The Mephistopheles of Hollywood

***The Mephistopheles of Hollywood: How David Geffen Corrupted the Entertainment Industry*** or simply ***The Mephistopheles of Hollywood*,** is a nonfiction book written by Vector Donovan that chronicles the life of disgraced entertainment industry David Geffen, from his beginnings at Asylum Records all the way to his criminal trial and later suicide in 2006.

### Synopsis

The book describes how Geffen started out as part of the "Killer Dillers", the team of proteges under the tutelage of Barry Diller at William Morris Agency and then Paramount Pictures, a team that also was the proving grounds for the likes of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, during the '60s and '70s, and where Geffen took Diller's coachings of being ruthless in business to an absurd extreme.

Afterwards, he became the manager of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, then started the record label Asylum Records with Neil Young's manager Elliot Roberts, pledging it to be an artists' sanctuary where full creative freedom was allowed and business hassles would not intrude; Geffen leveraged this reputation to sign the likes of Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, John Fogerty, and a brief, two-album deal with Bob Dylan that released *Planet Waves* and the live album *Before the Flood*. He then made an initial deal to bring Nyro to the label, but she walked away and signed a more lucrative deal with Columbia Records, leading Geffen to purposefully torpedo her career and pull strings to ensure that Columbia wouldn't push her albums fully and radio stations wouldn't play her singles, leading to her fizzling out and Geffen to crow that leaving him was career suicide.

The book shows how from the beginning, Geffen put the lie to his promises of freedom and showed he was far more interested in money, by selling Asylum Records to Warner Bros. and having it merged with Elektra Records, then purposefully withholding promised royalty payments to his popular and successful artists, with the exception of Browne, whom he rewarded because he was his first signing. Asylum then folded in 1980, and Geffen chose to jump ship by founding a new label, Geffen Records, which landed a deal by signing John Lennon to release his comeback album *Double Fantasy*, which sold slowly and received mixed to negative reviews, only becoming a hit when Lennon was assassinated. Geffen then steered the signings of the likes of Joni Mitchell, Donna Summer, Neil Young, Elton John, and the solo career of Eagles frontman Don Henley, but all was not well. John did all right under Geffen, but certainly couldn't sustain his momentum. Geffen tried to tool Mitchell to be more contemporary, by having her record songs produced by Giorgio Moroder, which the public rejected because it did not ring true to her fans. When Summer became a born-again Christian, Geffen then spread malicious rumors of her saying homophobic comments and saying AIDS victims deserved their fate, which led to her fans abandoning her in droves and her career plummeting. Young's Geffen recordings did not sell well, leading to Geffen himself to sue Young for delivering "uncharacteristic" material, a lawsuit that was laughed at by the press and eventually led to Young re-signing with Warner's Reprise Records. And Henley and Geffen butted heads in direct lawsuits against each other (with Geffen threatening to blackball Henley in the industry), the results of which Henley wrote and sang about on his 1989 album *The End of the Innocence*, and then Henley spent an entire decade waiting for his contract to expire before making another solo album. Meanwhile, Geffen invested in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical *Cats*, and founded a movie studio division putting out the likes of *Risky Business,* *Beetlejuice* and *Interview with the Vampire*, leading to his reputation as a master mogul only rising.

