"I told you," I said. "I'm Jerry Weintraub."
He thought a moment, noodled on the piano, notes drifting across the room, then said, "Tell you what. There is a show in London called Canterbury Tales." It's in previews. Hot as a pistol. Goddamn, I want to stage that in New York. But so does every other producer on Broadway. You go to London and get me the rights to that show, and we'll produce it together. We'll be partners.
"We got a deal?" he asked.
"Hell, yes, we got a deal."
"And you are again…?"
"Jerry Weintraub."
"Okay, Jerry. Go get it."
Loesser said everything but "fetch."
I had a big career on Broadway later, and owned a stake in several theaters with Jimmy Nederlander, who ran one of the great organizations in the history of the business. His name is up there with the Shuberts. But this is how I started, in that office off Broadway, with Loesser calling for this trick: Go to London and snatch the prize from the jaws of a dozen hungry producers.
When I landed at Heathrow Airport, I went straight to a house in Chelsea, where I met Nevill Coghill and Martin Starkie, who produced and adapted the original production of this play, Canterbury Tales. I say "this play" because I did not know anything about it. I had heard of Chaucer but did not really know who he was. Maybe if instead of the Air Force I had gone to college… but, as I said, I did go, only my professors were Colonel Tom and Frank Sinatra, who offered neither a core curriculum nor lectures in medieval English poetry. My classes, which were various, included deportment ("Talking Straight With a Buzz On"), History ("The Rise and Fall of Dukes and Kings"), Business ("Don't Be a Sucker"), vocations ("Knowing What You Got, and Using It"), and philosophy ("I think therefore I dance").
I knocked on the door of the house. A beautiful-looking guy came out in tight white pants with no shirt. He was Coghill and Starkie's butler. His name was Bunky. He led me to a dining room, where lunch had been set out. The producers were waiting, proper, English, amused. Referring back to my class with Professor Sinatra ("Knowing What You Got, and Using It"), and considering myself a not terrible-looking kid, I switched gears, turned a little flirty. We talked about the play. As I said, I did not know who Chaucer was, but the show had been a hit in previews and Loesser said get it, so here I was, drinking Perrier and asking the guys to pass the dill. I could not have the show, they said. Not yet, anyway. They were still making up their mind, had to meet with everyone, and so forth. But I persisted. I went over there every day for a week, pitching, selling. We got to be friends. They invited me to go with them to the opening night, which was a real honor.
We got to the theater. Freyer, Carr, Harris, Merrick, Bloomgarden-all the Broadway big shots were there, looking to acquire rights to the show. They were craning in their seats, looking over, perplexed, trying to figure, Who is the kid with Coghill and Starkie? Is that Jerry Weintraub? Doesn't he work with Elvis? What the hell is he doing here? The lights go down, the curtain comes up on a road in the country, a cart filled with travelers, each itching to tell his or her tale. The crowd is silent, rapt, but I'm not hearing it, not seeing it. I'm thinking about Frank Loesser: "Go to London, get the rights, we'll produce it together. We'll be partners." I'm with these guys, have them to myself… but the show will end, the party will start, the drinks and congratulations and Broadway hotshots, and I will miss my chance.
I have to act now!
I leaned over and whispered to Starkie-we're in tuxedos-"I'm sorry, Martin, and don't want to alarm you, but a pain is shooting up my left arm and into my chest."
Starkie looks over, thinks a moment, takes my wrist and says, "We're getting out of here right away. We're going to the hospital."
"No," I whispered. "I can't take you out of your opening night."
"To hell with opening night," said Starkie. "You're sick!"
Starkie and Coghill led me out of the seat and rushed me up the aisle, the whispers trailing us, out the door. I was slumped in back of the car. Martin was feeling my head, taking my pulse. We go by the Hilton. "Look," I said, "if I can just get in there, sit down, have a glass of water, maybe I'll feel better."
We found a couch in the lobby. These guys were all over me, pale with fear, certain I was going to die.
"How do you feel?" asked Coghill.
"A little better," I said.
"What can we do for you?" asked Starkie.
"Well," I said, "I really want to buy the show."
"Will that make you feel better?" asked Coghill.
"Oh, Nevill," said Starkie, "just sell him the goddamn show."
I bought it for ten grand. (My check bounced, but that's another story.) With the terms agreed on, my condition improved greatly. The play was over by then. We went to the cast party. Everyone was there. Coghill stood on a chair and made the announcement. "The American rights to Canterbury Tales have been sold to Jerry Weintraub." All those Broadway producers stood dumbstruck, couldn't figure it out. Neither could Loesser. He kept saying "How, Jerry, how?"
I'm not saying you should fake a heart attack every time, only in a pinch.
