We also forged major corporate alliances around the world, especially one with Pepsi, which in tandem with Sony worked to market music for the World Cup. Obviously this worked out great for Pepsi, which is served in Latino households much more than Coke. People inside our company got motivated and were constantly coming up with new ideas, always pushing, pushing, pushing, for techniques that were outside the box. Our vice president of promotion at the Columbia label, Jerry Blair, sparked many of the strategies early on for Ricky Martin. So many years of effort and a lit fuse seemed to converge all at once.
That slow fuse led to the Latin Explosion, but what I didn’t know was that I would eventually find my soul mate in a woman from Mexico.
The fuse to Thalia didn’t burn quite as long and slowly, even though the distance between us gave it a drawn-out feeling. Thalia occasionally got weekends off while shooting her telenovela, Rosalinda, and she would come to Miami where we would spend a couple of glorious days together. It was a beautiful way to fall in love and build a bond that would last forever.
Thalia was twenty-eight at the time. Her mother and all four of her sisters married men who were a generation older. And she had grown up in an area of Mexico City that had a feel of the Bronx. Emilio was absolutely right. There were so many similarities.
After months of eighteen-hour workdays on the set, Thalia was at the point of exhaustion, and as soon as the telenovela was done she came to visit me in New York for “a couple of weeks.” I was putting the finishing touches on the renovation of an old barn in Sag Harbor that Billy Joel had taken me to and told me would make an incredible house. I went to JFK Airport to pick up Thalia and saw her enter customs with nine suitcases and her dog.
The guy who cleared her through customs whispered to me, “Listen, my wife is from out of the country. She showed up one day like this and never went back home.” He said it to me as if he was trying to warn me, but it was music to my ears. I had a big smile on my face, because that was exactly what I was hoping for.
The barn became a beautiful home and it was quite special. It overlooked the harbor and the marina and reminded me a little of south France, especially at sunrise and sunset when the light hit the water.
Thalia walked through the front door, put her suitcases down, and took a deep breath. All of a sudden she had this relaxed look on her face that said: I feel like I’m home. She had worked so hard for so many years, starting at the age of seven. When I say she was on the brink of exhaustion, I’m not kidding—her doctor in Mexico had ordered her to take off one whole year.
On the third day after she arrived I was up before 5 a.m. I went out to a sitting room in my office at the top of the house and had a spectacular 360-degree view of the harbor. Shortly after, Thalia came in to find me staring out at the sunrise. There was a stunning purple light that I’d never seen on any color palette. What a gift. We couldn’t believe it. We felt like it had been made just for us. The greatest painter in the world would never have been able to capture this scene on canvas. In that moment, I was no longer moving at a thousand miles an hour. I felt very still and calm, and we held each other closely in that stillness.
I really began to feel that this was where God intended me to be—together with her. Our relationship just kept getting closer and closer, and we began to think and talk more seriously about our future.
One day in the middle of work I decided to skip lunch to meet a guy who was not bringing me a new recording artist but instead bringing me beautiful diamond engagement rings that I would consider for Thalia. I found the exact one that I thought she’d love. But I knew I had to wait for just the right time to give it to her. In fact, it took me three months to sense that the right moment had arrived.
The moment came one weekend when we were visiting Miami and staying in Emilio and Gloria’s guesthouse on Star Island. Thalia’s mother and sister had also flown in. We were getting ready to go out to dinner with family and friends.
There was a beautiful Miami sunset over the water, so Thalia and I walked to the dock to watch it. We kissed, and then Thalia said, “This is such a beautiful moment.” Of course, I tried to stay focused, but my mind was on fast-forward, screaming: This is it! This is it!
“Wait here,” I said. “Wait here.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She looked at me in dismay, but I was already gone.
I ran inside at full speed, up the steps to our room, pulled the black ring box from its hiding place, ran back down the stairs, and sprinted back outside to the dock. I was out of breath when I arrived. I looked at her ears and touched them gently.
