Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

  Not that I was going to let that stop me, by any means. I kept working it, doing appearances at record stores, hitting the record hops, walking down the promotion corridor at Epic Records to talk up new ideas. I was a real pain in the ass. But I was a polite and engaging pain in the ass. Besides, I was Pete Bennett’s protégé. So I still had some muscle. I started nudging everyone at Epic to give me another shot in a more contemporary direction.

  When the VP, Kapralik, agreed, I asked to work with a producer named Sandy Linzer. I’m not sure if it was Charlie Calello who introduced me to Sandy. But it wouldn’t surprise me, because Charlie and Sandy were close. Sandy was one of the writers on “Dawn (Go Away)” and “Working My Way Back to You” for the 4 Seasons, and Charlie had done the arrangements. I felt I’d have a much better shot on my second record with the two of them behind it.

  Sandy Linzer was a nice guy from New Jersey, only a few years older than me, very easy to get along with, and we hit it off immediately. Both Sandy and Charlie knew I wasn’t a great singer. But I had style and passion and they liked me. Their attitude was: hey, let’s try to help him make it.

  Sandy came on as the director and producer, and chose a song called “Love Trap,” written by a guy named Al Kooper, who was one of the original members of Blood, Sweat & Tears. Then he wrote a song for me called “Allison Took Me Away.” That felt great. It was very cool to have my own voice covering an original song. Sandy was not only engaged, he was able to sing me the lines and help me with phrasing. I felt much more confident working on the second record. That was helpful, because there was tremendous pressure.

  Like every other performer at that time, I had only one day to get it right. It didn’t matter if your voice felt good or if it felt sore. The musicians were booked. The studio was booked. You had to come through. I also sensed that I might be coming to the end of the road if this record didn’t hit. I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But that feeling walked into CBS Studios with me.

  Sandy was in the control room. Charlie was conducting the orchestra. Once again I stepped up to the mic and threw my soul into it. I could tell I’d done much better than the first time. But my ears also knew that “Allison” had come out much better than “Love Trap.” “Love Trap” had some really high parts that were hard for me to nail. Sandy and Charlie came over afterward with compliments. But the bullshit detector in me could tell that they weren’t thrilled with the results. They were satisfied, yeah, but I knew what was underneath: This is the best we’re going to get out of this guy. Let’s finish up and fix it in the mix.

  The 45 came out, and T. D. Valentine went through another round of whirlwind promotion. Again, the phones did not ring. I began to notice a distinct change when I walked down the corridor toward the promotion offices at Epic Records. Doors started to close ten steps in front of me.

  That experience taught me a great deal. I learned you could push the gas pedal too hard. The promotion department was like the transmission on my GTO. I’d pushed that engine too far so many times that it just burned out.

  It was clear that Epic might not go for a third record. But I didn’t want to give up. That left me with Plan B: get on the road and play clubs. I figured it would be a good alternative to making records in the studio and just relying on radio. The idea was to better develop my voice and stage presence on the road. Made sense. But that was me talking to me.

  I don’t know what my father really thought about Plan B. I was the sun, stars, and moon in his eyes, and I’m sure he wanted to give me every chance at success. But he was realistic, and he saw that it wasn’t working for me as a singer, or as an actor, either. I could get nontalking parts as an extra. But I never made the leap to a role with a speaking part in the script, and I certainly did not have the patience to wait for one. The way my father played it cut both ways. He decided to go all in on Plan B. He’d give the nightclub route his best shot. If it didn’t pan out, well, there’d be no regrets.

  So I went to the tailor and got measured for a custom-made tuxedo, and we hired Bobby Kroll to write me a nightclub act. Bobby Kroll was pretty famous at the time for rearranging big standards and tying them together with a little shtick.

