James B. Stewart | The Birthday Party: How Stephen Schwarzman became private equity’s designated villain

Profiles
The Birthday Party
How Stephen Schwarzman became private equity’s designated villain.
by James B. Stewart February 11, 2008

On June 18, 2007, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, and his driver approached the Fifth Avenue entrance of the New York Public Library. Schwarzman, a member of the library’s board, was being honored that night. To his dismay, television reporters and cameramen were milling on the steps and the sidewalk. He evaded them by using a side entrance. A TV cameraman managed to penetrate the cocktail party that preceded the ceremony, and Schwarzman was startled when the glare of a camera-mounted spotlight hit him in the face.

In the previous few weeks, he had become the designated villain of an era on Wall Street—an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence that had driven the Dow Jones Industrial Average to new highs, along with the prices of luxury real estate and contemporary art, while the incomes of ordinary Americans stagnated or fell. Blackstone, the partnership that Schwarzman founded, in 1985, with Peter G. Peterson, Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon and a former chairman and C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, was a new type of financial institution: a manager of so-called alternative assets, such as private-equity, real-estate, and hedge funds—esoteric vehicles that barely existed when Blackstone began but now accounted for trillions in assets. Most of the investments came from corporate and public pension funds, endowments of universities and other nonprofit institutions, insurance companies, and rich people. Blackstone was the world’s largest manager of these alternative assets, with $88 billion. Its investors included Dartmouth College, Indiana University, the University of Texas, the University of Illinois, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Ohio Public Employee Retirement System. It had taken control of a hundred and twelve companies, with a combined value of nearly $200 billion. It had just completed what was at the time the largest private-equity buyout ever, the purchase, for $39 billion, of Equity Office Properties, and was on the verge of acquiring Hilton Hotels.

Blackstone was also about to become the largest private-equity firm to offer shares to the public. A week before the library tribute, the company disclosed, as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission, that Schwarzman would receive $677.2 million in cash from the public offering and that he would retain shares worth an estimated $7.8 billion, making him one of the richest men in the country. Coming soon after the lavish and widely chronicled sixtieth-birthday party that Schwarzman had given himself in February, an unflattering profile on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and strident calls from Congress to raise taxes on private-equity funds like Blackstone’s, the disclosures could only tarnish the public offering.

Nevertheless, investors were eager to buy shares. On June 21st, a heavily oversubscribed public offering was priced at thirty-one dollars a share, at the top of the projected range, causing Blackstone to be valued at $31 billion—not far behind the venerable Lehman Brothers. The next day, Blackstone shares, trading under the symbol BX, opened at $36.45 and closed slightly lower, at $35.06. Schwarzman’s friend James B. (Jimmy) Lee, Jr., a vice-chairman at J. P. Morgan Chase, sent him a congratulatory e-mail:


You were like Indiana Jones over the last few weeks. . . . They rolled giant boulders at you . . . fired poison darts at you . . . threw you into that giant snake pit . . . and yet you still found the grail, and got the blonde. . . . Bravo.

Schwarzman had demonstrated extraordinary timing. Just days before, two Bear Stearns hedge funds holding mortgage-backed securities collapsed—the first tremors of what became a full-blown credit crisis. By the end of the year, major financial institutions had recorded losses on mortgages and related financial instruments of more than a hundred billion dollars. The chiefs of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup lost their jobs. Citigroup, Merrill, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and UBS turned in near-desperation to sovereign wealth funds (funds held by governments) and rich investors in the Middle East and Asia for capital infusions.

In this chaotic environment, Blackstone had managed to avoid nearly all the pitfalls of subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. It specializes in commercial, not residential, real estate. Indeed, its hedge funds are designed to profit from market turmoil, and the enormous assets that it manages deliver steady fees in good markets and bad. The stock peaked on its first day of trading, however; by mid-January, its value had been cut almost in half.

Schwarzman still had his cash from the offering, which turned out to be $684 million, but his Blackstone stake, worth $8.83 billion after the first day, was worth just $4.62 billion.

Schwarzman has made himself an easy target for critics of Wall Street greed and conspicuous consumption. He lives in splendor in Manhattan, and he has an expanding collection of trophy residences that are lavish even by the current standards of Wall Street. In May, 2000, Schwarzman paid $37 million—reportedly a record sum at the time for a Manhattan co-op—for a thirty-five-room triplex on Park Avenue that was once owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In 2003, he paid $20.5 million for Four Winds, the former E. F. Hutton estate in Florida, which occupies a choice spit of land between the ocean and the Intracoastal waterway. Designed by the Palm Beach architect Maurice Fatio, the thirteen-thousand-square-foot, British-colonial-style estate was a designated historic landmark; local residents were startled when Schwarzman had the house razed. The ensuing fourteen-month wrangle between Schwarzman and his New York architects and the Landmarks Preservation Commission filled countless pages of testimony. It turned out that Schwarzman had got approval for a proposed expansion, and, as the house was dismantled, workers had numbered and stored everything so that it could be rebuilt in an expanded form. In 2006, he paid $34 million for a Federal-style house, on eight acres on Mecox Bay, in the Hamptons, that was previously owned by the Vanderbilt heir Carter Burden.

Schwarzman also owns a coastal estate in Saint-Tropez and a beachfront property in Jamaica. He typically spends summer weekends and August in East Hampton; July in Saint-Tropez; and winter weekends in Palm Beach. His children use the house in Jamaica; he rarely goes there. The five properties and their renovations appear to have cost Schwarzman at least a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. “I love houses,” he told me recently. “I’m not sure why.”

Whatever his indulgences, Schwarzman has always drawn a strict line between personal expenses and Blackstone’s business operations; colleagues say that he keeps a close watch on office spending. The company’s offices, on Park Avenue, are furnished with slightly threadbare traditional rugs and furniture and a mixture of modest prints and photographs. (The offices are scheduled to be renovated later this year.) Blackstone does not own a corporate jet. Instead, it uses Schwarzman’s private jet. (In 2006, the company paid him $1.54 million for the privilege.) Schwarzman must approve any other chartered flights. Partners pay for their own lunches; there is a twenty-five-dollar limit on dinner expenses for employees working at night. Even subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal are deemed personal expenses, and all the partners pay for their own. One exception has always been company events; Blackstone has a long history of opulent anniversary and closing dinners, often at the Four Seasons, which is referred to by some as the Blackstone cafeteria. Still, until recently Schwarzman had trouble getting a prime table in the Grill Room at lunch. According to a friend of both men, when Schwarzman asked Peterson why, his co-founder replied, “It takes more than just money.”

Another traditional measure of wealth is charitable activities and donations, and Schwarzman’s philanthropic activities have received wide notice. With a hundred and fifty million dollars from the public-offering proceeds, Blackstone established the Blackstone Foundation. Schwarzman has contributed to or raised money for a long list of nonprofit institutions, including the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum, Phoenix House, the Red Cross, the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, the American Museum of Natural History, New York City Outward Bound, the Asia Society, and the Central Park Conservancy. His competitive instincts are as keen here as in business; he told me that every fund-raiser that he has chaired or at which he has been the honoree has set a new record. He is on the board not only of the New York Public Library but of the Frick and of New York City Ballet. Jimmy Lee jokes that his friend has received more accolades and raised more money for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York than any other Jew; Edward Cardinal Egan is a close friend. (Schwarzman has also raised money for the American Jewish Committee.) As chairman of the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, in Washington, he shares a box every year with the President and the center’s honorees.

In America, board memberships and contributions to worthy causes in the arts and education have traditionally helped cleanse a man of any taint of new money and can temper populist resentment of great wealth. For someone of Schwarzman’s wealth and business prominence, affiliations with boards—which are stocked with the lawyers, bankers, and business executives who are Blackstone’s clients, potential clients, or advisers to them—are all but essential. A board member is expected to make contributions that roughly correlate to the size of his personal fortune. In Schwarzman’s case, this aspect of the pact has generated considerable controversy and ill will, especially given his overt displays of wealth.

Schwarzman pledged ten million dollars to the Kennedy Center, but the pledge was to be fulfilled over ten years, which gave it a present value significantly lower than ten million. According to a fellow member of the library board, “He has given, but not remotely what he could. A big capital campaign is coming up. We hope that he’ll give very generously.”

One of Schwarzman’s most controversial proposed gifts was to Yale, his alma mater, which, during the late nineties, agreed to name the freshman dining commons after Schwarzman in return for $17 million. Some people at Yale thought the commitment was in hand, but it emerged that Schwarzman’s gift would actually be a contribution to one of Blackstone’s investment partnerships on Yale’s behalf. No money would change hands until the fund was liquidated, and there was a risk that the investment might be worth far less than $17 million (although there was also the possibility that it would be worth more). Yale balked at trading a significant naming opportunity for what it considered a speculative commitment, and Schwarzman did not give the money. (The naming opportunity remains.)

The president of Yale, Richard C. Levin, won’t discuss the incident other than to say, “We’re still good friends.” He points out that Schwarzman has raised money for Yale as a member of the executive committee of the current fund-raising campaign and was co-chair of the New York region during the previous one. “He’s been supportive and enthusiastic.” Yale, of course, is hoping for generosity in the future. Levin says, “Now that he’s reached a new level of liquidity, we hope that he’ll become a world-class philanthropist.”

Schwarzman’s longtime friend Jeffrey Rosen, a Yale classmate who is now a deputy chairman at Lazard, defended Schwarzman’s cautious approach. “He believes he can compound the money at a higher rate than an institution can. By reinvesting it now, he’ll have more to give away. In five years, who knows how much he could have? Steve is at the dawn of his philanthropic stage. He’ll mature into this.”

Schwarzman himself says, “I’m thinking through how I want to approach that area of philanthropy. Assuming that Blackstone does well over time, and the credit markets recover, I’ll have significant resources for charitable activities.”

Schwarzman has seemed reluctant to embrace the time-honored relationship between wealth, class, good works, and self-restraint. Richard Beattie, a prominent lawyer who is also a longtime friend, told me, “Steve laughs about the old Wasp image—he doesn’t buy into that old-money standard. He thinks it’s ridiculous.” Schwarzman may be rethinking that view, however; he says that he is pondering a major gift, one likely to silence his critics, but that it would be premature to say more.

Schwarzman’s many friends stoutly defend his right to spend or give away his wealth as he sees fit. I spoke to a number of people who attended the sixtieth-birthday party; most felt that, as one friend put it, “it’s his money, and he should be able to do what he wants with it.” He added, “Isn’t this America?”

I knew Schwarzman in the nineteen-eighties, when he was at Lehman Brothers, but I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. Late last year, we met in the Blackstone offices on several occasions. Although he has gained weight, and his dark hair is now streaked with gray, he has the same dark eyes, and he exudes a restless intensity and an enthusiasm that belies his age. Before we sat down, he showed me around his office, an ample corner space, but modest by the standards of chief executives. Half of his desk is crowded with family photographs. Behind his chair, along the windows facing Park Avenue, are scores of photographs of him with prominent people, including President Bush and Laura Bush, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Cardinal Egan, Michael Bloomberg, Colin Powell, President Hu Jintao of China, Bruce Wasserstein, and the 2006 honorees at the Kennedy Center—Andrew Lloyd Webber, Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson, and Steven Spielberg.

As we began talking, he seemed defensive. Nearly everyone, including Peterson, had advised him to stay out of the news and to avoid reporters, but many of his friends and associates had already spoken to me, and he seemed to warm up when I asked him to recount his path from suburban Philadelphia boy to Wall Street billionaire. He has a vivid memory for details, whether it involves an anecdote from his first job on Wall Street or a troubled buyout or his first merger.

Schwarzman and his younger brothers, Mark and Warren, who are twins, grew up in the suburb of Abington; his mother still lives nearby. Schwarzman’s father came from a comfortably middle-class family of merchants in Philadelphia; his mother grew up poor, in the Bronx. Her father died when she was ten, and her mother worked to support the family. “My father was very bright,” Schwarzman says. “My mother had enormous drive. Put that together, and that’s my gene pool.”

Schwarzman attended Abington High School, where he played basketball and ran track. His height—he is five feet eight—worked against him, but he says he learned that by working and training harder than anyone else “you gain an advantage at the margin.” He ran sprints and cross-country. He likes to tell a story about how, early in one cross-country race, he slipped and broke his wrist. Determined to set a record for the course, he got up and kept running, his arm tucked against his side, and set the record. At the finish, his coach asked him what was wrong. “I broke my wrist,” Schwarzman said, then went into shock and was rushed to the hospital. In 2004, he donated a new football stadium to Abington High School—the Stephen A. Schwarzman Stadium.

Schwarzman’s father and grandfather ran a drygoods store, Schwarzmans, which sold bed and bath linens, draperies, and housewares. When Stephen was fifteen, he approached his father with a plan to open more stores and expand into a national chain, “like Sears.”

“That’s a bad idea,” his father told him. So he suggested expanding in Pennsylvania. Finally, he pleaded with him to open just one more store. All his ideas were rejected. “I’m very happy with my life as it is,” his father explained as Schwarzman kept badgering him. “I’ve got enough money to send you and your brothers to college. We’ve got a nice house and two cars. I don’t want any more in life.” Schwarzman found this incomprehensible. He turned to his mother. “That’s your father,” she said. “He’s happy!”

Schwarzman’s father retired at the age of seventy, after selling the store. It closed ten years later, the victim of mounting competition from national chains like Bed Bath & Beyond.

“I admired him,” Schwarzman said of his father. “He knew what he wanted and he achieved it. But that’s not for me. I wanted a much bigger stage. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew something had to be out there.”

When Schwarzman arrived at Yale, in 1965, he was drawn to superiors—certain professors and administrators—and to students who shared his sense of ambition and were likely to get ahead. “I’ve always been comfortable with people who run things, whether it was the principal of my high school or the president of the university,” Schwarzman told me. “I empathize with their problems, with their issues. I ask myself, How would I do that? It’s very easy if you think about what they think. It comes naturally to me.” His academic record wasn’t distinguished, and he often seemed impatient with intellectual pursuits. In his senior year, he was chosen by Skull and Bones.

The summer before his sophomore year, while recovering from a touch-football injury, Schwarzman decided to study classical music, a subject about which he knew almost nothing. He started with Gregorian chants and worked through the repertoire chronologically, listening to recordings and reading related texts. He studied every major work and every major conductor, often spending, he claims, eight to ten hours a day listening to the stereo system. By late summer, he had reached Tchaikovsky. He was especially captivated by the ballet music from “The Sleeping Beauty.” “I’d close my eyes and listen, and I could see dancing,” he recalled. Back at Yale that fall, he shared his newfound enthusiasm with the physicist Horace Taft, the master of Davenport College, where Schwarzman lived, and his wife, Mary Jane, who loved the ballet. The couple grew fond of him, and Mary Jane tutored him on the fine points of ballet and arranged trips to performances for him.

There were no dance performances on Yale’s all-male campus, but the New England women’s colleges were filled with aspiring dancers. It occurred to Schwarzman that with these women he could stage a dance performance, and charge admission. “Put attractive women in tights and you’d sell out,” he said. He got in touch with Walter Terry, the dance critic for Saturday Review, and persuaded him to attend. He scheduled the performance for a weeknight, when nothing else was competing for students’ attention. The event sold out, and Terry wrote about it in Saturday Review, in the issue of March 29, 1969. In the article, Schwarzman, asked about his future, said, “I can’t afford the arts right now. That takes money. So I’m going to a school of business administration.”

Schwarzman had majored in Intensive Culture and Behavior, an interdisciplinary subject, and hadn’t taken a single economics or accounting course. Law school or business school seemed a logical next step, but he had little sense of where either would lead. During his senior year, he had sent a letter to W. Averell Harriman, the wartime Ambassador to Russia and former governor of New York, who was serving as the President’s representative at the Paris peace talks. “There weren’t that many people in that era to admire, and I wrote him a letter saying I admired him and wanted to meet him,” Schwarzman recalled. Harriman, a fellow Skull and Bones man, invited him to lunch at his town house, on the Upper East Side, occasionally interrupting their talk to take calls from Cyrus Vance, in Paris. According to Schwarzman, Harriman asked him, “Young man, are you independently wealthy?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“Well, I am the son of a very rich man, which has made an enormous difference—that’s the reason you’re seeing me. If you have any interest in the political world, I advise you to become independently wealthy yourself.”

Schwarzman applied to several law and business schools. He was accepted at Harvard Business School. Feeling that he needed a break, he asked to defer his admission for a year.

To earn some extra money, Schwarzman worked for the Yale alumni office and then the admissions office. Larry Noble, a 1953 graduate who worked in the alumni office, introduced Schwarzman to others in Yale’s extensive alumni network, including his classmate Bill Donaldson, who was running an investment-banking firm, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. (Donaldson went on to become chairman and C.E.O. of the New York Stock Exchange and chairman of the S.E.C.) Schwarzman waited in the reception area for half an hour, watching as young bankers hurried past in shirtsleeves, followed by secretaries wearing short skirts and big gold earrings. “It seemed fast-moving, intense,” Schwarzman recalled. “Everyone seemed happy.” When Donaldson asked him why he wanted to work at the firm, Schwarzman replied, “Mr. Donaldson, I don’t even know what you do. But if you have such great-looking girls and intense guys then I want to do it.” Schwarzman was hired at a salary of ten thousand five hundred dollars, which, by his account, was “five hundred dollars more than anyone else in my class at Yale.” He quickly realized that he was unqualified. He left after six months, but, before leaving, he had lunch with Donaldson. “I’m sorry I didn’t make more of a contribution,” Schwarzman recalls saying. “If you don’t mind my asking, why did you hire me and waste your money?”

“It’s simple,” Donaldson replied. “One day you’ll be the head of this firm.”

“You must be kidding. Why?”

“It’s my instinct. You have something special and I want to bet on it.”

(Donaldson says that he has no recollection of such an incident, but he does recall telling Schwarzman that if he returned to the firm he would do well.)

Schwarzman met his first wife, Ellen Philips, during his second year at Harvard Business School, where she worked as a researcher and helped grade essays. She was the daughter of Jesse Philips, a wealthy Ohio industrialist. They were married in 1971 and had two children, Elizabeth, in 1976, and Edward, in 1979. Looking for a job after graduating, Schwarzman was shocked when both Goldman Sachs and First Boston turned him down, but he had offers from Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He claims that he was only the second Jew to get a job offer from Morgan Stanley, but he chose Lehman. Being at Lehman worked to his advantage. As one former Lehman banker describes the firm, “It was survival of the fittest. You produced the business and then you fought over the proceeds. It was every man for himself.” Bruce Wasserstein, then at First Boston, and soon to be regarded as the leading mergers-and-acquisitions banker on Wall Street, said to Eric Gleacher, the head of M. & A. at Lehman, and Schwarzman, “I don’t understand why all of you at Lehman Brothers hate each other. I get along with both of you.” To which Schwarzman replied, “If you were at Lehman Brothers, we’d hate you, too.”

Tropicana, an important Lehman client that was merging with Beatrice Foods, asked Schwarzman to represent the company in the sale, even though Schwarzman had never worked on a merger. (A Tropicana executive had been impressed by a bond presentation Schwarzman made, and felt that, despite his inexperience, he could explain complicated aspects of a merger to a relatively unsophisticated board.) The $488-million deal, in 1978, marked Schwarzman’s emergence as a lead banker in M. & A., a field that was growing, along with junk-bond empires and a new entrepreneurial breed, the corporate raider.

Schwarzman was too new and too young to rival M. & A. strategists like Wasserstein, but his work habits and his competitive drive impressed clients and other bankers and lawyers in that tightly knit world. A former Lehman colleague recalls a concert at Carnegie Hall that he and Schwarzman attended with their wives. As soon as the lights dimmed and the music began, Schwarzman opened his briefcase, pulled out a sheaf of papers, and began working. Though his wife chastised him at intermission, he resumed working as soon as they returned to their seats. He typically was awake by 4:30 or 5 A.M., and often worked until 10 P.M.—a habit that continues today. Schwarzman was a showman as well. Another Lehman colleague told me that once, when he and Schwarzman were to call on Harry Gray, then the acquisitive chief executive of the industrial conglomerate United Technologies, based in Hartford, they travelled to the meeting by helicopter and limousine. When the colleague asked why they didn’t simply drive or take the train, Schwarzman replied, “You have to make an impression. ‘If you want my time, I’m so valuable this is how I travel.’ ” According to Schwarzman, Gray and United Technologies became a significant Lehman Brothers client.

Schwarzman says that he consistently earned the highest bonus of anyone in his Lehman Brothers “class.” He was made a partner in 1978, just six years after arriving at the firm. In 1980, the Sunday Times ran a profile of Schwarzman, with the headline “STEPHEN SCHWARZMAN, LEHMAN’S MERGER MAKER.” In the office the next day, he was beaming and brandishing a copy. “He loved the publicity, loved the attention,” a friend recalls. At Lehman’s annual firm outing that spring, at a country club, his colleagues had a copy of the article printed on a framed mirror, so that Schwarzman’s face would be reflected whenever he read it.

