Barry Diller: The Truth About Me and Diane von Fürstenberg

Photo: Courtesy of the subjects

I have never questioned my sexuality’s basic authority over my life (I was only afraid of the reaction of others). And when my romance with Diane began, I never questioned that its biological imperative was as strong in its heterosexuality as its opposite had been. When it happened, my initial response was “Who knew?”

I’m well aware that this part of my life has caused confusion and lots of speculation. A relationship that began with indifference, then exploded into a romance as natural to us as breathing, surprised us and everyone else. It really is the miracle of my life.

Much has been written about us, whispered about us, wondered about us. So I’ll just start at the beginning and let the story unfold.

In the fall of 1974, Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Gulf + Western, made me chairman and CEO of Paramount, which had become extremely successful under Frank Yablans, the short, feisty, street-smart Jewish mafioso who was its president, and Robert Evans, the smooth prince of Hollywood, who was head of production. At ABC, I was appointed vice-president back when the title still had currency, but they were the biggest executive stars in the show-business firmament. Television was still considered the underclass. To movie people, I was an interloper from an inferior land. I was clearly not cast right — or the right caste for this job.

Gil and Susan Shiva, two Über-socialite friends of mine who lived in the very elegant Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side, gave a congratulatory dinner for me and invited their very high-toned friends, few of whom I knew personally, though I was aware of their social superiority. This “informal dinner” meant that the men wore suits and ties and the dinner service ended with finger bowls; it was a social stratum to which I was unaccustomed.

After being introduced around the room, I was standing alone next to the fireplace feeling I did not belong in this group when Prince Egon von Fürstenberg walked up to me and said, “Your pants are too short.”

They were.

It wasn’t much better when I was introduced to Egon’s wife, the deliriously glamorous Princess Diane, who politely and dismissively said “Hello!” and quickly moved on to embrace someone more familiar and certainly more at ease than I was. She looked through me like cellophane, and I left that night thinking that after her casual obliviousness and Egon’s put-down, nothing could ever induce me to see either of them again. The only positive outcome from that night was that I went to the tailor and had him lengthen my trousers.

Nine months later, I was returning from my first vacation from the agonies at Paramount. The world thought I was driving it into the ground. The ex-Paramounters were out there actively mocking me as a parvenu who was destroying their institution. My work was so stifling and airless that despite the studio’s perilous condition, I just had to get away from it for a little while. Sam Spiegel had lent me his grand boat, the Malahne, for a cruise in the south of France. He asked me if his friend Irene Mayer Selznick could join us. Katharine Hepburn had introduced us because Irene, the daughter of MGM titan Louis B. Mayer, knew everything about how big studios ran. Hepburn felt Irene might be a help to me. She was, and we became friends.

I’d brought along David Geffen, and at the first night’s dinner it was quickly clear that Irene and David had an almost physical aversion to each other. Irene regally condescended to young David’s biting Brooklyn brilliance, and it was all tight asses until David said, “You know, Irene, you’re a cunt.” To which Irene gushed out a big laugh, all tension ceased, and all was calm except for the boat itself, which broke down outside St.-Tropez.

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I arrived home to an invitation for a dinner Diane von Fürstenberg was giving for my close friend Sue Mengers, the funny and feisty big-time agent who handled lots of stars. Sue was then the prime leader of Hollywood social life.

I immediately declined. Diane von Fürstenberg’s apartment was the last place I wanted to go.

Outraged, Sue Mengers called me and said, “How could you not come to a dinner being given for me?”

I said, “I’m not coming. I don’t like that woman.”

Sue said, “Of course you’re coming. It’s a dinner for me, and it has nothing to do with how you feel about her.” She added, “It would be too insulting if the top movie person in New York didn’t show up at a dinner for the top agent in the world.”

So I went.

The truth is I was a better-than-well-kept man living a mostly arid and work-cloistered existence, shuttling back and forth from New York to L.A. every other week. The externals couldn’t have been plusher, but the interior of my life was fairly barren. I had found ways to find men — starting with my teenage years street cruising in West Hollywood, darting in and out of side doors of bars along Melrose Avenue. The subterfuge continued into my 20s, save one Fourth of July weekend when a guy I had met invited me to join him on Fire Island. Since I had never been in any kind of ghetto (other than a rich one), I wasn’t prepared for a place that was all guys, all the time. He took me to a slew of parties and then to a dance club. All I thought about while I was avoiding the popper-soaked dancers surrounding me was that all too soon I would be going back to the house of a person I hardly knew and was growing to dislike as he pushed ever closer on the dance floor. A water taxi took me, all alone, across the bay, and I arrived on the other side around five in the morning.

