts of both films say they are brilliant.

DreamWorks has made only three pictures so far (Fox 2000, started at the same time, has made five), and the three, “The Peacemaker,” “Amistad,” and “MouseHunt,” have been less than spectacularly successful. Some of the problems are the result of bad luck. Shortly after settling on a site for a thousand-acre studio, in Playa Vista, the partners found themselves embroiled in a fight with supporters of the Ballona Wetlands. And some of the criticism of DreamWorks has been motivated by the usual desire to see the great fall. When the company was founded, Tom Hanks said, “I guarantee that when the first film premières everyone will say, ‘This is it? This is what these three geniuses have come up with?'” He was right. “The Peacemaker,” a well-made but run-of-the-mill action picture, was mostly savaged.

Geffen, in conversation with me, dismissed all talk of troubles at DreamWorks as “ridiculously premature.” He said, “I keep reading articles about DreamWorks that say, ‘Where’s the beef?’ We have put together an infrastructure that’s superb. We’re beginning to siphon products into that infrastructure. It’s very expensive and very time-consuming and you don’t get a lot of glory when you’re putting together an infrastructure, but if you don’t have it you can’t be in business.” Nevertheless, perhaps because Geffen knew the value of perception as well as anyone, the rumors about DreamWorks’ being in trouble with its investors made him very cranky. When I brought that point up, he said, “We know what we’re doing, no matter what anyone else writes about it. I have no doubt–none, zero–that we will be very successful. Because we would all rather die than fail.”

“Really?”

“I can’t imagine failing. I cannot imagine that. There is no scenario in my head that I can conjure up. I know that I will succeed, because I am committing all the energy, intelligence, passion, and belief that I can muster up to make me do so. And that’s true of my partners. That’s why we were attracted to each other and why we went into business together.” He added, “My life can’t be a failure, right? My life is a success: I’m a happy guy.” As on other occasions when he made that statement to me, I had a sense that it was a conclusion reached by argument.

At six-twenty, Geffen’s driver arrived to take him to the theatre.

“What am I going to say to these people?” Geffen asked, in a Woody Allen whine.

“I don’t know, boss,” the driver said.

Geffen began mimicking the grilling he was expecting to get from the paparazzi: “‘David! David! Mr. Geffen! Why did you cast George Clooney in “The Peacemaker”? What do you think about the lawsuit?'” And he said, “It’s awful. Awful. I have absolutely no desire to go to these things.” He gave me his dead-on look. “I lead a very quiet life.”

We got into the car, a black Mercedes sedan with a gray leather interior, and drove to the door of the Academy, at Wilshire and Almont. We were exactly on time, as Geffen likes to be. Pat Kingsley, Matthew McConaughey’s publicist–a tall woman with a pageboy–was striding back and forth in front of the rope shutting out the paparazzi; she looked like an exotic wading bird. On seeing Geffen, she approached, bent her head (Geffen is five feet seven), and whispered something in his ear. He moved slowly down the row of the entertainment press. He seemed to be taking another Post-it moment, the thing he does to “quiet his mind.” His face became very relaxed, and his perspective shifted to the middle distance. “Mr. Geffen! David!” Every single reporter asked about the lawsuit against “Amistad.” It was an amazing display of herd thinking. “I don’t know anything about the lawsuit,” Geffen said serenely. (Last week, Chase-Riboud withdrew her suit.)

After this ordeal, Geffen stood inside the door of the Academy. Jeffrey Katzenberg appeared and stood near him. Katzenberg said “Good, good” a lot when people stopped to chat with him. It was a way of responding to two questions to which the answer was “Good” and moving on.

Stars and other moguls paid homage to Geffen. Some clasped Geffen’s hand, some shook both his hands at once, some bowed, and a lucky few gave him a full bear hug–the Hollywood embrace. A simple handshake did not seem to be enough to convey the complex emotions involved in being in a relationship with Geffen–emotions encompassing both genuine gratitude for his friendship and an apprehension that this friendship may involve dues you haven’t yet been asked to pay.

The idea that Geffen crushes people who displease is felt so broadly and deeply in the community he presides over that it is almost an article of faith, irrespective of the facts. He is notorious for pursuing vendettas against enemies, some of whom used to be his closest friends. Sandy Gallin, a well-known Hollywood manager who used to be part of Geffen’s inner circle, was hurled from it last year for soap-operatic reasons. Even Barry Diller, one of Geffen’s oldest friends (they met in the William Morris mailroom in 1964), once fell out with him so badly that they did not speak to each other for a year.