In 1973, Peter G. Peterson joined Lehman as vice-chairman, and soon afterward became chairman and C.E.O. In addition to having been Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce, Peterson, a former chairman and chief executive of Bell & Howell, had headed Nixon’s Council on International Economic Policy and was a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations—a man very much in the postwar mold of an Averell Harriman, a John J. McCloy, or a Nelson Rockefeller, moving easily between private business and public service. He was sought after more for his contacts and his influence than for his business skills; in his work for Nixon, he had travelled incessantly and had got to know the chief executives of the world’s major businesses, often dropping their names in conversation. Peterson was a self-made man of an earlier generation, who had grown up in Kearney, Nebraska. His parents were Greek immigrants who ran a restaurant, where Peterson worked throughout his youth. He remembers people lining up at soup kitchens during the Depression and begging for food at the restaurant.

After investing much of his life savings in an equity stake in Lehman, Peterson discovered, three weeks after his arrival at the firm, that Lehman’s head trader, Lew Glucksman, had run up millions of dollars in losses, drastically depleting the firm’s capital and calling into question its ability to survive. The firm was in disarray. Recruited to help build up the roster of corporate clients, Peterson was suddenly made chief executive, mainly because, as one partner recalls, “he hadn’t been around long enough for anyone to hate him.”

Peterson’s instinct was to try to reconcile the warring factions. Urged by many to fire Glucksman, Peterson argued that Glucksman was a talented trader who had had only one bad year; instead, he named him to the management committee, and later promoted him to co-C.E.O. Peterson set up task forces to evaluate the firm’s strengths, weaknesses, and business plan, and asked Schwarzman to serve on one.

Schwarzman, who was twenty-seven, again demonstrated an extraordinary ability to ingratiate himself with an older man—Peterson was forty-seven—in a position of authority. Peterson recalls that Schwarzman was “extremely gifted, probably one of the two or three most gifted people I’ve met in the M. & A. world. More important, he had balance. He could make the major judgment calls. He knew when a C.E.O. needed to be called. He could gain their confidence better than anyone. I could bring in the business, but I couldn’t implement it. He was great at this, great to work with. He’d carry out the deal, and keep me informed.” Peterson recalls that his goal was to get to No. 2 or No. 3 in the M. & A. rankings. “I’d invite in a C.E.O.,” Peterson said. “I’d meet him, and then I’d invite Steve in for lunch. We got a lot of business this way.”

In 1983, Glucksman organized a luncheon to celebrate Peterson’s tenth anniversary at Lehman. The firm gave him a Henry Moore sketch, and Glucksman spoke enthusiastically of their relationship as co-C.E.O.s. By then, Glucksman’s trading operation was making record profits, and Peterson was credited with saving the firm. Business Week had run a cover story on the firm’s resurrection: “Back from the Brink Comes Lehman Brothers.” Five weeks later, Glucksman summoned Peterson to his office and told him that he had the votes to force him out. “I have to run the place by myself,” Glucksman insisted. Peterson asked if he could at least be given an opportunity to resign, and Glucksman refused.

Schwarzman urged Peterson to fight, insisting that they could rally enough support to block Glucksman. But Peterson saw no point in waging a civil war that might destroy the firm, and said that it was time to start something new. As part of his severance package, he insisted on generous stock options, which would be valuable if the firm was ever sold.

Peterson’s departure did not forestall civil war at Lehman Brothers, and within months the firm was losing money. Schwarzman, accurately gauging the ambitions of Peter Cohen, the chairman of American Express, to expand into the potentially lucrative field of investment banking, approached Cohen (a neighbor in East Hampton) and delivered a persuasive assessment of the benefits to American Express of buying Lehman. In 1984, just nine months after Peterson’s departure, Lehman was sold for $360 million. To many, it was Schwarzman’s most brilliant deal yet: he had enriched himself and his mentor while turning the tables on Glucksman and freeing himself to join Peterson in launching a new partnership.

Schwarzman initially refused to accompany Peterson in that new venture, because Peterson already had a partner, the investor Eli Jacobs, but Peterson and Jacobs soon quarrelled. This falling out cleared the way for Schwarzman to join Peterson, in 1985. Peterson and Schwarzman created a founders’ agreement that vested power in their hands alone, guaranteeing that one faction of partners couldn’t start a war over control of the firm. Peterson and Schwarzman had equal equity shares. Initially, they were going to call the firm Peterson & Schwarzman, with Schwarzman conceding top billing to Peterson, but Peterson argued that they needed something more institutional, or future partners would want their names added, leading to constant changes and an unwieldy name. It was Schwarzman’s idea to call it Black—schwarz, in German—stone, petros, in Greek. “I thought that was brilliant,” Peterson says.

“My job was to bring in business,” Peterson explains. He launched a direct-mail campaign, targeting a hundred chief executives, in which he declared that Blackstone would not back hostile deals and would have no conflicts of interest with investment-banking clients, since Blackstone had no investment-banking clients. According to Peterson, the effort resulted in retainer agreements with E. F. Hutton, Firestone, Union Carbide, Bristol-Myers, and Sony, whose chairman, Akio Morita, knew Peterson from his White House years. Peterson, in turn, joined the Sony board, solidifying his links with Japan.

Schwarzman and Peterson had bigger ambitions than a boutique firm: they wanted an institution with an array of businesses that could deliver a “comparative advantage,” the mantra of competition taught at Peterson’s alma mater, the University of Chicago. Schwarzman was also eager to expand into something less subject to volatile market cycles than M. & A. An obvious target was private equity, the new, sanitized name for the leveraged buyouts that had resulted in the scandals of the nineteen-eighties. Combining a merger-advisory business with a buyout fund was bold; leveraged-buyout funds were considered hostile to existing managements, and that was antithetical to Peterson’s insistence that Blackstone’s activities be strictly friendly to its corporate clients. But he and Schwarzman were convinced that a private-equity fund could be useful to established managements, too.

Shortly after they formed the company, a cautionary scandal involving Dennis Levine, who had been a Schwarzman protégé in Lehman’s M. & A. department, became public. Levine was an aggressive banker who had occupied the office next to Schwarzman’s, and who showed an uncanny ability to foresee hostile bids, which, in turn, often enabled Lehman to approach the target company to defend it. In 1986, Levine, who had left Lehman and was at Drexel Burnham Lambert, was arrested and charged with insider trading. This launched the biggest insider-trading scandal in Wall Street history. Levine agreed to coöperate with investigators, and eventually pleaded guilty to four felony counts. Among those implicated in the ensuing investigation were the arbitrager Ivan Boesky and the junk-bond financier Michael Milken. In short order came the collapse of Drexel Burnham, Milken’s firm and the principal force behind the takeover boom; the collapse of the junk-bond market; the savings-and-loan debacle, which was in part a consequence of junk bonds; and the 1990-91 recession.

According to Schwarzman, much of Levine’s insider trading had involved confidential information that he gleaned from his work at Lehman, including deals that Schwarzman had worked on. “Seldom have I felt so violated or betrayed,” Schwarzman said. “I personally talk to every class of first-year associates and analysts and tell them the story of Dennis Levine. I lecture them on what inside information is and how important it is to keep it confidential. Integrity is a core value. Dennis Levine helped drive that home for me.”

“Blackstone puts a huge emphasis on integrity,” Peterson told me. “We have a code of conduct, and every employee signs it every year. You have an affirmative responsibility to speak out about anything questionable, or unethical, you know about. If you don’t, you’re dismissed. In twenty-three years, we haven’t had one scandal.”

Despite the 1987 crash, the ensuing collapse of the junk-bond market, and the recession, the nineteen-nineties were the beginning of a golden age for private equity. As with leveraged buyouts, the power of private equity, and the wellspring of its remarkable profits, is leverage—the use of borrowed money. The private-equity fund raises capital from rich investors, often pension funds or large institutions. (The fund is “private” in that only invited investors are allowed to participate.) It uses the capital to buy an asset, typically a publicly traded company or a unit of a publicly traded company; restructures it financially to add layers of debt; manages it aggressively to cut costs and boost cash flow; then, after five to seven years, pays off the debt and resells the company or relaunches it on the public markets at an enormous profit. The power of leverage is vast: if you invest ten dollars in an asset and sell it a year later for twelve, you have earned twenty per cent. If you invest one dollar, borrow nine, pay a dollar in interest on the debt (an eleven-per-cent rate), and sell the asset for the same twelve dollars, your return is one hundred per cent.

Much as private-equity firms like to extoll the brilliance of their M.B.A.-holding partners and associates, this isn’t a difficult concept, which raises the question of why public companies don’t embrace the same high-leverage, high-profit model. The reason is that private-equity funds exist to generate capital gains, which are taxed at fifteen per cent; public companies focus on earnings, which are taxed at a much higher rate. Public companies are typically valued at a multiple of earnings, and the interest payments associated with high leverage may all but eliminate earnings. Private companies don’t report earnings. Freed from any preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports, private-equity firms like to praise their long-term perspective, but “long term” means between five and seven years, at which point they sell the asset to realize a capital gain and move on to new conquests. Most public companies are managed so as to exist in perpetuity. Even so, in recent years public companies have added huge amounts of leverage to their balance sheets, often by buying back their shares or taking on debt for acquisitions.

In addition to the turbocharging effects of leverage, private-equity operations like Blackstone benefit from an exceedingly generous compensation structure. The private-equity manager takes a management fee—two per cent is common—of the capital raised from the firm’s investors and twenty per cent of all gains (a stake known as “carried interest”), under the formula known on Wall Street as “two and twenty.” What’s left over is returned to the investors. The fees have no relation to the size or sophistication of the deal or the hours worked. Private-equity bankers reap the same twenty-per-cent carried interest on a multibillion-dollar deal as on one involving several million. A few firms have pushed higher, to twenty-five- and even to thirty-per-cent carried interest, but few have been willing to undercut the standard. Investors have tolerated the exorbitant fees, as long as they have been able to get results that surpass what they can earn in conventional stock and bond funds.

Several early Blackstone deals illustrate the firm’s strategy of combining high-leverage buyouts with M. & A. advisory work for established clients. In 1987, USX (the former U.S. Steel) was under pressure to raise its stock price in order to fend off the corporate raider Carl Icahn. To raise cash for a stock buyback, USX decided to sell its transport subsidiaries, which hauled iron ore and other raw materials into USX’s factories and finished steel out of them. It was an unglamorous, low-growth business, but it had a captive customer in USX and predictable cash flow to service debt. Peterson argued that Blackstone was friendly, whereas other bidders might prove little better than a raider, like Icahn. His argument prevailed, and USX sold the subsidiaries, for $640 million, to a company owned fifty-one per cent by Blackstone and forty-nine per cent by USX and the company’s managers. Blackstone invested just $13 million, with the rest in debt financing. USX used the cash to buy back shares, and Icahn eventually went away. According to Blackstone, the project ultimately generated a return of more than two thousand per cent.

Leverage greatly magnifies gains, but it exacerbates losses in equal measure. Recessions are especially treacherous. An early Blackstone employee, recalling 1990 and ’91, says, “These were tough years. Everyone was trying to prove themselves. The culture hadn’t jelled.” Though Schwarzman could be affable and charming—he called every partner on his or her birthday and sang “Happy Birthday”—he was impatient with failure and felt under intense pressure to prove himself. He sharply criticized employees like Steven Winograd and Brian McVeigh in front of others, forcing them out of the firm in the wake of bad deals. He clashed with Larry Fink, who departed with his money-management unit, BlackRock, which now manages more than a trillion dollars in assets. Roger Altman left to become Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, and eventually started his own private-equity firm, Evercore.

Turnover among partners was relatively high. The stress and the long hours damaged Schwarzman’s marriage; he and Ellen divorced in 1990, though he remained close to his children.

In 1993, Schwarzman hired another refugee from Lehman Brothers, J. Tomilson Hill, the former co-chief executive, to run Blackstone’s fledgling offerings in the world of hedge funds, the third major prong in Blackstone’s expansion strategy. Hedge funds have been the fastest-growing financial vehicles of the past five years—there are some eight thousand—and are fuelled by the same quest for higher returns and low volatility that has driven the private-equity boom. Hedge funds got their name from investment strategies that sell stocks short, or “hedge” against a declining market, thereby generating high returns in both bull and bear markets, but they embrace many investment strategies. The only thing they have in common with private-equity partnerships is the two-and-twenty (or higher) fee structure. Only recently has Blackstone launched its own hedge funds; its focus had been on what is known as a “fund of funds” approach, meaning that it steered clients’ money into suitable hedge funds. In return, Blackstone takes a fee of one per cent of the assets. The combination of private-equity, real-estate, and hedge funds has given Blackstone a presence in all three of the major alternative-asset classes.

In 1993, Schwarzman was introduced to Christine Hearst, a glamorous forty-year-old who had recently been divorced from Austin Hearst, an heir to the Hearst fortune. Christine, an intellectual-property lawyer, grew up on Long Island, the daughter of a New York City fireman. The two were married in 1995, at Schwarzman’s Manhattan apartment, and the reception was held at the Frick Collection.

The severe decline in stock prices between March, 2000, and October, 2002, during which the S. & P. 500 dropped forty-nine per cent and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite an astounding seventy-eight per cent, was devastating for the large financial companies, pension funds, and nonprofit institutions that depended on equity gains to finance their operations and to fund their obligations to retirees. The traditional investment mix of equities and bonds had served them well during the nineteen-nineties; now they found their asset values and endowments shrinking and, with them, the spending power that balanced operating budgets. Suddenly, the most desirable investments among institutions were those which, like hedge funds, private-equity, natural resources, and emerging-market funds, don’t necessarily track the stock market—so-called non-correlated assets.

Blackstone, too, struggled during the recession of 2001 and the collapse of the technology bubble, but not to the same extent as venture-capital firms and technology investors. As new money fled the stock market and poured into the firm, Schwarzman’s management style evolved, but only incrementally. Partners recall that, for all the firm’s success, Schwarzman acted as though they were only a deal away from failure. One person recalls a voice mail containing harsh criticism of a troubled deal that followed moments after the “Happy Birthday” call. A Blackstone investor recalls a golf outing with Blackstone partners where the game ended abruptly after the fifteenth hole, because Schwarzman expected his partners to be on time for the cocktail party. “It was ridiculous,” this investor says. “When he says jump, they jump. Still, I have to say they’re very disciplined in their business.”

Early on, Peterson agreed that the firm should have only one chief executive, and readily deferred to Schwarzman, a stickler for detail who chose the firm’s wallpaper and furnishings and interviewed every prospective employee. But, as the firm grew, Schwarzman came under pressure to delegate some management responsibilities and to carve out bigger equity stakes for both existing partners and new executives. Among those arguing for a change in course was Peterson, whose partnership with Schwarzman, perhaps inevitably, was increasingly strained. Although Schwarzman and Peterson had initially had equal equity stakes in the firm, over the years, as equity was awarded to other partners, those grants had come disproportionally from Peterson’s holdings. Peterson agreed that Schwarzman’s role merited a larger stake; indeed, he’d told Schwarzman that he wanted to spend less time at the firm and, in return, was willing to relinquish some of his equity. Still, the negotiations were painful. At one point, Peterson said that he would not give up any more, and he insisted on an agreement in writing. By the eve of the public offering, Schwarzman owned almost thirty per cent of the firm; Peterson’s interest had shrunk to eleven per cent.

Schwarzman and Peterson had different approaches to risk. Peterson was inherently more cautious, and Schwarzman found that every time Blackstone ventured into a new line of business he had to persuade Peterson to go along.

One banker who knows both men well explains, “At this point, there’s tremendous animosity between Steve and Pete. Steve gets the credit, but it was Pete’s Rolodex that built that firm. Pete gave and gave equity to accommodate more people, but Steve never gave. Pete may not be perfect. He encumbered the process. Steve did deserve the greater participation. But Steve never understood the importance of Pete’s broad-gauge nature.” A friend of Schwarzman’s put it this way: “The son eclipsed the father. Neither feels he’s gotten sufficient respect from the other.”

These tensions need to be kept in perspective: the Schwarzman-Peterson partnership, which has survived twenty-three years, is one of the most successful and enduring in Wall Street history. While conceding that there were some issues over equity shares, Schwarzman told me, “I have enormous respect for Pete, and we have a seamless relationship. Ours is the longest adult relationship in my life. We’ve never disagreed on any major issue. We do come at life from different points of view. He’s eighty-one—a different generation. He’s a good strategist and planner, a great thinker. We end up reaching the same conclusions.”

Schwarzman recognized that if he was to remain immersed in deals and larger strategic initiatives Blackstone needed a manager. In early 2002, he approached Hamilton (Tony) E. James, the tall, cerebral, patrician head of the investment-banking arm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which had recently been acquired by Credit Suisse First Boston. Already wealthy from the Credit Suisse First Boston deal, James, who had run his own operations for fifteen years, was planning to pursue personal interests, after helping with the merger. But Schwarzman courted him over a series of dinners at his apartment, and every meeting, James told me, “was more intriguing.” Schwarzman argued that Blackstone was outgrowing its entrepreneurial phase and needed more professional management. James had been deeply involved in all of Blackstone’s lines of business while he was at Donaldson. “People say Steve is a tough boss,” James said. “I don’t mind this; I’m happy to be accountable. Just give me the scope to run the business. He convinced me that I’d be empowered. If others didn’t like it, he’d support me one hundred per cent.”

James arrived in the summer of 2002, the stock market’s nadir. He streamlined operations, brought in new partners, imposed new screening standards for potential deals, and expanded committee oversight, so that deals weren’t based on one person’s judgment. He completed an internal evaluation called “Respect at Work,” aimed at boosting morale and coöperation. He worked to soften Blackstone’s aggressive image with clients and other dealmakers. “I didn’t want to be the most difficult partner—I wanted to get the first call,” he says. In contrast to Schwarzman, James worked toward consensus. “You can’t dictate,” he says. “I was more a guide than a leader.” To the surprise of many, Schwarzman delegated broad authority to James to run the firm.

Peterson gives James much of the credit for the firm’s recent success. “At my age, I can afford to be objective,” he told me. “Steve deserves credit. He’s aggressive, focussed, and growth-oriented. But Tony James is a remarkable manager. People love working for him. If you ask the top people why they’re here, they’ll tell you it’s because of Tony James.”

Blackstone’s alternative-asset businesses were not alone in benefitting from the extremely low interest rates and lax lending standards of the post-September 11th and post-Internet-bubble economy. Residential-real-estate values, which also benefit from high leverage, surged as well, becoming what is now widely conceded to be a bubble that rivalled or surpassed the Internet frenzy in magnitude. Not only were there billions of dollars in home refinancings as Americans drew cash from the rising value of their real estate; subprime lending—to borrowers who had bad credit records or who didn’t document their incomes, assets, or jobs—had soared in recent years. This huge expansion in risky loans was made possible by Wall Street banks such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, which bundled the loans together and parcelled out the resulting “collateralized debt obligations”—C.D.O.s—to investors eager for higher returns in a low-interest-rate environment. The theory was that any one of these loans was at high risk of default, but a large and diversified portfolio in which only a small percentage of loans defaulted was so safe that it merited an AAA rating from the credit agencies. Though these loans were hugely profitable for the banks that packaged and marketed them, Blackstone wasn’t tempted. Jonathan Gray, the co-head of Blackstone’s real-estate group, explains that subprime mortgages and related securities weren’t Blackstone’s area of expertise. “We invest in what we know and understand,” he said, noting that the firm has less than one per cent in residential real estate. Schwarzman tries to avoid business meetings when he’s in the Hamptons, but in June, 2006, Michael Klein, the chairman and co-chief executive of markets and banking at Citigroup, came over for lunch. Schwarzman and Klein tried to meet at least once a year outside the office to brainstorm, but this year’s discussion had taken on added urgency as stock markets soared and private equity reaped ever larger gains. Klein unveiled a detailed plan for taking the Blackstone Group public, in an initial public offering that, he argued, would value the company at an astounding $30 billion. This wasn’t the first time someone had broached the idea of going public—Goldman Sachs had been raising the issue for some time, especially after its own successful offering, in 1999. Schwarzman, who had taken so many companies public, had often pondered the possibility. Still, at that point no private-equity or other alternative-asset managers had taken their firms public. It was one thing for full-service investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to be publicly owned; they were closer to commercial banks than to private partnerships, and much of their income was fee-driven. But private-equity firms like Blackstone had long argued that their financial interests and incentives were identical to those of their investors: Blackstone partners, by investing in the same partnerships and having a carried interest, prospered when their clients did. If Blackstone was a public company, it would need to consider its shareholders’ interests along with those of its investors.

A public offering would also expose aspects of Blackstone’s business that even close observers could only guess at, such as its ownership structure, its partners’ equity shares, its compensation, and, most important, the exorbitant profits that Blackstone was earning, and, by extrapolation, the exorbitant profits of other private-equity and alternative-asset-management firms. At a time of growing discrepancies in income between the poor and the rich, how would the public react to these revelations? It also seemed peculiar that a private-equity firm, which championed the virtues of private ownership, would elect to go public.

