My experience with Karen had finally driven home a hard lesson for me, one I’d resisted most of my life: I wasn’t an island. Much as I gravitated, in my moody creative fashion, towards solitude, I was at best a half-hearted isolationist. I was part of a family, and if one person suffered, we all suffered. Being an adult, whether famous and rich, or struggling and poor, offered no protection, no licence to look the other way. But this realization didn’t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy, or noble. Quite the opposite.
When I returned from Berlin, still feeling the detritus of my sister’s depression grinding beneath my skin, Bev had a surprise in store for me.
“I didn’t want to tell you this while you were away, but when you were in Germany, an IRS collection officer came to Toronto to execute on your assets, including our house.”
“What?!”
My outstanding tax battle with the IRS had been dragging on for years. In fact, one of the reasons that Bev and I had spent half a year in L.A. was out of fear that if the IRS succeeded in its claim against me I’d be banned from travelling to, and working in, America. While Bev and I were a considerable business force, three years of paying an American tax firm, on top of a Canadian tax firm, along with an overworked accountant, ate up the six figures a year I was netting. Meanwhile the IRS claim—as interest, fines and penalties continued to snowballs—had metastasized into almost a million dollars. Given that the Canadian government taxed fifty cents on every dollar I earned, I had to make two million dollars, fast, to get the IRS off my back. That or legally prove that the IRS didn’t have a case. Bev, but a few years out of law school, remained determined to pull off what the four-hundred-dollar-an-hour tax firms swore, right from the beginning, was most unlikely to happen.
“The IRS did not allow you to claim expense deductions when touring through the States in ‘76/’77,” Bev explained, summarizing details I’d purposely blocked out.
Still unpacking, I snapped, as if Bev were on the opposing side, “I don’t get it. I mean, touring across America—with airfare, hotels and rental cars for me and everyone travelling with me—cost me more money than I actually earned.”
“But your managers couldn’t produce the receipts evidencing your travel expenses.”
“Evidencing your travel expenses? Plain English, please!”
Bev disappeared in the middle of my sniping, returning moments later with something that looked to me like a combination art-geography project that a grade schooler might hand in. Arms spread wide, she held a big wall map of the United States, along with a stack of contracts and reviews confirming all my stateside gigs over the years in question.
“See on this map how, with different-coloured pencils and pens, I illustrated the routes you had to travel all across America performing night after night? Only a singer with wings could perform in Seattle, fly home to Toronto afterwards and then show up in Portland two days later for another concert.”
I stood, entranced by Bev’s colour-coded visual recreation of my touring schedule. Surely, the IRS official would never have come across a defence like this before. Continuing to look over the different hues of lines and circles connecting some one hundred American towns and cities I’d hopscotched throughout the seventies, I mumbled, “How long did it take you to do this, honey?”
“Don’t ask. But don’t you want to know what happened next?”
Bev gave a lottery winner’s smile, still stretching out her proud creation, as she detailed the negotiation that followed. After a long and careful examination, the IRS official allowed my travel expenses to pass, reducing my outstanding bill to a “measly” one hundred thousand. Determined to return to his tax bosses with something, he reminded Bev that this amount had to be repaid before he caught his evening flight to Washington, D.C. Bev, usually cautious by nature, decided to go for broke, informing her adversary that during my dual citizenship period I’d overpaid the IRS twelve grand. (Bev had mailed several letters informing the IRS of this overpayment, to which there’d been no response.) According to IRS interest tables from the time of the overpayment right up to the present day, that wiped out the hundred thousand I still owed. Frowning, the official countered that if Bev could produce my “alleged” cancelled cheque and hand it over to him by early evening, before he left his hotel, he’d consider my claim.
Rising to what was meant to be an impossible challenge, Bev taxied to my parents’ home in search of the hundred-thousand-dollar smoking gun: my cancelled cheque to the IRS. A few hours later, after fumbling through reams of papers, documents and old fan mail piled into several boxes in the basement laundry room, Bev found my cancelled cheque, taxied back to the official’s hotel and presented her evidence.
“Your husband’s one helluva lucky man” was the taxman’s way of announcing I was, finally, free and clear of all the IRS’s claims.
How did I respond, jet-lagged and still unhinged from seeing my sister struggling to fend off the oldest Hill family scourge, upon arriving to such amazing news? Not the obvious “hooray, we’ve dodged bankruptcy and the spectre of moving in with my parents” reaction. Instead, I had the surreal realization that I’d married a woman who would go to the ends of the earth, to hell and back, to protect me.
What gave me the right to be on the receiving end of such utter devotion? All my life I’d believed I had to earn, through formidable achievements, whatever kindness I received. Cynthia had always been a magnificent friend, but in order to win, to earn, her heart, I had to write five years of letters and prove that I was on the verge of becoming a singing sensation. A variation on this principle could apply to how I eventually gained my father’s approval. But I didn’t have to achieve anything to “earn” Bev’s love; it simply poured out of her.
While I happily shared with Bev every drop of royalties, property, money, etc., I owned and would continue to earn (she’d offered to sign a pre-nup, and I’d scoffed at the idea), money and material things had always been easy for me to share. But it was never about money and possessions for Bev. It was about being loved in return. The kind of devotion Bev longed for and deserved could never be purchased. Bev needed to know that, when push came to shove, I’d choose her over everyone else. And “everyone else” meant one person: Dad.
“A man may be married to several different women over the course of his life. But he’ll only have one father.”
