And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (21 page)

Entering the motion picture business gave Neil the opportunity to become more of a player in Hollywood, and this was of utmost importance to his long-range plans. He had been working on the deal for quite some time, probably close to a year, and he’d always kept the Casablanca ownership group of Cecil, me, Richard Trugman, and even Buck apprised of developments. In order to make the deal happen, we would each have to grant Peter 20 percent of our stock. This was one of the many issues Buck had had with Neil that eventually led to his departure. Buck was so stuck in the here and now that he never seemed to grasp the big picture. If he’d had any foresight, Buck would have seen that the deal Neil had struck was particularly lopsided in Casablanca’s favor. Considering Guber’s success at Columbia, I was very surprised that he wanted to join a company that had spent most of the past two years peering into the abyss of bankruptcy without ever making a profit. Guber could easily have made much more money producing movies on his own than with us, but he was hedging his bets. He bet against himself, and it turned out to be a bad gamble for him.

Casablanca would own the profits from a five-picture deal Guber had in place with Columbia. In exchange, Guber got 20 percent of a company that was in the red and that, despite all its successes, real and apparent, had never come close to being profitable. But in some ways it may have been a good move for Peter to make: if he had stayed with Columbia, I have no doubt that they would have amortized all of his movies against each other and eventually, through creative accounting, showed that he owed them money and his firstborn.

The newly merged company was renamed Casablanca Record & FilmWorks. We retained our Sunset location as our headquarters and built out the first floor to accommodate the new film division. We owned three buildings at the site (over fourteen thousand square feet combined), and we still had plenty of room for expansion. Neil kept the title of president, while Peter was named chairman of the board.

The first picture, an adaptation of Peter Benchley’s follow-up novel to
jaws,
titled
The Deep,
was already in production in Bermuda by the time the deal was inked. Development of the movie had begun under the Columbia banner, and Columbia would serve as our domestic distributor on the deal. The merger was certainly a coup for us, and I was especially blown away by the size of the first movie. It had been barely a year since the
jaws
phenomenon had exploded into theaters—the film had single-handedly created the concept of the summer blockbuster. The property and anything associated with it was still red hot. Peter Benchley’s name gave the picture instant cash-cow status, and with an impressive cast (Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Lou Gossett Jr., and Robert Shaw) included, I couldn’t see how it could fail. Guber had also finalized a deal with Bantam Books to release a behind-the-scenes documentary paperback, tentatively titled
Inside the Deep,
which he would pen himself.

Another film was listed in the initial agreement. Titled
Six Weeks,
it had a certain cachet to it as well: the script was to be written by David Seltzer, who was hot due to the success of his screenplay for
The Omen.
However, unlike production on
The Deep,
production on
Six Weeks
went nowhere, and the film wasn’t released until years later, in 1982.

The glitz and glam of having big names on your roster comes with a price—it demands that you coddle egos and deal with hypersensitive personalities. In November, we were forced to confront a growing problem related to Donna Summer’s boyfriend, Peter Mühldorfer. A lanky fellow, Mühldorfer had established himself as an up-and-coming artist in European surrealist circles. He had come to LA to spend time with Donna, and we all bent over backwards to make him feel comfortable, but all the luxuries and the hospitality we bestowed upon him had no effect. He could see no reason to stay on in the US. He felt that he was the artist, not Donna—she was just his “woman.” He had also grown tired of looking after her young daughter, Mimi. We needed Donna in LA, but getting Donna stateside on a permanent basis required getting Mühldorfer stateside.

Neil backed into the solution when he was in Europe with Joyce attempting to garner Casablanca a better distribution deal with some European record companies. (Our distribution arrangement with EMI had been terminated, and an arrangement with RCA to step into the fold had collapsed as well.) While there, Neil got a chance to buy some works by the great artist Alexander Calder—enough to fill a shipping container, and all for a steal. He and Trugman decided that if they had all of these Calder pieces, they could open an art gallery in LA and sell the work; they could also show the work of Peter Mühldorfer, thereby giving him a reason to live in Los Angeles. This would allow Donna to be in LA full time to work on her publicity. It was a win-win situation for everyone, and thus the short-lived Casablanca ArtWorks was born.

