Ari Emanuel’s ‘Roll the Calls’ Takes Aim at Everyone From His Brothers to Former Business Partners

TheTools · 21.09.2026 10:00 · source · permalink

At Ari Emanuel’s wedding to fashion designer Sarah Staudinger (his second wife named Sarah), the officiant, Larry David, called the groom a “mutant” and a “c-nt.” Considering the setting and their decades-long friendship, you might think David used that last word in a complimentary way—like how a drag queen or a Brit might.

Nope.

David kept roasting him. He brought up Emanuel’s aggression; how brutal it is to walk a golf course with him. “And yet, and yet…I love this man,” Emanuel recalls David saying later in the ceremony. “When I go to sleep at night, no matter how bad things are, I say to myself…The C-nt will make everything okay.”

As Emanuel remembers in his new memoir, Roll the Calls, the speech brought him to tears. His mother frowned. But David turned the qualities that make the superagent a nightmare to deal with into reasons you’d want him in your corner. In that sense, David’s speech did what Emanuel spends much of his new book trying to do himself: justify his unrelenting rage and appetite for revenge. Essentially, he argues that rage can be a guiding philosophy in life—and I’m sure someone who believes that is very pleasant to be around.

“Rage means shit’s finally going to get done. Atom splittings, moon landings, Ozempic—humankind’s milestone discoveries didn’t start as inspiration; they started as aggravation,” writes Emanuel, who wrote the 400-plus-page memoir with famed ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer. He rationalizes his temper a thousand different ways: “History has been shaped by bad moods as much as good intentions.” Meanwhile, Emanuel writes “revenge is everything,” and compares plotting it to cooking pizza: “Hot is good. But cold is tastier.” Get it?

If Entourage brought Emanuel fame and cemented his image as Hollywood’s angriest agent (Jeremy Piven’s combustible character on the HBO comedy, inspired by Mark Wahlberg’s early acting career, was famously modeled after him), then Roll the Calls is where he gets a chance to explain how he turned out this way and why he doesn’t really want to change. And he’s funny, which makes his whole rage schtick mostly entertaining, and occasionally persuasive.

Emanuel’s a little neurotic (his highly regimented morning routine includes breath work, meditation, a cold plunge, and “a cup of live worms, to eat the bad bacteria in my gut”). He traces almost all of his rage and shame back to his dyslexia, which he got picked on for as a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs. His mom hung all of her kids’ report cards on the refrigerator, and his father encouraged him and his brothers—Zeke, now a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and Rahm, a longtime Democratic politician—to come to dinner prepared to debate. Emanuel’s grades were always bad, especially compared to those of his brothers, who went on to earn master’s degrees at Northwestern University (Rahm) and the University of Oxford (Zeke). (Emanuel went to Macalester College in Minnesota, at the same time as director Peter Berg, his close friend to this day.)

He talks about the time he asked his mom not to put his report cards on the fridge. “Everyone’s report card goes on the refrigerator, Ari. You want a report card you can be proud of? Work harder,” he recalls her saying. And he alludes to always getting the short end of the stick at home. He explains the sibling dynamic: “Zeke? He’s the brainy one. Rahm? He’s the cunning one. Me? I’m the last one…. No one ever corrected me.” He also makes it sound like he’s not particularly close with his brothers. Toward the end of the book, Emanuel tells a business partner, Mark Shapiro, that he’s the brother he never had. (Later printings of the book say "little brother.")

“I’m unreservedly proud of my brother,” he writes about Rahm, the former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to President Obama, “though I don’t always feel that it’s reciprocal.”

Emanuel writes that he’s been fighting his entire life—against both bullies and brothers. “My older brothers and I were very rough with each other. Wrestle, punch, kick, eye gouge—no-holds-barred. Plus, of course, constant razzing,” he writes. He describes one fight in which he almost beat a kid to death because he called one of the students in Emanuel’s special education class a “r-tard.” But he clearly loves combat. His company acquired WWE and UFC. He uses quite a few boxing metaphors. When his ex-wife, Sarah Addington, was in labor, he imagined himself beside her like “Mickey and Rocky. Tyson and Cus D’Amato.”