“You always wanted beautiful earrings,” I said. “So I wanted to get you these.” It worked. She had no idea what was to come.
She opened the box and saw this beautiful diamond engagement ring and started crying, hugging and screaming so loud that her mother and sister came running out of the house, and then everybody was around us, hugging and yelling and screaming.
Another fiesta had begun.
For the first time in my life I began to think everything was coming together. My personal life could not have been better at home, and Sony Music was delivering record profits each year. But there were smoke signals and warning signs on the horizon.
Allen Grubman, my daily dose of reality, sent up the first red flag. Allen had gotten a call from Sir Howard Stringer, and he repeated exactly what Sir Howard had told him. “You know, I went to the Grammys this weekend and I didn’t feel like I was taken care of the right way by the music company,” Stringer complained to him. “I went to the after party and I didn’t feel like I was part of it.”
“Allen,” I said, “what are you talking about? He was there. We got him the right seats. What’s the problem?”
What Stringer was really trying to say was he wanted even better seats at the event, and he wanted to be sitting next to me at the after party while I was conversing with the artists.
Looking back on it, it certainly would’ve been easy to make him feel more comfortable. So I have to take full responsibility for that. But after Idei had forced Mickey to leave, all of us at Sony Music had an uneasy feeling about getting too close to the corporate people. And so it seemed wiser to keep Stringer at a cordial distance. Sony’s film company, on the other hand, was trying to recover from its devastating debacle, and Stringer’s newly appointed executives in Hollywood went out of their way to roll out the red carpet for their new boss. So Sir Howard had a very stark comparison.
I also began to feel that when I went out of my way to make Sir Howard feel comfortable my hospitality turned against me. I remember inviting him to my home in Westchester for a Christmas party one year along with a lot of friends, some of the biggest stars on the label and some very well-known actors. Mind you, it was a Christmas party, but this was work for me. Part of my job was continuing to nurture the relationships we had with the artists and the entertainment community. It was part of how I did business day-to-day, part of how I got things done. The following Monday morning, Grubman got a call from Sir Howard, who was saying, “Wow, Allen, Tommy’s really living it up.”
Of course, it was not meant to be a compliment. Underneath the comment was a reference to many disparities. Perhaps it was uncomfortable for him to see me so close to all the celebrities in my house, when he was supposed to be the corporate king. And, of course, with him being new to the job, there was a disparity in our compensations. I was compensated and incentivized based on the company’s sales and results, and Sony Music had grown from one billion dollars in 1988 to almost seven billion in 1997. When Celine Dion alone sold a billion dollars’ worth of music, everybody on the team who was responsible for the planning and marketing was justifiably rewarded. That was the way Norio Ohga managed, and that was the way Steve Ross took care of Ahmet, Mo, and Geffen.
But Stringer was certainly no Steve Ross, nor was he a visionary like Norio Ohga. I believe my success, the success of Sony Music, and my personal lifestyle created tremendous resentm
ent. What’s more, I believe that even if I were serving him high tea and scones at 4 p.m. in his office, he still would have had that resentment. But make no mistake about it, I take full responsibility for this. I certainly could have and should have done a much better job of puckering up. But my Sony team was even more wary of corporate intervention than I was. So we politely tried to protect our turf. After all, we were pouring billions of dollars of profits into the corporate coffers of Sony Tokyo. And I had taken Sony Music into the number one spot worldwide. That should count for something, right?
Separately, sparks were starting on the Internet that would eventually lead to a bonfire, and warnings to all of us at Sony and the industry were coming from Al Smith, who was the director of our new technologies group and had been instrumental in the construction and operation of Sony Studios. Smith had been alongside me from the early years at Champion, and I had complete faith in him—although his message was hard to fathom.
