At 83, entertainment mogul Barry Diller is finally going public as a gay man while simultaneously explaining his happy, decades-long relationship with — and lengthy marriage to — designer Diane von Furstenberg.
“I’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers,” the Fox network co-founder, former head of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures and all-around media titan wrote in an essay published Tuesday by New York Magazine. “We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years.”
The piece is a prelude to his memoir, “Who Knew,” due out in two weeks from Simon & Schuster.
He writes about their awful first meeting at an event in 1974 where she dismissed him completely, then their fantastic second encounter at her apartment when she hosted a birthday party for agent Sue Mengers and he was a reluctant guest. He said he left knowing he would see Von Furstenberg again “and that nothing was gonna stop that.” He was 33 at the time.
“I told no one about our relationship in its early months,” Diller wrote. “I didn’t want to shine any outside light on us because I wouldn’t and couldn’t put any definition on it and I’d never talked about my personal life and thought to do so now would be exploitative.” His public persona, he said, always had business guardrails around it. Plus he understood that “everyone” knew about his relationships with men.
They wound up together at his house in L.A. soon after and during that visit took their passion to a guesthouse near his pool, providing a shocking scene when a “more-than-astonished” David Geffen walked in on them. Diller visited the designer the next week in New York, where he met her young children, and their relationship was set in stone.
“I was a deer caught in the headlights of a full-on romance, with no training or experience to cope with my teenage emotions,” he wrote, then explained his compartmentalized life and well-honed practice of denial.
People in his circle were confused, he wrote, because they thought he only liked men.
“I had so totally bottled things up my whole life into safe compartments of denial that I knew no way to work the levers when emotions couldn’t be contained,” he wrote.
An interesting revelation from the man who mentored Hollywood power players including Geffen, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel and Don Simpson, to name but a few. A man who could turn heads with his choice of a companion for a business lunch.
After going like gangbusters for years, the Diller-Von Furstenberg relationship faltered in 1981 after she had a “momentary” affair with Richard Gere — something Diller said drew an overreaction from him. They were apart for 10 years, then gradually came back together until they got married in February 2001, 26 years after meeting for the first time.
To this day they remain married, he said, acknowledging his inability to put into words what’s truly between them.
“[Y]es, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane,” he wrote. “I can’t explain it to myself or to the world. It simply happened to both of us without motive or manipulation. In some cosmic way we were destined for each other.”