For more than half a century, Barry Diller was one of the most feared men in Hollywood.
When he ran 20th Century Fox, he once got so frustrated at an employee, he hurled a video tape at a wall. (The employee put a frame around the hole.) The American billionaire media executive, who has also headed up Paramount, IAC and Expedia, has won contentious lawsuits against competitors and close friends alike. Even his friend Oprah Winfrey said she was afraid to meet Diller the first time they had dinner.
But with the publication of his new memoir, Who Knew, the world has learned that the gruff, terse, domineering Diller has a softer side. In the book, the 83-year-old mogul came out as gay, but also writes vividly about his love for his wife, the famed fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg – “the miracle of my life” – whom he married in 2001, and her children and grandchildren. Diller calls them his family. He, who had distant parents and an abusive, heroin-addicted brother, also has several passages in the book describing how he cried at tough moments, both personal and professional.
Nothing, however, makes Diller turn to mush like talking about his beloved late dog, Shannon, and her five cloned “daughters” (though technically they’re closer to replicas).
“They’re all little Irish girls,” Diller gushes.
The billionaire hates talking about himself, but he is happy to talk to The Irish Times about Shannon and her clones – which are objects of fascination in Hollywood.
“How can you even describe what you love?” Diller says about Shannon, his late Jack Russell terrier, when asked to explain why he was so infatuated with her. “She was a super dog. She was just the loveliest, most adventurous – she was a wondrous little animal.”
Diller first saw Shannon when he was on holidays in Ireland in 1999. He cannot recall the town’s name, but says it was “south of Shannon, about 30 minutes by helicopter”.
After having lunch in a small restaurant, he exited and saw his future pup on the street. She began following him around. He inquired about her owner and was told she belonged to a waitress. But when he saw the dog at another restaurant down the road the following day, he inquired again and was told the nameless puppy had no owner.
“I scooped her up,” says Diller. He was flying out that day. In an instant, the dog went from lonely and homeless in rural Ireland to a cosseted traveller on a private jet with a life most people can only dream of. En route back to the United States, they had a layover in Shannon Airport, and the puppy was nameless no more.
He jokes that he told Shannon to hide in the back of the jet until they cleared customs. “She made it to New York as an undocumented immigrant,” says Diller. They lived together at the von Dillers’ Beverly Hills mansion until her death in 2014. It was a canine Cinderella story.
The year before she died, some of Shannon’s tissue was biopsied and shipped to a biotech company in South Korea. Upon arriving it was injected into an enucleated egg from a canine surrogate donor, thus becoming a cloned embryo, which was then inserted back into the surrogate. Six months later, the first clones were born, and delivered back to Diller in the United States. First came Dina (a play on DNA) and Evita, then Tess in 2016, Luna in 2021 and Bossie and Birdie in 2024.
Diller says they all have the “ethos” of Shannon, and that their personalities are only “very slightly different”.
Diller took Dina back to Ireland to “explore her roots”. She lived a full life, living between Beverly Hills, their compound in Connecticut, the Carlyle Hotel in New York’s Upper East Side, and their Art Deco yacht Eos. But she met an unfortunate end while in Costa Rica, hiking with Diller and von Fürstenberg. She was eaten by a crocodile. “A country I’ll never return to,” says Diller bitterly.
Diller was early to the animal cloning game, even among those who can afford the six-figure-per-clone price tag. Barbra Streisand cloned her Coton de Tulear in 2017, but chose a cheaper cloning service. Celebrities from Simon Cowell to Paris Hilton have publicly mused about doing the same with their own canine companions.
Does Diller consider himself a trendsetter?
“We’ve given endless, endless details to people about our cloning experience, when they ask about it,” he says.
It has been said that von Fürstenberg murmurs to friends that she is sure Diller will clone her, too. He writes in his memoir that she is the only woman he has ever loved.
Does he plan on creating a carbon-copy wife to match his carbon-copy dogs?
“Of course,” he says, laughing.
