But then he came back stronger than ever—and a lot of that comes from the neighborhood, you know, the background, because you get knocked down a lot. You gotta get up, or you just back up. But Tommy never backed up. He just kept going forward. Because to become a Tommy Mottola, that’s what you have to do.
It had become clear that the new president, Nobuyuki Idei, had no knowledge or practical experience operating the huge Sony company. He most certainly had no understanding of the music, movie, or television divisions. And he definitely had no grasp or even a desire to understand how to manage and treat employees—particularly the executives who were making money for him.
Ohga and Idei came from two different schools of thought, as different as night and day. Even though Norio Ohga lived six thousand miles across the ocean and was culturally different from Steve Ross, there were so many similarities in their styles of developing executives into entrepreneurs. Ohga came from the school of building, developing, and rewarding. He would sit back and smile at success and think: I helped plant this seed, and now it has developed into a flower. It made his garden only more beautiful.
The contrast in Idei was that he had come up through the ranks and was involved in communications, which I guess was a fancy way of saying he was in charge of public relations. Interesting, because he had such a hard time communicating. He came from a Japanese cultural philosophy very much different from that of Morita and Ohga, which was that any successful manager of a particular unit—let’s say, electronics or insurance—could be mixed and matched to go run the music company in Japan or its movie division. He had no sensitivity toward understanding all the intricate and delicate matters that go into managing a highly specialized creative business. And he began to make moves along those lines.
The guy Idei chose to replace Mickey Schulhof, Howard Stringer, also had little knowledge of the music business or the movie business or the electronics business or any real hands-on operational experience running any entertainment businesses. He’d been the head of CBS News—a unit of journalists—before talking his way up to the head of CBS, which he then left to join a faltering television start-up called Tele-TV. But that was very different from signing talent, marketing, merchandising, and turning that talent into global superstars or creating the next piece of hardware that would dominate the world stage. Sir Howard was a very cordial gent, though, the ideal guest at your next cocktail party, because he loved to bloviate. Instead of knighting him in 1999, Queen Elizabeth should have appointed him the Empire’s Toastmaster General. Anyway, I did like him.
Stringer was born and grew up in Wales, immigrated to the United States, was drafted into the Army, and served in Vietnam. The Welshman got into communications and ended up as an executive producer for CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, then talked his way up to the office of CBS News president. He had great stories and could make you feel like he really knew what was going on in show business. If you didn’t know the real deal, you would think Howie was one of the smartest people in the room. Actually, he was perfectly suited for the news division. Sir Howard gave no reason for anyone to question what he really knew, because everybody liked him, so friendly and jovial was he. After moving to the tech television company, he was handpicked by Idei. So now we had two guys at the top of the company who knew nothing about what they were doing, and certainly not the music business. Even worse, they kept getting more power.
As Ohga grew physically weaker and weaker, he became overwhelmed with taking care of his health, and he transferred more and more authority to Idei. In 1998, Idei was named co-CEO. But you could tell Idei was insecure by the way he constantly belittled Stringer in public. Howard would just smile. I remember one important management conference where he introduced Stringer on the dais by saying something like: “And, of course, tonight I brought along my wine steward, Howard Stringer.” It almost seemed like when the boss is not really sure of what he’s doing, the one thing he is sure of is to let the guy underneath him know who is boss.
I just kept a simple view of it all. Do what you know how to do. Try to stay out of the line of fire. And if direction is coming down from the top, do what you are told. I figured the guy who keeps hitting the ball out of the park never gets taken out of the game. Right? And with everything we had in development, I knew there were lots of home runs coming.
Aside from the normal business phone calls I got from Emilio Estefan, he kept calling me to tell me that there was a woman he and Gloria wanted me to meet. I was still caught up in the Mariah fallout, and they were both always there to watch over my emotions.
“Who is she?” I asked the first time he told me.
He said, “She’s a singer and an actress that Gloria and I know from Mexico. Her name is Thalia.”
Thalia was a huge superstar from Mexico City also known across all of Latin America for her telenovela performances and as a singing sensation for all her hit records, and by that point was even the biggest star as far off as the Philippines.
“Oh, no,” I told him. “I’m not going there again. I already did that movie.”
But Emilio just kept insisting. “Look, I think you’re going to like her. Just have a drink with her,” he said. “That’s all. Just a drink.”
Gloria and Emilio were trying to convince Thalia the same way for about a year and a half. “You’re like two drops of water,” Emilio would tell her. “You have the same composition.” But every time they mentioned my name to her, Thalia responded in pretty much the same fashion that I did to Emilio. No, not interested. He’s coming off a celebrity marriage. Divorced. Kids. Don’t want any part of that.
Thalia was in New York for a few days toward the tail end of 1998, and finally, Gloria and Emilio convinced both of us to get together for a drink. So we arranged to meet at one of my favorite restaurants, Scalinatella, which has a dining room set underground, on East Sixty-First Street. I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to have a blind date, and so I had three of my Sony cronies sitting around the table with me just in case it wasn’t comfortable for either Thalia or me right off the bat. Of course, if things were going well, I could ask my friends to leave.
