Jerry Weintraub the Go-to Guy to Get Connected

“Look at me, do I look like an alter kocker?" Jerry Weintraub asks. Verily, he does not. At the moment, he looks like a guy ready to swing a golf club at a visitor for asking him if he feels like -- to offer a rough translation from the Yiddish -- an old fart.

At 72, Jerry Weintraub is still swinging. He has just come out with his autobiography: “When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man" (Twelve: 292 pp., $25.99). For a fat tract of the last half of the last century, Weintraub was the Man Behind the Man, whether the man was Sinatra, Elvis or George H.W. Bush.

Long ago, Weintraub realized that the guy who does favors is never far from the guy who has favors done for him. One thing parlays into another. His firm, Concerts West, revolutionized the form in the 1960s. He managed recording artists and then moved on to producing television, Broadway shows and movies. He became chairman of United Artists. And he still works the phone.

“I get calls every morning," Weintraub says from the deck of his Palm Desert mountaintop oasis. “Really I am a concierge, because the first 150 things I do in the day are for somebody else -- get somebody rooms in Vegas, tickets for James Taylor, can you get me into this hospital, get me into that college?"

“When I Stop Talking" is anything but a rote, let-the-record-show memoir. In it he tells about the folks he's known and worked with: He describes the statue of the Buddha that Elvis' manager, Col. Tom Parker, kept in a cabinet in his motel room on the road and how he almost cast Japanese actor Toshir Mifune in “The Karate Kid." How he got Bob Dylan to perform on the Chabad telethon he produced, how he hung out with Bobby Fischer and tried to make an album, teaching a kid how to play chess, with him.

Although it's packed with stories he's surely been telling at dinner forever, the book is also a modest set of guidelines for how you too can be a successful mogul. “A lot of it comes from my father," he says. “He told me when you walk in to work, in the office, just say 'Good morning' and go to work. Whatever you do, don't say, 'How are you?' Because people will tell you -- and there goes half your day."