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By Root 797 0

the bathroom, he left the door open a crack so he could continue talking. Although hotel suites had been booked for Bluhdorn and his party everywhere along the route, they never left the airplane. Instead, so as not to waste time, people with whom Bluhdorn had business waited at the airports to come onboard the airplane. As soon as the meetings were finished, the airplane took off again for the next city. The third man in the party was one of Paramount’s European executives, a genial, plump man in his sixties, who had apparently been chosen because of his calming effect on Bluhdorn. Though tired, he looked happier than Diller. I asked Diller why this was so. Barry nodded gingerly, like a man with a bad headache who doesn’t want to make it worse. “He’s learned to sleep with his eyes open,” he said.

Bluhdorn finished his call and asked for the time—watches, apparently, had a way of going dead on his wrist, perhaps because of the waves of energy emanating from him, or perhaps it had to do with his mechanical ineptitude, whatever the cause he preferred to ask the time rather than glance at a watch. Of course the simple answer may be that since he was always surrounded by people who were paid, among other things, to do his bidding, he simply saw no point in wearing a watch, or making a phone call, or carrying money for tips. Other people could do all those things for him, leaving him free to talk and worry about the price of sugar.

I told him that it was eight o’clock. “Jezus Ker-RIST!” he howled. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”

Bluhdorn was in motion again, sending the Paramount executive to search his luggage for a resupply of cigars, briefing us about our host, ordering me to place one last call to New York. We descended to the lobby in a flying wedge, led by Bluhdorn. Collins and Lapierre were waiting for us in the lobby. Bluhdorn hugged them, pulled their ear-lobes, pinched their cheeks. They were his boys, he told them, the goddamn movie was going to get made if it was the last goddamn thing he did. People had told him that The Godfather was a mistake, but he hadn’t listened, he had kept his faith in the book, in the young director, in the whole goddamn thing, and look what had happened. A huge fucking hit, one of the biggest ever! You had to believe, that was all, and he believed, he just wanted them to know that. This was said, I guessed, for the benefit of Barry Diller, who had made it very plain that he did not believe, but Diller was beyond arguing, putting one Gucci-clad foot in front of the other on the gleaming marble floor like a man who has just gotten out of bed for the first time since surgery.

Bluhdorn seated us in the limousine like a tour director, and we set off. We were having dinner at the home of Dino Fabbri, he explained, an Italian industrialist and printing magnate, who was both a close friend and a business partner of Bluhdorn’s. Fabbri’s house, when we arrived there, overlooked the sea, and was built in the style and on much the same scale as that of the Emperor Tiberius’s on Capri. The approach was hilly and winding, past small guest houses and garages hidden among small, fragrant pine trees. Bluhdorn charged up a broad flight of marble steps to embrace his host, while we straggled behind.

Fabbri was tall, slender, elegant. He didn’t seem to mind Bluhdorn’s bear hug, but he didn’t look as if he enjoyed it much either. He managed to extricate himself, shake hands with each of us, then led us through room after magnificent room, all of them in the somewhat cold and formal style of the lobby of a very expensive, but modern, grand hotel de luxe—the Baur Grünwald in Venice came to my mind. The floors were gleaming marble, and the furniture heavily gilded. Bluhdorn was on edge, trying to move as fast as he could, but Fabbri held him back, determined to show him the grandeurs of his palazzo, with a certain amount of pride. Clearly, he had gone to a great deal of trouble to put on this dinner. Spread out gracefully in the rooms were any number of very beautiful women in couture dresses, most of