‘When I stop talking, you will know I am dead’ by Jerry Weintraub — Select quotes and Reflection

Jerry Weintraub: the self-made, Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer, legendary deal maker, and friend of politicians and stars. No matter where nature has placed him — the club rooms of Brooklyn, the Mafia dives of New York’s Lower East Side, the wilds of Alaska, or the hills of Hollywood — he has found a way to put on a show and sell tickets at the door. “All life was a theater and I wanted to put it up on a stage,” he writes.
Source: Google books

Few things which stood out from me reading Jerry Weintraub’s journey are,

1. Get mentors in life. I can’t agree more on this! (even I got to read this book after one of my mentor’s suggestion)

“This has been a theme in my life: Somehow, I have attracted mentors. Again and again, who knows why, older men have taken me under their wing. Maybe they recognized something in me, a vision of their younger selves, before their wife left them, before they were disappointed by their children, whatever.”

2. ‘Persistence’. Weintraub is the guy who has called the manager of Elvis Presly for months everyday morning persistently until he accepts for a world music tour. The Colonel (manager of Elvis) finally budges to his request. I have heard a similar story from the academy award winner for the actress of ‘Silence of the lambs’. Keep Knocking that door is what they all say. And Weintraub beautifully puts this by telling: ‘I don’t hear it. I don’t hear a ‘No’ when these guys tell me’. I am getting reminded of one of my favourite scenes from the movie ‘Guru’ where Abhishek Bachan responds in a similar way to the collector’s plea to get out all the loads of Polyester.

“If there’s one piece of advice I can give to young people, to kids trying to break out of Brooklyn and Kankakee, it’s this: persist, push, hang on, keep going, never give up. When the man says no, pretend you can’t hear him. Look confused, stammer, say, “Huh?” Persistence — it’s a cliche, but it happens to work. The person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down! I have accomplished almost nothing on the first or second or even the third try — the breakthrough usually comes late, when everyone else has left the field.”

3. Going to the office early. Being the first one to the office. Weintraub beautifully tells this by saying that ‘he likes to know that his day’s work is over before 9 am.’

“I like knowing I have done an entire day of work before the clock strikes nine.”

4. Go-getter- Just asking for it.

5. Not being afraid to fail and try crazy ideas.

6. People are what matters the most.

“Maintaining relationships is the most important thing in business and in life.”

7. Moving on to learn a new thing/work on a new job when the current job is too comfortable. Jerry has a hunger for learning. This is something I really admire in him. Yes, he has been all over the entertainment industry. He has earned a name for himself.

“This much I knew: As soon as you feel comfortable, that’s when it’s time to start over.”

8. As with all big achievers, he too had big dreams. He writes down his dreams on a notebook or maybe sketches it and then works to achieve those dreams.

“So we stood in front of Ciro’s, with the sun going down. The cars rolled up and the stars walked the carpet, frozen in the light of the flash, pop, pop, pop. The door opened and I caught a glimpse of smoke and swells and bubbles, a look inside the genie bottle. (I thought I had died and gone to heaven.) Standing out there, on the wrong side of the rope, seeing the stars disappear into the velvet interior — well, if that doesn’t make you ambitious, nothing will.”

“It meant these big stars were just people, normal human beings. It meant I could live here someday, be one of them.”

Select quotes:

“It would be great if you could preserve the first vision of a place that would become important to you, but later experience gets tangled up with memory until what came later changes what came before. You can never really save anything.”

“I learned lessons from this business that I still follow today: People will pay you to make their lives easier; always take the time to make the pitch; personal service is the name of the game; never get paid once for doing something twice.”

“We’ll hitchhike,” I said.

“How do you hitchhike to Florida?” he asked.

“What do you mean,” I said, “You stick out your thumb — that’s how.”

“Four days — that’s how long we were gone, but those four days changed my life. Because I was scared but kept on going and managed to survive.

When we got home, my father sat me down and asked, Why did you do it, Jerry?

Why? Because I wanted to see the world.”

“You go away believing that when you return, your world, your house, your parents — all of it will be waiting for you when you get back. But time passes, and you change, and as you change, everything else changes, too, so when you return you realize there is no home to return to. It’s gone. When you stood at the train station, waving good-bye, you did not understand what you were waving good-bye to — the world of your childhood dissolved behind you. Maybe it’s better that way. If you knew how time works, you would never do anything.”

“I would stay until I got what I needed, then move on. Various jobs, that’s what interested me. That could be my coda. Various experiences, various adventures.”

“…but — here is the funny part — the more I observed, the more I realized how much I knew already. I already instinctively knew how to handle a client, how to deal with a demand, how to back off a bully, how to make everyone walk away feeling good about how bad the other guy was feeling — this was pure Bronx, street-corner stuff.”

“They were flowery in their rhetoric as to me, but as you get older you come to understand the real reason you’re chosen for such honors: because the committee of whatever thinks your name can sell tables. It’s not you they are after, in other words, it’s your address book.”

“I suppose I’m describing how I built my network, which is a key to my success. A lot depends on who you know, who you can get to. If you have people who will open the door for you, literally and figuratively, you can make a pitch. It’s in your hands from there. Soon after I arrived in Hollywood, for example, I struck up a friendship with a guy named Scotty, who worked the gate at the MGM lot. For me, Scotty was more important than Louis B. Mayer. Mr. Mayer might green-light a picture, but you can’t get the green light if you can’t make the pitch and you can’t make the pitch if you can’t get in the gate.”

