Paley said, "I can't take someone else's car."
"Don't be silly. Jerry would want you to take it. He would he honored."
So they convinced Paley, then convinced my driver, who at first objected-No, I work for Mr. Weintraub-then was talked into it. He dropped off Paley and was waiting for me when I got out.
On the way to my apartment, he said, "You know, Mr. Weintraub, when you were upstairs, I took another man home in the car."
Like he was confessing an infidelity, a love affair.
"You can't do that," I said. "You're my driver."
"I know, I told them, but they insisted," said the driver. "The guy was some big deal."
"Who was it?"
He had no idea.
The next day, I was sitting in my office, and my secretary rang in. William Paley was calling.
No. I couldn't believe it.
I picked up.
"Yes, Mr. Paley?"
"Are you Jerry Weintraub?"
"Yes."
"Well, Mr. Weintraub, I want to thank you for use of your car yesterday. Very generous of you."
"Oh, sure, no problem, don't mention it."
He asked me to come to his office so he could thank me in person. I went over, we sat, hit it off. He asked why I wasn't producing for television. I said something like, "Well, because no one asked." He called in two of his key guys and said, "Give Jerry a couple of our summer slots. He's going to put together some shows for us." See how life works? A low-pressure system looms over the Atlantic, and I wind up making TV shows for CBS.
Every ten years, I have built a new career without quite meaning to or even knowing it. (The pattern is apparent only when I look back.) I had already been an agent, a promoter, a manager, and a creator of shows. I now became a film producer. God, it was fun. The movies had always loomed large in my imagination-and now I was part of that world. I remember the early days, when I would drive onto the studio lots to meet executives and pitch my ideas. It was exactly like what Hollywood should be. There were crowds of extras dressed as cowboys, conquistadors, whatever, rushing set to set, shouting, alive. It was like being a kid again, reliving the thrill of driving into movie land. Just because you get older, make money and lose money, does not mean you should forget how exciting it all is.
This was the midseventies. It was an interregnum, a moment between eras. The new Hollywood of auteurs and independent producers was just coming into view, while the old Hollywood of bosses was just fading away. Most of the studio heads today are not bosses in that classic sense. They do not own the studios. They work for a board of directors and can be fired in five minutes. The old moguls, the guys who came from the garment trade, worked only for themselves. They owned the industry as you might own a house or a car. It was theirs. Harry Cohn. Joseph Schenk. Louis B. Mayer. Jack Warner. These men have since been vilified and condemned by the people who replaced them-that's what always happens-but they were in fact terrific pioneers. There is a lot to be learned from their sense of ownership and pride, and how they took responsibility for everything, from the first draft to the final cut.
Soon after I got into the business, Lew Wasserman asked me to come work for him at MCA. "Jerry, we're friends, we go back," he said. "It's only right that you should make pictures with us."
"I already have a deal," I told him. "It's a big deal. You don't want my deal."
"Don't tell me what I want," he said.
"Okay, you want to make a deal? Fine. Good. Bring your lawyer over to my house and we'll make a deal."
I went back to MCA with Lenny Goldberg, my partner in those years. It was coming full circle. I started as an assistant at MCA and returned with the big contract. My first day, I went to eat at the commissary. I was sitting with my corned beef and cream soda, and here came Lew, smiling. He sat at my table. He said, "Jerry, I can't tell you how happy it makes me that you're back." We talked about this and that, then, as he got up, he turned and said, "Oh, and Jerry. Do me one favor. Stay off the WATS line!"
Family
The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger.
When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don't deserve any of this!
I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, "Screw it. That's over. I'm done."
No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh.
Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again. I already had my son, Michael, but Jane wanted a baby. As we could not have a child of our own, for reasons I won't go into, we decided to adopt. By this time, Jane's career had taken a backseat to my own. It seems as if she planned it this way all along, though she calls it a natural progression. Jane brought me to LA, introduced me to the key people, made her world my world, set me up, mentored and loved me. Then, when my career took off, she let herself drift from the public eye, did fewer shows, made fewer records, and so forth, and not because she was forced to-there were plenty of offers and opportunities. Though she was, in fact, as beautiful and talented and in demand as she had ever been, she was simply tired of that life. She had become a star at such a young age, had been famous for so long, that she was over it. She wanted another life. She wanted to be a mother.
We pursued a standard adoption, wrote letters, filled out forms. We did not care if it was a boy or a girl. We just wanted a baby. It was many months before we found her in Florida. We learned all about the birth mother, her background, her history, her due date. We tracked it so carefully it felt, at times, as if Jane herself were expecting. Then, when the mother was about seven months pregnant, we got a phone call in the middle of the night-it's over, you will not be getting the baby. It's impossible to explain how hard this hit us. It felt as if there had been a miscarriage, as if we had lost the baby. It was terrible. Jane went into a deep funk. I remember going to see the lawyers and losing it, throwing a stack of papers in the air and shouting, "You bastards, you can't do this to a person! You're killing Jane."