Hitmaker

by Tommy Mottola

P. DIDDY (AKA SEAN COMBS)

  When I went to meet Tommy for the first time, I felt like I was meeting the Godfather. One of the things that Tommy and I have in common is our backgrounds. Coming from an inner-city New York background, him coming from an Italian neighborhood, me from a black neighborhood, we’re all trying to make it out. We’re all trying to make a better way.

  One of the things people may not really realize about Tommy Mottola is how hands-on he is. There are a lot of executives that stay up in the ivory tower. They don’t go to the studio. They don’t get their hands dirty. They don’t talk to the producer who doesn’t have a hit yet. But Tommy was always accessible. He was around, always listening to the music, and he was smart enough to ask questions. He understood the importance of melody, the structure of a hit record.

  I think one of his greatest attributes was working with the music in the studio, really cultivating the music, really pushing artists for greatness, and really assisting artists. Sometimes you could tell somebody you want more, and you leave ’em there with the problem. Tommy was able to say that he wanted more, then he would come up with the solution for how to get more.

  CORY ROONEY

  Music executive

  Tommy really knew his instruments. It was amazing to me sometimes. He would say, “You know what this needs? This needs a cello right here. You need this kind of string line.” He’d pick up the phone: “Get somebody to bring this.” And I’m thinking, This is crazy. But by the time it shows up and it starts to take form, I’m thinking, He really knows what he’s doing. Sometimes he would sit at the board and actually mix the records himself. Sometimes he would sit in the studio with us and write melodies and lyrics. He couldn’t take credit for it because he was the chairman of the company, but he would actually sit and write lyrics with us.

  HARVEY WEINSTEIN

  Tommy is a talent magnet. He’s a throwback to the icons in the entertainment industry. In my business, he’d be like an Irving Thalberg or a David O. Selznick, a guy who could make a movie.

  He’s an artist. He can go in and tell a producer what’s wrong with the song. He’s not one of those guys who just says, “Hey, man, thanks a lot for the record, and we’ll market it to the best of our ability.” No, he can go head-to-head with somebody and say, “This is what it’s all about.”

  In our world, those are the guys who created this business. Those who inherit it are something else, but the guys who created our industry are guys like Tommy Mottola.

  Two days later I was sitting in Mickey Schulhof’s new office reviewing all the deal memos and contracts. Within twenty-four hours we got every one of them signed and our company began firing on all twelve cylinders.

  My working arrangement with Mickey was easy and great. He kept it simple. He was not a music guy. So he let me do what I knew how to do. His timing couldn’t have been better. Imagine stepping into that job just as Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion were starting to bloom.

  After everything that had just gone down with Walter, it felt great for everyone to be back to normal. In January 1991, I was sitting in the front row at the American Music Awards. It was a huge night. Gloria Estefan was returning to the stage for the first time since her accident. Just before she appeared, a video had shown the television audience and the crowd at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles footage of the crashed tour bus and of the gurney rolling Gloria toward the ambulance. When it ended a hot single blue spotlight cut through the darkness and focused directly on Gloria center stage. The entire crowd erupted to its feet. As the ovation grew louder and longer, I looked at Emilio sitting next to me, then at ten-year-old Nayib next to him, then at Gloria, and uncontrollable tears came running down my face. One of the most emotional moments in my life came when Gloria began to sing “Coming Out of the Dark.”

  Less than a month later, I was accompanying Mariah to the Grammys. She’d been nominated for five awards. Out of respect for my children, I purposely was not seen much in public with Mariah as my divorce with their mother unfolded. But unfortunately the marriage ended up where it began. It started on the wedding pages of the New York Times and ended up in all the newspapers. Once it was official, I felt freer to be out with Mariah, and the Grammys was our big first step.

  Twice Mariah’s name was called. The first award was for the category that we had really hoped she’d win: Best New Artist. The second time was for the Best Female Pop Vocal with “Vision of Love.” Winning a Grammy on your first album is surreal—like a fairy tale. And as Mariah stepped away from the podium we had already ensured that the fairy tale would continue. There would be no sophomore jinx. Plans were in place to avoid it before there was even a chance that it could hit.

  The first four singles we released from Mariah’s debut album each shot to Number One. And now we were preparing to release the first single from her next album, Emotions, so quickly that people were bound to think it was still from the first album. When they finally realized that it wasn’t, we’d have already whet their appetite to immediately buy her second album. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Exactly what I’d seen Elvis do when I was eight years old. To this day, Mariah is the only artist to ever have her first five singles go to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, and no other solo act—including Elvis—has more Number One singles than Mariah.

  I can only now wonder about the expression on my therapist’s face when she tuned in to the Grammy Awards and saw Mariah thank God for that first Grammy, and then Tommy Mottola for believing in her. Although my therapist was certainly right that I was in denial, she could no longer call me delusional—at least in terms of Mariah’s success. My gut sure had been right about her talent, even though my emotions and the whirlwind got the best of me and made me drop my guard.

