King baby

But when you were in charge, you did the same kind of thing. You fought Sony when it started selling double-cassette decks and when the industry wanted to move to CDs.

I threatened them, actually, saying, I'm not releasing CDs, fuck you, I'm not releasing them. We all kvetched. We said, Oh my god, they're going to get rid of tape. We'll have to get rid of our tape factories and what are people going to do with their tape machines until they buy CDs? Nevertheless, the industry embraced CDs and it saved everyone's ass for a few years. So maybe the industry ought to intelligently embrace the Internet. There is a way to use it. I think you can harness the Internet. If the record companies were serious -- but they're in denial. They've turned it over to Apple.

Your book also has a few examples of ways that labels rip off artists, most notably by paying royalties on 85 percent of sales and claiming that the other 15 percent was damaged. What role did you have in perpetuating these kinds of accounting tricks?

It's been going on forever. I tried to ameliorate some of them actually; all of them, no. I was not paying particular attention. I was aware of it, more than most. But this is not what a chief executive focuses on. You don't think Ahmet Ertegun or David Geffen was looking at contracts. That's not really what we were doing. But I was aware of them, and some of them I tried to change -- like foreign royalties were being paid on all kinds of bases, which were really not called for by the contract. So I said let's get off the way we're doing things and get a little more kosher.

But it started a while ago ... and there's still some stuff floating around. There are a lot of artists who want to audit. And they're coming to me to be their consigliere. There's a guy named Steve Popovich -- Sony is going to hate this, they're going to have a conniption. What do I care? He's a friend of mine and he had a thing called Cleveland International, which had a participating interest in Meat Loaf. A long time ago, Steve came to me when I was still working there, and wanted an audit. It was one record, "Bat out of Hell." But the statute of limitations had run out. I said "Forget it, you're a friend. Go ahead, audit. Whatever we owe you, we owe you."

Sony refused to let him do it. He came to me and I wrote him a letter saying I agreed to do this and I have the authority. Then I get a letter from Sony's law firm, and I said, Don't ever do that again because you're really looking for trouble. I'll go public with stuff that you're really not going to like it.

I never heard from them. They engaged in litigation and Steve's like the coal miner's daughter -- his father was actually a coal miner; he does not have enormous resources. And he said, "What am I going to do here, they're beating me up." He's a little guy; they're a big company. I said, "They're going to settle on the courthouse steps; they're not going to trial for that." So they did. He signed a confidentiality agreement -- they're very nervous about things over there -- but he got paid over $5 million in settlement! I didn't hear it from him; I heard it from someone else, but I know it to be true. That's for him alone, forget Meat Loaf. So what do they owe the industry?

Your book is, of course, full of crazy stories, but many of them made me want more information. For instance, there was barely a paragraph about Studio 54. What did you leave out?

There were a lot of drugs. I was good friends with Steve Rubell and it was an interesting cultural phenomenon. I'm not sure what it did for the music business; it was more disco than anything else. But it was a place to be. What they first did was get a bunch of cute bartenders with cute little behinds and had them tend bar. That attracted the gay crowd and the gay crowd -- it's hip, it's in, they're the tastemakers often -- and that attracted the social climbers.

One of the weirdest things that happened is, I had a girlfriend that year named Boom Boom. We went to Acapulco. There's an enclave there that goes from the town to the Las Brisas hotel and it's owned by a Mexican. Boom Boom and her husband -- who has passed away -- used to go down there and they would receive their drugs. And when the Mexican came to Los Angeles, he would get his.

Now she got divorced and the Mexican's not talking to her. So we're at the New Year's Eve party there -- she came as a cat, and I came as the cat-keeper with a velvet rope around her neck -- and she says, that's the guy over there who wouldn't talk to me.

I, of course, went up to him and said, "What kind of fucking asshole are you? You were so friendly, now you won't talk?" And he says, "Hey Señor, is this worth it? Look." And I looked and saw a couple of guys with guns. "OK," I said, "you're right."

Well then I ran into him -- he was wearing a white tuxedo -- in Studio 54. "You remember me?" I said. He said yes. "And there's nobody with a gun over your shoulder, right?" He said no, so I hit him as hard as I could in the stomach. He fell down. Studio 54 was my turf.

What about celebrity lawyer Allen Grubman who got his start with you. You failed to mention in your book that he's the father of Lizzie Grubman. What was your reaction when you heard that she backed her SUV into a crowd in the Hamptons and became a tabloid mainstay?

Like father, like daughter. There's something very strange about that case. How come the cops didn't take a Breathalyzer test? Isn't that weird?

But Grubman, to me, is a whole different story. There were two stories taken out of the book, for literary reasons. The writer, Ritz -- who is a very nice guy, very different from me, he's very calm -- and he said, It doesn't look good. The stories make you look like a schmuck.

