DAYS OF THUNDER, NIGHTS OF DESPAIR

The Bad Boy

KIM MASTERS

Despite his wildly successful movies— Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun—producer Don Simpson lived in fear of failure, a fear he battled with drugs, plastic surgery, and sex. Two days before his death in January, he talked about his life

The phone was Don Simpson’s perfect medium—intimate yet removed. “He kept people in their boxes,” says an executive who knew the flamboyant producer and his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, after Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, and Top Gun made them famous. “The movie people. The drug people. The hookers. Nobody could reach him in a way to motivate him to say, ‘I don’t want to die.’”

He was quick, irreverent, trenchant, and tormented. The last time I spoke to the shower of the Simpson guesthouse him, in late January, was less than 48 hours before he collapsed and died, destroyed by a lifetime of excess. During our conversation, Don talked about starting over and boasted that he was in discussions with all the major studios about a production deal. After a threeyear drought, three big hits—Bad Boys, Dangerous Minds, and Crimson Tide—had seemed to suggest a comeback for Simpson-Bruckheimer. Then, last August, a doctor who claimed to be helping Don curb his addictions was found dead in with a cocktail of drugs in his system. Don Simpson’s personal life had finally overshadowed his career. After the immediate storm blew over, Jerry Bruckheimer quietly dissolved his partnership with his old friend. Don dodged questions for months. But, by Christmas, he seemed willing to try to explain himself. I wasn’t convinced that he was entirely frank with me, but I don’t think he was frank with anyone on these sensitive topics. He wasn’t lying, though, when he said he could still make a deal. When I checked with the head of one major studio to see whether Don remained a marketable commodity, he said he would consider him a talent worth pursuing as long as he had some assurance that Don was under control. I knew what that meant.

In our final conversation, Don told me that Warren Beatty had called to talk about a possible partnership. Beatty says this isn’t precisely true. But he did confirm that he was talking to Don about making a movie with him. Beatty also says he mentioned Don’s reputed drug use, making it clear that while he didn’t regard it as his business, Don had to be in shape for work.

He wasn’t, of course. But he wanted to be. Don was talking to me about an interview in which he would, in effect, reannounce himself. He would comment, for the first time, on the death of Dr. Stephen Ammerman last summer, as well as the breakup with Bruckheimer. He also wanted to publicize The Rock, the team’s big-budget action film due out from Disney this summer. Though Don rarely left home by this point, he had visited the set and talked exuberantly about the navy SEALS and the sight of the movie’s star, Sean Connery, impressing the young real-life warriors with his mature, movie-star masculinity. Watching this, Don was a kid at the movies.

Despite the cocaine and other indulgences, it was clear that Don had a future if he could just bring himself to put out his hand. But he was painfully nervous. During another conversation a couple of weeks earlier, he had talked about the challenges that he faced. He sounded a lot sadder then than he would in January, just before his death.

“I hadn’t planned on starting over at this stage in my life,” he had said, almost tremulously. “But that’s what I’ve got to do.” He started to ruminate about the difficulty of breaking old habits, of learning to change. “People live their childhood until they’re too old to do anything else,” he said, adding that this was especially true in Hollywood. “Too much money, too much freedom,” he mused. “It’s a town that allows as much eccentricity as you like—as long as you’re productive.”

Once Don’s “eccentricities” had finally killed him, it quickly became axiomatic to say that his demise was shocking but not surprising. Walt Disney Company chairman Michael Eisner responded to the news of Don Simpson’s death by saying that he had been expecting to hear of it for years— ever since Don was fired as head of production at Paramount because he was already being swallowed by drug abuse. Yet Don had defied the predictions for years. “I’ve always, always been able to kind of teeter on the precipice,” said in The Big Bang, James Toback’s 1990 film on sex, death, and the origins of the cosmos. “And a sense of whatever—selfsurvival, drive, desire ... is a kind of celestial cord that pulls me back, that reels me back in.”

At last, however, the cord snapped.

Eight weeks before Don was found dead with a book in his hand, Jeffrey Katzenberg—who had been Simpson’s protege in the early 80s at Paramount— persuaded the producer to leave his house, for once, and come to a lunch. He attempted a one-man intervention, urging Don to entrust him with his financial affairs while he went into rehab. Don had given it a few halfhearted tries before, checking briefly in and out of the Menninger Clinic after the doctor was found dead. During this period, his own mysterious absence led some friends to fear that he was suicidal. Katzenberg wanted a commitment that this time his friend would finally go the distance.

