“HOW WAS THE TRIP?”
After returning from Wisconsin I stopped by Ahmet’s office to catch up. Though I answered to Doug now, Ahmet remained my confidant, my role model, and my adviser. I sat down across from him and said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
He leaned back in his chair, put his glasses on his head, and said, “Tell me.”
“I fucked Michael Hutchence.”
Ahmet practically slobbered as I gave him the inside story, the one I entrusted to only a few intimate friends. If I were being true to myself, I would have admitted that I knew it was wrong to bang an artist, especially Hutch. INXS was Doug Morris’s act, which meant Michael was technically my boss’s employee. Besides, at Atlantic, the right to bang artists was reserved for titles—president and up.
I tried to rationalize it away. I’m not Michael’s A&R person, I thought. I have nothing to do with his career. Ultimately, though, it was Ahmet’s gleeful approbation of my story that allowed the guilt to subside. If the king says it’s OK, how can a peasant disagree?
“I hope you didn’t embarrass me,” Ahmet said. I didn’t tell him that I had the same thought midbanging. I did tell him that we wrecked the hotel room and that I put it on the expenses. Ahmet barely registered surprise. As I got up to leave, Ahmet looked at me with pride.
“You did good,” he said.
Michael showed me the mountaintop. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1988, it seemed all the men in my life decided to show me the valley. Perhaps fittingly, Ahmet kicked off my descent.
Skid Row had a gig at the Cat Club in the East Village to stay limber while waiting for their album release and subsequent tour. I took Ahmet to see them as a victory lap. I felt proud of my role in signing the band and wanted to get him excited about the project. He arrived with Atlantic’s cleaning lady—an age-appropriate date for once. He was drunk and high, as usual, but I didn’t feel nervous this time. The last time I took Ahmet to see Skid Row, I was a secretary. This time, I was an executive.
I sat with Ahmet and the cleaning woman at a table in the corner. After a few songs, I realized something was wrong with the band. Sebastian could barely squawk out the notes, the guitars jangled out of tune, and the audience went limp. Ahmet grabbed my hand and squeezed until it hurt. Then he squeezed harder, his temper winding tighter and tighter like a guitar string about to snap. The band couldn’t get it together, and Ahmet squeezed harder still, cocaine and booze fueling his rage. I was scared. He clenched my hand like a vise. Just before I thought my bones would break, Ahmet decided he’d seen enough.
He lifted my arm and slammed it on the table.
“This,” he growled, “is what you made me spend my fucking money on?”
I was stunned. Never in my life had I experienced anything like it. My parents never even spanked me as a child. Pain shot up and down my arm. Shock numbed the pain. I wanted to escape, afraid he’d hurt me again, but I had nowhere to go. When the show ended, Ahmet and I went backstage. I took refuge by Skid Row’s guitarist, Dave “the Snake” Sabo. He must have felt my fear. “What happened?” he asked. I brushed him off, slipped out of the dressing room, and went home. That night, shame and guilt took turns tying knots in my stomach. I knew Ahmet was wrong to have hurt me, but I believed it was my fault. How could I have let Ahmet down like that? What if he fires me?
The next day bruises covered my swollen arm, so I went to the doctor. He took X-rays and found a hairline fracture in my forearm. He asked how it happened. “My boss did it,” I said. “He didn’t mean it.” The doctor, recognizing those infamous words—“He didn’t mean it”—tried to help me. He explained that I had experienced abuse and told me my options. I laughed it off. Abuse? Me? No, this was just part of my job.
I really believed it was OK. It was my fault. It was the band’s fault. It was anyone’s fault but Ahmet’s. I enabled his behavior, just like everyone else around him. That’s how the legend of Ahmet Ertegun continued. He could fracture his A&R executive’s arm and walk away without consequences. No one wanted to stop the gravy train from rolling, so no one stood up to him—not me, not the artists, not the managers, not Tunc, not Sheldon, not even Doug. A few days later, during a conversation with Doug, I brought up the incident, and he said, “What do you want me to do about it?” I knew that no one at the company would protect me. Instead of making a scene, I wore long sleeves until the bruises went away. Again, I rationalized it. Life is all about compromise. We all have to pay a price for what we want. I wanted to be an A&R executive, and this was the price I had to pay.
So I thought.
Next, I ran afoul of Doug. Michele Anthony, the executive vice president of Sony Music (and Tommy Mottola’s right-hand woman), lived in the same building as John Kalodner in L.A. I met her through John, and she and I became close. When Sony wanted to poach me for their A&R Division, Michele invited me to lunch and asked if I would take a meeting with Tommy Mottola. I didn’t want to leave Atlantic, but I wasn’t an idiot. Mottola was one of the biggest names in the business. I took the meeting.
Sony Records had headquarters just across the street from Rockefeller Center, so I didn’t make a big deal about it. No one even knew why I left for an hour in the middle of the day, and most likely no one cared. Tommy had a huge office on a high floor in the CBS building. He showed me his vast guitar collection, including one signed by Bruce Springsteen. I had never met Tommy before, but I felt like I knew him. He reminded me of my brother, with his penchant for projecting that Italian mafioso image. I knew a bit about his background already. I knew he was friends with John “Sonny” Franzese (from the Colombo crime family), who was a silent partner in Buddah Records. I also knew he was friends with Louis Gigante, a Catholic priest whose brother was Vinny “the Chin” Gigante, godfather of the Genovese crime family.