  The act felt good. I rehearsed, then hit the road. Upstate New York. New Jersey. Pennsylvania. Massachusetts. Towns with names you can’t remember. Clubs that you’d pass if you drove too quickly because your only clue might be a winking neon sign with half the bulbs burned out. Inside were horrible smells mixing cigarette butts and stale beer. If you ever went into one of these places during the light of day, you’d run out, head for the hills, and immediately jump into a shower. Darkness gave you only temporary cover. We’re talking stages with squeaky mics. Audiences that made you sing over the drone of conversation and the clatter of silverware on plates. And those were the good nights.

  There was one night I’ll never forget, even though I’m trying hard to right now. I step out of my car with a garment bag on my shoulder like I’m about to play the Copa. Only I’m at a run-down joint somewhere in the wilds of New York. I get directed to a dingy dressing room, about ten by fifteen, the size of a prison cell, with a fat stripper sitting inside like she’s serving thirty to life.

  I want to avert my eyes. But there’s no place for them to go. I have to wedge myself behind a curtain in this same room to change into my tux. When I step out, I can’t help but notice that this woman has little white objects sticking out from between each of her toes.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I put garlic between my toes,” she said. “Stops you from getting sick.”

  Here I am, in my custom tux, trying to look like Frank Sinatra, standing backstage in Bumfuck Upstate New York in a snowstorm with a half-naked barrel-bellied stripper who’s got garlic between her toes—and that’s not the worst of it. I now have to go out and warm up the audience for her.

  Good luck! If the music business goes any lower, I don’t want to know about it.

  Everything seemed to be exploding about three feet in front of me. I pushed my GTO too hard on a stretch of Long Island road created by God for drag racing, to impress a girl I’d been dating at Hofstra. For some reason, I thought going fast impressed girls, and for some stupider reason, the girls seemed to be impressed. But I went way too far this time, and heard crunching and crackling, like the sound of metal being thrown into a wood chipper, as the car limped to a halt. That was it. I’d blown a rod in the engine, and torn the transmission apart for what must’ve been the fifth time. I had the GTO towed home, but this time my father refused to fix it. “You want a car,” he said, “go to work and buy a car.”

  It was almost shocking to hear those words—which I guess was his purpose. He never stopped supporting me, and he kept helping me out professionally. But otherwise, the money stopped flowing. It was time. He wanted me to see the reality of life as an opening act for Garlic Toes. He pulled my coat, no doubt about it, but I also remember feeling disillusioned. He was about to sell his business. There was never an easier time for him to help me out, and he was being very generous with my sisters—even going as far as buying them homes. Mind you, a really nice house cost $20,000 at that time. But day after day I’d open the front door and see my GTO sitting out front as if it were on life support. Finally, I sold it.

  I went to work parking cars at the beach clubs. I worked as a waiter. I drove a cab for Blue Bird Taxi in New Rochelle. The company still exists. When I go back there and see those cabs I get chills—and not good chills. But it was work, and at the end of the week I’d have a wad of cash in my pocket, which allowed me to go to all the clubs and hear music.

  I scraped together about $1,200 and bought a 1962 Impala convertible. It was a broken-down piece of crap with a dent in the back, and I was ashamed to drive it into the parking lot at the College Diner. Early on, I was very conscious of the power in an image. Me pulling into the parking lot in that crappy Impala might as well have shouted out: How did the guy who took down Superman
lose all his powers? I’d call my friend Ronny and ask him to pick me up so we could arrive at the diner in his car.

  One night, Ronny and I went out and ended up on the other side of town at the Eastchester Diner. I’d eaten there a few times, but it was not my turf. Everyone knew it was the place where the nice Jewish girls from Scarsdale hung out. The tables had the same setup with the jukebox. But nobody ever sang to my selections at the Eastchester Diner. At the Eastchester Diner, I was just another customer.

  I sat at a table with Ronny and noticed a beautiful girl with thick, shiny black hair at an adjacent table. She was sitting across from a really good-looking guy whom I knew. It was more than her physical beauty that struck me. It was everything about her. She was meticulously dressed and polished down to the snap on her handbag—her Louis Vuitton handbag. I always had nice clothes. But hers were on another level.