Katzenberg tried to enlist two of Don’s closest friends—Jim Berkus of United Talent Agency and Jim Wiatt of International Creative Management—to help. They agreed that Don needed support, but they couldn’t settle on a strategy. “Jeff was more into a tough-love approach,” Berkus says. “Jim and I were less confident of that. We were trying to guide Don and encourage him and be there for him. Jeff felt Don was bullshitting everybody and he was strung out on drugs and the way to do it was to give himself over to Jeff. But I don’t think Don would ever do that. He made it clear to everybody. You can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do.”

“I’m just too emotional ’ and too raw and too sad,” says Jerry Bruckheimer when asked about Don Simpson. “I’m going to protect him in death as I did in life.”

Berkus thought he and Wiatt might have a better chance of getting through than the comparatively straitlaced Katzenberg. “It’s not like we were two priests,” he says. But they failed, too. “Don was at a different level,” Berkus concludes. “Whatever you did when you were younger, he was at a different level.”

Wiatt, concerned about Simpson’s depression and his reluctance to leave his house, had urged Don last fall to try to pull himself together for a ski trip over Thanksgiving. Maybe at Christmas, Don had replied. Wiatt then made plans for a trip to Hawaii over the holiday. Don didn’t show up. “He called and said he had the flu,” Wiatt says.

Not long after Christmas, Wiatt went to visit. He wanted to talk about the future and tried to get Don focused on projects that he wanted to do. “I said, ‘Don, you understand, you have to get out of the house. You have to go to the office. You’ve got to act like a normal working person,’ ” Wiatt says. Don said he was going to get in shape, and, having missed two holidays with his friend, started planning a yacht trip to the Caribbean in the spring.

(Continued on page 161)

(Continued from page 154)

To him, getting in shape didn’t necessarily mean giving up drugs. He always had dozens of other explanations for the way he lived his life.

He told me, a few weeks before he died, that he had something physically out of whack, something that contributed to his emotional problems. He said he was in therapy for the first time in his life and added that he was impressed with his doctor, whom he described—just half-jokingly—as being smarter than he was. Antidepressants didn’t work for him, he said.

“I’ve tried seven different kinds. I’ve got strange brain chemistry,” he said. “If I take Dexedrine, I get so calm it’s like I’m on Valium.” He said he tried Prozac during the filming of Days of Thunder and became agitated. At one point, he said, “I literally ripped the car door off.” According to Don, Bruckheimer told him, “I don’t know what you’re taking—but whatever it is, stop taking it.”

What was intriguing about Don was his intensity—his extremes. He rose so high and fell so far. He was so smart and funny, so talented and rich, and yet so desperate and alone. “He was a lonely guy and not because people didn’t want to be with him, ’cause they did,” Berkus says. “He was lonely because he couldn’t handle it.”

“I would go through months without seeing Don,” Wiatt says. “As a friend, you’d have to make a real, genuine effort to see him.”

Perhaps Don was so lonely because he was never comfortable with himself. He was never completely at ease even with his friends. He didn’t relax. Wiatt says that even when Don skied he would focus on improving his skills rather than just enjoying the ride.

Maybe he was troubled because he lacked a solid core, a sense of identity. From what he said about himself in James Toback’s film, it seems that he was tormented even as a child. He recalled his strict Southern Baptist upbringing in Alaska and the trouble he had lived through, starting when he was only 10 years old, dealing with sexual urges in that repressed environment. “It was tough walking around with a Bible in one hand and my libido in the other,” he said with his characteristic bitter humor.

People live their childhood until they’re too old to do anything else,” said Simpson before his death.

On one occasion a pastor noticed Don looking at women in the church congregation and questioned him about it. “I told the truth to Minister Culley,” Don said, with lingering anger. “I said, ‘I have these thoughts, I have these feelings ... ’He said, ‘If you think about it beyond this moment, God will strike you. And if you do anything about it, you will live in hell forever.’ ”

From that point, Don said, he knew he would leave Anchorage and never return. “It was a lot of fun—go to church three times a week, get on your knees on a concrete floor and thank God for the fact that he didn’t kill you that day,” he said. “They made it real clear that we were all bom evil, nasty, dirty people, and that if we hung on long enough in this life, God would give it all back to us in the next one. I knew they were full of shit.”