As I said, in those years, I wanted to acquire, perfect, produce, and sell tickets to everything that moved me. It was not just about money. It was about love. I wanted to share whatever electrified me. In 1976, I was, for example, mesmerized by Dorothy Hamill, the perky, young, short-haired figure skater dominating the Winter Olympics. She won the gold medal, but it was her charm and style that made her a sensation. I was glued to my television. I did not want to miss a minute of it.
One afternoon, I was talking to Roone Arledge, who was producing the Olympics for ABC. I said, "Look, Roone, if you happen to talk to Dorothy Hamill, ask if she needs someone to advise her. This all happened so fast. She must be overwhelmed."
Ten minutes later-boom!-the phone rings. It's Dorothy. She asks to meet right after the closing ceremonies. The whole world wants her, and she does not know what to do. We met in the lobby of a hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. We talked for hours. She had a difficult family situation. She was eighteen, and, like most of the kids who skate-because they practice twenty-four hours, seven days a week-she had not had much interaction with the outside world. She was very childlike. The only people she knew had either staked their careers on her success, or staked their careers on someone other than her being successful. She asked me to manage her, take care of her, and so forth. I made several moves right from the hotel lobby. I called the guys that ran Bristol-Myers, for example, and made a deal for a shampoo called Short N' Sassy. Because that was Dorothy. I called ABC and made a deal for eight Dorothy Hamill TV specials. Within a few hours, this girl who had never seen a nickel in all her life was a multimillionaire. It was fantastic. She came to California after that and lived with me and Jane. My friends were her friends, and she married Dean Martin's son, Dino Jr.
Okay, here's my favorite of the crazy, why-the-hell-not-try-it stories of those years. In the summer of 1972, I got hooked on the World Championship of Chess, which was being shown on PBS and ABC Wide World of Sports, with Bobby Fischer, the American, playing Boris Spassky, the Russian, in Reykjavik, Iceland. The men crouched over the chessboard in utter silence for hours on end. I do not know a thing about chess, have never played it and don't want to-I was relying on the PBS commentator, who moved pieces around a board to explain the game-but I was transfixed by Fischer. He was tall, with blue eyes and wild hair and the slow, graceful motions of a hypnotist or magician. He sat stone still, radiating a weird charisma. It came right through the set. I rushed home every night to have dinner in front of the TV. You could not get me out of the house. I was mesmerized.
Jane finally confronted me.
"What is wrong with you?" she asked. "Have you gone nuts?"
"What are you talking about?" I said.
"You. You sit in front of the TV for hours every night, watching a chess match. You don't know anything about chess, not even the rules."
"I'm not watching a chess match," I told her. "I'm watching this guy Bobby Fischer."
"Why?"
"Because he's a star."
"You're insane."
"Oh, really," I said. "I will show you how insane I am."
I picked up the phone and called Icelandic Airways. I asked when they would next fly to Reykjavik.
Nine o'clock tonight.
"Good," I said. "I want a seat."
I got on a plane to Reykjavik. There was a young guy in the next seat. We started talking. He was a priest and also a grand master at chess. He knew everyone in that world, and had actually played Fischer and Spassky. He asked why I was going to Iceland. I told him I was going to meet Bobby Fischer.
"You're going to meet Bobby Fischer?" he said, surprised. "Do you have an appointment with him?"
"No," I said. "I'm just going to track him down."
"Oh, no," he said. "You can't just track down Bobby Fischer. He doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't go anywhere. He is locked off from the world."
"What? Why?"
"Because he's crazy."
It was the first indication that the goal I had set for myself-get in touch with Fischer, talk to him, pitch him, sign him, make him rich, and take a percentage-would be more difficult to achieve than I had thought.
I reserved a room in the hotel where most of the chess people were staying. The lobby was filled with tables, each with a chessboard, where grand masters were locked in combat. After each move, they hit a button to freeze the clock. Click. Click. Click. It made a kind of rhythm. A group of reporters, mostly Americans, were taking notes in the corner, searching for a new angle on the story. Spassky wouldn't talk to them because the KGB had forbidden it. Fischer wouldn't talk to them because he was nuts. When I went to the desk to check in, one of the reporters recognized me. He came over with a microphone; I was just off the plane, burned out and groggy, and now I was on the radio.
"Are you Jerry Weintraub?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"You represent rock acts, Elvis Presley, John Denver. What are you doing in Reykjavik?"
"I'm here to see Bobby Fischer."
"Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Fischer?"
"No, I don't have an appointment. I don't even know him."
"Then how are you going to see him? He won't see anybody."
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll see him."
"Do you play chess?" the reporter asked. "Are you a chess fanatic?"
"I don't even know how to play chess," I told him. "I don't know anything about it."