I had so much early career success you might have thought I’d conquered what I saw as the biggest danger in my developing life. I’d conquered other phobias, but fear of exposure still had a tyrannical hold on me, so much so that it stunted any chance of my having a fulfilling personal life. Instead, I had discovered I could separate myself from anything painful or terrifying by just locking it away, putting it into a distant box, and having to deal with it hopefully never. Compartmentalizing these unwanted feelings became so successful that it has both ruled and riled my life ever since. I developed the ability to say the right thing in order to make a situation better, whether or not it was anchored to any moral belief. I had no core at all, other than to please those who needed pleasing. I’d learned to seduce people, especially those much older than I was, and I could accomplish it on demand in any setting. I could subordinate myself effortlessly. I could keep secrets.

I never discussed my personal life, lowlight as it was, with anyone. Even though as the years went on I began to be realistic and understood that “everyone knows,” I never wanted to make any declarations. So many of us at that time were in this exiled state, so stunted in the way we lived. I hated having to live a pretend life, one that was totally silent on all the topics normal people talked about with each other. Of course I could have declared my sexuality, come out as some others were doing, but I was among the many at that time who were too scared to do so. But I wanted — needed — to adopt my own personal bill of rights:

I would live with silence, but not with hypocrisy.

I would never pose or pretend.

I wouldn’t do a single thing to make anyone believe I was living a heterosexual life.

I wouldn’t tell, and I wouldn’t allow myself to be asked.

I would live my life within these constraints, and I would never do a single thing to delude anyone.

I would never bring a man as a date to a heterosexual event — not that there were many guys I was serious enough about to bring — but I’d never bring a woman as a “beard,” either.

It wasn’t courage — it was simply the minimum conditions of my conduct, and I recognize it now as the opposite of courage.

The dinner at Sue’s was called for eight, but I showed up around 9:30, thinking, I’ll stay for a few minutes, do my duty to Sue, and exit. When I walked in, people were just finishing the buffet dinner and were lounging all over Diane’s elegantly louche apartment. Without any reference to ever having met me, Diane greeted me with a dazzling smile, saying, “I’m so glad you came.” I was instantly bathed in such attention and cozy warmth I couldn’t believe it was the same woman I’d been dismissed by a year earlier.

We went around together saying “hello” to the people I knew and being introduced to her friends. There were 70 or so, every one of them some New York or international person of social or artistic note, or whatever kind of note gets noticed.

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As we walked, we made little asides to each other, and then, like in the gym scene from West Side Story when everyone else fades away and Tony and Maria are left alone, Diane and I found our way to a sofa, far away from the rest, and we stayed there for a long time. There was a glow around us that was setting off sparks, accurately described by the French as a coup de foudre. Flushed and completely discombobulated, I said, “I’ve got to go,” and she walked me to the door.

I was functioning without a brain, not a thought in my head, being willed on by pure primitive urges.

We stood at the door, and I said, “I want to call you,” and she said, “I want you to.”

As I walked to the elevator, I knew something heretofore unimaginable was about to happen.

All my life I’d been mostly un-seducible — by a man or woman — held back by shyness and, to a degree, fear, yet here I was with no restraint at all, knowing I was going to see her again and that nothing was gonna stop that.

I called the next day and said, “We’ll go to Pearl’s,” an elegant modernist Chinese restaurant that was very popular. When I got to her apartment, she said, “Let’s stay here and have dinner. I have better Chinese food than Pearl’s.”

And so, with the dinner served by her Chinese butler and cooked by his wife, we ate in her formal dining room. Afterward, on the same sofa as the night before, we wound around each other, making out like teenagers, something I hadn’t done with a female since I was 16 years old.

Now, this has always amazed me: There was no effort, no reasoning, no what’s-going-on-here, no ambition, no anything. Other than sheer excitement, I thought, Well, this is a surprise! I certainly didn’t feel, Oh my God, what does this mean? I was simply existing in the moment, a rare place for me.

The next week, we went to the opening night of the New York Film Festival, and a third of the way into the movie we left. Then it was back to her place, and we repeated what we had done the week before.

Diane left the next day for Paris, and I flew to L.A. She had recently separated from Egon and had been dating an Italian journalist, with whom she was in the process of breaking up.

While she was in Paris, we spoke three times a day. After too much of this long-distancing, I said, “Come to California.”

She called her boyfriend in Italy and told him not to come to Paris because she was leaving the next day to see me.

She wrote this to me on the Air France flight to L.A.:

Barry Diller, Barry Diller … this name I kept hearing among people … You were a mystery to me, you are a mystery and you probably will keep being a mystery …

I probably need you more than you need me and you probably are more of a man than I am a woman … I like your image, your mystique, you are someone people talk about, I like that … and then I like the rest: the real stuff … your heart! I love your heart, I know your heart … I know you have so much to give and I want to get it … D

I picked her up at the airport, we came back to my house, and that was the first time we spent the night together. The next morning, she came downstairs and said, “I’ve never been in a house that is so unlived in, so vacant. There’s nothing in the drawers!” She was right: The furniture was all from Paramount. I hadn’t had any time to buy things, so the prop department essentially furnished the house. You’d open a drawer and inside it would say property of paramount pictures.