Still, Michael Klein convinced Schwarzman that Blackstone could retain many of the benefits of private ownership, and that it would be able to align the interests of management and investors. Investors would continue to invest, Schwarzman felt, as long as Blackstone delivered superior results. Public ownership would generate capital for investment and expansion and a currency—common stock—that could be used for acquisitions. “Michael wasn’t the first to propose this, but he was the first who really understood the earnings power and the growth potential,” Schwarzman says. “I told him the only problem was that his valuation was too low.”

Peterson told me that he also discussed these issues at length with Schwarzman, including the fact that Schwarzman needed to be discreet about his own wealth. “I could have blocked this, but I didn’t,” he said. “Still, I told him, you’re going to be the focus of intense scrutiny. You’ll be the first. You’d better be prepared.”

As secret preparations went forward, at one point involving as many as a hundred and fifty auditors poring over Blackstone’s records, the buyout boom moved into high gear, with a record sixteen hundred announced deals in the first half of 2007 alone. Stock markets rose as many stocks were valued to include the premiums that a private-equity firm could be expected to pay. Banks competed aggressively to lend, and the spread between junk bonds and U.S. Treasuries—historically, a measure of investors’ tolerance for risk—reached an all-time low. In this potentially lucrative buyout environment, Blackstone began to hold back. “We were cautious in the so-called golden age,” Schwarzman says. “We were the least aggressive of all the big firms in the first half of 2007. We were very concerned about the high prices of deals and the vast amount of liquidity fuelling the boom—we had articulated this at an investor conference in May, 2006. Things always come to an end, and when they do they end badly. We only did two large deals—Hilton Hotels and Equity Office Properties.”

Despite Peterson’s advice to avoid personal publicity, Schwarzman began planning the party for his sixtieth birthday, which fell on February 14, 2007. Weeks before the event, the Times ran an article, by Landon Thomas, previewing the plans and speculating about the guest list: “MORE RUMORS ABOUT HIS PARTY THAN HIS DEALS.” The article also mentioned Schwarzman’s tradition of extravagant Christmas parties, including the most recent, which had had a James Bond theme, and featured models circulating dressed as “Bond girls,” with Schwarzman in a tuxedo. “Steve does not like little things, whether it’s deals, Christmas parties, or his own homes,” the investor Roland Betts, who is a member of the Yale Corporation, told the Times.

Schwarzman and his press spokesman tried to discourage the story, without success, and it came out just as the huge Equity Office Properties deal reached its climax. In the event, the scale of the party disappointed no one. Part of the cavernous Park Avenue armory was transformed into a large-scale replica of the Schwarzmans’ Manhattan apartment by Philip Baloun, the party planner who designed the Prince Charles gala at Lincoln Center. Replicas of Schwarzman’s art collection were mounted on the walls, including, at the entrance, a full-length portrait of him by Andrew Festing, the president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Dinner was served in a faux night-club setting, with orchids and palm trees. Guests dined on lobster, filet mignon, and baked Alaska, and were offered an array of expensive wines. (Schwarzman himself doesn’t drink.)

The comedian Martin Short was the m.c.; he poked fun at his short, rich host. The composer-pianist Marvin Hamlisch played a number from “A Chorus Line.” Patti LaBelle sang a song written for Schwarzman, and Rod Stewart sang a medley of his hits, for a reported fee of a million dollars.

Fortune put Schwarzman on the cover of its March 5th issue, proclaiming him “Wall Street’s Man of the Moment: with a history-making deal and headline-making birthday party, Steve Schwarzman has become the symbol of a new era in finance. And that’s always a risky proposition.”

This kind of attention was exactly what Peterson had feared. “I’m a son of Greek immigrants,” Peterson told me. “For years, I’d shop at sales to save twenty-five per cent and take the shuttle to Washington to save money. I waited twenty-seven years to buy the apartment I wanted. Steve made fun of me, said it was irrational. Maybe he’s right. Steve is a different generation. They were brought up differently. They like to consume. They’re boomers. They want it all and they want it now. To hell with the future!”

On March 22nd, Blackstone filed a preliminary prospectus for an initial public offering, revealing that it had more than $78 billion in assets under management and listing its high returns. Two months later, an updated filing disclosed the existence of an investment by a sovereign wealth fund, the State Investment Company of China; it agreed to pay $3 billion for a non-voting stake of just under ten per cent. The Chinese investment—the first equity stake ever taken by the fund—immediately valued Blackstone at more than $32 billion.

On June 12th, Blackstone added the details that everyone on Wall Street had been waiting for: how much Schwarzman would make in the deal and how much of the firm he and Peterson owned. The prospectus disclosed that Schwarzman would take out $677.2 million from the offering and would retain a twenty-four-per-cent ownership stake, valued at nearly $8 billion, at the expected thirty-dollar-a-share offering price. Peterson would withdraw $1.9 billion, to be placed in a charitable trust, and would retain just a four-per-cent stake, valued at $1.3 billion. Tony James would withdraw $188.5 million and retain a 4.9-per-cent stake, valued at more than $1.6 billion.

“You have no idea what an impression this made on Wall Street,” a friend of Schwarzman’s who works at another bank says. “You have all these guys who have spent their entire lives working just as hard to make twenty million. Sure, that’s a lot of money, but then Schwarzman turns around and, seemingly overnight, has eight billion.”

Two days later, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story, by Monica Langley and Henny Sender, that recapped the now notorious birthday party, and quoted Schwarzman’s Palm Beach chef, who said that Schwarzman dined on four-hundred-dollar stone crabs and complained about an employee’s shoes because he found the squeak of their rubber soles distracting. The article quoted Schwarzman saying that his business philosophy is “I want war—not a series of skirmishes” and “I always think of what will kill off the other bidder.”

Schwarzman was wounded by the Journal article, which, he noted defensively, didn’t mention that he had sent the chef’s daughter to summer schools at Harvard and Yale and kept the chef on his payroll while he was undergoing treatments for cancer.

The combination of self-indulgence, seeming disregard for those less privileged, and militant hostility toward rivals inflamed many on Wall Street who were already envious of Schwarzman’s record and the additional fortune that he was about to gain.

The day after the Journal story appeared, Senators Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley proposed legislation that would subject private-equity partnerships like Blackstone, whose earnings had been taxed at the lower rate of “passive income,” to ordinary corporate income taxes. In the House, Charles Rangel proposed that carried interest be taxed at the ordinary income rate rather than at the lower capital-gains rate. The measure would effectively increase Blackstone’s tax rate from fifteen per cent to thirty-five per cent, seriously eroding its profitability, and, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, would generate an extra twenty-six billion dollars over the next ten years.

On June 22nd, the opening day of trading, Blackstone shares reached a high of thirty-eight dollars. On a day that should have been the pinnacle of Schwarzman’s career, with an achievement likely to earn him a place among such figures of finance as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, Schwarzman stayed away from the Stock Exchange and didn’t ring the traditional closing bell, apprehensive about further unflattering publicity. He had no plans for that night. His wife was on a long-scheduled African safari. He worked until after 8 P.M., then returned to his apartment and had dinner in the library, in front of the TV. He wanted to escape, perhaps with an episode of “CSI.” He clicked on the remote, and stumbled onto a live panel discussion on CNBC about him and the Blackstone offering.

“I stared at this in complete amazement,” Schwarzman said. “All I wanted was a normal private moment in front of the TV. I thought it was all over.” He sat for about ten minutes before turning the TV off, feeling odd and alone.

Within weeks of Blackstone’s offering, Wall Street was shaken by rising defaults in subprime mortgages, which exposed the inherent risk in all those supposedly safe, diversified C.D.O.s. Losses appeared throughout the global financial system, surfacing in everything from foreign banks to American pension funds, and even a few very safe money-market funds.

Although Blackstone avoided the mortgage and credit debacles that are expected to lead to more than two hundred and sixty billion dollars in losses, the resulting credit freeze caused asset values to plunge, credit to disappear, and leverage to decline, all of which affected Blackstone’s core businesses. Its earnings for its first two quarters as a public company disappointed investors, and its stock went down. Early last month, Blackstone couldn’t raise the financing for the buyout of the mortgage unit of PHH Corporation, which it had agreed to buy in 2007, and the deal collapsed. At the end of the month, Blackstone’s proposed buyout of Alliance Data Systems, for $6.8 billion, also collapsed, and A.D.S. is suing Blackstone to force it to complete the deal. The “bad ending” that Schwarzman predicted in 2006 seemed to be at hand.

“I’ve lived through periods of illiquidity before,” he said. “Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage. There are great opportunities for high returns—much better than the so-called golden age we’ve just come through. From our perspective, we see greater opportunities going ahead.”

When I was talking with Schwarzman in his office, I asked him how it felt to be the focus of so much negative attention.

He paused, and his look hardened.

“How does it feel? Unattractive. No thinking person wants to be reduced to a caricature.” He continued, “Why did this happen? We went public in June, 2007, at the top of a giant bull market, with a society undergoing rapid change. Globalization. Job dislocation. Middle-class anxiety. Private equity is seen as a symbol of the people who are prospering from a world in flux. That’s a lightning-rod situation.”

He said that “plenty of people” had tried to advise him on how extremely rich people are expected to behave—the charitable activities, the good works, the donations. “But you know what?” he said. “I don’t feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don’t. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate trying to make partner at Lehman Brothers. I haven’t changed. I still think of Blackstone as a small firm. We have to prove ourselves in every deal. Every piece of paper is important. I’m always still trying.”

Schwarzman told me that in 1993, at forty-six, he was found to have a rare blood-protein deficiency that put him at risk of a blood clot or embolism, a condition that had killed his grandfather at the same age. He is tested every few weeks and takes a pill each day, which he says should help guarantee him a normal life span. Still, “it’s a reminder that life is fleeting,” he said. “Every day should be a good day. People fool themselves that they’ll be here forever. I get a daily wake-up call that that’s not true. We have limited time, and we have to maximize it. Live life intensely—I’ve always believed in that. I’m happy to be here. I was happy to make it to sixty. That’s the simple reason for the birthday party.” ♦

Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood

Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood
In 2004, having made his name as Steven Soderbergh’s agent, Pat Dollard was the stereotypical Hollywood operator: coked-up, Armani-sheathed, separated from his fourth wife, and rapidly self-destructing. But when he hit bottom, Dollard didn’t go back to rehab; he went to Iraq, embedded with the Marines, and filmed a pro-war documentary, which has the industry buzzing and right-wingers hailing him as the anti–Michael Moore. But whether he’s surviving mayhem in Ramadi or dining with Ann Coulter in Los Angeles, Evan Wright reports, Dollard’s life is a one-man combat zone.
by Evan Wright
March 2007
Pat Dollard

Pat Dollard, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Photograph by Art Streiber.

The day before Thanksgiving 2004, Pat Dollard, a Hollywood agent who represented Steven Soderbergh, sent an e-mail to just about everyone he knew containing one word: “Later.” Friends worried it was a suicide note. Dollard, 42, had spent nearly 20 years in the film business. On a good day he seemed little different than any other successful operator, a sort of hipper version of Entourage’s Ari Gold. But often in his turbulent career, bad days outnumbered the good. Once a rising star at William Morris, he was fired in the mid-90s for chronic absenteeism brought on by drinking and drug abuse. He attended 12-step meetings and bounced back, playing a critical role in getting Soderbergh’s Traffic made. Propaganda Films tapped him to head its management division, and in 2002 he produced Auto Focus, the Paul Schrader–directed biopic about the murder of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane—a film in which Dollard has a cameo in drag. Dollard co-founded Relativity, a firm which would assist the Marvel Entertainment Group in its half-billion-dollar production deal and went on to produce, after Dollard’s exit, Talladega Nights. But by 2004, Dollard was bingeing again. His fourth wife left him, and his third wife was suing for sole custody of their daughter. News that his daughter would be spending Thanksgiving at the home of Robert Evans—for whom his ex-wife worked as a development executive—sent Dollard into a morbid depression. Late one night he phoned a friend and suggested that everyone might be better off if he were dead. Then he sent his good-bye e-mail.

But Dollard was not planning a suicide, at least not a quick one. Dressed in what he would later describe as his “scumbag hipster agent’s uniform”—Prada boots, jeans, and a black-leather jacket—he boarded a plane for New York, then Kuwait City. From there he hopped a military transport to Baghdad and embedded with U.S. Marines in order to make a “pro-war documentary.” Given the decades of substance abuse, the idea of the chain-smoking, middle-aged Hollywood agent accompanying Marines into battle was sort of like Keith Richards competing in an Ironman Triathlon. But Dollard thrived. “My first time in a combat zone, I felt like I had walked into some bizarre fucking ultra-expensive movie set,” he would later say. “I had this vivid clarity, like when I used to take LSD. I felt joy. I felt like I had a message from God, or whoever, that this is exactly what I should be doing with my life. I belong in war. I am a warrior.”

To those at home it seemed that Dollard had entered dangerous mental territory. Around the New Year in 2005, he e-mailed a photo of himself to friends. In it he is clutching a machine gun, surrounded by Marines. Dressed in combat gear, his hair in a Mohawk and the word “die” shaved into his chest hair, Dollard looks like the mascot of camp Lord of the Flies.
The H’wood Warrior

Midsummer 2006. Dollard sits across from me at a hotel restaurant near the Los Angeles airport, tearing into a breakfast of waffles, bacon, and black coffee while talking about his ambition to become a “conservative icon, the Michael Moore of the right.” He is well on his way, thanks in no small part to a terrible incident that occurred last February in Iraq. While filming U.S. troops in Ramadi, a Humvee Dollard was riding in was struck by a bomb. Two Marines were killed, but Dollard—in keeping with a streak of freakishly good luck—was thrown clear from the fiery wreckage and emerged unharmed but for a two-inch cut on his right leg. The bombing was, appropriately enough, first reported in Variety. Dollard was soon invited on Tony Snow’s radio show on Fox and spent as much time railing against Hollywood liberalism as he did talking about Iraq. Snow, weeks away from becoming White House press secretary, loved it. He called Dollard a “true believer” and invited him back for two more appearances. Dollard was soon hailed by conservative columnists in U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Times. The New York Post dubbed him the “H’wood Warrior.” No small part of his appeal to the right is the fact that Dollard was once a “doctrinaire liberal” who could even boast of close ties to Robert Kennedy Jr., but now speaks of his pro-war stance in the most militant terms: “This is a propaganda war, and if I can fight with a camera the same as a Marine with his rifle, I will.”

Last May he launched a Web site (patdollard.com) and began airing a five-minute trailer of his as yet unfinished documentary, Young Americans. The response was overwhelming: 100,000 hits in the first week, hundreds of supportive e-mails, and unsolicited offers of money. “Dude, I’m becoming a national hero,” Dollard tells me.

Compactly built, Dollard dresses in clothes—jeans, Wal-Mart work boots, and an olive-drab T-shirt—which look like they were slept in. His hair is close-cropped, but nevertheless manages to appear disheveled. He hasn’t shaved in a few days. His teeth are cracked and stained, and, worst of all, from a health standpoint, his right eye is obscured by a milky blob: a cataract that developed in Iraq which he has never treated. Also in need of attention is a wretched cough, which sounds like a snow shovel scraping on the sidewalk. If he were a homeless man, you’d probably wash your hands after giving him your change.

Beneath the unkempt appearance, Dollard projects unnerving vitality. Even with the cataract, his green eyes are alert and engaging. Words tumble from his mouth at a rapid clip, his voice a parched growl acquired from a lifetime of cigarettes and liquor. One moment he is laughing about the time he picked up hookers on the set of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, a film his second wife worked on as an assistant to producer Raffaella De Laurentiis— a moment later he is pounding the table, railing against Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war protests. “Cindy Sheehan is pathologically self-centered. It’s a tragedy she lost her son. Anyway, we all lose family members. So, fuck Cindy Sheehan.”

From hilarity to rage in less than two minutes. In laymen’s terms, Dollard is “intense.” Some might use words like “manic” or “bipolar”—a condition Dollard’s mother believes he might suffer from—but Dollard bristles at any suggestion he is clinically off balance. “True,” he says, chewing a strip of bacon, “I was told to get a cat scan”—after being blown up in Iraq—“but I feel fucking fine.”

And, true, Dollard was pretty much the same before he got blown up. He possesses a quality common among celebrities, children, and the insane. You are compelled to watch him because you never know what he will do or say next. His third wife, Alicia Allain, sums up her ex-husband, saying, “He may be the biggest asshole I’ve met, but he’s got twisted charisma.”

Not everyone succumbs to it. When Dollard first posted the story of escaping death in Iraq, his younger sister, deeply opposed to the war, speculated that her older brother was just “too evil to die.” (Dollard dismisses her as a “nutcase—even nuttier than I am.”)

When it comes to practicing the Hollywood art of salesmanship, Dollard was among the best. Steven Soderbergh says, “Pat has a quality that’s essential to selling movies: making people see things that can’t be seen yet. I mean, if Pat says he saw a U.F.O., he will convince me it was there, even if I didn’t see it.”

Upon returning from his second trip to Iraq, last March, Dollard moved from Los Angeles to an undisclosed location out of state to complete his film. (He is so obsessed with secrecy he recently had the OnStar system yanked from his S.U.V., fearing it might be used by “enemies” to locate him.) He is in L.A. today at the invitation of Andrew Breitbart—longtime contributor to the Drudge Report and self-described “right-leaning Hollywood basher,” but, a free-thinker, who helped create the Huffington Post. Breitbart plans to introduce him to potential financial backers.

Dollard’s film teaser is less like a documentary than agitprop. It opens on two young Marines hunched over their machine guns at a roadblock. It’s the winter of 2005. Both are shivering from the cold, warily eyeing the civilian cars which at any moment they may be called upon to shoot. The Marines pass the time speculating about what kids their age might be doing back home. One of them turns to the camera, concluding, “They’re over at home smoking blunts, fucking watching MTV, sitting on their fat ass. Well, fuck you.”

A montage of violent clips slides past—an Arab fighter being shot to death by American soldiers; a Marine rifleman dancing and clutching his groin, then firing a machine gun into an Iraqi town; the minaret of a mosque being blown to pieces. The violence is intercut with iconic images from American pop culture—the smiling face of Jackass prince Johnny Knoxville, college kids dancing at an MTV beach party, anti-war rallies, the faces of arch-liberals Jane Fonda and Michael Moore. The soundtrack is provided by Boston hard-core punk band Blood for Blood. Their song “Ain’t Like You (Wasted Youth II),” with its chorus of “Fuck you, I ain’t like you,” becomes the refrain of the troops as they blow away insurgents and give the finger to anti-war activists and kids at home enjoying the fruits of America’s mindless civilian culture.

There is evidence of a possible war crime in the trailer: a Marine clutches the head of a dead Iraqi and raises it in front of the camera like a jack-o’-lantern. (This footage was given to Dollard by troops, and he claims not to know the provenance of the decapitated man, or why a Marine was playing with his severed head.) In Dollard’s presentation, the act of desecration, accompanied by the faces of grinning Marines, is treated as a macabre joke. By intercutting this with actual Jackass footage, the trailer seems to suggest that, for the young, wild, and patriotic American, war in Iraq is sort of like the ultimate Jackass.

When I mention to Dollard that his severed-head scene might turn more Americans against the war, or even against the troops, he laughs. “The true savagery in this war is being committed by the American left on the minds of the young men and women serving over there by repeatedly telling them that their cause is lost.” He adds, “My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence. I want kids to watch my film and understand that brutality is the fucking appropriate response to a brutal enemy.”

Dollard’s target audience is the same as any rock band’s: kids—the more disaffected the better. He aims to alter the course of pop culture. “What we’ve celebrated since at least the 1950s is the antihero,” Dollard says. “Today, even though our country has been attacked, nothing has changed. If you are a young man in America right now, the coolest fucking thing you can aspire to be is like a gangsta rapper, or a pseudo bad guy. The message of my movie is simple: If you’re a young person in America, the coolest, fucking most badass and most noble thing you can be today is a combat Marine. Period.”

Breitbart believes Dollard is onto something important. “There needs to be a confrontation at the pop-culture level of the kids who are over there fighting versus the kids at home who are totally disconnected, immersed in this mindless Abercrombie & Fitch–MTV culture.” Breitbart adds, “There needs to be a revolution, and Dollard is the man who can kick it off. I don’t care if older conservatives are offended by Pat Dollard. I was not looking for someone pristine. He brings to our cause this whole spirit of, like, the Merry Pranksters Two.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Ann Coulter adores his work. Like Breitbart, she recognizes his ability to reach young people in ways that other conservatives don’t. She says of his Web postings, “What’s great about them is that they have the panache of a professional MTV video with a very un-MTV message.” In an e-mail she sent to Dollard after an initial viewing of his trailer, she simply gushed, “wow! wow! that certainly is attention-grabbing! I like it—especially the ‘fuck you’ melange with michael moore and [former Democratic Party chairman] terry mccaulliffe. I like it!”

The reaction to Dollard from soldiers and their family members has been even more enthusiastic. One Marine officer he encountered in Ramadi expressed his admiration in a terse note: “Thank God and Chesty Puller for people like you, Pat Dollard, who truly get us. Semper Fi.”

