Billionaire Barry Diller called the chatter over his sexuality "over the top" after an excerpt of his new memoir led to headlines and commotion on social media.
Diller spoke about his new memoir, "Who Knew," in a CNBC interview that aired on TODAY on May 20, two weeks after an excerpt of the book was published in which he wrote he had always been attracted to men until he met his future wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
"All this closet stuff, I mean, if I have been in a closet, it has been the most brightly lit closet with a glass door that you have ever seen," Diller said on TODAY.
"I understand, kind of, the catnip of media — but all this stuff about my sexuality at my frigging age just seems to me, well, it’s kind of obvious and over the top."
Diller's memoir was published on May 20, and the businessman shared the three words his wife told him ahead of the release of his life story.
"She said to me six months ago, or a year ago, when I knew I was going to publish: 'Just get ready,'" Diller recalled von Furstenberg telling him.
"I said, 'Get ready, what are you talking about?'" he said, before she replied, "You just get ready."
Diller also spoke of a set of rules he established for his life when he was around 20 or 21 years old.
"I just said I didn’t want to live a hypocritical life," he said. "It was in a way, rules of conduct that I just adopted for myself ... and I said, 'Well, there are things I will do and I won’t do. And those are my rules.' And it was adopted because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. And yet I didn’t want to tell anybody anything. So I said, I have to have rules for that. And I made them up."
Diller said he was living in fear when he was creating those rules. But looking back, the billionaire said it was that same fear that led to his success.
"If you have one great fear ... you don’t have room for many others," Diller said. "And I think that — in a weird way, as painful as the early development was, I think that’s actually a great gift. Odd, crazy-ish gift that I was given, that it allowed me to be fearless in so many other areas."
Diller said that the process of writing his memoir helped him learn that he's always had trouble living in the moment.
"Actually, it’s living in the old moments, since I didn’t really live in those moments at the time, was kind of fun for me," he said. "I learned things in the process of doing it that I had never known."
"For a lot of reasons, I worried that if I lived too much in the moment, it would take things away from me," he added. "I thought if I lived in the moment, it would make me cynical. One of the things I have always tried to hold onto is a certain kind of naivete."
In an excerpt of Diller's memoir published by New York Magazine on May 6, he wrote about how he met von Furstenberg for the first time, and that she was dismissive of him.
But when they met again at a dinner party, Diller said, “I was instantly bathed in such attention and cozy warmth I couldn’t believe it was the same woman I’d been dismissed by a year earlier.”
They later had dinner at her apartment, and “afterward, on the same sofa as the night before, we wound around each other, making out like teenagers, something I hadn’t done with a female since I was 16 years old,” Diller wrote.
“Now, this has always amazed me: There was no effort, no reasoning, no what’s-going-on-here, no ambition, no anything. Other than sheer excitement, I thought, Well, this is a surprise! I certainly didn’t feel, Oh my God, what does this mean? I was simply existing in the moment, a rare place for me,” he wrote.
The pair dated for a few years until they separated in 1981 after von Furstenberg had an affair with actor Richard Gere, Diller wrote in the excerpt. The couple would eventually get back together, and they married in 2001.
“I’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers,” Diller wrote. “We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years. And, yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane.”
He wrote: “I’ve always thought that you never really know about anyone else’s relationships. But I do know about ours. It is the bedrock of my life. What others think sometimes irritates but mostly amuses us. We know, our family knows, and our friends know. The rest is blather.”
