Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

  Don had a contract with Arista. But he had a verbal agreement and a handshake with Clive Davis that if he really wanted to leave and he had a much better opportunity, he could do so.

  The opportunity to become the president of Columbia Records was certainly a much better opportunity. Even though Clive kicked and screamed, he had to let Donny go. He’d given his word. Now, my two main labels—Epic and Columbia—had excellent leadership.

  I was happy to have my core team in place. I didn’t realize that there was a crucial player missing until I met her a few months later. Sometimes you don’t see things until they’re right in front of your nose.

  VOICES

  DOUG MORRIS

  Music executive

  It struck me as odd, initially, when Tommy got that job. Tommy was a very good manager, a very clever guy who got his records played and his groups on MTV. He knew how to move and work the system.

  What no one knew was that he had the kind of taste to really be a top executive. He’s not a financial guy. But who cares? You can get twenty accountants to do that. The guy who can pick the artist and pick the song is the rainmaker. And no one knew he could do that. You couldn’t know until he got the chance. He got the chance—and he was great.

  BILLY JOEL

  I had no concerns about Tommy when he took over. He’s got the street smarts. There’s that line from the song: “Tommy Mottola lives on the road.” He spent a lot of time working firsthand with bands on the road. So he knew all the idiosyncrasies of what goes on with the band and the musicians and the songwriters. He lived it.

  So I thought it was a good blend, a good balance. Walter was a corporate animal, an attorney, and he dealt with the higher-ups, the guys in the golf pants, as we used to say.

  The great thing about dealing with Tommy is he’s very direct. He’ll say: “We don’t think there are as many singles as there were on your other albums.” He’s straight ahead about it, and I don’t have a problem with that. He encouraged me to do my part, and I knew he would follow through on his end.

  A lot of the time, what he did was a complete mystery to me. I didn’t know a lot of aspects to that end of the business. I knew things in general, but he was the guy who could get things done. And the more direct you were with Tommy, the more effective he seemed to be. So I came to have every confidence in him.

  MEL ILBERMAN

  There were many aspects in the operation of a record company at which Tommy had no experience. The financial statements, he had no clue. He also did not have the experience of managing within a large company where so many interrelated factors are involved. What he did, very wisely, was bring in the help he needed—a guy like Dave Glew. Tommy picked good people. And that’s the most important trait to bring to a role like that.

  Another thing. In a normal company, there are very few bosses who would accept hearing You’re wrong. I had no problem telling him that, or telling him to stop if I thought he was going in the wrong direction. Tommy might argue for a minute or two. He might get pissed off for a minute or two. But he always listened. And he would never be upset afterward. Not many bosses could accept that positively.

  JIMMY IOVINE

  Music executive

  I had met Tommy early on when he was an aggressive young publisher and manager. When he got the job at Sony, my ex-wife said something very funny.

  She said: “Oh, this is interesting. Party’s at Tommy’s house.”

  And I said: “You know what, you’re probably right.” And he proceeded to throw an incredible party. I mean, he did a great job over there. Hustled, and got the right people working for him.

  We were competitors—Doug Morris and me were in competition with Tommy and those guys over there. We had our ups and downs—like the Lakers and the Celtics. It was always cool.

  The greatest gift Tommy had—the greatest gift any of these guys that have lasted for a long time or really made a mark have—is you can hear songs and you know talent. It’s that simple. Then you have to learn how to get it out and market it. But first you gotta start with a good product. Without a great song, you ain’t going anywhere. You just can’t get off first base. I mean, who wants to hear Elvis Presley sing a bad song? Nobody wants to hear bad songs. That’s why the Beatles were the Beatles. It’s all in the song.

  And then you marry this right song with the right artist, or they write it themselves, and that’s when the magic happens. Then you help that magic grow, which is the part that no one understands, because it just happens to be inside someone. It’s instinct. Tommy has those instincts.

  In October 1988, I threw a party for a friend of mine who had once gotten the feeling that I’d wanted to hurl him out the window.

  Jerry Greenberg had gotten chewed out by all of his bosses at Atlantic for releasing Hall & Oates. But he was a brilliant exec who went on to become Atlantic’s youngest president after Ahmet Ertegun rose to CEO. There were no hard feelings between Jerry and me. Business is business, and it didn’t stop us from becoming close over the years. Jerry had left Atlantic to go out on his own, but his new company hadn’t worked out. Didn’t matter to me. He was still a great record man. He was living in Los Angeles, and I was sure he would be a great presence for us on the West Coast.

  We gave him his own label, an imprint. It was a joint venture, but it used the services of Epic to promote, market, and sell. That was a great fit also because Jerry had worked at Atlantic for at least a decade with Dave Glew. It may sound like a minor decision based on everything else that was going on. But it’s impossible for me to calculate the impact of the decision to bring Jerry in, and the single night that occurred in October of ’88 that came along with it.

