The Tuesday before the roof fell in, everything seemed to be going swell for the president of Arista Records.
Sales at the company he’d run for a quarter-century were at an all-time high; four of his records were on *Billboard’*s Top 10; and Supernatural, the CD he’d co-produced with Carlos Santana, seemed headed toward an armful of Grammys. No wonder talk was circulating that he would soon be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was Clive Davis, and as the photographs which peered down from his office walls could attest, the music industry had never seen his like.
There he was with Whitney and Aretha and Bruce and Janis—the doomed child-woman who had started it all for him three decades before at CBS. And there were dozens of others who could have been on the walls: Sly Stone, Billy Joel, Laura Nyro, Spirit, Donovan, Neil Diamond, the Kinks, and Earth, Wind and Fire; Boz Scaggs, the Electric Flag, Pink Floyd, Dionne Warwick, Kenny G, and Patti Smith; Lou Reed, Barry Manilow, Sarah McLachlan, Hall and Oates, Miles Davis, and Gil Scott-Heron; Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, Mott the Hoople, Edgar Winter, Toni Braxton, Loggins and Messina, Ten Years After, and Annie Lennox; the Chambers Brothers, the Isley Brothers, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead—an entire gallery of modern musical history shaped by him.
“I’m pretty relentless,” Davis says, smiling. “Whether it begins with a tingle . . . or a feeling . . . or a sensation . . . you just know it: This is the goods.”
He talked on: about the party he was throwing in London in a few days to celebrate the eight million sales of Whitney Houston’s latest; about the wonder of Santana, who hadn’t had a smash album in 28 years, again being No. 1; about the more than 80 gold and platinum records Arista had released in the last year alone; about being as 14-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week driven at 66 as he had been when he was fresh out of Harvard Law, in 1956. With a laugh, he also told of agreeing to accompany his latest signee to a Knicks game, although he was still figuring out how to address “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” “It’s like when you get married,” Davis says jokingly. “You can’t call your father-in-law ‘Dad.’ It’s awkward. So you run around looking for substitutions and end up saying ‘Hi.’”
He was still bubbling with plans and self-confidence when his visitor, a reporter who had been following him for months, got up to go. “Do me a favor,” Davis said, taking hold of his arm at the door. “Get this fucking thing into print.” It was odd hearing him curse, odder still seeing his expression. All at once, Clive Jay Davis seemed very troubled.
A week later, a one-paragraph snippet in the Los Angeles Times explained why. The paper reported that five days before bidding farewell to his visitor, Davis had been summoned to a Manhattan dinner meeting with his bosses, BMG Entertainment chairman Michael Dornemann and chief executive officer Strauss Zelnick, and informed that the German-owned company was “considering” replacing him with 43-year-old Antonio “L.A.” Reid, co-founder of R—B powerhouse LaFace Records and a Davis joint-venture partner and protégé for a decade. Still in Europe, Davis wasn’t commenting, but his feelings were plain. The instant Zelnick raised the subject of Reid’s taking over, said the Times, Clive had walked out.
BMG’s “considering,” if there had been any, ended the next day. CLIVE TAKING DIVE AT ARISTA, bannered the New York Post, reporting that Reid was in and that the “legendary music man” was out—a victim, depending on who was telling the tale, either of not playing corporate ball (by refusing to designate a successor) or, as an unnamed BMG insider was quoted as saying, of Zelnick’s “naked ambition.” Whichever, the news loosed a storm.
“Clive and I are family, and it hurts me to think he is being treated with disrespect,” said Whitney Houston, who had been a teenager when Davis happened on her at a New York supper club. “He is on top, as he always has been. He deserves total honor and respect from everyone, including BMG.” “Clive is priceless,” Aretha Franklin agreed. “He’s the greatest.” “My allegiance and my heart is with Clive,” said Carlos Santana, announcing that he would ask Davis to produce his next album, wherever his mentor ended up. “What is it with these corporations?” demanded a “disgusted” Diane Warren, the industry’s premier pop songwriter (Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time”). “Are they out of their minds? ... This is a living legend and the greatest record man of all time. It’s just horrifying.” “If he’s toppled, no one is safe,” said Carly Simon, whose career was one of many Davis had revived. “It should send chills down the backs of everyone who has reached the age of 40.”
Davis’s industry colleagues were just as boggled. Clive, said former EMI Records chairman Charles Koppelman, “is the past, present, and future of Arista, and anyone who doesn’t recognize that needs to have their head examined.” Davis, said the Columbia Records president, Don Ienner, is “the most dedicated, hardworking, contemporary, brilliant music-man, strategist, and professional father figure that I have ever known in my life.” “He is one of the finest and most talented executives in the history of the record business,” said Doug Morris, chairman of the Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world. “He deserves to be able to continue. Who is better than Clive?” “I’m shocked and baffled,” said Atlantic Records co-chairman Ahmet Ertegun, 76. “If he’s at retirement age, I should have retired a long time ago.” “When I first started out, I could only hope to come close to achieving some of Clive’s success,” said Sony Music Entertainment C.E.O. Tommy Mottola. “Everybody in this business looks up to him. . . . I never knew that age had anything to do with hearing a hit or identifying a star.” Capitol Records C.E.O. Roy Lott put it the most simply. “This,” he said, “is a disaster.”
Explanations by anonymous BMG insiders served as gas on the flames. It wasn’t the sleek, 42-year-old Zelnick who had caused the trouble, they said, but cranky old Clive—by having profit margins that were too low; by thinking that he was still 25; by a whole host of things, including, according to the New York Post, allowing Arista to pay for $6,000 worth of liposuction on R&B star Faith Evans’s thighs (which Davis denies knowing anything about). “My strong desire is to do right by Clive Davis,” Zelnick said in a statement after it was revealed that BMG was dangling leadership of “a new public media company” as an inducement for Davis to step aside. “I have nothing but the highest regard and deepest respect for Clive. . . . Everyone at BMG—especially me—hopes that Clive will stay on.”
