Who Knew

Diller's memoir is most alive when he's inside a negotiation, the Paramount years, the Fox launch, the deals that reveal how he actually thinks, and reviewers agree this is where the book earns its keep, stacked with sharp anecdotes about Nicholson, Beatty, and Hepburn. The section where he publicly discusses being gay and his decades-long marriage to Diane von Furstenberg has drawn more mixed reactions: some found it a candid reckoning with a hidden life, others felt he uses distant parents and closeted identity to explain away a reputation for ruthlessness rather than fully sit with it. Taken together it reads less like confession than a mogul's own account of his mogul-hood, unusually well told but still very much on his terms.