  I kept glancing over at her, and she must’ve caught the vibe because Ronny noticed her glancing back.

  “Oh, that’s Lisa Clark,” Ronny said.

  “Who’s Lisa Clark?”

  “I went to school with her. Her father is Sam Clark. He runs ABC.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ABC.”

  “What do you mean, runs it?”

  “He’s in charge of the music, the television, the films—all of that stuff.”

  It’s hard for me to calculate the percentages of the two thoughts blowing through my mind at exactly that moment. One: that chick looks really great. And two: her old man was in show business.

  “Ronny, I gotta meet her, man.”

  Ronny walked over to her and said, “Why don’t you come over to our table for a second. I want you to meet my cousin Tommy.”

  Lisa got up and came over while the good-looking guy just sat there like a lox.

  It started out as a “Hi, how you doing?” conversation. She was really nice, easy to talk with and sincere. “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I’m a singer. An actor.”

  “Oh, really,” she said. “My father’s in the business.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He started ABC Records. Now he runs ABC films and theaters.” She told us how her father had signed Ray Charles and Paul Anka. It soon became one of those “Wow, that’s amazing” conversations, that ended: “Okay, cool. Here’s my phone number. Give me yours and let’s get together.”

  Then she went back to her table. About twenty minutes later the four of us got up from our tables to leave almost simultaneously. In the parking lot, I watched her step toward the driver’s door of a midnight-blue Thunderbird convertible with a white top.

  I just turned and looked at Ronny.

  I called Lisa about two days after our meeting at the diner and we started to go out. We didn’t go to the Canada Lounge to hear Linc Chamberland and the Orchids. Instead, she wanted to go to upscale restaurants. Lisa was a very different type of girl from the ones I was accustomed to going out with. There was a freshness to her, a newness, that made me feel like I was traveling for the first time. I was Italian, but she knew the streets of Rome. Lisa loved Italy. She’d been there many times with her parents.

  Lisa was refined—not the type of girl you’d try to impress by whipping all the horses under your hood as fast as they could possibly go. There was a formality to her, a seriousness that asked me to lift my game, a uniqueness that brought us together quickly. After about a month, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. That was when she invited me over to meet her parents.

  I was kind of anxious as I pulled up to the Clark home in my crappy Chevy Impala and parked near Lisa’s Thunderbird. Sam Clark drove a Mercedes, at a time when nobody I knew drove a Mercedes. A simple shot of the three cars gives you a pretty good cinematic lead-in to what was coming.

  I wanted to make a good impression, some kind of connection. At the bottom of it all, hey, I was meeting my girlfriend’s father for the first time. I’d brought along one of my 45s. I was not only introducing myself. I was introducing everything I wanted to be. “Love Trap” may not have sold well, but I was proud of it, and I still believed in myself big-time. I wanted to show Sam Clark that I was good.

  Sam was sitting in his usual chair in the den—a recliner—watching the news on television. He was always meticulously dressed. He went to work every day in a suit and tie, of course, but even around the house he’d wear custom-made pants, a nice sport shirt, and Gucci loafers. He did not get up out of his recliner to greet me. So I walked over to him to shake hands.

  I’ll never know what was in his mind. I’m sure he knew I was Lisa’s boyfriend. But he probably figured it was some passing fancy, and if it wasn’t, he’d have to deal with it down the road. Sam Clark and his wife had raised their daughters to keep the faith. That meant Jewish husbands. By the way, it wasn’t a religious rule—the Clarks were not ultraorthodox. It was cultural. Central casting was simply not supposed to send an Italian from the Bronx over to the Clark home in Scarsdale to audition for the role of son-in-law.

  Sam Clark was a self-made man. He’d started delivering records to stores in Boston when he was young and had become the top record distributor in town. That gave him a lot of power. There were many components to the music business back in the fifties and sixties: the artists, the songs, the producers, the record companies, the radio. But if you look at the mix of power as it pertained to the success of a music star, distribution was 50 percent of the pie. Distribution was the backbone and spine of the business.