The next morning, Diane went down to the kitchen, where my British butler, Derek, was standing. He said to her, “Madam, may I ask you? Did you sleep with Mr. Diller last night?”

She simply said, “Yes, I did.” The next day was a Saturday, and we were at the pool with some friends. What happened then between us was an explosion of pent-up demand, and we ran to the guesthouse. David Geffen, who had been one of those at the pool, walked in on us.

I caught a glimpse of David’s more-than-astonished face as he quickly closed the door.

The next days we were together in every happy way. Then she had to go to New York. When I drove back to my house from the airport, I found these little sweet notes she’d hidden everywhere, and every time I found one my smile expanded. She’d gotten to the airport early, so I got in my car, zoomed down the freeway, and caught her on the escalator for a final good-bye.

I was full-up ecstatic as I went to sleep that night.

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I returned to New York the next week. Diane and her children — Alexander, 5, and Tatiana, 4 — were on Park Avenue, and she moonlighted every night over to my place.

Within the space of one week, it was as if a giant tectonic plate in my life had shifted.

From that moment on, Diane and I were together.

I told no one about our relationship in its early months. 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. I had kept my private life distinctly private, and though I had a growing public profile, that profile always had business guardrails around it.

Diane, on the other hand, had been a glamorous public figure ever since she and Egon first arrived in New York. They were the young and pretty prince and princess. Then she started her own business, and as has been true ever since, she is her brand, her brand is her, so there’s no line between private and public. After a few months, as we began going out to various events, it was becoming clear to the world that we were some kind of together.

People started saying, “Huh? What is it with this person? We thought he liked only men.”

Much of the speculation subsided when it was clear to all we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We weren’t particularly conventional characters, and were so demonstrably in love both inside and outside the house. We were, though, still the subject of interest and gossip from people in the film and fashion worlds. But we were mostly oblivious to anything other than being together. Well, maybe we did prance a bit, enjoying the attention.

Diane had recently bought a country house in Connecticut that she called Cloudwalk. She didn’t want only a city life for her children or for herself. I had no conception of country life, and I was a little nervous when I went up for the first time to meet Alexander and Tatiana. I found every excuse that Saturday morning to avoid meeting the children, and I knew I was in another universe when I walked into the great room and 4-year-old Tatiana bluntly asked me, “Who are your friends?” Soon afterward, Diane bought a grand apartment at 1060 Fifth Avenue, and I moved in there. I moved into her life more than she moved into mine. I’d never exactly been poor, and I was now making a helluva lot more than a living wage, but Diane was selling 25,000 dresses a week and was on the cover of Newsweek. She and Egon had been on the cover of this magazine in 1973 as the “‘It’ couple.” She was European royalty by marriage, and while I wasn’t exactly chopped liver, the relative contrasts of our lives were pretty extreme.

I had never had a sustained relationship before this. I was a deer caught in the headlights of a full-on romance, with no training or experience to cope with my teenage emotions. Having not had what anyone would call a normal adolescence, I had no resources to cope with these wild swings. And I couldn’t even begin to articulate my feelings. I often just froze, unable to thaw. 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. We went on our first trip to the Dominican Republic, where Gulf + Western owned a huge sugar plantation and had developed a luxe golf resort on the southeast coast called Casa de Campo. We had our first fight there. Whatever hurt it was that stung me I no longer remember, but I had to get away. I fled on my motorbike up into the rocky hills of the Dominican mountains and slowly unfroze as I dodged potholes along the unpaved road. Why was I so emotionally unprepared for intimacy? When I was 8 years old, I had given up believing my mother could protect me from my brother or from my emerging sexual confusion. I became a “walker in the city,” all on my own, not dependent upon anyone. Now my emotions were all over the place because an actual person was becoming important to me. I didn’t just want her, I needed her, and that banged hard into my built-up self-protections. But all that receded as I drove back to the house and found Diane standing in the driveway, instantly stitching me back together with her huge Earth Mother heart.

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On Diane’s 29th birthday, New Year’s Eve 1975, I got her 29 diamonds. I didn’t know what to wrap them in, so I put them in a Band-Aid box and gave it to her as we were walking into the surprise party I was throwing for her. With Loulou de la Falaise as my co-host, it was a fusion of the worlds we all inhabited: New York and Euro society, movie and fashion stars. On my birthday, February 2, she sent me this note:

My darling: Today is your birthday and it makes me terribly nervous to think how I could make it so nice for you as you made it for me on my birthday … I want you to be me and me you … forever! I have my own life, and it is nice, you have your own and it is nice … but ours is and will be better, because we have each other to fall on, to rely on, and to breed! You are strong enough for me to be weak, and I am strong enough for you to be weak … Happy birthday … Diane the little one in your shadow!!

