Barry Diller Credits His Success to His Closeted Homosexuality

In a new memoir, the billionaire chairman and founder of IAC says his fear of coming out as gay made him far more fearless in business.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Barry Diller credits his success to his closeted homosexuality by
James Ptarmi read by Danny Scott. Despite the current right
wing obsession with gender orientation, it feels pretty retrograde to
discuss a public figure sex life in twenty twenty five,
as long as it's between consenting adults who cares. And
yet it's impossible to review very Diller's new memoir Who

(00:23):
Knew Simon and Schuster May twentieth without putting his physical
relationships with men front and center. Not because Diller, the
billionaire chairman and founder of media conglomerate IAC, is in
a highly publicized marriage with the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg,
and not even because he mentions his sexually confused childhood
in Los Angeles in the book's second sentence, thereby clearing

(00:46):
up years of wink wink, nudge nudge rumors. It's imperative
to discuss his sexuality, and, more specifically, its multi decade repression,
because Diller credits much of his initial business success to
being stuck in the claw. My one primary fear had
the by product of eliminating almost any other fear a
rational person would have. He writes, I just have never

(01:08):
seen business projects as risky. My blindness for that is
rooted in the stark fact that I've only ever been
really deeply frightened by the consequences of homosexuality. Everything else
is small beer. And so because Diller compartmentalized and compressed
his sexuality for so long, we are treated to what
is technically a memoir but is in reality a business book,

(01:31):
because business is what consumed his life. Fear of exposure
still had a tyrannical hold on me, so much so
that it stunted any chance of my having a fulfilling
personal life. Diller writes of his early years as an
executive in New York. Until very late in life, I
never believed that I deserved one. Diller grew up rich,
not comfortable, but actually rich in Beverly Hills. His father, Michael,

(01:55):
was a real estate developer who essentially bought and built
entire sections of southern California, Diller writes, replacing vast orange
orchards with hundreds of thousands of tract homes. Even after
Dillar left his very unhappy home. His older brother was
a heroin addict by the age of sixteen, and his
parents were constantly on the verge of getting divorced. He

(02:15):
was insulated from Quoteitian financial concerns. He never even deposited
the paychecks from his first job in the mail room
of the William Morris Agency, leaving them uncashed for so
long that it affected the company's accounting. In Diller's telling,
the unbalanced books almost got him fired at age nineteen.
He had gotten the position via his family friend sitcom

(02:37):
star Danny Thomas, then William Morris's biggest client. Dillar had
called him and asked if he could arrange a job.
Of course, my son, of course I will Thomas said,
and so began Dillar's assent. But by his own account,
Dillar lacked ambition. Instead of hustling his way into top
agent's good graces, he preferred to remain in the depths

(02:58):
of the company's file room. Transfixed by the history of
every transaction going back to the turn of the century.
The William Morris Agency, Diller quickly discovered, was so involved
in every strategic issue its clients faced. The files were
basically biographies of their professional and often personal lives, providing
Diller with an incredible foundation of knowledge about the structure

(03:20):
and workings of an entire industry. It was a foundation
that would serve him preposterously well, starting with his next
job as the assistant to Leonard Goldberg, the programming head
of ABC. Goldberg was a young man on the make
and brought Diller with him to New York. The porestness
of the company in the late nineteen sixties, when it
was one of just three national networks is kind of

(03:43):
impossible to believe, but in his mid twenties, Diller swiftly,
if unofficially, began to run the operations of the programming department.
One of the many wonderful things at ABC was that
if you wanted responsibility, you could simply take it, Diller rights,
there were few rules, little governance, and almost no bureaucracy.

(04:03):
His big break came when he was again unofficially, put
in charge of movie nights on ABC. Initially, that entailed
negotiating with movie studios for air rights, but Diller gradually
came around to the idea that it would make more sense,
both creatively and financially, for ABC to make its own movies.
Here too, he credits his closeted homosexuality. I didn't see

(04:26):
the risks an average person would, he writes of his
older colleagues, I was far more frightened than they were.
But my terror was of exposure, and that absorbed most
of my fear making capacity, leaving me fairly courageous on
temporal matters. Despite those older executives' reservations, Diller's Movie of
the Week at ABC was a industry shattering hit when

(04:48):
it launched in nineteen sixty nine. Using only the basic
criterion is that a good idea, Diller eventually produced about
seventy five movies a year, each of which would garner
as many as fifty million viewers. It was a career
making innovation and led the Austrian industrialist Charlie Bludorn to
offer Diller a position as chairman of Paramount Pictures in

