It is a wet, cold day in midtown Manhattan but the Grill Room at the Four Seasons on East 52nd Street is a well-appointed shelter from the rain. The lighting gives the walnut walls a warm, golden glow and waiters glide from table to table, attending to an assortment of Wall Street masters of the universe. Barry Diller has arrived before me and is chatting to some people he knows on a nearby table, flecks of rainwater on his dark suit and green-and-pink striped tie.
Diller is a regular diner here but says he doesn’t know the menu. “He never tells me what’s on it,” he says in a low growl, leaning forward conspiratorially as our waiter appears. “There are not too many people who can tell Mr Diller what to eat,” the waiter interjects, carefully placing a plate of crudités on the table. But you do? I say. “Oh, does he ever,” says Diller, smiling broadly.
Here, then, is the pinnacle in upmarket dining: off-menu, personalised meals. Available only to those who visit a place so frequently — and, presumably, spend so much money — that they get a specially tailored service. Diller, 73, has been coming here for decades (lacking any such familiarity with the menu, I decide to study it), during which time he has reinvented himself again and again in a fast-moving media scene. Forget F Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives: Diller is on his fourth or fifth.