With So Much to Tell, Jerry Weintraub Might Never Stop Talking

Legendary Hollywood figure Jerry Weintraub, whose face Imus believes would be on the Mt. Rushmore of show business, tells some wild tales in his new memoir, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. He shared some of them today with the I-Man, who just happens to be a former client.

“It is a hell of a ride,” Weintraub said about his life. Born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, he didn’t know what to do after the Air Force, and so he went to acting school.

“Not to act,” he stipulated. “But to find girls.”

Weintraub then became an NBC page, and started hanging out with singers and actors. “One thing led to another, and I started producing and managing, and doing Broadway shows,” he said, his New York accent think as ever, even after years in California.

Pretty soon, Weintraub was producing shows, and at one particular show at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, two tough-looking guys entered the room and informed Weintraub they were his neighbors, and therefore his partners.

“I said, ‘I don’t get it,’ and they said, ‘Well, you’ll get it real quick: if you make $100, we get $50, or else you can’t work here,’” he recalled. Upset and confused, he called his father who set up a meeting with an old friend from the Bronx, whose name Weintraub wouldn’t divulge today because, “He just got out of jail for the 18th time.”

That guy made Weintraub promise to do everything honestly for the rest of his life, and ensured his protection from the mafia so long as he agreed to stay clean. And he always has, ever since.

One of Weintraub’s biggest clients, besides Led Zepplin, The Moody Blues, and Bob Dylan, was Elvis Presley, whose manager Weintraub called every day for one year until Elvis agreed to let Weintraub promote a tour for him. But doing so involved more wrangling than the young Weintraub could have imagined.

Told by Elvis’s manager to show up at a roulette table in Las Vegas with $1 million for the tour, Weintraub called all the guys he knew in New York to beg for money. “Not one of those guy gave me five cents,” he said. Instead, funding came from a radio station owner in Seattle, who wired the money to the Royal Bank of Nevada.

“It looked like a pawn shop,” Weintraub remembered thinking as he walked into the bank, wearing crocodile cowboy boots and Indian jewelry, as he did in those days. Once the money through the wire, Weintraub recalled the bank manager asking him, “You need an accountant?”

One of the more melancholy aspects of Weintraub’s career concerns his longtime friend and client, the singer John Denver, who Weintraub said, “had a tough time accepting that critics in the music business didn’t take him seriously.”

Though he sold millions of records and made millions of dollars, Denver knew he would never be in the same league as Dylan. One day, out of nowhere, he walked into Weintraub’s office and fired him.

“It hurt personally, because we were very close,” said Weintraub. The two made up before Denver’s tragic death, and Weintraub considers him a great artist. “I think he was underestimated.”

One of the more colorful aspects of Weintraub’s life is that he remains married to his wife Jane, but has been living for years with his girlfriend Susie, an arrangement with which all three are very satisfied.

“I don’t need a divorce unless you need a divorce,” a not-very-surprised Jane had told her husband when he confessed his infidelities. They decided to “do this like adults” and not waste Weintraub’s hard-earned money on lawyers fees. Now, she and Susie are best friends, and Weintraub’s friends want to know how he worked out this arrangement.

“The fact is, I didn’t,” he said. “They did.”

For more of these stories, check out When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. As Imus put it, “It’s so much fun to read, it’s ridiculous.”

-Julie Kanfer