"Then why are you here?"
"I'm here because I've been watching Bobby Fischer on TV," I said. "I am glued to the set every night. He's like Mick Jagger. He's like Elvis. The man is a rock star."
I got my key and went to my room-it was the only hotel in Iceland, the rooms were little white cubes-climbed into bed, and passed out. A long, dreamless, time-zone-crossing sleep. The phone rang. I had the receiver to my ear before I had woken up.
Where the hell am I, half asleep in this tiny white square?
"Yeah?"
"Is this Jerry Weintraub?"
The voice was a spooky, otherworldly whisper.
"Yeah, who is this?"
"Do you really think I'm like Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger?"
"How do you know I said that?"
"I heard you on the radio."
He paused, then said, "We need to meet."
"Great," I said. "Where, when?"
I was whispering, too, acting as if someone were listening, as if the CIA had bugged the phones.
"Come to the sixth floor," he said, "take the steps, stand by the door. I will be waiting for you."
I scuttled down the stairs like a crab. (Am I being followed?) When I crossed the landing and stepped through the door, I was standing next to Bobby Fischer. The whole world was trying to talk to this genius recluse, this Howard Hughes. I mean, legions of reporters were camped in the lobby with this one goal in mind, and here I was, having pulled it off without trying, in less than a day. (What can I say? The Lord takes care of me.) Fischer motioned me to follow him. He took me down the hall to his room. It was disgusting. There were half-eaten cheeseburgers, old pizzas, boxes of shit, Coke cans, crap lying everywhere. And the smell! My God, the smell. Here and there, on the floor, on the bed, Playboy magazines were opened, and I am sure he'd been masturbating all over the centerfolds. Fischer was standing in the middle of all this, with an air of "Look what time hath wrought."
"I have no money," he whispered.
"What do you mean, you have no money?"
"The Chess Federation won't give me any money," he said. "I have nothing."
"No problem," I said. "We'll get you some money."
He looked at me. His eyes were intelligent and calculating, but their setting (his narrow, ascetic face, the face of a mystic or monk) was not reassuring.
"You can get me money?" he asked.
"Of course I can get you money," I told him.
"Good," he said. "I want to go bowling."
"Then go bowling," I said.
"I can't afford it," he said. "I have no money."
"I'll figure it out," I said. "By tomorrow, there will be a deal for you."
"Then can we go bowling?"
"Yes," I said. "Then we can go bowling."
He asked me to go with him to the match. So the next night, when Fischer climbed out of his car, with the journalists clamoring for a quote, I was the corner man at his side. I sat behind him as he played. A few days before, I had been watching this scene on television. Now here I was, in the background of the establishing shot. I had gone inside the screen. I played off Fischer, reacted to his every move.
I looked annoyed when he looked annoyed. I looked amused when he looked amused. We drove back to the hotel, huddled together in confab.
Then I took him bowling.
"How are we going to make money?" he asked.
"I've been thinking about that," I told him. "And I have a great idea. I'm going to call my friends in LA. You're going to make a record."
He looked at me like I was nuts. Being looked at like you're crazy by a crazy man is a singular experience. "What do you mean a record?" he asked. "I can't even carry a tune."
"No, you're not going to sing," I told him. "You're going to teach."
"Teach what?"
"The record is going to be Bobby Fischer teaching a six-year-old kid, who knows nothing about chess, how to play. And the cover will be a chess board. And with it, we will include chess pieces in a plastic bag. We'll sell it at Christmas. It will be huge."
I called Warner Music the next day. I sold the deal over the phone, just like that. First of all, the record executives loved the idea of getting a phone call from Reykjavik. They loved the idea of being in business with Fischer, too. He was the mystery man of the moment, a mercurial genius, all over television but nowhere at all. What's more, it was a great idea. The label gave us a lot of money for it. I don't remember the figure, but it was a primary number followed by many zeros. The contract came, Fischer signed it. Then I had another idea, which appeared to me in a vision: Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer playing a winner-take-all match in a glass box on a casino floor in Las Vegas. Could you imagine the scene, the bookmakers and high rollers and celebrities? We would sell it as a heavyweight title fight, the World Championship of Chess. For a minute, I even thought it would happen. I did not yet understand Fischer, and how nutty he was.
He flipped out in Reykjavik a few nights later. This was in the arena in the middle of a match. He was sitting there, head in his palm, drumming his fingers on his cranium. Every few seconds, he looked at the ceiling and shuddered. He leaped to his feet as if he'd been burned and ran across the floor. He went through the crowd as if he were being chased. Then he was gone, the match forfeited. There was a moment of silence, then you heard his voice, a guttural shout with a hint of Brooklyn, calling, "Jerry Weintraub! Come on, Jerry Weintraub, we're getting out of here."
