When I Stop Talking You (18 page)

One morning, at the end of the 1970s, I got into the office early. I like being up when New York is just waking, the old metabolism still governing in the Pacific Time Zone. I like knowing I have done an entire day of work before the clock strikes nine. When my secretary came in, she handed me the call list.

Now, let me explain my call list of those years: Simply put, it was the names and numbers of all the people who had called and whom I was obligated to call back, three or four pages typed up and handed to me each morning. These names, taken together, told the story of my day: managers looking to cut deals, studio executives looking to pitch scenarios, actors looking for representation, arena owners wanting to renegotiate a split, politicians looking for a handout, rock stars angered by a missing amenity or anemic sound system, local promoters apoplectic over a perceived infringement, reporters looking for a quotation, bankers looking to sell bonds, realtors looking to sell or buy land, clients panicked between projects, friends looking for tickets or a room in a sold-out hotel in Vegas-hotels are never really sold out.

So my secretary gave me the list-all these calls were in regard to Concerts West, my music business-and, as I was paging through the names, I suddenly realized that I did not want to call back any of these people. I sat there for a moment, thinking about what this meant, what my gut was telling me. It was not making the calls that bothered me. It was having to make the calls. In a flash I thought, I will quit this business instead of making these calls. I don't feel that way about my call list now-being successful means filling your life with calls you want to return. But in that moment, I knew that period of my life had ended. I was done with being a manager, because when you are a manager, you're not working for yourself. You're working for the people on the list. I'm not knocking it. But I just didn't want to work for anyone else. I called my clients over the next few days. I told them, one by one, "I love ya, find someone else, I'm done."

All these years later, people still ask me how I was able to walk away from the concert business.

"Don't you regret it? There was so much money to be made."

"Not for a minute," I tell them. "Not for a second."

You have to be willing to walk away from the most comfortable perch, precisely because it is the most comfortable.

The next morning was the greatest morning of my life. I went to the office at the usual hour, had my coffee, read my paper, and did my work as usual, only this time, when my secretary came in with the call list, I crossed out the names of all the people I did not want to call back. I was free! There was nobody I had to talk to. It was so liberating. I had become my own person.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Irving Azoff is one of the most successful men I know. He is a dear friend. He is as big and rich and brilliant as they come. But Irving Azoff has clients. One of his clients calls, he has to call back. Me? I call back who I want, when I want. That's freedom.

In this way, I became a full-time movie producer. It was all I did, all I wanted to do. I was a free agent in search of ideas, combing the ether for projects, looking to put scenarios together with writers, to put writers together with directors, directors together with actors, all the time trying to match the feats of my heroes Mike Todd and Billy Wilder and Louis B. Mayer. In my memory, those years play as a succession of movies, each dating my life the way a layer of sediment dates an era of civilization. One of my favorites was Diner, which I made in 1982. It's about a group of friends passing the last days of their youth in the parking lots and row houses of Baltimore. It was written by Barry Levinson, who, at that point, was known only as a writer, having worked on several movies with Mel Brooks.

I got the screenplay on a Friday at 8:00 A.M. By 9:30, I had fallen in love. Every kid I grew up with-the sports nut, the married-too-early, the deviant maniac-was in that script. You couldn't be from the East Coast and literate and not understand those guys. They came off the pages.

I called Levinson.

I said, "I have to make this movie."

"Great," he said, "but you do know that every studio in town has already turned it down?"

"I don't care what they did," I told him. "I love this movie and I'm going to make it."

"Great," he said, "and I'm going to direct it."

"Whoa! Wait a second. I did not know that was part of the deal."

"Yeah," he said, "it is."

Levinson had never directed before, and the script, as he said, had already been turned down. But if you think about it, and I did think about it, this really was his story, his life, and his world: Who could possibly tell it better than him?

"Okay," I said, "as long as I have the right to fire you, I don't care if you direct."

Barry, who had great faith in himself, agreed.