Davis wasn’t buying it. “I would like to make it clear that I have no plans whatsoever to retire,” he said in a statement of his own. “At age 66, I am absolutely at the peak of my powers. . . . I fully intend to live up to my contract ending June 30, 2000, and celebrate by far the greatest year in our 25-year history.”
Until someone blinked or filed a lawsuit, there matters stood—an extraordinarily messy confrontation: youth versus age, ambition versus experience, commerce versus art, head versus heart. And at the center, even his enemies conceded, was a remarkably talented man.
Auditioning for Clive, says Bruce Springsteen, who was an unknown when Davis signed him at CBS in 1972, “was a day that really changed the course of my whole life.” “[He’s] the whole reason why I exist,” says Kenny G, whom Davis transformed from a $150-a-week horn player to the best-selling instrumentalist of all time. “I think of him going way out of his way to put his neck on the line.”
So many successful others say the same; in music circles, Clive stories are traded like baseball cards. There’s the one that VH1 president John Sykes tells about giving Clive a portable radio so he could follow the play-by-play at a Giants game, then finding out at halftime that instead Davis had been listening to Top 40 on Z100. There’s the one that entertainment lawyer David A. Braun tells about discovering him by a swimming pool one summer Sunday, looking for bad records at the top of the Billboard charts—so, Clive said, “then I know who the really good promotion guys are.”
There are endless others: Clive beating out everyone to sign the early-90s Swedish phenom Ace of Base by calling its manager from a cruise ship; Clive wanting Kris Kristofferson so badly that he bought the record company that owned his contract; Clive setting the Arista air-conditioning at meatlocker temperature in order to keep himself and his troops alert; Clive ingratiating himself with Miles Davis by agreeing to interview lady friends he sent by. Nearly as numerous are the tales of Clive’s notorious ego, such as the joke that goes, “Clive thinks the CD was named after him.”
But the darker chapters in Davis’s life are neither glorious nor funny, starting with what happened in 1973, when he was abruptly fired by CBS, amid headlines linking him to everything from paying D.J.’s to air records to using corporate funds to finance his son Fred’s Bar Mitzvah. Disgraced, broke, and a target of a federal grand-jury investigation, he was so low that friends feared he might commit suicide. Instead, Davis clawed his way back. Within two years, he started Arista. Within months, it was making millions. And, save for some notable bumps, bruises, and backstabbings since, the rest is multi-platinum history.
It’s an improbable story—the ups and downs of Clive Davis—and as Tin Pan Alley tales should, it begins in Brooklyn, where he was born into a working-class Jewish family in 1933. His father, Herman, whom everyone called “Joe,” was a traveling tie salesman; his mother, Florence (“Flo,” as everyone called her), was the keeper of the spotless house and the center of her only son’s life. “She had a natural style, my mother,” says Davis. “The way she carried herself and dressed, the way she put things together with limited resources. She was a natural beauty.”
No one said that about young Clive, but the homely boy was not without gifts. The most evident was a head for figures, which, in combination with a prodigious memory, allowed him to rattle off the statistical accomplishments of his Ebbets Field heroes—Dolph Camilli, Duke Snider, and Dixie Walker leading the list. He also played a good game of stickball, could carry a tune with perfect pitch, and excelled at school.
His mom worried he was grinding too hard. “I was your basic, garden-variety, ambitious, upwardly mobile, hard-working Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was bound—and so were the kids around me—to go beyond my parents. It was simply the way things were.”
They certainly were that way at Erasmus Hall High, where Clive was admitted to the citywide honor society, which was named after the Greek word for excellence: arista. From there a full scholarship carried him to N.Y.U., where he was elected president of his freshman class. But during his sophomore year, the bottom dropped out of Clive’s world: Flo, 47, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her son wrote the tombstone inscription: “Until eternity we can wait, but none more loved can God create.” Within a year, Joe Davis was dead of a heart attack, and Clive, 18, went to live with his older sister, Seena, in Queens.
He passed the remainder of his college years studying (Phi Beta Kappa key, magna cum laude degree) and politicking—successfully, in a senior-year run for studentcouncil president, dismally, trying to get Adlai Stevenson into the White House. Certain that his future lay in holding high office, Clive limited his distractions to admiring Eleanor Roosevelt, attending “wondrous” Broadway musicals, and courting Helen Cohen, a social worker whom he’d met at a Poconos summer camp. They married in 1956, the year Davis graduated from Harvard Law and began to work at a New York firm, hired at the top new-associate rate, $4,500 a year. His goal, he said, was to one day make $25,000.
He took a step in that direction in 1958 by moving to Rosenman, Colin, Kaye, Petschek and Freund, whose clients included CBS and its legendary chairman, William S. Paley. But Davis was so depressed by the numbing corporate routine that while walking to work one day he found himself on the verge of tears. Then, in 1960, Harvey Schein, general counsel for CBS’s Columbia Records, went looking for an assistant. When his first choice turned him down, Schein settled on “relatively unassuming Clive Davis.” At the nuts and bolts of lawyering, Schein found his new charge rather ordinary. But Davis worked hard and had a knack for getting himself noticed, especially when he came up with a technicality that kept Bob Dylan in a contract that he’d signed while under-age. He also proved expert at managing CBS Records president Goddard Lieberson, a British-born aesthete whose mid-Atlantic manner and dress became his own. Clive, Schein thought, was going places.
The shock was how quickly he got there. In 1965, after less than five years at CBS, Lieberson named him administrative vice president. (Two years later, when Lieberson moved on to senior corporate vice president and effective semi-retirement, Davis became records president.) But the organization he found himself in charge of was suffering from multiple aches, none more pronounced than a near absence of rock acts. “They’re playing Andre Kostelanetz and Percy Faith,” says Davis, “and they’re thinking that those artists define where the future is going to be.” Columbia’s regard for the handful of rockers it had was demonstrated when Dylan performed at a sales convention. As he struck into his performance, many in the audience walked out. “They had this petulant child on their hands,” Billy Joel says of CBS and rock. “It was dangerous, like carrying around a stick of dynamite.”
