L.A. Confidential

When King first approached him, Geffen was reluctant to cooperate. He had a change of heart, however, when he read a biography of his hero Warren Buffett, which also happened to be written by a Wall Street Journal reporter, a colleague of King’s. To Geffen, the parallels with Buffett were obvious. Buffett is a billionaire; so is Geffen. Buffett lives in Omaha; Geffen lives in Malibu. Buffett is a mild-mannered family man; Geffen is a tightly wound homosexual, famous for his promiscuity and incendiary rages. Buffett acquired his fortune providing capital to businesses that have made the lives of Americans safer, more convenient, and more productive; Geffen produced Dreamgirls. Buffett has two f’s in his last name; so does Geffen. And so on. Having his biography penned by a Journal reporter would make the parallels complete. Geffen agreed to cooperate. He submitted to many interviews with King, and encouraged dozens of his friends and associates — old lovers, business colleagues, school pals, even his childhood psychologist — to do likewise.

The exhaustive cooperation was in keeping with an adage Geffen likes to repeat. He first heard it years ago at a friend’s Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” This means, by Geffen’s interpretation, that a fellow shouldn’t have secrets; the adage is a counsel to constant self-exposure. For example, Geffen often entertains strangers and new acquaintances with tales of his sexual doings, and King was no exception. He made sure his biographer knew that on the night Geffen’s client John Lennon was killed, he, Geffen, had been whooping it up with a male prostitute, if “whooping it up” is the correct term. And he made sure King knew all about his affair with Cher, whom Geffen dated in the 1970s. Back in those days Geffen still considered himself bisexual, apparently not realizing that anyone, boy or girl, who finds Cher attractive is by definition gay. “I f — d her countless times,” Geffen told King. What can I say? The man is c-l-a-s-s.

But anyway, it turns out that it’s not sick for a fellow to keep some secrets — like the secret that your brother hates your guts. That’s a secret you can try to keep secret. Geffen’s relationship with his biographer went rocky when he learned that King was off to see Mitchell Geffen, David’s estranged brother. King tells the story in the foreword to The Operator. “Tom, you agreed not to talk to him!” Geffen erupted over the phone to King. (Erupted is King’s word; Geffen never talks in the book, he “bellows,” “screams,” “shouts,” “cries hysterically.” It’s the loudest show-biz biography since The Ethel Merman Story.) “David,” Tom responded, “do you think I would write this book and agree not to talk with your brother?” It was their first spat but not their last.

Eventually, after about a year, David decided to stop cooperating altogether. Tom still isn’t sure why. It happened like this. One evening, Tom was at home, busy putting on his Abraham Lincoln costume. (It was Halloween. There was a big party.) The phone rang. It was David, who said, very calmly, I’m not cooperating with you. And that was it. Just like that. And there’s Tom, who is thirty-two years old, standing there with half an Abe Lincoln beard epoxied to his face! Can you imagine? Anyway, despite this, David’s friends and associates continued to talk with Tom for the book (although several of them, according to New York magazine, forwarded transcripts or tapes of their interviews with Tom to David). And David’s secretary continued to provide phone numbers for anyone Tom was trying to reach. Go figure.

But the man himself went into a dead man’s float. He roused briefly last year, after King sent him a manuscript of the finished biography. He faxed the author: “Let’s just leave it that much of the book is fiction.” Then David started working the phones. The telephone is Geffen’s instrument; he wields it the way Sammy Sosa swings a baseball bat. By all accounts, he averages more than a hundred calls a day. He talked with the editor in chief of Time, Inc., whose People magazine was running an excerpt of The Operator (the scrumptious chapter about Cher), and then he called a big-dog editor at the Wall Street Journal, which was also running an excerpt. He called the chief executive of Random House, the book’s publisher, and he called the chairman of Bertelsmann AG, which owns Random House. He called lots of people. There’s nothing unusual about this. David Geffen had gotten books killed in the past, and has gotten others rewritten before publication in ways more pleasing to him. Complaining to publishers is just one of the things powerful people do.