But these early lessons apparently created intolerable conflict and shame. “Somehow it came into my mind that I should lock myself in the bathroom and say my own name over and over into the mirror,” he remembered. “Don’t know where I got the idea except I did it. And I became absolutely nothing.

I remember being locked in the bathroom, sitting on the edge the bathtub, having repeated, mantra-like, my own name—Don Simpson, Don Simpson—until it became gibberish. . . . And I had this absolute lack of sense of self, and I would have to sit down and literally regroup my point of view and my orientation, and I would have to travel back to wherever I thought I was when I started. I remember almost not making it back on two occasions. I remember saying, ‘I better stop this shit,’ because I felt that I had this sense of personal power where I could destroy myself.”

Years later, Don developed a reputation for self-importance and braggadocio. Yet he never lost his sense of what was missing within himself. “There’s probably a revelatory experience awaiting everyone that has to do with finding out who and what you are,” he said. “And when that occurs, if it occurs, you reach Nirvana—heaven. And the degree to which you don’t reach that place of realization, you’re in an eternal hell.”

Don didn’t destroy himself right away. First he attempted to create what was missing—an identity large enough to fill the void. He graduated from the University of Oregon, became an advertising man, and then moved to Hollywood, where Paramount hired him in the mid70s as a production executive. He became one of the “Killer Dillers”—the brilliant group of aspiring executives which included Eisner and Katzenberg.

For years, Don was known to be steeped in drugs, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the celebrity producers of the 80s. While his films aren’t considered high art, he had an undeniable genius for making and marketing popular entertainment. “Many producers put packages together and take the money and run,” says Tom Pollock, vice-chairman of MCA. “That’s something he never did. He was always passionate about filmmaking, every detail, all the way.”

Hans Zimmer, the Oscar-winning composer who did the music for Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide, says Don encouraged and even inspired him to take chances. “He was very clear about the direction of the film and how to get there, which is really hard with a composer,” Zimmer says. “What are you going to say—‘Play a C-major chord here’? I would play something and there would be 30 seconds of silence and then out would come this paragraph, which would criticize and explain how to fix things.”

When Zimmer worked on Days of Thunder, he says, he had T-shirts that said “Co-composer” made for Don and Jerry. But it was Don who really spoke to Zimmer. During the making of Crimson Tide, Zimmer suggested that a male chorus could provide emotional intensity to certain scenes, “even though it just wasn’t what you do in a popcorn picture.” Bruckheimer hesitated, but Don embraced the idea. “Jerry would facilitate getting things done,” Zimmer says. “Don would do everything in his power to make me go crazy and do things I wouldn’t have dared. There was a recklessness about Don that you needed as an artist.”

“Don really looked at a movie in many ways like somebody from Nebraska,” says Chris Lebenzon, a film editor who worked on Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder, and Crimson Tide. “He had this kind of innocent eye in viewing movies that was really helpful. That’s why the movies were so popular.”

Unlike most producers, who don’t look at the pictures until the first cut, Don and Jerry would come into the editing room every day to check on the progress of their movies, Lebenzon says. This degree of involvement enabled them to make adjustments, scene by scene. He says that Don and Jerry were masterful at getting the studio to cough up money for fixes without letting the suits get the chance to see what was wrong in the first place.

Don and Jerry also worked at making themselves famous, according to Peggy Siegal, who was their publicist for several years. The partners initially sought the spotlight out of necessity when they produced Beverly Hills Cop, she remembers. Eddie Murphy didn’t want to do publicity, and director Marty Brest was almost unknown at the time. “They had no one to sell the film,” she says—so Don and Jerry stepped in. Reporters found that Don was smart and quick with a pungent quote. Having gotten a taste of media attention, Siegal says, “Don began to relish it.”

Siegal planned Don and Jerry’s annual holiday parties in Aspen, which began as a way to wedge Simpson and Bruckheimer into the local social scene. The first year, the two ordered invitations from Cartier and had them handdelivered to people’s homes. Once the guests showed up—and they did—Siegal says, the hosts were “the least famous people there.” Within a few years, the party had become an event. After it was merged with Don Johnson’s rival fete, the hosts attracted 500 guests. At the last such party, Siegal says, Don Johnson made a surprise announcement of his engagement to Melanie Griffith. “Don went ballistic,” she remembers. “He said, ‘I just spent $25,000 to launch Don Johnson’s engagement.’”

