Barry Diller, from mail boy to mogul

At the storied 92nd Street Y venue in New York, Barry Diller, now a sprightly 83, arrived on stage to a rapturous reception. Marking the publication of his memoir, the event featured a home crowd full of Manhattan media folk, some still active and some just enjoying proximity to the starry guest of honour.

Behind me sat a male model who had flown in from LA. Discovering that the elderly woman next to him worked “in entertainment”, he asked loudly: “I have somebody on the west coast, but do you know any good agents in New York?” It was that kind of night.

Diller, the wunderkind TV executive turned digital trailblazer, had recently come out as gay and talked openly about his troubled childhood. Interviewed by his friend of some 30 years, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Diller wisecracked, reeled out his fund of showbiz stories and delighted the audience, who rewarded him at the end of an hour with whoops and cheers. But there remained unanswered questions. Not Who Knew, the title of his memoir, but what did he do exactly? And how did he do it?

It’s hard to think of anyone – certainly in UK media – who comes close to Diller. He has been at the centre of a succession of media revolutions, shaping the landscape, always somehow just ahead of the curve. At ABC, still in his early 20s, he pioneered the TV movie when nobody else thought the format would work on network TV. He devised the mini-series, delivering shows that gripped the US: Rich Man, Poor Man, Roots and The Winds of War.

At Paramount, which he ran aged just 32, he turned a failing movie ­studio into a creative powerhouse, lifting it to number one for seven years straight, with hits that included Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Terms of Endearment and Beverly Hills Cop.

He had a hunch that the three broadcast networks in the US – memorably dubbed the “Three Blind Mice” by Ken Auletta – needed shaking up, and drove the creation of Fox.

“Around that time,” he writes insouciantly, “I began to think about starting a fourth television network.”

Diller was now only 37, with his hands full running a Hollywood studio, yet he still had time to dream. After a shaky start, he found hits like Married… with Children and The Simpsons, making upstart Fox the leading network.

Prompted by his long-term partner, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, he ventured out one day to an unlikely location near Philadelphia and fell in love with QVC and the idea of interactive shopping – despite programmes that “looked as if they were produced in Poland in the 1950s”. He saw the future… and ended up buying the business.

And before most of his peers had learned to send an email, he founded IAC, building a stellar group of more than 100 online businesses, with brands such as Expedia, Vimeo and Tinder, part of the Match Group.

There were setbacks along the way. As a teenager, he was fired from the school newspaper by Nora Ephron of When Harry Met Sally… fame. But if you are going to get fired by anybody, you could do a lot worse than Ephron. 

He went toe-to-toe with a succession of media titans, generally more than holding his own. Early on, he negotiated a film package for ABC with Charlie Bluhdorn, chairman of Gulf + Western, owner of Paramount. Bluhdorn was many levels above Diller’s pay grade but sensed that the 23-year-old was a special talent. He eventually brought him to Paramount to run the studio.

Over half a century, Diller went on to grapple with pretty well anyone who was anyone in media, from Sumner Redstone to Rupert Murdoch, Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Liberty’s John Malone. The memoir offers a ringside seat at all those contests.

It is to Diller’s credit that these war stories from the frontline of Hollywood don’t feel self-aggrandising: he writes too well, and too honestly, to fall into that trap.

In the time-honoured tradition of Hollywood, Diller’s dizzying ascent began in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency. But once there, he chose an unlikely course. “I wasn’t really working, I was studying.”

He spent long hours in the treasure house that was the William Morris archive: “It was a huge place with hundreds of metal files that housed the entire history of the entertainment industry.” He claims that he read every file – every contract – from “A to Z”, gaining along the way a profound understanding of the industry.

While at Paramount he greenlit The Last Tycoon, based on the book by F Scott Fitzgerald. In the novel, the central character, Monroe Stahr, (played in the film by Robert De Niro) is based on a boy wonder from an earlier era, studio head Irving Thalberg, whom Fitzgerald met when he went to work as screenwriter in Holly­wood. Stahr/Thalberg is said to understand “the whole equation” – every aspect of the film business, creative and commercial.

There is ample evidence in this memoir that the same can be said of Diller. Perhaps that all began when he buried himself deep in the William Morris Agency’s archives, while his mailroom contemporaries, including David ­Geffen (the film producer and record executive who became a lifelong friend), were running messages, delivering flowers and ingratiating themselves with the agents they aspired to be.

The independent producer and former BBC executive Michael Jackson, himself something of a wunderkind, was introduced to Diller by Ari Emanuel of WME. Trusting his ability to spot talent, Diller hired him as President of Programming at USA Entertainment and then President of Programming for IAC. Interviewed for this piece, Jackson points out that among his greatest achievements is the “myth of Barry Diller”, a media persona underpinned by “candour, sagacity and independence”. And, critically for Jackson, ­insatiable curiosity.

Diller remains curious about the future shape of entertainment. If there is a note of wistfulness about his assessment of the industry he did so much to shape, that is because the beating heart of the book, and his undoubted first love, is entertainment.

He writes that we are witnessing the “final throes” of the “end of Hollywood as we know it”.

He goes on: “All is now controlled and dominated by the tech overlords. That nightly roar of the lion of MGM is now a whimper, a vassal to the retailer Amazon.”

Of all Hollywood’s big beasts, it is perhaps Diller who has roared loudest and longest.

Who Knew by Barry Diller is published by Simon & Schuster.