Roll the Calls is as much about the changing film and television industry as it is about Emanuel’s rise from the boy who couldn’t read to the mogul who sits courtside at Lakers games. Emanuel starts out specializing in television, and the agency he created, Endeavor, now WME Group, establishes itself early on as what he bluntly calls “a TV shop” during the golden age of television in the early 2000s. He’s hanging with Wahlberg and Berg. The guys who inspired Vincent Chase’s fictional entourage are always sitting outside his office. Then, by the end of the book, Emanuel is dealing with UFC, WWE, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. He arrived at CAA as an aspiring talent agent, and decades later he was running a company that, as he insists, had become “more than a talent agency.” These days, Emanuel manages a sprawling sports and entertainment conglomerate. In his telling, he had no choice but to grow his business. He writes it would have stagnated and withered away if it didn’t expand. Grow or die.

Emanuel has stories about a remarkable number of Hollywood’s most influential—and notorious—figures. He writes about the time his client Wahlberg ordered bottles of pricey Petrus wine at a hotel in Cannes and charged them to Harvey Weinstein’s tab. When Weinstein confronted Emanuel about the bill and poked him in the chest, Emanuel, as he recounts, threatened to snap Weinstein’s fingers off one by one.

He writes Jeffrey Katzenberg—who at one point tried to beat Emanuel’s offer on a hard-to-get set of courtside Lakers tickets—once looked to him like the bald, pitchfork-wielding man in the famous painting American Gothic.

Emanuel held a chair over his head in CAA cofounder and then chairman Michael Ovitz’s office, threatening to destroy it and the whole office. He told then Disney CEO Michael Eisner, “Go fuck yourself.” After the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, reportedly ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Emanuel essentially told the Saudi government the same thing, and returned the $400 million investment it made in his company. (Bin Salman denied having any involvement in the killing, though he said he took “full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia.”)

Sarah Staudinger and Ari Emanuel at the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sanchez in Venice on June 2025

The book slows down a bit when Emanuel tries to explain his moral code. Loyalty begets loyalty. Snobbery violates his Chicago values. Fair is where we end up.

But Emanuel doesn’t always seem to notice when he violates his own code.

Take Patrick Whitesell, Emanuel’s business partner of more than two decades. Whitesell’s the good cop, Emanuel the bad. Together, they built Endeavor into WME, bought IMG, and assembled an empire stretching from Hollywood to professional bull riding. But by the end of Roll the Calls, they hate each other.

In short, Whitesell and his now ex-wife, Lauren Sánchez, separate, and she ends up with Jeff Bezos. Around this time, tensions begin to grow between Emanuel and Whitesell at work. Then Whitesell makes a play for more power at their company. In Emanuel’s telling, those tensions grew to an unmanageable point. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Patrick Whitesell for comment.)

But there’s a funny lack of self-awareness about the ways Emanuel contributed to their breakup. Just pages earlier, Emanuel acknowledges being photographed at Bezos and Sánchez’s engagement party, which, Emanuel writes, hurt his business partner. He admits he should have warned Whitesell, but then he tries to justify his attendance by calling it a good business move.

Emanuel soon manages to put his longtime partner on trial before members of Endeavor’s executive committee, cataloging Whitesell’s alleged failures. Whitesell ends up leaving the company and Emanuel’s reign continues.

His relationship with Whitesell is just one of many broken relationships left in his wake. He writes protecting yourself from “disloyalists” is “the cornerstone of mental health.” Maybe that’s the lens through which one should view Emanuel. His world divides quickly into people he protects and people he fights. And boy, nobody wants to be in the latter camp. But as Larry David said, it’s probably very comforting to have Emanuel in your corner.

He can be sweet to the people in his corner. His father frequently took in “strays, orphans, nomads, people who needed sheltering or reforming or saving,” and the younger Emanuel followed suit. When his niece Ashlee struggled as a teenager, he became her surrogate father and gave her a dose of tough love. As Emanuel writes, when she later asked him and his then wife to adopt her, they said yes immediately.

Emanuel saw the same therapist—he calls him Dr. Calm—for years and writes that he’s trying to figure out how to be more selective about when he allows his rage to come out. After Endeavor received a $13 billion valuation in 2024, Emanuel called his mother.

“Mom. I think this deserves to go on the refrigerator,” he recalls saying, referring to the appraisal.

She couldn’t hear him.

“What?”

“Nothing! Forget it!”

This article has been updated.

Ari Emanuel’s ‘Roll the Calls’ Takes Aim at Everyone From His Brothers to Former Business Partners

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