  I’d also found reassurance in the bond I saw between Gloria and Emilio, and the commonality that they shared through music. Celine Dion and René Angélil shared a similar connection, and even though they were not publicly linked when I met them, it was easy to see the chemistry.

  I met Celine and René in 1989 as she was making the leap from singing in French to her first album in English—Unison. Celine didn’t really speak much English at the time—just a few words here and there—but she had the voice of an angel, and much more. Her ears are so sharply tuned, and she is such an incredible vocalist, that she could study the phrasing and words phonetically and then sing songs clearly in English even when she didn’t have a full grasp of the language. I remember being in the studio and listening to her sing for the first time “Where Does My Heart Beat Now.” It was stunning. There was no question that Celine was going to be huge.

  She created her own lane and musical style. It was different from those of Whitney and Mariah—more down the middle, more pure. She had an uncannily perfect pitch. In that respect, she might be the best singer I’ve ever heard. There is something in her voice that will always stand up to time, and when I hear Tony Bennett sing today in his late eighties, I sense that Celine’s voice will have the same magic at that point in her life.

  The question was: how do we introduce this special voice to the world? We needed a master plan to launch her. A few months later, a brilliant opportunity came along. Disney had come to us with a big animated film, Beauty and the Beast. We could pick anybody on the label to do the title track. So, of course, I chose Celine, and brought in Walter A. to produce. The song, written by Alan Menken, called for a duet, so we paired Celine with a great singer named Peabo Bryson. There couldn’t have been a better mass-marketing opportunity. Disney was putting tens of millions in advertising and marketing behind the film, and it ended up nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category.

  I remember going to the screening, hearing the title track, and thinking: That’s it. A few weeks later, the song became a hit around the world. It was a beautiful time and the future couldn’t have looked more promising. While all this was going on, we were preparing the release of the great Michael Jackson’s first album in four years.
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  We had so much respect, and cared for Michael Jackson so much, that we bent over backward in 1991 when we at Sony renewed his contract. I can’t say it was the largest recording contract ever offered up to that time as it was reported to be—but it was certainly one of the largest.

  Here’s what you need to know about it because it sets up everything to come. Even though Michael was happy with the final negotiation, he wouldn’t sign the document unless the accompanying press release announced it as a billion-dollar deal. By no means were we paying Michael a billion dollars. But if that was the press release that Michael wanted, we figured out a way to do it for him. Yes, if his albums sold along the lines of Thriller and Bad, a case could be made that the sales of those albums would total a billion dollars. So we were able to spin it in the press in a way that pleased Michael. But if I recall correctly, the actual advance was somewhere around $35 million. Which I guess made it another normal day in the life of Michael Jackson, because he lived in a world of fantasy, where all dreams come true.

  I remember going to meet with Michael at the presidential suite at the Four Seasons. When I walked into his four-thousand-square-foot penthouse, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The suite was filled with life-size, fully clothed mannequins. Twenty-four of them, all in different outfits. It was eerie. Like walking into a wax museum. It spooked me out. I asked Michael what the deal was with the mannequins, and he said, “Oh, I just like them. They’re my friends.” He brought them with him everywhere he went. When I made the mistake of complimenting him on his friends, the next day he sent me two of my own, fully clothed and decked out in their regalia. They went straight into the storage locker.

  Anybody who punctured the balloons that Michael blew up around him was not around Michael Jackson very long. In other words, if you said no to Michael one time because it was the right thing to do, you’d be gone. During the fifteen years of overseeing Michael’s career at Sony, I think he went through at least five managers and different lawyers, not to mention temporary mentoring from Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. I would have to have numerous meetings with Al-Waleed about Michael’s career, as crazy as that sounds, going past two floors of security people at the Plaza Hotel to get to the prince’s suite. There were also meetings with Mohamed Al-Fayed, who owned Harrods and who truly cared for Michael and took care of him many times when he was in need.

  But there was virtually nobody around Michael who could speak truth to him because he was Michael Jackson, King of Pop, and he was writing the checks. He surrounded himself with people who said yes simply to be around him or because they were cashing his checks. Michael, what would you like? Michael, how would you like that? Michael, we can do this. Michael, of course we can do that. Yes, Michael. Yes, Michael. Yes, Michael, yes. That put me in somewhat of a unique position. I was in charge of Sony Music—and Sony was writing his checks. I didn’t confront him very often. But I might have been the only person in the world who was able to say “I don’t think that’s right” to Michael Jackson. From the beginning, part of him resented that, but mostly he respected that.

  In November 1991, Michael released Dangerous. There were two huge singles on it—“Black or White” and “Remember the Time”—and it would be hard for anybody to call that album less than a colossal success. Dangerous ultimately sold 32 million units. But everyone who heard the record at Sony knew that it was not going to have the same impact as Thriller or Bad. When it came to sales numbers, something was always off balance with Michael—and it’s easy to see why. All you have to do is look at his trajectory from his days with the Jackson 5 through the moonwalk to “We Are the World.” The world had never seen a performer quite like him ever before. But it was Thriller that really separated him from even himself. Not only did the album win a record-breaking eight Grammys, it also became the largest-selling album of all time. The accompanying videos and the theatrics of the world tour were astonishing. I knew Thriller was going to be huge the instant I heard it, but nobody had any idea that it would go on to sell 100 million. Nobody! Anybody who tells you that he or anyone else predicted that is full of crap!

