The first time I saw her in person, I was with my attorney—we were working out some parts of the job offer, and they were giving me a tour of the studio. I was twenty-nine, but I was the wide-eyed kid: “Wow, this is a New York radio station.” Carol waved at me from behind the glass. I didn’t realize who it was at first—but I felt good about the fact that I’d be following her on the air every night. She was stunning. She had black hair and green eyes, and big white teeth, and perfect skin. She told me later that when she waved at me, she said, “I think that’s the guy I’m gonna marry.”
WPLJ was the number one rock station in the number one market in the country. There are jocks who work their entire careers and never make it to that level. I was in radio basically four years, and it happened. Living in New York changed everything for me—it felt like home, and it felt like I’d hit the big time.
I started at WPLJ in the summer of 1980. Radio stations take on the personalities of the program director, and the guy who was running WPLJ was an uptight sphincter muscle. But Carol and I started hanging out—we’d see each other late at night, and on weekends. Saturdays were the worst, because I would be on until 3:30 A.M., until the public-affairs guy came in. Carol used to wear this perfume called Tea Rose, and she would leave a dot on the microphone before she left. I never knew that—I just knew that the studio always smelled like her, and the engineers would say, “Fucking Carol, this whole studio smells like Tea Rose, it’s driving me crazy.”
At the time, Carol was going out with Jimmy Iovine. He was producing Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and Stevie Nicks’s Bella Donna, so he was out in California all the time. I really had to fight for her. Although Jimmy wasn’t right for her, he was a good guy and she didn’t want to hurt him. To make things more complicated, ABC Radio, which owned WPLJ, had very strict guidelines about employees going out—but within months, we were living together. If they had known, they would have had a problem with it, especially because we were right next to each other on the air. But I stayed at WPLJ less than a year before MTV happened.
Martha:
I graduated high school in 1977, and when I went to college, I was deciding between Vassar and Colgate. (I know what you’re thinking: “How could she have gotten into Vassar or Colgate?” What can I say? Extracurricular activities meant a lot back then!) Here was my in-depth calculation: Vassar had four girls to every guy, Colgate had four guys to every girl. Guess where I went?
At Colgate, I lived in a dorm right down the hill from the school’s radio station, WRCU, so in my first week, I wandered over there. Other than WRCU, Colgate wasn’t for me—there were way too many cows in Hamilton County. I wanted to do journalism or radio, and my stepmother, Jane, gave me some great advice: “Be in the life. Go where the action is.” So my sophomore year, I transferred to NYU.
I actually majored in radio at NYU. I always say “communications,” but it’s not true. There were twelve of us in the radio major, and our advisor, Irving Falk, had been a production assistant on The War of the Worlds with Orson Welles in the 1930s. Our “professors” were DJs like Richard Neer, from WNEW-FM, a big rock station in New York. A typical day in the classroom: “Well, if you play Led Zeppelin at ten-twenty and there’s a news break, this is how you make the transition.”
I took some other classes, but mostly I worked at the WNYU radio station. I was on all the time with different shows: Just Plain Folk, Jazz Expansions, The Afternoon Show (where I played Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth”), and my baby, the R&B-oriented Getaway, named for an Earth, Wind & Fire song. I played Shalamar, the Whispers, and Parliament-Funkadelic—on the air, I called myself Tiffany.
I lived in NYU’s Weinstein dorm, and I worked there as a front-desk clerk, putting mail in everyone’s mailboxes, taking phone messages, and handing out lightbulbs and other supplies. Future superstar producer Rick Rubin lived there at the same time—I didn’t pay any attention to him, but I’m sure I gave him toilet paper many, many times.
I had a roommate, Becky, who was a model with the Wilhelmina agency. She was tall, blond, and very cute, like a young Christie Brinkley. She did commercials, and I decided I wanted to do them too. I got my on-and-off boyfriend Tony to take photos of me, and I sent them out to every talent agency listed in the phone book. Two responded, one of which was the Mary Ellen White Agency, a kids’ agency. They signed me up, and I started booking auditions. Becky never let on if she was bummed, but in her shoes, I probably would have been!
