WHO KNEW, by Barry Diller
The yachterati’s worst-kept secret is now billowing in the wind. Barry Diller is gay, and yet also married — like, really married — to Diane von Furstenberg, a woman.
After the carefully meted-out release of this news, is there still value in paying $30 for Diller’s memoir, “Who Knew”? I don’t know.
Certainly, there’s something reassuring about Diller believing it’s worth his while, and ours, to issue entertainment in such an old-fashioned delivery unit. So many of his 83 years have been about challenging established formats.
As a junior employee at then-struggling ABC in the late 1960s, where it was joked darkly that the way to end the Vietnam War would be to air it as a show, he created the hugely successful 90-minute Movie of the Week. Then, what the late producer Julia Phillips in her tell-all classic “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” joked was the Week of the Movie: epic mini-series like “Roots.”
As chairman and C.E.O. of Paramount in the early 1980s, Diller plunged headlong into the home video business from which many film executives shrank, releasing “An Officer and a Gentleman” on cassette when it was still in theaters, which counterintuitively revved the box office. (Generous of him, as its star, Richard Gere, had a brief affair with von Furstenberg that “lit the spark” for a breakup.)
At the QVC home shopping network a decade later, Diller had the epiphany that “screens could and would be used for something other than telling stories,” coming up with among other innovations the prescient ad “BUY UNDERWEAR IN YOUR UNDERWEAR.”