I followed him into the backseat of the car. We started to drive. "What the hell just happened?" I asked.
"Did you hear it?" he said. "Tell me the truth, did you hear it?"
"Hear what?"
"The whirring, the whirring."
Then he put his fingers to his temples, as if he was holding the dark matter of his brain from spilling across the backseat, and yelled, "I CAN'T THINK!"
When we got back to the hotel, I made some calls, asked around. At first, I did not believe him. He was really crazy, but, you know, he was right-there was whirring in the ceiling. It was the ABC camera, filming for Wide World of Sports. Fischer said he could not play until it was taken out, removed.
"No more whirring. No more whirring. No more whirring."
I spoke to Roone Arledge, tried to work something out. Then I came back to Bobby, and said, "Look, Bobby, if you got paid, if there was money on the table, do you think the whirring might go away?"
He stopped pacing and looked at me. At such times, the nuttiness and confusion went out of his eyes, and, for a moment, he was sober and shrewd.
"Sure," he said, "it might go away."
"Okay," I said, "let me see what I can do."
I spoke to producers at ABC, gave them the rundown, then came back to Fischer with twenty-five thousand dollars. After that, he did not hear the whirring. He won the tournament, but the incident was a prelude, a glimpse into his soul, which was a morass, brilliance knotted with neurosis, paranoia, and fear. The guy was really something.
He moved to LA. He was brilliant at chess, but lost in the world. He bailed out of the record deal and everything else. He did not trust the businessmen, he did not trust me, he did not trust anyone. There were voices in his head. He wandered, tortured by the whirring of imaginary machines. He let himself go, typical crazy man stuff. He was a target for charismatics, a question mark in search of an easy answer. He got hooked up with a cult in the Valley, the Assembly Church of God. He fell under the sway of a high-ranking member, Dr. Stanley Rader, a total con man. Rader was an accountant from New York who had seen the light. He had been Jewish before he was baptized into the sect-in a bathtub in the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong -by the church's founder, Herbert Armstrong. This is the craziness Fischer fell into after Iceland. In this way, everything we planned, everything he could have been and done, went away. He ended up living in the basement of the church and became utterly, totally, and completely insane.
The Death of the King
Elvis is dead."
I was in Malibu, the morning of August 16, 1977, when the call came. It was Roone Arledge, who had just become the head of ABC News. His people had picked up the 911 call on a police scanner. "What are you talking about?" I asked.
"We just got the news," he said. "Elvis Presley is dead."
I was supposed to meet Elvis in Portland, Maine, the next day. We were going on tour. He had been at home, in Graceland, getting in shape for the road. He had played racquetball on his private court, sat at his piano, sung "Unchained Melody," gone upstairs, and died-they found him several hours later on the floor of his bathroom.
My second line rang. It was Joe Esposito, Elvis's right hand. He was calling from the bathroom in Graceland. He was standing next to Elvis's body, waiting for the police to arrive. He said, "Jerry, we need you here right away."
I got the next plane to Memphis. I stared out the window. The sun hung over the clouds like a fiery eye. Celebrity-that's what killed Elvis. Fame had shut him out of the world. He couldn't go to dinner. He couldn't take his kid to the park. He was always inside. He went to bed at 3:00 A.M. and woke up at noon. His life was abnormal. He dressed different and looked different. He was the first real rock star, a freak in this regard. There was no one like him. Sinatra had New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Presley had all that plus Lafayette, Louisiana, and Knoxville, Tennessee. He could draw a hundred thousand people to a field in Macon, Georgia. His stardom was unprecedented. It isolated him until his isolation became intolerable. The very talent that connected him to millions kept him sequestered. Yes, he had friends, the Memphis mafia, guys he grew up with, but it wasn't enough. He treated his condition with drugs. When you're a celebrity, if you want a pill, you will have it. He was really a tragic figure.
I took a car to Graceland. What a scene. The news had hit the streets before it was broadcast. People poured out of houses and stood on the grass median strips with tears streaming down their faces. The city was mourning. My car slowed as it approached the mansion. Thousands of people had gathered in front of the gates, their faces reflecting the strobe of police lights. I saw children waving American flags, babies held aloft by mothers, Teamsters weeping without shame, hawkers selling T-shirts and locks of hair. I went into the house, a simple suburban home that Elvis had done up. The Stamps Quartet was singing in the living room, shouting and praising the Lord. Gospel was the soundtrack of the day. The house was packed with hangers-on and celebrities. I saw Ann-Margret, in a bodysuit, her face streaked with mascara. I saw the preacher Rex Humbard waving his arms and talking about the short-term occupancy of man, who rents on this earth and does not own.