Davis’s credentials for improving the situation were not apparent. He’d grown up a Kingston Trio fan. (Elvis, he thought, was “too gimmicky.”) He was a regular at the symphony and once reportedly joked, “I thought Simon & Garfunkel was a law firm.” Turning Columbia around would also require putting in long hours—tricky for Davis, who had been left the single father of a son, five, and a daughter, three, thanks to Helen’s decision to divorce and travel overseas. He would remarry soon, but the opera singing of his new wife, Janet Adelberg, wouldn’t be any help at the company’s weekly singles meeting, where votes were taken on which side of a record to promote. “Invariably,” says Schein, “all the promotion people and the A&R people would be one way, and Clive would be the other. . . . He didn’t know anything about the music business.” Then, in June 1967, music-industry lawyer Abe Somer and producer Lou Adler invited Davis to the event that would change everything: the Monterey Pop Festival. “It was a glimpse of a new world,” Clive wrote, recounting the three days of music and flowers, peace and love. “I sensed change.” And while listening to the raspy-voiced singer of a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, he sensed opportunity. “My eyes riveted wherever she went,” Davis said. “It was ebullience thrust at you in the most basic, primitive ways. . . . I knew immediately that I had to go after her.” Janis Joplin had that effect on people. Clive’s getting hooked cost $250,000, the price of buying out Big Brother’s small-label recording contract. The day the agreement was signed, Joplin said that she felt it only “fitting and proper” to seal the deal by taking the new boss to bed. Davis demurred, but assured her that she’d otherwise find Columbia most informal. “This,” Janis said, giggling as she glanced at a band member who had stripped, “is how informal we are.”
To promote her first album, Davis wanted a single for Top 40 radio. “Piece of My Heart” seemed the best bet. But Clive judged it too long, and its “hook”—the signature musical phrase meant to stick in the mind—didn’t occur often enough. The first problem he solved by lopping off 65 mostly instrumental seconds, the second by adding a repeat of “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.” Janis wasn’t happy with his handiwork, but was thrilled by the results: more than a million albums sold.
Davis loved telling that story, especially the part about how at Monterey “there were no other executives—I was alone.” In fact, the festival attracted numerous suits, including a dozen from CBS, led by Davis’s boss, Goddard Lieberson. But too much was going on to quibble. Profits were skyrocketing, and the signings were coming fast and furious: Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Earth, Wind and Fire, the Kinks, the Electric Flag. “Every burner was burning,” says Michael Klenfner, then a Columbia promotion man. “Whatever was happening in music, we had.”
By 1973, few quarreled with a mock-up Rolling Stone cover which hailed Davis as the “emperor” of the music industry. Profits had risen 600 percent, the CBS stock price had doubled, and Columbia—barely breaking even when he took over—commanded 25 percent of the market, roughly the percentage held by the next two biggest labels put together. Clive wasn’t “relatively unassuming” anymore, either. He now traveled with an entourage, and, with his stretch limousine and white Nehru suit, was no longer amused when friends such as vice president of business affairs Dick Asher said teasingly, “Clive, you’re just a fat little kid from Brooklyn. Calm down.”
A more secure man might not have named an incentive prize the “Clive Davis Award for Extraordinary National Promotion Performance, 1970.” But it was hard to be humble when David Geffen, then a young talent manager about to start his first label, was panting to have him as his partner, and Elektra and Warner were proffering milliondollar deals to lure him away. He would have taken the Warner offer—or so he threatened—had CBS not upped his pay $25,000, the most he’d ever hoped to make in a year. Nonetheless, Davis felt unappreciated. Paley hadn’t even sent a note acknowledging the tens of millions in new profits Davis was generating, and exponentially larger sums were being collected by his industry counterparts. “I was getting hot under the collar,” Davis said.
He got hotter in the summer of 1972, when Paley named Arthur Taylor, a 37-year-old Renaissance-history specialist turned Wall Street whiz, president of CBS. Davis made no secret of his contempt for Taylor, who had just arrived from the hopelessly unhip International Paper, and registered his disdain by routinely absenting himself from Taylor’s division-head meetings. When he did show up, according to Fredric Dannen, author of the 1990 record-industry best-seller Hit Men, he’d stare out the window. When Taylor spoke to Davis about the record division Davis would tell him, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Taylor put up with the gibes, even being called “a stupid bastard” to his face. Davis was, after all, a board member and the head of a division responsible for onethird of CBS’s profits. What Taylor could not abide was Davis’s seeming to treat the record division as a personally owned and operated possession. “You don’t understand the business,” Clive had told him after losing $ 15 million of CBS’s money by closing down a Memphis label he had acquired only three months before. “It’s got to be freewheeling.”
That, Taylor thought, was the problem: Columbia was altogether too freewheeling. He learned, for example, that one star had a standing arrangement: when he’d visit New York, 10 young women were made available to him. “There were a lot of whores hanging around all the time,” says Taylor. “In the building, out of the building.” And not only there. Working girls (and boys) also entertained at Columbia conventions, where “aberrational sex shows,” in Taylor’s words, were allegedly put on for top customers. In one well-remembered instance, a convention poker game featured a prostitute duckwalking beneath the card table. According to a senior executive who was there, the object of the woman’s ministrations could be divined when a player “suddenly got very quiet and a couple of chips fell and went under the table.” “We had hookers and sex parties in Columbia Records forever, forever,” says the executive, who went on to become president of a major label. “It was part of the record industry.”
“You aren’t going to like the record business,” CBS vice-chairman Frank Stanton had warned Taylor after his appointment. Now Taylor understood why. “It was peopled by characters, honest or not, who would sacrifice any ethical standard—any ethical standard—in order to sell a record,” he says. “It was not an atmosphere of gentility.”