As Don’s career flourished, the opportunities to promote himself became more plentiful. He exploited them rapaciously. He couldn’t resist reporters, even though he often came off as a grotesque braggart. But Don loved journalism—and not just because he wanted to use it to make himself famous. Something in him loved the truth, though he was notorious for not telling it. The only thing he lied about consistently was himself. When he talked to reporters about the machinations of the movie business, he was like an irreverent professor. He spun out delectable insights in his distinctive way: usually funny, often angry, always knowing. He was smart, smart, smart. “Don had an addiction for the taste of truth,” says magazine writer John H. Richardson. “The truth kept jumping into his mouth.”

A Disney executive once dropped by at 11 P.M. and found Don in his bathrobe, sitting down to “breakfast”— with a prostitute.

It seemed as though the successes— Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Beverly Hills Cop II—filled him with an overpowering dread, a fear that he could never live up to his own act. It’s a common enough worry among those at the head of the pack in Hollywood. Don fought his with drug-inspired grandiosity. He became fixated on his appearance, particularly his weight. He fought to keep his weight down all his life. He had plastic surgery. He worked out obsessively and reportedly discarded jeans after one wearing because they lost the tight fit that he favored. On overseas trips, Don and Jerry loved to shop, Peggy Siegal remembers, and “they always tried to get the newest and the chic-est and the blackest.”

Don swelled more than ever after he and Bruckheimer cut an exceptionally rich production deal with Paramount in 1990. Don and Jerry pretentiously had the deal announced in full-page newspaper ads as a “visionary alliance” and, incredibly, went on the Today show to talk about it. “He was doing press on the money,” Siegal laments. “That’s how outrageous it got.” The hype helped to set up the Simpson-Bruckheimer team for a fall, and it wasn’t long in coming. By the time the pair started shooting the overblown Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise, Don’s macho antics had started to seem like selfparody. He and Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne engaged in endless rewrites as the budget climbed. The film wasn’t a flop, but it fell short of blockbuster status, grossing $165 million worldwide.

The project ended his relationship with Siegal. Things went wrong, she says, after Don told her to arrange to have a swarm of fans rush him at the airport in Deauville, France, when he went there to promote the movie. Nonplussed, Siegal told another producer, who called Don to rib him about it. “He was obviously embarrassed, and fired me for being indiscreet. And he was right,” she says. “But it got to the point where I didn’t know how to handle him.”

Days of Thunder soured the relationship with Paramount, which wanted a $9 million refund on Don and Jerry’s profit participation. The partners moved to Disney and for three years produced nothing but a modest and unsuccessful film called The Ref. Don seemed almost invisible during this period, though he spent hours on the phone. Sometimes he called friends late at night, raging at the world, slurring his words, only semi-coherent. “He would say things just for effect. He would say things that were off-the-wall,” Wiatt says. A Disney executive once dropped by the house at 11 P.M. and found Don in his bathrobe, sitting down to “breakfast”—with a prostitute. There were constant rumors that Disney was about to dump Simpson-Bruckheimer.

In 1995, Simpson and Bruckheimer bounced back, at last, with Bad Boys. Next came Crimson Tide and Dangerous Minds. On Crimson Tide, Chris Lebenzon notes, Don had dailies sent to him on cassette. He didn’t show up in the editing room—didn’t see the film until the first cut.

'I've never had a year like this,” Don told me when we started discussing his doing an interview. “Professionally, it’s probably the best year we’ve ever had, and personally it’s probably the worst.”

Then he started talking about his future without his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer.

“Our rhythms have changed,” he told me. “Doing three pictures in a row has really burned me out. I put on a lot of weight. I was under a lot of stress_I just can’t do that again.” The comment seemed odd considering that it was Bruckheimer, not Simpson, who had showed up on the set of Crimson Tide every day. And it was Bruckheimer who saved Dangerous Minds from seemingly certain box-office death by inserting a hip sound track. Now Disney wants to make a sequel.

Don said that his old friend was restless and wanted to make more pictures. “He wants to make five a year and turn into Imagine,” Don said, referring to the film company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. But Don didn’t seem sure where his ambition lay. “I want to be in front of the camera,” he told me. “I want to be the center of the circus. I trained as an actor. That’s why I came to this town.”