I went all over town with the script, pitched like mad, but no one was interested. It's nearly impossible to sell a story that has no grand concept, reads intimate and small, and is moody in the way a song can be moody-you get it or don't. It was like trying to sell jazz to a person who's never heard Coltrane. Finally, when I was about to give up, David Chasman, an executive at MGM who could really read a script, called.

"How much is this going to cost?"

"Five and a half million dollars."

"We're on."

The key to Diner was casting. For this, credit goes to Ellen Chenoweth, who is one of the greatest casting directors of all time. She understood the script and was able to find real-life equivalents of the characters, clearly based on real guys, among the hungry young actors of LA. My job was to see what Levinson saw, then sell the executives at MGM on a cast of unknowns.

It's no accident that, in the course of my life, I've launched dozens of careers. Like my father, I can look at a sea of sapphires and pick out the Star of Ardaban: the young kid who will blossom on stage, glow on screen, separate from the journeymen to become a star. Diner launched, among others, Ellen Barkin, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, and Steve Guttenberg.

Another favorite of those years was September 30, 1955, about the day James Dean died. It, too, was brilliantly cast, marking the debut of Tom Hulce and Dennis Quaid. That it did not find an audience is a perplexing mystery. Wise men say you learn more from failure than from success, and, though that's often true, in this case failure left me nothing but confused. So many variables determine the fate of a film, some having to do with script and casting and marketing; but others are so mysterious and zeitgeist-related and beyond human control that the best posture is humility. There are three key words in business: I don't know.

Ideas come from many places. Sometimes they arrive in the mail as a script. Sometimes they develop like stalagmites, growing from a slow drip of thoughts. Sometimes they appear on TV, as a story in the news. Take, for example, The Karate Kid. I was at home watching the five-o'clock news. All the stations were broadcasting the same story. It was about a kid in the Valley who had been getting beat up every day on his way home from school. He took it and took it, until, tired of taking it, he found a teacher and learned karate. The next time the bullies came, it was lights out for the bad guys. I loved the story. It reminded me of the ninety-pound weakling ads they used to have for Charles Atlas.

I found the kid. Billy Sassner. I had a car pick up him and his parents and bring them to my office. His dad was heavyset, a postman. His mom was heavy, too. (We made her a character in the first movie, but wrote her out of the sequels; the actress wanted too much money. I told the writer, "Deal with it in the script." It was going to be a funeral or a phone call-the phone call was cheaper.) I told Billy's parents just what I wanted to do, then made a deal for the rights to their story. I hired a screenwriter named Robert Kamen, who, in addition to being really good, knew all about karate, which was, of course, a huge advantage in writing the fight scenes.

The plot was classic-the picked-on kid takes his revenge and the bully gets his comeuppance-but I wanted the movie to be more. Kamen and I knew it was not about karate, not really. It was about fathers and sons. Since the kid has no father in the film, this wise old teacher, this Japanese man named Miyagi, becomes his father. We worked hard to get that right. A lot of Miyagi is, in fact, my father, everybody's father, if not the father you had, then the father you wish you had.

I hired John Avildsen to direct. He had won the Academy Award for Rocky, and The Karate Kid was really just Rocky in another way-it was an underdog story, a Cinderella story and a fantasy, the world as you wish it would be. We signed Ralph Macchio to play the kid, then found the girl. How does the girl fit into the picture? Haven't you ever been to the movies? There's always a girl in the picture! I found her in a Burger King commercial. She jumped off the screen. This was Elisabeth Shue, who later became a star in her own right.

We soon had every major part cast with the exception of Miyagi, the most important part in the movie-the father, the teacher, the moral center, heart, and soul. I went to Hong Kong. I went to Kabuki theaters in Kyoto. I traveled the world looking for this guy. It was a manhunt. I flew the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune to LA. He showed up at my office with twenty-five or thirty people. He looked great, but something did not seem right. Whenever I asked him a question, a member of his entourage answered.

