A Life in Show Business

There's a word people reach for when they try to describe Jerry Weintraub: instinct. Not education, not strategy — instinct. The kind you're born with, then spend a lifetime learning to trust.

Jerome Charles Weintraub came into the world on September 26, 1937, in Brooklyn, the son of a gem dealer who traveled from town to town selling stones. He grew up in the Bronx, where he learned early that the world was full of people who'd tell you no — and that no was just an opening offer. As a teenager he sneaked into the palatial Loew's Paradise Theater so often that the manager eventually gave him a job as an usher. He served in the Air Force at seventeen, moonlighting in Alaska selling clothes to anyone who'd buy them. He used the G.I. Bill to study at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse, then worked his way through the mail rooms at William Morris and MCA — the unglamorous engine rooms of show business, where a sharp young man with ambition and good ears could learn everything worth knowing. By his mid-twenties he'd left and started his own management company. He was a self-made millionaire by twenty-six.

Jane Morgan had already been building her own world for years before Weintraub came along — and what a world it was. Born Florence Catherine Currier on May 3, 1924, in Newton, Massachusetts, she grew up in a musical household: her father played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, her mother was a trained pianist. She began performing publicly at seven. She trained as a lyric soprano at Juilliard, singing in nightclubs and at private parties to pay her tuition, until she was spotted by French impresario Bernard Hilda, who offered to take her to Paris and make her a star. She said yes. It was the right call.

Morgan became the toast of Parisian café society — an elegant American who sang Cole Porter and Gershwin and French chansons with equal ease, mentored by Edith Piaf herself, recording on the French Polydor label, moving through circles that included the finest songwriters in Europe. She came back to America, signed with Kapp Records, and had a hit with "Fascination" — a French standard that found its way into Billy Wilder's 1957 film Love in the Afternoon starring Audrey Hepburn. Six gold records followed over the course of her career. She recorded in five languages and across roughly forty albums. On television she was a fixture — appearing more than fifty times on The Ed Sullivan Show, a record among female singers — and on Broadway she starred in Mame, Can-Can, Kiss Me Kate, The King and I, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She performed at the Academy Awards twice, and sang for five American presidents. She was, in every sense, a star.

Hollywood’s New Power Couple

It was around 1962 that she found a new manager: a restless, relentlessly driven young man named Jerry Weintraub. He booked her into the finest venues in America. He believed in her without qualification, the same way he believed in everything he took on. They married in 1965, and what had begun as a professional relationship became a partnership that would last the rest of their lives — producing four children, two remarkable California homes, and a shared orbit that touched nearly every corner of entertainment, sports, and politics for half a century.

By then, Weintraub was already rewriting the rulebook on what a concert tour could be. His breakthrough came when he called Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and told him he wanted to take Elvis on the road — a national stadium tour at a scale that had never been attempted. Parker named his price. Weintraub worked the phones until he had the backing. The tour happened. It changed the business. He did it again with Frank Sinatra, then Neil Diamond, then Bob Dylan, then Led Zeppelin, then John Denver — whom he transformed from a folk singer into one of the most beloved entertainers in America. The playbook he wrote in the early 1970s for the modern arena concert is still the playbook today.

He didn't stop at music. He never stopped at anything. His pivot to film began with Robert Altman's Nashville, which he produced without fully understanding the script but believing in the filmmaker — and which earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Oh, God! followed. Then Diner. Then The Karate Kid. In 2001 he assembled an extraordinary cast around director Steven Soderbergh for Ocean's Eleven — Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Roberts — and the film grossed over $450 million worldwide, spawning two sequels in which Weintraub himself appeared. On television, his credits ran from John Denver specials to the broadcast of the 1984 Olympic opening ceremonies to HBO's Behind the Candelabra, which won eleven Emmy Awards and the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. In June 2007, he became the first producer ever to have his hand and footprints set in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Jane Morgan, for her part, retired from performing in 1973 to raise their family — though she remained quietly present in the world Weintraub built, eventually working as a production assistant on films including the Ocean's Eleven remake. In 2011, Weintraub was there when she received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — a long overdue recognition for a woman who had conquered Paris, Broadway, and prime-time television before most people in the industry had figured out what they wanted to be.

Jerry Weintraub died on July 6, 2015, in Santa Barbara, at the age of seventy-seven. Jane Morgan lived to 101, passing away peacefully in August 2025 in Naples, Florida, surrounded by family. Together they inhabited a world that very few people ever get close to — and they held onto it, not just in memory, but in the objects that filled their homes and told their story.

Hollywood, His Way

Weintraub's pivot to film was not the cautious step of a man managing his risk. Robert Altman sent him a screenplay for a film called Nashville, a complex ensemble satire set in the world of country music. Weintraub later admitted he couldn't make heads or tails of it — but he was intrigued, and he believed in Altman, and so he raised the money. Nashville was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and became an icon of 1970s cinema. It was his first film as a producer.

He followed it with Oh, God!, Diner, and The Karate Kid — films across wildly different tones and genres, each of them exactly right for their moment. He was not a man who chased trends. He recognized things.

In 2001, he reunited the Ocean's Eleven property — originally a vehicle for Sinatra and the Rat Pack — with director Steven Soderbergh and an extraordinary cast: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts. The result grossed over $450 million worldwide and produced two sequels. Weintraub appeared in all three films himself, a high-rolling presence who clearly relished every minute of it. That wasn't accidental casting. It was a man completely at home in the world he'd built.

His television work ran the same range. John Denver specials in the 1970s. The broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. And then, in 2013, Behind the Candelabra — Steven Soderbergh's HBO film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon — which won eleven Emmy Awards and claimed the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. It was among the finest prestige television productions of its era, and Weintraub had his name on it.

In June 2007, he became the first producer ever to have his hand and footprints set in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre — alongside Clooney, Pitt, and Damon. Former president George H.W. Bush, a longtime friend and neighbor in Kennebunkport, said it as plainly as anyone could: Jerry was an American original, who earned his success by the sheer force of his instinct, drive, and larger-than-life personality.

A Life Fully Lived, and Fully Kept

What makes Weintraub's story so compelling, beyond the sheer scale of his achievements, is that he kept things. He was a collector in the truest sense — not a hoarder, but a man with strong opinions about what mattered and a genuine appreciation for the objects that marked moments. His Beverly Hills estate and Palm Springs home held a life accumulated with purpose: paintings by serious artists, sports memorabilia from real champions, props from films he was proud of, letters from friends who happened to also be presidents and legends.

Dorothy Hamill's figure skates from her 1976 Olympic gold medal performance — skates she gave him herself, because he was her manager and her advocate. Tennis rackets from Jimmy Connors and Rod Laver, used to win actual titles. Signed gloves from Muhammad Ali. A Gibson guitar gifted by George Strait. A Bono-signed photograph with a personal inscription. Gold and platinum records bearing names that defined American popular music for fifty years. Props from the Ocean's films that he both produced and appeared in. Costumes worn by Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. Awards he earned from some of the most demanding institutions in the industry.

These aren't celebrity trinkets or commercial merchandise. They are the artifacts of a man who moved through the world at the highest level and held onto what resonated — a private archive of a life that touched nearly every corner of American culture and never lost its sense of wonder at any of it.

Weintraub once wrote, in his 2010 memoir, When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: "When I believe in something, it's going to get done." That sentence tells you everything you need to know about the man.

The objects that fill these auction pages tell you the rest.