Hollywood agog over new memoir by Diane von Furstenberg's billionaire mogul husband in which he reveals he's been sleeping with countless men during their 50-year relationship... while she once bedded Warren Beatty and Ryan O'Neal in a single weekend
Billionaire movie mogul Barry Diller first met the 'deliriously glamorous' fashion queen Diane von Furstenberg at a super smart Manhattan dinner party in 1974.
On that occasion the haughty Belgian creator of the iconic 1970s wrap dress snubbed the gauche movie man – as did her then husband, German playboy Prince Egon von Furstenberg, who immediately told Diller his trousers were too short.
But when Barry and Diane met again months later, it was a very different story.
The pair clicked and were soon in the grip of a torrid passion that spawned one of America's most formidable power couples.
'There was a glow around us that was setting off sparks . . . I was functioning without a brain, not a thought in my head, being willed on by pure primitive urges,' gushes the hard-nosed Hollywood executive in a highly revealing new autobiography.
Diller, who was at that time the 32-year-old head of TV and film studio Paramount Pictures, and his 27-year-old lover were inseparable for most of the next 50 years, eventually marrying in 2001.
But their relationship was unorthodox in the extreme.
She was one of the world's most sexually voracious women, described by friends as the 'ultimate flirt' and even by Diller as unable 'to sit down without being louche'.
She enjoyed a series of flings with other men, including an affair with the actor Richard Gere, which began in 1981 and led to a split with Diller that lasted a decade.
Not that Diller was a choirboy himself. The big revelation in his new book, Who Knew, is that he is gay and enjoyed regular dalliances with men.
Hardly surprising, then, that when the now 83-year-old told his wife, 78, that he planned to publish a tell-all memoir, she had just three words of warning: 'Just get ready'.
Diller, estimated to be worth £3.4billion, was for decades one of the most formidable men in Hollywood, earning the nickname 'Killer Diller' for his ability to reduce even the most hardened executives to tears.
But, despite his reputation, he avoided the limelight.
And there was good reason for that, as he has now confirmed: he was terrified of being publicly outed at a time when being openly gay was still not accepted in Tinseltown.
Diller has claimed to be taken aback by the excited media reaction to the revelation of his sexuality in his memoir published on Tuesday, since it was an open secret among Hollywood insiders.
But even they assumed that his union with von Furstenberg had to be purely a marriage of convenience, a strictly platonic union.
As the artist Andy Warhol once observed: 'I guess the reason Diller and Diane are a couple is because she gives him straightness and he gives her powerfulness.'
But in Who Knew, Diller insists that nothing could have been further from the truth, describing their relationship as 'an explosion of passion that kept up for years'.
He relates how they could barely keep their hands off each other after they met for the second time at a soirée a year after she first ignored him that night in 1974.
'While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman,' Diller says, adding: 'Yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane . . . I have never questioned my sexuality's basic authority over my life (I was only afraid of the reaction of others).'
Within 24 hours of their second meeting, they were on von Furstenberg's sofa at her palatial Manhattan apartment 'wound around each other, making out like teenagers, something I hadn't done with a female since I was 16'.
She promptly ditched another boyfriend (her relationship with the German prince was a marriage of convenience to conceal the fact he was bisexual) and they reconvened at Diller's LA mansion.
In what he describes as an 'explosion of pent-up demand', Diller recalls them leaving friends by the pool to have sex in a guest house.
Readers will have to decide whether these tales of unbridled passion are Diller's attempt to reassure his wife their marriage hasn't been a total sham.
While he may not be a household name, in Tinseltown Barry Diller was a man to be reckoned with.
At Paramount he was responsible for giving the green light to such classic films as The Godfather Part II, Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
He later set up the Fox TV network with Rupert Murdoch and brought us The Simpsons, whose vicious, bullet-headed boss, Mr Burns, was reportedly inspired by Diller.
He reveals in his book how he was once seated next to Princess Margaret at a Hollywood dinner shortly after the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977.
The late Queen's sister said she'd like to invite its star, John Travolta, for tea at her hotel.
Diller duly arranged a meeting only for the actor to complain to him afterwards: 'She hit on me!' (Travolta was then 33, Margaret 47.)
Diller is still revered as one of the most brilliant operators in Hollywood history and remains chairman of the digital media company IAC, but nowadays prefers to spend time on his 305ft schooner Eos, one of the world's biggest sailing yachts.
He and von Furstenberg are often accompanied on trips by their friends Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his soon-to-be-wife Lauren Sanchez.
It's clear von Furstenberg, who is proud to be 'sexually fluid' having reportedly slept with men and women by the score, knew about Diller's men.