He told me that his plans to get serious about acting had been foiled repeatedly. “There have always been so many problems with the pictures that I didn’t have time,” he said. “I’ve been cast in just about all our movies.” He also wanted to direct, he said. And his taste didn’t always coincide with Bruckheimer’s, he added. “To be honest, I didn’t want to make Bad Boys. I said, ‘There’s nothing in it for me. It’s a programmer.’ But Jerry loves doing that. He’s a worker bee.... I’ve got several little psychological, darker pictures which I’m anxious to make with newcomers.”

Simpson-Bruckheimer had dozens of projects in the hopper, he said. He and Jerry would make a few together and divide up the rest. “I’m definitely going to get another partner, which is not the easiest thing in the world, because this has been a 20year marriage,” he said. (Actually, the two had been partners only since 1983.) He needed someone to handle “the mule work” and “fighting with the studios.”

He tried to see the bright side of life without Bruckheimer, who had been such a loyal ally for so many years. “It is a big life change for me,” he acknowledged. “But I would be lying if I said I’m sitting here destroyed, because I’m not. It opens up a lot of opportunity for me. Jerry’s very penurious. I’m the type of guy that will put a million dollars of my own money into a movie. Jerry’s never wanted to do that. Jerry is basically a big-studio filmmaker, and I always think more like an artist.”

It took a lot for Jerry Bruckheimer to terminate his “marriage” to Don Simpson, whom he had attempted to help many times. But the devastated Bruckheimer doesn’t want to talk about the demise of his partnership or to discuss Don at all. “I’m just too emotional and too raw and too sad,” he says. “I’m going to protect him in death as I protected him in life.”

In some ways, the death of Dr. Stephen Ammerman now seems like an eerie dress rehearsal for Don’s subsequent collapse. In both instances, Anthony Pellicano—the private detective who handled a variety of troublesome matters for Don—was apparently called before the police were. In Amere were also rumors that Pellicano had swept the house before the police arrived. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Coroner’s office confirms that “the scene had apparently been cleaned up” before the coroner’s representatives got there. Pellicano won’t comment on these reports. “All you have to say is ‘Listen, Pellicano takes care of his clients,’ ” he suggests.

"I’m the type of guy that will put a million dollars of my own money into a movie,” Don said. “I always think more like an artist.”

In my last conversation with him, Don said that Warren Beatty had told him that “the town” believed he was somehow complicit in Ammerman’s death—that Ammerman had tried to “keep up” with Don’s drug use and wound up dying. Beatty says he never discussed the matter with Simpson. “We talked about movie ideas— and I thought he talked very intelligently and imaginatively about them,” Beatty says. “I’m not a person who passes judgment on people in relation to the way they lead their private lives.”

But the idea that the community regarded him as responsible for the death gnawed at Don. He worried that addressing it in an interview would revive the episode in people’s minds. He told me what he planned to say. “The truth is that Towne and I had met this individual—an aspiring screenwriter,” he said. “He was smart, Harvard-educated. Towne is always looking for ways to stay young.” Towne and Don gave Ammerman advice, Don continued. “I’ve never done drugs with him in my life. I didn’t know he did drugs. He was an all-American football player.”

Ammerman had never been an allAmerican athlete, and he didn’t go to Harvard. Maybe he told Don that he had done these things, or perhaps Don’s desire to do a rewrite got the better of him. According to the Los Angeles Times, Ammerman had been a highschool football star in Sandpoint, Idaho, but his college career at Washington State was cut short by a knee injury. He transferred to the University of Oregon— Don’s alma mater—where he improved his grades, and got into the Oregon Health Sciences University. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 80s and started to practice emergency medicine. Ammerman was entrepreneurial, starting a company that contracted doctors to emergency rooms. Like Don, Ammerman tried to transform his appearance through surgery. He had liposuction and a hair transplant. He pursued bodybuilding, and when he met Simpson at a gym several years ago, he latched on.

Ammerman was infatuated with the entertainment business. He had gone as far as starting to shoot a self-financed film. It is unclear whether Don had any interest at all in Ammerman’s scripts, but Ammerman must have considered his association with Don to be a tremendous break. He claimed he was acting as Don’s “doctor,” though Pellicano later denied it and dismissed Ammerman as “a hanger-on.” Nonetheless, Ammerman wrote prescriptions for Don on at least two occasions, for dextroamphetamine in 1990 and morphine in 1993.