I did a lot of commercials: Clearasil, Campbell’s soup, a deodorant soap. I was the Chicken McNuggets girl for McDonald’s, promising, “You’ll go nuggets for McNuggets.” (Ironic for a girl who went on to be a staunch vegetarian!) I was making a ton of money—my senior year, I got thirty thousand dollars for being in a Kellogg’s commercial. (I had something like six hundred dollars in my bank account. I had a drawer full of checks, most of which I threw out because I mistakenly believed they had expired.) I did a Country Time Lemonade commercial with Jeff Daniels; I think he played my dad. We filmed it at a barn on Staten Island, frolicking around, enjoying the sun, being wholesome and lemonade-y. Years later, I interviewed Jeff for Arachnophobia and told him we did a commercial together. He said, “Really? Was it for hemorrhoids?”
My senior year, I got an internship at WNBC-AM, which was the biggest pop station in New York City. In 1980, AM stations were still relevant in the musical world—NBC, pronounced “NnnnnnnnBC,” was the home of Don Imus (Howard Stern arrived soon after). I considered myself a radio pro by this time, and was genuinely surprised when the music department didn’t let me, a college student, help decide what records to play! I spent a year alphabetizing the ratty old singles they stored in the back closet, putting little stickers on their dust jackets. I spent a year in that closet—except when they sent me out to pick up dry cleaning for Imus.
After graduation, I moved into Tony’s apartment. He proceeded to spend all his time in Ossining. At first I pretended not to notice, but within a few weeks I knew I had to get out. Finding an apartment in New York ain’t easy, but luckily, Jane knew a guy who had an apartment to sublet on the Upper East Side, on Eighty-eighth Street between York and East End. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, and I had to take care of a big, mean parrot. This guy also collected African erotic art, so there were all these carvings of people with erections. It was totally odd, but I was desperate. I moved out of Tony’s place over a weekend, not even telling him that I was leaving. I was hoping he’d discover I was gone and run wildly through the streets like Stanley Kowalski: “Martha! Marthaaaa!” My family carried my furniture up five flights of stairs, I pushed all the erection art to the back, and I tried to figure out what I was doing with my life.
Alan:
Jan and I found a rent-controlled apartment in New York the night before we went back to Birmingham to get our stuff, and gave the broker all our money. That night, we stayed on the floor of our new apartment, ecstatic about how our life was unfolding, if weirded out by the late-night sounds of the big city: a couple making mutual death threats, a dog barking until dawn, a baby wailing loud enough to drown out a saxophone. The next morning a young couple knocked on the door and said, “Y’all are in our apartment.” Whaa? The apartment was double-booked—to another couple from the South—Alabama, no less. I suggested we could share the joint, but no luck.
We went back home; several weeks later, I came back up and found a studio with a kitchen in the closet at the Woodward Hotel on Fifty-fifth and Broadway. It was a transient hotel—okay by me, but guys can wear the same socks for weeks. I knew Jan wouldn’t be happy: she wanted at least a one-bedroom with a real kitchen.
She drove up from Alabama in a U-Haul for seventeen hours with my brother Randy, who was coming to New York to be a musician. To stay sharp, he smoked dope and did coke most of the way. When they arrived in the early evening, Jan looked stunned, like she had been shot out of a circus cannon. She went up to the tenth floor on the rickety elevator, walked into the apartmen
t, and burst out crying. “This is our apartment? It sucks.”
“Yes, honey, but the price is right,” I said—with no conviction.
We sat there for the first couple of weeks, not believing we were really in New York. We’d watch The David Letterman Show—this is when he was on in the morning. My brother would slurp his coffee and smack his lips; Jan was getting increasingly irritated. One day, I looked at the two of them and said, “Fuck it, somebody’s got to get a job.” I walked down the street to a restaurant that was owned by the Mafia, and got us jobs waiting tables. The job didn’t last long for Jan: She locked horns with the manager and he fired her. She found another waitress job at the Magic Pan on Fifty-seventh Street; they had a better-paying job for me as a bartender, so I told the manager to fuck off and followed Jan to the land of the crepe.
