Jerry Weintraub is Still Talking (Thus, is Not Dead)

Jerry Weintraub was stunned that his book, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead, will debut at number nine on the New York Times Bestseller list this weekend. These days, he considers himself more of a concierge than a writer or movie and music producer.

“In the morning when I get up, my first 50 or 60 e-mails and telephone calls are favors,” he told Imus, a former client. “Can you get my kid into Stanford? Can you get me two rooms at the Vegas Hilton? Can you do this? Can you do that?”

It often takes the 72-year old Weintraub, who managed no less than Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Led Zepplin, three or four hours a day just to get through these favors. But this onetime NBC page wasn’t always so successful, as he told Imus today.

Fresh out of the Army, Weintraub attended acting school, on the basis that there would be lots of women there. Instead, he met the actor James Caan, also a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Acting. One of the required classes was dance, taught by the famous choreographer Martha Graham.

“She sent Jimmy Caan and I, two street kids from New York, to Capezio on Broadway to get tights and ballet slippers,” said Weintraub. “If you knew where I grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, if I walked out of my building in tights and ballet slippers, I would not be here today.”

He refused to wear the required attire, but others were less averse. “Jimmy put on the tights and ballet slippers,” Weintraub said. “And he ended up being Sonny Corleone in The Godfather!”

Weintraub, dressed in jeans, ended up being called a “klutz” by Graham. Many years later, Weintraub produced one of Graham’s shows, and she had nothing but high praise for his work. Ever gracious, he told her, “I’m not a good producer. I’m a klutz.”

After recounting for Imus the story of firing “Ferguson” to appease an angry John Denver while he was on tour in Europe, Weintraub recalled setting up Frank Sinatra’s famous concert, “The Main Event Live,” which he preformed in the middle of a boxing ring in Madison Square Garden in1974. The idea for that show came to Weintraub in a pinch.

A distraught Sinatra had phoned Weintraub one day, threatening to quit his gig in Las Vegas because he was bored. Hoping to fix the situation, Weintraub rushed out to Vegas.

“He was sitting there with a bottle of Jack Daniels, a glass, a cigarette, that famous alpaca sweater, and a little hat,” he said of Sinatra, who was depressed. Weintraub promised his pal he had an exciting plan, and not to think of quitting. Weintraub, however, was lying.

“I had no idea,” he told Imus today. “Zero.” As he soothed Sinatra, Weintraub had a vision of the singer, whom he called “the all-time, heavyweight champ of singing,” doing the show from the Garden, live on television around the world. He promised Sinatra no rehearsal, and vowed to get sportscaster Howard Cosell to announce the event.

There were, of course, plenty of bumps in the road on the way to The Main Event, from Sinatra sending over a bogus setlist, to late arrival just 20 minutes before the start. For those details and hundreds of others, pick up, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. It’ll be difficult to put it down, as Imus learned.

“It’s so much fun to read, it’s stupid,” he said.

-Julie Kanfer