Geffen Biography Stirs Up Old Feuds, Triumphs

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of David Geffen’s enigmatic personality is his uncanny ability to get associates and clients whom he has angered, upset or betrayed not only to forgive him but also to get back in business with him.

It’s a recurring and compelling theme in Tom King’s much-anticipated Geffen biography, which hits bookstores today and is already stirring emotions in Hollywood because of its unflinching and largely unflattering portrait of the music mogul.

The exhaustive list of people with whom Geffen had this kind of relationship includes such former artist clients as Don Henley, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and such rival music executives as Mo Ostin and Ahmet Ertegun.

Many of them found ways to reconcile their complex and conflicting emotions about Geffen and forgive his sometimes cold, insensitive and ruthless behavior, though some relationships, such as those with Henley and Mitchell, later broke down again.

“He’s magnetic,” said King, a respected entertainment writer at the Wall Street Journal. “On one hand, David repels people, and on the other hand, he draws them in.”

While it may say much about Geffen’s tremendous power and charisma, it may also speak to the rather complicated relationships that exist in Hollywood, where the lines between personal and professional lives are often blurred and in conflict.

“Some people found Geffen to be like an intoxicating drug,” King writes in his 600-page tome “The Operator,” published by Random House. “The high was indescribable, despite the fact that it would likely be followed by a wicked hangover.”

Despite an awful incident in which Geffen intentionally humiliated Mo Ostin’s wife, Evelyn, to get her husband out of the way of an important business deal with Ostin’s boss, Time Warner czar Steve Ross, Ostin agreed years later to run the music division at Geffen’s DreamWorks SKG.

Even Steven Spielberg was deeply offended by Geffen’s behavior during the dying days of their mutual friend and mentor Ross, but years later he became Geffen’s partner in the ambitious DreamWorks studio.

“In friendship or in business I have relied on him to tell me the truth, which he has done without fail,” Spielberg told The Times. “He knows so much about people and how and why they behave that his personal counsel feels almost parental.”

King writes that while Spielberg spent the last months of Ross’ life in the backyard of Ross’ home in East Hampton, keeping his friend company, Geffen was nowhere in sight.

Spielberg was horrified when Geffen, who was working at Warner Bros. at the time, vilified Ross in a December 1990 profile of the music executive in Forbes magazine. In the profile, which appeared a month after Ross confirmed reports that he was being treated for prostate cancer, Geffen blasted Ross for not giving him Warner stock options and for not buying his record label.

Though Ross’ wife, Courtney, refused to invite Geffen to the funeral, years later she accepted an invitation by Geffen to join him for dinner in the newly decorated Jack Warner mansion he had purchased.

She wasn’t the only one of Geffen’s estranged friends to share a conciliatory dinner at his request. King said Geffen and Mitchell, onetime platonic roommates, “weathered tremendous storms” over the years but always seemed to make up.

In 1980, Mitchell agreed to sign with his newly founded Geffen Records label, despite feeling snubbed when she was on his Asylum label because of his preoccupation with the career of Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s “Planet Waves” was released by Asylum at the same time in 1974 as Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” her biggest record to date, featuring “A Free Man in Paris,” her tribute to Geffen.

“She was devastated and felt betrayed,” King said. “In her moment of glory, she couldn’t even get David Geffen on the phone.” In King’s opinion, Mitchell--who refused the author’s many requests to be interviewed for his book--”was more than any other single artist greatly responsible for Geffen’s success in the music business.”

King, who interviewed about 300 subjects and conducted exhaustive research over a three-year period, acknowledged, “I think people have a genuine affection for David.”

Neil Young is another classic example of someone who once had a tumultuous relationship with Geffen yet “still harbors deep fondness for him,” King said.

In 1983, Geffen sued Young for fraud and deceit, alleging that the artist “broke promises to deliver commercial albums,” costing his label more than $3 million.

Offering an anecdote that didn’t make his book, King said that in an interview with Young, the artist told him how concerned he had been about Geffen’s welfare after fashion designer Gianni Versace was murdered outside Versace’s Miami Beach mansion in July 1997.

“The day Gianni Versace was murdered, he instantly worried about David living in his beach house in Malibu without much security,” King said, noting that Young told him he called Geffen that day “wanting to check in with him.” Like Versace, Geffen is gay.

“In many instances, an apology was all it would take” to get people back into his orbit, King suggested.

Surprisingly, that’s exactly what happened when Geffen called Mo Ostin and offered him what King termed a “simple apology that Ostin deemed genuine.”

In one of the book’s most damning indictments of Geffen, for which King said Geffen himself was the main source (backed up by accounts from the Ostins), Geffen takes Ostin’s wife, Evelyn, to lunch at the Ivy and tells her that her husband “doesn’t really care about you that much” and that only “when you got sick and he saw that everybody really loved you, that’s when he started loving you.”

Geffen’s scheme worked. The Ostins didn’t speak to him for the next year and a half, allowing Geffen to negotiate directly with Ross and bypass Ostin.

King noted that the incident with the Ostins was one of countless examples of how Geffen would routinely “sabotage any relationship, personal or professional, to get what he wants.”

Another music associate with whom Geffen had, as King put it, “a tortured history of an on-again, off-again relationship” was Ertegun, the esteemed longtime head of Warner’s Atlantic Records.

Ertegun was Geffen’s first major mentor and an influence in his early rise as a record executive. He had talked Geffen, then a young artists’ manager, into starting his own record label in the early 1970s, getting Time Warner-owned Atlantic to finance his newly founded Asylum Records.

The two were inseparable, and Geffen told Ertegun, “We’ll be partners in everything forever.” A couple of years later, Ertegun would feel betrayed by Geffen when he left the Atlantic fold to head up Elektra/Asylum. So much for partners forever.

“Ahmet felt deserted,” King said.

Then again, in 1976, when Geffen was fired as vice chairman of the Warner Bros. movie studio after an 11-month stint, he felt abandoned by Ertegun and many others in Hollywood when his phone temporarily stopped ringing.

Ertegun told King that Geffen started bad-mouthing him and was spreading a mean-spirited rumor that he was an anti-Semite.

But again the two would eventually bury the hatchet.

Ertegun, now co-chairman of Atlantic, takes a philosophical view of his long, colorful relationship with Geffen.

“Look, these books come and go. They don’t really mean much in the end, do they? Not like friends. Friends mean everything. David is a good friend of mine.”