When I Stop Talking You (20 page)

One day, years ago, when I arrived at work, I spotted a Hasidic Jew in the hall outside my office. These are the guys in the black coats with side curls and beards. This particular rabbi was a Lubavitcher, part of the group from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who believe their rabbi, Menacham Mendel Schneerson, might be the Messiah. The followers of the Rebbe are devout. Rather than merely study and pray, they want to heal the world, do good work, invest even the smallest errand with a kind of godliness. I don't know all the particulars, but it's hardcore Hebrew, whiskey straight from the jug, no mixers, no water, radically different from my own casual American Judaism, which is practiced in a synagogue designed by modern architects.

I ducked in a side door unseen, walked into my office, got behind my desk, went to work. My secretary came in with the call sheet. As I looked it over, she said, "Do you know there's a rabbi outside waiting to see you?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm aware."

"Well," she asked, "do you want to talk to him?"

"No," I said, "I don't."

"What should I tell him?" she asked.

"Here," I said. "Hand me a pen."

I wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars.

"Give him this," I said. "Tell him I'm too busy to talk, but take the money and good luck."

I would gladly have paid ten grand just to avoid one of those maddeningly circular discussions you have with rabbis.

A few minutes later, my secretary came back. "He said he doesn't want the check," she told me.

"He doesn't want the check?"

"No," she said. "He needs to talk to you, and claims it has nothing to do with money."

Now I was interested, genuinely curious. I mean, those guys never turn down a check! "All right," I said. "Send him in."

He came in and sat down. I got a look at him. I had only noticed his clothes, but now I could see that his face was intelligent and warm. (This, as I then learned, was Schlomo Cunin, who is still my rabbi.) It tells you about judging from a distance, based on generalities. I mean, there are the clothes, then there is the face; there is the face, then there is the brain; there is the brain, then there is the soul. He had a good soul. We're friends to this day. He brings me a fresh challah every week.

"What's going on?" I asked. "You don't want my check?"

"I don't need the check," he said. "I need help. I've got a problem. The check won't fix my problem."

"What's your problem?"

"I owe eight million dollars."

"You owe what?" I said. "If you think I'm going to give you eight million dollars, you're crazy."

"We don't want money," he said. "We want you to help us solve our problems."

"What do you mean, 'We'?" Who sent you here?"

"The Rebbe."

"Who's the Rebbe?"

"Menacham Mendel Schneerson. The Hasid. The leader of the Lubavitchers. He said, 'Go see this Weintraub. He is going to help us. He is going to do the work of God.' "

I sat there, dumbstruck. I looked into my coffee cup. Half full. I looked out the window. The streets were swollen with morning traffic. "It's too early for this," I said. "I'm not going to do what you want me to do, whatever that is. Just take the check and go."

He left without the check.

Time passed. Hammer and I were planning a trip. A few days before we left, I got a call from George Bush. He was then vice president. He wanted to talk. We met for lunch.

"I understand you and your friend Armand are going to Moscow," he said.

"Yeah," I said, "we're leaving in a couple of days."

"Good," said Bush. "I want you to look up a friend of mine. His name is Demachev. He is going to be important. I think you will find him interesting."

This was in the 1980s. Thousands of Jewish refuseniks were trapped in Russia. These were critics of the regime who had spoken too volubly or too well. I had gotten a list of the names and addresses of the most prominent. I planned to visit them all. This was on my mind as I planned the trip.

I went home, packed, got into bed. We were leaving early in the morning. I turned on the TV and flipped around. I happened on a cable access channel I'd never noticed before. The picture was grainy and washed out, a synagogue seen through a stationary camera. The hall was filled with hundreds and hundreds of men in black coats and hats listening with rapt attention to a bearded man. He was speaking Yiddish, his words translated into English in subtitles on the bottom of the screen. I suddenly realized that this was the Rebbe of Crown Heights. Next I realized he was talking about me. I'm not exactly sure how I realized this. He never mentioned my name or anything like that, it was just clear. "An important trip will take place tomorrow," he said. "A Jewish businessman will travel to Russia. He plans to carry the names of refuseniks in his lapel pocket. Do not do this, sir. Do not put yourself in danger. We will take care of the refuseniks. You do your business, then come home. You are needed for more important work here."