I auditioned for the part of Lysander in a new-wave/punk-rock version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the New York Theater Ensemble on East Fourth Street in the East Village. I didn’t get the gig, but the director called me up and said, “Do you move well?” He cast me as one of the spirits of the forest—there were eight of us, four guys and four girls. The director was named Lester and he was flamboyant, to say the least: “I want the spirits of the forest to be sexual animals. I want you always in the background as the scenes between the earth people and the gods unfold, groping and hanging on and just being sexual.” We had tights and makeup and music was playing: Joan Jett, Talking Heads. I did well because of my dance background, but there was a problem: because of all the groping I was doing with my cute girl dance partners, I had a constant hard-on! I was wearing tights, so it wasn’t a secret. Lester was enthused; hopefully, the audience thought it was a prosthetic for effect. And I was married—that didn’t make me bitter, just conflicted.
I had a bit part in the movie version of Annie, playing one of fifty ushers at Radio City Music Hall. I had a line; it got cut. But I got to spend three days on a huge-ass production with John Huston directing. Huston sat in a corner with his emphysema tube, watching a monitor, barking orders to his assistant director. I got my SAG card based on that.
Once I had my union card, I qualified for a better class of auditions—I went on casting calls for industrial videos or extra parts in movies. I showed up at one of those, and they told me that it was for a David Bowie video. Look at the camera, say your name, turn sideways, get out. I didn’t have to do a dance audition; I just told them I danced. I got a call two days later: “You got the video.”
There were six of us; the other people were dancers except for one, a guy named Obba Babatundé, a black guy who, a year later, got nominated for a Tony in the original production of Dreamgirls. We had two days of rehearsal. The choreography was very experimental, and I was feeling very non–Martha Graham. We had to make these specific moves with our arms to our foreheads and our chins; we were voguing years before Madonna did it, and I didn’t know what it was.
We showed up at the fabled Mudd Club in lower Manhattan: every rock band played there in the ’70s. It had a reputation as the raunchiest of clubs, where people vomited, pissed, and defecated all over. It reeked! When the time came for our little squad to do our weird signature moves, I was self-conscious about it and chose the statue pose: My choice as a dancer was to be still, like a John Cage performance of silence. The choreographer said, “That’s great, because that’s weird—that’s the new dance.”
I looked over and saw David Bowie watching us flail around. A couple of sycophant extras were bugging him, but he was very gracious. On a break, I found an opportunity to ease up next to him, and he said, “Good job, mate.” I said, “Oh, thanks, but it’s not really what I do.” I was trying to explain that I was an actor. When Bowie got onstage for his performance in the video, he did the moves that we had been taught and I realized, “Oh, we’re mirroring what he’s doing.” It was a new kind of dance, invented by Bowie himself.
A month later, the video played on Wolfman Jack’s Midnight Special, which was a late-night music show on NBC. I stayed up till midnight to watch it—it was insane and fabulous to see myself on TV.
3
Welcome to Your Life
MTV Hires the VJs
Nina:
I read an article in Billboard saying that there was a new twenty-four-hour music channel, owned by Warner AmEx Satellite Communications, that was looking for hosts and hostesses who knew about music. I sent them my résumé and an eight-by-ten picture. I wanted it to look punk, so I started coloring the picture with crayons. Danny came by and said, “What are you doing?” I told him and he said, “Nina, there are such things as color Xeroxes.”
They came out to L.A. and held auditions. I went down in my little MG, dressed all in black. I was dying in the heat, but I had to look cool. A few weeks later, they came out again. This time they wanted me to interview a “celebrity.” It was Robert Morton, who went on to be Morty, the producer of David Letterman’s show—he was pretending to be a smart-alecky Billy Joel. It went well, but I didn’t hear from them for a while, and I thought that was weird. I’m not the cockiest person in the world, but I kept thinking, “If they don’t hire me, who are they looking for? In the whole United States, how many people are working on this sort of thing already?” And I had rock ’n’ roll in my heart.