  Sam Clark caught the attention of two of the big bosses at ABC corporate, one of them being Leonard Goldenson, who brought him in to start a music division in 1955. There was no label at ABC when Sam Clark arrived. Sam Clark created ABC-Paramount Records, and in doing so he became one of the pioneers of the music industry. I don’t know how much Sam Clark knew about music. But he was close to Alan Freed, the disc jockey who broke all boundaries and coined the phrase rock ’n’ roll, and he was an extremely smart businessman. He would’ve been successful distributing apparel to major retailers. He would’ve been successful in just about any business because he was a hustler and he made smart moves. It didn’t take much of an ear to know that Ray Charles could sing. But it was Sam Clark who signed Ray Charles when he left Ahmet Ertegun and Atlantic Records. Sam had big hits with Ray, like “Hit the Road Jack,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” They even portrayed Sam Clark in the movie Ray, starring Jamie Foxx.

  Sam kept building. He acquired Dunhill Records with Jay Lasker, another great record man, and lifted that division into one of the most important record companies of that era. He’d done so well that by the time I met him he’d been given the responsibility of running ABC’s film and theater divisions. When we first shook hands, I was looking into the eyes of a serious business executive with a monster job. Sam Clark looked at me as if trying to understand what his daughter was doing with T. D. Valentine.

  I’ll never know if Sam Clark thought that I was using his daughter simply to get to him. Even if he didn’t feel that way, Lisa was in a difficult position. When Sam Clark walked into a room in front of Lisa it was as if God had suddenly materialized before her eyes. But she had brought home the forbidden fruit, and she knew it as well as he did. Lisa’s parents made a point of introducing her to the sons of affluent Jewish families from the country club in the hope that some sort of passion could be sparked. I can really understand, looking back now, that Sam Clark knew what would work best for his daughter over the long haul. But back then I was nineteen years old and unable to grasp the big picture. Neither could Lisa. All I knew at that moment in time was I really liked Sam Clark’s daughter and wanted his respect.

  “How do you do?” he said. He had a very formal Brookline, Massachusetts, way of speaking. Out of his mouth, Scarsdale sounded the way a Kennedy might say it: Scaaaaaaahhhhsdale.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m a singer.”

  Lisa jumped right in. �
�Oh, Daddy, he’s a singer, and he brought his record! Can you listen and see what you think?”

  Sam reluctantly got up from his easy chair, crossed the foyer, and stepped down into the living room toward a credenza that held the family’s stereo. It was a large piece of furniture containing a record player, a radio, and a shelf filled with LPs. Sam clipped my 45 over a round spindle on the turntable that allowed it to be played like an album, and soon the stereo’s arm was hovering over it and the needle came down. Sam listened at the start, but I could tell after a little while that his mind was elsewhere.

  I don’t know if he knew that my voice was a 5 out of 10. Charlie Calello and Sandy Linzer had elevated it to a 7 in the studio, and even though nothing happened in the U.S., the record became a big cult hit in England. In any case, before the song ended he lifted the needle off the record.

  “That’s very nice, very nice,” he said. He was trying to be polite, but his tone gave me the feeling that it was uncomfortable for him to have my Chevy Impala in his driveway. He asked who did the arrangements and kept it civil. But then he said something that I cannot recall word for word because it hit me like a wrecking ball right between the eyes.

  “Good luck. But if you want to come around here, you’d better forget about singing.”

  Looking back on those words now, I can see that maybe he was simply offering brutally sound advice. But between those lines there was no mistaking his other message: Hey, look, kid, you’re not Jewish—forget it.

  Three words were surging through me as I walked past the Mercedes and the Thunderbird to get to my Chevy and go home. Three words that would never allow me to ask Sam Clark for a job, nor take one from him if it were ever offered.