And even if it doesn’t result in altering the book — and it didn’t in this case, apparently — the tactic never fails to create buzz. “Buzz” is a show business term for “excited talk on a subject nobody really knows anything about.” Widespread, comprehensive ignorance is the necessary condition for buzz, which is why it’s so popular in Hollywood. And The Operator was the occasion for lots of buzz; only a handful of people, most of them in show business, had access to the manuscript, and it’s not clear how many of them could read. Rumors circulated that the book was full of salacious material about David’s private life, packed with horrifying stories of his shady business dealings, throbbing with tales of deceit and double-dealing and all-purpose creepiness. Random House ordered up an extra-large printing — eighty thousand copies. It rented a vast billboard in the heart of the Sunset strip. The tension was unbearable; the buzz was thunderous. And then, and then . . . people started to get copies of the book. People started to read it.

Reviews began appearing early last month. They were unkind. Entertainment Weekly complained that The Operator “isn’t exactly War and Peace,” which I’m almost certain is intended as an insult. Tom King, said Entertainment Weekly, “just doesn’t convey the gritty reality of the business. . . . His juicy bits are pretty much the stuff of trivia — Geffen’s collagen injections, colorless statements from old boyfriends, and not much else.” Variety was disappointed, too. “King treads prudishly over Geffen’s sex life,” lamented the show-biz bible. Then it complained that King should have “embroidered this book with grander ideas — some nuanced vision of the zeitgeist that swept Geffen to power.”

You’re in trouble when Variety thinks your book lacks intellectual rigor. You’re in trouble when Entertainment Weekly thinks your collagen-injection stories are trivial. And sure enough, sales of The Operator, in the six weeks since its release, have been far below expectations. It initially sold well in Los Angeles, then didn’t. It touched the lowest rung of the New York Times bestseller list, then quickly fell away. It failed to rise to USA Today’s list of the fifty top selling books. There have been bigger publishing fiascoes, but at the very least The Operator is unlikely to earn back the generous $ 700,000 advance that Random House paid Tom King.

There are many possible reasons for this. For one thing, the reviews are onto something: The Operator — whether considered as a straight biography, a business book, or a chronicle of show biz played out at the highest levels — really does stink. King lacks the storyteller’s gift. He writes badly and he writes long. He loses the reader’s sympathy almost immediately. In his foreword, for no apparent reason beyond the thrill of name-dropping, he recounts his efforts to make Joni Mitchell — an old pal of Geffen’s, now an enemy — sit for an interview.

“I wrote her yet another letter and — at the suggestion of a friend who had heard Mitchell mention in a National Public Radio interview that her cat Nietzsche had learned to dance — I sent a box of gourmet cat treats to her home in Bel-Air. She never responded.” It’s one thing to suck up to a potential source by buying her gourmet kitty treats; reporters frequently demean themselves for their art. It’s another thing to brag about it.

The most plausible explanation for the book’s commercial failure, however, must be Geffen himself. Even in King’s lifeless rendering he is a repellent fellow. His career is a trail of atrocities, raising the question of why anyone would want to read about him at a length of 670 pages. Consider a few of his contributions to cultural life (I’m picking from the book at random). For one brief moment in the mid-1970s, it appeared that Cher’s career would finally come to an end; Geffen single-handedly revived it, and she is with us to this day. He launched the Southern California “singer-songwriter” movement, which makes him responsible for Dan Fogelberg. He brought Cats to Broadway. He was involved in the making of “Horse with No Name.” He discovered Sonic Youth and Nirvana and became the foremost promoter of grunge. He put up the money for a Bruce Willis movie. He released several records by Guns N’ Roses. He gave Courtney Love her first big break. On and on it goes. David Geffen has a lot to answer for.

Several years ago a protege of Geffen’s, tottering toward a nervous breakdown, went to see a psychiatrist. After listening for hours to her lamentations, the analyst offered four words of advice: “No . . . More . . . David . . . Geffen.”

The book-buyers of America are saying the same.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.