  The party on that particular night celebrated the launch of Jerry’s new label and the signing of an English pop band called Eighth Wonder featuring Patsy Kensit, who went on to become an actress and star in Lethal Weapon 2. When I walked in, it looked like so many other typical music business parties. But when I walked out, I held something in my hand that would change my life.

  An old friend of mine, a singer named Brenda K. Starr, was at that party, and she walked over to me and handed me a demo tape.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Just listen to it,” she said. Then she nodded to a honey-blonde-haired girl across the room. I found myself staring into brown eyes that were staring back at me in a way that demanded attention.

  “That’s my friend,” she said. “Her name is Mariah.”

  Mariah had been one of Brenda’s backup singers. There was a really brief hello. But it was a common hello. There are a lot of parties, a lot of hellos, a lot of beautiful young singers, and a lot of demos.

  After I left the party and reached my car, something inside me wondered if she could really sing. So I slipped the tape into the player. At first I thought there was some mistake. The music had R & B and gospel qualities that made it seem like Brenda had given me the wrong tape. That couldn’t be the blonde chick that I met, I thought. I waited for the next song. It blew me away. It was amazing music, an amazing voice, but my overriding feeling was confusion because I thought there had to be some mistake. The third song played, then the fourth. By that time my confusion was gone. It didn’t matter whose voice I was hearing. An unbelievable energy was running through me, screaming, Turn the car around! That may be the best voice you’ve heard in your entire life!

  It took me about three days to track Mariah down and arrange a meeting in my office. She showed up with an older woman wearing dark glasses who didn’t say a word. Her mother. Mariah was eighteen years old.

  “Is that you on the tape?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I love it,” I said. “I’d like to sign you to our company.”

  She was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a girlfriend’s apartment and had been working as a waitress and a coat-check girl. Needless to say, she was thrilled. Developing Mariah was going to be a long process, and I believed it best to con
nect her to people—like Grubman and the management team at Champion—who would understand how to nurture her.

  There was one hitch. Mariah told me that she’d signed a production agreement that linked her music and earnings to the keyboard player on the demo tape—Ben Margulies.

  “Can I meet him?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Just come down to the Woodshop.”

  That very night I went down to the little studio where she and Ben worked. It was called the Woodshop, and it really was a woodshop, filled with machines for cutting and turning wood to make furniture. There was sawdust all over the floor, and the smell of glue and fresh-cut wood filled the air. In the back of this shop was a small space where Mariah and Ben worked with a couple of keyboards.

  Mariah stood in front of me, singing a cappella, and then Ben joined in on the keyboards. When a voice comes at you like that from only a couple of feet away it completely occupies your space, your ears, your eyes, and your universe. It was like hearing that demo tape times ten. I was overwhelmed by the breadth and power in her vocals. She had a seven-octave range that peaked with a high-pitched whistle that almost knocked me to the floor.

  It reminded me of the emotions that ran through me the first time I heard Daryl Hall and John Oates play and sing acoustically in a room back at Chappell Music. Only this was magnified. It was raw, but that was the beauty of it. Her voice was the Hope Diamond.

  I went back to the office the next day and told my business affairs department, “I don’t care if you lock her lawyer in your conference room, do not let him out until you have a deal.”

  Once it was signed, Mariah got an advance to move out of her girlfriend’s apartment, get her own place, and start work on her first album. There was no timetable. My goal was for it to be right. Didn’t matter if it took a year, a year and a half, or two years, because we were creating the world’s next superstar. If the first album wasn’t right, her entire career could fall apart before it even started. But if we got all the music right on that first album and positioned it correctly, then everything I envisioned could actually happen. It was that simple.

  The only complication was how the arrangements would work with Ben Margulies. He had written more than a few good songs with Mariah. But I was certain that he didn’t have the chops to produce them. I knew I would eventually have to extricate Mariah from that agreement, and the first step toward doing that was to let Ben try to make the first album even though there was no possibility that he could pull it off. I started to think about a backup plan immediately, knowing it would take a few months for the situation to come to a head.

  As all this was transpiring we were finalizing the details to bring Ienner to Columbia from Arista Records. Don and I were sitting in a car and I slipped Mariah’s demo into the cassette player. When Don heard Mariah’s voice he went crazy.

  “In addition to giving you all the things you asked for,” I told him, “in addition to giving you a deal that is totally unheard of, this is going to be the first project you’re going to work on. Together we’ll make Mariah bigger than Whitney.”

  It was a defining moment. Don had promoted Whitney, and he knew exactly how talented Mariah was just by hearing that voice on the demo.

  I kept going by the Woodshop to check in on Mariah’s progress. We had a great chemistry when we talked about the music, and when it came to work she was as obsessed and fanatical as I was. Mariah had been flirtatious from the moment I set eyes on her at the launch party. I did everything in my power to resist. But a few months later there was a moment when it all began to change.

  I had just come back from a business trip to Miami. I’d spent four or five days working with Gloria and Emilio and, in my spare time, had been able to enjoy some sunshine. I was wearing a jacket and tie and had a great Miami tan when I went to the Woodshop to see how Mariah and Ben were doing. Mariah looked at me, and said: “You look great!” The tone of her voice went beyond my clothes and the tan, and everything went into slow motion. I looked into her eyes and she stared back at me, and then we quickly turned back to work.

