BARRY DILLER Who Knew. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell

Barry Diller has worked with some of the biggest names in entertainment in a career spanning Paramount, Fox and now his own media company.

Serendipity, that variation on the idea of a happy accident or unexpected good fortune, is elevated to something of a theme in this media titan’s autobiography. During his career, Barry Diller has headed two major Hollywood studios – Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox – and alongside Rupert Murdoch, he founded Fox Broadcasting. He is currently the chair of IAC, a new media conglomerate that owns, or has owned, Vimeo, Tinder, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Live Nation, to name but a few.

As Diller’s story unfolds, the role of serendipity, his ‘lodestar’, begins to seem a little disingenuous. As a teenager growing up in Beverly Hills, son of a wealthy property developer, young Barry has the perfect vantage point to observe the entertainment industry he will later come to dominate. The world of his high school friends is one of pool parties and privilege (though nothing, he notes, like the one-percenters of today). Sadly, there’s a cold heart at the centre of his own ‘deformed’ family. His parents are uninterested in him to the point of neglect and Diller recalls a pivotal moment of abandonment as a seven-year-old packed off to summer camp:

I cemented myself shut. I became cold and pragmatic and sceptical of all humans on all human affairs. I saw it very clearly. My parents and my brother would not have a role in my development. There was never going to be any discussion about my hopes or dreams or worries. We were not going to engage about ideas or books or world affairs. All the rangy discussions overheard at friends’ dinner tables with their parents only reinforced that I lived in an alternate universe.

His brother, Michael, four years older, becomes a heroin addict at 16 and, despite the money his parents throw at various cures, his life spirals into crime and death at 36, during a ‘police incident’. Michael’s fate still baffles the elder Diller looking back so many years on:

Maybe the airlessness or lack of parenting affected him more than me, or maybe it’s just a mystery that so many affected families are never able to solve.

Diller identifies the dark shadow of his brother as one of the reasons he grows up striving to please and learning to seduce. Meanwhile, his incipient homosexuality hangs over him like ‘an anvil’, threatening obliteration. Instead, he finds salvation of sorts in the bosom of another family, that of his friend Terre Thomas, whose father is TV sitcom star Danny Thomas. Diller aches for a family as ‘demonstrably loving’ as Terre’s and he ends up spending more time with them than his own.

What’s fascinating about Who Knew isn’t the so-called ‘serendipity’ of it all. What makes it worthwhile is a man’s account of being in both a time and place that afforded him entry into such significant cultural and business institutions. That he chooses to embark on a career in the entertainment industry seems inevitable given his proximity to it. The way he tells it, he’s neither smart nor talented but he is a voracious reader who loves to break things down to fully understand them. Plus he’s physically robust, so when he embarks on his career he’s able devote himself to work with a tireless zeal.

He identifies the mailroom at the William Morris Agency as a suitable entry point. It helps that Danny Thomas’s best friend happens to be Abe Lastfogel, its owner. But he’s such a ‘dim rich kid’ he can’t even cash his pay cheques and he gets into trouble for letting them accumulate for months on end. He’s also the only kid in the mailroom who doesn’t burn to be an agent. Instead, he stumbles into the basement treasure trove of the William Morris file room. Files containing contracts and correspondence dating back to the turn of the twentieth century offer Diller a unique business education and he soaks it up like a sponge, allowing his instincts to develop.

His next big break comes through Danny Thomas’s other daughter, Marlo, whose boyfriend is an ambitious ABC executive, Leon Goldberg, who is so impressed with Diller’s precocious knowledge that he offers him a job as his assistant. On Diller’s first day on the new job, his boss is promoted, and he grabs the opportunity with both hands.

ABC is a ‘scrappy and adventurous’ little outfit, the newest of the three national networks, but always last in the ratings. By the late 1960s, Hollywood is in decline, both in terms of its economic viability and its outsized influence on popular culture. Nevertheless, out-of-touch studio executives still hold the ‘grubby’ world of TV in disdain, despite Hollywood’s increasing reliance on sales of movies for broadcast. Enter Charles Bludhorn, aka the Mad Austrian, head of Gulf and Western, the conglomerate that has just acquired Paramount Studios. Diller’s affection for the late businessman is palpable, despite the fact that Bludhorn saddles ABC with a bunch of movies so awful they’re guaranteed ratings disasters. Bravely attempting to prise ABC from the jaws of such an unfair deal, Diller makes little headway. Instead, he makes a new deal, gambling on the quality of the studio’s future output, which is how ABC later ends up airing Paramount hits The Godfather and Love Story, surging ahead in the ratings.

