I’ll show you!
I must’ve mentioned something about Sam Clark’s comment to my parents, because they saw an opening. Not long afterward, my father came to me and said: “Your uncle Vic wants to have a talk with you.”
That got my attention big-time. In some ways, going to see my godfather was like an event. Uncle Vic was a very important guy. So you had to feel good about it. Hey, Uncle Vic is paying attention to me. At the same time a meeting with Uncle Vic made me nervous. I might be getting called in for a sit-down. Maybe my parents figured Uncle Vic was the only figure I was sort of fearful of, and fear lasts longer than love. That line was from the movie A Bronx Tale, written by my buddy Chazz Palminteri, but I’m gonna steal it because it’s a good one and he won’t mind.
I went down to the Democratic Social Club on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, where Uncle Vic had an office and all the big fish met. There was a huge hall in this club where the politicians spoke to crowds. But nobody was around on the morning I came by.
Everything about Uncle Vic’s office was solid and made of wood. Wood door with a piece of glass in the middle. Wood desk. Paneled walls.
He greeted me with a hug. But then said: “Sit down.” Just like that. “Sit down.”
Uncle Vic was a big, strappy guy, six feet tall but broad and on the heavy side. His size was only one factor in his large presence. He was extremely authoritative, extremely opinionated, and extremely short on patience. There was no small talk at all. He was sharp as a tack.
“Look,” he told me. “You gotta stop with this singing business. Nothing is gonna happen with it. You could continue to go on and on and waste your time. I’m telling you, you don’t want any part of that business. I know lots of those guys. I’ve seen them all. And I’ve seen them all come and go. It’s a rat business.”
He pronounced that last line in a way that made you see a rat’s whiskers right in front of your nose, in a way that made the line impossible to forget.
“You want to be a professional man,” he continued. “You want to be in your father’s business. You would make him so happy. He could teach you the business. Look at what it did for him. He was able to provide well for his family. You could make the business ten times bigger.
“And if you don’t want that, become a doctor or a lawyer. But you gotta stop this singing now. This is a big opportunity for you, and you’ve got your parents behind you.”
It was not supposed to be a conversation, and it was not supposed to be a long meeting. “Okay, thank you, Uncle Vic,” I said, getting up. “Thank you very much.”
“You understand?” he said. That was his way of saying good-bye. “You understand?”
I nodded, and walked out of his office with my head spinning. You gotta do this. You gotta do that.
But my brain and my body and my soul didn’t want to do this or that. My brain and my body and my soul wanted to make music.
From out of nowhere Uncle Vic’s voice resounded once more.
“You understand?”
There was a lot of bell ringing going on. I looked around and saw my friends going into their fathers’ businesses, into construction, retail, the garment industry, and the financial markets. I saw my teenage friends becoming men. It got me to thinking: Maybe I should listen to Uncle Vic. Maybe I should give up singing like Sam Clark says. It didn’t mean I’d have to remove myself from the world of show business. The more time I spent with Lisa, the more I began to hang around with the Clarks and their fancy friends. It was not odd for Sidney Poitier to come over for dinner. In a matter of months, I’d gone from opening for Garlic Toes to meeting Sophia Loren.
But there was an awkwardness to it for me. Sam Clark put an invisible wall between us. Not only was it invisible, but it was multiplatform. It was horizontal: Don’t come through here. But it was also vertical: Our Mercedes is up here, and your Chevy Impala is down there. So I never felt legit when I walked into Lisa’s house. I needed to make money. I needed a real path. If I couldn’t drive over in a Mercedes, I needed to at least be on the road to doing something that would become successful. Because success was everything in the eyes of the Clark family. That was all Lisa’s parents talked about: success, people of success, and the benefits of success.
Which brought me back to my father. His dream always had been to pass on his business to me. Many times when I was young, he’d taken me to his office at the southern tip of Manhattan and tried to make the day appear fun and interesting so that in the future I’d want to make the business my own. I never took the bait. Now, he had just sold the company, but part of the deal called for him to stay on to oversee it. It was too late for me to take it over. But his idea was to teach me the business so that I could then start my own company. My only motivation when I took the job was to win over Lisa.
So I got on the train with my father every morning and headed downtown. That was the first jolt. Remember, this was the end of the sixties. There were no iPods back then. This was more than a decade before the Sony Walkman first made a splash. Nobody was listening to the radio on the train ride from Westchester into Grand Central Station at seven in the morning. I found myself sitting next to silent businessmen reading the New York Times. The trip was a succession of conductor’s calls—“Mount Vernon, next!… One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street!… Last stop, Grand Central!” Then came the frenetic churning and steel braking of the subway downtown at Bowling Green.
I worked at a desk in a big open room right next to my father. There were no cubicles. Just lots of people around, all sectioned off, going about their duties. It was a brokerage house. So the entire job, unless you were the boss, meant filling out entry forms coming in from the importers that had to go to the customs house for clearance. It was a simple business. But it was a boring business. It was all about pushing paper. Mastery of the simple diligent process was what had taken me on all those vacations to Miami Beach through my childhood. But I didn’t hear “Summer Wind” playing at the tiki bar while I was doing it.
