B009HOTHPE EBOK (33 page)

Along with the music, the music business changed. You went from General Artists Corporation, a company that had been around since the beginning to these younger guys like Albert Grossman, Andrew Oldham, Jon Landau, and David Geffen. Geffen wanted to be my manager in the sixties, and had I not been with Irv, it was something I would have done.

Jerry Weintraub was a classic case of the showmanlike promoter. He was married to Jane Morgan, who was also a client. I wrote a song for her called, “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” under the name of Dee Merrick. At that time I wanted to write under another name. I can’t remember why.

Jerry was one of the guys around New York that I knew and liked. Very resourceful, smart, and ambitious. Creative. He went to Colonel Parker, offered him a million bucks to promote Elvis Presley. That got the Colonel’s attention, and he started doing Elvis’s tours.

I knew Jerry long before that, when he was still carrying hat boxes and gowns from gig to gig for his wife, but even then he was a smart guy and he knew the business. He evolved out of the motion picture business into his own big management firm. Jerry is the ultimate showbiz, spieler—which is why he called his autobiography
When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead.
Somewhere in his book he says, “I knew Paul Anka before he was Paul Anka.” And he did. I’ve known Jerry since the fifties and we’re still very close friends. A lot of love and respect here.

Jerry Weintraub is Mr. Showbiz. He’d show up in Vegas, come backstage with, say, Neil Diamond, or another of his famous clients to say hello—always a big thrill. He’s represented or promoted a boggling mix of artists: Charles Aznavour, Pat Boone, Jackson Browne, George Burns, Eric Clapton, John Denver, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Connie Francis, Jerry Garcia, Waylon Jennings, and Elton John.

I spoke to Jerry the first time I played at the Aladdin Vegas. How the hell he happened to pop up in my life at all these different events in my life I don’t know. He’s a kind of showbiz Zelig. He’s a flamboyant, colorful character, easily the charismatic equal of any of his clients. Jerry’s the classic showbiz entrepreneur who’s been there throughout history. Aristophanes knew this character, Ben Jonson wrote plays about him, Billy Wilder immortalized him, and Woody Allen bottled him in
Broadway Danny Rose
. Woody and Jerry once worked in the same office building and Jerry speculates he may have based the Danny Rose character on himself from listening to his spiels in the elevator, yelling at his dumbstruck clients: “You’re not just a
juggler
—but an artist! Do you hear me, an
artist
!”

In the ’70s or ’80s when I was living in Vegas and had my jet plane company, I got a call from Jerry and he asked me to fly in a newborn baby from Vegas to L.A. It was his adoptive daughter.

*   *   *

In 1969, in Monte Carlo I was actually crowned backstage by the Monte Carlo, Sporting Club ballet dancers at their performance of their ballet,
“Femmes.”
That was the kind of coronation I could get into. The Nice
L’Espoir
reported that it was the first time
“la jeune grande vedette Américaine”
(big young American star—that would be me) had performed in Monte Carlo, a city I would get to know a whole lot better as time went on.

Hanging around the Rat Pack I had separated myself from my generation, but I wasn’t their contemporary, either. I was some twenty-five years younger than Sinatra and Dean Martin, and sixteen years younger than Sammy Davis Jr. Generationally I was in a kind of limbo. I was apart from my generation, but I felt very much in tune with its dissatisfactions—with the war, the government, and outdated cultural attitudes.

On the morning of October 4, 1969, I was apparently feeling upset about a lot of things. “If you just work as a star, you’re mad,” I told
The Sydney Morning Herald.
“In spite of everything I’ve gotten out of life, I’m deeply worried. I feel like it’s getting harder, more dangerous. Today, young people at least know where it’s at. When I was young they didn’t have the grim knowledge and power they have today. In our country, 65 percent of the country is under twenty-five. My generation were puppies in their teens. Not now. And every time the kids have gone out to make noise, they got what they wanted. They sat still through my early years and got nothing but promises. They live in fear of the bomb. I know, because I’m with them every hour, every day. And they live in hatred of the government we have. Religion is dead for them. I still believe in God, but at twenty-eight, I’m an older generation man, God means nothing to them. What they want is not in an afterlife. It’s a chance to change this one. They want the vote. Why the hell, they say, can we have one? We can serve in Vietnam, can’t we? We want a vote at eighteen. I’m going to end someone’s life, they say, well, why can’t I decide what guy is going to send me to kill? Their parents have no answers.”

