"Yes, but we're never live like this," I said, "on every television in America and all across the world."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah…"
And now that I had gotten the thread I was gone.
"And let's do it in the center of the Garden," I told him, "on the floor, in a boxing ring."
"A boxing ring? What are you talking about?"
"I'll tell you what I'm talking about. You're the heavyweight champion of the world, Frank. You hold every belt in the world of entertainment. The number-one singer in the world. No challengers, no one even close. So let's do it in a ring, and make it like a heavyweight title fight, and invite all the people who go to heavyweight title fights, because they're your fans. And let's get Howard Cosell to be the announcer. Yeah, wow, I can hear it!"
"Hear what, Jerry? What can you hear?"
"I can hear Howard Cosell. He's ringside, his hand over his ear, announcing it as you come down the aisle, climb through the ropes and into the ring: "Ladies and gentlemen, live from Madison Square Garden. Jerry Weintraub presents 'Sinatra, the Main Event.'
"And here's the best part," I told Frank. "No rehearsals."
"No rehearsals."
"No rehearsals. You just get there on the night of the show, and sing your songs, and do your thing, as fresh and spontaneous as can be-like a heavyweight title fight. Frank Sinatra Live!"
"The Main Event" was one of the great concert events of the age, Sinatra, in a ring in the center of his town, singing the story of his life, and this is how it began, on the roof of Caesars, Sinatra depressed and brooding, Weintraub talking and talking.
When we got to New York, Sinatra checked into a suite in the Waldorf Astoria and I went to the Garden to set this thing up. Live? In every house in America, in every nation on earth? What was I thinking? The project had grown quickly-too quickly. It started as a concert broadcast on TV, but there was now a record and a film. And we had five days to pull it off. Just like that, I had three hundred people working for me. By the second day, I was feeling pressure. By the fourth, I was in a mild panic. By the fifth, I was out of my mind. What had started as a ploy to snap Frank out of his depression had turned into a major deal-handled wrong, it could turn into a major embarrassment.
At such times, I become obsessed with details. That's where God is, so that's where I go, with my notebook and phone numbers and head full of ideas. The people, the angles, the chairs-I wanted to get everything exactly right. I hired Roone Arledge, who was then head of ABC Sports and ABC News, to produce the broadcast. I hired Don Ohlmeyer, who ended up being president of NBC, and Dick Ebersol, who later ran NBC Sports, and still does.
We built the boxing ring, arranged the seats, rehearsed the camera moves, intros, and exits, everything choreographed to a fraction of a second. Commercials were a major issue. We were supposed to break six times in the hour, and needed a system whereby Frank would know when to close out a song and when to start back in. Also, which songs would work the best as hooks, and which would work the best as lead-ins to new segments. Simply put, I needed Frank at the Garden for a rehearsal. But when I called his room at the Waldorf, there was no answer, nor a return call, day after day. Finally, on the morning of the show, a secretary answered.
"This is Jerry Weintraub," I told her. "I've got to talk to Frank."
"I'm sorry," she said. "Mr. Sinatra is not available."
"What the hell are you talking about?" I said. "We have a show tonight! At 8:00 P.M., we go live around the world."
"I'm sorry," she said "but he's indisposed."
Click.
I kept calling, but he never got on the phone.
At 2:00 P.M. a note arrived from Sinatra. It was his set list, the songs he planned to sing. It was ridiculous, absurd. I could not believe what was on there. "Crocodile Rock," "Disco Inferno."
To hell with this! I jump in a cab and head over to the Waldorf.
I went through the lobby, up the elevator, knocked on the door. I was in a panic. Clearly, Sinatra was not. He was, in fact, sitting in his bathrobe, smoking a cigarette as he read the newspaper. I went over, holding the set list.
"What is this?" I asked.
"What's what?" he said.
"These songs."
He laughed. His hair was pushed back and every part of him glittered. His funk had clearly lifted. "Forget the list," he said. "I wanted to see you, and figured that list would get you here quicker than a phone call."
"Okay, great," I said, "why did you want to see me?"
"Because you've been calling every eight minutes. What do you need, Jerry?"
