Barry Diller has only just started his book tour, but he’s already trying to sneak away.
“I’m shortening the tour part,” the 83-year-old mogul said recently in his sonorous baritone, the “Killer Diller” voice that intimidated and intrigued Hollywood for more than half a century. “I am not up for interrogation on aspects of my personal life.”
As we sat on cappuccino-colored couches in his gorgeous Art Nouveau aerie in the Carlyle hotel, I reminded Diller about the bewitchingly candid first paragraph of his bildungsroman, “Who Knew”:
The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional. My parents separated often and came a day short of divorce several times before I was 10; my brother was a drug addict by age 13; and I was a sexually confused holder of secrets from the age of 11.
And there it was, Hollywood’s worst-kept secret spilled: Barry Diller is gay. Or rather, bisexual — or bi with Di, since, as he writes, “While there have been a good many men in my life from the age of 16, there has only ever been one woman.” The sultry Princess of Wrap, Diane von Furstenberg, swept him away back in the Studio 54 days. She’s proud of being the first woman he ever slept with, in a torrid romance that later unfurled into a long, happy, sexually liberated marriage.
Von Furstenberg and Diller’s friends are watching, wide-eyed, as Diller talks publicly for the first time about his unorthodox private life. The gruff, point-blank executive is known, as the Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos said, as “one of the very few who doesn’t care what people think in a town full of people who do care.” That is true in business. But for most of his lifetime, Diller did care about what people thought of his sexual orientation.
“I wanted to tell the story,” he said about his alienated childhood and dazzling career. “And I knew if I told the story, I had to tell the truth.” That doesn’t make it easier. He’s kept his private life shrouded for so long, it’s hard now to rip off that shroud.