Given the reports he was beginning to get from New York senator James Buckley’s office, bad manners were the least of Taylor’s worries. Columbia and the rest of the industry, he was told, were being investigated for using a variety of illegal means to grease the promotional skids, including supplying drugs to D.J.’s and programmers. The worst was confirmed when a representative of the Federal Strike Force Against Organized Crime dropped by to say that the entire top echelon of CBS Records’ executives were involved in a federal grand-jury investigation. Moreover, while unraveling a heroin-smuggling operation conducted by one “Patsy” Falcone, a Genovese crime-family associate and manager of Sly Stone and other Columbia acts, authorities had discovered the name of David Wynshaw, a key Davis executive. Wynshaw’s title was “senior director of special events,” but around Columbia he was known as “Mr. Gotcha.” Two tickets to a Knicks game 15 minutes before tipoff? Front-row seats at the Copa when Tony Bennett’s in town? Fly 700 people to a Vegas convention in the middle of an airline strike? Gotcha could get anything. Now “Clive’s procurer,” as Paul Simon described him to Taylor, was about to be indicted with Falcone for defrauding CBS of up to a reported $2 million by billing for fictitious services performed by equally fictitious companies.
Davis fired Wynshaw in April 1973 and had his office locked. When it was reopened by a special investigator hired by CBS, a file was found detailing phony Davis expense-account items, including more than $18,000 to stage a Plaza hotel Bar Mitzvah, which was written off as a party for Liza Minnelli. Davis denied any knowledge of Wynshaw’s schemes, and also denied being aware that his accounts had been jiggered. But Taylor, who hadn’t bought Davis’s earlier disavowals of sexual shenanigans at record-division get-togethers, was shaken. If a pattern of wrongdoing was established, CBS could be stripped of its broadcast licenses by the Federal Communications Commission.
Outwardly unconcerned, Davis went ahead as planned with a Los Angeles promotional extravaganza entitled A Week to Remember, featuring Columbia acts such as Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis. A film of the seven nights of events was to be the showstopper at the next sales convention, and though rumors of scandal were already circulating, Clive carried off playing M.C. with aplomb. Privately, though, he was worried. As reported by Fredric Dannen, Davis had instructed his attorney to wind up confidential negotiations with EMI which would have given Davis his own record label with the European music power. As the talks were under way in London, Taylor was making the case against him to Paley in New York. “If it’s true, the president of our record company has committed fraud,” said Taylor. “And if it’s not true, he’s committed incompetence.” “All right,” Paley replied, “I instruct you to fire Clive Davis.”
Around noon on May 29, 1973, Taylor summoned Davis to his 35th-floor office. “That’s it, Clive,” he said. “You have pushed the envelope too far, too long, and you’re gone.” With that, Davis was served with a CBS civil suit, accusing him of perpetrating fraud in the amount of $94,000, and was instructed to gather what he needed and leave the building immediately. Security guards escorted him out to a waiting company limousine. Half an hour after it dropped Davis at his apartment, a CBS representative called, asking for the car back.
Friends found Davis so unstrung that Elliot Goldman, director of the record division’s business affairs, watched him all night. Goldman remained close by for months, bucking spirits and offering advice. “You’re probably going to go out and form your own company,” he said as they walked along one weekend, “and that company will be extraordinarily successful. And when it is, you are going to get more credit than you ever could have gotten being head of CBS. . . . And when that day comes, you’ll almost be able to look back and say, ‘This was worth it.’” Davis, Goldman recalls, “looked at me like I was from Mars.”
EMI was now loath to admit that it had ever heard of the ex-emperor, and “incorruptible Clive,” as he’d once been known in the business, was an industry joke. “Did you hear that Columbia’s going to put out a new album?” it went. “Clive, Live at Folsom.” On top of everything, Davis was running out of cash. “I remember him walking the streets of New York with a threadbare coat,” says one of his old friends. “The collar was torn. . . . I don’t think he had any money.”
His mood varied. The weekend when Charlie Koppelman invited him to his home in Roslyn, Long Island, Davis seemed “in a battle mode,” proclaiming innocence and laying plans. Other times, he appeared detached from reality. “He would talk to us like he was still at CBS,” recalls a recordcompany president. “‘I’ll never allow you to sign that artist.’ . . . We would just say, ‘Yeah, Clive.’” But Davis didn’t buckle. “I don’t know anyone around who would have handled it the way he did,” says David Braun. “It was always with dignity. You never heard him bitch.”
That spring, Davis eased his financial woes by contracting to write his autobiography. Unapologetic for anything he’d done at CBS, Clive: Inside the Record Business was a national best-seller and touched off rumors that Davis would head up a label, take over the presidency of RCA, or form a record company with Dylan, George Harrison, and Paul Simon. None were true. “We wanted to hire him,” says former Warner and Capitol executive Joe Smith, “and Steve Ross said, ‘We can’t do it. We’re a public company. We don’t know what the story is.’” Others were scared off by Davis’s style. “He would take over a whole company, so some execs were afraid,” says a label president. “You had to be pretty strong to take in Clive.”
Or, as in the case of Alan Hirschfield, president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries, be pretty desperate. Much to the discomfiture of his bosses, the media-investment firm Allen & Co., Columbia was virtually bankrupt, its music division—“bubblegum” specialist Bell Records, which featured acts such as Tony Orlando—part of the reason. Telling the Allen brothers, Herbert and Charles, “You really can’t fall off the floor,” Hirschfield scrapped Bell and went after Davis. “Whether you did or didn’t,” Hirschfield said to him, “and I prefer to believe you didn’t, Columbia has nothing to lose.” The bad news was that Columbia could invest only $ 10 million in the new label. But there were two things that Hirschfield could offer: a 20 percent equity stake and total control. Davis leapt at the deal, and in November 1974, as disco and acid rock converged, Arista Records opened its doors.