Ammerman’s struggles with drugs pre-dated his relationship with Don. His father told the Los Angeles Times that his son first confronted the problem in the mid-80s. He had checked into rehabilitation facilities twice, but apparently he couldn’t drop the habit. In April 1995, he was arrested by police in Santa Monica when he was found standing naked on the ninth-floor ledge of his apartment.

Ammerman spent a lot of time at Don’s house last summer. The day before Ammerman died, Don said, he had agreed to let Ammerman and his girlfriend spend the night in his guesthouse. He went to bed that night without looking in on the pair. “I woke up at nine in the morning, and there’s a blue body with a needle in its arm in the guesthouse,” he said. The girlfriend, who according to Don had quarreled with Ammerman sometime during the night, was nowhere in sight. Ammerman had a pharmacy of illicit drugs in his system: cocaine, morphine, Valium, and an antidepressant, venlafaxine.

“Pellicano found out that the guy had a history of substance abuse,” Don said. “I had no idea of that.” And he said he was shocked that he could be tarred by the incident. “I didn’t think it was as serious as it was, because I was so innocent. But because of your party-boy background and profile, you are going to be perceived as complicitous in this.”

Don realized that many in the community would have trouble believing that he was unaware of Ammerman’s drug use. But if he had played any role in the tragedy, Don insisted, he would never consider giving an interview. If that were the case, he said, he couldn’t hold up his head.

Don was right. Even his friend Jim Wiatt, who says he never met Ammerman but asked Don about him after the incident, acknowledges that he didn’t buy Don’s version. The disclaimers sounded “kind of shallow and didn’t ring true,” he says. I kind of let it go at that point. I couldn’t demand that he tell me more. I always wanted to believe Don.”

“I want to be the center of the circus,” Don said. “I trained as an actor. That’s why I came to this town.”

That was a dilemma for many of Don’s friends, who knew things were bad with him but averted their gaze. They knew that Don liked drugs and prostitutes, but they overlooked rumors that he was given to some rather bizarre, sadistic games. A person’s private life isn’t anybody else’s business, as Beatty points out. Don said the same thing: he often acknowledged that he was a “bad boy,” but also observed that he was single and free. In the course of reporting a series of articles on prostitution in Hollywood, writer John Richardson met a number of prostitutes who associated with Don. Richardson says he once mentioned to the producer that he had heard he had a weakness for watching two women engage in sex acts. “It’s not a weakness,” Don responded. “It’s an interest.” For some people, ignoring their late friend’s private life became more difficult after perusing a sordid little book published around the time of his death. You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, a tell-all by four prostitutes identified only as “Robin, Liza, Linda, and Tiffany,” includes a section entitled “Don Simpson: An Education in Pain.” A dark joke quickly made the rounds that this was what Don was reading when he died, but a friend says the book found in the producer’s hands was really a new biography of Oliver Stone.

In the book, Tiffany reports that Don showed her home movies of degrading sex acts. The film depicted the torture of a young woman that should have gotten Don “thrown into prison.” She describes another woman, who was screaming and sobbing at his hands. Other producers take advantage of women, she writes, “but I have never heard of anyone as bad as Simpson.”

While Wiatt says he hasn’t read the book, he knows the depressing gist of it. “We all sort of knew, but none of us really knew the depth of it, I guess,” he says. Asked whether Don’s behavior had sunk to a point where it was finally immoral to ignore it, Wiatt acknowledges that he’s pondered the question. “The answer is, I don’t think so,” he says. “None of us really ever knows everything about our friends. I don’t feel any moral conflict in not knowing all that part of his life. Obviously, he didn’t want me to know.”

When I called Tiffany to see how she felt about Don’s death, she told me she was devastated. I was surprised, considering the loathing that seemed to be expressed in the book. But she said she didn’t expect the passage to be read in those terms. “What sounds so scary to most people was actually fairly funny,” she said. “The guy was truly harmless and everything that happened there was voluntary. Everybody who went there knew what they were getting into_ I went there and I said, ‘O.K., let me look at this thing, and if I don’t understand, I don’t participate.’ There was no pressure.

She called Don “the grandmaster dragon.” He called her “the equestrian” because she told him that her favorite sport was horseback riding. To anyone who knew him, it sounds like vintage Don Simpson.

