I said, "Okay, good night."

Hung up.

A minute later, the phone rang. "All right, if you need me to come, I'll come," she said. "And I can see that you need me."

She brought my father. Peter Falk found out and he came, too. Same with John Avildsen, Tom Courtenay, and Charlie Durning-they were all there. My mother was sitting next to me. When she came on screen, she yelled out, "I look great!"

In the end, she loved it, mostly because she got residual checks from the film-$3, $27, $41-for years and years.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

By 1977, John Denver was the biggest star in the world. This was no accident. It was, in fact, the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign to package and sell him, as I had packaged and sold weekend getaways in the window of the Sachs Men's Shop in Fairbanks. I tried everything with John, sold him in every way I knew how. One year, for example, he was late with an album, had missed a deadline for Christmas, which infuriated the executives at RCA. They wanted their record or their money. It was John's ass. "Jerry," he said, "what can we do?"

"Don't worry," I told him. "We'll fix it."

I designed an album cover, pasted it on envelopes, and sent it to record stores. You bought the envelope, which could be traded for the album, making you an inside player, an investor in Denver 's career. It was a gimmick that worked. The envelopes sold like mad-a perfect gift for the John Denver fan in your life. The record went gold before it even existed. I went to RCA and said, "Look, you've had your Christmas, now where's our money?"

And yet, for various reasons, John began to lose his bearings. It's a danger of success: You're a kid, and want only to be heard; then you are heard, by everybody, all the time, but your thought is, either, "Well, yeah, great, but now what?" or "Yes, they hear me, but it's not the real me, not the voice I have in my head, or the person I want to be."

There were portents and signs. John started talking about ditching his glasses, his earnest and trustworthy glasses. He wanted to change his hair, too, which would be like Nike ditching its swoop. His hair and his glasses were known and loved everywhere on earth. Probably even the Bushmen of Africa could hum a few bars of "Rocky Mountain High." Then, coming off the huge success of Oh, God!, which set him up for a major career in film, I developed a follow-up, An Officer and a Gentleman, which John turned down. He said it was a B movie, and not good enough for him with its seedy backdrop of desolate airstrips and Panhandle bars. Of course, An Officer and a Gentleman was not only a great film, but also the movie that really launched the career of Richard Gere.

Much of this confusion had to do with problems in his own life, ways in which, so it seemed to him, everything was coming apart. First of all, his marriage had ended. He had split with Annie, who wasn't just his childhood sweetheart, but his muse. Much of his desire for her, the chase and courtship, could be heard, sublimated, in his best songs. The end of the marriage was the end of his life, the first life he lived from the time he left home. Then his father died. He had trouble with his father, but they had been close at the end. These losses hit him hard. In fact, the only person left from his old life was me. Which explains a lot. The man was trying to reinvent himself, start again by forgetting. This is when I began to hear rumors: John is upset. John is unhappy. John wants to leave you.

I discounted these, because, I mean, look what we had done together: in the ten years since I found him, this obscure, underpaid nightclub singer had become one of the biggest stars in the world, with hit records and shows and a big movie career before him, and money pouring in. But I did not realize how troubled he was, how insecure, and how badly he ached to be free. This was my friend, the executor of my will, the caretaker of my (God forbid) orphaned children, yet I knew nothing about him. That you know a person, does not mean you know a person.

So one morning, I was sitting in my office on Wilshire Boulevard -I had a huge office, with a million-dollar view of the hills-when John came storming in, unannounced and unplanned, a freight train with a head of steam.

"We have to talk, Jerry."

"Hey, John," I said, "great to see you. How're you doing?"

"Fine, fine," he said. "I've got something to tell you."

"Okay, good, tell me."

"I'm firing you."

I sat back and looked at him. I was infuriated, enraged. Look at this guy. Look where he was and look where he is. And now he comes here like this, not even sitting, not even talking and explaining, to tell me it's over and we are done. At such moments, I don't know why, my gut instinct is, Hey, fuck you!

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I'm firing you."

"Can you repeat that?"

"I'm firing you, Jerry."

I came out from behind the desk, came at him like you would come at someone on a basketball court. I was really hot. "Say it again," I told him. "I want to hear you say it again."

"I'm firing you."

"I don't ever want to see your face again," I told him. "Get out of my office. Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"Don't you want to know why I'm firing you?" he asked.

"I don't care why, what, where, or how," I said. "Don't ever say my name again in your lifetime; get out of here."

I threw him out. I went over to the window and stared at the hills without seeing, the blood pulsing in my face.

Later that afternoon, John's business manager called to tell me that all the things I owned with John-we were partners on every show and record-no longer belonged to me, as I had been booking his shows while also working as a producer, which was not permitted, or some such mumbo jumbo. I could hardly follow him, and I did not care. I was angry, heartbroken as well. "What's the point of this conversation?" I asked. "Just tell me what you're trying to tell me."

He said, "You don't own anything with John anymore."

I said, "I don't want to own anything with John. You can keep it all." And I hung the phone up.

I was depressed for weeks. Not about losing a client but about losing a friend, somebody to whom I had given so much of myself.

Things did not go well for John after that. RCA dropped him, his talent agency dropped him, most of the other people he worked with dropped him. I knew all of them and they understood how the operation functioned. What we created with John, the persona, the mood, simply was not real; we invented it. We were so interwoven, there was simply no way you could have Denver without Weintraub-not as John Denver had been in the seventies. It was his talent, but it was also my maneuvering. I was really his partner in everything. I did all the marketing and press. I packaged and sold him and turned him into a star. I put in a lot of my own money and all of my effort and ingenuity, because he was so talented and because I loved him. I still do. I miss him even now. When John died-in 1997, he crashed an experimental aircraft off the California coast-there was still so much left to do, to forgive and to be forgiven for, but who knows. As the poets say, death is not a period, it's an ellipsis.

John and I did not talk for years. He was just another star dimming in the glassy firmament, another face on TV. I wanted to forget him. Because he had been such a good friend, because the end had been so traumatic, because he had hurt me. I buried it and moved on. I did not see him again until 1984, in a restaurant at the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. We exchanged polite hellos. Cordial, but cold.

"Hey, Jerry," he asked, "now do you want to hear why I fired you?"

"No, John," I told him, "I honestly don't give a fuck."