So I was sitting at my table having a martini, and here comes Thalia, walking down the steps, in a white cashmere coat with long, beautiful, curly brownish-blonde hair. I don’t want to go Hollywood on you, but for me it was like an angel coming out of a cloud and walking down the steps. I was sitting there in a black cashmere sweater—what else?—and it was as if the darkness in the restaurant all around me was suddenly filling up with light.
I stood and reached out to her with my hand, but she leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, the customary greeting in Mexico. “Please sit down,” I said. “Let me take your coat.” But I was almost fumbling. Wow. I quickly nodded for the guys to hit the road.
Thalia and I started speaking, but it wasn’t really a conversation because she spoke very little English and my Spanish was barely basic. She was just finishing up acting in a movie in New York that week and had memorized lines phonetically in English without completely understanding what they meant, and she tried to comically insert those lines in what she thought were the right places in our dialogue. But, mostly, the conversation was a lot of facial expressions, hand motions, and broken phrases. We had to use every physical way of communicating that we could think of to try to make ourselves understood. It was beautiful, just beautiful. We may not have had the clearest understanding about the actual words we were hearing, but it was the most passionate, sensual, captivating, and mesmerizing conversation that I ever participated in. The distance between us was a gift from God.
Thalia said she had to go to a wrap party on the film she had just finished. It was her last night in New York.
“Okay,” I said, “so when can I see you again?”
“Well, I have to do a ’novela,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll be filming in Mexico City for six to eight months.”
&
nbsp; “What? You mean I’m not going to see you for maybe eight months?”
“We’ll communicate,” she said. “We’ll figure out a way.”
At least I think that was what she said. So I dropped her off, and sat stunned in my car, thinking, I can’t believe this just happened to me. I immediately dialed Emilio and said, “What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you tell me about this woman sooner?”
“You jerk,” he said. “I’ve been trying to tell you for a year, and you’ve been saying, ‘I don’t want to meet anybody. I don’t want to meet an actress or a singer.’ Whenever I told you about her, you told me, ‘Shut up, forget about it!’ ”
“She’s the greatest woman I’ve ever met,” I said.
“I told you! I told you!”
Talk about a Latin Explosion…
That was the first week of December, and Christmas was right around the corner. So I made a quick run down the street to FAO Schwarz. I searched for a big teddy bear and sent it to her home in Mexico City. You could never go wrong with a teddy bear, right? Even if she doesn’t like you, she’s gonna like the teddy bear.
I sent it with a note that told her I was going to take a Christmas vacation on a yacht I had chartered, that I would be in Saint Barths with my son and daughter, and that I’d call her when I returned to New York. Within a few days, just before I left, a package arrived and I could see it was from Mexico. I got really excited. I opened it and found two gifts: a pair of sunglasses and a terry cloth robe that had my name stitched on the front and into the little loop on the back of the collar. Details, details—something I’m always aware of and take great pride in. There was also a card, and I paused over the note Thalia had written in English. It said, “These glasses are to protect your eyes from the sun and this robe will keep you warm when you get out of the sea.”
Wow! Who would ever think of saying that? Or saying it in that way? It had so much heart and soul, so much caring. Some other chick would have written: “Hey, here’s some stuff to wear on the boat. Merry Christmas.” But that’s the Latin culture, warm and embracing. The words in that note told me a lot. It told me that Thalia’s first instinct was to protect me. And how the hell did she get the monogram and my name on the loop done so quickly?
When I got back to New York, the daily phone calls started. Sometimes we’d fall asleep at the end of our eighteen-hour days while talking to each other. We took photos during our workdays and mailed them back and forth as if we were high school pen pals. The distance, and the language barrier, only intensified our feelings.
Throughout this period of time another Latin Explosion was about to erupt—the musical one. It had been building for a few years and we were working night and day on it, but it really was ignited on one special night: February 24, 1999. That was the night that Ricky Martin appeared onstage at the 41st Grammy Awards.
Ricky had been a performer ever since he was a young boy. He joined a Puerto Rican boy band back in 1984 called Menudo, which was so successful and organized at that point it had its own private plane to tour the world, and it rotated members out when they reached sixteen and their voices changed. Ricky became the group’s most famous member, and after he graduated from the group he moved to Mexico City and began to act in soap operas and plays. Between his raw talent, incredible dance moves, and looks to kill, he had every ingredient to become the Latin Elvis Presley. At the height of his singing career on his Spanish-language albums we started discussions with him about crossing over and making an album in English.
He’d been asked to put together a song for the World Cup, and with help from Desmond Child he came up with “La Copa de la Vida” for the 1998 tournament hosted by France. The song was an instant success all over the world, and the Spanish-language album it appeared on, Vuelve, went straight through the roof everywhere except the United States. That put Ricky’s crossover potential on our radar. Everybody who’d watched the World Cup was already swooning over Ricky. We all began to envision what could happen if Ricky were correctly guided and developed to cross over into English.