For about six months I worked through the minutiae of these tedious forms. During the monotony of this daily grind came a very unexpected moment. It must’ve happened on a weekend because I never took a day off. Lisa and I were walking on Fifth Avenue. It was damp and chilly out, and when it started to rain we stepped under an overhang for cover. I looked over at Lisa and saw tears on her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t think I can continue seeing you,” she said.
“What?”
There’d been absolutely no warning. Things had been going great between us—which was exactly why she was crying.
“What’s the matter, Lisa? Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you. It’s not that. It’s because… because you’re not Jewish.”
“Not Jewish? Of course I’m not Jewish. You knew that.”
“You don’t understand, Tommy. My parents will never accept you. They’ll never accept me being with a boy who’s not Jewish. It’s hopeless.”
So many conflicting feelings smashed inside me and knocked me off balance. I fired back in a finger snap with all of my heart and soul:
“Well, then, I’ll convert.”
It felt like I had seized the moment. Little did I know that those words would keep me off balance for almost thirty years. Here’s the thing: Those four words were not hard to say. They were easy to say. Remember, my best friend was raised Jewish by an Italian Catholic father and a Jewish mother. His Italian dad went to the temple with him, put on a tallith, and hummed along with the prayers. His Jewish mother learned how to cook rigatoni. I celebrated his bar mitzvah with him, and he came to Christmas Mass with me. Ronny Parlato was an example of how seamlessly it could work if two people were deeply in love. And make no mistake about it, I was definitely in love. At least I thought I was in love. I was nineteen years old, just a kid. What the hell did I know about love?
But there was more to my response than love. It was a w
ay of finally smashing through the wall that Sam Clark had put up between us. I didn’t fully understand all the reasons he put up the wall. What Sam Clark’s ancestors had passed on to him alongside that one rule through more than five thousand years was self-preservation. When Sam Clark threw that rule out at me I took it as prejudice. So, in a strange way, me saying I would convert to Judaism was like telling him, Hey, you can kiss my guinea ass.
Again, this all happened in less than a finger snap. I didn’t think it out. If Sam Clark were with us right now and standing in front of me, I’d tell him he was right. It was not fated to work out over the long haul. I feel terrible for any pain that moment caused Lisa down the line. But I can’t apologize for what I did. I can’t apologize because two beautiful kids who mean everything to me came into the world because of that moment. So if I had to do that moment over again, I’d make the same decision. I can only apologize to Sarah and Michael for the conflict that they grew up in, and tell them that I had the best of intentions when I said those words. My parents were married for seventy years, and when I said I’d convert that was how I thought marriage would be for Lisa and me.
“You’d do that for me?” she said. It was as if the sunshine had just broken through the rain.
I can see now the depth in that moment for her. It was powerful for both of us. In some ways, in that moment, I became my own man. And a man never feels more powerful than when he’s doing something for someone else.
The power in that moment would set me up for a marriage that was announced in the New York Times and an ugly divorce that was covered by all the newspapers. It would set me up to fall for a fairy-tale marriage to Mariah Carey that didn’t end up like a fairy tale at all.
It would take me thirty years from that moment to gather my balance. When I look at that moment now, I see it as the first stop on the long road to Thalia.
Fate seemed to put the wind at my back. Within a couple of weeks, an unusual opportunity arrived on my desk. There was a problem with some wine that one of our importers was bringing into the country. I can’t remember the details—maybe a couple of cases came in contaminated by bad corks. The point is, nearly all the wine was good. But because a couple of cases were bad, the importer wanted to play it safe. He didn’t want to allow the lot out for distribution, and risk his reputation. So he made a suggestion.
“Look, I’ll give it to you for a dollar a case. Do what you want with it. Keep it. Or just get rid of it.”
So I opened a bottle and poured myself a glass. Tasted good to me. I didn’t know shit about wine back then. Gallo tasted good to me when I was nineteen. But I knew this wine wasn’t bad.
What the hell. I rented a truck, got four of my friends, and we picked up hundreds of cases of this wine. I took the wine around to family and friends, gave them all a taste, and everybody liked it. I made everybody buy this wine.
I went to wine stores, asked for the owner or the manager, and said: “Listen, I got some great, great wine. I can sell it to you really cheaply. Why don’t you taste it and see if you like it? If you like it, I’ll sell you a case for twenty bucks.”
Half these guys looked at me like I was nuts. But all those acting lessons really kicked in. They gave me a confidence and an assertiveness, a sense of how to carry myself and present myself to people who didn’t know me. All those disastrous evenings on the nightclub circuit helped me, too. When you walk on a stage at a nightclub, you have to make people like you. All those lessons and experiences helped turn me into a great street salesman.
Most of the owners figured the wine was hot. But back then, people didn’t have the same frame of mind that they do today. If there was a deal and a buck to be made, and nobody knew or cared, then that was the end of the story. Besides, nobody would have bought it if it didn’t taste good.
