Jerry Weintraub

Jerome Charles "Jerry" Weintraub (September 26, 1937 – July 6, 2015) was an American film producer, talent manager and actor whose television films won him three Emmys. He began his career as a talent agent, having managed relatively unknown singer John Denver in 1970, developing Denver's success through concerts, television specials, and film roles, including Oh, God! (1977). Weintraub has been credited with making "show business history" by being the first to organize and manage large arena concert tours for singers. Among the other performers whose tours he managed were Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, The Four Seasons, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night and The Carpenters.

Following his years as a concert promoter, he began producing films. Among them were director Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), the films from The Karate Kid (franchise), as well as the remake Ocean's Eleven (2001), and its two sequels. Later, he was executive producer of HBO's series The Brink and HBO's Behind the Candelabra in 2013, which won an Emmy. In 2014, he won another Emmy as co-producer of Years of Living Dangerously, a television documentary about global warming. In 2011, HBO broadcast a television documentary about Weintraub's life, called His Way.

Weintraub was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, the son of Rose (née Bass) and Samuel Weintraub. His father was a gem dealer. While growing up, he worked as a theater usher and as a waiter in the Catskills. After several years at MCA, where he first started work as a mailroom clerk, he left and formed his own personal management company. While at MCA, he was assistant to Lew Wasserman, whom he reportedly thought of as a father figure.

In the 1960s, he co-founded the vocal group The Doodletown Pipers. Among the acts that Weintraub managed at this time were Paul Anka, Shelley Berman, Pat Boone, Joey Bishop, The Four Seasons, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, and singer Jane Morgan, whom he would later marry. Weintraub was married twice. His first wife was Janice Greenberg, a dentist's daughter from his Bronx neighborhood who had been singer Julius La Rosa's secretary. They had a son, Michael.

Weintraub's second wife was singer and actress Jane Morgan, who was 13 years his senior. Their relationship went from professional to personal, and the two were married in 1965 when she was 41, and he was 28. They adopted three daughters. The couple separated in the 1980s but never divorced. For 20 years until his death, Weintraub had been living with his girlfriend and longtime companion, Susan Ekins.

Weintraub supported both political parties at various times in his life. However, it is widely noted that he was friends with both George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. He also had a strong spiritual side, which he once described to television host Larry King. He was a devotee of The Lubavitcher Rebbe and believed in his mystical powers.