Transcript
Introduction
I felt you could never be too paranoid. I always told our agents, "Make your clients think that they're your friends, but remember that they're not."
Yet it would be my clients who would stay loyal and my friends who would betray me. Jay Moloney, the agent that I thought of as a son and my eventual successor, would join the agency's posse of young turks who disavowed me after I left CAA. Michael Eisner, my great friend who ran Disney, would hire me as his number two, then publicly humiliate me and fire me after 14 months.
And Ron Meyer, the blood brother that I started CAA with, would leave to take a big job at Universal after I'd negotiated for us both to go, and then disparage me all over town. For 20 years, I had made it my life's work to understand people, to grasp what made them tick. I'd been certain that I was too wary to misplace my trust and too smart to be duped. So I'd like to think that these betrayals were random and flagrantly unwarranted and that I was the victim of some perverse instinct that destroys all human intimacy.