As for those Americans who believe in the conspiracy of a liberal-controlled media, Dollard tells them that their worst fears are true, that the entertainment industry is run by a form of reverse McCarthyism. “If you’re conservative in Hollywood today, you’re not necessarily getting blacklisted, but you essentially are blacklisted. You are reviled and treated like shit.” That a former Hollywood big shot would descend from the heights and admit to the people that he was once part of the liberal cabal electrifies them. The father of a Marine Dollard met while filming in Ramadi wrote him, “[My son] told me that you were one of those very rare media types that didn’t suck and had nuts equal to that of any Marine infantry rifleman. [Your film] will be mighty powerful ordnance deployed against the bed-wetting peaceniks on the left.”

Most important from Dollard’s standpoint, he is reaching his target audience—the MySpace crowd. Typical of the many e-mails he receives is this: “Hey Pat im a 17 year old high school student. I lived most of my life as a liberal and over the last year realized I was only a product of the leftist school system and the media. The clips I’ve seen of ‘Young Americans’ are an inspiration and it’s time someone tells the truth. Thanks for putting your life on the line for the better of the country.”

When you consider that just 18 months earlier Dollard was a confessed whore-loving, alcoholic, coked-out Hollywood agent, his transformation into the great hope of conservative America is nothing short of astonishing. “It’s fucking crazy, dude,” he admits as he stands at the entrance of his hotel, smoking and watching planes take off from LAX. “I was afraid conservatives wouldn’t have me, but they’re fucking all over me.”

He brings up George Clooney and Steve Gaghan, both of whom he knew through his work with Soderbergh. In Dollard’s view, the two of them represent everything wrong and shallow about Hollywood liberalism. Dollard claims that he was having lunch with Gaghan—who wrote Traffic—a few years ago when Gaghan was struck by his inspiration to make Syriana. “He literally held up the bottle of olive oil on the table and said, ‘Oh, my God! It’s all about the oil.’ ”

(Though Gaghan remembers the lunch, his version of events differs from Dollard’s. And by that point, Gaghan says, he was already a few years into his research for Syriana, which was based on Robert Baer’s 2002 book, See No Evil.)

Nothing irks Dollard more than the praise Clooney received for making Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. “Clooney actually goes around letting people say he was ‘brave’ for making those movies. Everybody in Hollywood is obsessed with wanting to be perceived as tough. Is it brave making films that serve the agenda of every liberal in Hollywood, when real heroes are spilling their blood in Iraq?,” Dollard sputters. “Clooney is a pompous jackass.”

Another plane takes off from LAX. Lighting another post-breakfast cigarette, Dollard turns to me and laughs. “Dude, I spent 20 years being a pimp for the stars—now I’m becoming a political star.”
The Young Turk

Billy Bob Thornton, at one point a client of Dollard’s, once told a mutual friend, “Pat Dollard is the only person I know in Hollywood who’s crazier than me.” When Dollard was a teenager his goal in life was to become a “stoned artist.” Inspired by his hero, Jim Morrison, Dollard dreamed of spreading a “metaphysical message throughout the world.”

He grew up, the second eldest of five children, in a “Puerto Rican–Irish welfare family.” When Dollard was three his mother, Eva, packed up the kids and fled from their alcoholic, Irish-American father in New Jersey, moving to Paramount, California, a smog-bound blue-collar city on the southern fringes of the Los Angeles basin, where Eva took a job as a night-shift switchboard operator.

Dollard’s father stalked the family to California. Living on skid row, the elder Dollard would show up at his ex-wife’s house and terrorize the kids. As Dollard remembers it, his dad would inevitably end up leaping onto the cinder-block wall in the backyard to punch and threaten imaginary enemies. “My dad thought we were being attacked by pirates, and the police would come,” he says. “But it wasn’t my mom who called them. My dad would call the police to help him fight the pirates.”

His mother again moved the family, but Dollard’s father found them. Dollard was in first grade, a scholarship student at a Catholic elementary school, when his dad took a job parking cars nearby. During recess his father would approach the chain-link fence by the playground and call Pat’s name.

According to Eva Dollard, she warned her son, “No matter what he asks, you don’t answer any questions.” Dollard remembers standing with friends on the playground when his dad, dressed in shabby clothes and an orange reflector vest, approached. “I told the other kids I didn’t know him—he was a crazy drunk.”

That was the last time Dollard saw his father. He died within a year, at age 45, of cirrhosis of the liver. “I was chewed up by guilt for treating him like that,” Dollard says. “I stopped believing in God, and felt guiltier because my mom was this big Catholic. I seriously believed I must be some kind of psychopath.”

In addition to her faith, Eva possessed a commitment to liberalism that was once almost a birthright of working-class Catholics. “My mother had this belief in, like, the nobility of being poor and the eternal fight for social justice,” he says.

No one was more touched by Eva’s faith than her eldest child, Ann, eight years older than Pat. Ann’s involvement in activism would, strangely enough, put her on a fairy-tale ascent into the highest reaches of the American social strata. In 1976, a year after graduating from high school, Ann took a job as an extra in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, which was being filmed at a nearby hospital. During a break, Ann chatted up one of the film’s stars, Jane Fonda. The conversation resulted in Ann’s taking a job with Fonda’s husband Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, then with César Chávez’s United Farm Workers of America. Her work inevitably took her deeper into Hollywood’s activist-entertainment circles. By the early 80s, Ann had found her professional niche as a junior agent at Leading Artists Agency. Her activism continued, particularly in the nuclear-freeze movement, which led to an intimate friendship with Robert Kennedy Jr., who says, “Ann was one of my closest friends. She was extremely smart and extremely forceful and was absolutely committed to progressive issues, a vision of social justice for America.”

In the Dollard family, no one was closer to Pat than Ann. Kennedy recalls, “Ann would bring Pat to whatever she was doing. Pat idolized her, and she adored him.” Through his middle-school years, Dollard followed his older sister to marches and fund-raisers and spent weekends canvassing door-to-door for her.

But he was also beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps. Dollard had become a blackout drinker by age 15. Nevertheless, with the help of his parish priest, he won a scholarship to a Jesuit prep school. The priests nicknamed him “Nemesis.” He was the smart-ass who debated them about religion based on his extensive readings of South American writer Carlos Castaneda, and the kid who, when asked to do a book report on Colombia, brought in a live pot plant as a visual aid. Dollard claims he was nearly thrown out after being implicated in a plot to put LSD in the priests’ drinking water. By his junior year, Dollard had discovered L.A.’s punk scene, which only accelerated his drinking. “I remember being in honors algebra, drunk out of my mind every fucking day.”

Yet Dollard believed fate held something grand in store for him. Some nights he would take a girlfriend drunken-driving in the hills above Los Angeles, and when she would scream, “Slow down! You’re going to kill us!” he would say, “Maybe you’ll die. But not me. I can’t die. I have a destiny.” At 17, believing he was onto that destiny, he dropped out of high school to become a rock star. “I didn’t play an instrument, and I couldn’t sing,” he says, “but I thought I could make it on ego and mouth.”

He formed a band but admits, “I was too loaded to ever get up onstage.” His most memorable performance would be at another band’s show: the time he cracked his skull stage-diving at a Black Flag concert, then stayed in the mosh pit slamming for hours, despite later requiring 12 stitches. “I remember coming out covered in blood and everyone telling me how cool I looked,” says Dollard. “That was as far as my career went in music.” Married briefly at 21, Dollard became a telemarketer, spending the next few years in various boiler rooms, selling pens, printer ink, and charity vouchers for the Long Beach Police Department. “It was dismal,” he says. “But I learned how to close.”

When Dollard was 22, Ann performed a career intervention, hiring him to answer her phone at Leading Artists. He lasted two years before she fired him. But destiny, which he still believed in, had other plans. He would get his break, but only through enduring the greatest tragedy of his life. Two days after Ann fired him, she was killed in a freak horse-riding accident. Dollard was offered her job and her client list, which included a then unknown Steven Soderbergh, about a year away from releasing his breakthrough, Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

Dollard was 25 when Soderbergh shot to fame, and quickly proved himself in his own right. In the early 90s he moved to William Morris, where he worked with Mike Simpson, today a senior vice president of the agency, whose best-known clients are Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Craven, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone. “Pat was outspoken, very articulate, and knew how to operate in the world,” Simpson says. “He became an important soldier in our army.”

His biggest contribution was to help establish the agency’s independent-film division, which, Simpson says, “was extremely important to our success in the 90s.” In addition to Soderbergh, Dollard represented Billy Bob Thornton and his writing partner Tom Epperson; Mike Werb, who wrote The Mask and Face/Off; Don Mancini (writer of the Child’s Play series); director Alan Rudolph; writer Fina Torres; and actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner.

To Dollard, the sudden success felt as if “someone handed me a basket of power.” One of his favorite movies as a teenager had been Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, based on the Thackeray novel about a fatherless Irish rogue who fakes his way into the aristocracy. For Dollard, becoming an agent fulfilled this fantasy. “It was like being a fucking duke or count in Europe back in the day,” he says.

Dollard did what many other twentysomethings in his shoes would have done: he became a swine of the first order. He wore Armani suits, drove whatever car was “tasty” at the time—from a Miata to a Porsche, to a Range Rover—and “plowed through more pussy than I thought was imaginable.”

Outwardly, Dollard was the consummate Hollywood player. A former client says, “Pat seemed like the archetypical agent. He was hyper-slick in that hyper-glib, dismissive, hipper-than-thou, bullshit-Hollywood way. He was your basic Young Turk prick.”

Simpson saw something different in him. “The main thing I always liked about Pat from day one is that I felt like he had a soul. There was something else going on besides just who his clients were, what the deal was, that kind of agent veneer.”

Dollard was earning a reputation for intense but passing infatuations, such as the time in the early 90s when he converted to Judaism and took the name Schlomo Bin Avrihim. (“The rabbis who held my beth din,” says Dollard, referring to the council that determines a candidate’s suitability for conversion, “told me afterwards that they wished all converts could reach my spiritual level.”) The conversion didn’t last. Dollard’s second wife, for whom he’d become a Jew, divorced him not long after his romp with hookers on the set of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.

While visiting his wife on the Dragon set, Dollard found the time to chat up one of the hairdressers, Alicia Allain, who would become his third wife, in 1994. Alicia, 19, had come to Los Angeles from Louisiana with ambitions of becoming a producer, though was still relegated to the hair-and-makeup department.

The Dollard Alicia met “always wore these very tasteful Italian suits and was so gifted I believed he was going to end up running a studio.” Alicia was open-minded in a way that should have made theirs the ideal Hollywood marriage. When I ask her if she was aware that her future husband was having sex with hookers at the same time he was wooing her on the set of Dragon, she corrects me. “No, Pat didn’t have sex with those girls,” she says. “They just gave him some blow jobs.”

But as tolerant as Alicia was, Dollard’s increasing drug use plunged her into despair. While he controlled it at the office, after hours he typically functioned in a chemically induced haze. She says, “Those guys at William Morris loved Pat. They saw him as this happy-go-lucky dude. They didn’t see Pat locking himself in his bedroom at our apartment, him high as a kite, and me and his mother finally having the police and firemen get him because we’re afraid he’s killing himself in there. I saw he hated himself for what he was doing. After these runs Pat would just be balled up on the floor crying.”

Dollard estimates that he wound up in emergency rooms half a dozen times for overdoses.

By 1995, at age 30, Dollard was barely functioning. Mike Simpson tried to intervene. He says, “I talked to him, kind of like up against the wall, and said, ‘What are you doing, man? You’re gonna kill yourself.’ ”

According to Simpson, Dollard simply laughed and said, “You’re right.”

That year, he was fired from William Morris. Pat and Alicia moved back to her hometown, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where initially she supported them working at a hair salon. “We lived on clipping coupons for pizzas,” Dollard recalls. He began attending A.A. meetings and took a job at a Baton Rouge commercial-production house, and in 1996, Alicia gave birth to their daughter. He and Alicia produced two independent films, Notes from Underground and Lush, a portrait of a man suffering from alcoholic blackouts who is accused of murder. Neither film put Dollard back on the map. Nor was Soderbergh, who remained a client, doing especially well. After he failed to connect with audiences with films like The Underneath and Schizopolis, Soderbergh’s relations with major studios had chilled. “For a while there,” says Dollard, “the most successful film I was involved with was a Louisiana State Lottery commercial I worked on.”

Everything changed in 1998 when Soderbergh’s Out of Sight was released to critical acclaim. Dollard’s career came roaring back to life. In short order he set up lucrative deals for Soderbergh to make The Limey, Full Frontal, and Erin Brockovich. But Traffic was Dollard’s biggest coup. Dollard is credited by Soderbergh and others with getting the film made after it fell apart during pre-production. When Traffic won four Academy Awards, including Soderbergh’s first as a director, Dollard was a made man in Hollywood.

Propaganda Films hired Dollard to be president of its management division. Then at its peak as a commercial- and feature-production company, Propaganda’s stable included some of the hottest directors in town, including David Fincher, Michael Bay, and Spike Jonze. Dollard moved into a home in Bel Air. He and Alicia had separated in 1999, but continued to work together as a producing team.

With Traffic having moved the national debate on the war on drugs to the forefront, Dollard spoke candidly to the press about his own struggles with addiction, telling one reporter that his practices as an agent were now “consistent with A.A. principles.”

Despite preaching about sobriety, Dollard began using again. Initially, he attempted to hide it. “I would take drug vacations,” he explains. “I’d check into a hotel on Sunset and just binge for a few days.” Soon his addictions spilled into his work life. According to Dollard, in 2001, after starting at Propaganda, he initiated monthly drug-and-hooker parties, which he dubbed “the Hotel Club.”

Dollard claims that the Hotel Club became part of his executive plan at Propaganda. “I’m not saying we expensed any of this,” Dollard says. “Once a month, a variety of executives at the company would have non-wedding-connected bachelor parties with drugs and hookers we’d book at all the different trendy hotels—the Avalon, Four Seasons, Argyle. We would invite potential clients and get them loaded and get them laid. I was participating in the fucking Roman orgy.”

Propaganda soon went belly-up—industry-watchers blame a post-9/11 recession in commercial production, not Dollard—but he landed on his feet, taking a senior position at Catch-23, the management firm that represented Renée Zellweger, among others. In 2004 he and manager Ryan Kavanaugh co-founded Relativity Management, with up to $150 million in financing and ambitious plans to produce films as well as manage talent. “My career had never been better,” Dollard says. “My personal life was this ongoing disaster.”

In 2000 he had married for the fourth time. He and his wife moved into a Hollywood Hills mansion previously inhabited by Kirstie Alley. It was owned by Alley’s former boyfriend Melrose Place actor James Wilder, who lived next door. After Dollard reverted to old habits and began locking himself in the master bedroom to binge in privacy, his new wife enlisted Wilder’s help breaking in—by climbing across a walkway that connected the two homes—in order to check on her husband. She says, “Poor James went from Kirstie Alley to Pat and me.”

At a dinner party at Stockard Channing’s house, Dollard’s third wife, Alicia, heard alarming stories about her ex-husband. She says, “Pat was seen running naked down the street waving a sword.” (Dollard disputes key details of the account, saying, “I was wearing my boxers and I never left my balcony.”)

What’s not in dispute is that police were called to Dollard’s house in the spring of 2004, handcuffed him, and took him to the psych unit at Cedars-Sinai for observation. Around this time he began his political conversion. Somewhere between the Roman orgy and the mental ward he became a staunch supporter of George W. Bush’s.

To show his support for the war in Iraq, he acquired vanity plates for his Hummer that spelled, us wins. He told friends, “President Bush is the Che Guevara of our time. He’s already liberated two countries from tyranny. Those kids walking around in T-shirts with Che on them in a red beret, someday they’ll be wearing shirts with Bush’s face on them in a cowboy hat.”

Paul Schrader, who became close to him during the making of Auto Focus, says, “Pat is a passionista, just like Jimmy Toback or John Milius. These are guys who have never allowed logic or, actually, their own thought process to interfere with the progress of an interesting argument. The danger with Pat comes when he moves into that territory where everything gets blurred, and he becomes the object of his own imagination.”

Soon, Dollard was telling people that it was his intention to “personally fight al-Qaeda.” As he told me, “If I could, I’d kill jihadis with my bare hands. That’s really the goal.”
Kidnapped

My first encounter with Dollard takes place in the spring of 2004. We are introduced by a mutual friend who believes Dollard might be interested in representing the film rights of a book I wrote about Marines in Iraq. “He’s a little crazy,” my friend warns, “but he’s Steven Soderbergh’s agent. This guy makes movies.”

We meet in the offices of Relativity, on the fourth floor of a reassuringly stolid concrete-and-glass building on Beverly Drive. The reception area is a jumble of cardboard boxes and partially assembled desk components, with phone lines snaking through the mess. It looks like the company is just moving in, rapidly expanding, or folding. (As it would turn out, it was doing all three at once.) It’s populated by attractive, young, female assistants who seem to be doing nothing when Dollard—still in his Prada-boots-jeans-and-silk-T-shirt phase—strides in, shakes my hand, and tells me he’ll be right back. He has to go to the bathroom. I can wait in his office down the hall.

Dollard returns 20 minutes later. We sit on black leather chairs around a chrome-and-glass coffee table. He smokes, ashing in a paper cup, and rambles about killing jihadis and his dream of making a pro-war film.

Despite his ease in discussing his travails with drugs, he lowers his voice when discussing his incipient Republicanism. “Dude,” he says, “when I have meetings with George Clooney, I’m afraid to drive my Hummer on the lot. I’m afraid if I come out as a Republican it will jeopardize my business relations. How fucked is that, dude? I live in fear of George Clooney.”

At the end of our meeting Dollard offers to become my manager. “Seriously, dude, I could get something set up for you like that,” he says, clapping his hands to indicate how fast he is going to make a deal.

But Dollard never becomes my manager. In the coming weeks, he breaks several appointments. One day he phones. Rapid, shallow breaths come across the line. “Dude, I am so, so, so fucking sorry for not calling you.” No explanation is required, but Dollard offers one anyway. “I was fucking kidnapped.”

Dollard claims that members of an A.A. meeting abducted him after promising his wife to get him sober. Instead, they held him prisoner at a hotel in Palm Springs while plying him with call girls and coke. Meanwhile, they used his credit cards to charter a yacht and a plane for business deals they were conducting. The story is incredible, but Dollard’s fourth wife later confirms its essential truth, adding, “I’m sure those A.A. people started with good intentions, but Pat twisted their intervention around until they thought the right thing to do was buying coke and hiring prostitutes for him.”

On Election Day 2004, I receive an urgent phone call from Dollard. I must come to his office immediately. When I show up, two agents from Relativity are on the couch. Dollard paces, making introductions at a rapid clip.

His eyes are glassy. He speaks with those shallow breaths I’d heard when he phoned after the “kidnapping.” I get the feeling he may be seriously messed up. The two agents slink from the room.

Dollard reveals why he asked me over. New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, a friend of mine, has completed a book on directors of the 90s, Rebels on the Back Lot, for which she interviewed him. He wants to know if he is quoted in it. I tell him I believe he is.

Dollard summons an assistant. “I want you to take a letter for me,” he tells her. “Send it to all my clients. Tell them I might be quoted in Sharon Waxman’s book. I don’t recall what I told her. I was on drugs and I retract my quotes.”
“Hollywood Yuppie Faggot”

Three weeks later Dollard leaves for Iraq. He persuaded a former client—a director who had previously won accolades at Sundance for a small, gritty film—to accompany him. The director says that when he first glimpsed Dollard on their way to the airport “he looked like he was detoxing. He didn’t have any proper gear. I knew this would be a disaster.”

As it turned out, disaster befell Dollard’s partner. Shortly after their arrival, he was severely injured in a Humvee accident and had to be medevac’d home. Dollard decided to push ahead on his own. The military embedded him with Marines at a forward operating base about 25 miles south of Baghdad in an area troops dubbed “the Triangle of Death.” About 200 Marines occupied the camp, a dusty crater surrounded by concrete blast barriers and razor wire, which insurgents showered with mortars every other day or so.

Dollard wandered the camp befriending anyone who would talk to him. Sergeant Brandon Welsh, then 22, recalls their first encounter. “He came up and said, ‘I’m Pat Dollard from Hollywood.’ He talked fast, was all uppity and shit. We thought he was a cokehead.”

The troops nicknamed him “Hollywood Yuppie Faggot.” Welsh’s section leader, Sergeant John Callan, says, “Pat came up with these stories about partying with movie stars and rock stars and models, and the Marines just ate it up.”

Dollard pulled the ultimate trump card. Using his sat phone, he called Lucy Walsh, daughter of former Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh. Lucy, a client of Dollard’s, had toured as a keyboardist for Ashlee Simpson. Dollard managed to catch her when she was visiting with Simpson. Callan says, “Pat put this kid from West Virginia on the line with Ashlee Simpson. I was told she was like, ‘Well, thanks for going out there and getting your dumb ass blown up. I gotta go.’ ”

As far as the troops were concerned, Dollard was now in. Says Callan, “For the younger guys he became, like, their leader. Nobody from the command ever told us he was attached to us. He just kind of went out for a ride with us one time, then said, ‘I’m gonna get my stuff,’ and he moved in.”