Whenever Dad made this statement, he would argue that he meant it generally, with the implication that if I took it personally, that was my issue, not his. True to form, Dad’s reservations about Bev did not interfere with his swooning over everything she appeared to symbolize. “My son married a top-notch attorney!” was how he described her to his friends. For someone as scrupulously class-conscious as my father, Bev’s intelligence, bearing (Bev’s grasp of etiquette rivalled Grandma May’s) and law degree, should have put him over the moon. Except that Bev the perfect wife caused my dad great concern as Bev the daughter-in-law. Because all of Bev’s kindness and grace couldn’t make up for one fatal flaw: she’d married Dad’s oldest son.
I was plagued by conflicting loyalties; it wasn’t as basic as me loving Dad in one way and Bev in another. I kept feeling as though I were being forced to quantify which love was stronger and more significant. As in many families, the tensions, between Bev and Dad, between Bev and me over Dad, between Dad and me over Bev, were never dealt with directly, coming out from time to time in petty observations.
“Why isn’t Bev drawing a paycheque yet?” Dad would ask.
“She’s starting up a business, Dad. Any money she and her father are making is being invested back into the firm.”
“Well, how long will it take before she can help out with all your fancy restaurant bills and holidaying?”
This was a pointless discussion and one that I’d quickly put an end to. Dad, like most people, assumed lawyers walked out of law school and straight into high-salaried jobs. (Similar to the public’s view of a pop singer with one song on the radio.) But this wasn’t about Bev’s money-making abilities.
Still, money was largely the point of contention between Bev and my dad. Dad felt that I should give, or loan, money to various members of our family, no questions asked. Bev disagreed. A lot of this revolved, as usual, around control. But it went deeper than that. Dad, coming out of a family where it was a moral obligation for a brother to financially support an ailing sister, or any other relative in need, couldn’t understand Bev’s point that singers (unlike university professors or top-echelon government employees) make and lose huge pots of money at unprecedented rates, often ending up, when it’s too late to stage a comeback, desperately broke, if not in debt. As a lawyer, Bev had seen many businesses surge and then fail. Dad’s demand that I needed to give, no questions asked, no paperwork necessary, an advance on, say, a cousin’s down payment on a house, because that’s what Hills do for other Hills, was galling to Bev.
As always, I muddled through, trying to please both parties and usually accomplishing the opposite.
“It’s better to have Dad’s respect than his admiration,” I’d explain to Bev, spinning things in my typical manner. “I mean, your mom took a long time to warm to me. In fact she couldn’t stand me.”
“And she still doesn’t respect you!” Bev joked (an encouraging sign).
“The key is not to take it personally,” I added.
But the thing about Dad was that, despite himself, he remained, to all of us, unavoidably and unabashedly lovable. And when you love a person as much as Bev loved Dad, everything little thing he says and does has a way of getting to you.
Furthermore, when Dad judged Bev, however unfairly, it felt as though he was judging me. Still, I knew better than to point out that Bev, by cutting out all sorts of middlemen who’d been siphoning off my royalties, by making the IRS go away and by advising me to settle with the McCauleys, was earning us plenty. These things were too corporate, too impersonal, for my father. Money, as in big money, along with big money complications—like publishing lawsuits and tax claims—was boring, arcane and maybe even a little bit frightening.
It wasn’t until the summer of ‘86, when Bev took on one of the most powerful men in the music business on my behalf, that Dad’s respect for her started to cross over into something approaching genuine affection. A one-on-one confrontation, especially one so seemingly lopsided, was something Dad could relate to.
Halfway through recording my “comeback” album that year, my record producers (Hank Medress and John Capek) realized they were way over budget. The only person willing to confront my executive producer, legendary music mogul Charles Koppelman, with this news, and dare to ask for more money so we could finish the recording, was Bev. Koppelman was known to throw around lots of cash when he chose to, but it tended to be on himself. When he’d visited Columbia Records in Toronto the previous spring to sew up the Canadian portion of my record deal, his rented white limo had been too massive to manoeuvre into Columbia’s parking lot. Everyone inside the Columbia building had stopped work to gawk out the window at the monstrous vehicle stranded on Leslie Avenue like a whale washed ashore. The president of Columbia Canada was rumoured to have been so taken with this spectacle that he decided, at that moment, to give Koppelman whatever he was about to request in terms of co-financing my record deal.
While I appreciated Koppelman’s influence and power in securing my international record deal (which led to a string of hit singles in America), I hated his penchant for keeping me on a tight creative leash when I was in the studio. During the final recording stages I’d have to report to him each morning so that he could hear the previous night’s mixes. Koppelman would always demand changes that I believed were dated.
“Dan, you write great fucking hooks, so why do you keep changing your chorus melody at the end of the song? Go back in and sing each fuckin’ line exactly the same.”
When I’d cite recent examples of pop hits with ever-changing final choruses, like, say, Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” he’d hop out from behind his grand piano–shaped desk, his outlawed Cuban cigar popping in and out of his mouth as he spat out the same command: “Stop fucking around and just do it!” Then he’d snap his W.C. Fields suspenders hard against his puffed-out chest, causing a swift, sharp bwack that signified my dismissal.
Koppelman, a former songwriter, was not unlike a lot of hugely wealthy, megalomaniacal record execs who revelled in micro-controlling the artists signed to their roster.
So when Bev volunteered to meet with Koppelman on my behalf to negotiate a bigger album budget, I felt as though she were about to be fed to the lions. But Bev returned from New York City with the extra money we needed.
“What’s the big deal?” Bev asked my flabbergasted dad. “Charles is a businessman. He’s not going to pull the plug on a close-to-finished project. He’s invested a fortune in Danny, he plans to make it back and then—”
“Charles?” I parroted. “No one calls Koppelman by his first name!”
“Daggum, girl! Tell me once more how you got that rich old so-and-so to part with his loot! Donna, I should have used Beverly to negotiate my ombudsman’s salary.”
Dad was finally seeing the light. Bev was a fighter, just like him.