So I called them up, and the phone number went to a hotel, I think the New York Sheraton. I hung up and told Danny, “Oh my God, they’re a fly-by-night organization using Warner’s name. How are they getting away with it?”
He said, “You should call back.”
It turned out they were the real thing—they were working out of a hotel room—and they wanted me to come to New York for the final verdict. I went out, and they said, “We want you, but you have to move to New York.” Because the company’s name included “satellite communications,” I had assumed the job was going to be in L.A.
I couldn’t decide, so executive producers Sue Steinberg and Robert Morton said they would show me the highlights of New York, hoping I would want to move and take the job. They took me to the public library—hey, I like books. And we went to lunch at the Tavern on the Green. I was nervous, and when they brought out the crusty rolls, I inhaled one. It lodged in my throat—I was choking to death. Luckily, Morty knew the Heimlich maneuver. He jumped up and saved my life. After everybody calmed down, he said, “You owe me.”
I said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll take the job.”
Mark:
I got a call from a friend of mine in Philadelphia. We both knew a guy named Richard Bencivengo, and he said, “I heard that Bencivengo’s working on some sort of music video channel.” I was unhappy at WPLJ, so I called them up. It turned out they were seeing everybody in the world. A bunch of people from PLJ went in—I saw them at the auditions. The first audition was in a forty-eight-degree studio. It was pitch-black, with a stool and a spotlight. Freezing cold, with a spotlight in the face, the vibe was interrogation: Answer our questions or we’re going to pluck out your eyeballs. I talked into the camera about Eric Clapton going on tour. There was a one-way window in the studio; it felt like a sci-fi movie where they do an experiment and the alien overlords watch through the window, waiting to see if your head explodes.
It was a few weeks before I heard anything—I guess they were scouting for talent in other cities. I had a second audition, at a different, warmer studio. They had two areas set up. One had a big white card with pictures of the Eagles taped on it, perched on an easel. They wanted me to back-announce an Eagles video, and then walk from the board to this other area, which had a ratty couch and a chair, sit down there, and throw to the next video. They were literally seeing if I could walk and talk at the same time.
There were a couple of camera guys, and a bunch of producers, and cue cards. I had never worked with cue cards before, but I knew what I was supposed to be saying. At one point, I was so far off the cards, the producer had no idea what to hold up next. I just said, “Next card, please.” I
found out later that went a long way toward getting me the job—when I needed some information, I didn’t stumble through it like a standard TV host. I spoke to the people off-camera and asked for it.
The next section was interviewing “Billy Joel,” as played by Robert Morton. Billy Joel is the nicest guy ever, but Robert was being cantankerous, giving yes and no answers to questions. At the end, I talked to Sue Steinberg. I’m six foot one, and Sue is approximately four foot nine. She looked up at me and said, “I think you’ll be hearing from us.” There was something in her face that said, “I can’t tell you this, but you so have this job.”
Nina was the first one they hired, and then maybe a day later, J. J. I got the call very soon after that. I had a three-year contract with ABC, which owned WPLJ, but I really wanted to do MTV. I booked a vacation, went away for ten days, and let my lawyers hash it out.
Nina:
They wanted me right away—this was the middle of June. I asked if I could stay in L.A. for the Fourth of July. At the time, there were wonderful fireworks up and down the coast, and I really wanted to see them. I watched them from my favorite spot, Topanga Beach, and left for New York City on July 5.
MTV was a gamble. Vicki Light, who was my agent, and Danny, who was my manager, figured it was some little cable show, and if I didn’t like it, I could come back in three months. We weren’t even sure it’d still be on the air six months later.
MTV put me up in a beautiful hotel, the Berkshire. After the incident at the Tavern on the Green, I was really scared about choking when I was by myself. For about two months, I would order room service and eat right next to the phone so I could call the front desk in case anything happened.
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave Page 4