Al had a son who, at the time, was a student at Carnegie Mellon, and so he was not only on the cutting edge of technology, but he knew how kids were using it. He’d tell me that students were downloading graphics and sharing them with each other from one college to the next. And that wasn’t all—they were sharing their music, too.
This was well before the file-sharing site Napster became popular. While jumping around bulletin boards at the corners of the Web, Al noticed a connection between porn—which has traditionally been at the cutting edge of technology—and music. A lot of times sites advertising porn would offer music. And, oddly, some sites advertising free music were offering porn. In either case, all anyone had to do was simply download the music. The bottom line was that there was no bottom line in this for us. Music was being offered for free over the Internet, and Smith immediately sensed where this could lead. It seemed like he was overreacting, though. He would go so far as to tell me that we were in the buggy-whip business and could soon be obsolete. This was hard for anyone in the entire music industry to comprehend. I was looking at sales numbers skyrocketing, and at the same time he’s telling me the company is soon going to be obsolete?
All of us, the entire industry, viewed this as a mosquito at first, just a mosquito buzzing around our ears. We all thought it was just another form of counterfeiting. There was another pirate on deck. Okay, I said, let’s figure out a way to get rid of the pirate. But it’s hard to shoot an invisible pirate. We might as well have been aiming at a ghost.
None of us could believe that at the end of the day, consumers wouldn’t want to buy music the way they had for the last fifty years. The experience of pulling a freshly pressed piece of vinyl out of a record jacket—which transitioned to looking at a beautiful jewel box and CD—and browsing in the record stores was culturally part of the whole experience.
Sony Music was enjoying some of its most successful sales when a revolutionary peer-to-peer file-sharing site appeared next. As soon as Al Smith saw Napster, he knew it wasn’t a mosquito buzzing around anybody’s ear anymore. He saw it as an elephant about to put its foot on our chest. We all picked our heads up and started to pay attention.
Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker. When Parker was seven, his father had taught him how to program an Atari. As a teenager, he hacked into a Fortune 500 company and attracted the attention of the FBI. Now, he had helped create a system that basically offered an ever-expanding library of songs that anybody could easily download. Of course, it was not legal. It was done without paying any royalties to the artists or the composers. But the people doing the downloading didn’t seem to care. They were just sitting in their rooms. Napster was still in its infancy, and it didn’t make much of a dent in our numbers at first. So we took what seemed like the right approach. We instructed Al Smith and his new technologies group to deal with it, and to reach out to all the other record companies in the industry to see if there were some joint solutions that could be helpful and productive. We also asked him to check with Sony Tokyo and their R & D division to see if we could create a new technology that protected our product and could become a source of income for us.
This, we would come to find out, was much easier said than done.
From early on, Thalia’s childhood dream was to be married in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. So when the discussion of our wedding came up, she told me that was where she had hoped to one day be wed.
I just looked into her eyes and said, “Okay, no problem.”
I wasn’t sure how to infiltrate the archdiocese, so I enlisted the help of two friends to make some introductions. One was New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir, and the other was John O’Neill, who was in charge of the FBI’s New York office and one of its top experts in counterterrorism. Both of them had an excellent relationship with the cardinal, and they set up a meeting for me with Msgr. Anthony Dalla Villa, another Italian from 187th Street in the Bronx. As soon as I sat down with the monsignor I felt like I was back home again. What an amazing and beautiful man. I told him how I’d once been an altar boy, and he loved it. Not that there was any kind of halo over my head, but he was happy that I wanted to come back to the church. I discussed with him my strong feelings for Thalia, and how she had left her home and family in Mexico City to be married and start a family with me, and I told him I wanted to be able to give her the wedding of her dreams at Saint Patrick’s.
Dalla Villa looked me in the eye and said: “Tommy, we’ve got one very, very, very, very big problem. You’ve already been married in a Jewish ceremony and your second wedding was at an Episcopal church. Under Catholic law, we can’t marry you, and you can’t be married here, unless your previous two marriages are annulled.”