Preparations for the opening of the ArtWorks Gallery were accelerated when the seventy-eight-year-old, terminally ill Calder passed away, on November 11. Not to be ghoulish, but the timing could not have been more ideal in terms of business: nothing increases the value of art like the passing of the artist. Neil and Richard had more invested in the gallery and inventory than anyone else, and they thought that this would be their road to riches. Casablanca’s press department worked on a big opening for ArtWorks, which Candy and I attended, though not necessarily willingly. In fact, Neil decreed that attendance was mandatory; furthermore, we were pressured into purchasing a few Calder prints. The ArtWorks Gallery failed almost immediately. Calder had hired many people to work on his stuff, so even if it bore his name, a Calder work might never even have been touched by the artist. The market was flooded with Calders as soon as he died. But, even though it was a miserable failure as a business, ArtWorks did get Donna Summer over to the US permanently.

Our work wasn’t finished on that front. We found out that Peter beat Donna when he was feeling down or depressed. She was the focus of attention, the star, not him, and this was very difficult for him to take. We marshaled a campaign to help her build the courage to leave him. Eventually, she saw the light, and they split up. The breakup devastated her, but I believe that her musical success and her new support group helped her to get through this difficult part of her life.

Meanwhile, KISS was ready to release yet another studio album. In the 1970s, when the biggest acts only released albums on a yearly basis, at most, KISS was churning out material at a breakneck pace. It had been a little over two and a half years since their debut release, and they were completing their sixth album. Much of that output had been directly supported—if not outright demanded—by Neil. The album, titled
Rock and Roll Over,
was scheduled to ship on November 1, and to get some national exposure for it, we booked the band to appear on
The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.
The hour-long program aired on October 29 on ABC Television, and it created a nice sales spike for us. It was a great opportunity to feature some of KISS’s material, especially “Beth,” which was in the middle of its successful ride on the charts; the band lip-synched three songs on the show. The national exposure was likely responsible for “Beth” peaking on the charts: it entered the Top 10 a few weeks after the special aired.

 

 

Casablanca released sixteen albums in 1976. In 1977, that number would triple. This type of growth is exactly what the owners of every young business hope for, but steering a company through such expansion is more challenging than creating it to begin with. One of the major factors behind our accelerated growth rate was Bruce Bird, whom we hired as vice president of promotion in January 1977. Bruce ran a successful independent promotion business out of Cleveland, and we’d used him to help market our product in that region. He was happy where he was (his mother and his children from his first marriage lived nearby), and he made an excellent living, but he was also developing a relationship with Nancy Reingold, Buck’s ex-wife. They had known each other for many years—in a purely platonic way—until their relationship took a different turn at a convention in 1976. The news of their budding romance was not well received by Neil. He was desperate to keep Beth and their children in LA. If Nancy, her twin, moved to another city to be with Bruce, then Beth could decide to follow her, taking the kids.

Nancy had finally ended her marriage to Buck earlier in 1976. He was lying to her and cheating on her every hour of every day. He was absolutely shameless about it—it was almost as if he wanted to get caught. He was so brazen that among his shack-ups was a woman who lived across the street from them. He would even cheat at the office while Nancy was in the next room. But her loyalty to him was so strong that it took a sledgehammer to the head to get her to recognize his infidelity.

Early in her relationship with Bruce, Nancy (who had begun to spend a great deal of her time with Bruce in Cleveland) had decided that it would help ease Neil’s angst if she and Bruce were to visit him in LA. So she and Bruce came to town, but they spent most of their visit with Candy and me, and a lot of that time Nancy and Candy just hovered over lines of coke complaining about Neil. Of course, word of these bitching sessions ended up getting back to Neil (Nancy had trouble keeping her mouth shut), leaving the Bruce-Neil relationship in an even worse state than it would have been if Bruce had just stayed home, which is what he’d wanted to do in the first place.

One afternoon a week or two later, after Nancy and Bruce had left LA, I heard Neil on the phone through our adjoining office door. The volume of the conversation was so loud that I could hear what he was saying with the door closed. “You’re going to do what?!” Neil sounded incredulous. “No! Nancy, you can’t . . . I won’t stand for it.” I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, realizing that Nancy was trying to explain her feelings for Bruce. Neil spun into a tirade. “How could you? How could you possibly marry that complete slob?! He’s going nowhere! He’s a nobody!”

I absolutely hate playing the middleman in personal conflicts. I’d tried acting as hall monitor between Candy and Neil and gotten nowhere—I’d always thought that two adults shouldn’t need some outside moderator to broker a peace treaty for them anyway. And if I had thought that this particular conflict would have no impact on the company, I would have simply let Neil and Nancy hash it out, but as vice president I had a responsibility to protect Casablanca.

