by Pat Benatar
But while there was no doubt that we’d been on the road too much, it was the confusion at the label that really sank the record and the tour. Chrysalis was in transition; they didn’t focus on marketing and promoting the record as much as they should have or as much as they had with past records. This combination proved fatal to the album and the tour.
Of course we didn’t realize this until it was too late, and we started off the tour feeling as confident as ever. At first we simply kicked back and had a great time with Haley on the road. She loved it—and the “house-bus” was her favorite part. She decorated her bunk and was the little queen with an extended family totaling nearly forty people. Her parents and godparents were with her every day. Before she was born, I’d sleep until one P.M. when we were on the road, usually because I’d been up ’til four A.M. the previous night. Now, we were up and out the door first thing in the morning, always looking for ways to entertain an energetic three-year-old. Up until this point, I’d led a pretty insulated and reclusive life, but with Haley we had lots of visits to museums, parks, kid movies—even the dreaded mall.
Though only three, Haley was an avid shopper, and I found myself traipsing through places like the Mall of America with a huge African American bodyguard and a three-year-old decked out in a Disney Princess costume (complete with tiara and “sparkle shoes”) and trying to blend in. Women would stop us, oblivious to me, but dazzled by the child and say, “Oh! Isn’t she adorable? Is it her birthday?”
I’d smile and say, “Yes…. Yes it is,” and then I’d get the hell out of there.
We spent many days teaching Haley how to swim in pools across America. Spyder taught her how to play baseball in the artist’s parking lot of Pine Knob Music Theater outside of Detroit. Eventually Haley became such an experienced traveler that she would walk into our hotel suite, go straight to the phone and say, “Mommy, I’m going to call room service and see if they have crème brûlée.” She was incredibly precocious and sweet, and we adored her.
While all this was fun for us, it was not exactly the rock star life that most people imagined. When I was plugging the new record, I went on Howard Stern, who was in L.A. promoting his new radio show. I had met Howard years back in New York before he became the shock jock he is today. I did my interview first; we were talking about how normal my life was, considering my profession. You know, no trips to rehab, actually married to my daughter’s father—the usual. Between takes we talked about having kids, and he asked me where he could get a Disney princess costume for his little girl while he was in L.A.
Also on the show was Robin Leach, who was the host of the show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and when Howard started interviewing Robin, Robin launched into his stable of great stories about the excesses of the wealthy. When Robin’s aristocratic British voice came to a break, Howard chimed in: “Robin, you should have Pat on the show sometime.”
Robin deadpanned, “She just spent twenty minutes telling you how boring she is. Why would I do that?” All I could do was laugh, but I had to admit, the man had a point.
But as much fun as we were having, the actual shows themselves became increasingly lackluster. Venues were undersold; the crowds weren’t showing up in the same numbers. “All Fired Up” was flying up the charts, but even that wasn’t enough to stop the tour’s break-neck downward spiral. Promoters began panicking, and before long, our booking agents for the tour were suggesting that we cancel the tour and cut our losses before there was any more bloodletting. We had to protect our relationship with the promoters for future touring. Spyder and I were reeling; we immediately went into survival mode. Our first priority was salvaging everything we could. We’d put our heart, soul, and blood into this for the last nine years. After all the shit and sacrifices we’d made in our personal life there was no way we were going to sit idly as it all went up in flames.
We met with our attorneys and business manager and proceeded with triage. Besides all the damage that had been done to our reputation, there was one truly terrible question to face: we had a crew of forty people who depended on us for their livelihood and if we canceled the tour, what would happen to all of them? The very thing that they’d used to manipulate me on the Seven the Hard Way tour was about to come to pass. I was sick. We had to do the right thing. Some of these people had been with us since the beginning. Everyone was paid a severance and released from their obligation to us so that they could work elsewhere.
In the aftermath, I was furious. How had no one seen this coming? The label alone was not to blame. What had our side been doing? Where were our people? How had things gotten so bad? It seemed incredible that everyone was so complacent and hesitant to take a proactive approach to protect all of our interests. We were rife with questions and had very few answers.
GETTING OUR FIRST TASTE of real failure was eye-opening, but we didn’t come back from the Wide Awake tour to feel sorry for ourselves. We were eager to pick ourselves up and figure out where we’d go from there. As luck would have it, a peculiar chain of events led to a dramatic turn that would reshape our entire career and impact the rest of our lives.
It all began shortly after we returned home from our aborted tour for Wide Awake, when our attorney, Owen Epstein, died of a brain tumor. Newman and Owen had been best friends, and for years he’d represented Newman with the club and many of his comedy acts. Our A&R guy, Buzzard, was close with Owen as well. This strange triangle was a little too cozy for comfort, and it inevitably created a conflict of interest for Newman and Owen. Where did their allegiance lie—with us or the label? For years, we’d looked the other way, but the combination of the Wide Awake disaster and Owen’s death meant that we had new incentive to take hold of the situation.
