And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records

by Harris, Larry

  In New York on the big night, Candy and I were seated on the dais next to Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records. Warner executive Joe Smith was the emcee. Joe had been master of ceremonies at so many of these events that it was practically his second career. Launching into his introduction, he spoke with great gusto about Neil. He went on and on, and finally Yetnikoff leaned over to Candy and me and said, “He’s making such a fuss—Neil this, Neil that—I thought he was talking about Neil Diamond.” Candy and I giggled quietly. The evening was wonderful. It was announced that seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been raised—a record amount. It crossed my mind that the next guy the UJA honored was not going to have an easy time following in Neil’s footsteps.

  A week or so after we’d returned home, our chief financial officer, David Shein, along with a few accounting people, came into my office and showed me the bills for limos from the night of the UJA dinner. It seemed that each person who had attended the event, including those who lived in New York, had taken a limo (over thirty in all), and many had kept them until the wee hours of the morning. Limo, hotel, air fare, and other expenses associated with the dinner totaled in excess of seventy-five thousand dollars. It would have made more sense for us to have stayed home and donated the money to the UJA. Seeing those expense reports, I lost it. I couldn’t keep up the who-cares-it’s-only-money pretense any longer. I just could not stomach any more of this whistling past the graveyard, this willful ignorance. We were hemorrhaging money. “David! What the fuck is this?! I don’t care if people used the limos to go to and from the event, but to have them standing by overnight outside their hotel?” I was livid. “Look at this shit!” I pointed to several of the invoices. “At least half of these limos only had one or two people in them. We were all staying at the same hotel, for God’s sake! How much common sense does it take to coordinate trips to an event?”

  I finally took a breath. “David, I don’t get it. We treat our people well—better than any company in the business. Even if they don’t outwardly appreciate that, these assholes don’t get to abuse the privilege!” Everything we did for our employees was first class. Remember, even the mailroom guys got birthday parties with, literally, crates of expensive champagne. When some idiot hit-and-run driver severely damaged several employee cars in the company parking lot, Neil had rentals delivered for each affected employee within the hour. We never pitted one executive against another when it came to expenses. Everyone who had to travel went first class and enjoyed the trip. After all, if you happened to run into industry colleagues en route, your first-class accommodation would reinforce their perception that Casablanca was doing well, and that perception was very important to us.

  Of course, that policy led to some iffy decisions. For instance, for the sheer spectacle of it, Neil and I were among the first to have cell phones. These were the early models—enormous, clumsy, non-user-friendly contraptions that we had to cart around in briefcases. We’d call each other from our cars, just because we could. Did we need them? No, of course we didn’t. No one else had them. Hardly anyone was aware that we had them, so only a select few knew that we could be reached in the car. It was prestige. It was boys and their toys. But that was Casablanca.

  Yes, we permitted our people to spend more money than any other company did, but they would never leave us because we treated them like royalty. On occasion, we would jump in to help with an employee’s family or health emergency, covering deductibles or fronting money for medical treatment; this generosity and family feeling extended down through the ranks from the executive level to the mailroom. Neil was even known to call in a favor at Cedars-Sinai Hospital to get specialist treatment for an employee’s family member. He would sometimes pay medical bills for someone’s kid out of his own pocket. He was very compassionate, and such actions go a long way toward explaining why he remains so revered by so many people.

  Not long after the UJA event, I attempted to walk into my office one morning. I wasn’t entirely successful. I was impeded because every teenage actress in Hollywood seemed to have taken up residence in the hallway. Our FilmWorks division was producing our next theatrical project for our new film distributor, United Artists—a coming-of-age drama called Foxes. The movie, which was about the mistreatment of 1970s youth, would have four female leads, so an army of pert, flirtatious minions had come to hang out at 8255 for days on end, vying with each other for a lead role. Former Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie landed one of the parts, and she did such an incredible job portraying a zoinked-out teenager that I’m convinced the only reason she didn’t go on to have a major film career was that no one thought she was acting. Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster, whose dad, coincidently, had sold Neil our Sunset Boulevard headquarters in 1975, scored another lead role. Also included in the cast were Randy Quaid (fresh from Midnight Express) and Scott Baio (who was then starring in the ABC Television hit Happy Days). Laura Dern would make her screen debut in Foxes, as would a tween-aged girl named Jill Bogart, who was surprisingly convincing in her role as an annoying younger sister. (One of the actresses—or, more accurately, future actresses—running up and down the Casablanca halls during this time was a precocious six-year-old named Christina. She was a charming little kid whom everyone immediately liked. We had hired her father, Bobby Applegate, to work in our promotions department, and from the day he arrived he would tell anyone who would listen how his little girl was going to grow up to be a star. He was right.)

