At Ari Emanuel’s wedding to fashion designer Sarah Staudinger (his second wife named Sarah), the officiant, Larry David, called the groom a “mutant” and a “c-nt.” Considering the setting and their decades-long friendship, you might think David used that last word in a complimentary way—like how a drag queen or a Brit might.
Nope.
David kept roasting him. He brought up Emanuel’s aggression; how brutal it is to walk a golf course with him. “And yet, and yet…I love this man,” Emanuel recalls David saying later in the ceremony. “When I go to sleep at night, no matter how bad things are, I say to myself…The C-nt will make everything okay.”
As Emanuel remembers in his new memoir, Roll the Calls, the speech brought him to tears. His mother frowned. But David turned the qualities that make the superagent a nightmare to deal with into reasons you’d want him in your corner. In that sense, David’s speech did what Emanuel spends much of his new book trying to do himself: justify his unrelenting rage and appetite for revenge. Essentially, he argues that rage can be a guiding philosophy in life—and I’m sure someone who believes that is very pleasant to be around.
“Rage means shit’s finally going to get done. Atom splittings, moon landings, Ozempic—humankind’s milestone discoveries didn’t start as inspiration; they started as aggravation,” writes Emanuel, who wrote the 400-plus-page memoir with famed ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer. He rationalizes his temper a thousand different ways: “History has been shaped by bad moods as much as good intentions.” Meanwhile, Emanuel writes “revenge is everything,” and compares plotting it to cooking pizza: “Hot is good. But cold is tastier.” Get it?
If Entourage brought Emanuel fame and cemented his image as Hollywood’s angriest agent (Jeremy Piven’s combustible character on the HBO comedy, inspired by Mark Wahlberg’s early acting career, was famously modeled after him), then Roll the Calls is where he gets a chance to explain how he turned out this way and why he doesn’t really want to change. And he’s funny, which makes his whole rage schtick mostly entertaining, and occasionally persuasive.
Emanuel’s a little neurotic (his highly regimented morning routine includes breath work, meditation, a cold plunge, and “a cup of live worms, to eat the bad bacteria in my gut”). He traces almost all of his rage and shame back to his dyslexia, which he got picked on for as a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs. His mom hung all of her kids’ report cards on the refrigerator, and his father encouraged him and his brothers—Zeke, now a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and Rahm, a longtime Democratic politician—to come to dinner prepared to debate. Emanuel’s grades were always bad, especially compared to those of his brothers, who went on to earn master’s degrees at Northwestern University (Rahm) and the University of Oxford (Zeke). (Emanuel went to Macalester College in Minnesota, at the same time as director Peter Berg, his close friend to this day.)