"Well, I'll tell you," I said. "We have a live show in five hours, Frank. I need you to come to the Garden."
"No, Jerry, you said no rehearsal, remember? Live?"
"Yeah, I remember, but this thing has grown."
"Don't worry, Jerry."
Sinatra obviously had a plan in mind, but he was not sharing it with me.
"Well, I am worried," I said. "Can't we just do a quick run-through?"
"No, Jerry, no rehearsal. That's what you said. I will be there when the show starts. That's when you need me. Not before."
At 7:30 P.M., his limo pulled into Madison Square Garden. The streets were filled with scalpers and fans-and that special electricity only Frank could generate. He had arrived with a police escort, sirens, flashing lights. He climbed out, straightened his tux, tossed away a cigarette, took my arm, and asked, "How you doing, kid?"
"Not great," I said.
"We'll fix that in a minute," he told me. "First, remember to tell your wife, Jane, to get in the car when I start singing 'My Way.' I want to go by Patsy's and pick up some pizzas for the plane."
So that was what he was thinking about-not the show, not the commercial breaks, not the slender thread that was holding me above the flames of oblivion, but the pizzas he would eat on the way back to Palm Springs.
As we were walking to the dressing room, his entourage trailing behind us, he said, "Okay, Jerry. What's the problem?"
"We're going to commercial six times in this hour," I told him, "and this is a live show, and you don't know when to break."
"Jerry, is there a kid around here with a red jacket?" he asked.
"I'm sure we can get one," I said. "Why?"
"Have a kid in a red coat stand up ringside with a sign that says 'five minutes,' " he said. "When I see him, I will start 'My Way.' "
"Okay," I said, "but what are you going to do during the six commercial breaks?"
He said, "I'm going to sing, Jerry. That's what I am going to do. When you go to commercial, I will be singing and when you come back, I will still be singing. That's live."
He taught me about spontaneity that night-this, too, helped me as a film producer. Live, let it happen. There's never a better take than the first: Sinatra knew that in his bones.
If you watch a tape of the "Main Event," you see me and Sinatra walk out of the dressing room and down the aisle side by side. He is Muhammad Ali and I am Cus D'Amato, the trainer, the cut man, the voice in the ear, saying, "You are the champ! It's yours! Now get in there and murder the bum!" I was, in fact, as white as a sheet, shuffling as if to my own funeral. You hear Cosell going though his routine: "… Here, coming through the same tunnel that so many champions have walked before, the great man, Frank Sinatra, who has the phrasing, who has the control, who knows what losing means, who made the great comeback, and now stands still, eternally, on top of the entertainment world…" Just before we went out, when the music started Sinatra leaned over me-well, I was a lot taller than Frank, so he looked up, but it felt like he was leaning over me, you know? And he asked, "How you doing now? Better?"
"No," I said, "not better."
"What the hell's the matter with you?" he said.
"Frank"-or Francis, that's what I said-"this is going live around the world, we have not rehearsed and have no markers or breaks. It could be the end of my career."
He pinched my cheek and said
, "Listen, kid. You got me into this, and I'm going to get you out."
And he went through the ropes, and the music started, and it was all Frank from there. He was a genius. He held the crowd in his hand. "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Angel Eyes," "My Kind of Town," they poured out of him like Norse sagas. When he sang "Autumn in New York," it was as if he were leaning on a bar, spilling his guts out to a late-night, Hopperesque bartender.
Who thought this could work, intimacy in an arena filled with thousands and thousands of people, but he pulled it off. He turned the Garden into a shadowy, three-in-the-morning, Second Avenue saloon. You could have heard a pin drop.
Then, just like that, when it seemed no more than a moment had passed, the kid walked the aisle in the red coat and Frank launched into "My Way." The ignition was turned in the limo, the pizzas were pulled from the ovens, the plane raced down the runway, and we were laughing and eating pepperoni as the jet climbed into the stratosphere.