(05:10):
nineteen seventy four. Initially, he hemmed and hawed, but blue
Doorn wasn't having it. You can give me the only
answer a sane person would give, he told Diller, which
is a grateful thank you when do I start. Upon
taking the job, dillar discovered a company riddled with waste,
inefficiency and corruption. Every rock I turned over had something

(05:31):
foul underneath, he writes, In one small side, he mentions
that the company's former president, Frank Yablans, had been getting
one hundred thousand dollars a year in bribes in the
form of diamond jewelry from National Amusements CEO Sumner Redstone. Accordingly,
Diller's first two years at the Helm of Paramount were
a disaster. The studio went from leading the industry to

(05:53):
dropping to a distant fifth, But soon enough Diller righted
the ship and was churning out epic defining hits Saturday
Night Fever, Grease, American Jigglow, Days of Heaven, The Warriors
Escape from Alcatraz, Mammy Dearest, Flash Dance, and Star Trek,
which was spearheaded by a then very junior Jeffrey Katzenberg.
After the movie's blowout success, Diller arranged for a truck

(06:15):
to dump twenty five thousand dollars worth of pennies on
Katzenberg's lawn as thanks. These were what Diller calls the
golden years, when practically everything we touched succeeded, but he
wasn't able to enjoy himself even in this halcion period.
He quotes the former Coca Cola executive Robert Woodroff's line
that the world belongs to the discontented. It's a recipe

(06:37):
for success, Diller says, but it isn't exactly the definition
of a happily contented human. There are moments, however, when
contentment managed to seep through. One instance was in the
nineteen seventies, when Diller met von Furstenberg and began a
passionate love affair, plain and simple. It was an explosion
of passion that kept up for years, he writes, and yes,

(06:59):
I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict
with my love for Diana. Their relationship cooled when von
Furstemburg wanted to have a child, and he balked. I
was afraid my fun life would become my not so
fun life if we had a child together. He writes,
I was enjoying too much an adolescence I'd never had.
As their relationship disintegrated, von Furstemburg took her children from

(07:21):
a previous marriage and moved to Bali. Diller compensated by
buying his first boat, a fifty three foot sixteen meter trawller.
But over the years the two stayed in touch, and
starting in the early nineteen nineties, they began seeing each
other again. It was not the coup de food of
our first ferocious love. Instead, we came back together gently,

(07:41):
month by month, then day by day, until we coalesced
into the couple we are to this day. He writes.
By the time he and von Furstenburgh reconciled, Diller had
already left Paramount for Fox, lured there by oil executive
Marvin Davis with a three million dollar salary and twenty
five percent of the studio. But it wasn't the sweetheart deal.

(08:01):
He thought Davis qualified as a big man, except in
terms of honesty and integrity. Diller writes much of his
enmity stemmed from the belated discovery that Fox was, in
fact hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. To keep
the company from going under, Diller would have to raise
cash on his own or risk humiliation. Fox had been

(08:22):
run like a candy store for a sweet toothed con
man who was in it for all the wrong reasons.
He writes. The solution to Diller's woes and Fox's money
troubles came via Rupert Murdoch, who bought Davis's share of
the company and began to build up the Fox TV network. Eventually,
Diller wanted to work for himself for once, and struck
out on his own in nineteen ninety two. After that,

(08:46):
his work affairs became varied and entangled. Diller wisely turned
down some offers, buying NBC with Bill Cosby, for instance,
and foolishly declined others, like a twenty five percent stake
in AOL right before its stock took off. He took
over the shopping channel QVC, turning it into a cash
cow juggernaut, and then did the same thing with its

(09:08):
competitor HSN. He bought Ticketmaster and then merged it with
Live Nation. He made a deal with Universal that merged
HSN with the USA Network, which included the Sci Fi
Channel and Universal's television library. Then, as part of a
larger Byzantine deal, he sold all three for twelve billion
dollars to the French company Vivandie. He bought ask dot

(09:30):
Com for one point eight billion dollars. It's a bit
of a lemon, Diller acknowledges, but for almost twenty years
we've been able to squeeze enough profits out of it
to get us way past break even on the original
purchase price. And Expedia for one billion dollars in total.
He says his company IAC has made transactions that produced
a combined value of more than one hundred billion dollars.

(09:52):
It would be something of an understatement to call this
a solid hit rate, but who knew never feels hagiographic.
Much of that can be credited to Dillar's conflicted sense
of self for decades. He says, I justified my silence
by believing that my complex sexuality would preclude me from
being a poster boy for gay pride. In truth, I

(10:12):
was just too chicken to tell any one anything given
all my own trauma, I believed I didn't owe the
world A defining statement. Diller continues, I was wrong. I
should have been a role model for whatever good that
might have done for others. It's a guilt that will
never leave me.