I sold every case of that wine and pocketed about thirty grand. Back in the day, that was enough to buy a house. But I needed every cent of that money, and whatever else I had saved up, to buy the biggest possible diamond engagement ring I could afford for Lisa because I knew how status conscious her mother and father were. All I heard in that house were the words Gucci, Bulgari, and Saks. My offer to convert to Judaism had broken through Sam Clark’s horizontal wall. I figured a really big diamond could help me smash through his vertical wall.
I had no knowledge whatsoever about diamonds. But I figured, hey, I’m going to convert. Why not go down to the diamond district on Forty-Seventh Street and buy a ring from the Hasids like all the other Jewish boys? I looked in all the windows for the biggest, shiniest diamond that could be bought with the money I had.
There was a three-karat diamond that was long and flat, marquis shaped, and not a lot of depth, but this stone looked big. One of the salesmen with peyes, the beard, and the black hat really started pouring it on. “Look at the quality of this stone!” If he was taking me, I didn’t give a shit. I walked out of that store with a big, shiny stone that I knew was impressive.
I put it in a candy wrapper and brought it over to the Clark home. I was sitting in the kitchen having tea with Lisa and her mother, and I said: “Open the bag. I got you some candy.” Lisa opened the wrapper and went nuts. Her mother gasped and slapped a hand over her open mouth. If you were looking at her mother’s expression without any reference, you wouldn’t have been able to tell whether this was a happy event or if somebody had died. Is this Italian guy really going to marry my Jewish princess?
Lisa immediately ran with the ring into the den where her father was sitting, smoking a cigarette, and watching television. He took the ring from her hands, stood up and looked at it, then passed it back to her. He headed for the stairs. Halfway up, he turned back and said, “I hope you two are planning to elope.”
If there had been springs in my head, it would’ve felt like I was being pulled to the point of bursting each day as I looked up from the paperwork in my father’s office. I am not cut out to do this. I am not made to do this. I do not want to do this!
Everyone around me could see my disillusionment with the drudgery of the job. It was certainly no secret to my father. So he understood when I turned on a dime. I got his blessing to go back to what I loved. I pounded the pavement and got a job offer from Joel Diamond at MRC Music—the publishing arm of Mercury Records.
When I think of all the powerful connections I might’ve been able to access through Sam Clark, it’s ironic how things turned out. Joel Diamond had been a life insurance salesman who wrote and sold songs on the side. Through a chance encounter on an airplane, he met an executive who quickly recognized his talent and enthusiasm, and chose him to run MRC Music over a lot of candidates with more experience. If anyone understood what it meant to give someone on the outside a chance, it was Joel Diamond. He started me at $125 a week. It was a bottom-of-the-barrel job in music. But for me, that paycheck was like getting a badge. I felt like a cop walking his first beat. I was a long, long way from detective, captain, and police commissioner. But I wore the badge. I was officially in the music business.
Just approaching that office on 110 West Fifty-Seventh Street was the most exhilarating feeling I’d known since stepping onstage with the Exotics. I exuded happiness as I swung through the door every day to greet the six-foot-seven-inch security guy with the face of a bulldog. Everyone called him Tiny. Tiny had the happy hello of a florist—which he was in his spare time. But cross him, and he’d take out your liver for lunch.
My formal job description was “professional manager.” Which was a fancy industry term for “song plugger.” There’s nothing quite like it today. On the most basic level it was like being a cross between Simon Cowell and Dale Carnegie. Half of the job was about having good ears and taste, and the other half was about being able to communicate what you knew to influence people.
I’d walk from my office in a pair of jeans and a sweater about ten feet to a bank of writers’ rooms. These rooms were essentially the same—no more than a piano and stool—but some looked different because
the writers had decorated them. Not all the writers were permanent. Some would show up on a Tuesday or a Thursday. But the day-to-day crew hung art on the walls to make their space feel like it was home. It’s important to understand how committed everyone was to their work. Some writers slept in these rooms overnight and woke to write.
It was in these rooms where I found myself, and the path that I would follow for the rest of my life. Having writers listening to my ideas and suggestions was an amazing new experience for me. These were the moments where the roles shifted and the course of my career turned. Musicians were now taking my advice.
And why did they take it? Because everything I said came from walking down 187th Street and hearing Dion and the Belmonts blare out of all the open windows and stores, and then walking a few blocks farther and hearing Tito Puente and all the Latin sounds and rhythms. Everything I said came from what Linc Chamberland and Charlie Calello had taught me. Those rooms gave me the first place to voice all of my musical experiences since that lightning bolt of hearing Elvis hit me at eight years old.
I’d walk into these rooms, sit with the writers next to the piano, listen to a song that they were working on, talk with them about it, and see if it was right musically and lyrically. I might even help them reconstruct it, or discuss how the lyrics might work best for a certain singer. Sometimes I’d listen to a finished song and know that it wasn’t right for a certain artist, but that it might work for another. Other times I might think it was great. If I did, it was my job to know where to sell it. That meant I had to know which artists were in the process of making albums, and the stylistic themes of those albums. Matching the two ends took talent and creativity. Even though the job was technically called music publishing, it was still the process of music making.
I had found my niche. My forte, more than anything else, was being able to hear and to singularly focus songs and writers and artists and producers to help them create popular music just like the music I grew up with and loved as a kid.
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