The question was how long they would stay open, since Davis decided to keep fewer than half a dozen of Bell’s acts, among them a gawky singer-songwriter from Brooklyn with one dud record to his credit. “I got this kid you gotta hear,” Davis told Hirschfield. “He’s great. He’s got it.” So down to a Greenwich Village nightclub they went, and out onstage stepped Arista’s supposed salvation. “I’m waiting for Clive to sign the Rolling Stones,” remembers Hirschfield, “and he comes up with this kid with big ears—Barry Manilow.”
Davis also had a surprise for Manilow: a demo tape of an up-tempo pop number called “Brandy,” which was light-years from his jazzy style. If Manilow transformed it into a ballad, Clive told him, he’d “guarantee” a No. 1 record. “Who would ever say anything like that except, like, Madame Zoloft the fortune-teller?,” Manilow recalls thinking. “[But] I figured, Why not?” When his efforts failed to satisfy Davis, Manilow told him to try it himself. Clive did, adding a bigger back-beat, getting Manilow to redo the vocals, and changing the title to “Mandy” to avoid confusion with an earlier “Brandy.” He also kept his guarantee: “Mandy” went to No. 1.
More was in the immediate offing: more acts (Patti Smith, the Outlaws, Eric Carmen), more profits (up 700 percent by the end of 1975), and, everywhere, more Davis. If he was not writing a hit of his own (“All out of Love” for Air Supply), he was finding them for others—“Right Time of the Night” for Jennifer Warnes, “Looks Like We Made It,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “I Made It Through the Rain” for Manilow, who at one point had four albums on the charts simultaneously. But success did not prevent fights. Manilow and Davis “had a blowup,” in Davis’s words, following the release of “I Write the Songs” (Barry did many, but not this one), and Melissa Manchester, who had been with Arista from the beginning, concluded a series of creative-difference-related spats by leaving the label. Davis was unfazed. The trouble with Melissa, he said, was that she “went around trying to be Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt” when she should have been following his advice to do “more middle-of-the-road” pop. As for Barry, that, says Davis, was a case of identity upset: “He wanted to be Irving Berlin, and by continuing to do our material, he thought he would become Andy Williams.”
Being an Arista executive wasn’t a backstage pass, either. “You’d have meetings all day long, get back to your office around 7:30 at night, and that’s when you would start looking at your mail and the messages that you didn’t return,” says Lou Mann, who is now a president of House of Blues. “Then the private line would ring around nine, and it was ‘Come up here, we’ll have a drink, and I want to play some music for you.’ So you’d go up, have a shot, whatever. He’d be playing music, talking about the record, and then, 11:30 or so, you’d go out to dinner and talk some more.”
The reward was fat paychecks and swelling sales figures. But, for Davis, no payoff was sweeter than the logo on a $ 1 million licensing check which arrived 10 months after Arista’s founding. It read: “The Columbia Record Club.”
But the past could also bite. In May 1975 a federal grand jury in Newark indicted him on six counts of filing false income-tax returns. If convicted of the charges, which revolved around improper CBS expense reimbursements, Davis was looking at 24 years behind bars. In his 1982 best-seller Indecent Exposure, David McClintick reports that Herb Allen asked Hirschfield, “What if Clive goes to jail?” “Then,” said Hirschfield, “he’ll run it from Danbury.”
That seemed a live possibility, given the prosecutors’ eagerness to go to trial. But a jurisdictional call transferred the case to Manhattan, where Davis arranged to plead guilty to a single felony—failing to pay $2,700 in taxes on CBS-financed vacations in 1972. In handing down a $10,000 fine and a suspended jail term, Federal District Court judge Thomas Griesa excoriated the press for subjecting Davis to “unprecedented . . . appalling innuendo” and went out of his way to note that the crime was in no way connected to the activities of Wynshaw and Falcone, who were residing in the federal lockup. Eighteen months later, Davis appeared to put the last of his troubles behind him by settling CBS’s civil suit.
His former employer was not yet done with him, though. Already, CBS had edited Davis from A Week to Remember and had instructed artists not to mention him in interviews or liner notes. Except for his records, which continued to sell, CBS had expunged all physical traces of its former record-division president, including his office, which was dismantled walls and all, and his extension number, which was permanently stricken from the switchboard rolls. “CBS not only fired me,” Davis told Fame magazine, “they rewrote history to pretend that I’d never existed.”
Now, despite the failure of an exhaustive internal investigation to turn up any proof of Davis’s criminality, the campaign grew uglier. In one instance, Lieberson-who had started to claim, “The rock era began with me”—unsuccessfully tried to get The New York Times to kill a story about Arista. In another, CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who had been given his first music-industry job by Davis, threatened to fire Dick Asher if he wrote a character letter to Davis’s sentencing judge. (Asher did anyway.) According to a newsmagazine writer and a newspaper reporter who told their story to The New York Times, CBS took things even lower. A CBS spokesman, in the words of one of the journalists, “personally tried to leak all kinds of stuff—that Davis had huge gambling debts, that he was homosexual, or that he was a drug freak of some sort. It was all very dirty information, all unprovable, and all personal.” (“Utterly ridiculous,” the spokesman told the Times.)
After the Times’s article, CBS’s attacks petered out. Unfortunately for Davis, so did Arista’s record-setting, just as Columbia was imploding over the case of studio chief David Begelman, who had been caught pocketing a $ 10,000 check made out to actor Cliff Robertson. Hirschfield had fired him, Herbert Allen wanted him back, and in 1978 Allen got his way, disposing of Hirschfield in the process and leaving his outspoken supporter, Clive Davis, at the terminus of a lengthy limb. “Herb was not a big music-lover or rock ’n’ roll fan,” says Hirschfield. “After they got rid of me, the handwriting was on the wall.”