“Okay,” I said, “no problem. So let’s get them annulled.”
Which led to the famous David Geffen wisecrack: “Every time Tommy gets married, he converts.”
Now I had come full circle. There were several clandestine meetings and a couple of ceremonies at the church—you know how mysterious the Catholic Church is. And then a message was sent to me that it would be appropriate to make a serious contribution. So I took care of all the business at hand, and there I was, back where I’d started.
Thalia and I began to make all of our wedding plans and focus on logistics. The administration office at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral had only one date available before the end of the year 2000—and that was December 2. My mind started reeling. Oh, boy, I thought, Christmastime, on a Saturday night, lots of crazy traffic but also freezing cold. But my brain quickly switched to the thought of how festive and beautiful it would be, taking place almost directly across the street from the majestic Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. It would almost feel like it had been lit that night for us. So, with Thalia’s approval, I took the date with the church, and we began searching for the ultimate location for our reception. There was a beautiful building that was an old bank downtown, and it was just about to open. Back then it was called the Regent Wall Street. We took a tour, and we both felt that it was very, very special. Done. And then I knew I had to pull another rabbit out of my hat when it came to the entertainment.
We couldn’t have just another lame wedding band, right? So I made a call to one of Thalia’s favorite artists, and my longtime friend, Donna Summer.
“Donna,” I said, “Thalia loves you. She loves every one of your songs. You’re the only person I would ask to do this because you’re the only person I know who can turn this reception into a party. You gotta do me this favor. Would you please come and sing at my wedding?”
Of course, I offered to pay her, but before I could get those words out of my mouth, Donna stopped me and said, “This will be my pleasure, and it’ll be my gift to you and Thalia.” I kept it a secret. Just as Thalia kept her wedding gown a secret from me. She worked for months on it with the famous Latin designer Mitzi, and I was not allowed to know anything about it until the moment she walked down the aisle.
The night before our wedding, I went to visit Tha
lia in her suite at the Mark Hotel. I was so nervous. I wanted everything to be perfect. As I anxiously began talking about the day to come, Thalia grabbed my hand and said, “Stop. Why don’t we pray? It will be good for us.”
So we knelt down on the bedroom floor and held hands, and there was so much intensity and clarity in that moment that tears filled my eyes, and hers, too. My freight-train brain finally stopped. Cold. That room was filled with the understanding of everything that I had to be grateful for with this beautiful woman who was holding my hand. Together we simply asked for God’s blessing as we were about to begin our new journey together. There were no guests, no custom-made outfits, no musicians, no worries about traffic in front of the cathedral, no concerns about the press and how everything would read; it was just a very pure moment in which the two of us asked a greater power to help us find our way together for the rest of our lives. To this day, Thalia will tell you that was the moment when she felt that we were married.
Everything else was icing on the cake.
Sadly, my parents were getting on in years, and they had moved into an assisted-living facility. Getting them out of their living quarters in the facility and to dinner was a stressful event in itself, and it most certainly would have been overwhelmingly difficult to get them to Saint Patrick’s, and then to the reception. Finally, finally, I had gotten it right. And now, the two people whom I loved more than anyone and had raised me so wonderfully could not get to the event. The good news was they had met Thalia quite a few times, and I could see in their expressions how happy they were for me. And my two children, Michael and Sarah, filled in for my parents and were at my side as I walked into the church that day.
It’s usually the parent who gives the children as many chances as they need in life to find the right path. But now I was asking my children for yet another chance. They’d been so hurt and bruised by my divorce with their mother, and negatively impacted by my marriage to Mariah. I’ll carry that pain with me for the rest of my life. But they, too, had gotten a chance to spend time with Thalia and to see how caring, warm, and welcoming she was. Thalia loved family, and they were my family, so she loved them. I will never be able to describe how proud and happy I was when Michael and Sarah accompanied me into that church that day.
Hitmaker Page 28