Jerry Weintraub

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.

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 partner, 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.

Weintraub led some very successful campaign fundraisers for the Republican Party and was good at fundraising. He was a major contributor to many charities, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Music Center, the UCLA School of Dentistry and the Children's Museum of Los Angeles. In 1988, the American Friends of the Hebrew University gave Weintraub and his wife, Jane, the Scopus Award in gratitude for their support. He was also a major supporter of Chabad and was close with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

He also began doing charitable work to help stop the ongoing genocide taking place in Darfur in 2007. Weintraub, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, David Pressman, and Brad Pitt cofounded the nonprofit organization, Not On Our Watch, dedicated to preventing mass killings in Darfur and other areas of the world. They raised $9.3 million to aid their relief efforts.