Roll the Calls

Ari Emanuel opens his memoir with a meditation on rage, the force he considers both his greatest liability and his secret weapon. Growing up in Wilmette, a middle-class suburb of Chicago, he was diagnosed in fourth grade with dyslexia and ADHD. His formative moment came in a high school cafeteria, where he beat a bully taunting a boy for being unable to read. Emanuel was in the same special education class as the boy; the attack felt like an attack on him.

In late autumn 1985, Emanuel interviewed with Robert Lantz, an elderly New York talent agent who had fled Nazi Germany. Lantz hired him at $250 a week. Emanuel watched Lantz court actress Debra Winger for months, only to have Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) steal both Winger and actor Al Pacino. Witnessing Lantz's helplessness, Emanuel realized he needed to leave, and Lantz sent him to Los Angeles to start in the CAA mailroom.

A senior executive Emanuel calls "Office Dad" rejected him as too old at 26, but Emanuel called the man four to five times a day until he relented. He bought bagels before dawn, delivered mail, and navigated the city at night in a battered 1983 Le Car. He was nearly fired when a letter for actor Dan Aykroyd ended up in Ovitz's mail package. Bill Haber, one of CAA's co-founders and head of TV, became his mentor and championed his promotion to agent after Emanuel wrote a white paper on international TV markets.

As an agent, Emanuel recognized the importance of packaging, the practice of bundling multiple clients and selling the package to a network for a percentage of each episode's revenue. When a group of agents invited him to leave CAA and form a boutique agency called InterTalent, he agonized but agreed. He confided his plan to colleague Jeff Jacobs, who betrayed him by calling Ovitz at dawn. Emanuel confronted Ovitz; when Ovitz threatened to destroy him, Emanuel lifted a chair over his head, then walked out.

InterTalent operated out of a crummy bungalow. Emanuel signed his first clients and bonded with Tom Strickler, a former mailroom colleague fired by CAA for not informing on the plotters. A 153-day writers' strike nearly killed the agency, and when agent J. J. Harris joined without bringing actor Kevin Costner, who went to CAA instead, InterTalent collapsed. Emanuel and Strickler moved to ICM, another talent agency, where they found a toxic culture. In summer 1994, walking back to the office, Emanuel was struck by a pickup truck. Lying in the street, he had an epiphany that life is not a dress rehearsal and resolved to start his own agency.

Emanuel, Strickler, and two co-conspirators, fellow ICM agent Ricky Rosen and former CAA rival David Greenblatt, named their venture Endeavor. They launched on March 29, 1995, Emanuel's 34th birthday. The night before, Greenblatt's assistant was caught extracting files from ICM, and the founders were fired, though Emanuel insists he quit first. They regrouped at a borrowed office and began rebuilding.

Emanuel married his high school sweetheart, Sarah, in January 1996, and their first son, Noah, was born that July. Emanuel signed Vince McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation, and pursued comedian Larry David for months until David surrendered: "I will make you my agent if you just promise to stop calling. Just leave me the fuck alone!" (139). He signed actor Mark Wahlberg after seeing him in Boogie Nights and built the client list past 200 names. Producer Harvey Weinstein summoned the Endeavor partners to announce he had brokered their sale to rival agency William Morris without consent. Emanuel erupted, but later realized someone at William Morris had sent Weinstein as a proxy, confirming Endeavor was threatening the establishment.

The recruitment of Patrick Whitesell from CAA in 2001 transformed Endeavor. Whitesell, a tall, charming Iowan whose clients included Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, and Matt Damon, became Emanuel's co-leader: Where Emanuel kicked down doors, Whitesell sauntered in with a smile. The HBO show Entourage debuted with actor Jeremy Piven playing Ari Gold, a character based on Emanuel, blurring his real and fictional identities while supercharging his business.

Consulting Harvard Business School professor Nitin Nohria, Emanuel learned that every merger is really one company swallowing the other. He targeted William Morris, the oldest talent agency in Hollywood. Initial talks in 2003 collapsed, but Emanuel spent years maneuvering and secured a $100 million investment from Khaldoon Al Mubarak of Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund Mubadala. The merger closed on April 27, 2009. Emanuel swiftly removed Jim Wiatt, the chief executive, paying him roughly $20 million in severance, and ousted Irv Weintraub, the chief operating officer. Co-founder Strickler quit via company-wide email on the eve of the vote, devastating Emanuel.

Emanuel then partnered with Egon Durban of the private equity firm Silver Lake, which purchased a stake in the newly formed William Morris Endeavor (WME). Together they acquired IMG, the global sports and talent management giant, for $2.4 billion. Emanuel moved to London for months to learn IMG's businesses. The strain contributed to the end of his marriage to Sarah. In 2016, he assembled a consortium to buy the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) for $4.2 billion. Selling the TV rights became a years-long ordeal until Emanuel closed a deal with ESPN and Disney worth nearly $550 million per year for seven years.

In September 2019, Endeavor shelved its initial public offering after WeWork's offering collapsed, destroying investor appetite. Emanuel's father died the following month. The COVID-19 pandemic then shut down live events, which constituted 43 percent of Endeavor's revenue. Emanuel gave up his salary, laid off 350 people, and saved the UFC by staging fights on Yas Island off Abu Dhabi, with medical protocols written by his brother Zeke Emanuel.

Meanwhile, Emanuel pursued fashion entrepreneur Sarah Staudinger, who rejected him for months. They first connected during a trip to Saint-Tropez, but she ghosted him afterward. Grieving his father and overwhelmed by the pandemic, Emanuel broke up with Staudinger through his therapist. Months later he spotted her at a coffee shop, resumed calling, and they reconciled.

Endeavor went public in 2021, but the stock languished. Emanuel acquired Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) for roughly $9 billion, merging it with the UFC into an entity called TKO, then forced McMahon out when damaging revelations surfaced.

When Whitesell, increasingly absent, argued he had saved the company during COVID and should run Endeavor while Emanuel ran TKO, Emanuel convened a Zoom call and methodically dismantled Whitesell's record. Egon investigated, backed Emanuel, and Whitesell was removed. The company went private at an implied valuation of $13 billion.

Emanuel married Staudinger in Saint-Tropez, with Larry David officiating. He returned a $400 million Saudi investment after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, publicly condemned musician Kanye West's antisemitism, and delivered a controversial speech criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct of the war in Gaza. The memoir closes with Emanuel arriving home and reflecting on his mother's story of him as a two-year-old pulling a pacifier from his own mouth and shoving it into a complaining stranger's mouth. He wonders whether this impulse to help, predating all the traumas and triumphs, has made all the difference.