  Also included in Foxes were the members of Angel, finally making it to the big screen in a small but key performance role. Angel’s next release was imminent, and, being as frustrated as we were that we hadn’t broken them yet, they decided to call the LP Bad Publicity. The title was a self-deprecating shot at their failure to generate or sustain any sort of visibility. It’s possible that Neil missed the point and took it as an attack on Casablanca for failing to break the band, but, for whatever reason, he balked at the cover art, which depicted the band partying it up at the Riot House (the Continental Hyatt House in LA). Despite the fact that the pressing plant in New Jersey had already printed ten thousand copies of the jacket, Neil called one of the reps and gave the order to destroy the album covers. Retitled Sinful, the LP was released in January 1979. Angel was effectively a lost cause in our minds, and any enthusiasm we’d had to promote them was long gone. We scaled back our Angel advertising, which had previously included full-page ads in the trades, and we shelved a promotional film (shot during the Riot House photo session) for the LP’s first single “Don’t Take You Love,” which we didn’t bother to work or even send to the trades. Angel probably suffered from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I would bet the house that had they first come onto the scene in 1985 instead of 1975, they would’ve been as big as latter-day peers like Poison or Bon Jovi. I took that gamble in the mid-1980s, when I became comanager of Giuffria, Gregg’s post-Angel band, which had been signed by MCA Records.

  As 1978 drew to a close, our press department continued to grow, and we assigned most of the new people to work on Neil’s endeavors or on Donna Summer. We also concentrated our energies to establish other artists, movies, and projects. After Susan Munao left to become Donna’s comanager, Neil called Bobbi Cowan, another Gibson and Stromberg alum, and offered her the job of vice president of publicity. Not realizing what she was getting into, she accepted. Bobbi thought she would be working for Neil, and she wasn’t happy to find herself more under my direction than his. I did not demand very much from her, as I immediately saw that she was in way over her head. She was a good publicist, but at that stage in her career she was not equipped to handle a sixty-person department that had about one hundred artists depending on it. The demands of the job overwhelmed her, and she soon left the company. She rebounded quickly and ended up being the inspiration for Bobbi Flekman, the nasal-voiced publicist portrayed so famously by Fran Drescher in This Is Spinal Tap.

  • November 18, 1978: Jim Jones leads 912 of his People’s Temple
followers to mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

  • December 15, 1978: Superman: The Movie, starring Christopher Reeve, opens in the United States.

  • December 31, 1978: Gas hits 63 cents per gallon.

  For Casablanca and PolyGram, 1978 was a banner year, the embarrassing KISS solo album debacle notwithstanding. Casablanca logged $102 million in sales, while PolyGram posted $470 million domestically and over a billion worldwide. We had ten Platinum and thirteen Gold albums that year, second only to Columbia. However, 1979 would be the worst year in the history of the music business.

  We didn’t know it at the time (our only indication might have been slower-than-forecasted sales during the 1978 holiday shopping season), but a number of factors had combined to pull the rug out from under the entire industry. Due to flagging confidence in the economy and the escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union, consumer goods prices rose dramatically, while economic growth slowed at an equally alarming rate. This left consumers with considerably less disposable income. Music, of course, isn’t bread, it’s a luxury, and the entire industry suffered as the record-buying public went into hiding.

