The former AOL Time Warner CEO and his fiancée open an ultra-chic
California clinic for celebs.
By Barney Gimbel

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/ceo/articles/0,15114,710447,00.html

In a posh Santa Monica, Calif., office building a few weeks ago,
studio executives, powerful celebrity agents, and even a few movie
stars washed down smoked-salmon canapés with Perrier as they toured
Moonview Sanctuary, a new, ultra-chic mental health clinic designed
for high-profile millionaires. "That massage seriously changed my
life," said one visitor who left her tour for a free 15-minute
treatment. "Forget going to a spa, I want to come here for my next
vacation."

"Got $175,000 handy?" says former AOL Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin,
the tour guide and presiding director. Yes, that's right. Levin,
once known by his own description as an "imperial CEO," a man whose
famed emotional detachment led to power, celebrity, and eventual
downfall, is helping Laurie Perlman, his Hollywood producer-turned-
psychologist fiancée, start Moonview, "a sanctuary of calm and order
in a world of chaos, pressure and fear." The 15-day intensive
program includes everything from traditional psychoanalysis to
acupuncture, neurofeedback, and even sex therapy. It's designed for
movie stars and executives like Levin, who says he battled with
depression following his son's murder in 1997.

"Life's traumas are much bigger than anything that could ever happen
in business," says Levin. "But as a CEO, you're totally out of
focus." At Moonview—where he plans to sometimes help clients himself—
people can discover that "humanism in business has to flow from
within." If it had been around back when he was at Time Warner
(parent company of Fortune), he says, he could have been a more
effective leader and better inspired his staff.

Perlman dreamed up Moonview some six years ago as a place where
celebrities could receive treatment by people who understand the
unique stresses brought on by being in the public eye. But it wasn't
until she brought in three other partners and then met Levin in
November 2002 that her idea came to fruition—though she says she
footed the bill for the $2 million sanctuary through a combination
of savings and loans.

Moonview's highly personalized approach allows clients "to explore
and begin to resolve core issues on a deeper level." There's even a
special treatment program for families of celebrities on trial
(perfect for the families of Kobe Bryant or Martha Stewart, says
Perlman). The 30-room facility is nonresidential: Clients stay at
home or in a nearby hotel, and after their treatment return for
three two-day follow-ups.

The center itself resembles an Oriental-themed luxury hotel,
lavishly decorated with furniture and art handpicked by Perlman and
Levin during a five-day trip to Bali last year. "The people in Bali
understand that life isn't just a Darwinian struggle of survival of
the fittest," Perlman says as she points out a 900-year-old Balinese
wooden bench in the facility's waiting room. "Like myself, they
understand the importance of family and that one is not alone in the
universe."

Levin says he has been reborn with the help of Perlman and the
sanctuary, adding that today he feels the same kind of spirituality
he did when he used to practice being a rabbi as a child. Maybe he
has been in the wrong business all along.

From the Oct. 18, 2004 Issue