Geffen became known as a spin-master and for launching smear campaigns by proxy against those who he considered his enemies list. Besides the sabotaging of Nyro and Summer, he launched such tactics against Jon Peters and Peter Guber (calling them hucksters who didn't know how to produce movies but "fucked and sucked" their way to the top, and claimed that during their short tenure in charge of the newly formed Sony Pictures Entertainment, they "took them for a ride and nearly ruined them before they started"), CBS Music CEO Walter Yetnikoff (saying that "an addict can't run things", even though Yetnikoff had cleaned up his act on his own accord and was renowned as "the mensch of the music industry",), cleaved mega manager Irving Azoff away from his successful post running CBS Music to form a rival label with Warners, and most damningly, against pop star Michael Jackson. Geffen promised Jackson plans to create movies together, and used his connections with Katzenberg, then the head of Walt Disney Studios, to create the deal for the attraction Captain EO, then also hinted that a leap to the silver screen was close at hand. He also attempted to get Jackson to dump Epic Records and sign instead to his own label. When Jackson refused, Geffen laid a very insidious trap, of enlisting Katzenberg's help to say that Disney and Steven Spielberg were creating a Peter Pan movie with Jackson as the star, with Jackson unaware that Spielberg was already working on the TriStar Pictures/Robin Williams project *Hook*, so that the illusion that the Disney project was being abandoned and leaving Spielberg as the scapegoat, while Geffen would appear to be the loyal friend looking out for Jackson. This wasn't enough, as Geffen, using contacts in the media, like *Los Angeles Times* reporter Bernard Weinraub as his proxies, deliberately set up the infamous 1993 allegations of child molestation against Jackson, apparently because Jackson turned down a romantic proposition from Geffen. He also forced the ouster of Jackson's management team, installed his own protege, Tommy Mottola, as head of Sony Music, and purposefully created the manufactroversy of "anti-Semitic" lyrics in Jackson's song "They Don't Care About Us," as well as a trap for Jackson to default on loans he'd made, using the Beatles catalog as collateral, to finish his 2001 album *Invincible*, by sabotaging promotion of the album to make it not sell, so that Sony could snare Jackson's masters and the catalog for life, a trap that ended up not springing because Azoff, then involved with Springbok, used his own muscle to force Sony to promote the album properly.

Geffen showed precious little attention to the artists he founded or the running of his label. He only met Aerosmith, whom Geffen helped nurture their successful '80s comeback, once, and never met with Nirvana, whom were relegated to the small sub-imprint of DGC Records because he felt they could never compete with the ultra successful Guns N' Roses, and only once intervened on their behalf regarding rumors that Geffen would reject the album *In Utero* with an angry phone call to a reporter. He arranged for Geffen Records to be purchased by MCA, the parent company of Universal, then arranged for the 1998 mega-merger of MCA's then-parent company, Seagram, with PolyGram, and for Geffen Records itself to be purchased by Interscope Records, which despite the rich payout for himself lead to several thousand executives losing their jobs and dozens of bands that had been signed to be left without their label; then angrily denounced Interscope founder and head Jimmy Iovine for letting Nirvana walk away to a five-album deal with Atlantic Records, then to Kurt Cobain and wife Charlize Theron founding Springbok Productions and their record label arm Exploitation Records. At the same time, Geffen, along with Katzenberg (having left Disney) and Spielberg, founded DreamWorks SKG, with the intent to create a new powerhouse studio, and also with the gentlemen's agreement that they'd make fewer than nine movies a year, that Spielberg would be free to do extramural work for other studios, and they'd always be home in time for dinner with their families, promises that Geffen immediately reneged on, angrily dressing down Spielberg for "not taking DreamWorks seriously enough", despite all this being part of the original deal. In addition, Spielberg was constantly left in the dark about the financial state of the studio, with Geffen constantly giving orders to underlings to "keep Steven happy," meaning that DreamWorks was constantly on the state of bankruptcy without Spielberg being aware. Yet, while denouncing Spielberg for his alleged transgressions, Geffen continued to do extramural activities of his own without recourse, including telling Mel Brooks to turn his film *The Producers* into a stage musical, promising to provide money and producers' support, then backing out of that deal.

Most infamously, Geffen placed himself at the head of the so-called "gay mafia" in Hollywood, a cabal that basically took control of the industry, determined who succeeded and who was ruined, and actively aided and abetted sexual molestation in the industry, spread smear campaigns against accusers, and planting false stories against innocent people to draw fire away from their own, even by figures not actually gay. Among the people that Geffen helped get away with their crimes for a long period of time includes filmmaker Bryan Singer, Universal Creative/Landmark Entertainment head Gary Goddard, boy band impresario Lou Pearlman, The WB programming head Garth Ancier, Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, journalist Charlie Rose, actor Kevin Spacey, and real estate mogul Donald Trump. However, when Weinstein was exposed for his actions in early 1999, during Miramax's Oscars campaign for *Shakespeare in Love*, a slow fuse was lit that would eventually lead to Weinstein and Singer turning on Geffen and exposing him, and the biggest celebrity trial of the 21st century to unfold, in which virtually every major Hollywood player testified in open court. Geffen was convicted of all counts, then committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning before he was sentenced.