Barry Diller, one of the kings of the US media, president of IAC/InteractiveCorp and founder of Fox Broadcasting Company, was born in San Francisco 83 years ago. The city is known for its great diversity, both demographic and cultural, and has one of the largest and most prominent LGTBIQ+ communities in the United States. Even so, in their youth were other times. “Today, sexual identities are much more fluid and natural, without all those rigidly defined lanes of the last century,” says the tycoon in an extract of its new memoirs, Who knewwhich are published on May 20. Diller has taken advantage of his biography to clarify parts of his life that many rumors have generated in the past. Among them, her love story with the woman she has been married for 24 years, designer Diane Von Fürstenberg (Brussels, 78 years old), a relationship labeled by many simple cover. “I have lived decades reading about Diane and I: that we were best friends instead of lovers. We were not just friends. We are not just friends. It simply was an explosion of passion that lasted for years. And yes, I also liked the boys, but that did not get into conflict with my love for diane”, the billionaire ditch – a fortune of 5,000 million dollars is estimated New York Magazine.
Diller and Von Fürstenberg met in 1974, when she had just separated from the German designer Egon Von Fürstenberg, at a dinner of a common friend to which the tycoon did not want to attend. “I will stay a few minutes, I will fulfill my duty with Sue [la amiga común] And I will leave, ”he says he thought. But his life changed forever at that dinner when he stayed alone with what is now his wife.“ We sat on a couch, far from the rest, and we stayed there for a long time. There was a glow around us that gave off sparks, described precisely by the French as a thunderbolt. Blushed and completely bewildered, I said: ‘I have to leave’, and she accompanied me to the door. I was working without a brain, without a thought in my head, driven by primitive pure impulses. We were at the door and said: ‘I want to call you’, and she said: ‘I want you to do it.’ While walking towards the elevator, I knew that something until then unimaginable was about to happen, “he recalls.
What was unimaginable until then for Diller was to be attracted to a woman. “There have been many men in my life, but there has only been one woman, and it did not reach up to 33,” he acknowledges at the beginning of the chapter. It is the first time that the businessman speaks openly of his sexuality, something he has never hidden, but has not preached either. “I could have left the closet like others, but I was one of the many who at that time were too afraid to do it,” he explains, and will list the rules that he self -imposed before he met Diane: “I would live with silence, but not with hypocrisy. I would never pose or pretend. I would do nothing that could make anyone believe that I am living a heterosexual life. I would not say it and I would not tell me. Life within these limitations and would never do anything that could fool anyone.
The businessman and the designer spent their first night together in an apartment given by Paramount, a company that Diller presided and directed at that time, a house that Von Fürstenberg described as “empty” and “uninhabited”. “The next morning, Diane went down to the kitchen, where my British butler was, Derek. He said: ‘Lady, can I ask him? He lay with Mr. Diller last night?’ She simply said: ‘Yes, I did it,” he recalls in the book. The skepticism of the butler is the same as his close and not so close environment: “People began to say: ‘Eh? What happens to this person? We believed that he only liked men.” That is why this extract of their memoirs is titled The truth about us, after all these years. “I have always thought that you never really know about the relationships of others. But I do know about ours. It is the basis of my life. What others think sometimes irritates us, but above all it fun. We know it, our family knows it and our friends know it. The rest are nonsense,” he writes.
Those passionate encounters – “Much of the speculation calmed down when it was clear to all that we could not take our hands off” – happened shortly after Von Fürstenberg separated from her first husband and father of her two children, who also publicly declared her bisexuity in 2000 during the world Gay Pride of Rome. “I had never had a stable relationship before,” recognizes the businessman. Until actor Richard Gere got in his way. “The first chapter of our romance ended at the time of Studio 54. The fleeting romance that [Von Fürstenberg] I had with Richard Gere and my exaggerated reaction lit the spark that would separate us. He was rolling American Gigolo, And the idea that this happened while working for me in Paramount made me feel too dumb. 10 years would pass until she returned to my life, “says the tyco Pretty Woman. “Well, it was shit,” he said.
The billionaire describes the reconciliation with the designer as much more leisurely than the beginning of romance: “We had both had relations with others that did not resist the passage of time. Theirs were deeper and more complete, mine were mostly superficial and incomplete.” Another 10 years passed until they married by surprise at the City of New York. “We met in 1974, we separated in 1981, we met in 1991, we got married in 2001 and we have spent 50 years united in a unique and complete love,” summarizes the entrepreneur.
Diller’s statements have surprised many, but not his wife. “Today it opened to the world. For me, it opened 50 years ago,” he confessed on Tuesday in a brief interview with The New York Times. “He has been reserved all his life, but not with me. So it is not strange to me,” he confirms. Diller describes in the book his romance as full of “romantic love and deep respect, companionship and adventures around the world.” She, who does not qualify the extract as a “exit from the closet”, but rather as if her husband “simply told the truth,” she says they have never needed to talk about their relationship, which has been enough for them to live it, but she has also made an exception: “I can only tell you that Barry and I have had an incredible life, we have been in love for 50 years. We have been lovers, friends, married, of everything. To honor life and love is never lying. ”