I let it play out for a few more minutes before I rolled my eyes, sighed, and trudged off to talk Neil down. I opened the adjoining door and shut it behind me. I’d learned that the key to coaxing Neil back off the ledge was a mix of calm, quiet, and resolution. “Look, I know you want Nancy to stay here in LA, but screaming at her and calling the man she loves a slob is going to get you absolutely nowhere, and you know it.” Neil looked at me intensely, eyes popping out more than usual. Then he exhaled and said, “Yeah, I know, you’re right. I’ll get it together.” “OK, then,” I thought, and then I went back to my desk.

Not five minutes later, I received a call from Bruce, who must have been listening to Nancy talk to Neil. Bruce was every bit as livid. He told me that he and I would always be friends, but he would never do promotion work for Casablanca again, and he would certainly never speak to Neil. Later in the day, after I knew that Neil’s emotions had settled and I had given myself time to think, I went back into his office to talk things over. I was blunt: “If you ever want to have a relationship with Nancy again, you better find a way to apologize and make it up to her. And to Bruce, too.” Although his emotions were easily stirred, Neil was a smart man, and he finally admitted that he wasn’t really mad at Bruce at all; he just desperately wanted to maintain his contact with Nancy, he valued it so much. After a few days, he spoke to Nancy and Bruce and invited them back to LA. Bruce was apprehensive about returning, but he would grin and bear it for Nancy. During their visit, Neil had them over to his house and did a real sales number on Bruce, offering him the position of vice president of promotion. Bruce accepted, even though it would cut his salary in half. Neil assured Bruce that he would take care of him—wink, wink. To my knowledge, he never did, but for the moment, Neil was happy, Nancy was happy, and Bruce was happy.

I was fine with the resolution, too, but only because this is what Neil needed to do to keep Nancy in LA. But the collateral damage caused by Neil’s move was now my problem—that is, I had to figure out a way to tell Scott Shannon that someone had just taken his job. That would have been relatively easy had Scott been doing poorly, but he hadn’t. I was very satisfied with Scott as head of promotion; he was doing a good job, and we had had some major hits under his watch—“Beth,” in particular. Since Neil had gotten me into this mess, he would damn well help get me out of it. The next day, he and I huddled to figure out what we could offer Scott that would seem like a lateral move or, better yet, a promotion. I called Scott into my office and explained to him that with the company growing so fast, we wanted to give him a promotion and a raise. He was to be our vice president in charge of special projects. He would help out in various areas of the company, including the motion picture division. Scott went along with this for a time, but I suspect he always resented it, and that showed up later when he was back in radio running a big station in Miami; he refused to help any of us out—me, Neil, or Bruce. He wouldn’t play our records or even take our calls. Years later, I ran into him in a restaurant in New York. By that time, he was a fairly famous DJ on Z100 with a nationally syndicated show. The chance meeting was pleasant enough, and we greeted each other cordially, but that was as far as it went.

When Bruce moved to LA, he started to build the promotions department, luring some of the best promotion guys away from other companies with perks like a Mercedes, first-class airfare everywhere, and a big salary increase, plus full coverage of moving expenses and, in some cases, the down payment on a house. By March, the department was staffed by three guys talented and experienced enough to be running national promotions by themselves: Howie Rosen, Brian Interland, and Don Wasley.

Don was entirely new to me, but I’d known Howie and Brian for years. We knew Brian from the Buddah days, when he had worked promo for the local Boston distributor. We’d always liked him a great deal, plus he was still tight with all of my friends at WBCN, so that was another point in his favor. All three had different strengths, and Bruce efficiently captured and directed those strengths to give us the strongest promotion team in the country. Brian was close to the northeast programmers, Don ran in San Francisco circles, and Howie had programming friends scattered along the eastern seaboard. The lineup didn’t last for long. Don Wasley became head of our artist relations department, which meant hanging out with KISS and other artists. Brian was in LA only a short while before his failing marriage forced him to return to Boston, though he retained his position with us after the move. This left Howie as the lone in-house national promotions guy.

