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When I was seven, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized, and my grandmother was taking care of the family. I was confused. I didn’t understand what was going on.

What happened?

When I was six, in 1949, my mother got a letter from a sister in Russia who she didn’t even know was alive. They hadn’t seen each other since 1917. And she told her that everyone in the family had died and that she was the only survivor. And my mother had a nervous breakdown.

Had they been killed in the Holocaust?

No, they had lived in the Ukraine. And when the Nazis were marching across Russia, the Ukrainians didn’t wait for the Germans to get there. They rounded up all the Jews in the neighborhood and killed them. In the case of my mother’s family, they threw everyone down their wells. Eleven people. My mother’s mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and seven brothers and sisters. My mother’s sister survived because she wasn’t home.

And when did your mother tell you all this?

She never did. No one knew what had happened. The day after my mother died, her sister told me she had written her all about it. No one ever saw the letter. Not my father and my brother. All they knew was that Mom had gone crazy. My mother was very secretive. Before she died, she had a series of strokes, and the last stroke affected her ability to use her right hand and to speak. But she worked and worked on it, and she regained her ability to speak and the use of her hand. And the last time I spoke to her before she died, I said, “Mom, to what do you attribute this miracle?” And she said: “I have no envy. I have no jealousy. And I have no hate.” And she died two days later.

What kind of advice did she give you as you grew up?

It was advice tinged with a lot of suspicion and fear, because my mother lived a life that would encourage suspicion and distrust. I learned how to be careful.

Careful in your relationships with people?

Careful in business, careful in everything. I acquired a healthy amount of my mother’s suspicion.

Has that in some ways cut you off from people?

I don’t think so. I’m a person who’s been in therapy, analysis, Lifespring, est, Course in Miracles, for the last twenty-five years. I’ve been working on myself and my demons and my nonsense and my fucked-up-ness for a long, long time. Which is not to say that I’m still not a little fucked up. I think you get better and better in tiny increments, and you die unhealed.

To use your mother’s words: No envy, no jealousy and no hate. How far along the road are you to those three?

At my mother’s funeral, I told [Hollywood agent] Sue Mengers, who is a good friend, what my mother had said, and Sue looked at me and said, “Well, they’ll never be able to say that about us.”

There’s a famous story about how you got your first real job, working in the William Morris mailroom, by faking your résumé and saying you’d graduated from UCLA. And you watched the mail every morning, waiting for the letter to come saying you hadn’t graduated. And when it came, you steamed it open and replaced it with a letter on fake university stationery saying you had. What does that say about your level of ambition?

It’s about survival. If you want this job and the only way you can get it is to be a college graduate and you clearly aren’t—I made it up. It just seemed like the practical thing to do.

And is that what it takes to get ahead in show business?

Let’s not kid ourselves. I could have done that and been untalented, and I would have failed. The reason I succeeded in my life is not because I have chutzpah. I succeeded in life because I’m smart and I’m talented.

What initially made you want to launch Asylum Records [in 1971]?

I started the record company because I couldn’t get a record deal for Jackson Browne. I had taken him around, and everybody had passed. Nobody wanted him. I told Ahmet Ertegun, “Listen, I’m doing you a favor.” And he said: “Don’t