Tiffany may not be the most linear thinker, but in our conversation she portrayed Don in an entirely different light than in the book. He was genuinely interested in the prostitutes, she said. “Don Simpson was great,” she declared. “There was never a ‘whore.’ He would call prostitution ‘commercial sex.’ He had the greatest terms for things.” He sent his dominatrix to fire-fighting school. He gave Tiffany career advice, although in her case he suggested that she could become a madam. He gave her a cross to wear with a card reading, “For an angel.” He sent flowers—“the most expensive and beautiful ones.”

And here’s the kicker. They never actually had sex.

"Don spoke in awe about the fact that we had these two kids,” says Warren Beatty.

“Don Simpson never paid for sex,” Tiffany said. “Don paid for ideas. As outrageous as he was, he was private as well.”

Don’s friends—Wiatt, Berkus, Katzenberg, and producer Steve Tisch— held a wake for him on a Monday night at Mortons, the industry hangout where Don had been a frequent presence in better times. The event elicited mixed reactions in the town. To some, it seemed brazen. To some, it seemed perfect. To some, it seemed like an amazing networking opportunity. Wiatt’s assistants were shocked when people called trying to wangle invitations.

“He’s hot,” Wiatt said sardonically on the night of the event.

It was extremely A-list. Every major studio, except Fox, sent heavy hitters. From Warner, Bob Daly. From Disney, an army that included Michael Eisner and studio chief Joe Roth. From Paramount, Jon Dolgen and Sherry Lansing. From DreamWorks, Katzenberg and David Geffen. From Universal, Ron Meyer. Michelle Pfeiffer was there. Dan Ackroyd. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Richard Dreyfuss.

Despite Don’s reclusiveness, Will Smith said, he had gotten to know him on Bad Boys. “Energy—just raw energy from passion for the work that ' he wanted to do,” Smith said when asked his impression of Don. “He had so many ideas.”

Michael Eisner remembered how he had arrived at Paramount in 1976 to find that there was no movie in the pipeline for summer. “I said to Don, ‘We’ve got to do something.... He and I and Paul Brickman over a weekend wrote a sequel to Bad News Bears."

Bruckheimer gave the only speech, calling Don “my best friend and brother by choice.” There was a brief video that included some startling pictures of Don as a child, as well as outtakes from Toback’s interviews with Don. Some wept. Most didn’t. A lot of the guests were angry at Don for throwing himself away.

“The degree to which you make enough money to then feel like you don’t have to make any more money is the degree to which you have to deal with something that’s pretty interesting,” Don said on the monitors. “It’s called ‘You.’”

When Don died, he had no will. There is no spouse, no child, so his parents, whom he had so often blamed for his problems, are in line to inherit an estate that is probably worth millions. The fact that Don died intestate is not especially surprising to those who knew him. “On a certain level,” Hans Zimmer says, “he thought he was smarter than death.”

Like other friends, Zimmer sees Don’s death as a double waste. Zimmer is angry at Don not just for destroying himself but for failing to fulfill his potential by leaving behind a body of risky work. “The infuriating thing is that I know he was capable of doing it,” Zimmer says. “He was scared of not having the success.” Having won his own Oscar for The Lion King, Zimmer says, he understands that success can lead to paralysis. “Success,” he declares, “is the worst of all the drugs here.”

Warren Beatty says Don told him that he wished that he, too, could have a family. “He spoke in awe about the fact that we had these two kids,” Beatty says. “He seemed to me to be longing for that kind of life. Anyone who would say Don is misogynistic is not looking at the real picture. Don had a lot of female friends who were not hookers.”

Wiatt doesn’t think Don ever seriously saw himself as a prospective husband and father. “To get into a relationship with somebody, there has to be flexibility,” he says. “His tolerance level was too minute.” Certainly Don didn’t seem to have much faith in marriage when I told him I was engaged. He angrily told me that marriage was “a fool’s game” and that husbands invariably cheated on their wives.

In Toback’s film, Don said he never wanted a family. To him, family life stood for “pain and obligation and false ritual.”

“Love is not something I understand,” he said. “Love is something that in my experience has always seemed distant and fleeting.... I think that there are probably extreme forms of emotionality where people get involved with one another and commit for a lifetime and live by it. And I think they are probably purer people than I am. I don’t think I’m clean enough to do that.”