“They say that Hollywood is a high school with money,” one media executive told me, “and David is the principal of that high school.” He has brought to school some unsettled scores from the Brooklyn playground. Having no family leaves Geffen lots of energy to pursue his machinations and his grievances. “You know, the guy has a lot of time,” one record-industry person told me. “And if you make him unhappy you’ll hear from him.” Geffen’s long-running feud with Michael Ovitz almost came to blows a few years ago, when Ovitz went to his office and threatened to punch Geffen out for disparaging his family. (These days, Geffen’s style is not so much to trash Ovitz as to say, “I hate to kick a man when he’s down.”) Michael Eisner, once a “close close friend,” fell out with Geffen over Eisner’s treatment of Katzenberg. “Michael is a liar,” Geffen told Robert Sam Anson, in the magazine Los Angeles in 1995. “And anyone who has dealt with him–genuinely dealt with him–knows he’s a liar.” Now, according to Geffen, they’re friendly again.

Geffen likes to portray himself as an honest man in a dishonest world. “In Hollywood people lie to each other and cheat each other and then go and play tennis,” he told me. “But I don’t want to be a tennis player. I don’t want to be that. I’m not going to go play tennis with people who lie to me or fuck me over in some way–I’m not interested in that. I’m willing to trust people until I’m taught not to trust them. I come from a place of trust and openness.” In a world built on fake reality, a man who purports to trade only in the truth is feared as much as he is respected. But some say that Geffen wouldn’t need to talk about honesty so much if he were more honest in his own dealings with people.

In the lobby of the Academy, Sid Sheinberg, the former president of MCA, approached Geffen and gave him the Hollywood embrace. The actor Harry Hamlin stopped to talk about the beach where they both live; Hamlin said that there was a break in front of his house where he and his seventeen-year-old son surf; Geffen’s eyebrows were lively with interest. (“Do you surf?” I asked Geffen after Hamlin moved on. “Do I surf? My God, no.”) A guy thanked David for his generosity to an AIDS charity and made almost a full bow. A writer said, “You know that Phil Spector thing you helped me with? Well, he wrote me a letter and he said, ‘You can have the rights–only, don’t think that I am representative of the music business.'”

Finally, Steven Spielberg arrived, and there was a photo op for the three partners. No glamour, no aura came off them: they were just three hardworking middle-aged guys, all with a similarly boyish quality. After the official pictures were snapped, a DreamWorks employee directed the three to a van outside, to take them to a second opening, where they would do everything again. The man said, “Make sure you don’t all walk outside together”–it would not do to allow the common paparazzi to capture the image of the partners standing together.

“First, they don’t let us ride on the same plane,” Spielberg said. “Now they don’t let us leave together.”

IV–The Transformation of Hip into Cool

A less comfortable Geffen put in an appearance in these pages in 1978, in George Trow’s Profile of Ahmet Ertegun, published when Geffen was in retirement. Geffen was found to have bladder cancer in 1976, and at the same time he was fired from his job of running Warner pictures. Bound by a non-compete contract, he “retired” to New York, frequented Studio 54, and lectured at Yale. After a brilliant trajectory across the music industry, his influence seemed to wane. “There was a brief vogue for David Geffen,” Trow wrote. Geffen was bright and brash, but he didn’t have any of the connoisseurship, the cultivation, or the style that Ahmet Ertegun had. Ertegun was hip. He was an adept. He had the specialized knowledge that you could get only by going out night after night to Harlem to smoke some tea with bebop musicians, or by going down to New Orleans to hear the swamp music. Geffen, whose Jewish Afro was always slightly askew, was emphatically not hip.

The fact that things seem to have turned out the other way–one could argue that there was a briefer vogue for Ertegun than there was for Geffen–offers an interesting lesson in the history of cultural capitalism. Intimate knowledge of black-roots music, such as Ertegun possessed, made it hard for him to grasp the fundamental change in the meaning of rock and roll, in the seventies, from something that was primarily about music and history to something that was primarily about image and style.

As Ertegun presided over the transformation of black culture into hip white culture, so Geffen presided over the transformation of hip culture into the new consumerist culture of cool. Cool required no specialized knowledge. Cool could be bought (though, one hoped, not for cheap). Cool was hip plus market demographics. Instead of a tastemaker like Ertegun, companies now had a “coolhunter,” a kind of market researcher who went looking for the adolescent styles in the streets and then passed them along to the suits. Geffen, easily bored, petulant, insecure, unburdened by history, and blessed with the plastic enthusiasms of the fifteen-year-old impulse buyer, was attuned to this new market-oriented spirit in a way that the erudite Ertegun could never be.