  Due, to some degree, to the KISS solo LPs disaster, we were ahead of the pack when it came to cutting back on spending. We only released four albums (about one a month) to fill out 1978, and by the new year, we’d already made considerable cutbacks in our trade advertising. Albums that would have received a full-page ad six months earlier now got to be part of a two-page collage featuring six to ten releases. But all of this wasn’t happening because we at Casablanca had suddenly decided to be sensible; it was in response to a decree that was handed down to Neil, Dick, and me during PolyGram’s national sales meeting in New Orleans just a few days into 1979. Overshipping was another sore spot with the PolyGram brass, which meant that our days of shipping out a million plus units of every major release were over. And although these messages were probably intended for all the subsidiary labels, the speaker looked directly at Neil from the podium as he addressed the issue of unnecessary expenditures. Neil sat there displaying his best poker face. He didn’t bat an eye. The era of true independence was over for us: we now had to answer to Mom and Dad.

  Neil’s ambition remained undimmed, however. I’m still not sure whether I found that inspiring or alarming, but, in any case, his sense of opportunism ran strong. The publicity department at Casablanca was the biggest in the company. Neil required an entire contingent just to work on his own publicity. We were sitting in his office one day discussing his growing public presence, and he came right out and told me, “If I’m seen with famous people, I will be famous.” This declaration perfectly captured what he was becoming, and it made me cringe. Neil had fully succumbed to the Hollywood mentality. It struck me hard that we were fucked. If he was signing artists simply because they were famous, then the company was in more trouble than I realized. The line became a running joke around the office. Maybe all of this had begun in the fall of 1977, when Susan Munao had secured Neil a cover story in New West magazine (a People-like West Coast publication). Or maybe it had come out of Neil’s Merv Griffin Show appearances, which had been set up for him by Steve Keator, a relative of Merv’s who worked for us ostensibly in the publicity department, but who was really there because of his connection to Merv.

  The Merv Griffin Show helped us to showcase Donna Summer, the Village People, and the movie Thank God It’s Friday. Merv bent over backwards for us, devoting entire shows to stuff we wanted to promote and market. Despite Neil’s ease with people and his natural confidence within the music industry, he was always uncomfortable delivering a major speech, and he was truly scared to appear before millions on TV. But, regardless of his stage fright, he knew that Merv’s show, which drew solid ratings, was an important means to expose our artists and projects. So Neil and Merv became friends, to a degree (with Merv, it was always to a degree). Although Merv appeared warm and caring on television, in person I didn’t find him quite so friendly. He had a tough-guy shark for a business manager and would always blame him for any difficulty that arose in negotiations—as if Merv himself wasn’t the real shark. The Merv Griffin-Casablanca love fest came to an abrupt end when we realized that Merv had taken an idea we’d developed and paid for and turned it into a TV show himself, cutting us out completely.

  It began in May 1978, when we had the idea of doing two ninety-minute Thank God It’s Friday-themed episodes of Merv’s show featuring several of our acts and a big dance contest. To do this, we would need a custom-built set with a state-of-the-art lighted dance floor and other discotheque touches. We would have to pay for it ourselves, since Merv was very—oh, let’s say—thrifty (in fact, every time we had an artist on his show we would later get a bill from his company for union fees). But we had no problem spending thousands of dollars for the set, because we planned to use it later for a TV pilot centered on a dance contest. And the episodes were a huge success, scoring for Merv the highest ratings of his career to that point.

  Four or five months later, Merv’s people contacted us about doing a new show of his called Dance Fever. We arranged for several of our acts, including the Village People and Pattie Brooks, to appear. Then Steve Keator told us that Merv had stolen the idea for Dance Fever from us—it was our TV pilot concept, and he was shooting it on the set we’d paid for in May. Neil hit the roof; he was probably angrier than I had ever seen him. He called Merv to work it out, but either Merv would not take his call or he just blew him off. This only compounded the problem. Neil started screaming about suing and going to the press to expose Merv as the slime he was. He finally calmed down when he spoke to one of our lawyers about legal remedies. The lawyer told him that if we didn’t drop the whole thing and pretend it had never happened, then we’d never get another act on Merv’s show. Furthermore, certain old-line Hollywood types would not want to see Merv’s dirty laundry exposed for their own reasons, and if Neil decided to pursue this, he could kiss many of his TV and film aspirations goodbye.

