Mystery man

A tight-lipped David Geffen tell-all

by Ted Drozdowski

THE OPERATOR: DAVID GEFFEN BUILDS, BUYS, AND SELLS THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, By Tom King. Random House, 670 pages, $25.95.

By the time Wall Street Journal reporter Tom King was steaming into the homestretch of this media-superstar biography, its subject, multi-billionaire David Geffen, had withdrawn his cooperation. Too bad, because King's workmanlike prose would benefit from the deeper insight that only Geffen could provide.

What makes a man turn on his friends, tell bald-faced lies, and toy with his associates' and benefactors' most guarded emotions in pursuit of money? What made Geffen twist so venomously toward Steve Ross -- the Warner Communications chairman who time and again gave Geffen impossibly favorable terms on deals, mentored him, and handed him the raw material to build his own kingdom? Why would Geffen utter miserable untruths about him publicly even as Ross lay slowly dying from cancer?

The simple answer is that Geffen is a greedy shithead, the kind of business supervillain raised to hero's status in the '80s, when our nation's values shifted under the stewardship of Reaganomics. But that's too simple. Not that Geffen isn't a greedy shithead. It's clear from the lies he's told artists and employers right from the beginning of his career in the record business -- managing Laura Nyro, establishing the '70s singer/songwriter bastion Asylum Records -- that this is a man who can flick his conscience off like a light switch.

Geffen -- the money man behind Cats -- bribed his high-school teachers with Broadway tickets. He lied about having a college degree to get his first industry job in the William Morris mailroom; from there he climbed to found Asylum, home of '70s superstars Joni Mitchell and the Eagles. And decades later, when he wanted to squeeze Warner Bros. for the label's equity stake in Geffen Records, he took Warner head Mo Ostin's wife, Evelyn, out to lunch with the intent of telling her poisonous lies -- including that her husband didn't love her -- in order to start a war with Warner Bros. that would turn negotiations in his favor.

King also adduces evidence that Geffen has a capacity for emotional and financial generosity that seems to have come to him with massive success, age (the word "maturity" seems inappropriate), and years of psychotherapy. Geffen has repeatedly rescued friends in need, though perhaps not as often as he's cut off them off after real or imagined slights. He is the world's single largest private donor to AIDS research and treatment. He even brings a kind of benevolence to his latest colossal venture -- the multimedia empire DreamWorks SKG -- that seems out of character with his earlier career. According to King, Geffen was reluctant to enter the DreamWorks partnership with director Steven Spielberg and studio honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, despite his almost lifelong ambition to be a Hollywood mogul. At the time the alliance was formed, in 1994, Geffen's worth was estimated at $1 billion, and he seemed to be settling into a life as a philanthropist and art collector, leaving the day-to-day workings of his businesses to his captains, as he appears to do today.

The thing that's clear from King's writing, which reads too often like the stiff-necked journalism of a daily newspaper (and not one as good as the Journal), is that this is a very complex guy. Besides his issues with honesty, there's his sexuality. Geffen is gay, yet he nearly married Cher, with whom he had a sexually active relationship. He also pursued Carrie Fisher as ardently as he's pursued a string of younger men. But he's never been able to find a lasting love. And King shows Geffen as an often lonely soul.

In part, that's the price of being a manipulative backstabber. But it's part of Geffen's basic wiring, too. He comes from a classic dysfunctional family. Young David was the coddled favorite of his immigrant mother, Batya, who fled the Holocaust and at one point tipped into insanity. His ineffectual father's life is explained in The Operator as a long, slow decline. His relationship with his brother, Mitchell (born Mischa), has been undermined by rivalries deep enough to touch the black bottom of Geffen's emotions.

It was Geffen's unhappy relationship with his brother that ended his cooperation with King on The Operator. After sitting down for eight interviews with the author and advising even some of his formidable rivals that he would not oppose their speaking to King, Geffen exploded into one of his famous screaming rages when King mentioned that he was planning to interview Mitchell. Then Geffen stopped returning King's calls.

So what The Operator lacks, despite King's impressive body of research, is enough of Geffen's own voice to untie the riddles of his life, to explain ways that seem so contemptible, and to answer the question that dangles at the book's end. Is he a changed or an evolving man, or simply a wolf who's gone into hiding until the next worthy game crosses his path?