After Owen died, I retained new counsel, a man named Gerry Margolis who had been Spyder’s original attorney for a short time in the very beginning, and the first thing Gerry did was clean house. He examined all of our current contracts and associations, and as we sorted through the documents, it immediately became clear that we had major problems with how our management had been handling things. He sat me down and said it simply and clearly: “The bad news is that there are a lot of problems here. The good news is that they are all fixable.”
And then he laid it out for me in no uncertain terms: there were large-scale issues with how our affairs were being handled. For a couple years some things had been going on that we hadn’t bothered to take control of; now all that had to change. These problems began with Newman but they didn’t end there. Because money was always an issue and Newman was pretty overwhelmed with his various responsibilities to us as well as the club, he eventually took on a partner, a guy named Richard Fields.
Appropriately, this had all started around the time we made Get Nervous. At first Fields didn’t actually work with us—he worked with Newman. Fields’s job was to help Newman run the business of the club and the comedians that Newman managed, and we were adamant that it stay that way. But Fields wasn’t content doing that. All the fun stuff was happening in our world, and slowly he began to infiltrate it. That was when we learned one of the ugly axioms of the entertainment business: if someone works directly with your manager, they are also working with you. Don’t dream that they’re not.
Spyder and I protested his involvement. We didn’t want this guy to just waltz in after all of us had worked so hard together to achieve what we had. But Fields was crafty, making us feel at ease and showing us how much this would help Rick out. Little by little he worked his way in, and we started to see the impact here and there. When we filmed an HBO special, his name appeared as a producer. When decisions were made, he was always there. And he seemed to think he was a Rockefeller. The next thing I knew, our most trusted business manager had been let go. Fields became more involved in everything. Suddenly we had Dom Pérignon in the dressing room. We had fleets of limos taking us around town. We were staying at the St. Regis. We were encouraged to spend money as well. At Fields’s suggestion I once bought our
attorney Owen a DeLorean, as compensation for doing such a good job on the renegotiation of our record contract. Money was being pissed away moment by moment.
Millions of dollars were coming in the door, and a lot of it was going out for no good reason. We weren’t completely oblivious and we didn’t go broke, but we weren’t in control as much as we needed to be because everything was channeled through my management. I kept feeling like something was very wrong, that what had basically become a show-business empire was in danger of going in the dumper. The money we got from our writing, for example, we protected. But there was money coming in that we couldn’t even track. My management even took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on me, using power of attorney. Apparently this was not illegal, but crazy, nonetheless.
There were other reasons that some of this maneuvering slid past us at first. Fame brought more than money in the door. For a while I had a Winnebago full of FBI agents protecting me from a stalker. Out of the blue one day, some crazy guy’s parents contacted our office. It seemed their son had just been released from a mental hospital in Georgia because of some loophole that prevented the hospital from keeping him. During his time there he’d written threatening letters saying that he was the real Neil Giraldo and that Spyder was an imposter living in his home with his wife and child. The letters claimed he was going to California to set it all straight, even if it meant killing Spyder. Now, I’ve been around weird people all my life, but the crazies, they’re scary. So the FBI was brought in and they lived in our driveway, in a Winnebago, for six months. They finally caught the guy; he’d made it all the way to Denver.
In the end, between the fleets of limos and expensive hotel suites, I would guess that the new partner cost us about half a million dollars. We probably wouldn’t have ever discovered the full extent of what was going on if it hadn’t been for Owen’s death.
As Gerry laid everything out for me, I felt like I’d come out from inside a cave. This had all been happening under our noses. We took a serious look around us, and it wasn’t pretty. With the exception of everything surrounding Wide Awake, the last few years had been incredibly good to us professionally and financially, but the rate at which everything had unfolded caused us to commit to things without fully understanding what we were getting ourselves into and what the consequences might be. The music business is littered with these situations.
If I was going to be the mother I wanted to be, I needed to be protective. I began to see the future in terms of taking care of a family, of providing for a family’s future. All of a sudden it wasn’t our money, it was for our daughter, and that realization helped me to see I didn’t have to be so nice about things anymore. If I questioned what people were doing, I wasn’t being a selfish pig. I was looking out for my child. I became a viper. I ended up marching in and saying, “What the hell do you people think you’ve been doing? I want an accounting. I want to know where every dime is. And if you don’t know where it is, you better be able to explain why.”
It was like day and night. I’d drawn a line in the sand. I called each and every asshole on the carpet and started heads rolling. People got fired. People got scared off. People realized that we were done bank-rolling whatever they wanted. It was a beautiful thing to see.
While it felt good to take control, in reality this turn brought about one of the saddest points in my professional career. All of the aggravating and tedious experiences we’d been through with the label paled in comparison to what it felt like when we finally had to confront Newman about what had been going on. Newman was one of my oldest friends, going back even farther than Spyder. From the first moment that I stepped off the stage at Catch, he’d been there, listening to my crazy ideas and helping me make them realities. Even when he wasn’t sure he agreed or understood what I was talking about, he’d cheered me on. He was my confidante, my manager, and my friend.
