Three tiny titans — rich man, poor man, Canadian — came to New York. Barry Diller, of Beverly Hills, arrived here in 1966 in his mid-20s, finding the city so “overstimulating and disorienting” that he had “severe stomach cramps” each night. Keith McNally arrived a decade later, in 1975, at the time of his arrival also about 25 and late of bumming around the world. To him, the city “seemed more like the films than the films themselves.” New York “in the summer of 1978 was a festering pot of arson, stabbings, prostitution, and graffiti,” says Graydon Carter about his arrival; he dallied in Canada until his later 20s and did himself the favor of transgressing the border to secure a job first before his arrival. He loved it here: “I can’t recall when I had ever been so happy.”

For thousands of us over the last decades, they were our bosses. Now, they all have memoirs that reveal much. Why do these older men who have often loomed so large in the worlds of media, dining, and entertainment suddenly want to show us their tender bits? Maybe they felt we’ve all been too incurious. We knew them as bosses better from “Page Six” than reality, and we were too young to know that, just like us, they arrived as young, silly, and unsure people themselves, entering industries that were previously dominated by eccentric, unhinged, even venal characters. These three, though, in their own telling, were relatively well adjusted. Can you believe it? Here they are to confess their pile of phobias: just the usual, like heights, planes, exposure, heartache, the agony of being backstabbed, contemplation of the self. (Collectively they have also slept with more men than you might have suspected.)

They move fast. Carter, seven years after his arrival, is already looking for backing from billionaires to launch Spy. “I often wonder where I found the confidence at twenty-nine to open a 130-seat restaurant in Manhattan........

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