  As we watched the meteoric rise of this album from the sidelines, we saw how stunned executives were about the reaction and the incredible sales that snowballed day after day. I arrived at CBS/Sony shortly after his next album came out. Bad sold 45 million units. Forty-five million is an insane number. And yet, it was a frightening figure to Michael. “You’ve got to turn this around,” he’d tell me, “so it can sell more than Thriller.” It was an unrealistic situation to be in. But there was nothing about Michael Jackson or his universe that was realistic, and he put his expectations on the back of the company.

  When Dangerous came out four years after Bad, there was nothing I could do other than to tell Michael that I had sent out a promotional army to make way for his album, and that he had to look at the numbers realistically. There was not another album out there selling 32 million units. Not even close! So you can see how differently our views were of the same numbers from the start.

  Anybody would have signed Michael Jackson for an enormous amount of money. He was arguably the biggest star in the world in any category of entertainment, and he was making the company money hand over fist. So you just had to deal with unrealistic requests when one of his managers would come in and ask for millions more for short films—MJ never called them “videos”—and more displays in music stores and more ads on television. More, more, more, more, more…

  I just had to deal with it when Michael would wake me at three in the morning and ask me to commit to selling more than a hundred million. I’m not talking about one 3 a.m. phone call. I’m talking about dozens. And that doesn’t count the 3 a.m. phone calls that Dave Glew was getting from him. But it was okay. I understood the fear and insecurity, having lived with the emotions of so many artists right from the start.

  You just dealt with it, even when reports surfaced of him trying to buy the Elephant Man’s bones and living with his pet monkey, Bubbles, not to mention the rumors of sleepovers with young boys. You just dealt with it. You managed it. You managed it the best you could day in and day out. It was clear that the rumors and his strange behavior were hurting his popularity. The calls would come in from Toyko. “Are these things true? Is everything all right?” All I could say was, “As far as the music goes, everything is okay. We’re managing it.”

  But Michael was very right about one thing. As high as those numbers were, and as profitable as they were for the company, they were shrinking.

  Mariah was now perfectly positioned. She was a blend of soulful essence and pop hits, which was exactly the appeal that Berry Gordy used when he had black artists sing great pop songs to put Motown on the map.

  Everything in her short career had unfolded as if it had been perfectly choreographed. The debut on Arsenio. The marketing that helped push sales of her first album past 30 million units. The two Grammys. The release of the single “Emotions” months before it came out on her second album—which built a groundswell of anticipation and allowed her to avoid the sophomore jinx.

  We wanted her to stay in the studio just a little longer after the Emotions album was released to write some more hits since she was on such a roll. It was not just a matter of selling CDs. I’m a creator and a builder, and I’ve seen these situations come and go so many times. When an artist comes along and is so prolific, it’s always critical to take advantage of that creative energy and document as much of it as possible. On top of that, we wanted to continue to finish the rock-solid foundation of her career that had been meticulously blueprinted. If we got it right, that foundation would always support her no matter what musical styles or changes she would undertake or directions she would want to go in.

  I explained that this foundation would give her a rare opportunity. “Look, if you keep putting out all this diverse music and have hits,” I told her, “you’ll have the opportunity to become iconic like Barbra Streisand.” I explained that
if Barbra wanted to do a Broadway album or an album produced by the Bee Gees, she had the latitude to do so at any point in her career. “If you can get to that point,” I told Mariah, “everything you do will be a new plateau.” On top of that, she would have the benefit of a more diverse audience: kids, black and white, moms and adults. Quite simply, the career we were trying to build would allow her to have it all.

  But Mariah felt that the workload wasn’t giving her the time to go out and celebrate her success. Looking back on it, this was totally understandable. She was twenty years old and never really had a childhood to begin with, not to mention money or success. She was a perfectionist in the studio, dissecting and correcting every note if she had to, and she’d redo any line or word if it was not to her liking. When she threw herself into her music there was no holding back or anything left afterward. It was grueling, and I understood where she was coming from. I loved and respected her, and I supported all of her dreams and desires. But I had also seen dozens and dozens of times how instant success had unraveled the lives and careers of so many other artists. All the classic stories you’ve heard about and all the ones that you haven’t. The process is so demanding, so delusional, so surreal, and you live in such a bubble, that unless you walk a fine line and have people around you to help keep you grounded, there’s no possible way to make it through. I don’t care who you are. That overwhelming force will get you. You can’t argue with history—and history repeats itself over and over.

  Having seen it all, my feeling was that there’d be plenty of time for Mariah to celebrate just a little ways down the road. I’m not talking ten years, just a few. I encouraged her to stay focused on the big picture. Those suggestions began to form very tiny cracks between us. In the beginning they were unnoticeable, though, because for us in so many other ways this was the best of times.