The meeting went well, and Tommy said he wanted me to meet Donnie Ienner, president of Columbia Records. He suggested we do it during Grammy week in Los Angeles. I thanked him for his time, left the CBS building, walked across the street, and went back to my office. Before I could sit down, Doug called me into his office. I’d barely stepped in his door when he laid into me. “You just met with Tommy Mottola?” he screamed. “How could you do such a thing? You’re disloyal.” I understood in a flash how connected the men in the music business were. Mottola must have called Doug right after I left and told him about our meeting. There was no other way Doug could have known so soon. I was sure Mottola did it just to fuck with Doug. These guys had the mentality of children arguing over who gets to rule the fort.
Now in a defensive position, one I was becoming used to with Doug, I pled my case. “I don’t want to leave Atlantic,” I said, “but it’s Tommy Mottola calling. What was I supposed to do, pass up a meeting with him?”
“Yes,” Doug said. “And I’d better not hear of you being disloyal to me again.”
Lesson learned: there are no secrets in the music business. I left Doug’s office reeling. Of course, I didn’t mention Doug’s games with Irving Azoff, or how he reamed me out for something he regularly did, or how Jason had just done the same thing and Doug had given him a raise and a promotion.
I realized how much Doug and Ahmet had in common. On the outside they seemed so different, but deep down, both men expected total loyalty, and both would explode with shock when they didn’t get it. I already expected this behavior from Ahmet. The more I got to know Doug, the more I expected it from him. I did not, however, expect it from my best friend.
After leaving Doug’s office, I ran into Jason, and he started yelling about disloyalty. I could barely take him seriously. This was even more ridiculous than what I had just heard from Doug. Jason apparently didn’t remember the meeting I had set up for him with David Geffen, or how that had led to his current salary and title.
In fact, since his promotion, I could feel Jason starting to turn on me. It was like watching a living, breathing example of the age-old principle that power corrupts. Jason hired new assistants, including Wendy Berry from Def Jam, whom he eventually married, and he ordered an expensive new desk and office furniture. He idolized Doug and began dressing in cheap suits like him. Even his vocabulary changed. He started using SAT words, putting on bullshit airs of scholarly refinement. I didn’t know him anymore.
Then he started hiring friends to work in the A&R Department, and he automatically paid them more than me. He told me about it, too—he’d say that these guys were lawyers and businessmen and they expected a certain salary. Never mind that they had no experience in A&R; they were men.
It is a horrible, powerless feeling to watch a friendship disintegrate. Jason was my boss now. Neither of us knew how to adapt to that. He fluctuated, sometimes treating me like his best friend, sometimes treating me like a piece of property, like Ahmet did. He’d go from the old Jason, laughing and joking, to the boss Jason, barking out orders as though I were a useless subordinate, and he’d change so fast I couldn’t keep up. We had been too close for too long to adjust to this change. After a while, I no longer knew where I stood. Jason, my only refuge from the constant up-and-down yo-yo of emotions that Ahmet and Doug put me through, now had the yo-yo tied to his finger.
I wanted to escape, to distance myself from everything that had let me down. When I started working at Atlantic, I believed it would satisfy the need I’d always felt to prove my worth. It didn’t. Even as an executive, I still felt powerless, taken for granted, and denied. My family didn’t help—after my raise they started asking for money. Worse, I now earned more than my father, and it made me feel guilty, as if I had broken some unwritten law. Even New York seemed to have turned on me: the subway was shitty, the city was dirty, and I had no friends.
Coincidentally, an opening for director of A&R had just come up in Atlantic’s West Coast Division. I loved Los Angeles. In L.A. the sun was always shining. In L.A. I woke up every day thinking, Isn’t it great to be alive? In L.A. I had a great group of friends and professional acquaintances who respected me as an executive. I’ll never forget going to see Tori Amos record at producer Richard Landis’s gorgeous house on Mullholland Drive and gasping at the vista of the city below—all palm trees and sunlight and swimming pools in every backyard. This was my escape. I asked Jason to consider me for the job, and he laughed in my face. “You’re not director material,” he said. “Plus you’d be the only A&R person out there. You’re not capable.”
If Ahmet or Doug had said that to me, I might have believed it. Coming from Jason it rang hollow. Not capable? I outranked him in education. I had more business savvy than he did (he might’ve been happy to stay in the same job at the same salary forever if I hadn’t helped him get a raise and a title). Plus, I knew the guys on the West Coast—I couldn’t have done worse than they did.
That’s when I knew our problems went beyond a crumbling friendship. Jason didn’t respect me anymore. He began treating me the way all the other men did, like I was an expendable little nothing, not worth the trouble of taking seriously. I don’t know how or why it happened. I want to believe that it was corporate culture’s fault. He had been promoted to a world where women did not belong, where a man could feel his power and wield it without consequence. I want to believe that as Jason felt this power pumping into him, he realized the difference between us. Given that I was a female of lower rank, my attempts to maintain our friendship threatened his power because being someone’s best friend is an admission of equality. By the rules of his new world, he had to put me in my place. Maybe I’m being too kind to Jason. Maybe the disrespect was within him all along and had nothing to do with his promotion. Whatever the case, I didn’t intend to put up with it.
In all, it had been a year of painful transitions. Yet I counted 1988 as one of the best years of my life, both because of Jason, Doug, Kalodner, and Ahmet and in spite of them. I was living my dream, and in most ways the reality lived up to the fantasy. After only a year and a half in the music business, I had helped sign a promising new band, become an executive, and watched that band record its debut album. I had held my own with businessmen and rock stars, both in the conference room and in the bedroom, and I counted some of the industry’s elite figures as close friends.
I remembered Sister Rose Ellen’s warning: “Men are going to try to break you.” They had tried. Some even tried literally (my fractured forearm had healed, no thanks to Ahmet). Only I didn’t break. I kept rising.