*   *   *

As we fell into the seventies and eighties, everything became disposable. We learned to live in a disposable society. It was always funny to see all those changes, what with the Neil Bogarts, the Jon Peters, and Peter Gubers. The movies—
Five Easy Pieces
,
Easy Rider
—reflected the new climate in Hollywood. The power started being taken away from the old guard.

It just wasn’t my time. You sit there saying to yourself, “Maybe the older I get, things may revert, and maybe I could be ‘in’ again.” That sort of thing happens a lot in pop music. It was getting to the point where I was old enough to become new again. You are constantly watching the demise of this or that person or style of music. That’s what life is all about. Construction and destruction. Something else comes in and defuses something else. It has been an interesting trip, to say the least.

I began waiting to see what I could do next. I had a family I loved, I had kids to raise … but I also had this career that was not where I wanted it to be. The business as I knew it had been wiped out.

In the meantime I ran after a performing career. I thought if I could be a performer and have those kind of legs, I would always work. But as to what to write, that was my dilemma—I had to bide my time. I kept waiting for my chance, to see where my writing could lead me into that next thing. You’re always waiting for that next window, but you can never really anticipate these changes until they arise.

I had tested this song a few years before it came out, and the disc jockeys told me they couldn’t put a record out with a singer talking about his wife having a baby; it just wouldn’t fly. Anne postponed having children for a couple of years after we got married but then they came one after another: Alexandra was born November 25, 1966. It was a natural birth and I went through it with Anne. “I now understand the word ‘miracle,’” I told the
Philadelphia Daily News
a few days later. Right after she was born I had to leave for Philadelphia to do
The Mike Douglas Show.
Amanda was born in ’68, Alicia in ’70, Anthea in ’71, and Amelia in ’77. I had written “(You’re) Having My Baby” as a tribute to Anne.

When I thought the time was right I began thinking how to approach “(You’re) Having My Baby,” so as to make a delicate subject like this sound as heartfelt as possible. I’d met Odia Coates when I was producing the Edwin Hawkins album for Buddah Records, and he introduced her to me. My cousin Bob Skaff, who at that point was a United Artists executive, suggested I make “(You’re) Having My Baby” a duet. Odia had a great voice, she came out of gospel, and was the daughter of an evangelical minister. All the great black acts came out of gospel: James Brown, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles. I’ve always been into gospel, and I had an idea: I would try to integrate gospel into my songs. Odia sang with me on “(You’re) Having My Baby,” one of the first black and white duets, and it went to number one in 1974. We went on to make more hits with “One Man Woman/One Woman Man” that same year, plus in 1975, “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” and “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger than Our Love.” Sadly we lost her to breast cancer in 1991—she was only forty-nine.

“(You’re) Having My Baby” was a song I thought nobody would object to—who could possibly be against that? But it ended up stirring up quite a bit of controversy. We were growing up as a country, things were evolving, and obviously the situation of women was changing radically. A whole new wave was starting. Some women’s magazines thought it was condescending and hipsters naturally found it corny.
Rolling Stone
hated it. The National Organization for Women gave me their “Keep Her in Her Place” award, and
Ms.
magazine called me “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.” But there really is no such thing as bad publicity. It generally ends up doing something for you; controversy is always a plus. In the end I never needed to get up on a soap box to answer my critics because suddenly everybody was coming to my defense. Even
Time
magazine said, “What are you getting on this guy’s case for? We’re in a war. We’ve got a drug plague. We’ve got shit going on in our country. Give him a break, he’s writing a song about his wife.” Overnight, with all that heat, the record went to number one. Go figure.