"How do you like the script?"

"Mr. Mifune likes the script very much."

"How do you like your green tea?"

"Mr. Mifune likes his green tea very much."

I threw everyone out but Mifune.

I said, "I want to talk to Toshiro myself."

They went out reluctantly, looking back, but they went.

I closed the door and said, "No bullshit now. Do you speak English?"

"No," he said, "not really."

"Then how can I do this picture with you?"

He said he could sound out the lines phonetically-it would sound all right, even if he did not know the meaning of the words.

"No, no," I said, "we can't do that."

Mifune went to Western Costume after the meeting and had pictures of himself taken dressed as Miyagi. I still have them. He looked fantastic. He was a strong man. I was tempted, but how can you play father-and-son scenes phonetically? I called the director John Frankenheimer, who worked with Mifune in Grand Prix.

"How did you do it?"

He told me they shot him in Japanese, went back, and dubbed all his lines into English. I did not have the budget for that. Mifune was out.

I believe in not getting hung up or paralyzed in a quest for perfection, but by the same token, you have to identify what is truly important and hold out until you can get those things right: Miyagi was important. And I could not find him. I was about to put the picture on hold. We would just have to wait until fate brought us Miyagi-san.

Then, one morning, John Avildsen burst into my office, grinning as if he had just made the mother of all breakthroughs, as if he had just found the cure for old age.

"I know who should play Miyagi," he said.

"Who?"

"Pat Morita."

"Pat Morita?"

"Yeah, Pat Morita."

I knew Pat Morita. I knew him when I was busing tables up in the Catskills. He was a hundred-dollar-a-night comic at the resorts. He played a character called "The Hip Nip." He came onstage in horn-rimmed glasses and fake buck teeth and, in a bad Japanese accent, from an old World War II movie, said, "Don't forget Pearl Harbor."

I told John Avildsen, "No. This is a major motion picture. I'm not casting Hip Nip."

"He's great," said Avildsen. "Let him audition at least."

"No fucking way," I said. "Get out of my office."

A few days later I was at my desk, eating a pastrami sandwich and drinking a Dr. Brown's cream soda, when Avildsen barged in, shut the door, and locked it behind him.

"What's this?" I asked.

He put a videotape in the machine and said, "Just watch."

"Why?"

"It's only three minutes. Just watch!"

On came Pat Morita in costume as Miyagi, doing a monologue from the script. "Not bad," I said. "Really, not bad at all."

"Well?" asked Avildsen.

"All right," I said. "Call him up. We'll do a screen test."

We staged a test with Morita and Macchio, a scene in which the kid, who has been hurt, is in bed and Miyagi is nursing him. We shot it. And while we were shooting, I started to cry. I mean, real goddamn tears. The next day, as we were looking at the footage, I said to Avildsen, "You were right, so very right." Morita was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in the movie.

No matter how hard you work on a movie, no matter how good you think it is, you never know how it's going to play. You have to wait for the first real audiences, an often endless purgatory of hoping and fearing. With The Karate Kid, the waiting ended in a moment of sheer joy. This was at a screening in LA a few weeks before the release. We hung around the lobby talking when the picture was over, then went to the parking lot. Most of the people had gone, but there were forty or fifty kids out there, with their arms outstretched and legs up, imitating the crane kick that comes at the climax of the movie. I knew right then that the picture was going to be a smash.

Armand Hammer had one of the most colorful biographies of the last century. His father, Julius, a Russian immigrant, headed the Communist Party in New York, which was unusual in that the family was quite prosperous. They owned a pharmaceutical company in the Bronx, but there was a scandal. I'm not sure of the details, but it had something to do with an illegal abortion and the death of a young woman. The family was horrified. Julius was sent to Sing Sing. If you're the son of a convict, the middle of three boys, it can have an effect.

Hammer graduated from Columbia medical school, but he never practiced. Still, he loved it when people called him "Dr. Hammer."

