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Diller shuttles on his Gulfstream jet between coasts and half a dozen offices and residences, including a beach house near Malibu, another home 20 miles away in Beverly Hills and a suite at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. "I am business-orphaned," he laments. He skis in Utah, sails in the Bahamas and shows up regularly on the A-list party circuit. On his recent social calendar: a birthday party for Yoko Ono thrown by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner and a Manhattan gala hosted by gossipmeister Liz Smith. For more down-to-earth recreation, Diller enjoys hiking in the woods around Furstenberg's Connecticut country home and devouring "cheesy novels," which he claims he is able to read without his Hollywood hat on. "It will only dawn on me later, 'Why didn't I think of this as a movie?' I really can suspend my disbelief."
The son of a Los Angeles builder, Diller grew up in Beverly Hills and worked in the mail room at the William Morris Agency before landing a job at ABC-TV. While still in his 20s, he was negotiating for theatrical movies with studio moguls more than twice his age. "These were guys who had generically tortured the TV people they had dealt with, who were frightened of them," says Diller. "Of the people I'm frightened of, they weren't among them."
Diller's great innovation at ABC was the Movie of the Week, the first network series of weekly made-for-TV movies. It also was one of Diller's formative dealmaking experiences. ABC asked Universal to produce the 90-minute films, but the studio was being difficult. It proposed that it make the movies exclusively and -- what really galled Diller -- retain rights to the concept forever. Diller's bosses were ready to comply, but the young executive went to the top of the company with his objections. He got ABC to propose a compromise -- a deal granting one-year exclusivity -- knowing that Lew Wasserman, Universal's stubborn chief, wouldn't give an inch. He didn't, and ABC walked away from the deal. Diller was then put in charge of making the films with various studios. He smiles at the memory of Universal's belated efforts to get the network's business. "They laid siege to ABC," he recalls. "They totally folded, which was sweet to watch."
In 1974, when he was just 32, Diller became chairman of Paramount Pictures after another snazzy bit of negotiating, this time with Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of Paramount's parent company. Bluhdorn took Diller to lunch and offered him the job as No. 2 executive to the studio's chief, the difficult Frank Yablans. Diller's response: "I would rather have the job of that waiter than work for Frank Yablans." Two hours later, Bluhdorn called back. "I'm making you chairman of Paramount," he told Diller. "Yablans works for you."
Diller guided Paramount through some of its most successful years, with hits like Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Flashdance. But after 10 years, he jumped to 20th Century Fox, soon to become one of Murdoch's media holdings. There Diller became the prime architect of the Fox network. He rewrote the rules, operating with a lean staff, a fraction of the size of the Big Three, and experimenting with offbeat shows like America's Most Wanted and The Simpsons.