We went to Russia. I had my meetings, met with the Russian official, spoke with the refuseniks, then flew back. When we landed at LAX, I had a pain. It was terrible. I could not stand to walk off the plane. I was rushed to the hospital. Nurses and doctors stood above me, talking, poking me with needles. I was being rushed into surgery. Then, suddenly, the Hasidic Jew who I had seen in the hall outside my office was over me.

I looked up, blinked hard, looked again. I couldn't believe it.

"Rabbi?" I asked.

He put a dollar bill in my hand and said, "The Rebbe sent me. He says everything is going to be fine. He needs you here to do God's work."

As they rolled me into the operating room, I called back, almost screaming, "Yes, Rabbi, yes! If you get me out of here, I will do God's work!"

Later, in the recovery room, I found the dollar bill folded on the side table. I thought a lot about the Rebbe, faith, God. I am not an obvious target for the Lubavitchers. I am not religious. I don't obey all the laws. I go to synagogue twice a year. Pork and lobster came into my world as soon as my grandparents left it. I am not strictly observant, but I felt an intense spiritual connection to the Rebbe. The things that happened-that cable access show, the sudden illness, the dollar bill-were unexplainable, and I did not want them explained. I treasured the mystery.

Soon after I was released from the hospital, I flew to New York to meet the Rebbe. I drove to a shul on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. Vivid. That's the best word I have for the scene inside. Hundreds of Hasidic Jews, a sea of black coats, rocking as they prayed, lips moving, mouths filled with the holy words, minds crowded with visions of God. There were at least a thousand people in the room. When the Rebbe came in-I was waiting for him near the Torah, as had been arranged-the people in the sanctuary, three or four thousand of them crowded in like sardines, stopped talking, praying, breathing. Every eye was on this man with a gray beard and sparkling blue eyes. The crowd opened like the Red Sea as he walked through the room.

He came near me. He was a little man, but also the biggest man I have ever seen. He was small, but he was huge. And he had a face, well, it was as close to the face of God as you are likely to see on earth. That was my sense, my dazzled, knocked-out sense. It was expressive and warm and gave off a glow. You felt wide awake in his presence, but also calm. I think that's a good way to describe it: also calm. He came up to me and took my hand, and his hand was warm. He was a brilliant man, he had attended the Sorbonne in Paris, and was a terrific writer, and spoke about a dozen languages. But he was simple, too, and earthy, all about the eternal and important, the only things that matter and last. When he spoke to me, everything was still, no one moved-I mean, these were people who jumped up and down and yelled and prayed fiercely, but not when the Rebbe was speaking. I do not remember everything he said, but the particulars were less important than the general sense, the impression he gave-that he was here and I was here and no one has to be alone. Then we stood side by side and read from the Torah.

The Rebbe comforted me about life and death. He made me see that my general, uneducated sense of the world-that there is a God, an order, a plan-was not superstition or error, but correct, built into me for a reason, as my heart or lungs are built into me. Without it, I could not live. Which is why you need more than material things. I mean, yes, the material can be nice. I like having what I have, but I know none of it is mine, that we are only renters on earth, that even our bodies belong to someone else. Which is why you hunger even when you've had your fill. Life will never satisfy if it is experienced only as the rise and fall of commerce. You need to see yourself as part of something larger that never dies.

When I left that day, I was a different person.

I brought my father and brother to meet the Rebbe. I had been talking a lot about my experience, and my father was giving me that skeptical look of his. "So, Jerry, tell me, how does your friend the Rebbe think we should proceed?" The coats and hats, the beards-it was not his thing. We went in the afternoon. My father was not doing well. He was having trouble with his back and was bent over in pain. I helped him up to the altar. The Rebbe reached out and took his hand. I looked at my father's face. He was transfixed, transfigured. He and the Rebbe were locked in a moment. Something was happening. It was beyond me-it was just between them. I didn't understand it. When we left the shul, my father was standing straight, without pain. I'm not talking about a Rex Humbard laying on of hands, or Oral Roberts healing on TV. I'm talking about something subtle and real-about a man who can lift you up and change your mind. We went in crooked, but came out straight.