Diller further challenges Hollywood hegemony when he pioneers made-for-television movies with ABC’s groundbreaking Movie of the Week. The first of these is Seven in Darkness, in which a group of blind passengers who survive an air crash must make the perilous journey down a mountain to safety. Other movies greenlit by Diller at ABC include the gloriously titled Scream, Pretty Peggy and Women in Chains. Later, Diller ushers in the era of the blockbuster miniseries with Roots, which arguably paves the way for the prestige long-form television that later defines the streaming era and further contributes to the declining relevance of the feature film.

When Diller becomes the head of Paramount Pictures at 32, he refines his management style, best described as ‘creative conflict’, into the ability to distil something of value and truth from ‘the cacophony of voices in the room’. Who Knew is an interesting hybrid because it can be read as a showbiz memoir, but also a business management book, with its pithy insights and insider accounts of bruising boardroom battles. On the other hand, there’s an honesty to Diller’s writing and a flair for storytelling that sets this book apart from the chest-beating ghostwritten memoirs of other captains of industry. It would be difficult to imagine someone like the late Jack Welch, for example, giving such a colourful and chaotic account of the opening night of Studio 54 and chomping through Steve Rubell’s qualuudes like so much candy. Or painting himself the American vulgarian when he throws up a quart of lobster bisque on designer Yves Saint Laurent’s perfect white suit during a trip to Deauville.

The splashiest headlines and reviews of this book relate to the fact that it is Diller’s first confirmation of his sexual orientation, despite so many years in the public eye. There is much for Diller to grapple with here, not least because he is married to a woman, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, whom he met in 1974, separated from in 1981, reunited with 1991 and then married in 2001. He accepts people find their union confusing:

… today, sexual identities are much more fluid and natural without all those rigidly defined lanes of the last century. I’ve always thought you never really know about anyone else’s relationship. But I do know about ours. It is the bedrock of my life.

He writes of his homosexuality:

I never discussed my personal life, lowlight as it was, with anyone. Even though as the years went on I began to be realistic and understood that ‘everyone knows’, I never wanted to make any declarations. So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived. I hated having to live a pretend life, one that was totally silent on all the topics normal people talked about with each other. Of course I could have declared my sexuality, come out as some others were doing, but I was among the many at that time who were too scared to do so. But I wanted – needed – to adopt my own personal bill of rights … It wasn’t courage – it was simply the minimum conditions of my conduct, and I recognize it now as the opposite of courage.

By the mid-1980s Diller is chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, where his long-held dream of starting a fourth TV network is realised when Rupert Murdoch enters the frame. The launch of Fox Broadcasting in 1986 is a ‘glorious mess’. But Murdoch earns Diller’s enduring respect and admiration for the way he weathers the storm of debt that threatens to swamp News Corporation in this era. Interestingly, Diller credits the success of the 20th Century Fox movie Home Alone as the unlikely factor that turns the media behemoth’s fortunes around. Who knew? Similarly, it’s the decidedly anti-establishment Fox TV shows Married … with Children and The Simpsons that cement the new network’s place.

It comes as no surprise when Diller runs out of road as one of Murdoch’s executives in 1992. In his boss’s words, ‘this is a family company and you’re not a member’. Here begins a new phase of Diller’s business life, where ownership and independence are vital in building the conglomerate that becomes IAC and makes him a billionaire. The world of interactive technology lacks the outsized personalities of the world of entertainment, nonetheless it’s still interesting to read how Diller goes about finding and exploiting the opportunities that the digital revolution opens. Who Knew is a fascinating and up-close account of some of the biggest media and technology companies and the larger-than-life personalities behind them.

Barry Diller Who Knew Simon & Schuster 2025 HB 336pp $59.99

Naomi Manuell is a Melbourne writer. She recently won the Melbourne Athenaeum Library Award for best ‘body in the library’ story at the 2024 Sisters in Crime Scarlett Stiletto Awards.

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Tags: 20th Century Fox, ABC Television (US), Barry | Diller, Charles Bludhorn, Diane Von Furstenberg, entertainment business, IAC, memoir, Paramount Pictures, Rupert Murdoch, William Morris Agency