David Geffen: a Biography of New Hollywood
Tom King
Random House £18.99, pp670
Buy it at BOL
THE MOST SHOCKING thing about David Geffen's biography is the dust jacket. There, displayed shamelessly on the spine, is a black-and-white photo of pin-up actor Keanu Reeves. The publishers' desperation is almost tangible. Inside Hollywood and the music business, Geffen's name clearly inspires fear, loathing and admiration in equal parts; outside that closed community, it is more a case of 'David who?' However, his one foray into the tabloid headlines came courtesy of a rumour that he had participated in a 'gay wedding' to heart-throb Reeves.
Turning to the index, however, there is only one reference to Reeves, and this is to pour cold water on the gay wedding rumour, saying it was a simple case of mistaken identity, as Geffen was squiring a young man of similar looks at the time. It is a shame that this rather low marketing tactic has to be deployed by Random House, especially as the twentysomething women who form the Keanu Reeves fan club will almost certainly be the wrong audience for what, in its own way, is a shocking and quite compelling book.
The contradictions in Geffen's life are plentiful and intriguing. He spent decades battling with his sexuality, dating a string of women, including Cher, while conducting numerous sexual liaisons with men before coming out in 1992. He was ruthless in business, yet gathered round him difficult but inspired artists - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro in the Seventies, Guns N'Roses and Aerosmith in the Eighties, Nirvana in the Nineties - often wooing them with promises that his labels, Asylum and later Geffen Records, would give them unprecedented artistic freedom. Sometimes he did, but often he reneged, breaking and remaking friendships with expedient speed.
Latterly, as a co-founder of Dreamworks film studio and record label, friend of the Clintons and generous donor to Aids charities, Geffen has plopped into the 'great and good' category, yet he didn't turn a hair when providing Forbes magazine with a character assassination of his former boss and mentor, Steve Ross, even though Ross was having chemotherapy for terminal cancer.
Geffen's ability to finesse himself into his desired position with a combination of persuasive charm and outright deceit was demonstrated at an early age when he landed a coveted job in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency, traditionally the first step on the ladder for budding showbusiness 'players'. To get a foot in the door, Geffen made up a CV on which he claimed to have graduated from UCLA.
On hearing that another mailroom clerk had been fired for providing a phoney CV, Geffen's response was to arrive at the office at 6am every day for several weeks to sort through the post. When the UCLA envelope arrived, he stole it, steamed it open and then persuaded his brother to mail a forged confirmation of Geffen's graduation from the West Coast.
Geffen, it emerges, is a man whose desire to be rich pushed him beyond boundaries even most business people would find unacceptable. At his father's funeral he was more preoccupied with riding in a limousine for the first time than his recent bereavement.
Another anecdote that perfectly illustrates Geffen's attitude to life, money and relationships involves his first art purchase. Mica Ertegun, wife of fabled Atlantic Records boss Ahmet, had taken a very young, very rich Geffen under her wing. She told him he should collect art and got a dealer friend to offer Geffen a Picasso, La Buste, at a very preferential price. Geffen bought it but then had it stolen by a young man (the boyfriend of a friend, of course) he had picked up for the night.
The insurance company gave Geffen the true value of the picture - twice what he had paid for it - but when they recovered the drawing they offered to return it. Geffen declined, saying he would rather have the money. But when the insurance company then auctioned the picture it raised twice the amount Geffen had received. His bizarre reaction to this piece of mixed fortune was to pick up the phone to Ertegun and scream at him for costing him so much money.
Tom King, the Wall Street Journal writer who received a rumoured $660,000 advance for the book, uncovers many more anecdotes in a similar vein, where celebrities, executives and even family members are routinely screamed at, ignored or royally shafted by Geffen. King certainly earns his money in terms of research, which he writes up with perhaps too much diligence and not quite enough sauce or flair - he is no Michael Lewis (The New New Thing, Liar's Poker). Inwardly, one has to be disappointed that the book stops short of being salacious, but its clinical, non-judgmental exposition of what rises to the top in the Hollywood cesspool provides us with enough shock factor to make a gay marriage to Keanu Reeves look like a vicarage tea party.
