DEAL OR NO DEAL

Barry Diller recalls a career built as much on serendipity as on strategy.

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

Diller in 1986 with Martin Davis, the head of Paramount's parent company.

Why do we read the memoirs of aging entertainment tycoons, long after the entertainments that made the tycoon a tycoon have largely been shelved and forgotten? The easy answer is that they offer brushes with celebrities. Yet in books like Barry Diller’s new memoir, “Who Knew” (Simon & Schuster), the actors are treated in a by-the-way manner, like addled accessories to the tycoon’s ambition, or, at best, like coddled children who squabble and sleep in the back seat while the tycoon, dad-like, drives and navigates.

What such books really offer is a glimpse into the micro-mechanics of consumer capitalism, in forms that are still eccentric enough to be entertaining.

At the supermarket, seeing that Lindt has introduced a lime-flavored chocolate bar, we might assume that it’s a playful experiment in taste. In fact, it’s doubtless the result of years of testing and boardroom brinkmanship: fierce debates over which lime additive will survive on the shelf, and equally fierce arguments back in Switzerland over how far line extensions can go before they dilute the core brand. That new bar isn’t just competing with the offerings of rival companies; it’s fighting for space alongside other Lindt products, including an alarming pistachio-filled one that claims to be “Dubai style.”