The Barry Diller Story, The Life and Times of America's Greatest Entertainment Mogul.

It's no secret that the better-known media moguls are considered to be shrewd, difficult and controlling. Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone all fit the bill. So does Barry Diller, but one doesn't hear as much about the man who launched a fourth television network and made home shopping what it is today.

According to author George Mair, Diller is "America's greatest entertainment mogul" and is just as shrewd as the rest of them, if not more so. Indeed, Mair's book, The Barry Diller Story, The Life and Times of America's Greatest Entertainment Mogul (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 348 pp.), describes Diller as a true visionary, one who knew that cable would be the wave of the future even before the phrase "information superhighway" became fashionable. Diller saw the potential of technology and the viability of cable long before his industry colleagues did, and he used this knowledge as the impetus for the purchase of QVC and later for a bid for CBS to "converge" the two mediums. He knew that the ultimate winners in the media game would be the companies that "own the wire" - the phone line, the cable TV line, etc. He predicted that television would be led into the next century by the cable systems.

Although Diller came from a large family, the Dillers were not particularly close. Diller's grandfather was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant who opened a kosher meat market amid San Francisco's Orthodox Jewish community in the early 1900s. In the 1940s, Diller's father and uncle Richard set up a home construction business, which later spun off into a variety of construction and real estate development companies. Diller supposedly got the "Diller drive" from "the family's work ethic, sense of ambition and philanthropic spirit."

Diller grew up in Beverly Hills, where he went to high school with the children of such stars as Doris Day and Danny Thomas; Diller became a close friend of Marlo Thomas. Diller skipped college and, thanks to Marlo's actor/comedian father, he got his first job at the age of 19: working in the mail room of the William Morris Agency. While at William Morris, Diller learned the ins and outs of the business by reading all of the files that passed through. the mail room. One of Diller's first friends at the agency was a young David Geffen. (Although Geffen would always remain a close friend, Diller constantly measured his own success with Geffen's.)

From William Morris Diller moved on to ABC, becoming personal assistant to Leonard Goldberg, who had just been named head of programming for the network. In the mid-1970s, Diller went to Paramount Pictures, where he turned the struggling studio around but made an enemy in Martin Davis, who took over as president after Diller's boss and good friend Charles Bluhdorn died. Eager to get away from the bad situation at Paramount, Diller quickly took an offer from oil magnate Marvin Davis to become CEO of Fox, Inc. The company was deep in debt, and a power struggle ensued that resulted in the purchase of Fox by Rupert Murdoch. Diller and Murdoch made television history in 1987 when they launched the fourth television network. In 1992, Diller unexpectedly left Fox to pursue a new career outside of the entertainment industry, as CEO of QVC, the home shopping channel.

The most interesting parts of the book are the details Mair includes about the many deals Diller made and failed to make. This behind-the-scenes information gives the reader a better understanding of Diller's volatile and shrewd personality. During his first couple of months at Fox, Diller used intimidation and pressure on the staff, scaring them out of their wits. Not surprisingly, Diller made a few enemies along the way, particularly Martin Davis, whom he battled again when he tried to buy out Paramount Communications with a QVC-backed bid in 1993.

With a failed bid for Paramount on his resume, Diller quickly tried to make a comeback with a merger between QVC and CBS. Diller's QVC partners Ralph and Brian Roberts of Comcast intercepted his plan by topping his bid for CBS. The Wall Street Journal called Diller "a mogul in search of an empire." In 1995, at the age of 53, Diller finally became his own boss: he gained control of St. Petersburg, Florida-based Silver King Communications, which owned 12 little-known independent television stations in small markets as well as 27 stations on the UHF band. This reunited Diller with his former QVC partner John Malone of Liberty Media, since Liberty Media subsidiary the Home Shopping Network was distributed by Silver King. In a stock swap with the Liberty Media Corporation, Diller gained control of the Home Shopping Network. Liberty, which owned the largest share in HSN, Inc., exchanged 41 percent of its stake and voting control for an interest in Silver King. In 1996, Silver King bought the Home Shopping Network.

HSN, Inc. is the parent company of the Home Shopping Network, Silver King Broadcasting and SF Broadcasting (which owns and operates VHF Fox affiliates in four markets).

Diller's life story would have made excellent fodder for a Movie of the Week much like the ones he pioneered while working at ABC. Differ made headlines this past May for his deal with Microsoft's Paul Allen to buy a $209 million controlling stake in Ticketmaster. Diller said that the potential of both companies is limitless and that he hopes to transform HSN and Ticketmaster into an electronic retailing powerhouse. And his dream of creating an alternative programming service via his 18 Silver King stations is that much closer to becoming a reality: he plans to launch a live broadcast service, transmitting roughly 12 to 13 hours a day, during the first half of 1998.