One who read it with particular interest was Bertelsmann Music chairman Monti Lüftner, whose U.S. label, Ariola, was a bust, and who had been a Davis fan since reading his book. “This man got ears,” says Lüftner. “Really good ears.” Elliot Goldman was similarly admiring of Lüftner, and at his recommendation, sale negotiations commenced. When they concluded, in the fall of 1979, Davis was publicly reported to have cashed in his 20 percent Arista stake for an estimated $4 million to $5 million. “The best deal since the Indians sold Manhattan for $24,” Davis calls the Bertelsmann purchase. However, it cost him the friendship of Elliot Goldman. At the time of Arista’s formation, says Goldman, Davis informally promised a 10 percent cut of anything he got in a future sale. According to Goldman, the pledge went unfulfilled. But Davis says he arranged a signing bonus for Goldman in excess of the 10 percent agreement. Nonetheless, Goldman quit for Warner in 1982.
Clive, as ever, accentuated the positive: the career resuscitations of the Grateful Dead and Dionne Warwick (the first hit single in five years for her), the nearly $100 million in predicted sales for 1981, the 40 gold and 11 platinum records racked up during his Arista reign. “Talent comes to me because they believe I’ve established a creative haven in which they can flourish,” he boasted to Newsweek. “And talent attracts talent.”
But even as Davis was speaking the words, the record business was headed into a deep financial funk brought on by the Reagan recession and a sudden consumer mania for video games. At Arista, the fault also rested with Davis, who had spurned urgings by Goldman to beef up the label’s burgeoning A&R and marketing operations—and who had, temporarily at least, lost his ear for rock. Instead, he fell back on the tried and true: another Manilow album. Except this one tanked. “Clive was torturing everybody until he could figure it out,” says Lou Mann, recalling the frantic weeks of companywide “Manilow meetings.” “He thought for sure the record was there.”
By 1983, Arista’s losses totaled an estimated $30 million to $40 million, and Bertelsmann was considering quitting the U.S. music business altogether. “If they could have gotten away with it,” a top industry figure says of Davis’s German bosses, “they would have killed him.” They settled for selling him off, dumping a 50 percent stake of Arista onto RCA in March 1983 for a sale price of zero. “This was ‘Help, take this off my hands,’” says former RCA president Robert Summer. “They had to get out from under it or close, and we offered the only exit.” Davis tried to put the best spin on events, insisting that Arista was still firmly under his control. The truth was, according to some Arista insiders, he now had to clear major moves with RCA, which made the reality of the power shift painfully clear by nixing the re-signing of Manilow. “Clive,” says a Davis lieutenant, “had to go tell one of his really good friends he wasn’t on his label anymore.”
Then, during a talent-scouting expedition to a New York supper club in February 1983, luck checked back in. On the bill that evening was a 19-year-old model and former gospel singer best known as Dionne Warwick’s cousin. Davis arrived half an hour late, sat expressionless during her set, and left without saying a word. But he had seen the future, and its name was Whitney Houston. “I was stunned by her talent,” he said. “I wanted to sign her immediately.”
Clive would have much more to say about Whitney Houston, not all of it accurate. He had not “found” her, as he claimed. (Arista’s chief talent scout, Gerry Griffith, had, and persuaded Davis to take in her act.) Nor was he the first record-company president to “discover” her (Elektra’s Bruce Lundvall had in late 1982), to recognize her talent (she’d been attracting good reviews since 1981), or to try to sign her to a deal (Elektra had already offered a contract, and Epic and others were also in the hunt). It was also a stretch to say, as Davis regularly did, that he “chose every song . . . picked every producer, took over the entire career.” Griffith selected one of her first hits (“How Will I Know?”) and hired the producer; career direction was also provided by Houston’s manager, mother, lawyer, and cousin, plus family friend Aretha Franklin. Whitney herself also had an occasional say.
What Clive Davis did do was make Whitney Houston a star. Step one was negotiating a contract as unusual as her four-octave range. Among the eyebrow raisers was a provision appointing Davis “executive producer.” But the most extraordinary aspect of the deal was a “keyman clause,” freeing Houston from Arista should Clive ever quit or be fired, and thus affording Davis enormous negotiating leverage with RCA. According to Hit Men, the author of the wrinkle was Paul Marshall, who, in addition to being Houston’s lawyer, possessed two other distinctions. For one, he had persuaded Houston to sign with Arista, despite a richer offer from Elektra. For another, he happened to be Clive Davis’s lawyer as well.
The actual album-making consumed two years and $250,000, well above the industry’s average recording cost. “It came in higher because she was growing,” Clive explained, “and I was supervising.” He was also mounting a marketing campaign like few others. It kicked off with a Clive-chaperoned appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, moved on through star-studded performance “showcases” in New York and L.A., and climaxed in a blizzard of press releases attached to Whitney Houston calendars. Lest there be any doubt how much was riding on it, Clive, according to Manhattan, Inc. reporter Bill Barol, gathered the Arista staff and, pounding his fist on the conference table, bellowed, “I will not be let down.”
He wasn’t. Released Valentine’s Day 1985, Whitney Houston spun off three No. 1 singles, rode the charts for more than three years, and sold 20-million-plus copies, making it the most successful debut album of all time. The only intrusion on the cork-popping was Gerry Griffith, who quit after being cropped from a magazine photograph taken with Houston and Davis. “I’m a noteworthy figure,” Clive said, shrugging. “The picture would be somewhat diminished by an unknown A&R man in it.”
Largely on account of Houston, Arista’s profits the first half of 1986 were up 75 percent, and sales had doubled since 1983. Armed with the keyman clause, Davis also did nicely, negotiating a new contract which awarded him profit participation and clearance to spend 15 percent of his time on personal, non-Arista projects. This soon translated into the financing of a Broadway flop (Is There Life After High School?) and a multi-picture production deal with TriStar which produced no pictures.