From a First Amendment standpoint, it’s to be applauded that commanders never sought to supervise the activities of their embedded reporter from Hollywood. But to Callan, Dollard was a constant headache. “I’m the guy that has to talk to these guys’ mothers if one of them gets killed. With Pat around, it was hard to get people to do their jobs.”

Dollard claims he was sober when he arrived in Iraq, but he soon fell off the wagon. As one Marine describes it, “One afternoon, on patrol, we bought beer from a hajji.” Later, back at the base, he says, “we all got buzzed, and Pat was like, ‘Let’s get Mohawks.’ ”

After Dollard shaved the word “die” in his chest hair, the night was immortalized in the photo he e-mailed back to friends in Hollywood. By then, Dollard was wearing Marine fatigues. Another reporter at the camp recalls, “I was there when the commander, a lieutenant colonel, saw this clown running around in cammies with a Mohawk. The colonel called over the platoon sergeant of the unit he was with and asked, ‘Is that your fucking reporter?’ ”

Welsh and the others were ordered to shave off their Mohawks. Shortly after the incident, the platoon Welsh and Callan belonged to was ordered to Al-Musayyib, a town of an estimated 10,000 on the Euphrates where a few days earlier insurgents had destroyed one of two main bridges with a truck bomb. Their platoon was sent in to hold the remaining bridge. Dollard accompanied them—fewer than two dozen troops in three light armored vehicles—as they rolled into the center of Al-Musayyib. At sunset, a muezzin sang calls to prayer from loudspeakers on a nearby mosque, and the Marines were ordered on foot patrols through the narrow streets surrounding their position. Dollard joined them.

Unfortunately, the patrol Dollard accompanied encountered an Iraqi selling whiskey. Dollard purchased several bottles and drank himself into a blackout. Callan says, “He was wandering around singing and spewing stupid shit. It was the middle of the night, and he was turning on the light to his camera to film us, putting a spotlight on us in the middle of our security patrols.”

Sergeant Brandon Wong, another Marine in the unit, who was then 22, says, “When Pat first showed up in Iraq he was all, like, he’s an alcoholic and can’t drink.

“We saw what he meant that night. He was fucking trashed. Pat ran up to a mosque and ripped the fucking sign off it”—a cloth banner with hand-painted Arabic on it. Later that night, Wong says, “a patrol of Humvees was driving by and I look and there’s Pat just standing in the middle of the fucking road trying to wave them through, like he’s directing traffic.”

The Marines returned from their patrol before dawn and were allotted a couple of hours to sleep. Dollard continued babbling and singing—a sort of shanty that went, as Callan recalls, “ ‘Three bottles of whiskey and a couple of hajji sodas and just got shitty.’ ”

The antics pushed Wong to the breaking point. “I could not fucking sleep because of his ass,” he says. “I flipped out on him.” Wong, who later became friends with Dollard, regrets what happened next. “I pulled my gun on him. I put it to his head and told him he’d better shut the fuck up or I would pull the trigger.” Wong adds, “It’s fucked up to say now, but I really didn’t care if he lived or died.”

Other Marines talked Wong out of shooting Dollard. Callan wasn’t told about Wong’s threat on Dollard’s life until the next day. He recalls, “When I heard about it, I said, ‘You should have just shot him.’ ”

The following morning Dollard returned to the main base with another unit, while Callan’s platoon remained in Al-Musayyib. At about noon, a mob gathered in front of the mosque whose banner Dollard had stolen as the imam delivered an angry denunciation of the American occupiers. Soon, the Marines came under fire from gunmen around the mosque. “Our whole platoon opened up on that side of the city,” says a Marine. “We could never prove Pat is the one who caused it, but that’s what we thought started it.”

No Marines were injured in the engagement. Among some, affection for Dollard actually grew. “It wouldn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t there,” says Welsh, “but Pat brought this civilian craziness to our lives. He made being in Iraq fun.”

Among troops, Dollard’s next stunt gave him almost mythic status as a wild man. For several weeks an urban legend circulated on the base that a derelict former palace beyond their perimeter was a whorehouse. Marines talked of seeing attractive young women, dressed in provocative clothes and makeup, coming and going from it. But given the abductions and beheadings meted out to unaccompanied Westerners, no one dared leave their fortified perimeter to investigate—until Dollard informed them that he was going out alone to search the alleged whorehouse.

According to Wong, he and other young Marines decided to help. “We gave him a pistol and a grenade and showed him how to work the shit. We told him, ‘If you start shooting, we’ll come running after you,’ but, you know, we weren’t allowed to leave the patrol base.”

As Marines watched from the base, Dollard walked alone into the city. He says all he found in the shattered palace was a family living in the rubble. Walking to the rear of the building he found a hole blasted through the back wall, which offered a view into the city, where something caught his eye. “It was like this blue sign. I don’t remember if there was a crescent on it or not,” Dollard says, “but something about it said ‘pharmacy’ to me.”

He set off into the city toward the blue sign. His instincts proved correct. The shop with the sign was a pharmacy, where Dollard lived out a drug addict’s dream. Armed, dressed in American military attire, he entered the shop to take anything he wanted. “The man at the counter just looked at me,” Dollard says. “I showed my weapons and pointed at the stuff on the shelves. The man started speaking in Arabic, but I heard the word ‘analgesics.’ I knew that was the shit I wanted.”

Dollard left with several bottles of liquid Valium and other substances he wasn’t quite sure of. “I never pointed my gun at the guy,” he explains. “But it was robbery at gunpoint by implication.”

Dollard at one point claimed that his dealer in L.A. sent him an unsolicited care package of coke through military mail. Later, he retracts this story and denies robbing a pharmacy of Valium. But several Marines I interview confirm that Dollard shared liquid Valium and other substances with men in the unit, and say he told them they were legally acquired in Iraq. Two Marines claim to have done rails of coke provided by Dollard on top of their armored vehicle after their tour of duty on the way back to Kuwait. “The shit we got into with Pat was crazy,” says one.

Dollard himself contradicts one of his retractions later while showing me raw footage he shot. “You can tell we’re all on Valium,” he says, “because everyone is heavy-tongued when we talk.”

Hours of tape Dollard has shown me but not yet made public reveal an embedded reporter running out of control. In one sequence, filmed at a checkpoint where Marines are stopping civilian cars, Dollard himself cuts in front of the Marines to accost the driver. He leans in the window and shouts, “You got any bombs, dickface? Any booms? Any women?”

Dollard backs away, laughing, then shouts to nearby Marines. “Will you fucking kill something while I am here?”

Dollard argues that his reckless behavior was calculated to get the Marines to loosen up in front of his camera. Leaving aside whatever damage he did to the combat effectiveness of the unit by distributing drugs, as well as the harm he did to American-Iraqi relations by vandalizing a mosque and robbing a drugstore while dressed as a U.S. soldier, his footage from Iraq stands as a peculiar and often compelling record of war.

Most documentaries emerging from Iraq, no matter how scrupulously their makers strive to be neutral, have the feel of an adult presence, an intermediary at the controls. In Dollard’s work, there is no filter. It’s not the work of a grown-up. There’s no authority interpreting how the young troops ought to feel about their experiences. It’s the kind of film a 19- or 20-year-old Marine would make to show his buddies. It captures the raw experience of a combat zone about as well as anything I have seen—short of actually going to a combat zone. No small part of the loyalty Dollard engenders among young Marines stems from what they see as the honesty of his work. “No one else out there I know of,” says Wong, “has gone as far as Pat to show people what our lives are like.”

There are some Marines Dollard never won over. “His presence endangered lives,” says Callan. “I have no doubt that he’s insane.”
Escape and Evasion

Dollard returned to L.A. in March 2005 to find that his business and personal affairs had imploded. Relativity was in the process of ousting him. An ex–business partner in an unrelated venture was seeking a $700,000 judgment against him. His fourth wife, Megan, had filed for divorce. Even worse, the three most influential women in his life—Megan, Alicia, and his mother—had sided together, like a freak alignment of stars, in a legal action to deny him custody of his daughter. His Porsche and Range Rover were repossessed. Megan sold their furniture to pay bills. Dollard still had his Hummer, but a thief stole his us wins vanity plates.

Dollard dealt with everything by going on a massive binge, living alone in the empty Hollywood Hills home. The four-story house was built into the side of a cliff, with panoramic views, an open steel-cage elevator running through its center, and walls adorned with his collections (not yet sold off) of African art, swords, and battle helmets. Soon he was living like a bum. The electricity was turned off. He slept on a mattress on the floor of a bathroom.

In mid-April, when an agent colleague showed up at his house to check on him, she found the front door open. The place was filled with trash. It smelled. As she entered the kitchen, Dollard stumbled in, so filthy she initially thought he was a homeless man. Dollard lunged and threatened, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

She fled and called the L.A.P.D., who showed up in force. “They had shotguns out,” she says. “I was terrified they were going to kill him.”

Dollard left peacefully, but given his proximity to neighbors like Bill Condon, Russell Crowe’s agent Bill Freeman, and James Wilder, his arrest was a bizarre industry event. “Everyone came out to see what was going on, and there was Pat being taken away in handcuffs,” says Dollard’s colleague. “It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.”

No criminal charges were filed. Police deposited him at the Los Angeles County/U.S.C. Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation. Dollard describes the place as a “ghetto psych ward full of true nut jobs and power-mad nurses.” They tied him down and shot him full of Ativan. He was held for three days and released.

Dollard returned to his home and picked up where he’d left off. Two of the Marines he’d befriended in Iraq, Welsh and Wong, flew out to L.A. to visit. Dollard was still wearing his hospital bracelet, doing lines, and downing jug vodka when his visitors showed up.

As the Marines left, Dollard promised them he’d taper down. Shortly thereafter, someone—Dollard still doesn’t know who—again called the cops. This time Dollard, on foot, led police on a pursuit through the hills. Even his landlord, James Wilder, became involved, grabbing a stick and thrashing the bushes in an attempt to corner Dollard. But Dollard evaded capture. He crawled into a hole and hid out Saddam-style through the night. “In my ability to run and find cover, my experience in Iraq really paid off,” Dollard would later tell me. “It’s what the Marines call ‘E and E,’ escape and evasion.”

By May, Dollard was ready to call it quits. He voluntarily entered Impact House, a live-in, highly regimented rehab in Pasadena.
Always the Truth

In early June 2005, I see Dollard after his departure from Impact House. Friends have helped him move into an apartment on Sunset Boulevard, where he is staging a comeback. Outside his window the dome of the ArcLight Cinemas appears to be melting in a liquid sunset. Inside, the air-conditioning blasts. It’s on because Dollard actually abhors cigarettes: the smell, the taste, the ruinous effects on the lungs—everything about cigarettes, except, of course, smoking them. He paces beneath the ceiling vents, chain-smoking and discussing his newfound sobriety. “I had this realization about my drug use,” he tells me. “Until my last binge, I held on to the idea that I could just drop out for a day or two and do drugs. I would have this James Bond fantasy where I’m in, like, the Mondrian [hotel], drinking martinis and shit with beautiful women, then having, like, great coked-out sex.” He laughs. “But I always seem to end up, like, homeless within a matter of hours.”

Dollard has acquired his new, post-agent look: crew cut, Marine Corps fatigues, the haggard, unshaven face. The cataract is just starting to appear over his right eye. He looks wrecked, but Dollard insists he has never felt better, saying, “I wasted 20 years of my life on the narcotic of being a Hollywood agent. Iraq gave me a shot at redemption, but I didn’t realize it, dude, until it was almost too late.”

Dollard is full of new morality. “Ultimately, you realize that the purpose of life isn’t just to take from it whatever you can get,” he says, bending over the stove to light another cigarette on the gas flame. “You can’t spend your life as a sexual libertine and end up being at peace.” He walks up to me and points to my chest. “We were not just born to be sexual pirates.”

I ask if he is involved in outpatient therapy or going to A.A. meetings. “I’ve just been through a war,” he says. “How can I sit around listening to a bunch of grown men whine about their fucked-up childhoods? I’m part of something bigger than myself—the war, the conservative cause. I can’t get loaded anymore.”

Dollard shares a profound discovery he’s recently made. “I’m a warrior, dude. I am of the class of people whose role has been genetically determined to be protectors. My role is to fight the battle against Islamic-fundamentalist Fascism.”

There are people in Dollard’s life who believe he’s gone completely out of his mind. His mother believes that at a minimum he may be bipolar. His third wife, Alicia, offers a blunter assessment: “I think he brain-damaged himself in one of those last drug runs.”

Exhibit A in her argument that he has gone mad is his recent announcement that he is terminating his relationship with Soderbergh. “Pat owned 10 percent of Steven Soderbergh, and he goes and fires him,” Alicia says. “How crazy is that?”

Dollard tells me, “I’m a director now. A director can’t represent a director.”

His future lies in 243 hour-long videocassettes piled on the floor in the corner. There is no furniture, just wall-to-wall white carpet and a sleeping bag. Dollard can’t afford a computer yet on which to edit his tapes. What keeps him motivated is a tattered Iraqi flag tacked to the wall, signed by Marines and inscribed, “Always the truth.” I later ask Captain Brian Iglesias, who signed the flag, about the inscription. He answers, “ ‘Always the truth,’ because the truth is what Pat Dollard champions.”

Most people in Dollard’s life have written him off. Yet for an industry where relationships are reputed to be calculated solely on the basis of self-interest, loyalists remain, from Soderbergh—who helped pay for Dollard’s stay at rehab—to William Morris’s Mike Simpson. (After my visit, Simpson will give Dollard an editing system.) Prior to moving into his apartment Dollard couch-surfed at the Bel Air home of Erik Hyman, an entertainment lawyer and the partner of photographer Herb Ritts until his death, in 2002. Explaining his surprising bond with Dollard, Hyman says, “Our friendship transcends whatever nuttiness he’s involved in at the moment. After Herb died, Pat showed up for me. He wouldn’t let me be alone. He is an extremely caring friend.”

Dollard argues that those most critical of his career abandonment are either his ex-wives and mother, who depend on him financially, or those whose “empty lives making crap films” he now rejects. “People expect me to regret going to Iraq, because I lost everything,” he says. “What’s really going on here is I left the whorehouse. The people who stayed behind are the ones saying I’m a psychopath. Why? Because I rejected being a self-centered, moneygrubbing pig, which is what you are supposed to be in this town if you want to be considered sane.”

Dollard’s mother believes that her son is a near genius “at taking any information and transferring it into self-serving data.” A case in point is his argument that his recent trips to area mental wards prove his mental health is solid. “Psychiatrists checked me out. If I were truly pathological, they never would have released me,” he says, accidentally banging his cigarette against the side of his face. Sparks fly from his smoldering whiskers. “I have often asked myself the question ‘Am I a psychopath?’ But it just doesn’t add up. I am one of the sanest people I know.”

Dollard sucks mightily on his mangled cigarette. The aroma of burnt hair lingers. “The only exception is if you fill me with drugs and alcohol I do become insane. I concede that point.”

I ask him whether there is any difference in his thought process when he’s sober or on drugs. Dollard laughs. “None. When I’m on drugs, the same garbage comes out of my mouth, only it’s amplified.”
The Pitch

Late August 2005. Pat Dollard is bombing down Sunset Boulevard at the wheel of his new, gray Hummer, on his way to a meeting at William Morris. He handles the massive vehicle with about as much caution as the average 11-year-old at the wheel of a carnival bumper car. “I love the Hummer,” he says, weaving through the lanes. “It’s like driving your fucking living room from your Barcalounger.”

Sober for nearly 120 days now, Dollard’s comeback is well under way. He has created a 90-minute rough cut of his documentary, now titled Young Americans. Both Soderbergh and Simpson viewed it in his apartment and, as they say in Hollywood, “went crazy.” Soderbergh has offered to help arrange distribution. Simpson has scheduled a screening at William Morris this morning at 11, with the idea that the agency that once fired Dollard will take him on as a client.

A couple of weeks ago, Dollard received an unexpected cash windfall. Hence, the new Hummer, including a new set of us wins plates. His military fatigues—what he now refers to as his “Travis Bickle uniform”—are neatly pressed. His hair is slicked flat on his head, and he is clean-shaven.

Three days a week he’s been training in krav maga, Israeli martial arts. “I have to get my body up to the level my mind is at,” he says. “When I was in Iraq, I learned all this will-to-power shit. I could kill now.”

The exception to his new, squared-away life is his failure to obtain treatment for the cataract clotting his right eye—a result of Dollard’s fear of doctors and hospitals. Driving partially blind has become a sort of experiment. Cutting recklessly through traffic, Dollard laughs. “I’m just a puppet in the hands of God, dude,” he says, repeating a saying he picked up at an A.A. meeting.

Nowhere is God’s grace more evident than in Dollard’s resurrection in Hollywood. People who long ago wrote him off have begun to pop out of the woodwork. In the past few days, even one of the most powerful men in town, ICM’s chairman, Jeff Berg, has been asking him for a chance to see Young Americans.

“Berg’s a sensitive matter,” Dollard says, sounding oddly calculating—more like an agent than I am accustomed to hearing. “I can’t blow him off, but I have an obligation to show it to Mike Simpson first.”

“How do you know Berg?,” I ask.

“Business,” Dollard says. “We crawled through the slime together.” (Dollard later explains that Berg once provided him with helpful advice on a deal.)

Outside William Morris, Dollard is seized by a fit of self-objectivity. He admits to qualms about involving an old, loyal friend like Simpson in his current scheme. “People who get involved with me tend to end up feeling that they’ve been put through the wringer at some point,” he says. “Oh, well. What the fuck.”

Inside the lobby, receptionists do double takes as he approaches their desk and announces himself. God only knows what they make of him. He’s too old to be a recent vet, but his digital camouflage trousers, with their futuristic abstract pattern, have only recently become standard issue. Perhaps they think he’s a homeless man from the future.

An assistant escorts us to a screening room on the fourth floor. Mike Simpson, over six feet tall, lanky and fair-haired, approaches in the hall, grinning. In his early 50s and dressed in his regulation William Morris blue suit, Simpson looks more like a small-town banker than an industry player. Originally from Texas, Simpson’s voice retains a rural twang. Patting Dollard’s shoulder, Simpson seems slightly in awe of him, like the straitlaced kid in high school who secretly yearns to be accepted by the delinquents.

To help evaluate the potential of Dollard’s film, Simpson has invited fellow agent John Ferriter to the screening. Simpson believes the agency ought to sell Young Americans as a hybrid documentary/reality-TV series, for which Dollard’s rough cut would be a pilot.

When I ask Simpson if he’s at all worried about representing Dollard, whose drug lunacies are a known quantity, he replies, “What we look at is the success of films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and the ability to go into that territory with Pat’s very different point of view. As far as his personal issues, this is the entertainment business. It’s not banking.”

John Ferriter enters the room, dressed in a baggy black suit like the hit men from Pulp Fiction—a look that has never gone out of style among some agents. In his early 30s, Ferriter has earned a reputation as one of Hollywood’s top reality-TV agents. As they make introductions, Ferriter drops his business card (Senior Vice President Worldwide Head of Non-Scripted Television) on the table, then flips it like a blackjack dealer. Dollard appears momentarily unsure of himself. He tries shaking Ferriter’s hand, but fails to connect on the first pass.

“How are you?,” Ferriter asks.

“Fine, good,” Dollard says, sitting down.

“You just got back from Iraq?”

“A few months ago.”

“Are you O.K.?” Ferriter leans closer to Dollard.

“Fucking fine.” Dollard fidgets.

“I mean, how are you doing?” Ferriter radiates deep concern.

“Dude, I didn’t fucking come here for fucking psychotherapy,” Dollard says.

(Dollard later tells me, “It’s important to show your agent he’s just the fucking cleaning lady. Ferriter obviously has good agent training. He didn’t even act insulted when I insulted him.”)

Simpson, watching from the back, laughs quietly.

Dollard feeds his DVD into the player by the TV at the head of the conference table. Ferriter sits about four feet from the TV screen, shaking his foot, tugging at his cuffs, running his hand through his longish black hair. When the Blood for Blood song begins to blast, Ferriter seems to relax, bopping his head to the rhythm. At about the 20-minute mark, he stands and hits the stop button.

“Great, great,” Ferriter says. “I totally get it.”

“Is that all you want to see?,” Dollard asks.

“This is going to be like The Aristocrats,” Ferriter says. “Every college kid in America is going to want to see this. It’s like Tom Green, Jackass in a war zone. And it’s real.”

Ferriter asks Dollard the most important question. “Can we get Steven [Soderbergh] to come in the room with us?”

“Yeah,” Dollard says.

Ferriter and Simpson discuss possible buyers, then a price. “What do you think?,” Ferriter asks. “Eight to ten million?”

“Sounds about right to me,” Simpson says.

Ferriter tells Dollard to shorten the rough cut at future screenings. “This is like a drug. You’ve got to give them just a little bit, so they want more.”

A few minutes later, as we emerge into the brightness of the street, Dollard seems amazed Ferriter went for it. “He didn’t even watch it. The guy was twitching the whole time.” Dollard is incredulous. “He bought it on a vibe and the fact I can bring Steven Soderbergh into the room with me.”