  Neil took the legal advice and never brought it up again. As it happened, we never did have another act on The Merv Griffin Show. In retrospect, I can see that it would have been better to go to court and get the rights for the show, as Dance Fever was an instant hit and stayed on the air in syndication for over eight years. Merv made very good money on it. Years later, I read a piece about Dance Fever and learned that Denny Terrio, the show’s host, had been mistreated by Merv and had threatened Merv with a workplace harassment suit. What a surprise. I often wondered whether the little old ladies who loved Merv so much would have been such fans of his show if they’d known that Merv had used his friendship with Eva Gabor as a cover for his alternative lifestyle. Before Steve Keator fell victim to AIDS, he told me about Merv’s bisexuality, and about his preference for younger men; he also said that the Eva Gabor relationship was completely transparent to those who knew Merv well.

  Merv was a rich guy and a legit TV industry player, but he was small potatoes compared to some of the people who ran in the circles Neil was now a part of. On February 21, 1979, Neil and Joyce hosted a dinner party for former president Gerald Ford at their home. I asked myself why they would want to do this for the only man ever to hold the office of president without having been elected to it. Ford had ascended to the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned, in August 1974; he had become vice president when Nixon’s original VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned over a tax fraud scandal in 1973. I could have understood wanting to throw a party for Nixon, despite his damaged reputation, but Ford? At least this time (unlike the time he’d hosted Jerry Brown) Neil shared the political views of his guest of honor, but we all knew that the party had nothing to do with politics. Art Kassel had helped organize the affair, which was a see-and-be-seen event, nothing more. These political gatherings, as well as the one-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, were strategic attempts on Neil’s part to become a major force in Hollywood. He believed that if he had name recognition in Hollywood as
a player in philanthropic and political circles it would help Casablanca get artists, TV shows, and motion picture deals. He really wanted to become a major power broker in the entertainment industry, and he almost made it.

  Neil insisted that any Casablanca employees at the Ford party be on their best parochial school behavior: no one should even think about getting high; those who showed up with fun substances would find themselves polishing their resumes. With an army of Secret Service guys running around, Neil was intent on ensuring that he didn’t become publicly associated with a bunch of glazed-over employees (I don’t know what he did with those bags of Quaaludes he normally kept in the pocket of his suit jacket). All of the guests donned masks just prior to Ford’s arrival, and though I forget the purpose of the stunt, I do recall that Ford did not like it. Candy and I were uncomfortable with the vibe of the event, and we both started looking for an excuse to leave as soon as we got there. Later on, I beat Frankie Crocker in a series of Pong games that we played in the pool house—in fact, the highlight of my night was taking hundreds off Peter Guber and Richard Trugman, who had bet against me.

  Neil’s foray into the spotlight was mostly a source of amusement for me. I’d watch him squirm and sweat in front of the cameras, figuring that at least he was getting the Casablanca name out there. Unfortunately, as his public persona grew, his business acumen, which had been so keen, began to waver. Neil had always bravely risked failure to achieve great rewards, and I’d never questioned his judgment when it came to artists, but I was beginning to have my doubts. Seeing something in KISS, a band that none of the major labels would touch, and helping them reach the rock stratosphere, or giving the madcap George Clinton free rein, or predicting Donna Summer’s future, or damned near single-handedly creating disco—this was the Neil Bogart I knew. He was the man who discovered and created tomorrow’s stars. But the person in the office next to mine was now signing yesterday’s sensations: acts like the Captain and Tennille, Tony Orlando, Don McLean, the Sylvers, and Mac Davis. They all had name recognition, but almost all of them had peaked before Neil walked them in the door. This star-signing rampage was disconcerting to me, even when the star was someone like Cher, who would have a Top 10 hit for us with the song “Take Me Home” (the single that caused Neil to set Howie Rosen’s desk on fire to show how hot we were). After she had signed with us, Cher told me what a great guy Neil was. “How gracious of her,” I thought, “to pay a compliment to Neil and share her enthusiasm at being on the Casablanca roster.” Then she added that she found it especially nice of Neil to pay her more per album than she had asked for. I was dumbfounded. Neil always threw money at things, so that was nothing new. But he wasn’t stupid, either. When you have someone sold at ten dollars, you don’t insist that they take fifteen. I nearly choked trying to keep myself from saying “What the fuck?!”