Firing Ferguson
Around this time, in 1978, Jane and I purchased land in Malibu and built the house where she still spends much of the year. I describe it as a beach shack, but it really is one of the great California houses, a compound more than a house, with stables and guest quarters and trails that run across six acres on the Pacific coast, where the land juts out and Catalina Island rises into view. If you leave Beverly Hills at 2:00 P.M., heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway, with the sea on your left and the hills rising steeply on your right, you will arrive before three, finally passing through a gate marked "Blue Heaven."
In the midseventies, Jane and I threw a lot of parties. She calls it the era of "extreme entertaining." We had people over most nights, the rooms filled with music and movie types, the windows glittering, laughter spilling onto the beach, where I stand with a bottle of wine knee deep in the surf. In the garage in Malibu, we have posterboard-size pictures taken in those bygone days. Jane with Walter Winchell. Jane with Darryl Zanuck and John Wayne. Jane, at a dinner party, with three different kinds of crystal in front of her, seated between Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant.
By then, my touring company, Concerts West, was booming. But no matter how well I was doing, I was always on the lookout for the new artist, the next big thing. When I think back on those years, it's me going from club to club, sitting at cocktail tables, meeting artists in cramped dressing rooms, pitching, cajoling, selling. (Breaking a new act is a special high; some agents spend their careers chasing it.) My most noteworthy find of those years was John Denver, who, as far as I am concerned, I cooked from scratch. By examining how I dealt with John Denver you can get a pretty good sense of the task and challenge of the manager, how he finds and builds an act, and how that act will eventually break his heart.
John was a military brat. His childhood was spent moving base to base, New Mexico, Arizona, Alabama, Texas. His real name was John Deutschendorf Jr. His father was an amazing guy, a test pilot and flight instructor who often seemed confused by his kid. The love of music and songwriting, the long hair and pursuit of beauty-where did they come from? John left home as soon as he was of age. He traveled the country with a guitar and a notebook of songs. He was going to write about everything, all of it, the mountains and plains, the continental divide, set it to music. He made a few solo records, which went nowhere, then scored one big success, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," which went top ten when recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, who, by the way, I managed. But his first real break came in the midsixties, when, answering an open audition, he won a spot in the Chad Mitchell Trio, a hot New York folk act.
I first heard about John when he left the Trio and was looking to make it on his own. He had been represented by Irwin Winkler, who was going into the movie business, and needed representation. A friend tipped me: "Jerry, check out this kid. He's playing a dive in Greenwich Village." So I went over. No one there. The joint was empty. Just this earnest kid with a pageboy haircut, singing and playing guitar on stage. I sat and listened. He made a connection immediately. That's how it was with him-his talent. With each song, you felt he had opened his chest and was showing you his beating heart.
Okay, you might think, Jerry Weintraub and John Denver, something does not compute, something is not right. How does a folk singer from New Mexico end up in league with a street kid from the Bronx? But the fact is, we were a lot alike, me and John, had a lot in common, which is why our friendship was so immediate and deep. He, too, had run away from home when he was a kid-he left in his father's car and turned up weeks later at a cousin's house in Los Angeles. He, too, wanted to get out into the world, see and experience everything, find his way. I saw all of this that first night in New York. I saw the talent, too. It was one of those rare moments you dream of as a manager-spotting the kid who will become a star, who is a star already, even if the world does not yet know it.
From that moment, I was determined to break John Denver. He would be a test case for all my theories on selling and packaging, for everything I had learned since I left home and before, on the streets in the Bronx and from my father. John Denver would be my Star of Ardaban.
I wanted to start by getting some noise going. Here was this gem, John Denver, playing five nights a week in Greenwich Village, virtually for free-he was making seventy dollars a show when I met him-and no one even knew it. I went all around New York and LA, talking my head off to all the big operators. John Denver. Have you seen this kid? John Denver. He's amazing. John Denver. I went on like this until my friends said, "All right. We get it! John Denver. Shut up."
"Shut up about who?"
"John Denver."
"Yeah, isn't he great?"
Then I started to embroider, embellish. I would say, "Wow, John Denver, this client of mine, he's so great, so on fire, that Bob Dylan has been hanging out in this club every night, watching him play."
Just get them there, that's what I believed. Just get them there, let them see this kid, they will love him.
Did it work?
Of course it did.
Within a few weeks, the place in the Village was packed, every seat filled, and the patrons three deep at the bar.
"Okay," I said, "now let us see what we can do about this seventy dollars a night nonsense."
John had cut a record for RCA. This was part of his long-term contract. He had already made Rhymes and Reasons and Take Me to Tomorrow. This was all before I got there-pre-Jerry. The new record was called Poems, Prayers and Promises. It had one obvious hit: "Take Me Home, Country Roads." But the challenge was the same as always: get people to hear it, to recognize it as a hit. This mirrors the greater challenge of the talent manager. I did not invent John Denver. I did not write his hits, or create anything that was not there before I arrived. No manager does that. As I tell aspiring agents and managers, remember where the engine lies: with the artist. If the artist makes nothing, I have nothing to sell. It's as simple as that.
It's best, when selling something new, to envision the goal-let the entire world hear John Denver-then work your way back. How do we get there? Now and then, it happens by itself. This is a matter of luck, zeitgeist. More often, you have to be creative, crabwalk your way. Once the new record was released, I sent John on a tour of the biggest radio stations in the country. He would turn up by himself, with his song and his guitar, as if he just stumbled out of the mountains.
You have to remember what John looked like back then. He was simple and blond with the bangs and the glasses. This was the early seventies, when everyone was looking for his own Jimmy Carter, a man he could trust. John, with his apple-pie face, was perfectly cast. He came to hate this, but he was lucky. He had just what the market was demanding. It was his trademark, as the blue suede shoes and pompadour trademarked Elvis. It was his thing. You can evolve and grow but you should never resent your thing. If you look at how few artists actually make it, you will recognize that those trademarks, though in some ways limiting, are a gift of providence. John would show up with his pageboy and all-American smile and say
, "Hi, I'm John Denver. I would like to play a song for you." And bang, he was on the air.
At times, I used my other clients to break John. Fame is a private party. You can dazzle your way in with talent, or you can be vouched for. How far this can be carried depends entirely on who is doing the vouching. If it's Frankie Valli, okay, maybe. But if it's Sinatra? I arranged for John to cross paths with Elvis on the road. They went to radio stations, or Elvis mentioned one of John's songs. I had learned something important from the incident of the unsold scarves. A mention by Elvis was the same as a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.
I had Sinatra talk about John, hook up with John, be seen with John. You might think of Sinatra and Denver as a mismatch (like Weintraub and Denver; like martinis and moon-shine) but everything blurred in the seventies-this is when Sinatra recorded "(It's Not Easy) Bein' Green." It was an odd moment, and yet another lesson for producers and managers: know your age, sing its songs. If you cross-breed the Elvis audience with the Sinatra audience, you get the great big everyone the Colonel spent his life chasing. We were not interested in niche marketing, or in targeting a selected demographic: We wanted them all.
Soon after its release, "Country Roads" was dominating the charts. You could not turn on your radio without hearing it.
The song, the tour, the public appearances-these were means to an end, which was not merely to have a hit, but to turn John into a star: not a star in prospect, but a star now and yesterday, someone who has already happened, so accomplished it's no longer up for debate. It's why I did not present John Denver as an exciting find, or as someone who had recently been playing to an empty house in Greenwich Village, but as talent that had already made it, an accomplished fact. I sold him in the past tense, as someone you've known about for years. I was telling the audience to relax and enjoy, as the judgment has already been made. You love him! In this way, we skipped several steps, jumping directly from the early days of struggle to the golden years.
I bought every billboard on Sunset Boulevard from Bel Air to Hollywood. On each, I put a different picture of John, a different posture, a different mood. You could not drive to work without being bombarded. He was all over the place. By the time you heard his song, you already knew him. I met with executives at RCA. They wanted to cut a follow-up to Poems, Prayers and Promises. I convinced them to do a greatest-hits album, which was amazing, considering John only had one hit. This is what I mean by selling John as if he were already a star. They paid us a million dollars for the record-a huge sum in those days. It came out in 1977, went straight to the top of the charts, and stayed there.
When I Stop Talking You Page 10