“One night we saw Jennifer Jones get out of a limo,” he recalls, “and I thought how elegant she was; years later, I was doing her house, and I told her that story.” Gehry drops stellar names with a frequency made tolerable by his lack of boastfulness. “I don’t know what to make of fame,” he insists. “I see somebody like Brad Pitt, who I know, and what he goes through, and I wouldn’t want to go through that. . . . I only get maybe 1 percent of that, and it’s scary already.”

All that notwithstanding, Gehry indicates why hanging out with the rich and famous can help an architect’s business. During a trip to Bilbao, Gehry was dragooned by Thomas Krens, mastermind of the New York Guggenheim’s Basque country offshoot, into joining an all-star motorcycle posse with Jeremy Irons, Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. Gehry reconnected with Von Furstenberg, who served on the board of the American Center in Paris, which he designed. She introduced him to Diller, her entertainment-mogul husband, who later asked Gehry to build the IAC headquarters in New York. (That pairing was brokered by the real estate developer Marshall Rose: “I had known his wife, Candy Bergen, for many years,” Gehry notes.)

Things weren’t so easy before Gehry ascended to celebrity heaven. Starting in 1965, he executed a highly creditable series of jobs for America’s most enlightened postwar commercial builder, James Rouse. But the architect craved artistic status of a sort he’d never win as a developer’s hired hand, and severed that lucrative connection.

Gehry broke out with an audacious 1977-78 remake of a Santa Monica bungalow for himself and his young second family. He enmeshed the pink-shingled exterior in chain-link fencing and corrugated steel, impaled it with an angular wire-glass skylight and exposed the interior’s wooden lath like a Gordon Matta-Clark house-deconstruction sculpture. This residential bombshell nailed Gehry’s avant-garde credentials but left establishment patrons baffled or disgusted. He lost the commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Japanese newcomer Arata Isozaki and seemed destined for another humiliating local rejection when a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic was announced in the late 1980s.

Gehry recounts a nightmarish evening while that coveted assignment hung in the balance. Jennifer Jones and her third husband, the conglomerateur and art collector Norton ­Simon, invited him to their birthday party for David Niven, where the host promoted Gehry to Dorothy Chandler, the imperious dowager of Los Angeles philanthropy. “I don’t like his work,” Chandler sniffed. “And he will not be considered to design a concert hall.” Another guest disparaged a nearby Gehry house with a crude epithet, and a servant spilled a tray of buttered vegetables onto the hapless architect.

Alas, Chandler didn’t live long enough to witness the triumphant opening of Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. Sited across the street from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Gehry’s pitch-perfect auditorium and the voluptuous forms that envelop it consigned Chandler’s prissy sub-classical bandbox and its notoriously dead acoustics to the dustbin of architectural (and musical) history. Disney Hall furthermore proved that Bilbao was no fluke, and that Gehry could never have prevailed without a careerist drive as ferocious as his formidable talent.