Meir Doron - Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon- Arnon Milchan

CONFIDENTIAL

The Life of Secret Agent
Turned Hollywood Tycoon
Arnon Milchan

Meir Doron Joseph Gelman

GEFEN BOOKS

Copyright Joseph Gelman and Meir Doron

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be translated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronics, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission from the publishers.

Cover Design: Darko Bovan

Typesetting: David Yehoshua

Images courtesy of New Regency Productions, unless specified otherwise.

Back cover quotes:
Peres quote: Authors interview, Feb. 8th, 2010, Presidents Residence, Jerusalem.
Chernin quote: September 18, 2008 at gala honoring Arnon Milchan, Paramount Studio, Los Angeles.
Murdoch quote: January 27, 2011, News Corporation press release.
Netanyahu quote: September 18, 2008 at gala honoring Arnon Milchan, Paramount Studio, Los Angeles (via video message).
Redstone quote: Authors interview.
Robert De Niro quote: The Last Tycoon, Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000, in article by Ann Louise Bardach.

First Edition 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doron, Meir, 1954-; Gelman, Joseph, 1960
The life of secret agent turned Hollywood tycoon Arnon Milchan / Meir Doron, Joseph Gelman.
p. cm.
Includes a filmography and index.

ISBN 978-0-615-43381-3 (alk. paper)

1. Milchan, Arnon. 2. Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography.3. SpiesIsraelBiography. 4. BusinessmenIsraelBiography. I. Gelman, Joseph. II. Title.

PN1998.3.M513D67 2011 791.4302'32092dc22 [B] 2011016156

To our loving wives and children,

who tolerated our late-night writing sessions

and general obsession to get this story told

Contents

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all those who helped in the writing of this book, especially those who agreed to talk on the record, such as Israeli president Shimon Peres, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, former chairman of Warner Brothers Terry Semel, Meir Teper, and Dr. Michael Ledeen at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, among others. We are also very thankful for the many sources who talked off the record. You know who you are.

We would like to thank Hadas Klein, Ety Kanner, Dvora Ben Yitzhak, Yair Lapid, Roger Schneider, and Aya Markovitch in Israel. A big thank you to Jane Bulmer at New Regency Films and Gal Shor of Israel Weekly in Los Angeles. Thanks to Gary Ginsberg who at the time was at News Corporation in New York, but has since moved to Time Warner. We also thank David Kuhn of Kuhn Projects in New York for his early guidance.

We are thankful to all of those talented journalists and researchers whose diverse body of work over the years undoubtedly helped us piece together this story: people like Yossi Melman, Ronen Bergman, Dan Raviv, Ben Caspit, Dr. Avner Cohen, Seymour Hersh, Wolf Blitzer, Ann Louise Bardach, John M. Goshko, Jack Mathews, Bob Woodward, Thomas Reed, Danny Stillman, and many more.

We would like to thank Ilan Greenfield for immediately grasping the importance of the material spelled out in this book, and of course, a big thanks to our editors, Kezia Raffel Pride and Katie Roman. Thank you to all of the staff at Gefen Publishing House who have worked so hard on this project.

And last but most important, we are thankful to Mr. Arnon Milchan himself, for leading such an incredible life, and for agreeing to respond to the many assertions made in this book, even though, as would be the case with any human, not all are flattering. It takes a man of special confidence and honor to do so, and for that we are grateful.

Joseph Gelman and Meir Doron

Prologue

I would rather nobody write a book about me.

Arnon Milchan

The evening of September 18, 2008, the Paramount studio lot could have easily been mistaken for a high-profile movie premiere. Powerful searchlights reached up into the sky as A-list stars walked the red carpet accompanied by blinding camera flashes. But this event was different; the more than seven hundred attendees were powerful studio executives and community leaders who had come to honor not a movie, but a man.

Arnon Milchan arrived with his wife Amanda, seemingly uncomfortable both in his tuxedo and with all of the lavish attention heaped upon him. He quickly sought refuge in the anonymity of the crowd. But there would be no escaping the numerous speeches praising him, and the elaborate film documenting his cinematic achievements.

Although his name is connected to Hollywood blockbusters such as Pretty Woman, The War of the Roses, L.A. Confidential, Fight Club, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and the Oliver Stonedirected conspiracy epic JFK, few in the audience had any awareness of the secret life of the man they were about to publicly honor with a Lifetime Achievement Award. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Milchan is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. This book lifts that shroud of mystery.

This is the controversial story of a secret agent, of nuclear proliferation, billion-dollar high-tech defense transactions, ideology, patriotism, and the awe-inspiring Hollywood career of a mysterious mogul.

Arnon Milchan, born in Israel in 1944, has led the kind of life that Ian Fleming and John le Carr loved to write about, that Steven Spielberg or perhaps even Oliver Stone like to make movies about. Milchan is a real risk taker, charming yet tough, secretive yet famous but only among famous people. Hes a superagent in the real-world sense, and the closest thing to a real-life James Bond that one could imagine. He understands fine wines and high-stakes gambling, deception, exotic cars, exotic weapons, and exotic women, and maintains a private $600-million art collection spread among his grand dwellings around the world from Monaco to South Africa, from Paris to Malibu to Israel.

We began this endeavor as unauthorized biographers and quickly evolved into detectives, peeling away layer after hidden layer, revealing the narrative of a unique man and his deep involvement in Israels clandestine struggles for survival.

For many months, without Milchans knowledge or approval, we immersed ourselves in court records and obscure articles from both the Hebrew and English presses, as well as in novels and private memoirs. We leaned heavily on our direct knowledge of the culture and language from which our main subject emerged, talked privately with the key figures mentioned in this book, and visited most of the locations described.