I started helping the Lubavitchers, doing what I promised to do as I was wheeled into surgery. It began thirty years ago, when neo-Nazis burned down the Chabad house in Westwood. To raise the money to rebuild-because the best answer is a new shul-I decided to do one thing I knew I was good at: put on a show. It was their idea, but I knew how to put it together. We've staged a Chabad telethon every year since, raising millions of dollars, with appearances by, among others, Bob Dylan. The telethon has earned a cult following. Groups of comedians gather in living rooms each fall to watch me dance with the rabbis. I raise my hands and kick my feet, feeling in no way self-conscious or embarrassed. I might be dancing in front of the cameras, but I am dancing with the Rebbe.

The Rebbe left this earth in 1994. Thousands of worshippers filled Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn and mourned. Who was this man, the same as the rest of us, but entirely different? Was he a prophet, was he the Messiah, was he a Hasid? I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, either. I don't think it's our business to know. I do think he was as godly as any man who ever lived. And I know what he gave to me when he was here, that tremendous sense of peace and solace, and what he gives me still, even though he is gone. When I am troubled, I talk to him, and his face is there.

Every small man wants to be a big man, every big man wants to be a king. It's human nature. By the eighties, having achieved many of my goals, I began to dream the dream of all producers-total control. I wanted to cross the lot in the manner of Zanuck. I wanted to sit in the big seat and make the wheels go round. I wanted to run a studio. It started in 1984, when Kirk Kerkorian, the industrialist and one of the wealthiest men in LA, purchased United Artists, a studio that traced its lineage to Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, its founders. The studio had fallen on hard times and Kerkorian said I was the man who could fix it. I was named to head United Artists that summer.

It was not an easy decision for me. It meant joining the establishment, going legit. I was the rough rider who dons the badge to clean up the town, for what is an independent producer if not a kind of cowboy, out on his own? In the end, though, it seemed like an opportunity I could not pass up. By this time, I had made every kind of movie and every kind of hit. I was ready for something new. The problem was not my decision. It was my boss: Kirk Kerkorian. Simply put, we had the same dream: total control. As I hired staff and began planning projects, I realized he had given me the title but not the job. A title without a job is the worst of all worlds: it means taking all the blame while getting none of the credit and having none of the fun. I began to plan my exit soon after I arrived.

Due to my contract, I left United Artists with a tremendous severance. I had invested thirty million dollars, but I left with a lot more. This became the story, as it made me look like a genius. Jerry Weintraub worked at United Artists for less than three months and walked off with tens of millions. It was portrayed as a master move, as if I had taken the job with the sole intention of getting out with all I could carry. As usual, the reporters missed the real story, which was my terrible sense of failure and lost opportunity. I was heartbroken. It was not money that I wanted-I had lots of money-it was the chance to run a studio. And, in fact, the little taste I did have made me crave the challenge even more. It became an obsession.

In 1985, I formed my own film company, the Weintraub Entertainment Group. I first went about raising money, because what is a trip to Vegas without a bankroll? In other words, you need to spend money to make money, and I wanted to start with the biggest roll in town. The dream of building your own movie studio is an old dream. The path is piled with corpses. One reason is financing. If you don't have enough money to start with, you do not have enough money to fail. Two or three clunkers will put you out of business. I wanted to be able to weather a long dry spell-only then, I figured, would I have time to reach critical mass, the point at which a business becomes self-sustaining. I raised some money and put in some more of my own.

I rented offices in West Hollywood. The rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows through which you could see hills and cars moving in the canyons. There was art on the walls, shag on the floors, Perrier in the refrigerators, no expense spared. People judge on first sight, so make those surfaces shine. If you want to be seen as a major, look like a major. As a great man said, perception is reality. As another great man said, You grow into the suit. As a philosophy this means operating on confidence, in the belief that something will happen, that the trick will work, that the backup will arrive with the heavy guns. It's how America has operated from the beginning.