Even today, I don’t really know what happened, and I’m not sure I want to. Somewhere, as things progressed, boundaries became blurred, ethics were pushed aside. People justified their actions and codes of conduct were relaxed in the name of compromise. Being forced to see it all in the daylight hurt immensely. Newman didn’t do anything out of malice; that much I knew for sure. His intentions were good and his heart was always in the right place, but he was in the horrible position of keeping the peace between all the parties. Something had to give, and unfortunately that something turned out to be us.
To some extent, I think he and I were both naïve and trusting, and people took advantage of that. I took full responsibility for my part in all of this, but I held everyone else accountable as well. Newman had allowed Richard Fields to play far too prominent a role in our affairs. Fields’s actions may have hurt us, but they destroyed Newman.
We parted ways “amicably.” It broke our hearts, because Newman was a friend, but for both our sakes, we had to sever the old tie. It was 1988, and I’d been with him for over ten years. Now for the first time in my professional career, I didn’t have a manager.
As if that weren’t a sea change in itself, there was still one surprise waiting for us. As big as Gerry’s discovery about our managerial problems had been, it was not the most shocking thing that he had uncovered when he went through Owen’s paperwork. Rustling through the reams of contracts and decade-old documents, he made the most important finding of all: our contract with Chrysalis was no longer legally binding.
It seemed that under California law, a person could not legally be bound to a personal service contract for more than seven years. Though the original document was signed in New York, which didn’t have that law, when we had renegotiated our contract with them in 1980, it was done in California, so the law applied. It was now 1988, meaning that more than seven years had elapsed. They had been so caught up with everything happening in their company and focused on pushing us back into the studio that they hadn’t realized their mistake until we brought it to their attention. Just like that, we could walk—no lawsuit, no lawyers. We simply could walk away with no repercussions. It was crystal clear; we were free.
CHAPTER NINE
ALMOST OUT
THE NEWS THAT WE were no longer obligated to Chrysalis came as a complete shock. We’d been waiting for this moment for so long, we almost didn’t know what to do with it. But as monumental as it was, it was almost overshadowed by another, equally dramatic development.
Unbeknownst to us, while we’d been on our problematic tour for Wide Awake, Chris Wright had been busy laying the groundwork for a deal that would give the international record giant EMI full control of the U.S. division of Chrysalis, with Chrysalis selling 50 percent of the company to EMI/Capitol. Chris never discussed his plans with anyone from our camp, and we didn’t know what was happening until it already had. When the news was announced, we were in disbelief. As bad as things had been, after ten years of being with one company, we were being sold to a group of strangers.
At this point, we were without a manager, and while it was extremely liberating, it was a little unnerving as well. We weren’t set up to take care of the huge responsibility of running our careers. We went on the hunt, interviewing several people for the job and ultimately deciding on Danny Goldberg. Danny was well respected in the industry and had an eclectic roster of successful artists such as Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, and the Allman Brothers. He was a talented, decent man, which was crucial because he had a challenging job ahead of him: fixing the mess we were in and restoring our status.
With Danny signed on, we all went to work repairing the damage that had been done. The first order of business was straightening out our relationship with the record company, and we went in with every intention of crucifying them. As free agents we were in a position to decide if we even wanted a relationship with them anymore. We went with a hard line: If we decided to work with them, we’d choose the kind of record we were going to make, and it would occur under the conditions and terms that we dictated. It was a very big “if.” It was unfortunate, b
ut they were going to pay for the sins of their predecessors.
Once the deal was finalized, the two new presidents—Joe Kiener, who was the former vice president of A&R and marketing for Adidas, and Jim Fifield, who was with EMI—came to L.A. to meet with us. The company was “under new management” and they wanted to show us this by having our first face-to-face sit-down. Right away, it was clear Kiener and Fifield were both affable, decent people—a far cry from the people we had grown so used to dealing with. These new executives were actually gracious and amiable people, but they clearly had no idea about our history with the label. They were completely unaware of how contentious things had been and the hell we’d been put through. Chris Wright hadn’t bothered to fill them in on our turbulent relationship. Neither of them knew about the discovery Gerry had made about our contracts. They had signed on to Chrysalis thinking that they were getting us along with the company, and I was all too happy to tell them this was not the case.
When we finally got down to business, I was incredibly blunt. I told them in no uncertain terms that we did not owe them another record, and that if we decided to do anything with them in the future, it would be on our terms. We were free to dictate everything that we wanted. They were not going to tell us how to make records.
They were stunned. Not surprisingly, they had no idea our contract was up. They’d assumed we were locked in and were astonished to learn we were no longer under contract. While our last two albums had not measured up to our previous sales and Chrysalis had recently hit it big with Sinéad O’Connor, we still had a history as one of the original artists on the roster. We were no longer the lead artist, but we had been responsible for much of the earlier success that had helped build the label into what it was.