Episode Details

What I learned from reading The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood by Tom King. 

----

He told me he had recently read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Buffett was Geffen's hero.

Geffen—with searing focus, unyielding drive, and outlandish nerve—had devised and implemented strategies to propel himself to the top of the heap of Hollywood powerbrokers.

I used to have phone conversations with David that would leave me sweaty.

David might not have realized it, but he was being educated by a master entrepreneur. Batya succeeded in teaching him the value of hard work and the possibilities of life under even the most difficult circumstances. She was a brilliant businesswoman who could account for every penny that went into and out of the enterprise. She kept her overhead low by driving hard bargains with her suppliers and by closely monitoring her expenses.

His mother determinedly drilled into him the same advice she often repeated to herself. "You may not be very tall, but you will stand head and shoulders above everyone," she declared. "You think of yourself as head and shoulders above everyone else, and you will be."

Arriving in Hollywood for the first time, David thought he had found paradise. It was even more intoxicating than he had imagined. His life's ambition was soon established after he read a new biography of MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer called Hollywood Rajah. "I want this job," he thought to himself.

He simply did not have the attention span that college required. He was eager to get into the real world.

She told Geffen that some of the brightest lights in the entertainment business had gotten their start in the mailrooms of the major talent agencies. Although it was not a glamorous job, it was a way to get a foot in the door.
 

Having tossed aside all notions of right and wrong, David Geffen simply lived by different rules than did the rest of society around him. Unconstrained by traditional ideas of acceptable social behavior, he was free to use all of the resources at his fingertips to achieve his lofty goals.

Geffen simply worked harder than anyone else.

The music department, he said, was the place where a young agent could make a name for himself. Brandt's advice had a profound impact on Geffen. He at once rejiggered his career plans.

It was not an undying passion for music that made him decide to try to make his fortune in the business; he did it because he might get rich quickly.

Geffen recognized that publishing was one of the areas in the music business where the real money was being made. Long after an artist's star has faded, publishers benefit financially for years to come, pocketing royalties whenever a group records a song or sheet music is sold.

Having studied Clive Davis, he decided that he, too, had the savvy to make it in the record industry. It was not much of a stretch for him to envision David Geffen, the music mogul.

He remained unsettled and plagued by feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction. He was driven by a devil that constantly told him he needed to be bigger, more, and something else. He simply was not the kind of man who was going to stand in one place for very long.

While he saw himself most of the time as the smart, fast-rising star he had become, there seemed to be fleeting, dreadful moments when his confidence shattered and he was gripped with fear.

The way Geffen saw it, there was a natural synergy in owning both a record company and a management company. They could use the management company to book and promote the acts it was recording on the label and vice versa. Controlling both sides of the business. But the real advantage, Geffen explained, was