I hired a staff, recruiting talent from studios and agencies all over town. What these people had in common was a belief that we could accomplish what had not been accomplished in a generation-the creation of a new factory. These were, for the most part, established executives, men and women with families and careers behind them, meaning they were experienced and knowledgeable, and also meaning they were expensive. I suddenly found myself mired in a sea of health plans and pension benefits. In this way, we accrued a great mountain of debt before the first writer was contracted or the first scene was filmed. If I had known what to look for, I would have seen it in the early balance sheets-money going out (left pocket) versus money coming in (right pocket)-a terrible premonition

The company existed for less than four years. In this time, we made a handful of movies-these were distributed by Columbia Pictures-including Fresh Horses, The Big Blue, and My Stepmother Is an Alien. I promoted these films every way I knew how-George Bush, then president, was at the premiere of My Stepmother Is an Alien, generating a shower of publicity. But the trouble was evident early on. What makes a major a major is its ability to float a sea of debt. This is needed less to make movies than to weather flops. You need enough not merely to survive one dud, but to survive a season of duds, a worst-case scenario not at all infrequent in the business. In the case of a small studio, even one that has been well financed, the margin of error shrinks. With each flop, debt accrues and pressure grows. Each new movie is more important than the last. As the stakes increase, so does the fear, until the mood in the office and on the sets becomes intolerable, exactly the wrong atmosphere in which to make a movie. There was bickering and second-guessing; some people quit, others were fired. Part of it had to do with bad luck-a movie opened at the wrong time, it rained that weekend, and so forth-part of it had to do with bad planning. If I had known two years would go by without a hit, I might have made fewer films-but most of the problems resulted from a basic flaw: The movies were not very good.

This, in turn, resulted from a still more fundamental error, a flaw in the very conception of the business: I loved making movies, which resulted in hits, which increased my love, which sparked a desire for control, which caused me to start my own studio, which-and here is the paradox-took me out of the movie business and put me into the company running business, occupied not with writers and artists, but with health-care plans, office rivalries, and infighting. I had, in a sense, promoted myself right out of the job I always wanted, which was telling stories, producing. I lost touch with the films, which were now being made for me instead of by me and thus were no longer Jerry Weintraub Productions.

Of course, if the movies had been good, if they had drawn audiences, if they'd had kids doing the crane kick in the parking lot, everything else would have taken care of itself. But the movies were not good. I realized this little by little, then in a great rush. Success had caused me to cease doing what made me successful. More important, it had caused me to stop doing what I loved. I recall this period reluctantly. People say you learn more from failure than success; it's true. From this period, which runs like a ridgeline between my middle years and my true adulthood, I learned the great lesson of business: If you find something you love, keep doing it.

A business fails like a levee or a body fails. Everything is okay until it's not. There is a break, a wall caves in, the flood rushes through. For us, this meant debts we could not repay, movies we could not finish, bonds we could not redeem. I take full responsibility for this. It was all my fault. Did I feel sorry for myself? You bet. I was drowning in self-pity. It felt like I was watching this beautiful edifice I had constructed over the course of a career wash away at the first high tide. The banks were involved, the creditors were involved, the government was involved. When it was over, the company was gone. I was fifty years old. I had lost $30 million.

When the pressure was too great, I got on a plane and went to Florida. I wanted to be out on the water, the horizon ringed by water, the sun on the water and a line taut with a big fish. My mind was reeling. I did not know what to do, or where I would go next.

Luckily for me, I had a father, and he was a piece of steel. I went to see him. I was in tears, a grown man crying real tears. I said, "Oh, Pop, you got to help me. Look what happened. Look how hard I have fallen. Look how much I lost. I have troubles, real troubles. I've made such a failure, Pop, such a terrible failure."

Here's what he said: "You've got troubles, kid? Real troubles? Well, I tell you what. Put your troubles in a sack. Bring them to the end of the road, where you will find a lady in a store filled with sacks. She will take your sack of troubles and, in return, let you leave with any sack you want."

In the end, I was saved by my friends, all the people I had known and worked with over the years. Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Steve Ross, Bob Daly, who was the co-CEO of Warner Bros., Terry Semel, Sid Sheinberg, who was the chief operating officer of MCA, Lew Wasserman, the people who ran the studios, they all backed me up and supported me. It was not just that they offered me jobs and opportunities, which they did, but that they showed confidence in me, and were certain I would make it all the way back. I especially remember a conversation I had with Steve Ross, who was the CEO of Warner Communications. "What are you worrying about?" he said. "You are a talented guy. That talent did not go away. The company went away? So what! Companies always go away. They're a dime a dozen. It's talent that counts!"

I was soon back in business, working from a bungalow on the lot at Warner's, where I had signed a contract to make movies. I don't care if you get flattened a thousand times. As long as you get up that thousand-and-first time, you win. As Hemingway said, "You can never tell the quality of a bullfighter until that bullfighter has been gored."