When he got out of school, the Russian revolution was in full bloom. There was a lot of suffering. Armand, who knew many of the Soviet leaders through his father-they visited the house on trips to America -decided something had to be done. He got hold of an old ship and filled it with medical supplies, which he took to the Soviets. I don't believe this was done as altruistically as Hammer claimed. I think he was actually unloading stuff his father could not sell. Nevertheless, Lenin heard about the shipments, this great act of charity, and asked to meet with "Dr. Hammer."

This was in the early 1920s, the Lenin of the black-and-white photos, peasant cap worn low, riding the crest of a terrifying wave. And here was Hammer, the son of the disgraced capitalist, shaking hands with Rasputin. Hammer used to say he was the only person who had been friends with both Lenin and Reagan; that was the scope of his life. Lenin thanked Hammer for all he had done, then asked if he wanted to help some more.

"Sure," said Hammer. "What do you need?"

"We have to do business in America," said Lenin. "We need to make deals with all your great men, Henry Ford, the bankers, the financiers. Why don't you represent us, take care of us?"

"Sure," said Hammer.

"And we want to pay you for the medical supplies," said Lenin. "But not in money."

He told Hammer to go to the Hermitage Museum and take whatever he wanted. Hammer went through the halls with a pointer, looking at masterpieces-he knew nothing about art-saying, "Give me two of those, and I'll take one of those, and that one of the monk in the red velvet robe, and that one of the dog." Rembrandts, Pissarros, Cezannes, Faberge eggs-he got them all. You can see his collection today at the Hammer Museum in LA. There is a curator and there are catalogues and shows and students writing dissertations, but this is how it started, with Hammer, trailed by a minder from the special police, going through the Hermitage, saying, "Give me one of that, give me two of that, give me three of that."

Armand Hammer made a fortune with the Soviets. For several years, he was the only conduit to the West, and thus had a piece of every industry.

The men around Lenin complained. Who is this American? It doesn't look right! He's getting too much. Lenin brought Hammer back to Moscow. He said, "Look, Armand, you can't have everything. Pick one business, one industry, and it will be yours."

"One industry?"

"Yes, one industry."

"Okay," said Hammer, "let me think about it."

And he went away, thought about it, and when he came back, he said, "Pencils."

"Pencils?" asked Lenin.

"Yes," said Hammer, "pencils. You've got millions and millions of people in this country, millions of them in school, and every one of them is going to need a pencil."

That was Hammer-head in the clouds, feet on the ground. He thought of basics, of important, everyday things.

Pencils? I mean, we're into big history here, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the man who overthrew the czars who defeated Napoleon who succeeded the Sun King and the rest, and what is Hammer thinking about? Pencils!

Hammer went to Germany, where he met with the executives of the Eberhard-Faber Company. He took a group of them back to Russia, where they set up a pencil factory. Hammer made every pencil in the Soviet Union.

By the time I met Hammer, which was decades later, he was on a first-name basis with the most powerful men in the world. He believed that personality could overcome anything, that a great man, by force of will, could straddle every divide-that's why he loved Lenin as much as he loved Reagan. Hammer was the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. This was typical of his luck and his life: The company was not meant to make money at all. He founded it as a tax shelter in the 1960s. Then, a foreman sank a tax shelter drill into an actual oil bed off California, and the old man was rich all over again. The first well came in when he was sixty-one. He was living in LA. Of course, I knew all about him. He was one of the grand old men of American business, and I was fascinated by him.

One day, I got a call from a movie executive who had taken a job with Hammer. He had decided to make movies, mostly about himself. The executive asked if I wanted to help produce a TV special about Dr. Hammer's upcoming cultural tour of the Soviet Union. For me it was less an opportunity to make a television show than a chance to meet and work with and learn from one of the great machers. No matter your age, you never stop looking for teachers. "No," I said, "I'm not interested in a one-time project with Armand Hammer, but I might consider an exclusive deal to cover all such cultural exchanges."

Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Hammer. He said, "Hey, kid, get over here, let's talk."

I went to meet Hammer at his office in Beverly Hills. He was a small and steely man, with a helmet of silver hair and horn-rimmed glasses. There was mischief in his eyes. He said he wanted to be where the action was. He was always in jump position. In him, I saw big deals and fun. In me, he saw himself as a kid. We had the same sensibility, we rhymed. So we called our lawyer-we had the same lawyer-and told him to draft an agreement. Just like that, we were partners.

I loved to listen to him talk. My stories were about the Bronx, the Air Force, Elvis, the Colonel, Zeppelin, Sinatra. His were about the Communist Party, Trotsky, Lenin, Brezhnev, Moscow in January, Nixon, and Reagan. We hatched plans, crazy ideas.

I remember a trip we made to China. There must have been a reason for this trip, but in truth Hammer just liked to go for the sake of going. Airports, cities, languages-that was his thing. We spent the night on the plane, engines humming, the world black outside the window. Then Beijing came into view, a sea of lights. We were met on the tarmac by bands and diplomats. Armand was the main event wherever he happened to be. The Chinese had a manifest. It listed the dozens of people in our group. Because I was Armand's partner-in America we were Weintraub-Hammer, in the rest of the world we were Hammer-Weintraub-my name was second on the list, which, as far as the Chinese were concerned, made me something like a vice president.

Though we had been up for hours, we had no time to rest or shower and were instead hurried by motorcade to a dinner at the people's palace. This was the 1980s, not long after Nixon opened China to the West. There was still something mysterious and exotic about the country, the squat buildings and shrines, the sea of faces, the narrow lanes. It was as if we had passed through the looking glass. The party was held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where we sat around an enormous table. Hundreds of waiters were coming and going. Ritual governed the slightest gesture.

Hammer occupied the seat of honor, between the premier of the nation and the chairman of the country. I was second in importance, also seated between high officials. There was a lot of eating, talking, drinking. This was followed by the toasts. They came one after another, as dignitary after dignitary raised his glass and spoke about the generosity of Dr. Hammer. At one point, I leaned over and looked at Armand to see how he was taking all this. His chin rested on his chest and his horn-rimmed glasses had slid down nose. He was asleep.

Then a little man at the end of the table raised a glass and said, "And now, we honor our other fine and honorable guest, Hollywood movie man and maker of the great film E.T., Mr. Jerry Weintraub. Everyone applauded. Then the little man said, "Now Mr. Jerry Weintraub, please to stand and say a few words."

I stood, blushing, nodding through the applause. I tried to say no, no, I did not make E.T., but everyone seemed so happy with me, it felt wrong to disappoint them. In the end, I gave in and signed all their stills from E.T.

We spent the rest of the trip in meetings with officials. Hammer, having finally gotten some sleep, was exploding with energy, shaking hands, talking, making deals, which, to him, was the same as making friends.

Hammer was unpredictable and fun. As I said, he wanted to be where the action was. I'll give you an example. During Jimmy Carter's presidency, George H. W. Bush scheduled a reception for Deng Xiaoping, a member of China's ruling Politburo, in the course of his first visit to the United States. It was a big deal. Deng Xiaoping made only three stops when he was in the country. He went to Washington for a state dinner at the White House, he went to California to visit Disneyland, he went to Texas for a dinner with George Bush. The Chinese loved Bush-he had been the American representative in the formative years after Nixon's first visit-and they wanted to let the world know how much they valued George Bush, and how important he was. Ronald Reagan took notice of the dinner, and, in my opinion, it was a factor a few years later when Reagan picked George Bush to be his running mate. The dinner would be held in Houston, Bush's hometown. Bush told me about the dinner and asked if I wanted to invite anyone and so forth.

