Billionaire Barry Diller might be surprised that people care about his secret gay lovers, but that hasn’t stopped him from naming names.
Diller, 83, who has a net worth of $4.6billion, is spilling some of his secrets ahead of his May 20 book launch for Who Knew.
His sexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, but the wealthy entrepreneur is just now confirming it for the general masses.
And now he’s giving a glimpse into who exactly he was messing around with, having revealed wife Diane Von Furstenburg was the only woman he could ever love.
Diller allegedly had liaisons with Michael Bennett, famous Broadway director and choreographer behind A Chorus Line, as well as Johnny Carson’s stepson, according to The New York Times.
Columnist Maureen Dowd didn’t name the stepson and the book isn’t out for another 10 days. But Carson only had one stepson – Joe Holland – who died of AIDS in 1994.
Diller’s other lover Michael Bennett was also killed by the disease in 1987 aged just 44.
Diller – a former Paramount boss – says he knew he was gay from the age of 11. But his older brother was a drug addict and he says he did not want to inflict the shame of two ‘broken’ children on his parents.
And, at the time, the lifestyle choice could have ended his career, telling the outlet that it was ‘better to be called a failure than a fairy.’
However, that didn’t stop Hollywood from nearly outing him over the years.
In 1974, he caught wind that People was planning on writing a ‘mean and homophobic’ piece on him. But when it came out, it mainly criticizing his business acumen, leaving the New Yorker relieved at the time.
Twenty years later, while he was working at QVC and was trying to acquire Paramount, a rumor about him having AIDS began circulating.
When a Times reporter contacted him to ask him about it, he said he was shocked and told the reporter he was fine.
His friend, Michael Eisner, outed him to Disney executives in 1995, writing in an internal board memo that ‘the fact that he is homosexual should have no weight’ when considering him for the role of CEO of the company, The Times reported.
It doomed his chances of getting the job, the publication said.
And throughout his marriage to von Furstenberg, they lived separately – him in the Carlyle hotel on the Upper East Side, her above her business in the Meatpacking District.
The first time he met the ‘deliriously glamorous’ fashion queen von Furstenberg at a super-smart Manhattan dinner party in 1974, she’d rudely brushed the reserved movie man aside to talk to someone else.
As Diller describes it, he was an outsider in her snooty world: ‘I was standing alone next to the fireplace feeling I did not belong in this group when “Prince” Egon von Furstenberg [Diane’s first husband] walked up to me and said, “Your pants are too short.”‘
But when he and Diane met again a year later at another fabulous soiree, she was suddenly all over him.
‘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,’ he recalled. Later… ‘We stood at the door, and I said, “I want to call you,” and she said, “I want you to.”‘
But overall, Diller is ready to tell the truth after all these years in his upcoming book.
‘I wanted to tell the story, and I knew if I told the story, I had to tell the truth,’ he told The Times.
Diller says he knows most people had guesses his sexuality long before he came out and joked that he was in a brightly-lit, glass closet prior to coming out.
He said not doing so helped him achieve incredible career success – partly because he believes all his anxiety was centered around being outed, which meant he was a decisive and fearless leader.
But Diller says he’s also ashamed he didn’t come out sooner and wishes he could have served as a role model for gays of his generation who felt ashamed of their sexuality.