At 83, the magnate of Entertainment Barry Diller is finally being made public as a gay man while simultaneously explain his happy relationship and decades with, and the long marriage to the designer Diane Von Furstenberg.
“I have lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends instead of lovers,” wrote Fox Network, former head of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures and Media Titan, in an essay published Tuesday by New York magazine. “Not only were we friends. We are not just friends. Simple and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept the rhythm for years.”
The piece is a prelude to his memoirs, “who knew”, which will come out in two weeks of Simon & Schuster.
He writes about his horrible first meeting in an event in 1974 where she fired him completely, then his fantastic second meeting in his department when he organized a birthday party for Agent Suegers and he was a Guest Rhetic. He said it was known that he would see Von Furstenberg again “and that nothing was going to stop that.” He was 33 years old at that time.
“I didn't tell anyone about our relationship in their first months,” Diller wrote. “I didn't want to shed external light on us because I wouldn't and I couldn't put any definition and I had never talked about my personal life and I thought doing it now would be exploiter.” His public personality, he said, always had business railings around him. In addition, he understood that “everyone” knew about their relationships with men.
They ended up together at home in Los Angeles shortly after and during that visit they took their passion to a guest house near their pool, providing a shocking scene when David Geffen “more than” more eagerness “entered them. Diller visited the designer next week in New York, where he met his young children, and his relationship was established in stone.
“It was a deer trapped in the headlights of a complete romance, without training or experience to deal with my teenage emotions,” he wrote, then explained his compartmentalized life and his perfect negation practice.
The people in their circle were confused, he wrote, because they thought he only liked men.
“I had so totally bottled things all my life in safe compartments of denial that I did not know that it was not the way of working the levers when emotions could not be contained,” he wrote.
An interesting revelation of the man who advised Hollywood power players, including Geffen, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel and Don Simpson, to name just a few. A man who could attract attention with his choice of a partner for a business lunch.
After going as gangbusters for years, the Diller-Von Furstenberg relationship hesitated in 1981 after she had a “momentary” issue with Richard Gere, something Diller said he made an exaggerated reaction. They were separated for 10 years, then returned until they got married in February 2001, 26 years after meeting for the first time.
To this day they remain married, he said, recognizing his inability to put in words what really is among them.
“[Y]It is, I also liked the boys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane, “he wrote.” I can't explain it to myself or the world. It simply happened to both of reason or manipulation. Somehow cosmic we were destined for each other. “