Dollard turns to the William Morris sign on the building. “This is the place that fired me. Now I’m the fucking getting-my-ass-licked client. How cool is that?”
In the Room with Soderbergh

Later that afternoon, Dollard has an appointment with Soderbergh on the Paramount lot to deliver a copy of Young Americans. Soderbergh is then flying to Italy, where he plans to hand-deliver the film to entrepreneur and HDNet founder Mark Cuban at the Venice Film Festival.

Bouncing through traffic on his way to the meeting, Dollard is on a high, dreaming of the millions he stands to make, which has made him forgetful of the lecture on sexual continence he delivered weeks earlier. “Once I get some production money, this is my M.O.,” Dollard says. “Hire a hot, 21-year-old assistant, get her to do all my shit—paying bills, laundry—then I start banging her. Serious, dude. I had one in the 90s I literally trained to lick my ass. She was so good I even took her to Italy once. Two weeks. But all we did was stay in the hotel room so she could lick my ass.”

Soderbergh’s office is off Gower, where he is in pre-production for The Good German. Soderbergh enters the reception area wearing jeans and heavy black shoes that look as if they have paint spattered on them. He greets Dollard with a quiet hello. Like Simpson, Soderbergh is genuinely enthusiastic about Dollard’s project. He believes Young Americans transcends Dollard’s political message and is simply “riveting.” He tells me, “I knew Pat was going to come back with something pure. I believe in Pat’s sense of what’s compelling.”

Soderbergh works from a drab office fairly typical of those on studio back lots. He and Dollard sit opposite each other on threadbare lounge chairs. Soderbergh has often spoken of his need for anonymity in order to function as an artist—“So I can eavesdrop, sit in an airport behind somebody and listen to their conversation, spy on people and hear stuff in undiluted form.” The drive for self-effacement seems to guide his social interaction as well.

Soderbergh’s presence in the room is like this: he arranges his body on the chair, then somehow astrally projects himself into a corner of the ceiling to watch himself interacting with his guests. To a guest, being seated across from Soderbergh is like sitting in front of a two-way mirror. You know someone is there, but you can’t quite make him out, just shadows and indecipherable movements. A throat clears. A chair scrapes. Dollard fidgets nervously, as if he’s straining to rein in his normal impulses to do and say the wrong things. He appears paralyzed.

Soderbergh breaks the ice: “Did you bring the DVD?” His voice is as lively as a pre-recorded message.

It turns out Dollard had a change of heart. He doesn’t want Mark Cuban to have it. He wants Cuban to see it, but he doesn’t trust him to possess it. “It’s like laying my dick out,” Dollard tells Soderbergh. “This guy could be in a hotel and might lose it.”

Soderbergh reveals the faintest annoyance: “Pat, we should move fast on this.”

“I’ll fly to New York or something, and show it to him there,” Dollard says.

Soderbergh shakes his head.

“We’ll work something out.” Dollard grins, as if oddly satisfied to have put a spanner in the works. I am seated between Dollard and Soderbergh, what would be the therapist’s position if they were a couple in need of help, which they in fact are. I ask Soderbergh if he was surprised when he found out Dollard had gone to Iraq.

“No,” Soderbergh says, “I’ve known him a long time. When you get a call from Pat you never know what to expect. It could be ‘I just got married,’ ‘I’m making a new film,’ ‘I’m in Mexico getting an operation.’ Pat is sort of an adrenaline junkie.”

Dollard leans around me to bicker with Soderbergh. “I have no history of being the adrenaline junkie, an adventurer, blood-fucking-thirsty, or anything like that,” he says.

“I’m saying you were looking for a change in your life,” Soderbergh says.

“I didn’t change intentionally by going to Iraq,” Dollard argues. “It wasn’t so much this noble thing where I was trying to change myself.”

Soderbergh measures his words carefully. “I think you had created a circumstance last fall in which, if there was ever a time when going to Iraq would seem like an appealing thing, that was the time.”

“It’s really easy to say that,” Dollard says, “but I was not going to go to Iraq and risk my life just to not deal with some hassles. It’s almost insulting to, like, fucking say that.”

Soderbergh sticks to his point. “Do you think if you’d been totally happy and things were great, would you still have gone to Iraq?”

“There was no fucking way I was running away.” Dollard gives a feeble wave of his hand, running out of steam. “That’s my argument and whatever.”

Soderbergh turns to me, now animated. “When you look at Pat’s narrative, which I think for Pat is probably really exciting, for a lot of the supporting people it can be crazy.”

It’s an odd reversal that he, the star director, would cast himself in the supporting role with his agent. I ask Soderbergh about his friendship with Dollard, and he says, “The formative years of our relationship were strange because we were really young”—Soderbergh 23 and Dollard 22 when they first met. “We had nothing in common with people in Hollywood,” Soderbergh says, “no interest in the high-school aspects of the social life in Hollywood.”

Dollard says, “We’d just sit around fucking talking about chicks.”

“Yeah, we would,” Soderbergh says, laughing. “We’d swap stories about fucking chicks.” Soderbergh corrects himself. “I don’t mean fucking chicks. I mean … ”

“Steven, we would talk about fucking chicks,” Dollard insists.

Soderbergh leans closer to me. “I was just so close to Pat’s family. And of course because of the horrible event that happened, it stepped up the relationship with Pat several levels. It made us much closer.”

Dollard twists in his chair. The subject of his sister’s death makes him uncomfortable. He says, “Let’s talk about whatever, dude.”

Soderbergh ignores Dollard. He says, “There are certain people who have an integrity, whether you can articulate it or not.” He pauses. “I guess I fall back to the word ‘soul’ for lack of a better term. It’s just a feeling. You meet them and you have an instantaneous reaction to them. It’s certainly the reaction I had when I met Ann.”
Ann

It was Pat Dollard’s great fortune and misfortune to have Ann as his sister. She was so good, when people talk about her, you wonder if canonization would do her justice. Robert Kennedy Jr. says, “She was beautiful and she was charming and you couldn’t meet her without loving her.” Larry Jackson, the president of Northern Arts Entertainment and former executive V.P. of acquisitions and co-productions at Miramax, says, “There was something magical about Ann. She had such a rosy expectation of what the world could become.”

No small part of Ann’s expectations were poured into her little brother, Pat. Their mother, Eva, says, “Ann was probably more of a mother figure to Pat than I was.” Both Ann and Eva believed Pat would be the first in the family to attend college. After he dashed those hopes by dropping out of high school, Ann continued to try to guide him until finally hiring him as her assistant at Leading Artists.

Initially, Dollard cleaned up his act. Other agents nicknamed him “Beaver Cleaver.” Ann began grooming him to become an agent, but Dollard began screwing off on the job. On the last workday before the Fourth of July weekend in 1988, Ann fired him. Dollard claims he had already decided he didn’t want to be an agent and was relieved.

Two days later, Ann went horseback riding with friends and fell while crossing a field. Though it was a relatively minor fall, Ann wasn’t wearing a helmet and her brain stem was crushed. She lingered for two days in the hospital before being removed from life support. Scott Kramer, a producer and close friend, arrived at the hospital about the same time as Dollard. “Pat literally couldn’t bear to see her,” Kramer recalls. “He began hitting his head on the wall to the point where we had to grab him and hold him down and take him out of the hospital.”

Dollard says, “I was blown apart by the horror. I’ll never forget trying to see Ann’s face and looking down at these two massive purple lumps of flesh sticking out like eggs where her eyes were supposed to be. For years after, if I saw a hospital I would start crying.”

Her death was no less mourned in Hollywood. Ann’s memorial service, held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, became an industry event, drawing more than 700 people. Julia Phillips described the gathering in her 1991 book, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, as “all of young Hollywood looking stricken.” Stephen Stills sang, and eulogies were delivered by filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd and Robert Kennedy Jr., who later held a private ceremony with Eva at his home in Mount Kisco, New York, where they spread her ashes.

Among Ann’s clients, Steven Soderbergh was one of the closest to her. When they met, Soderbergh was 22 and had just finished directing his Grammy-nominated documentary about the band Yes, but a couple years later he was drifting, uncertain of his next move. Their meeting wasn’t so much a typical agent-client encounter but the start of an intense creative collaboration. Ann encouraged Soderbergh to continue work on his own scripts. Scott Kramer says, “Ann believed in Steven in such a way that it filled him.” Production on Sex, Lies, and Videotape was about to begin when she died.

Soderbergh was devastated. “The idea of replacing Ann was something I couldn’t contemplate,” he says. He and a few of Ann’s other clients decided to ask Pat to fill her shoes, which, Soderbergh explains, “felt like a way to process and transcend the awful thing that had happened.” He approached Dollard and told him, “I want you to be my agent. If you won’t be my agent, I just won’t have an agent, because I can’t.”

“My family was ripped apart by Ann’s death,” says Dollard. “I felt like I had to take her job, to hold it together.” At the time of her death, Ann hadn’t yet come into her own as an agent. Had she lived another year, it would have been a different story.

In addition to Soderbergh, clients on her list such as screenwriters Michael Blake (Dances with Wolves) and Scott Frank (Out of Sight, The Interpreter) became major successes shortly after her death.

Inheriting most of Ann’s list, Dollard had assumed his sister’s life (much as the protagonist of his favorite film, Barry Lyndon, had risen by assuming the life of a deceased nobleman), and though he loved the trappings of success and power that came with it, he says it filled him with self-loathing. “I had this idea that I was going to be a subversive inside the system and do great things,” he says. “But when they said, ‘O.K., you’re Steven Soderbergh’s agent’—and suddenly Steven becomes the biggest filmmaker in the world in terms of the hype—all my greed and power lust and alcoholism kicked in.” He adds, “It’s like I went to hell when I became an agent, and I’ve been trying to fight my way out ever since.”
The Dark Arts

A day after his meeting at William Morris, Dollard sits across from me at Kabuki, a restaurant near his apartment, eating a celebratory meal of ribs and flan, while unloading on his former profession. All the clichés are true, he tells me: Agents are “assholes, these morons who have an entirely superior attitude. They believe that they are better than everybody else because they think they’ve pulled off this scam, where they’re doing the coolest thing in the world.”

Though Dollard is loud and obnoxious in most matters, when it comes to discussing the dark Hollywood arts he practiced as an agent, he looks over his shoulders, as if expecting a squad of agent hit men to show up in their black suits, armed with bland smiles and Uzis. Leaning forward, he claims that, as much as he embraced every possible excess during his rise to the top, the life appalled him. “There was just so much fucking money and whores and power that people actually got bored with it,” he says. “An agent I worked with—I guess he was bored out of his fucking mind—he trained his fucking Chihuahua to lick his balls and would have people come into his office to watch.”

He continues: “There was another guy I worked with”—Dollard names a prominent manager—“who was such a pathological liar they did a whole intervention, like a 12-step thing on him to get him to stop lying, hired fucking psychiatrists and brought, like, his mother and wife in to confront him in his office.”

What troubles Dollard the most about his past as an agent were the business practices. “A lot of what we did was just your basic nasty, lying, backstabbing stuff that’s part of the normal business world,” he says. “But some of what we did, it’s like The Firm, like over-billing.” He explains that during the heyday of the speculative-script market, in the 90s, a form of over-billing commonly perpetrated against clients was cutting side deals with producers for secret commissions. He says, “You’re talking about, like, white-collar crime here—virtually—about some of this stuff.”

He adds, “I was taught when I was a kid that you’re supposed to grow up and contribute to society and be a good person. No kid thinks, When I grow up, I want to fuck other people.” He laughs. “I always used to tell myself it’s all going to be worth it because eventually I’m going to make good films.”
The Delivery Dude

A few days later Dollard phones with good news. One of the Marines from Young Americans is visiting him. Sergeant Brandon Welsh greets me at the door of Dollard’s apartment. Dressed in jeans and a knit surf shirt, Welsh is compactly built and fair-haired with a gravity to him which seems at odds with his boyish smile.

Dollard saunters in, looking unusually relaxed. His apartment has been transformed. There’s an Oriental rug, velvet couches, African art on the walls, and a six-foot-tall statue of Buddha by the entry—all purchased out of hock with his recent cash windfall. Dollard drops onto a velvet chaise.

For Welsh the war is a deeply personal matter. Friends of his died in Iraq. Welsh nearly died. And he believes the fatal patrols undertaken by his unit helped stabilize the area and will in the long run improve the lives of Iraqis. Still, terrible things, which trouble him today, did happen. He tells me of one instance when his unit came under fire and, in the confusion that followed, Marines may have ended up killing innocent civilians. Welsh shakes his head. “It was so fucked up.”

“Welsh, you’re a killer, and that’s a good thing,” Dollard says, walking up behind him and gesturing toward him like he is an exhibit in a science project. “Earlier today Welsh was having anxiety about killing and I had to tell him, ‘Look, dude, appropriate killing is one of the most sacred and noble and greatest things to go on in the world. The world cannot survive without killing. Good killing is required to hold society together and to protect it. This involves nobility and sacrifice. It’s about subsuming the self to the whole.’ Welsh volunteered to kill on behalf of our society. That is a good, noble thing.”

I point out that Welsh’s anxiety was about killing innocent people.

“Chaotic and terrible and tragic things are just part and parcel of the natural laws of war,” Dollard says, pacing. “War is its own state of being. It’s like another planet, Planet War. And the people who live on Planet Peace read about the terrible things that happen on Planet War—friendly fire, innocents killed—and are shocked. They naturally say we need to punish these boys”—Dollard points to Welsh—“because they’re not playing by the rules of civilization. The point is these are two worlds, each with their own set of natural laws. And they just don’t get it. Everything that’s happening in Iraq is completely in line with the rules of war state.”

Welsh runs his hands through his hair, worn out by Dollard’s frenetic arguing. “I’m fucking hungry,” Welsh says. “You said we were going to get takeout.”

“We can’t call on my phone,” Dollard says. “You’ve got to make the fucking call on your fucking phone.”

Dollard explains the problem: His favorite delivery place is a nearby Brazilian restaurant, but a couple of nights ago he had a run-in with the delivery dude. Dollard ordered a meal, and the delivery dude showed up more than an hour late. Dollard demanded the delivery dude give him his chocolate cake for free, but he refused. Dollard sent him packing. He fears the restaurant won’t deliver to his address. The plan is for Welsh to have the food delivered to the security guard in the lobby.

But Welsh runs into an unforeseen glitch. The woman taking our order doesn’t understand English very well. He tells her we are at the building on the corner of Sunset and Vine, but she doesn’t understand. Welsh holds the phone up. We hear the heavily accented voice of the woman on the other end. “Vane?” she asks. “Where is Vane Street?”

Dollard grabs the phone and shouts, “Vine, you dumb bitch!” He throws the phone across the room. Welsh collapses, laughing. Dollard broods. “There are all these people in this town I’ve been waiting to get back at. It’s going to start now.”

Dollard suggests the three of us go to the restaurant, hide out in the parking lot until closing time, and fuck up the delivery dude. “This whole war started with him,” Dollard says. “Fucking delivery dude was two hours late and wouldn’t comp me with a $4 slice of chocolate cake on a $50 order.”

Welsh punches his fist into the palm of his hand. “I’m down.” (Welsh later says he wasn’t serious.)

Dollard rushes to the front door, then hesitates. “The thing is, this restaurant has gotten me through so many binges.”

They decide not to fuck up the delivery guy, and instead we go to the 101 Coffee Shop. Welsh leaves the next day.
American Jihadi

In mid-September, Dollard screens Young Americans for Bob Greenblatt, the president of entertainment for Showtime. Afterward, Dollard leaves a message for me: “Hey. Dude. They fucking loved it, man. I was fucking shocked. They watched the whole thing. First thing out of Greenblatt’s mouth: ‘These Marines are movie stars!’ ”

The next day I visit. He greets me at the door drinking root beer and ice cream from an enormous bowl. “You want a root-beer float?” he asks, nodding toward a quart of Häagen-Dazs vanilla melting on the counter. Dollard admits last night was a little rough. After the fantastic news from Showtime, he learned of a setback in his custody battle for his daughter. Dollard is particularly incensed that his ex-wife Alicia has been taking their daughter to Robert Evans’s house. Dollard fumes, “Alicia tells me that Bob bought a fucking bicycle for her.” (Evans recalls Alicia bringing her daughter to his home a few times, but laughs at the suggestion he bought her a bicycle.)

He stayed up all night writing letters to a therapist and a lawyer involved in his custody battle. Dollard insists I read some of these communications. He says, “You will uncover the fact that I am not a paranoid schizophrenic about all of these people. But I am right. They are all psychopaths.”

I have scarcely digested one of these letters when Dollard leads me into the editing room to reveal his next inspiration. The editing system is set up against the back wall of the bedroom. Along the opposite wall is a child’s bed, with an ornate iron frame and a ruffled cover, which was his daughter’s in his old home and is set up for a visit from her that never happens. I sit on the bed as Dollard plays jihadi videos: YouTube-quality clips made by insurgents to showcase attacks on Americans, beheadings, and other violent doings. Designed to recruit young men into the insurgency, many are set to jihadi hip-hop. Watching them, Dollard becomes outraged (even as I am struck by how similar they are to his own film). “This is the Islamo-Fascist death machine at work,” he says. “This is the breath of Darth Vader.”

Dollard has long conceived of his film as a work of guerrilla cinema, a sort of American version of a jihad video to galvanize the domestic audience. But recently the videos have inspired him further. Dollard wants to launch an anti-jihadi action cell in the West. He explains, “This will be an educational, activism, and political organization dedicated to waging final war on modern jihadism. There will be a manifesto, guides for maintaining political pressure in favor of the overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian governments. Aggressive militarism in support of these goals will generally be encouraged, dependent on current conditions within the target nations and regimes.”

He tells me that he has already registered the domain name, jihadikiller.com, then shows me a note to his business manager, Evan Bell, telling him to incorporate a business named Jihadi Killer, Inc.

(Dollard forwards me the e-mail from Bell responding to his request: “Pat you sure you want this name?… I do think it is a mistake.”)

I leave at about 10 as a delivery guy shows up from a corner store with cigarettes and more root beer and vanilla ice cream. “You sure you don’t want a root-beer float?,” Dollard asks, grabbing his bowl from the sink.
The Buddy System

A few days later, Dollard calls, sounding rattled, to tell me that the night before “the Devil was back.” Driving alone in Hollywood, he was seized by a powerful urge to get loaded. Though he resisted, he says that since then he’s “just felt literally sick.”

Dollard assures me he’s taken steps to maintain his sobriety. He’s having a young man he met in rehab move in with him. “I’m doing it just like the Marines,” he says. “I’m going on the buddy system.”

Dollard describes his new roommate as a “metrosexual gangbanger.” Josiah Hernandez is 22 and slight of stature, about five two, but with eyes so large his face looks like that of an anime character. His dark hair is fragrantly pomaded. He dresses like any kid in a low-rent Hollywood club—black Skechers, a dark striped shirt, and pressed jeans worn so low his plaid boxers fluff out like feathers. When I meet him at Dollard’s place, Josiah shakes my hand, grinning. His smile is so big it makes his eyes squint.

Before he and Dollard met at Impact House, in May, Josiah had recently finished serving three and a half years in prison for armed robbery. “Josiah has a long history of occasionally going crazy and stabbing people,” Dollard explains, eyeing the young man with a look of paternal pride.

Josiah had been folding Dollard’s laundry on the coffee table when he let me in. In addition to serving as Dollard’s sobriety helpmate, he works around the house as a sort of manservant (while also working as a busboy at Hamburger Hamlet). Josiah fetches me a drink, then resumes sorting Dollard’s socks. He tells me about his past.

“I used to be a stickup kid, eh?” He finishes his sentences with an “eh?” like Canadians do, but in L.A. it’s part of the cholo slang. “Fifteen years old, eh? Fucking tweaked out on meth, eh? My homey and me would just rob people on the street.”

Josiah was an industrious petty criminal, but also an unlucky one. He was in and out of various youth facilities until the age of 18, when the state of California sent him to prison. After his release, seven months earlier, he began smoking meth again, fell in with his old homeys, and was arrested and charged with possession of stolen checks. He is out now on bail, pending trial. If convicted, he could face another four years in prison.

Josiah claims he is a changed man since going to rehab and meeting Dollard. “I fucking take responsibility for my actions,” he says. “They want to throw me back in prison, so be it, eh? But if I stay out, I’ve got a new life now. I’m fucking clean, eh? I work for Pat fucking Dollard. I’m a movie assistant.”

Dollard gazes affectionately at Josiah. “For the first time in probably six, eight years, Josiah’s clean and sober. He’s working for me and flourishing at Hamburger Hamlet. He’s leading a really good, squared-away life. I trust Josiah completely.”

There’s no more compelling evidence of his trust than the large sums of cash piled on the coffee table where Josiah is sorting laundry. Owing to Dollard’s pronounced fear of banks, he prefers to keep his money in liquid form. One-hundred-dollar bills are bundled in $10,000 bricks, which Josiah delicately brushes aside as he stacks the socks.