“…nothing is more important than a relationship. It trumps politics, party, club. People are what matter.”

“Life is strange — you travel so far, do so much, but the people you look for at the end are often the same people you looked for at the beginning.”

“What we miss, if anything, are the people, the world when it was crowded with crucial players.”

“There’s something to be learned from this story. It shows how, even if you have the greatest script in the world, it won’t work if the actors don’t play their parts.”

“But I used that promise, the Colonel’s price — “Do it for me and later on I will do something for you” — many times over the years. There is a lesson in this: Let the other guy save face with his people, but keep score.”

“Working with Elvis made me rich, taught me show business, made me a player. I did not have to hustle quite as much. Once you’ve established yourself, you can, to some extent, let business find you. You become a beacon, a door into a better life. “Can you do for me what you did for Elvis?” In other words, people seek you out.”

“He taught me about spontaneity that night — this, too, helped me as a film producer. Live, let it happen. There’s never a better take than the first: Sinatra knew that in his bones.”

“Fame is a private party. You can dazzle your way in with talent, or you can be vouched for. How far this can be carried depends entirely on who is doing the vouching. If it’s Frankie Valli, okay, maybe. But if it’s Sinatra? I arranged for John to cross paths with Elvis on the road.”

“The song, the tour, the public appearances — these were means to an end, which was not merely to have a hit, but to turn John into a star: not a star in prospect, but a star now and yesterday, someone who has already happened, so accomplished it’s no longer up for debate.”

“Yet there was something troubled about John. Success and money, rather than making these things easier to deal with, often bring them to the surface. He had an overwhelming need to impress and be accepted. He was in search of a father….As he became more successful, he began to resent me. He needed me, but hated me for that need. I understood this only later.”

“Believe me, John, you’re better with the people than with the critics. That counts if you’re an actor, a producer, a politician, or a singer.”

“Jerry Weintraub?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got to help me!”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got dreams!”

“All right, my boy! All right.”

“These were rock stars. They needed to say “Screw you!” to whoever was cutting the check or wearing the suit. It’s part of the job description.”

“I don’t really know what came out of this meeting other than a bunch of chatter. The fact is, if a bunch of men are discussing you, meeting about you, and scheming to destroy you, it probably means you’re doing something right.”

“Like every kid from the boroughs, I dreamed of Broadway. I put on a few small shows but realized that to be good, I would need a teacher and guide. If you want to learn, find a person who knows and study him or her.”

“I’ll tell you my biggest talent. When I believe in something, it’s going to get done. When people say, “No,” I don’t hear it. When people say, “That’s a bad idea,” I don’t believe them. When people say, “It won’t happen,” I pretend they’re joking.”

“Work with the best people. If you have the best writers, the best actors, and the best director and fail, okay, fine, there is even something noble in it; but if you fail with garbage, then you are left with nothing to hang your spirits on. Besides, life is too short to be spent in the company of morons.”

“In the end, though, I think your outlook has less to do with money than with the values your parents exhibit and your own nature. In this, I’ve been neither perfect nor blameless. I love my children and I think I have been a good father, but there were times when I chose my career over the life of the house. Was I there for every recital, or play, or concert? No, I was working. It’s nearly impossible to succeed in the world and also succeed in the house, which means, at some level, even if you do not realize it, you make a choice.”

“This is a regret. I wish I had been there more, had done better, had given my children as much as my parents gave me. I did not. I was always divided, being pulled away, on the phone, and so forth. But maybe you do best by being true to your nature. Whatever my children have lost to my work habits, they have made back in the privileges afforded them by my success. I could not give them what my parents gave me, so I gave them the world instead.”

“You have to be willing to walk away from the most comfortable perch, precisely because it is the most comfortable.”

“I believe in not getting hung up or paralyzed in a quest for perfection, but by the same token, you have to identify what is truly important and hold out until you can get those things right: Miyagi was important. And I could not find him.”

“That was Hammer — head in the clouds, feet on the ground. He thought of basics, of important, everyday things.”

“We’ve got to be at that funeral,” said Hammer. “It’s where the action is!”

“I can’t just go to Moscow like this,” I said. “I don’t have the clothes for it, for one thing.”

“Look, Jerry,” said Hammer, “history is not asking your permission. It’s telling you. A man has died.”

“He made a study of human drama — it was his life’s work. He was fascinated by everyone, high and low. He wanted to find out everything. He had a special interest in charisma and power, in great men, the special few who worked their will on history.”

“I like having what I have, but I know none of it is mine, that we are only renters on earth, that even our bodies belong to someone else. Which is why you hunger even when you’ve had your fill. Life will never satisfy if it is experienced only as the rise and fall of commerce. You need to see yourself as part of something larger that never dies.”

“Success had caused me to cease doing what made me successful. More important, it had caused me to stop doing what I loved. I recall this period reluctantly. People say you learn more from failure than success; it’s true. From this period, which runs like a ridgeline between my middle years and my true adulthood, I learned the great lesson of business: If you find something you love, keep doing it.”

“I was soon back in business, working from a bungalow on the lot at Warner’s, where I had signed a contract to make movies. I don’t care if you get flattened a thousand times. As long as you get up that thousand-and-first time, you win. As Hemingway said, ‘You can never tell the quality of a bullfighter until that bullfighter has been gored.’ ”

“A man without a mother is a man without a country, an exile. You never recover from it….That was his generation — they worked for us, gave up their lives and bodies for us, without a whisper of regret or complaint.”

~Rahul vignesh Sekar