P.S. Do I make you stronger?

On March 22, 1976, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek in a story that described our relationship in some detail, including this passage:

Her nights are spent either working or making the rounds of film screenings with Barry Diller, Chairman of the Board of Paramount Pictures. At thirty-four, Diller is as much a boy wonder as von Fürstenberg is a superwoman. And singularly underwhelmed by her title, he refers to her as “her lowness.”

I even took Diane to the preview of one of my earliest Paramount films — Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood — one of the worst movies we ever made. I was in my second year, and the studio was still a disaster. Diane had become a superstar, and I was still flailing. Even her Chinese butler told her, “He’s going to get fired any moment!”

Photo: Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

I’m not so sure the word settled should have ever been used in a sentence with me and Diane, but during many of those Paramount years, it seemed to apply. We were living in Diane ’s apartment, where we and the children were becoming our version of a nuclear family. I hadn’t actually lived with anyone since leaving my childhood home. Even the word lived is a little off, as I hadn’t been doing much living. I was inhabiting hotels and had few possessions of my own. For the first time, I entered an abode where I wasn’t the first person to turn on the lights. Where when I came back at the end of the workday there was someone and something to greet me other than room service. I wasn’t lonely or pathetic before because I was mostly careering, but now the fireplaces were lit, and there were children’s noises and birthdays to celebrate, and holidays with presents and all the family activities I’d never experienced in my parents’ house.

When not in New York, Diane was selling her dresses worldwide, and I was much of the time at the studio in Hollywood — or we were traipsing around the globe together, pulled to this or that country for work or just escapades. We were once in Hong Kong on a Friday, where the construction boom was so booming that we had a headache from the noise but had to stay over the weekend for a meeting on Monday. I said, “Can’t we just get out of this place — go somewhere?” Diane knew Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Filipino president, so she picked up the hotel phone and … just called her. She invited us over to the Philippines, just like you’d ask a neighbor to come on by for dinner, and asked us to stay with her in the presidential palace, so off we went.

Off we always went, cruising on friends’ boats in the Mediterranean, flying to a party in Paris, skiing in St. Moritz or Aspen. Oh the glamorous life. But the children were always with us on holidays, and I was getting to know them as actual people and sometimes becoming something of a parent. Once, in Aspen at Christmas, we were having Chinese takeout for dinner. Alexander, then around 9, wanted to meet some friends down the hill. I said “no,” it was too late. He said he was going. I said not. A small matter, but our voices got higher, with him rejecting my authority and me realizing I actually needed to have some. Higher it went until he threw an egg roll at me and I responded with a volley of shrimp. It ended with us each drenched in soy and ginger sauce and laughing over who was the greater child. But they were beginning to bring me up in ways that I, in my previous louche life, could never have imagined.

The first chapter of our romance ended in the days of Studio 54. The momentary affair she had with Richard Gere and my overreaction to it lit the spark that would separate us. He was in the middle of making American Gigolo, and the idea that this was happening while he was working for me at Paramount made me feel too much the fool. It would be ten years until she came back in my life. We’d both had relationships with others that didn’t come close to standing the test of time. Hers were deeper and more complete, mine were mostly superficial and incomplete. But eventually, without plot or plan, we began to tack back into each other’s lives. It was not the coup de foudre of our first ferocious love — instead we came back together gently, month by month, then day by day, until we coalesced into the couple we are to this day. On February 2, 2001, Diane and I got married, 26 years after our not-so-cute meeting. Alexander, Tatiana, and I are all Aquarians, and Diane had been planning to give a big party for our three combined birthdays. We knew we were now a couple for life, so we went down to City Hall and found a willing judge to do the vows. That night we surprised everyone in announcing our marriage.

I’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers. We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years. And, yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane. 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. At that time the Europeans had a wiser attitude about this than us provincials. And today, sexual identities are much more fluid and natural, without all those rigidly defined lanes of the last century. I’ve always thought that you never really know about anyone else’s relationships. But I do know about ours. It is the bedrock of my life. What others think sometimes irritates but mostly amuses us. We know, our family knows, and our friends know. The rest is blather.

Excerpted from Who Knew, by Barry Diller (to be published by Simon & Schuster). © 2025 by Barry Diller. Printed by permission.

Photo: Courtesy of the publisher

Who Knew, by Barry Diller

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Photographs are courtesy of the subjects.