In 1980, Geffen came out of retirement by founding Geffen Records. (His bladder ailment turned out to have been misdiagnosed; he never had cancer at all.) After twenty consecutive unprofitable quarters, Geffen caught a vibe from the big-hair hard-rock bands of the mid-eighties–Whitesnake, the second incarnation of Aerosmith, and, above all, Guns n’ Roses–and rode it to astonishing success. His company also produced successful movies–“After Hours,” “Lost in America,” “Beetlejuice,” “Interview with the Vampire” (Geffen has always been drawn to stories of dysfunctional families)–and he himself invested in two enormously successful Broadway musicals, “Dreamgirls” and “Cats.” Perhaps his most self-revealing project, though, was “Risky Business,” which introduced Tom Cruise to the world. Geffen came up with the famous poster image of Cruise in sunglasses, dressed in the Geffen T-shirt-and-jeans style, and he insisted on changing the screenwriters’ ending for the movie, in which Tom Cruise was punished for his misdeeds by not getting into Princeton. In the version that the world now knows, Cruise gets the good life and Princeton.

To find talent for his company, Geffen assembled a legendary A. & R. department. Gary Gersh brought Nirvana to the label, which extended Geffen into yet another musical generation; Tom Zutaut signed Guns n’ Roses; and John Kolodner brought Whitesnake and Aerosmith. Geffen himself no longer cared much about the artists on the label. “In the seventies, I wasn’t a businessman,” Geffen told me. “I was simply a fan. We were all just hanging out, and–oh, my God–I just heard this guy Tom Waits, and isn’t he terrific, and I’m going to make a record with him. But in the eighties I was a businessman.”

Jackson Browne says, “One time, I came to see David and I heard this heavy-metal music coming through the floor and I said ‘What’s that?’ and David said ‘Oh, that’s my heavy-metal band. There’s a lot of money being made on heavy metal, and I want some.’ And I said, ‘O.K. Help yourself, you know.’ Or he would name somebody on his label and say, ‘They tell me he’s really good; I’ve never heard him.’ He almost flaunted his ignorance–not knowing exactly who the artists were but knowing that his company was a really well-oiled machine.”

At the end of the eighties, in the round of corporate consolidation that laid the foundation for the big media of our time, Geffen cashed in and became the richest man in Hollywood.

“We saw David not long after the MCA deal,” the producer David Brown, who has known Geffen for years, told me. “I was with my wife”–Helen Gurley Brown. “Helen asked David what it was like, being so successful, and David said, ‘It’s the oddest feeling.’ He couldn’t quite understand it. It was as though he had lost something when he gained so much.”

The MCA deal ended the second act of Geffen’s life. He bought, for forty-seven and a half million dollars, a famous house–the Warner estate, which was built by Jack Warner at the top of Beverly Hills in the thirties. For eight years now, he has been closely involved in the taking apart and rearranging of virtually everything in and around the house, including the tennis court and the swimming pool. (He may be the only mogul who has ever made his Xanadu smaller.) He turned a billion dollars into two billion. Though he preferred to remain above the fray, he didn’t seem to have lost his gut for pop culture. It was Geffen who persuaded Calvin Klein to use Marky Mark for his underwear ads. And Geffen immediately grasped the appeal of Beavis and Butt-head. “We aired Beavis and Butt-head on a Friday night late in 1992, ’93,” says Tom Freston. “David calls me at home the next morning, ten o’clock Saturday morning New York time, so it’s 7 A.M. in L.A. He had seen it on MTV the night before. It’s not as if someone said, David, you got to watch this. He had just seen it. And he called me and said, ‘Tom, this is going to be a huge hit, unbelievable. I want to make a movie and a record with you.’ “

Geffen still approaches the moviemaking part of his job at DreamWorks gut first. “I’m just here as a member of the audience,” he said recently to David Brown and his partner Richard Zanuck, when they screened the rough cut of their new DreamWorks movie, “Deep Impact.” Geffen spoke laconically when the screening ended, and what he did say mostly concerned how to sharpen the film’s emotional appeal. “‘Go for the gut, go for the emotions,’ he kept saying,” Brown recalled.

These days, most of Geffen’s own passion and money are spent on collecting art. In the past decade, by using what several dealers I spoke to said was a remarkable eye for an artist’s best work, Geffen has assembled one of the world’s greatest collections of postwar American art in private hands, with special emphasis on works by Pollock, Johns, de Kooning, Twombly, Newman, and Gorky. Only when we were talking about his collection did I glimpse the kind of irrepressible awe and enthusiasm that little David Geffen brought to rock music in the old days.

V–HOLLYWOOD RAJAH

Shortly after the new year, Geffen at last moved into his new house. This marked a significant passage for him. Geffen’s Malibu beach house, comfortable though it is, has no real style except as another neutral, white environment for Geffen to operate within. The Warner house, on the other hand, seemed to be Geffen’s attempt to commit to something, a departure from the “Who really gives a shit?” attitude that is Geffen’s usual mode. Renovating the house seemed to be a symbolic working out of the larger project of his life. “David knows more about making two billion dollars than he does about being happy,” the manager and producer Jon Landau told me. “And I think he wants to know about being happy now. He’s a work in progress. He is able to experience happiness, but it’s been a roller coaster for him.”

