The Barry Diller Story, The Life and Times of America's Greatest Entertainment Mogul.

It's no secret that the better-known media moguls are considered to be shrewd, difficult and controlling. Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone all fit the bill. So does Barry Diller, but one doesn't hear as much about the man who launched a fourth television network and

According to author George Mair, Diller is "America's greatest entertainment mogul" and is just as shrewd as the rest of them, if not more so. Indeed, Mair's book, The Barry Diller Story, The Life and Times of America's Greatest Entertainment Mogul (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 348 pp.), describes Diller as a true visionary, one who knew that cable would be the wave of the future even before the phrase "information superhighway" became fashionable. Diller saw the potential of technology and the viability of cable long before his industry colleagues did, and he used this knowledge as the impetus for the purchase of QVC and later for a bid for CBS to "converge" the two mediums. He knew that the ultimate winners in the media game would be the companies that "own the wire" - the phone line, the cable TV line, etc. He predicted that television would be led into the next century by the cable systems.

Although Diller came from a large family, the Dillers were not particularly close. Diller's grandfather was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant who opened a kosher meat market amid San Francisco's Orthodox Jewish community in the early 1900s. In the 1940s, Diller's father and uncle Richard set up a home construction business, which later spun off into a variety of construction and real estate development companies. Diller supposedly got the "Diller drive" from "the family's work ethic, sense of ambition and philanthropic spirit."

Diller grew up in Beverly Hills, where he went to high school with the children of such stars as Doris Day and Danny Thomas; Diller became a close friend of Marlo Thomas. Diller skipped college and, thanks to Marlo's actor/comedian father, he got his first job at the age of 19: working in the mail room of the William Morris Agency. While at William Morris, Diller learned the ins and outs of the business by reading all of the files that passed through. the mail room. One of Diller's first friends at the agency was a young David Geffen. (Although Geffen would always remain a close friend, Diller constantly measured his own success with Geffen's.)