Ari Emanuel makes a lot of calls.
For nearly four decades, the Hollywood superagent—best known outside Tinseltown as the inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage—has made a career out of it. “On a typical day in November, I might roll a hundred calls,” he writes in his new memoir, the aptly titled Roll the Calls. During TV hiring season: “Now it’s three hundred.” During Endeavor’s IPO, his “normal three hundred calls a day increases by another hundred.” Extrapolate those numbers over his decades-long career and you’re somewhere in the millions of calls.
Emanuel’s book—written with J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter behind Andre Agassi’s Open and Prince Harry’s Spare—keeps up the count. He calls Larry David 50 times trying to sign him. Oprah gets at least eight. His future first wife, Sarah, gets a call “every day for the last eight months”—roughly 240—while she is still “almost engaged” to someone else. Sometimes it’s love at first call: Emanuel rings Mark Wahlberg, they meet, hit it off, and he signs him “on the spot.”
If the phone is Emanuel’s tool, rage is his fuel. It’s also the first word of Roll the Calls—”every story starts with rage,” he claims, making reference to The Iliad—and a theme Emanuel returns to throughout the book. But so is another four-letter R-word: “read.” Emanuel has difficulty reading, the 65-year-old reveals, which he attributes to his dyslexia. A school bully taunts him: “RETARD can’t READ.” And at a Passover seder, his mother implores him to recite the Four Questions. Later, his brother Rahm—former Mayor of Chicago and Chief of Staff to Barack Obama—takes the joke public by announcing on stage that Ari “can’t read anything more than two hundred pages.”
All of this makes the length of Roll the Calls somewhat sadistic. So, for anyone who’d just rather jump on a call than endure the book’s 417 pages, what follows is a selective call sheet of the famous and powerful people Emanuel praises, insults, threatens, flatters, represents, fires, and, well, calls.
BEVERLY HILLS, CA – SEPTEMBER 15: Agent Ari Emanuel and writer/director/producer Michael Moore arrives at Overture Films’ LA Premiere of “Capitalism: A Love Story” held at AMPAS Samuel Goldwyn Theater on September 15, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Overture)Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Ari Emanuel
On his morning routine: “Upon waking, drink two bottles of mineral water, do forty minutes of stretching, do ten minutes of dynamic warm-ups, do a regimen of extremely difficult breath work, then dive into the sauna, then twenty minutes of meditation, then ten minutes in the ice plunge, then twenty minutes of infrared light therapy, then a protein shake with coffee and vitamins, topped off with a cup of live worms, to eat the bad bacteria in my gut.” Self-care or self-own?