There were no apparent obstacles. Ricky had been working in show business since the age of nine, and he was focused and disciplined, especially from the schooling he encountered while in Menudo. He spoke flawless English and was certainly no stranger to success. Vuelve sold ten million albums and was up for a Grammy. We had the idea to break him, then and there, by turning his World Cup theme into the biggest crossover event ever.
We leveraged all of our Sony muscle to get him that slot on the Grammys that year and onto the stage that night. The competition for those slots is intense, and sometimes it can even become bloody. When I think back on that night it strikes me just how much talent Sony Music had in the room. There was Lauryn Hill, who as I mentioned would take home five awards. The Dixie Chicks won two Grammys that evening, creating a tremendous spark and helping Wide Open Spaces sell more CDs in the year after it was released than all the other country groups combined. And, of course, Celine took home two Grammys with her hit song from Titanic, while her albums were honored with two more awards, as well. So we felt entitled to ask the Grammys to showcase a guy who had never put out an album in English. It was a ballsy move, but I was certainly not shy and we knew what it would mean to Ricky’s career.
Ken Ehrlich, the producer of the show, knew how great Ricky was and how great he would be for his show, but he had to get the approval of his obstinate boss, Mike Greene, who liked to say no to everybody just so he could get them to call and beg him to do it. Nice guy. And then there was the rest of the CBS television management and sponsors to contend with. The fact remained that no matter how good Ricky Martin really was, he was still virtually unknown to the American television audience.
So I picked up the phone and called CBS president Les Moonves, as I had done so many times before on behalf of people we believed in, and told him how confident I was that Ricky’s performance would lift the show. Les knew that when I made those calls we would have an army behind them to back them up. He agreed. Ken Ehrlich agreed. Mike Greene capitulated. And we prevailed.
A lot of people think Ricky sang “La Vida Loca” that night. He didn’t. “La Vida Loca” came out on his new English crossover album after this show. The song he sang that night was the one that had given him international notoriety, “La Copa de la Vida.” As a performance piece, it was a lot more dynamic than “La Vida Loca,” and it allowed Ricky to seamlessly alternate between English and Spanish. He knew the power of it. We knew the power of it. Everybody who’d seen it in rehearsal knew the power of it. The unknown, of course, was we didn’t know how strongly the public would react to it.
I was anxious and nervous until the moment Ricky started. But instantly he turned the song into an extravaganza, and a conga line of musicians beating tambourines and drums came down the aisles, making the entire audience feel like it was in the middle of a gigantic fiesta. Ricky absolutely tore the house down. People simply could not believe what they were seeing and hearing. This had not happened on the Grammys or any music variety television show in many years.
Madonna, sitting in the first row, rushed the stage and stood there clapping, yelling and screaming like Ricky’s biggest fan. And then, immediately following his performance, she raced backstage just to meet Ricky. Right on the spot I made a deal for her to sing a duet with him on his upcoming album. That made it official. The explosion had begun.
When Time magazine put Ricky Martin on its cover, we could suddenly make an argument that we could do the same with any one of our great Latin stars. It wasn’t even an argument anymore. The Latin Explosion was already in full bloom. Within the next six months we released albums by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony that sold millions of copies. The explosion was so sudden that few people really understood just how long the fuse had been burning.
Latin sounds had been in my ears and consciousness as a kid walking by the record shops and hearing the rhythms of Tito Puente coming out of apartments in the Bronx
. When I was an eight-year-old trumpet player, one of my solo pieces in the band orchestrations at Iona Grammar School was a song called “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” which was made famous by Perez Prado. As a guitar player at fifteen, I would slap my guitar on the neck and then play chords for that Latin touch. I was nineteen when Frank Sinatra released an entire album of Brazilian rhythms with Antonio Carlos Jobim. Songs like “Tequila” and groups like Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 also had their moments. And before my arrival at Sony, Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson released a song called “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before.” What I was never really conscious of was how all of this was subliminally rolling around in my ears, mind, and senses, and just how much influence it would all have on my future. But the stars were aligned.
We had the foundation and support of the most successful and powerful Latin division in the world—Sony Latin in Miami. And coincidentally, one of the first people I met in 1988 when I entered the company was the man who was doing a brilliant job heading that division, Frank Welzer. After that meeting I embraced that division without the slightest idea that the culture would be such a big part of my life.
We continued to keep Julio Iglesias as a major cornerstone artist after I arrived. Then came Gloria mixing Afro-Cuban rhythms and sounds, and singing amazing lyrics in English to pave the way for all Latinos to cross over. We came up with special packages and CDs for the Latin market, and we would have our biggest superstars like Mariah and Celine record one or two songs in Spanish so we could market and develop them across Latin America and Spain, and allow those audiences to enjoy them in their native language. The crossover was now going both ways, establishing Latino stars in English and having some of our great superstars now singing in Spanish. And it resulted in the sales of millions and millions of albums.
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