IN ALL MY YEARS AT Columbia, I never had a relationship with Tommy Mottola. Whenever I saw him in the office, he pretended he didn’t know me. That was fine by me—I hadn’t forgotten how he buried me with Doug Morris after our first meeting back when I was in A&R at Atlantic. The less contact we had the better.
Tommy was ruthless. No one knew that better than former CBS Records chairman Walter Yetnikoff. Walter had hired Tommy in the late 1980s, not long after Sony bought CBS, and Tommy quickly became Walter’s right-hand man. Walter had serious trouble with substance abuse, and by the time Tommy came to work for him, Walter was out of control. At meetings, he’d blurt out things like, “I want David Geffen to teach my girlfriend to give blow jobs,” or “Courtney Ross [Steve Ross’s wife] has a smelly cunt.” Of course, none of this would raise an eyebrow in the music business as long as the money still came rolling in. That’s where Walter slipped. He lost $2 billion for Sony, and Tommy began working behind his back to get him fired. It only took two years for Tommy to be named chairman and CEO of the newly named Sony Music.
It didn’t take much longer for Tommy to become one of the most hated men in the business. Ahmet always said he was a two-dollar pimp in a $2,000 suit. Tommy thought he was a mobster and would regularly grab his chin and say, “I’m going to see the man.” This was code for Vinny “the Chin” Gigante, head of the Genovese crime family (recall that Tommy was friends with Gigante’s brother, and he had courted the Mob since his early days at Buddah Records). He must have believed his own bullshit, because he had the balls to disrespect his own boss, Sir Howard Stringer. He rarely invited Stringer to corporate events. At one Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dinner, he gave Stringer the worst seats in the house. When Stringer called and asked to see him, Mottola’s reply was always, “Make an appointment.”
Tommy was also extraordinarily competitive and petty. In 1997, Donnie wanted Céline Dion to sing a duet with Barbra Streisand. Tommy insisted it would be bad for Dion, but Donnie pushed ahead with the project. When the song “Tell Him” sold 450,000 copies and became a worldwide hit, Donnie ordered a congratulatory bouquet of 450 roses to be sent to Streisand. Tommy found out about it, called the florist, and ordered 450 roses of his own. He told the florist to send Donnie’s flowers the next day.
Like many mobsters—or in this case, wannabe mobsters—Tommy acted paranoid. He regularly pulled up employees’ phone records to see who was talking to the media. He kept the blinds drawn in his office, and when guests came, sometimes he’d leave his gun out for display. He hired attorney Michele Anthony to do his job and handle the Japanese corporate owners of Sony. He paid her a fortune to fly to Tokyo and do all the paperwork so he could have his time free to scheme and plot and spy.
He spent much of his day keeping tabs on his wife, Sony’s biggest artist, Mariah Carey. Tommy and Mariah married in 1993—he a forty-five-year-old music mogul, she a twenty-three-year-old diva in training. Like many an older man who has snared a beautiful, younger woman, Tommy kept Mariah under lock and key. She couldn’t go anywhere without supervision. Tommy dispatched Ann Glew, the wife of Dave Glew at Epic Records, to be Mariah’s unofficial House Bunny. When Mariah wanted to ride a roller coaster, Tommy rented out Rye Playland—a huge amusement park in upstate New York—and let the whole company go on a field day. When she wanted to go ice-skating, he rented out the Wollman Rink in Central Park and made all of Columbia Records skate with her. When she went into the recording studio, no one was allowed to use her name. She was referred to as “Project 50.”
Tommy also had Mariah trapped professionally. She was managed by his former partner and doppelganger, Randy Hoffman, of Champion Entertainment. Tommy had owned Champion before taking the job at Sony, and the two men remained close.
By the time I started working for Columbia, cracks had begun to appear in their relationship. In 1996, Mariah Carey was nominated for six Grammy Awards, but she didn’t win any (this came after seven nominations and no wins in the previous four years). After the ceremony, Mariah berated Tommy in the lobby of the venue, saying, “What do I need you for? You can’t even get me a Grammy.” After that, Tommy penned a letter to Mike Greene of NARAS, the recording academy, complaining about the voting rules. Greene ignored his pleas.
What arrogance, to think you could persuade the Grammys to change the rules just because your wife didn’t win. And yet, after a decade in the music business, I was no longer surprised by that arrogance. I had grown used to it, and I was tired of it. I was tired especially of how lavishly these men were rewarded for their arrogance—it was rumored that Tommy gave each of his assistants a Mercedes-Benz for Christmas, while he bought a yacht for himself. I used to wonder why the corporate powers would allow such excess, but I came to understand that the music business was just a drop in their bucket. That’s how many billions of dollars were involved.
Even after Tommy and Mariah separated in 1997, Tommy still tried to control her. Actor Steven Seagal had a crush on her, and when she was scheduled to perform on Saturday Night Live, Seagal contacted the show and asked for tickets. When Tommy found out, he called his old friend Sonny Franzese—the notorious mobster from Buddah Records—and there was no more trouble with Seagal.
Mariah Carey released a video that year for the song “Honey,” which portrayed her as a captive in a giant mansion trying to escape a man who was the spitting image of Tommy Mottola (played by Goodfellas actor Frank Sivero). She denied that it was supposed to be a commentary on Tommy, but let’s just say that many people have found her denial less than convincing. The couple divorced in 1998.
Mariah Carey left Sony for Virgin Records in 2001. This was a huge loss for Sony—she had just won Billboard’s Artist of the Decade award, as well as the World Music Award for Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium. Tommy gaslit Mariah in the media, and she hired private detective Jack Palladino to investigate him and prove he was the source of planting stories on her. Tommy tried to drive her crazy, and it seemed to work. In the summer of 2001, she began a public and painful breakdown.
Tommy wasn’t done with her. As Mariah worked on her first project for Virgin—a movie soundtrack called Glitter—he damaged her career in a move that was petty even by music industry standards. Tommy had been secretly watching film rushes from Glitter, which contained early versions of the songs Mariah was recording. For one of these songs, “Loverboy,” she had sampled the old disco song “Firecracker.” She also recorded a slow song featuring a give-and-take vocal with rapper Ja Rule called “If We.” Both had hit-single potential.
Tommy approached Irv Gotti—founder of Murder Inc. Records—and asked him for a favor. According to Gotti, Tommy said, “I want you to do this remix for Jennifer Lopez, I want you to put Ja on the record.” Before Glitter’s release, Jennifer Lopez put out “I’m Real,” which used the same sample that Carey had used in “Loverboy.” Then, a remix of “I’m Real” came out—it was slowed down and featured a give-and-take vocal between Lopez and Ja Rule in the exact style of Mariah’s “If We.” The song became a hit, and Mariah couldn’t release her songs anymore because Jennifer Lopez had unwittingly stolen them. Carey scrambled to change her songs to differentiate them, but Glitter bombed.
In fairness, there were many reasons the film and soundtrack bombed, including a release date of September 11, 2001, but Tommy undoubtedly played a part. Sony still had a stake in Glitter, so Tommy wasn’t just sabotaging Mariah; he was sabotaging himself. That’s how far he would go. Carey said in an interview at the time, “It shouldn’t be about finding the new way to mess with me. Like, OK, you’ve surely done your share of damage. Couldn’t we stop now?” Watching this saga unfold, I realized yet again how dangerous the music business was for women. If they’d fuck with the bestselling female artist of the millennium, how could I ever be safe?