Another Bruce Bird hire was T.J. Lambert. Everyone in the promotions department was married except for T.J., so the rest of the promo guys tended to live vicariously through him. T.J. would come in after a rough night and have the rest of the guys on the edge of their seats with his war stories about entertaining the female population of Los Angeles. Twenty-five years old and working for Casablanca, T.J. was already living the dream—but when two girls moved in with him, everyone in the office, at least everyone with a dick, was even more impressed. One morning, he came to work looking particularly wrung out and collapsed into his chair. He had that running-on-no-sleep look we all knew so well. No one could resist the bait for long. Someone asked him what had happened. T.J. sighed heavily and mumbled, “Well, the girls had six or seven of their friends over last night, and one thing led to another, and . . . ” Then he lapsed back into the semiconscious state we’d aroused him from. The guy had had an orgy with nine women, and he’d regaled us married stiffs with all the joy and enthusiasm of someone doing a line reading of the Sunday classifieds. He stopped talking, stared for a moment (if it’s possible to be asleep with your eyes open, then he was), and pondered out loud, straight-faced and monotone, “I don’t know if I’ll be happy with just two women ever again.” The poor bastard.

It was fun to work surrounded by such an assortment of characters and lunatics, but, due to Casablanca’s rapid growth, maintaining a sense of managerial presence or control was becoming a real challenge. The feeling of teamwork that had been such a part of the culture at Buddah and at Casablanca in the early days was beginning to disappear. Departments were establishing their own cliques—sales didn’t know what was going on in marketing, legal barely spoke to accounting, and so on. This slow fracturing undermined the sense of family that Neil so cherished, and he was determined not to let that go. As the company grew, Neil, whose first love was always promotion, would periodically walk down the hall to the promotions department and shout out things like, “OK, first person to get me the Parliament single added anywhere west of the Mississippi gets two hundred dollars. You’ve got sixty minutes . . . go!” or, “Anyone adding a single on a major Top 40 station by the close of business can come to my office and take a C-note out of my hand.” The promotion team members were thrilled when he came into their area of the building, and his visits helped bolster spirits and foster unity. When Neil walked through the offices, he left awe in his wake. He was the Man, and everyone knew it. I made a point of walking the halls every day, too, but with me there was more joking around. My presence certainly did not carry the weight or inspire the same feelings as Neil’s did, which was OK with me, because not long before that I had been in awe of Neil myself.

Casablanca was big business. Important decisions were constantly being made, and millions of dollars and the careers of hundreds were on the line every day. Still, more often than not, we acted like a bunch of sixth graders. One day, a fire broke out in Howie’s office. Neil had taken a bottle of lighter fluid, poured it on Howie’s desk, and ignited it just to show everyone how hot we were. A few miles away at Warner, or over at Capitol, they would have been content with a nice interoffice memo to pass on the news. Not us. We set the furniture on fire.

That wasn’t the half of it. We played games, too, like Bruce Bird’s “hit the hooker with the Frisbee.” An infamous strip joint, the Body Shop, was located directly across Sunset from us, and it wasn’t all that uncommon for hookers to pace on the sidewalk in front of the club. When he was bored or looking for something to do, Bruce would open his window wide and chuck Frisbees across Sunset, trying to hit the hookers. From time to time, you’d hear the screech of tires—some driver slamming on the brakes when a toy disc zipped passed the windshield.

Even the parking lot wasn’t immune from our decadence. For instance, Al DiNoble, our director of singles, wasn’t Al. His first name was Fuckin’. As in, “that fuckin’ DiNoble.” Employees had their names painted through stencils onto their parking slots in the lot behind the building. Naturally, Al’s parking space had “Fuckin’ DiNoble” painted onto it. We loved it because it so obviously offended the occasional conservative stuffed shirt who came to visit.

For his part, Neil would conspire with Phyllis Chotin (our director of advertising) on a practical joke that would leave visitors with stunned expressions. Phyllis would crawl under Neil’s desk before he met with a client and then climb out in the middle of their conversation, like she’d just given Neil head. It was all in good fun, and Phyllis thought it was hilarious, but today we’d be sued into oblivion for it. Howie had his own stunts—one was playing a recording of machine-gun fire at full volume or repeatedly striking a very loud gong every time a record was added to a major station. Even though my office was a good fifty feet down the hall from him, if I was on the phone, the person I was speaking to would ask me what was going on. Neil couldn’t hear the gong unless I had both my doors open, but when he did hear it, he loved it, and he would ask Howie to do it again. I enjoyed these antics, too, and when we had VIP visitors we would sometimes tell Howie to bash the gong just to impress upon them how crazy we were.