  Those three words—“You look great!”—were intoxicating to me. Those three words—and the way she said them—opened the door to a forty-year-old’s crisis and I stepped right on through. There was no time to think about it. Everything else in my life was moving at a thousand miles an hour. This was no exception.

  After a while, I went to see my therapist about it. I told her how Mariah and I had met, how she looked at me, how she made me feel. “I think,” I told her, “I’m falling in love with this girl.”

  Often, therapists listen to you and then frame what you’re telling them so that you can see the full picture and reach your own conclusions. But this therapist was a wise old broad who pulled no punches.

  “Tom,” she said, “stop right there. Forget it! It’s not going to work!”

  She tried to make me see that I’d been blinded, and she listed the reasons why it couldn’t possibly work. But I didn’t want to see that Mariah was roughly the same age as I was when I first walked into Sam Clark’s home with a 45 in my hand. I didn’t want to see that Mariah was from a broken family and had grown up without her father around, and for the most part had gotten by on her own.

  What didn’t work, the way I saw it, was the marriage that I was in. And what did work was the strong bond based in music that I’d seen between Gloria and Emilio Estefan. I’d seen that bond work for Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. And later, I would come to see how it worked for Celine Dion and René Angélil. René is twenty-six years older than Celine. He launched her and manages her career. Age doesn’t matter when it works. When it works, it works.

  “Absolutely forget it!” My therapist put the hammer down again. “This will never work!”

  The therapist kept trying to make me see Mariah as someone who’d been through a difficult childhood. All I could see was what Mariah was about to become.

  “You don’t understand,” I told the therapist. “Mariah is going to be the biggest star in the world. She’s going to be as big as Michael Jackson.”

  The therapist took a deep breath and stared at me as if I were totally delusional.

  “Great,” she said. “Then just develop her as a recording artist. This is a girl who’s had a lot of family issues. Remember, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Tom, don’t do it.”

  I didn’t like hearing the word don’t come out of her mouth. The sound of that word did everything she didn’t intend it to do. It was as if she’d thrown kerosene on a fire. Smashing through the word no was a big reason for my success. Hey, I had no MBA and I was now the head of CBS Records. Who would’ve said yes to that twenty years earlier? Just as I had willed everything to work in my career, I believed I could also will Mariah and me to work out.

  “Tom,” the therapist said, “you’re in denial.”

  She must have realized she really needed to put the hammer down because she went so far as to get me to see that I was trying to fix myself by trying to fix Mariah.

  This time she’d really rung my bell. I went back to see Mariah that night, and at one point told her that I didn’t know if it was good for her, good for me, or good for both of us to continue our intimacy. Mariah looked at me, confused, but really didn’t say much. I left early.

  That feeling lasted about two days before my emotions and obsessions and my denial overwhelmed me again. I thought: Life is short. Fuck it. This is what I feel. This is what I’m going to do.

  There really was no time to reflect on it. Everything in my life was moving in fast-forward. That was perfect for me in a business sense, because it fed my machinery beautifully. It’s just the way my brain works. I was trying to turn around the company in one minute. Trying to help Sony buy a movie studio the next. Turning Gloria Estefan into a global superstar the minute after that. Then spending all night at the Woodshop.

  I went off with Mariah without thinking about the po
ssible consequences and repercussions, or the effect that both might have on my children.

  How the hell this happened to the razor-sharp Bronx street kid who would’ve grabbed a buddy in the same situation by the lapels and then slapped him silly—I’ll never know.

  Everything around me was in such sharp focus that it was impossible for me to comprehend that I was making this mistake. Not long after I met Mariah, I saw a unique talent in another woman. This woman did not seek me out with a demo tape. She did not seek me out at all. In fact, at the time she didn’t want to work with us. But as soon as I met her, I knew that I wanted her alongside me riding shotgun.

  This is what happened. As part of an overall strategy to be competitive developing new bands, Columbia was trying to make inroads into the rock and alternative scenes in Los Angeles and Seattle by signing a band called Alice in Chains. But we just couldn’t get a deal done.

  When I asked why, I kept hearing the same name.

  “Well, Michele Anthony…”

  “Michele Anthony says…”

  “Michele Anthony…”

  It got to the point where I wanted to scream: “Who is this Michele Anthony and what is her problem?” The only two things I knew about her were that: (1) Michele Anthony was the daughter of Dee Anthony; and (2) coming up in the business the way I did at the time of the British Invasion, Dee Anthony was like a god to me. That is, if a god measured about five feet five and weighed three hundred pounds.

  Dee was a charismatic street guy from the Bronx who managed Tony Bennett in the early years and later went on to work with some of the great British bands and talent like Jethro Tull, Traffic, and Peter Frampton. He had a larger-than-life persona, so I was naturally curious about his daughter and why she kept refusing to let us sign Alice in Chains. I went to Los Angeles to meet her.