Josiah says when he met Dollard—whom the staff nicknamed “Saddam Manson” due to his crazed appearance and wild talk of Iraq—he “had no idea Pat was a rich Hollywood agent.”

Dollard checked himself out of Impact ahead of Josiah. The day Josiah left, Dollard picked him up and drove him to his father’s house. “I told Josiah’s father I was adopting him,” Dollard says. “He turned Josiah over to me.” Though Dollard’s claim has no legal standing whatsoever, Josiah enthusiastically nods.
Pat Dollard with roommate Josiah

Pat Dollard with his former roommate and assistant Josiah, in late 2005 at Dollard’s apartment, on Sunset Boulevard. Photograph by Jason Schmidt.

Dollard himself had no money or place to go. He and Josiah spent a weekend sleeping at Dollard’s mother’s house, then split up. But the two have kept tabs on each other ever since. In the wake of Dollard’s recent scare over using drugs, both feel it’s prudent to live together.

For Josiah, the move comes at a convenient time. As he explains it, owing to his incredible good looks, charm, and sexual prowess, he has been experiencing female trouble. Until a couple of days ago he had been living with a girlfriend. But, according to Josiah, she had recently grown unreasonable. “Dumb bitch didn’t want me seeing other bitches,” Josiah says. Their contretemps grew to a head. The other morning Josiah awakened to find himself being held prisoner. “Bitch took all my clothes, told me I couldn’t leave,” Josiah says. “I don’t hit bitches. But I said, ‘You don’t give me my clothes, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you, bitch.’ ”

“Tell him about the bitch you fucked up in seventh grade,” Dollard says, egging him on.

“It only happened one time,” Josiah says. “In elementary school there was this bitch, she was so big she used to fuck up the dudes.”

Although he was the smallest boy in his grade, Josiah stood up to the giant bully girl, telling her he wasn’t afraid. “Bam!,” Josiah says. “Bitch hit me in the face. Tore off my shark-tooth necklace.”

Josiah re-enacts the fight, throwing kicks and punches to demonstrate how he felled her. “I got that big bitch down and whaled on her, eh?” Josiah straddles an imaginary human on the floor and pummels. “Boom, boom, boom,” he says. “Bitch was all lumped up and drooling.”

Warmed up by the fight tale, Josiah dances across the room, recounting his years of being the littlest guy in youth camps, county jail, and then prison, but who was always ready to throw chingasos with the big vatos. He drops onto a couch, seemingly exhausted. “I been fighting my whole life.”

Josiah points to Dollard. “But thanks to this dick, for the first time I got a reason to stay clean.” Josiah’s mouth wobbles. He chokes back tears, thumping his chest to regain composure. “This motherfucker’s been there for me.”

Dollard turns to me. “We’re friends against all probability. When we met at Impact, we were a gangbanger and a Hollywood agent. It was funny because Josiah came from this hard prison culture and yet he became my vassal. Everyone thought he was my bitch.”

“I wasn’t his bitch, eh?,” Josiah clarifies.

“Josiah,” Dollard explains, “in the sense that I was your friend and protector, you were my bitch.”

“I wasn’t your fucking bitch.” Josiah’s face darkens.

“Josiah, you are my lieutenant. I am the general.” Dollard gestures to the apartment. “Someday, you will inherit everything.”
On Fire with Sobriety

September 19, 2005. I accompany Dollard to a screening of his film for a small company seeking content for outlets like Spike TV. Dollard meets the head of the firm’s film division—a tall, wiry, cerebral-seeming man whom Dollard nicknames “Spock”—in a spacious Beverly Hills suite. A few minutes into the screening, things start to go badly when Spock leaps from his couch to turn down the obscenity-laden soundtrack. “They can hear this outside,” he says.

Dollard immediately jumps from his seat and twists the volume up. To my astonishment, the two go back and forth like this until Spock finally has enough. He hits the pause button and stands blocking the equipment from any more interference from Dollard. “This is great,” Spock says through a tight grin, “but I’m having trouble getting my head around it.”

“This is cinéma vérité,” Dollard says, standing up, beginning to rant. I time Dollard on my watch. He talks for 12 straight minutes. The cords on his neck pop out. Spit flies. By the end of the tirade he paces, talking about whores in Iraq, robbing pharmacies, liberals, Valium. He finally sputters to a stop.

Spock breaks the silence. “I don’t even know how we could market this.”

“I don’t want you to market it.” Dollard yells, “I don’t want an audience talked into watching this by marketing tricks. Fuck that.”

Spock shakes Dollard’s hand. “The thing is, I totally respect you as an artist.”

Careening down Wilshire Boulevard minutes later, Dollard grouses, “He turned my shit off. You do not tell the artist to turn his shit off early.” Then his face brightens with inspiration. “Let’s take $10,000, go to Las Vegas, get a bunch of hookers and blow, and have fun for a few days.”

“What makes you think you’d be able to stop?,” I ask.

“What we’ll do is hire a couple of big niggers to shut us down at the end of five days and put us in suitcases and bring us home.”

Dollard catches me writing down the word “nigger” in my notes.

“I can say that word,” he says. “I’m half Puerto Rican, and if I’m Puerto Rican, then I’m a nigger. End of story.”

He also insists for the record that he has no desire to actually get high, that he is merely joking. “The fact is Josiah and I are on fire with sobriety.”
Megan

It seems the gods do favor Pat Dollard. Mike Simpson informs him that the HBO executives who saw the film in L.A. have recommended it to the head of the documentary division in New York, Sheila Nevins, arguably the single most influential person in America in the realm of documentary. The plan is for Dollard to fly to New York for a screening.

After sharing this news with me, Dollard says, “I called Megan”—his fourth wife, who left him a year ago. “I told her I’m going to be getting eight million bucks. I told her I’d pay her $10,000 if she’d come over here and suck my dick.”

“Calling me up and saying disgusting things like that to me is Pat’s idea of a joke,” Megan tells me when we meet a few days later. She is 25, tall and blonde, and speaks in a silky Louisiana accent. We sit outdoors at a restaurant near Dollard’s apartment. He has invited her over to watch his film. She has agreed to go only because she needs to pick up papers related to their divorce.

When I sit down, Megan is reading a cheap romance novel. “One of my vices,” says Megan, who has been known to often carry one in her purse. But her worst vice, she allows, is still caring about her soon-to-be ex-husband.

From the moment Megan met Dollard it was as if his almost supernaturally good luck was working on her, only in reverse. She was 21, about to graduate from college in Baton Rouge, when early one evening she burned down her apartment trying to heat potpourri on the stove—something she’d read about in a magazine article. After the firemen left, Megan walked to the bar where she worked part-time as a waitress to commiserate with some co-workers, who plied her with free drinks. Soon she was plastered. Then her girlfriend pointed out that there was a celebrity in the bar, Billy Bob Thornton, who was in town filming.

Megan’s friend dared her to say hello. At that moment Billy Bob happened to be sharing a cigarette with his former agent, Pat Dollard, who was in town visiting his ex-wife, Alicia. Megan approached Billy Bob and said, “I’m Megan. Want to drink some martinis with me?”

Billy Bob declined the invitation. He was due to pick up Angelina Jolie at the airport and excused himself. Megan was alone with Dollard. She admits that by this point “I was too drunk to know anything.” (Dollard claims, “Megan was so drunk she thought I was Billy Bob.”) All Megan knows is that when she woke up the next day she was smitten. A couple months later, they flew to Las Vegas, where Soderbergh had just wrapped the location shooting for Ocean’s Eleven at the Bellagio, where Dollard was comped a suite. According to Megan, “Our second night there Pat was like, ‘Hey, you want to marry me?,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and we got married at the Little White Wedding Chapel.”

A few days later she moved into Dollard’s Bel Air home. “My first week in L.A.,” Megan says, “I met Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Pat introduced us on the Ocean’s Eleven set, and Brad gave me this knowing look and said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ And I was like, Holy shit, Brad Pitt has heard about me? Then I went to Cannes with Pat, and I hung out with Julia Roberts. I would call my friends back home every night and I’d be like, ‘Guess who I just met tonight.’ ”

Megan tamps out her cigarette. “It was very surreal, for sure.” She adds, “I grew up with very little, and Pat offered me this total fantasy of staying at home, not working, and raising children.”

The fantasy quickly bumped into the realities of his addictions. Initially, Megan was prepared to help. She encouraged him to attend A.A. meetings and opened their home to informal gatherings of recovering addicts. It didn’t work. Once, she says, she saw “a vagrant walking around” outside the house who turned out to be “Pat’s drug dealer leaving coke underneath the rocks.”

The relationship went terminal soon after Dollard began “sponsoring”—serving as a 12-step adviser to—a young, recovering female crack addict he’d met at an A.A. meeting. “Pat told me it would help him stay sober if he was helping another addict,” Megan explains. Dollard got his “sponsee” a job and moved her into their house. Megan moved out and later discovered e-mails Dollard had written his “sponsee” in which he suggested that both their lives would be better off if she killed Megan. (Dollard says, “Anyone who knows me knows I was only joking.”) As the controversy played out, Dollard made his first trip to Iraq.

Megan now works as a waitress at a swanky Sunset hotel. As a result of her three years of marriage to Dollard, she is left with tens of thousands of dollars in debts. “Pat told me when we first got married that it would help build my credit if we put everything in my name,” Megan says as we enter his building. “As awful as this sounds,” she confesses, “sometimes I wish he was dead.”

Dollard greets us at the door. He is neatly shaved. The living room is pristine. Josiah kneels in front of a TV Dollard purchased for him and is playing Hitman 2, a game he likes because “it teaches you how to become a professional killer.”

“Is this your new little slave?,” Megan says, nodding toward Josiah. She says to me, “Pat always manages to get a little slave. Like I was.”

Dollard laughs indulgently and corrals her into the editing room for her viewing of Young Americans. Megan sits on the bed and watches the first few minutes with a stony expression. Then she starts to sob.

“Jesus, they’re so young,” she says of the Marines on-screen. “They’re like the boys I went to school with.”

“I told you this was good,” Dollard says.

“Have you talked to your mother?,” Megan asks. “You need to call her.”

“How’s that fucking bitch?,” Dollard says.

“You don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“Watch me—I just did. I just did.”

“Your mother is the most wonderful woman that I’ve ever met,” Megan says. “I want to punch you in the face right now.”

She sits up and inadvertently knocks over an ashtray concealed under the blanket on the bed. She leaps up, brushing ashes from her jeans. “This brings back memories,” she says, growing angry. “This is definitely why I left you.”

“You left because you’re a quitter,” Dollard says.

“I left because you are an alcoholic and you won’t get help,” Megan says.

“You didn’t stick around like Bill Wilson’s wife,” Dollard says, referring to the wife of the A.A. co-founder. “If Bill Wilson’s wife hadn’t stuck by his side when he was drinking there would be no A.A.”

“My husband was hiring hookers on my credit card—to buy coke [for him],” Megan says to me.

She walks to the door. Dollard hurries after her and hands her the papers he promised her. She kisses him on the cheek and leaves.

Dollard stares at the door. “This really hurts,” he says. “Am I over her? Maybe not. But the question with having a woman is, to what extent do I want to continue to engage with civilization?”

“Jesus Christ, Pat,” Josiah says, still playing Hitman 2. “You said she was hot, eh? But she’s really fucking hot.”
The Jesus Room

Dollard’s screening with Sheila Nevins, in New York, is scheduled for mid-October. During the two weeks before his scheduled departure, his behavior becomes increasingly bizarre. He phones early one morning and says, “I need your help.”

I ask him what’s going on.

“I’m taking steps,” he says, “but they ain’t the 12 steps.” He won’t explain any further, because he feels it’s unsafe to talk on the phone. A couple hours later he shows up at my apartment. There is a massive safe in the back of his Hummer. All his money is in there, he tells me. He plans to hide it. To that end, he needs to leave his cell phone at my house so no one will track him while he’s on his mission. Several days later he phones from a new telephone number and leaves a message: “Driving on Washington Boulevard I clutch the receipt for my new .45-caliber Glock and the feeling that I will be very disappointed if I die before I kill jihadis with this gun.”

It turns out that in the state of California people who have been taken into custody as a danger to themselves and others and held for psychiatric evaluation—as Dollard has been—are potentially ineligible to purchase firearms for the next five years. Days later, he calls: “Yo, call me as soon as you get this, please. I need to know if you have a clean record in California, and if you could purchase guns. I will pay you.”

I decline the offer.

Dollard is eager for me to accompany him to New York and witness what he expects will be his triumphant screening for HBO. The day we are to fly out, a girl named Sunshine (I’ve changed her name) phones and introduces herself as one of Pat Dollard’s assistants. She is calling to arrange the final details of our flight. An hour later Dollard phones to say his new assistant will be flying to New York with us. “Oh, yeah,” he adds. “Sunshine will be smoking meth.”

The two never show up for the flight.

Josiah phones the next morning from New York. He has taken it upon himself to rescue Dollard’s appointment with Nevins by hand-delivering the screener DVD. He took the red-eye to New York—his first time on an airplane and his first trip outside of California. When he checked into the Times Square Quality Hotel moments before phoning me, something happened that totally tripped him out. The hotel put him in Room 316. “Can you fucking believe it?,” Josiah shouts. “I’m in 316, the Jesus room. That’s who I am. My middle name is Jesus.”

I tell Josiah I don’t get the relationship between the number 316 and Jesus.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” Josiah says, quoting the Scriptures. “John 3:16.”

“Have you guys been smoking meth?,” I ask.

“Yeah, I ain’t going to lie,” Josiah answers. “Pat’s fucked up. He’s fucking psychotic, fucking psycho, fucking, a fucking weirdo. We all are, you know?”

Dollard phones minutes after Josiah hangs up. Unlike Josiah, Dollard sounds supremely relaxed, groggy, maybe a little drunk. He informs me that he was unable to fly to New York because he has fallen in love with Sunshine. “She has a golden heart,” he tells me.

There is a complication. Sunshine is Josiah’s girlfriend, one who, at times, meant a great deal to him. “This is rough for Josiah,” Dollard says. “She came here to see him and … ” He whispers. “What happened between us had to happen. She’s the one.”

I ask him why he skipped his meeting in New York, and he cuts me off. “Dude, I can’t talk right now. I’m having my dick sucked.”
No Redemption

Auto Focus, the film that Dollard produced and Paul Schrader directed, is about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s self-destruction through his addiction to sex as well as the murky homoeroticism of his relationship with a hanger-on who films Crane’s exploits with women and ultimately beats him to death with a camera tripod. The film did not do well at the box office, but Schrader remains pleased with his collaboration with Dollard. “He wasn’t scared about doing stuff that may offend people,” Schrader tells me. “I knew that if we did something warped he would get it.” Despite its lackluster reception, Schrader believes the film stands as a pure story, unencumbered by hack studio convention, which he attributes in part to Dollard’s influence. “Pat was attracted to the idea that we just weren’t going to redeem or glorify our main character. That this was the story of the life of an extremist, what happens if you release the reins on a normal powerful passion and let the horse run. Will you achieve some kind of balance, or will it break you apart?”

Unlike the fictionalization of Bob Crane’s life in Auto Focus, Dollard since I have known him has been obsessed with redemption. This was the whole point of going to Iraq. While I’m not totally surprised that he has apparently gone out on a bender, I hadn’t expected he would so casually skip the all-important meeting with Nevins. As a practical matter it also seems potentially dangerous to be having sex with the girlfriend of a violent felon.

Josiah phones after delivering the film to Nevins’s apartment. “There I was, eh, in this rich bitch’s apartment,” Josiah says. “These broads were fucking all into me, saying how handsome I am. They thought me and Pat were gay. I was all ‘Wait, I know I’m fucking fine, eh? But that doesn’t mean I have to be gay and shit.’ ” Josiah states for the record, “Gay is not my position.”

I ask Josiah what’s going on with Dollard and his girlfriend. “He’s fucking fucking her,” he says. Josiah admits this was initially hard for him to take. He and Sunshine have known each other for several years. “Then I got busted and went to prison and she wrote me, giving me hope, ’cause she was the only broad there for me,” Josiah says.

But when Sunshine, who hadn’t seen Josiah in months, showed up at Dollard’s apartment several days ago, she turned the tables. She refused to have sex with him and, as Josiah saw it, was trying to make him jealous by flirting with Dollard. “It hurt, eh, ’cause I fucking love that girl.”

About this time, Josiah says, he and Dollard, then Sunshine, began smoking meth. Soon, Dollard advised Josiah on the best way to handle the situation with Sunshine. Josiah says, “Pat told me she was trying to play a game on me.” Dollard gave Josiah a pep talk to remind him who he is: “I’m the pimp. I’m the one that plays the games. She thinks she’s playing me? I’ll use her to my fucking advantage. So I pimped her out.” Josiah laughs. “Last night he gave me $5,000. She got fucked, and I got paid.”

When I later speak with Dollard, he laughs off the notion that he talked Josiah into pimping his girlfriend to him. “The fact is,” Dollard says, “Josiah can’t stop watching her fuck me.” Dollard informs me that Josiah filmed him as he had sex with his girlfriend.

I point out to Dollard that he has now entered the realm of Auto Focus. He says, “The difference is in Auto Focus the girls Bob Crane was fucking were just girls, but Josiah’s filming me fucking the love of his life.” Dollard laughs. “People get killed over this.”
Three Days

Mike Simpson phones me in the midst of this to ask how my story on Dollard is going. I don’t want to divulge anything that will screw up Dollard’s prospects at William Morris. Moreover, there’s something so strangely decent about Mike Simpson, so at odds with Dollard’s portrayals of agents as whoremongering, borderline white-collar criminals, I’m at a loss to say anything. I tell him Pat is certainly an interesting subject. “We’re hearing such good things about his project at Showtime and now HBO,” Simpson says, sounding pleased. “Pat is really coming into his own as a filmmaker.”

On an unseasonably hot October afternoon Dollard invites me to his apartment to show me something. Josiah greets me outside the door. He asks if I’ve come alone. Dollard is afraid I might have brought his mother. Ever since the first time his family had the police take him to the psych ward, he’s grown wary. (As he once told me, “They figured out they could pick up the phone, and, boom, I’m in a mental hospital. It fucking sucks, dude.”) I assure Josiah I’ve come alone.

The apartment is a rat’s nest. One couch is overturned. Cigarette butts are burned into the carpet. Tear-gas grenades—part of an arms cache Dollard hoped to acquire to launch his anti-jihadi network—are scattered on the floor. The bathroom looks like someone skinned a deer in it: everything is covered in tufts of hair and blood from Dollard’s effort to cut off the beard that grew during the past couple of weeks.

Dollard enters in shorts and sandals, drinking vodka and cranberry juice from a plastic cup. “I’m tapering down,” he says. “This is medicine.”

Gesturing to the wrecked apartment, Dollard attempts a joke. “I go on a drug binge for 10 days, and when I come out of it I find out my agents have done less work than I have.”

Dollard boasts he has just completed a new film which he plans to send to Sheila Nevins. “This is the woman who is the grande dame of interesting, weird documentaries. Part of what I am trying to sell them is that I am a madman—this, quote, insane genius.”

“It’s called Three Days,” says Josiah, kneeling at the coffee table and playing with a large hunting knife.

Dollard says, “I want to send Three Days to Sheila as an explanation as to why I missed my meeting with her.” He adds that Three Days may be one of the greatest films ever made, whose meaning is, well … I just have to watch it.

I sit on the tiny bed in the editing room. Josiah is next to me, his hunting knife now sheathed. Dollard hunches by the monitor and starts the film. The face of a girl with long black hair fills the screen. Sunshine. Though she is of legal age, she speaks in a child’s voice, plaintive and quavering, as Dollard, still offscreen, barks at her, “What’s your job on the team?”

She giggles. “To sexually satisfy you and clean the house.”

Dollard enters the frame, totally nude, a decrepit satyr. A montage ensues of him performing various sex acts with her, intercut with close-ups of the girl smoking a glass pipe. There is unintended comedy: while Dollard is having sex with her on the couch, it catches fire, and the two fail to notice until flames engulf their feet. There is intended comedy: Dollard performs anal sex with her while simultaneously talking on the phone with an agent at William Morris.

In the film, Josiah, who serves as cameraman, does not have sex with Sunshine. He later explained that he enjoyed watching it and pleasuring himself. His most significant on-screen presence is to lean close to Sunshine and offer encouragements: “What’s his name? Say Pat. You’re fucking a rich man with accomplishments, not a fucking loser.”

In the room with me, Dollard and Josiah howl and tap knuckles. I stand up.

Dollard shoots me an annoyed glance. “You have to pay attention,” he says. “You’re going to miss that this is not really a porn film.”

The film fades to black. Jim Morrison comes across the loudspeakers singing “The End.” Dollard narrates in the background about immortality, death, and the horrors he witnessed in Iraq. It cuts to Dollard readying to make his money shot on Sunshine.

In Auto Focus, when Bob Crane and his sidekick watch their homemade porn together, they masturbate. Thankfully, Dollard takes a different route. He turns to Josiah, speaking excitedly. “You love this girl, Josiah. But you know what? You wandered off into a room by yourself to fucking jerk off to a tape of her fucking somebody else. That’s who we are. That’s who people are! They’re scumbags!”