'Today, he opened to the world,' she said this week.
'To me, he opened 50 years ago. All I can tell you is Barry and I have had an incredible life for 50 years. We have been lovers, friends, married, everything. And, you know, for me, the secret to honour life, and to honour love, is never to lie.'
That's fine for her to say now – and Diller echoes her noble sentiments by insisting in the book that he never pretended he was straight – but the couple have spent years evading or ignoring questions about his personal life.
A few months after their 2001 marriage, for instance, she made clear to Vanity Fair magazine that rumours their marriage was only platonic were entirely wrong and that 'everything has always been normal' in their relationship.
'We share the same bed,' she said. 'We go on vacation together . . . It's so weird that people can even ask.'
By 2013, when she and Diller still retained separate homes in New York, von Furstenberg was sticking to the same script when a New York Times interviewer mentioned to her that there was 'a lot of curiosity' about their marriage.
'I don't understand what is there to understand,' she responded. 'This man has been my lover, my friend and he's now my husband. I've been with him for 35 years.
At times we were separated, at times we were only friends, at times we were lovers, at times we're husband and wife, that's our life.'
The following year, von Furstenberg published her own memoir – but nowhere in its 240 pages did she address her husband's sexuality.
Her past coyness about discussing Barry's bedroom habits was definitely unusual for a sexual adventuress who delights in retelling tales of her conquests and who Vogue once dubbed 'an exotic cat woman seductress'.
In a 2024 TV documentary, von Furstenberg boasted of how Mick Jagger and David Bowie once suggested she join them for a threesome: 'I considered it and I thought: 'OK, this is a great thing to tell your grandchildren, then I came back to the room and they were two little skinny things, and I didn't',' she recalled.
She also revealed that while once staying at LA's Beverly Wilshire hotel, she slept with both Warren Beatty and Ryan O'Neal on the same weekend.
'How about that? I was very proud,' she said.
The mother of two children (by first husband Egon) added: 'If I didn't have kids, I can't even imagine what I would have become, because I would've had no restraint.'
(Her daughter Tatiana revealed that von Furstenberg was so remiss as a mother that it wasn't until she went to a doctor at the age of 21 that she discovered she had a serious neuromuscular condition, Brody myopathy, that causes weakness and cramps.)
A 2015 biography of von Furstenberg, with which she collaborated, detailed how she continued to play the field in the years before she and Diller finally married.
Leaving her two children at home with the nanny, she partied at New York's Studio 54 nightclub, where male couples would have sex in back rooms and drugs were passed around by bare-chested men.
While she's denied being a lesbian, she admits her tastes have also run to women, especially a heroin-addicted Italian supermodel named Gia who died of Aids in the 1980s.
Von Furstenberg was also a regular at gay bars in Manhattan where she'd go dressed as a man.
Why Diller has decided to publicly address his sexuality so late in the day remains unclear and friends are reportedly bemused.
(Some expressed similar confusion when he suddenly wed von Furstenberg 24 years ago, although in that case it was assumed to have been for tax reasons.)
He suggests it may be because of the immense 'guilt' he still feels that he failed to step forward to try to be a 'role model' for other gay men.
After an unhappy and isolated childhood in Beverly Hills, with parents who neglected him and a drug-addicted older brother who bullied him (and was later shot dead in a drug-related incident aged 36), Diller had a nervous breakdown aged 19.
It left him with a crippling shyness which never completely left him as he battled his way up the Hollywood ladder.
It would also be fascinating to know when and how he broke the news of his preference for men to von Furstenberg and how she reacted.
Diller, a man used to getting his way, isn't about to reveal any more than he wants, snapping to a New York Times interviewer last week that he had cut short his promotional book tour as 'I am not up for interrogation about aspects of my personal life'.
Indeed, while Diller insists he's now 'too old to care' what people think, he glosses over the nitty gritty of his relationships with men.
He writes sketchily of his first sexual encounter with a 'shaggy blond guy' who, from the terrace of a West Hollywood apartment, signalled to a 16-year-old Diller, sitting in his car at traffic lights, to come up to him.
He doesn't dwell either on his notorious reputation as a ferocious boss and business adversary whose hair-trigger temper was likely to explode at any time.
Staff at Diller's various offices reportedly lived in dread of him descending on them. 'There's no tolerance for errors; Diller is known to shred employees if his tea isn't properly brewed,' reported the Tampa Bay Times in 2002.
Diller admitted to the New York Times last week: 'I'm a difficult manager.'
Whether he's also been a difficult husband is for his wife to decide.
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