\n<\/p>\n
At Ari Emanuel\u2019s wedding to fashion designer Sarah Staudinger (his second wife named Sarah), the officiant, Larry David, called the groom a \u201cmutant\u201d and a \u201cc-nt.\u201d Considering the setting and their decades-long friendship, you might think David used that last word in a complimentary way\u2014like how a drag queen or a Brit might.<\/p>\n
Nope.<\/p>\n
David kept roasting him. He brought up Emanuel\u2019s aggression; how brutal it is to walk a golf course with him. \u201cAnd yet, and yet\u2026I love this man,\u201d Emanuel recalls David saying later in the ceremony. \u201cWhen I go to sleep at night, no matter how bad things are, I say to myself\u2026The C-nt will make everything okay.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Emanuel remembers in his new memoir, Roll the Calls,<\/em> 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\u2019d want him in your corner. In that sense, David\u2019s 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\u2014and I\u2019m sure someone who believes that is very<\/em> pleasant to be around.<\/p>\n \u201cRage means shit\u2019s finally going to get done. Atom splittings, moon landings, Ozempic\u2014humankind\u2019s milestone discoveries didn\u2019t start as inspiration; they started as aggravation,\u201d writes Emanuel, who wrote the 400-plus-page memoir with famed ghostwriter<\/a> J.R. Moehringer. He rationalizes his temper a thousand different ways: \u201cHistory has been shaped by bad moods as much as good intentions.\u201d Meanwhile, Emanuel writes \u201crevenge is everything,\u201d and compares plotting it to cooking pizza: \u201cHot is good. But cold is tastier.\u201d Get it?<\/p>\n If Entourage<\/em> brought Emanuel fame and cemented his image as Hollywood\u2019s angriest agent (Jeremy Piven\u2019s combustible character on the HBO comedy, inspired by Mark Wahlberg\u2019s early acting career, was famously modeled after him), then Roll the Calls<\/em> is where he gets a chance to explain how he turned out this way and why he doesn\u2019t really want to change. And he\u2019s funny, which makes his whole rage schtick mostly entertaining, and occasionally persuasive.<\/p>\n Emanuel\u2019s a little neurotic (his highly regimented morning routine includes breath work, meditation, a cold plunge, and \u201ca cup of live worms, to eat the bad bacteria in my gut\u201d). 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\u2019 report cards on the refrigerator, and his father encouraged him and his brothers\u2014Zeke, now a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and Rahm, a longtime Democratic politician\u2014to come to dinner prepared to debate. Emanuel\u2019s grades were always bad, especially compared to those of his brothers, who went on to earn master\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n