“This is so fucked up,” Josiah shouts, “but I like it.”

“Exactly, dude!” Dollard claps his hands, like a teacher whose pupil is about to achieve satori. “That’s what I told you! That’s the whole point to everything around here, with this whole thing, all of it, beyond! It’s what everything in my life is about. It’s about finding all those truths and those fucking experiences that other people just don’t get.”

Josiah seems paralyzed, staring at the screen, his huge eyes unblinking. “This is so fucked up,” he repeats.

“That’s what we do here,” Dollard says, pounding the editing table. “We take everything to its furthest limits. We go out. We go get in cars. We fucking kill people. We kill terrorists.”

I’m guessing that Dollard has veered into the realm of his jihadi-killer fantasies, or that he is in some sort of meth psychosis. The final moments of the film play. Dollard stares at the decrepit-satyr version of himself on-screen executing the money shot. When it’s over, he turns to me. “So what do you think?”

All I can think of is Ben Stiller’s line in Meet the Parents after Robert De Niro asks Stiller for his reaction to the awful poem he reads about his deceased mother. “Wow,” I say. “Your film contains a lot of information.” I urge Dollard not to send it to HBO.

“Our taste may be too cutting-edge, too extreme,” he admits. Despite these reservations, Dollard stands. “We need to film Sunshine more.” He tells Josiah to phone her and ask her to come back over. It turns out Sun- shine has a responsible day job. Josiah reaches her, but she refuses to come over. Dollard takes the phone and pleads, “We’ll make right on the mistake from when you were here the last time. I promise.”

He hangs up and drops onto the partially burned couch in the living room. “Josiah,” he says, “we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that she may not be coming back.”
The Geographic Cure

Dollard does not get a deal for Young Americans. Nor does he send Nevins a copy of Three Days. He drops out of sight for nearly a month. About a week before Thanksgiving he resurfaces in a phone message: “Where you been, dude? I’m having the D.T.’s—it’s awesome. Give me a call. Bye.”

We speak. “I feel like suicide, or going into a hospital,” he tells me. Dollard says he nearly died recently while smoking meth. “I couldn’t move. It was like my body had turned to ice.” He mourns wrecking the prospects of his film, then adds, “I failed Josiah in all of this.” A few days ago Josiah totaled the Humvee, and Dollard kicked him out. (Dollard subsequently found an attorney and helped pay nearly $5,000 to defend Josiah in his outstanding case, but in March 2006, he was convicted of receiving stolen property and sent back to prison with a four-year sentence.) “Do you think you could help get me to a hospital or something?,” Dollard asks.

I call Impact House, and they agree to take Dollard back. I don’t reach him again until after midnight. I am about to deliver the good news when Dollard cuts me off. “I need a favor,” Dollard says. He informs me that he e-mailed a Marine Corps public-affairs officer who offered him an embed spot if he could get to Kuwait in the next 72 hours. The only problem is Dollard’s credit card is maxed out and he can’t buy tickets. He wants to know if he can use my credit card to buy the tickets. “What am I going to do in a rehab?,” Dollard asks. “I’m going to feel like shit no matter where I am. I’d rather be lying in a hole in Iraq than in a bed somewhere in L.A.”

Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism analyst with Rand, has argued, like other experts in his field, that a primary lure of jihad in radical Islam is the notion that war offers “purification.” I am beginning to think that it’s much the same for Dollard in his indomitable drive to purge himself of his afflictions.

I give him my credit-card number. In recovery-speak, people might say I’m “enabling” the “untreated alcoholic” by helping him run away from his troubles with a “geographic cure.” I know this because I have had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol. It’s probably why I like Dollard, feel a kinship with him in his madness. Unlike him, I haven’t had bad experiences with people in 12-step meetings. But from what I have seen you just can’t force it on someone. The way I look at it, if the untreated alcoholic wants to take his geographic cure by going to Iraq, that’s his business.

The night before Thanksgiving a taxi delivers him to my apartment. Dollard wants to say good-bye. He gets out of the cab lugging his camera equipment, a few changes of underwear, and a jacket, all packed in several shopping bags. I give him an old suitcase. Stuffing his possessions into it, Dollard laughs, watching how badly his hands shake. He is totally blind in his right eye from his cataract, and the contact lens in his left eye—which he hasn’t removed for more than six months—is filthy. He nearly tumbles down the steps when he walks out my door. The apartment below mine belongs to a devout Mormon woman, who every year puts up a large fir tree in her window facing the courtyard. The tree is up, but not yet decorated. My neighbor opens her door as Dollard clatters past. “Hey, it’s fucking Christmas,” he tells her. “Put some shit on your tree.”

I yell after him, “It’s Thanksgiving, Pat, not Christmas.”

“Fuck it, dude. Whatever.”
The Third Act

The Marine Corps sends Dollard to Ramadi. After the relatively calm national elections on December 15, 2005, a new wave of insurgent attacks erupts in Ramadi, making it one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq for U.S. troops. The media largely ignore the city. Dollard becomes one of the few Western journalists to continuously cover the battle for the city throughout the winter and early spring of 2006.

Dollard is the first reporter on the scene on January 5, 2006, when insurgents bomb a recruitment center for Iraqi police. An estimated 40 men are killed and 80 wounded. Lieutenant Aaron Awtry, a Marine platoon commander who arrived with Dollard at the blast site, says, “We were the first ones at the scene, where a formation of Iraqis had been blown apart. Body parts were everywhere. Pat was really struggling with what we were seeing. We both were, but Pat was doing his job filming. On that day, he became part of our platoon like any other Marine.”

This time in Iraq, Dollard does not engage in the antics that had so entertained and enraged troops on his first tour. In the course of nearly five months, Dollard films Marines on well over 200 combat patrols. Says Lieutenant Awtry, “Nobody covered the war like he did.”

While in Iraq, Dollard sends me an e-mail, revisiting his Hollywood past:

I was like a junky who never kicked because someone kept throwing me a bag of heroin every Friday Who loves you, baby? If you’re an agent, you really don’t want to know the answer. … You ever watch terrified 55 year-old men begging for praise every week in a staff meeting … ? It’s not pretty. Any Hollywood agent or executive who criticizes my career doesn’t understand how much of a geek they sound like. “He wasn’t really one of us.” No shit, Maynard, I didn’t want to be a geek like you. Go back to your cappuccino, auto-fellatio, and faux tough-guy posturing. It took me forever to escape, and that’s arguably pathetic, but I have the whole third act of my life left, and there’s an old Hollywood maxim: The first two acts of a movie can suck, but if the third act rocks, everyone leaves the theater saying, “Damn, that was a great movie.”

All of Dollard’s efforts seem geared toward that third act. When he survives the February 18 bombing that killed two Marines, Dollard continues to join patrols, surviving yet another vehicle bombing on March 9. At the ceremony troops hold in Iraq for their brother Marines killed there, Dollard is given a place of respect.
Homecoming

In late March, Dollard flies home with the Marines. An ex-girlfriend of Dollard’s drives to the base at Twenty-Nine Palms, California, to join military families at the welcoming ceremony. Dollard had phoned her asking if she would take him back to L.A., promising that he had cleaned up his act. “The parents of the boy Pat was with when he died met him and were hugging him and it was so powerful,” she says. “Then we went out to a restaurant and Pat started drinking and told me he wasn’t coming back to L.A., and he disappeared.”

In April he calls me from an undisclosed location. Dollard says he is not doing well, and insists he must tell me about the February 18 bombing which killed Second Lieutenant Almar L. Fitzgerald, 23, and Corporal Matthew D. Conley, 21. Dollard says he was in the lead Humvee of a patrol going through Ramadi when a bomb hit the Humvee behind his. The patrol stopped. Nobody could see what was going on, because it was the middle of the night and the city, with no electricity, was pitch-black. Adding to the confusion, the Marines’ radios stopped working. Lieutenant Fitzgerald, the officer seated next to Dollard, ordered Conley, the radioman, to exit the vehicle and see what was going on with the Humvee behind them that had just been hit. As Conley stepped out, insurgents detonated a second bomb buried in the asphalt, underneath their Humvee. Conley was blown to pieces. Dollard’s armored door flew open, and he was thrown from the Humvee. A four-inch piece of shrapnel had penetrated his calf muscle, and he was covered in diesel fuel, but he was otherwise O.K. As insurgents began to rake the area with machine-gun fire, he crawled back to the crumpled, smoking Humvee and climbed inside for cover.

I ask him what happened to Fitzgerald. “He was next to me,” Dollard says, “pushed forward in a prone position, dying.” Over the phone Dollard emits a series of sharp noises. He’s sobbing. He hangs up, then phones back about half an hour later. “This is why I’ve got to stop doing drugs and finish this project,” he says, sounding desperate. “It’s their film.”

He turns to two former Marines to help him complete his project. Sergeant Brandon Welsh, honorably discharged in early 2006, and another young vet offer Dollard a place to stay at a town house they rent in a Sunbelt metropolis. (Dollard requests that the city not be named.) By early May, Welsh helps Dollard create the Web site that draws the attention of Andrew Breitbart and his invitation to return to Los Angeles for a series of meetings with operatives on the right.
The Evil Genius

Our breakfast at the LAX hotel is the first time I have seen Dollard since his return from Iraq. A couple days later I accompany him to an invitation-only pool party on the roof of the downtown Standard hotel. Breitbart has introduced Dollard to Morgan Warstler, a thirtysomething entrepreneur who dabbles as a conservative operative. Warstler has promised to be Dollard’s “evil genius.”

We meet Warstler, an impish redhead (with an uncanny resemblance to Danny Bonaduce), by the pool. Dressed in jeans and a green baseball cap, he invites Dollard to sit on some plastic cube chairs by the dance floor. While sipping a rum-and-Coke, Warstler lists his credentials. “I was a national-champion debater,” he says. “I made the president of the Yale debate team cry. I called him a dildo in front of 500 people.”

“Mad props to you,” Dollard says, drinking a black coffee.

“I deal in ideas,” Warstler continues. “People are hosts to ideas, like viruses. When two people meet, ideas jump out of their heads, looking for new hosts. What I’m after is for my idea to jump out of my head and crush the ideas in someone else’s head.”

Warstler lays out a series of schemes for Dollard to spread his conservative, pro-war views, using viral-marketing techniques. “There is a whole vast, untapped market of Americans who don’t know shit about geopolitical bullshit, but who want this war to succeed,” Warstler says. “Those people need arguments. So if they’re in a bar somewhere arguing with somebody they can just hold up their cell phone, play the latest installment from you, and be like, ‘End of argument.’ ”

Dollard warms to the plan. “I’m like this gonzo character, but I fucking support the whole conservative agenda.”

Warstler takes a long, reflective pull from his drink. He tells Dollard that he personally digs “the whole Hunter S. Thompson direction you’ve been going in.” He says, “I loved the guy. I once spent a night drinking with him, but once he killed himself, that brand died.”
Blowing Smoke

A few days later, Breitbart arranges Dollard’s introduction to Ann Coulter. They meet after she tapes an appearance on The Tonight Show, rendezvousing at the Acapulco, across from the NBC studios in Burbank. When I enter, Coulter is standing on the patio surrounded by about 30 fans, leading them in a chorus of “God Bless America.” Coulter wears a black dress stretched tightly over her thin, angular, almost starved-looking frame.

Dollard hovers by the entrance, dressed in a morrison hotel T-shirt, waiting for their dinner, which will take place at a nearby steak house. When Coulter finally walks out, Breitbart hustles Dollard over for the introduction.

Dollard attempts to ditch his cigarette. “No, no,” Coulter tells him. “Blow smoke in my face.” She leans her oblong, Brazil-nut-shaped face toward Dollard’s lips, and he exhales through his yellow, cracked teeth. Coulter, who later explains she recently quit smoking and is still jonesing for tobacco, shuts her eyes and coos, “Thank you.”

A few days after their dinner Coulter e-mails me her impression of Dollard: “The main thing I’d say about Dollard is that when you first meet him, he looks like a bad-ass degenerate and then the moment he starts talking, you realize he’s highly intelligent, interesting and funny.… I would trust anything he says implicitly.”

Through Breitbart’s tireless networking, Dollard travels to New York in July to meet with a magazine editor, who offers him a job as a war correspondent. In an e-mail to Dollard, the editor reveals the mixture of awe and obsequiousness Dollard increasingly receives from the swelling ranks of new acolytes:

So … I shit my pants just thinking about all the shit you’ve been through Your shit is so raw and real … The knives must be out for you … Hollywood eats its young so my God they must be sending some liberal fucking hit squad out after you … I want to know everything about your project and I want to promote it in a good way with your voice and diary … I’m sure you think [the magazine] is frivolous shit that is part of the problem but we are read by the soldiers.738230; We are the dick that is to be sucked by the vapid, MTV bullshit, I know all that but imagine if your shit ran on MTV … You can trust me, I’m one of the good guys …

While in New York, Dollard also appears on Hannity & Colmes. Introduced by Colmes as a former talent agent who left “Tinseltown behind to see what the Iraqis themselves think of the liberal anti-war movement,” Dollard plays a clip of an Iraqi translator who calls Michael Moore a “little bitch” and crushes a DVD purported to be Fahrenheit 9/11 (but appears to be I, Robot). Dollard rambles about “an incredibly strong [anti-Republican] bias in Hollywood that denies people work.” Hannity adds, “The truth isn’t being told, is it? The left is undermining [the soldiers’] effort and stabbing them in the back.”

After viewing her ex-husband on the show, Megan Dollard tells me, “It’s really scary that a person who is completely crazy can go on TV and have that influence.” Having seen him come unglued so many times in front of me, I hadn’t anticipated how effective he would be on TV. Isn’t somebody going to notice he’s insane, I had wondered while watching him trade sound bites with Hannity? But of course he would fit in. In the pro-wrestling world of opinion TV, Dollard is a natural.

In conversations I’ve had with Breitbart, he, like other conservatives, harps on the “nihilism of the left.” Breitbart brings up anti–Vietnam War protesters, like yippies, who attacked the Establishment “by spitting on people. They debased people and institutions and values with anger and disrespect.”

Despite his outrage, Breitbart advocates a right-wing version of the Merry Pranksters led by people like Coulter and Dollard. Perhaps America has experienced a circular movement in its social history. The freaks are now on the right. Dollard takes this even further. With his drug-fueled excursions into combat zones, his lust for booze and hookers and porn, and, above all, his madness for life, he is an authentic anti-Establishment figure and is certainly in the running to be the first true gonzo journalist to emerge from this war. And yet he supports the Republican Party platform, George Bush, and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Four days after Dollard’s Hannity & Colmes appearance, I receive a call from a security guard at the W Times Square hotel, where Dollard is staying. The guard tells me the N.Y.P.D. is on their way to possibly arrest Dollard. Throughout the call, I hear a drunk slurring in the background. It’s Dollard. The guard tells me that earlier that morning a woman from room service had brought him cigarettes and found the room trashed, covered in what she thought was blood. (Dollard would later claim it was coffee.) Dollard allegedly told the woman from room service, “I killed someone.” Welsh, who accompanied Dollard to New York, tells me that after his appearance on Hannity & Colmes a magazine editor “trying to kiss Pat’s ass and believing all his Hunter S. Thompson bullshit” gave him “a bunch of coke, and Pat got all retarded as usual.” Welsh left him a few days ago.

When the cops show up at the W, instead of arresting him, they have an ambulance take him to St. Vincent’s hospital for observation. He is released hours later and flies back home.

Welsh informs me that he and an ex-Marine buddy plan to tie Dollard up and use a Taser gun if he acts out. Dollard sobers up for a few weeks. But in early September, Welsh moves out after an incident in which Dollard shoots a hole through the ceiling of his bedroom while playing with a .45. “The motherfucker’s out of his mind,” Welsh tells me. “I’m just fucking tired of being a 23-year-old babysitting a 42-year-old.”

Two weeks after Welsh’s departure, Dollard contacts me. He has finished cutting his second version of Young Americans (without any pornographic scenes). According to Dollard, since the new version of his film includes footage of the two bombings he survived and graphic footage of Marines in close-quarters firefights, “William Morris thinks it’s going to be fucking big. Fucking liberals are going to buy this. That’s the thing about all the dark-side stuff I’ve done, which I didn’t truly understand until now: it’s appealing to everybody. I guess that’s why in the bottom of their hearts most people fucking love war.”
Epilogue

Dollard and I meet for dinner at a Santa Monica steak house a couple of nights before Christmas. He claims that on September 11 he underwent an experience—part spiritual, part patriotic—in which he was struck sober and has been clean ever since. He certainly looks better than I expected. A few weeks earlier he had cataract surgery, and for the first time in more than a year his gaze is clear. Over Caesar salads and steaks, Dollard tells me it’s important that people in the public realize he doesn’t “advocate drugs or the drug lifestyle. I don’t think taking drugs is cool. I suffer from the disease of alcoholism like millions of other people.” Unable to stomach the “whiny assclowns” at A.A. meetings, Dollard remains in solo combat with his personal demons.

In the battle against Islamo-Fascism he is gaining new allies. He says that Frank J. Gaffney Jr., an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration and charter member of the Project for the New American Century, has begun discussions with him about helping to distribute Young Americans. (Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy has produced TV ads and promoted documentaries aimed at stiffening the American public’s resolve to carry on the war in Iraq.) Dollard is also in direct negotiations with Fox News V.P. Ken LaCorte to provide clips to the network. “I’m becoming a member of the Fox family,” he tells me.

In mid-January, Andrew Breitbart hosts a conservative coming-out party for Dollard to celebrate his upcoming Fox deal. (According to Dollard, Fox News head Roger Ailes was “stoked” about bringing him into the Fox fold after viewing his Web site.) About 30 people gather at Breitbart’s hillside home in Brentwood to view Dollard’s clips. When I enter, Ann Coulter stands by a bowl of guacamole, eating tortilla chips and venting about the lack of spine shown by her own partisans. “I meet so many conservative men afraid to say they still support the war,” she says. “Conservatives are pussies. That should be the title of my next book.” The large man behind her in a double-breasted, white linen suit is Richard Miniter, author of Losing Bin Laden (plot spoiler: it’s Clinton’s fault). Miniter, chewing an unlit cigar, huddles in conversation with a bald guy in a baseball cap, discussing battle plans to promote more “pro-war content” in the movies. The guy in the baseball cap is part of a small contingent of movie-industry people on hand, a writer and a couple of producers, who represent the new face of butch Hollywood. While maintaining the same careers they had before 9/11, at parties like this they now talk forcefully of the need to confront the Islamo-Fascist threat. I find Dollard—who flew in from his undisclosed location—in the living room wrestling with loudspeakers and computer cables in preparation for his screening. When he sees me, Dollard throws his arm around my shoulder and asks, “Dude, how’s your fucking mother?”

Having recently learned of an illness in my family, Dollard has bombarded me with phone calls and e-mails inquiring about my well-being, providing me with leads on experimental medical clinics offering non-traditional cures. Dollard, when he is not off in a war, on an anti-liberal rant, or locked away on a binge, becomes an obsessively and at times intrusively caring friend. Tonight, he scolds me for not being at the hospital with my mother, and offers “anything, anything I can do to help. Just ask, dude.” After I decline, Dollard switches gears, asking if I have read his latest e-mail. In it he writes that liberal enclaves in Manhattan and Los Angeles “basically need to be exterminated in order for the planet to move ahead into peace.” In Dollard’s view, the liberal media based on both coasts are “literally allied with the Islamic Fascist Imperialists out of a short-sighted grab for domestic political power. You are seeing the age of treason in America.”

The screening—a series of interviews Pat conducted with Marines complaining about the liberal bias of the media—concludes with polite applause.

Back in the kitchen, Ann Coulter resumes her assault on the guacamole and chips. A male guest approaches, slips Coulter his number, and delivers what must be the ultimate pickup line at a conservative party. “I’m having dinner tomorrow night with Richard Perle. Would you like to join us?”

I find Dollard on the balcony conferring with a producer. The producer tells him he could help him walk into a major studio and get a deal. Dollard listens attentively. The producer says, “My problem is the title. Young Americans—I don’t like it.”

One thing you can’t criticize is Dollard’s title. He believes it is not only one of the best things he’s ever come up with but that it’s been plagiarized at the highest levels. He believes that last summer President Bush himself checked out his Web site, saw the trailer, and began slipping the phrase “young Americans” into speeches as a not-so-subtle nod to his film. Dollard turns from the producer and pulls the last cigarette from a pack of Marlboro Lights. “Fuck, I’m out.”

The producer slinks back into the living room. Dollard lights his last cigarette and looks up at the twinkling lights on the hills. I point out that he is now essentially back at a Hollywood party.

“It’s like I never left,” he says.

I remind him of his e-mail arguing that Los Angeles needs to be wiped off the face of the planet.

“After I get my deal.” Dollard shrugs. “Fuck that. I just want to get back to Ramadi this spring. I’m supposed to die there.”

He turns to me. “Dude, drive down to a gas station and buy me some cigarettes.”

This is Evan Wright’s first article for Vanity Fair.