Back in New York in 1964, David landed a mailroom job at William Morris. After lying about UCLA references of his own, he steamed open a letter from the university denying that he’d ever studied there. He regularly embellished his CV to enhance his standing. Elliot Roberts was an agent who witnessed Geffen steaming open other letters in order to get jump-starts on what was happening in the company. The guy’s drive and ruthlessness, appalling to others, thrilled Roberts. It didn’t take David long to rise from the mailroom.
As pop music became bigger business in the mid-’60s, William Morris opened its doors to longhaired musicians that it might have disdained two years before. Geffen was perfectly placed to deal with this emerging talent. ‘Stay with people your own age,’ senior agent Jerry Brandt counselled him. ‘Go into the music business.’ In truth, Geffen knew little about music. When television director Steve Binder turned him on to a remarkable singer named Laura Nyro, he’d never heard of her. Nyro was a Gothic Cass Elliott, a boho Barbra Streisand in black. Her swooping voice and street-operatic songs were starting to be covered by successful pop/MOR acts. Geffen eagerly seized the opportunity to offer his services. Nyro was quickly won over by his infectious enthusiasm, especially after she bombed at the Monterey Pop Festival and he rushed to her side to comfort her.
‘She was a very strange girl,’ Geffen told Joe Smith. ‘She had hair down to her thighs. She wore purple lipstick, Christmas balls for earrings, strange clothes. But very talented.’ David Crosby believed that Laura was ‘a window into something in [Geffen] that was not primarily about money’. The fact that Nyro and Geffen were both primarily gay helped: those who weren’t in the know even thought they’d become a couple. ‘People said, “You know he’s gay,”’ says Judy Henske. ‘And I thought, “Well, you don’t get a really gay hit from him, but whatever.” In any case he was great, and the reason that he was so great was that he was so smart. He was really, really fun and really, really smart.’ Journalist Ellen Sander, who’d written about him in the New York press, also failed to get ‘a gay hit’ from Geffen. She even seduced him one night in her apartment on East 20th Street. According to his biographer Tom King, ‘[David] credited Sander with helping him to conquer his fear of sex with women.’
For at least two years, Geffen was jetting back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. A fast-rising star, he lived in a chic apartment on Central Park South and stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel when he was in LA. On one trip he pressed a demo of Laura’s songs into the hands of Bones Howe, producer of pop-soul group the Fifth Dimension. Subsequently they recorded several Nyro tunes, notably the smash hits ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ and ‘Wedding Bell Blues’. To Geffen’s delight, the value of Laura’s catalogue increased exponentially as a result. Brazenly disregarding rules governing conflict of interest, he worked as both her agent and her publisher, forming Tuna Fish Music in partnership with her. ‘David was an opportunist,’ says Joe Smith. ‘He was very quick and very smart.’
Geffen’s energy was formidable. ‘He never stopped,’ says Essra Mohawk, an aspiring singer-songwriter adopted by Nyro. ‘I called him The Elf on Roller Skates. He seemed gay to me, so I never bought that he and Laura were a couple. I liked him a lot. He was very friendly.’ In May 1968 he quit William Morris and joined Ted Ashley’s agency. His responsibilities were now almost entirely musical. When he wasn’t in California himself he would receive at least one phone call a day from Elliot Roberts. Usually it involved the careers of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
Before a year was up, Geffen was tiring of Ashley Famous. He began scheming to form not just his own agency but his own label and personal-management firm too. With unprecedented audacity he suggested to Clive Davis that he leave his job as president of Columbia and partner him, Geffen, in a new label. Davis declined. In February 1969, turning 26, Geffen resigned from Ashley Famous and launched David Geffen Enterprises. First, however, came a major challenge: the disentangling of Crosby, Stills and Nash so they could form a new group.
Taking a break from LA in early 1969, Crosby, Stills and Nash honed their new material in a house that Paul Rothchild kept on Long Island. While there they went into New York City to formalise their relationship with David Geffen. Elliot Roberts flew out from LA to be present. What CSN proposed in Geffen’s Central Park South apartment was a straight no-paper handshake deal. Geffen hesitated for a split second and then agreed. Clive Davis, who thought highly of Geffen’s sharklike talent, released David Crosby without a whimper; if anything he was delighted to be rid of ‘the Bad Byrd’. In exchange Davis would get the Buffalo Springfield’s Richie Furay and his new group Poco. A tougher sell was Jerry Wexler, who fiercely resisted Geffen’s request that Atlantic release Stephen Stills. When Geffen came to see him, the meeting sparked a decade of bad blood. Jerry, a well-read jazzophile who scorned agents as parasites, physically threw the smaller man out of his office.
‘I knew [Jerry’s] accomplishments and went to him with great respect,’ Geffen later protested. ‘I’m not saying I was completely in control of my emotions, because I wasn’t. But Wexler wouldn’t even listen to me. He treated me like dirt. He screamed and yelled and acted like I was looking to rob him.’ Altogether wilier was the response of Ahmet Ertegun. The legendary co-founder of Atlantic thought a few moves ahead of Wexler. What, he asked himself, can I get out of this arrogant kid? ‘I saw in him a potential genius entertainment executive or entrepreneur,’ Ertegun said in 1990. ‘He was very bright, very fast. He was younger than me and he had a keen sense of where youth was going in America.’
Turning on all his Park Avenue charm, Ahmet seduced Geffen, who left thinking the goateed Atlantic prez was ‘the most sophisticated, amusing, and encouraging man I had ever met in my life’. Within weeks, Crosby, Stills and Nash was an Atlantic act. ‘Later I saw [Geffen’s] devotion to his artists,’ Jerry Wexler would concede. ‘His group of California rock poets worked for him without a contract – that’s how deep their trust ran.’ But the two men were to clash even more unpleasantly.
With the CSN deal inked, Geffen decided to make Los Angeles his base. ‘There was so much going on in California that it was the only place to be,’ he says. With Elliot Roberts already based there and building a stable of talent, David knew it was the right time to strike. The two men cemented their partnership as they drove to Carl Gottlieb’s house on Gardner Street one afternoon. ‘David stopped the car,’ says Roberts. ‘Then he turned to me and said, “Listen, let’s just do this.”’ When Elliot faintly protested that he’d done most of the hard work himself, David told him to shut up. ‘You know you’ll make twice as much money with me,’ he said.
Installed in a fancy new office at 9130 Sunset Boulevard, the two men plotted to shape the destinies of the canyon ladies and gentlemen. ‘The word got around that there were these music-industry guys who were also human beings,’ says Jackson Browne. ‘Crosby told me that Geffen was really brilliant but you could also trust him. And you could. David and Elliot would have done anything for their artists. In an industry full of cannibals, they were like the infantry coming over the hill.’
‘[David] had a description – he said these people were significant artists,’ Bones Howe recalls. ‘The significant artist is an artist who creates his own music, records it, and produces it. These people created and crafted themselves.