THE GREAT PERSUADER

Spotlight

Jerry Weintraub calls himself "the man to go to when you want what money can't buy." That's convenient, since Jerry Weintraub is also the man to go to when you want what money can buy.

Over the course of his 50-year career as talent manager, concert promoter, and film producer (to narrow it down), Weintraub has served as the go-to guy for such machers as Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lew Wasserman, George H. W. Bush, Robert Altman, Armand Hammer, George Clooney, and Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Weintraub has worked hard to get what he wanted. And he wanted it all.

His new memoir, When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead, was written with Vanity Fair contributing editor Rich Cohen. It reads at times like a screenplay: a rags-to-riches tale complete with stunning reversals of fortune, punchy dialogue, and star cameos galore. But it's hard to imagine that even Weintraub himself would option it—the levels of success and influence he's achieved are too improbable, the good news too abundant.

Even the lows (sharing a New York apartment with two hookers above P. J. Clarke's as a young man, blowing $30 million on his own film company) are enviable. Weintraub attributes his success to being "born in the right nation with the right parents at the right moment," but here he's underselling himself. In the book's most entertaining stories he not only has to sell an audience on a celebrity but also has to sell the celebrity on himself—piling fake speakers onstage to make Led Zeppelin believe it's the loudest band in the world, or removing 5,000 seats from a concert hall to trick Elvis Presley into thinking his show is a sellout. "I'll tell you my biggest talent," says Weintraub. "When I believe in something, it's going to get done." No reader of his memoir will need to be convinced of that.

NATHANIEL RICH