“Everyone who knows him thought that it was such a very unlikely house for David to buy,” Fran Lebowitz told me. Another friend, the designer Diane Von Furstenberg, said, “The house is a mystery. It may be a mystery to David. It will reveal itself. Either he will be happy and comfortable there or he will sell it.” Perhaps a clue lay in “Hollywood Rajah,” by Bosley Crowther, which Geffen bought in the Times Square subway station when he was eleven years old. Crowther tells the story of Louis B. Mayer, a poor Jewish boy who made his way to Hollywood and became a great mogul, in part because he based decisions on his heart and gut, not on his intellect. Geffen has said that “Hollywood Rajah” was the only book he ever read that deeply influenced his life.

A long negotiation preceded Geffen’s agreeing to show me the house, where he lives alone. At one point, trying to put me off, he said, “Well, you come out to L.A. for other things, right?” and I said, “No, David, I’m here for you,” and Geffen clasped his hands together and warbled, “You’re here for me! I love that!” Finally, on the morning after the “Amistad” opening, I received a call saying that Geffen would pick me up at my hotel at noon. Coming down the steps, I saw his face leaning against the car window as he was talking on the phone. The eyebrows were not lively, and boredom was completely in the ascendant on his face.

“I want you to know I really didn’t want to do this,” Geffen said as I got in, his voice gravelly with displeasure. This established, his mood seemed to brighten a little. The driver started up the winding streets that led to the top of Beverly Hills, where the Warner house occupies ten rolling acres.

“Steven was in tears this morning,” Geffen said. “You know what Time called him? ‘Steven Stealberg.’ It’s awful. Disgusting. The film is forever tainted by this lawsuit.” Peeking out of a leather document holder on the back of the front seat was the day’s schedule, starting with his shrink at 11 A.M.

After passing through a big copper gate, the driveway wound among overhanging sycamores. Jack Warner had had a four-hole pitch-and-putt golf course here. Geffen had eliminated it and regraded the area extensively, enhancing the great long vistas of the rolling hills. He planted full-grown sycamores; they were brought through Beverly Hills one at a time at night, after streets were closed off for that purpose.

The house is white, in the Hollywood Georgian style, with columns in front. Geffen flung open the front door for me and made a submissive, “you first” gesture. Inside was a circular entryway with a parquetry floor and a curving staircase. To the right was a long, narrow Jackson Pollock and to the left was a de Kooning; beyond them were a Gorky and a Rauschenberg. The dining room, just to the left, was also the library. There was pine panelling, of a width that you can’t get anymore; Geffen bought a nineteenth-century school in North Carolina just for the pine. Rococo moldings throughout the house had been cleared away, except in the living room, which also contains other touches of its original aspect. Downstairs was a great Art Deco screening room. Geffen showed me where the screen came up through the floor. There was a Deco bar, and around the corner was a billiard room. A spectacular Jasper Johns target painting on one wall made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

When I asked Rose Tarlow, later, to characterize Geffen’s sense of style, she said, “David knows what he wants. Or, rather, he knows what he doesn’t want. David has a very definite sense of right and wrong. But he couldn’t tell you how to do something–what style, what period to use. He just knows. He can walk into the room and see one little piece down in the corner, just one spot, and say, ‘That’s not right.’ It’s simply amazing. Almost unbelievable.”

Upstairs, we went into the master bedroom, where the only painting was a Jasper Johns flag. Down the hall was what had been the children’s wing, which Geffen has turned into a guest bedroom and a gym full of gleaming Cybex machines. The gym was the only room in the house where I could easily imagine him. He seemed a bit sheepish in the other rooms; it was as if we were kids sneaking into the grownups’ house.

Finally, Geffen led me into the one room from the original house, which has been preserved intact: Jack Warner’s cracked-leather office and dressing room. Masculine hairbrushes and tonics were lying out on the table as though Warner had left them there earlier in the day. Geffen said that the windows in the bathroom had been moved, and that some of the cracked leather had needed to be redone, but it was impossible to find anyone who knew how to do the work. “So we–See.” He showed me his solution: painted panels that looked exactly like the original leather.

If the purpose of his existence was the Hollywood Rajahfication of little David Geffen, the process was now complete. Geffen could get no closer to the myth that had shaped his life than this room. But the place did not seem to have any appreciably different effect on Geffen than his other environments. Part of the trick in being David Geffen, this rajah of the relationship economy, seemed to mean remaining untouched by anything that might make the exquisite instincts less pure. Even Jack Warner’s cracked-leather sanctum was just another room for talking on the phone.

Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved