Larry was a man of his word, and he stuck by the deal he and I had agreed upon. He also liked the fact that the four of us—Neil, Buddy, he, and I—got along very well, plus I was close friends with Robert Klein, another of his clients; Robert would still stay at my house when he had a gig in LA.
Neil was equally impressed with Robin after watching the next few episodes of Mork & Mindy, and, as usually happened, he was soon bursting with enthusiasm. He decided that he would produce the album himself (a big plus for both Larry and Buddy, as they held him in such high regard), and from that point on, the budget flew out the window. Neil quickly made plans to record the album live over a period of four nights at Manhattan’s Copacabana, which had been closed for a while. We staged the show and made sure that the audience was comprised mostly of fans, plus as many national media heavies as we could fly in on short notice. We all piled into the first-class cabin of a 747 and had a Casablanca party at thirty thousand feet. I spent most of the flight losing money to Neil in an endless game of gin (I couldn’t beat him to save my soul).
Neil and Robin spent considerable time together sorting out what Robin needed in the way of sound, lighting, and backstage accoutrements; nonetheless, at the first show, held on April 11, the Copa was the madhouse I’d expected it to be. Cocaine flowed like water backstage. So when Robin blew the doors off the place, we were all on a high, both literally and figuratively. He was the most brilliant comic any of us had ever seen. We were left speechless at the way he could destroy an audience. Offstage, however, he was a completely different person; he was shy and didn’t make eye contact unless he knew and trusted you. Later, when the stories about him and John Belushi doing drugs together came out, I realized that the shyness may have been a side effect of his cocaine habit—coke can certainly induce paranoia. Plus, his fame was burgeoning and he was little prepared to handle it.
Several weeks later, Neil told me that he was going into the studio with Robin to edit the live performance for the album. He emphasized that he did not want to be disturbed, which meant that I would be temporarily presiding over everything, including stuff he’d probably forgotten to tell me about. After a week of neither seeing Neil nor hearing from him, I began to wonder how a live comedy album could take so long to edit. I stopped by the studio to check on their progress, only to find them in the middle of a weeklong cocaine bender. This, naturally, was making the editing task a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Eventually, they muddled their way through the process, and the album was released, quickly earning Gold status.
Robin was hardly the only comedian with a drug habit—the lifestyle of a stand-up comic is as brutal as that of a rock star. As vice president of artist development, Don Wasley would spend a lot of time on the road with our artists, and he told me that the wildest guy he ever traveled with wasn’t a rock star at all: it was Rodney Dangerfield. Rodney always kept a Noxema jar filled with cocaine in a pocket of his leisure suit. One day, they were both at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport waiting for their bags when Don noticed Rodney partaking. Don said, “Rodney, you can’t do that here.” Rodney just replied, “What are they going to do, arrest me? I’m Rodney Dangerfield!”
After that successful incursion into TV, Neil thought it would be a good idea to sign the Lenny and Squiggy characters from ABC’s Laverne & Shirley (both Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy were spinoffs of Happy Days). Laverne & Shirley was one of the most popular programs on TV, and Lenny and Squiggy were a major part of it. I loved the characters, so I was all for signing them, and we did. I never became close to Michael McKean (who portrayed Lenny), and, as far I know, he never did drugs; however, David Lander (Squiggy) was always happy to indulge with me.
We planned a show at the Roxy featuring the duo performing as Lenny and The Squigtones and arranged to tape it for a live comedy album. We loaded the Roxy with TV insiders and Hollywood people for the taping. The place was so crowded that it was hard for the band to get to the stage. Finally, when Lenny and The Squigtones began to play, we experienced a big letdown. The music was terrible. It was meant to be funny, but it was just bad. I left way before the show was over. The next day at the office, I found out that everyone had had the same reaction: this was a bad idea, and we should stop pursuing TV acts. We did issue the record, but we didn’t put much effort into marketing or promoting it.
Lewis Merenstein, a producer who had worked with Van Morrison, was a good friend of Neil’s, and he’d worked with us at Buddah for a time. He knew some McDonald’s Corporation executives, and he brought Neil an idea for a project involving the restaurant chain. They would produce kid-oriented record albums that would be marketed by McDonald’s and sold in their restaurants. The guy who had coined the term “bubblegum” was again thinking about the younger audience. These albums would be both entertaining and educational. The market was there, too: kid’s music was a growing niche; a recent Sesame Street album had even hit Gold status. It was an idea that would have given Casablanca the financial success it so desperately needed. If it had worked, it would have catapulted us into the stratosphere.
Once the idea was hatched, Neil had to come up with the actual product before McDonald’s would even consider becoming involved with us. The corporation was famous for testing new ideas; they tested their television commercials for months before running them. This was a very conservative outfit, and they would take no chances when it came to their brand. Who could blame them?
As he’d done with Thank God It’s Friday, Neil brought in Ellen Wolf and Walter Wanger from our creative services division and put them to work. We conjured up a division name for the product, to boot: Casablanca KidWorks. No one at PolyGram knew what we were doing, and we kept it that way on purpose. In fact, most of the people in the company had no idea what was happening; news was communicated on a need-to-know basis only. We knew that PolyGram would not have wanted us to make the expenditures necessary to realize the project.
The project began slowly. Ellen and Walter consulted some well-known child psychologists and researched what would work for children, as well as for McDonald’s. They hired songwriters known for their understanding of children’s music. They met with Neil often to report on their progress and to get his input. I saw and heard their reports after the fact, and I was very impressed with the quality of their work. I liked that the concept behind the project was uplifting at a time when what was happening in the world seemed so dire. Ellen and Walter did a magnificent job creating the albums, which were titled Rainy Day Fun Starring Ronald McDonald, Ronald McDonald Visits America, and Birthday Party Starring Ronald McDonald Dee-Jay. They all had interactive (long before the term started to be applied to everything) elements—puzzles, books, or maps that kids could work with and learn from. The songs were geared to the appropriate age group, and they had a seal of approval from every child educator we spoke with. We tried them out on our own kids and our friend’s kids, and they worked. The artwork was also first class, as we had spared no expense in developing it.
The biggest hurdle was McDonald’s. Walter, Ellen, and Lewis went to Chicago and presented the project to McDonald’s numerous times, and finally McDonald’s came to LA to view the commercials, which had been created in the McDonald’s mold. After listening to our masterful sales pitch, McDonald’s agreed to all of it, including the marketing plan that Neil had presented.
Having McDonald’s, with their impressive advertising capability and massive customer base, market the albums in their restaurants would have ensured their success. But, like many huge corporations, McDonald’s did everything very slowly and very cautiously. The three albums were manufactured in very, very small quantities just to test the project, and they were eventually released to some critical acclaim. However, coordinating in-store sales in McDonald’s restaurants would prove to be a lengthy endeavor, and we were already on borrowed time.
19 Last Dance
Cooking the books—The jig is up—Creating the
list—Execution day—Summ
er and Somers sue—
Disco at the precipice—Demolition in Chicago—Another
Wardlow forum—Stiffed at Studio 54—
A change in the wind—Exit
June 29, 1979
Casablanca Record & FilmWorks Headquarters
8255 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
In the middle of 1978, about nine months after PolyGram had acquired a majority stake in Casablanca, I drafted the quarterly sales forecast. I was responsible for generating Casablanca’s sales projections, and although much of it was guesswork, I based the projections on the previous period’s sales and the level of commitment we were planning to give our projects. I ran the numbers and showed them to Neil. He told me that we had to show PolyGram a rosier picture and I should add millions of records to the sales column. I did as I was told and added enough sales to the projections to make PolyGram comfortable, even though I knew we would never hit such lofty heights.
PolyGram never questioned the figures. Whether they weren’t familiar enough with Casablanca to be suspicious or simply weren’t paying close enough attention, I cannot say. In retrospect, the fact that they had no clue that we were unprofitable speaks volumes about their lack of due diligence prior to the buyout and/or our ability to shape reality out of thin air and good PR. I think PolyGram’s ignorance stemmed from the fact that we had painted the building so well they never realized that they’d bought twelve coats of paint without a building underneath. It was just a question of when they would finally poke a finger through the layers and figure out it was an empty shell.
After the four KISS solo albums had emphatically bombed, we knew that PolyGram would at last realize that we were losing a fortune. They were handling all distribution for us, and it was impossible that they would fail to notice two million returns. No amount of cooking the books was going to hide truckloads of unwanted records, especially since those trucks were backing up to their doorstep, not ours. When at last the ruse was up, PolyGram insisted on dramatic changes. Our marketing and advertising budgets were slashed and then watched closely with very wary eyes. Loss of freedom was the trade-off for big-bother corporate protection. By June 1979, PolyGram wanted more, and they demanded that we start cutting staff. Our employee roster was in excess of 175, and PolyGram expected us to cut big. Neil called Bruce and me into his office and informed us that he needed a list of expendable people. Bruce and I both knew that this had been coming, but that made the task no easier. Even though the company had long since grown so large that I couldn’t know everyone intimately, axing over a third of our workforce felt like sawing off my left leg.
So we sat down to create a death row roster. One person Bruce and I agreed should be let go was Irv Biegel, the former cohead of Millennium, who had been running our New York office for some time. I’d had little interaction with Irv, as I rarely visited New York, and, frankly, I hadn’t trusted the man from the moment I met him. At our first meeting he’d made grand claims like, “Larry, I’m just here to look out for your welfare.” After knowing me for five minutes, that was his primary motivation? No way. He registered high on my bullshit meter. Irv was near the top of the Casablanca pay scale, too, and he did nothing that we felt had produced results, so his name went to the head of the list.
We tried to be as fair as we could, consulting with all the department heads and asking them who should be kept on. This was hard on them, of course, as they were friends with many of the people they would have to fire. When the list was finished, it contained the names of dozens and dozens of people. Bruce and I brought it to Neil. He crossed off Irv’s name: we were not allowed to fire Irv. This stunned me. Neil hadn’t even asked us why Irv was on the list—he’d just vetoed the cut immediately. Bruce recovered quickly and asked why Irv was protected, since he was clearly overpaid and did nothing to generate dollars. Neil claimed that Irv had a contract. I was completely astounded by this response. Of all the reasons Neil could have offered, it was the last I would ever have expected to hear. In fact, it was an out-and-out lie. I felt insulted and incredibly pissed off. I knew that Irv didn’t have a contract. The only people with contracts were those who owned company stock: Neil, Peter, Cecil, and me. Even Bruce did not have a contract.
What was worse was that Neil knew that I knew, but he still lied. Bruce and I strongly suspected that Neil was sheltering Irv because Irv had close ties to Jeff Franklin, and Neil was afraid of upsetting Franklin. Neil read through the rest of the list and approved it, looking like he wanted to crawl under his desk and hide. Bruce and I met again with the department heads and gave them their final cut lists. They handled the firings themselves. The bloodletting took place on June 29, 1979.
To make this ugly situation worse, when a few of the people who had been fired went to say goodbye to Neil, he feigned ignorance. “What? You were fired? I had no idea!” He had the damned list on his desk and he’d had no qualms about cutting anyone loose—except Irv, of course. He was making Bruce and me out to be the bad guys, and probably me most of all. I would ultimately be perceived as the executioner. People lose their jobs every day, and when Neil had told us that PolyGram was demanding the cuts and then asked us to get it done, I wasn’t angry. It’s never a fun scenario, but it’s part of doing business, and I accepted it. But his acting surprised at the firings when he had approved them himself was to me a betrayal.
• August 10, 1979: Michael Jackson releases his debut album, Off the Wall. It goes on to sell over seven million copies domestically.
• December 3, 1979: Outside Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, eleven people are killed in a crush of fans waiting for the doors to open for a performance by The Who.
• December 7, 1979: Star Trek: The Motion Picture opens in US theaters.
To add to the turmoil, Bruce Bird came in one day with some shocking news. He and Nancy had had dinner with Donna Summer’s lawyer and his wife the night before, and the lawyer had told them that Donna was going to hire the famed and feared music attorney Abe Somers to represent her in her bid to break her contract with Joyce and Casablanca. Neil might have been skittish about pissing off Jeff Franklin, but at the mention of Abe Somers’s name, he cowered under the table. He called Joyce right away and told her to retain Abe before Donna could, which would force Donna to find another attorney. We’d actually been expecting Donna to try to get out of her contract for months, but Neil never expected that we’d be going up against Abe Somers. Back in the Sherbourne days, someone represented by Somers had threatened to sue Neil. Neil had agreed to an immediate settlement. So, either Abe was an incredible attorney or he had done something in the past that had made Neil extremely wary of him—I was never certain which.
One of the legal arguments that Donna’s lawyer would make was that Joyce was in conflict of interest, since she was both Donna’s manager and the wife of the president of Donna’s record company, and this was detrimental to Donna’s career. I believe that Joyce was also making as much as 25 percent of Donna’s adjusted revenue stream—a very sizable take for a manager. Another point was that Joyce sometimes placed Casablanca’s interests above Donna’s interests. It was a legitimate argument. From my perspective, Neil and Joyce were perfect for one another. He used her as a sounding board for every business idea that came into his head. Joyce had a keen sense of business herself, but she was loyal to Neil to a fault, and she almost always agreed with him, at least publicly; whether she could privately sway him to her way of thinking, I’m not sure.
Neil believed that with Joyce as Donna’s manager, he could control Donna’s career much more effectively, but he also thought that in helping the company in that way he would benefit Donna herself. He was probably right. Through Joyce, he heard all about Donna, and based on what he learned, he came up with some great marketing and sales schemes for her. He always had Donna on his mind. Joyce’s relationship with Neil also helped loosen the company’s purse strings when it came to her client. This situation is not quite parallel, but
it’s instructive: when Mariah Carey and Sony head Tommy Mottola became an item, there was no way a record of Mariah’s was not going to become a hit, no matter what it cost or what Sony employees had to do to make it happen; but the first record Carey released after divorcing Mottola sank like a rock in quicksand. The pressure that comes with this kind of relationship is enormous. Are you going to let your wife, girlfriend, or sister fail? No. Not if you have the power to prevent it.
I was now in a quandary. I liked Donna and her comanager Susan Munao, and I thought that they were being screwed by their lawyer and by Neil. The lawyer, who also represented Casablanca in numerous deals, had a definite conflict of interest. After much soul-searching, I decided that the only honest thing for me to do was to betray Neil and tell Susan that Joyce was planning to hire Abe Somers. This was a hard decision to make, especially because I knew that Donna would go to Geffen Records if she got out of her contract with us, and this would really irk me, as I didn’t like the company president, Eddie Rosenblatt. I didn’t know David Geffen, but I knew that there was no love lost between him and Neil. I still loved Neil and respected what we’d tried to build together, but our relationship and everything around it had changed. I had begun to dread going into the office.
My outlook was dimmed even further by what I saw happening around us in the industry: disco was about to crash. All the telltale signs were there—the too-rapid expansion, the market saturation, the growing contempt among the music-buying public. Despite our penetration of various areas of the entertainment industry (much of it via cheap signings that held little hope of long-term profit), the Casablanca ship was afloat on disco waters, and disco waters alone. Without disco, we had almost nothing to sustain us. Remember that even our lone rock act of any value, KISS, had edged into disco territory. Our fortunes were pinned to disco, and no amount of spin doctoring was going to change that.
And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records Page 30