Inside the wild, drug-fueled world of celebrity keynote speakers
An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.It's a bustling night in Las Vegas, and Sugar Ray Leonard is ready for the main event. In his suite high above the Strip, the legendary boxer, boyish and ebullient at 66, sports a gray T-shirt, black running pants, and gray sneakers. A silver crucifix bobs around his neck."Vegas is my second home. My major fights were here," he says, flashing his familiar smile.
The lecture industry, as it happens, was invented by another gonzo journalist. After the Civil War, a scrappy abolitionist writer named James Redpath took a page from his friend P.T. Barnum and created what he called"the canvas college." It was a traveling intellectual circus of tents featuring orations by the country's leading writers, radicals, and humorists.
Booking Hunter proved the most epic of all. On the day of the lecture, he was scheduled to fly in from Denver, near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. The night before, I got an urgent call from his agent, Betsy Berg. Thompson, she informed me, was going to be reuniting with his ex-girlfriend Maria at my event. I would have to pick her up ahead of time, and if she wasn't at Baltimore/Washington International when Thompson arrived, he wouldn't get off the plane.
When we arrived at the Best Western, Thompson insisted I drive him around the parking lot while he sat on the hood of my car."Maria said you're a good driver," he informed me as he lit a Dunhill Red. After we circled the hotel a few times, he headed up to his room with Maria, promising to come down later and have a beer with me and my friends. I figured there wasn't much chance we'd see him again.
The next morning, he screamed at me when I knocked on his door — then opened it with a sigh of relief."I thought you were the maid!" he groaned. She'd been trying to get in to clean the room. Two years later, armed with a recommendation from Hunter, I got a full-time job booking him and other celebrities for the most gonzo agency in the business, Greater Talent Network. By the early 1990s, Big Talk had grown beyond low-paid college lectures to the more lucrative world of corporate conventions.
As the young upstart competing with Walker, Epstein ran Greater Talent like a boiler room. We'd spend our days pounding the phones in our cubicles, hawking not only speakers but the occasional hypnotist and ventriloquist. For weeks on end, he had us gather in the conference room every morning and listen to Tony Robbins motivational tapes.
Not every audience wanted enlightenment. One day Andy, a fellow GTN agent, pitched a Holocaust survivor to a Midwestern community college — only to be told by the student activities director that the Holocaust was a hoax. Andy reported the incident to the school's president, who refused to take action. Shaken, he called the Anti-Defamation League and left a message about what had happened.
Another time, when he hadn't received a check from GTN, Hunter threatened to send some Hells Angels to"stomp" one of my fellow agents. But if the check arrived by the following day, Hunter promised, he would send flowers. My friend, who had already FedExed the check, came to work the next morning to find a dozen white lilies — funeral flowers — on his desk, along with a thank-you note from Thompson.As the years went on, the business became increasingly cutthroat.
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