*   *   *

Everyone has a dark side, but in those days no one guessed that there could be a dark side to Michael Jackson. However, I saw it early on and it wasn’t pretty. I had a cool run of stuff in the early seventies, but at some point I decided to get back to writing with other people. I love collaboration and the diversity it brings to a song.

When I first met Michael Jackson I knew he was immensely talented—this was before
Thriller
and his huge hits—and I began to think about collaborating with him. I’d known the Jackson family for a while. They used to bring their kids to Caesars to see my shows when they were young. They were a theatrically driven family. You could see that. I knew of Michael’s talents, saw him growing up—everyone knew it was going to happen. Later on I met Michael again through a guy named David Gest, a real go-getter who eventually married Liza Minnelli.

I first sat down with Michael Jackson and talked about collaborating in 1980. We started working together at my house in Carmel. It was a fun place to be—he was using my guest house, playing with my girls in the Jacuzzi. He clearly had a real fondness for kids—he was very childlike himself and related to them on their own level. When Michael and I talked, we were rapping. Even then he had this fascination with plastic surgery, a major obsession, obviously.

Anyway, Michael and I start messing around with the songs we were working on. I was very impressed with the way he went about the writing process. He knew how to make his way around a song, not only because he had an incredible vocal quality, but he also had a capacity to make complicated singing licks from an initial one-finger tune played for him on the piano. He didn’t seem at all like a disturbed character when he was working. He was just very tenacious, very focused on what he needed to do. But you could tell he was also wildly ambitious and capable of anything; I sensed an absolutely ruthless streak.

The concept of the album I was working on for Sony,
Walk a Fine Line,
was collaborations, with other artists: Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, David Foster, and Chicago, plus the two tracks I was doing with Michael. But the thing is, while we were doing
Walk a Fine Line,
Michael was also doing tracks for his album,
Thriller.
Well,
Thriller
comes out and is an absolute smash, and of course I can’t get Michael in the studio to finish what we are doing. But I had tapes sitting in the studio in L.A., at Sunset Sound I think it was—all the tapes from when we were working together. It was right around then I started to see Michael’s true colors. It happens.

I’m trying to finish my album, and suddenly I couldn’t get him on the phone. Then he sent one of his people over to the studio and they actually stole the tapes we’d been working on.

When I heard about this, I went, “
What
? Michael went in and just took them? Holy shit!”

Then Michael disappears, and only after weeks of threatening, did I get the tapes back—finally. But I knew then that this kid was headed for trouble.

I just thought it was a terrible thing to do. How do people become ruthless? What mania takes over them is always a mystery. What happened? This boy was a child when I met first him. Who knew what went on in that family? I saw him a few years after the disappearing tape affair, at a law office, ironically.

I worked many years with my two loyal and smart lawyers—and close friends—Stu Silfen and Lee Phillips on this issue. They were involved all the way through in the negotiations regarding the posthumous release of Jackson’s song, “This Is It.” The song was originally titled, “I Never Heard,” when it was written in 1981 for the album I was recording. In the end we prevailed—I got 50 percent of the credit and “They did the right thing,” I said at the time. “There were only honorable people involved. I don’t think that anybody tried to do the wrong thing. It was an honest mistake.”

Some time after the stolen tape incident, Michael called and asked to meet me. I could tell he was disturbed and sorry, but I mean, what could you say? This was a major talent who got derailed too early in his life. It was never a good situation, and see where he winds up. You could almost sense it coming.

For example, between the Jacksons and the Osmonds, there was always a certain rivalry despite the fact that they were two family groups supposedly competing with each other in a friendly way. But Michael could be scathing about the Osmonds. He thought they were a kitsch exploitation group compared to the Jackson Five.

While we were working together he’d call the Osmonds and talk them up in a nice, chatty manner, and as soon as he’d hung up he’d rip them apart behind their backs. The Osmonds were not in good shape at that time. Donny is a nice guy, he and Marie both are. He has kind of kept it together the best that he can. It’ll be interesting to see what he can make out of the next phase in his life.