RCA, meanwhile, was going through corporate contortions. First, it arranged to sell itself to G.E. Then it gave Davis a new corporate boss—none other than Elliot Goldman. “Make a lot of money so I don’t have to call you,” Goldman counseled his former friend. “Because I don’t want to—I really don’t.” Fortuitously for Davis, Goldman was equally forthright with G.E. chairman Jack Welch, who liked his revenue flows steady and was perplexed about why those of the record division weren’t. Unlike “making television sets or aircraft engines,” Goldman explained, referring to two of G.E.’s core industries, music was subject to ups and downs; in other words, just because Michael Jackson sold 20 million records one year didn’t mean he would the next. “We can’t deal with a business that has that!,” Welch exclaimed. As of September 1986, he didn’t have to: G.E. announced it was selling the RCA Records group to Bertelsmann. Out was Goldman; back in was Manilow.
By paying at least $275 million for a basket of anemic performers, many in the industry felt that Bertelsmann had been suckered. What they didn’t know was that Clive was putting the final buff on a second Houston album. It entered the charts at No. 1 (a first for a female artist), spawned four No. 1 singles (making for seven in a row, a record that bested the Bee Gees and the Beatles), and—astounding for a sophomore outing—sold only slightly fewer copies than its predecessor. An R&B-flavored album followed in 1990, but, to Whitney’s irritation, produced “only” two No. 1 singles and eight million sales. “I didn’t think I had to be ‘totally urban,’” says Houston. “Well, they did, and it was a mistake.” To atone, Davis arranged for Whitney to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl. Released as a single, her soaring rendition of the national anthem was good for more than a million units. “Clive,” Joe Smith cracks, “told me he wrote the words and music.”
After The Bodyguard, it seemed conceivable. At its peak, in late 1992, the soundtrack from the Houston—Kevin Costner movie sold a million copies in one week. Worldwide sales eventually topped 40 million, making it the most successful soundtrack ever—and, for Arista, the source of an estimated $200 million in profits. A goodly portion derived from “I Will Always Love You,” a single with Davis’s DNA all over it. Grammy-winning producer David Foster worked for weeks, doing take after take with Houston, but Davis fired all of them back. “Doesn’t sound right,” he’d say. “Too sweet—too produced.” He liked the first, roughest version best. Foster was left hurling curses. But Davis wouldn’t budge, even after warnings that the 45-second, a cappella lead-in would doom radio play.
And, initially, station programmers resisted. Then listeners began calling, which set disc players spinning; in two weeks, “I Will Always Love You” was No. 1—a position it would hold a record 14 weeks, on its way to becoming the biggest-selling U.S. commercial single of all time. When he started Arista Nashville, a country-and-western label, its first release by then unknown Alan Jackson went platinum. When his gut said “Christmas album,” he arm-twisted Kenny G (who is Jewish and didn’t want to do it) and the aptly named Miracles became the first holiday album to top the charts in 35 years. Even the disclosure in 1989 that his German pop duo, Milli Vanilli, hadn’t sung a note while selling seven million records and winning a Grammy (which was revoked) was a passing cloud. Had he known in advance that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus were only lip-synching? He was shocked, shocked, Clive said—even though the boys swore that he did know.
Mixed, however, were the blessings of the $10 million joint-venture deal which Davis struck with rap impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1994. While there was no doubt about Puffy’s commercial worth ($150 million in sales his first four years with Arista), the “total music man,” as Clive called him, had a downside. For starters, there was his reputed association with four unsolved murders, including that of rapper Tupac Shakur, whose drive-by killing set Arista executives checking on the status of their partner’s life insurance. Combs was also expensive. In order to get him to sign a five-year, 50–50 ownership deal with Arista, Davis had reportedly coughed up a $700,000 annual salary, a $6 million advance, and a $50 million line of credit—with a $2 million, state-of-the-art mid-Manhattan sound studio thrown in. After a year that saw Combs’s Bad Boy Records release five straight No. 1 singles, and Combs’s own recording debut, No Way Out, open at No. 1, he was back at the trough again. “I want to be very, very rich, right away,” Puff said. Rather than lose what was now $200 million in yearly sales, Clive accommodated him, handing over a reported $55 million advance.
With Arista annually taking in nearly as much as BMG’s 200 other worldwide labels combined, the good burghers of Gütersloh, Germany, didn’t make a peep—which was just as well, since Davis claimed to be ignoring them anyway. “They asked me for a budget once,” a music lawyer quotes him as saying. “I just got up and walked out of the room.” (Clive denies both walking out and making the remark.)
The industry landscape, however, was changing. All the majors were now controlled by conglomerates—Atlantic by Time Warner; Columbia and Epic by Sony; Capitol by EMI; MCA by Seagram’s—and a business where “strategic planning” traditionally meant figuring out where to have lunch tomorrow was suddenly dominated by revenue-forecasting M.B.A.’s. Davis paid them no notice. “Corporations haven’t a clue when it comes to creativity in the music world,” he said. “I remember a few years ago, when everybody was talking about synergy and how powerful all these corporate figureheads were going to be. Well, half those guys are gone now. They really didn’t know anything about music then, and they don’t really know anything about it now.”
They were not words his superiors at Bertelsmann wanted to hear. He now had two new ones, Michael Dornemann, whose “Germanic arrogance,” said Forbes, “would intimidate Arnold Schwarzenegger,” and Strauss Zelnick, a well-groomed American Wunderkind who combined Harvard degrees (law and business school) and movie-star looks with a glittering résumé (president of Fox’s studio operations while in his early 30s) and ties (by marriage) to the Bronfmans. Dornemann had brought Zelnick in after allegedly losing $150 million trying to fix RCA, which Bertelsmann had acquired with Arista from G.E. in 1986.