As soon as Hammer heard about this the calls started. He had tried to get on the list for the state dinner, but was rejected by the State Department. There were several reasons, chief among them his long relationship with the Russians. We were, after all, trying to take advantage of the rivalry between the Russians and the Chinese. After the White House turned him down, Hammer focused on the dinner in Houston. He had to be there.

But it was a no go, I couldn't do it, and Hammer finally gave up. Or so I thought. Then the night came. And Hammer showed up. No invitation? So what? There he was. I'm not sure how he got there, and do not remember the whole backstory, but Bush, who had known Hammer for years and was at that time a private citizen, said something like, "Of course, of course, he's here, let him in."

Bush introduced Hammer to Deng Xiaoping, who was thrilled to meet Hammer because he had known Lenin-so thrilled, in fact, that he insisted on being seated next to Hammer at the dinner. Everyone was sent scrambling. All the seats had to be rearranged. Hammer ended up next to Deng Xiaoping, and that's how the two of us got an invitation to visit Beijing at a time when private citizens didn't do so. And we went on a private jet, which was the only way Hammer, who was over eighty by then, would travel.

A few years later, I threw two parties at my house for Yitzhak Shamir because I really admired him. He was then prime minister of Israel. Shamir was a tough guy and a real hero. Hammer was at both parties, helping Shamir hit up the people at the dinners-forty heavyweights from LA-for money. He wanted us to drill for oil in Israel. I remember him sitting with his map, pointing to all the known fields in the region, saying, "Look, where we're sitting, there's got to be oil!" We had done surveys, tests, studies. We knew there was no oil, but he refused to believe us. He kept saying, "Gentleman, please, please, look where we're sitting! There's got to be oil."

Shamir was smart. He knew that in order to get to us, he had to get to Hammer, and to get to Hammer, he need only play on his vanity. So, at the end of dinner, the prime minister stood and said, "I would like to thank Dr. Hammer, who loves and understands Israel and is therefore going to help us drill for that oil that's just got to be there. I mean, look where we're sitting!"

Hammer, never shy of a spotlight, then said, "Uh, yes, Mr. Prime Minister. We will drill and the Jewish state will have its oil!"

Hammer went to each of us later, saying, "One million from you, one million from you, one million from you, and we find that oil."

When he came to me, I said, "Hey, Armand, I know a better way to get oil."

"What's that, wise guy?"

"Let's just sink a bit into the Saudi Pipeline."

I kicked in the money, though. It was always that way with Hammer. He was a very good salesman. (They never did find oil in Israel.)

Hammer became even more active as he got older. He wanted to go everywhere and see everything. His bags were packed, his plane was fueled, he was ready to travel with a change in the news. In the summer of 1982, while we were in the air on our way to South Korea, we got word that Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian premier, had died.

"Turn it around," Hammer told his pilot. "We're going to Moscow."

The pilot leaned on the stick, the plane banked steeply.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"We've got to be at that funeral," said Hammer. "It's where the action is!"

"I can't just go to Moscow like this," I said. "I don't have the clothes for it, for one thing."

"Look, Jerry," said Hammer, "history is not asking your permission. It's telling you. A man has died."

"Brezhnev was anti-Semitic," I said. "And I don't need to see him buried."

"He's been my friend forever," said Hammer. "I've got to be there."

"Fine," I said. "But I'm not going to the funeral."

"Don't worry," said Hammer. "I couldn't get you a ticket anyway."

We landed in Paris, where we were met by Soviet pilots, who flew Hammer's plane into Moscow. In those days, they did not let private jets fly into Russia, unless they were flown by Soviet pilots. I saw the vice president's plane on the runway in Moscow, Air Force Two, with the government crest on its side. "Look," said Hammer, "your friend is in town."

Hammer took a car to his apartment-he had houses and apartments all over the world-and I checked into a hotel. I called the U.S. Embassy and asked to talk to the vice president. Within a few seconds, Bush was on the phone. "What the heck are you doing here, Jerry?" he asked.