By ruthless cost-cutting and downsizing, Zelnick stanched the bleeding and installed a management team which stopped the joking that RCA stood for “Record Cemetery of America.” Then, with the aid of a personal publicist, he began portraying himself as a record maven, and bragged to the press, “We own pop music.” Conspicuously absent in his accounts of BMG’s rise to the No. 2 slot among U.S. music companies was mention of Clive Davis, whose distaste for both Zelnick and Dornemann was well known. At least one Arista-connected executive, however, had warm feelings about Zelnick. That was Antonio “L.A.” Reid, whose LaFace Records Davis had helped get off the ground in 1989. In partnership with Grammy-winning producer-songwriter Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Reid attracted R&B acts such as Toni Braxton, TLC, and Usher, and before long LaFace was the industry’s runaway R&B leader. Impressed, Zelnick sent him to a special nine-week executive course at the Harvard Business School and put him on a confidential short list of possible Davis successors. “I [am] really in awe of Clive,” Reid says. “When I had an opportunity to meet him and be in business with him, it was for me a dream come true . . . He still gets excited. He still loves it. I’m such a huge fan.”
Despite a deluge of bad news on the Puffy front (including the murder of his leading act, “Biggie” Smalls, and a one-year sales drop of $165 million), Clive wasn’t intending to leave anytime soon. “Retire?” he said last summer. “I’ve never thought about it.” Dornemann and Zelnick, however, had. Company policy mandated that BMG senior executives retire at 60, and though the stricture had been waived at the signing of Clive’s last contract in 1995, Zelnick had made it clear it wouldn’t be again. Davis needed a successor.
Clive shrugged it off. Why should he worry about the pronouncements of no more than “an up and coming young man in the music business,” as he publicly dismissed Zelnick. His most recent deal—$50 million plus over five years—allowed him to maintain a glistening duplex in the Ritz Tower, a sprawling country house in tony Pound Ridge, and an art collection featuring Picasso, Botero, and Frankenthaler. Though long divorced from Janet, his relationship with their two children and the two he’d had with Helen was closer than ever. Seldom was there a Sunday when they weren’t together, eating Chinese and trading industry gossip. At work, where he claimed he could now tell a hit in 20 seconds, honors were raining in on him: several designations as record executive of the year; even his own star on Hollywood’s walk of fame. “What a fun game!” he said of his life.
Zelnick, however, was more formidable than Davis imagined. In five years he’d taken what had been 25 divisions—22 of them money losers—and shrunk them to 18 moneymakers. Further endearing himself to his masters, he’d even taken a crash course in German. But perhaps his shrewdest move was schooling himself in the foibles of Clive Davis. Aware of the Arista president’s vanity, Zelnick said nothing when Clive boasted of reporting functionally to no one (in fact, he reported to a board controlled by Zelnick and Dornemann). But bit by bit, Zelnick was gathering ammunition.
By the summer of 1999, he was fully armed and ready to strike. Dornemann, who’d been the first to press for an Arista guard-changing, had given his approval to move on Davis, as had Bertelsmann’s most senior corporate executives. According to industry sources, Davis himself played into Zelnick’s hands by letting it be known that he would not only refuse to discuss succession during upcoming contract talks but would also be seeking a substantial salary increase. Just how much he might have in mind was revealed in a Variety story last September, which reported that BMG was putting “the final touches” on a new employment agreement that would keep Davis on for another five years in a deal worth “around $70 million.” BMG’s suspicions that Davis was behind the story grew when, the day after Variety hit the stands, Davis called to say that the only way BMG could remove the “deep embarrassment” he’d suffered was to immediately grant a new contract. Instead, Zelnick’s resolve strengthened.
The dénouement came during a dinner with Davis, Dornemann, and Zelnick at Lutèce on November 4. Over appetizers, Davis was told that BMG planned to buy the 50 percent of LaFace it did not already own, and install Reid as Arista president. After a year’s “transition,” Davis was to become Arista chairman for life. “There is no one inside or outside of the company who can succeed me,” Davis replied. Either BMG renewed his contract on terms he would outline or, he said, “We will go to war in the press.” With that, Davis stomped out.
Since then, the war has escalated. Davis has enlisted entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman to represent him, and, to the cheers and champagne toasts of his staff, repeated his vow not to step down. Just having received word that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is indeed inducting him, Davis, who is also being honored at the upcoming Grammys, is in a feisty frame of mind. BMG, which is fighting a simultaneous, equally high-stakes war with another Clive (Calder, proprietor of Zomba Recording, home of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears), shows no signs of retreating, either. Already, the company has let it be known that staffing cutbacks await Arista, and that its Nashville label will be swallowed up by RCA. At the same time, BMG has also been collecting pledges of continuing under Reid from Arista stars, including some of Davis’s most vociferous advocates. One contract BMG does not have to worry about is that of Whitney Houston; Dornemann bought out her Clive keyman clause years ago. “I sympathize with Clive,” says one of the ubiquitous BMG insiders. “But the bottom line is, he hasn’t owned this company or any part of it for 25 years. We do.”
Despite the rhetorical pyrotechnics, the most likely outcome is a mutually face-saving settlement, one that could see Davis running his own, BMG-financed label, while having an advisory role in the operation of a Reid-led Arista. “I am not embattled,” he says, trying to sound brave. “The situation for me is win-win.” Still, an era is ending.
There was a whiff of that during the final Tuesday in his office. Clive had spent much of the time reminiscing: about Janis, Bruce, Carlos, and Patti; about the travails at CBS; about starting Arista 25 years before. “It was giving birth to a baby . . . a brand-new baby . . . a brand-new company,” he said. “Within 10 weeks, we had the No. 1 record in the country, nominated for Grammys.” Shaking his head, as if still amazed, he rummaged through the pile of recordings on his desk, then slipped a newly arrived CD into his stereo. “Listen to this,” he said, tilting back. “It’s something I put together for Kenny’s album.” As the music came up to top volume, just how he lived his life, his eyes closed and his body began to sway, perfectly in tune with Kenny’s wailing sax. The sound of “Auld Lang Syne” was haunting.