What were they?

One of them was completely innocuous. He was representing me in a deal with Steve Ross, which almost happened, and I had to pee in a bottle because I was taking medical tests. I had to pee in the bottle at all times. It was late at night and we ducked into a hallway on Park Avenue, and I said, "I'm going to pee in the bottle, you hold the bottle." And I spritzed him a little. And he says, "You're spritzing a lawyer!" I said, "A lawyer like you I can spritz." It's like a joke!

The other one is not true, but it wouldn't have to be true because the point of the story was true. I said that I made him take his dick out to continue a meeting and this little gray thing came out. I made it up, but it was to make a point -- that nothing is beneath his dignity. Nothing. He used to come into my office -- and this is true, he cops to that -- and kneel in front of my desk and say, "Puhleeze, puhleeze." He once followed me into the bathroom when I was taking a shit to make a deal. That's pretty undignified, even for a lawyer.

His business is getting very bad now; he must be getting very nervous. Billy Joel sued him, you remember ... But that's not the story. His first wife Yvette had M.S. He knew that when he married her. And it started to deteriorate -- this is the mother of his children.

This was more than 15 years ago. It was starting to deteriorate, and the night he left her, he was staying at the Regency, the Tisch hotel. And I bought him a bunch of bagels. I went over to see him. He was waiting for a hooker -- to show you how good my memory is -- named Corolo. How you spell it, I don't know.

But I said, "Allen, I'm surprised you left. You didn't have to. You can do whatever you want." I know a hooker he patronized for years and years and she lived on Gramercy Park near my girlfriend at the time, who was not a hooker. This was a saint of the fields, but they'd walk the dogs together. So whatever Allen told her, she told this girl and the girl told me, so anyway, I'm a fount of information.

So I said, "Allen, I'm surprised you left. You can do whatever you want." And he said, "She didn't keep her part of the deal." I said, "What was her part of the deal?" [He says] "She was supposed to look good on my arm, and she doesn't look good on my arm anymore."

I said, "You know Allen, I don't side with women generally. But you know, that's over the top even for me."

That's what we're talking about. That's the antecedent to Lizzie. And it's only one story of many.

But again, with Mottola and Grubman, you made these guys.

Yes, I did. But I was drunk and I plead mental defectiveness. But they were different. Neither is stupid. [Tommy] Mottola, in my view, is more pathological. But he played me. He became my brother. He's very good at male bonding. Grubman is not good at male bonding. But Tommy was very good at male bonding, and he was very successful at it. And he was very persuasive. He persuaded Mariah Carey to marry him.

I imagine you haven't seen Mottola recently.

He seems pretty chubby.

But what would you say to him?

Nothing. I wouldn't talk to him. There's no need. What am I going to say? I know what he's going to do. He's going to come running over. He'll try to kiss me -- and I don't want to have to go to the doctor right after that. He's going to say, "Oh, Walter, it's so nice to see you, I'm glad you're doing so well, congratulations on your book." That's what he's going to do. There's a level of bullshit that I don't have to listen to.

What's life like for you today? How often are you still going to addiction meetings?

Four or five times a week. And I'm active in service. On Thursdays, I do meetings at the Bowery Transitional Center on Avenue D and Fourth Street. It's not a program thing. There's not recovery there; it's just a shelter. And I do the thing out in New Jersey with the priest, Monsignor Puma, who might have been a bishop, but he's crazy. And he's one of the most altruistic people in the world. We're the odd couple; I grew up as an Orthodox Jew and he's a Catholic priest. But he's been very, very helpful to me.

I also sponsor a couple of people and I'm on the board of Caron, an addiction treatment facility in Pennsylvania that just opened up an office in New York -- a whole building designed for the needs of young people, because it's hard for kids to get sober.

Do you still feel angry at your dad, who used to abuse you?

There's still a bit of resentment about what a schmuck he was. There's still a lot of legacy from that. Like, I have a chapter in the book called "Sparring With Daddy" -- and Mommy too. Well, a lot of that aggression probably comes from the fact that there was a schmuck I was powerless against. Now there are a lot of schmucks who I'm not quite powerless against and I probably want to get even. There's probably some psychodrama like that because I still have an aggressive kind of thing. I almost punched a guy out at Heathrow airport, which is not a smart idea. I wanted to kill this guy. I got into a fight in a plane coming back from Texas because there was a woman with a baby screaming on the plane, and I told her off. The stewardess came over and said, "That's inappropriate behavior." I said, "You know, you're nothing but a waitress. Go away."

So it doesn't ever disappear, but it goes down.

When you come home today from a tough meeting, or a fight at the airport, what kind of music do you listen to?

I'm listening to a lot of things. People give me things. I'm putting out a bunch of soundtracks, so I'm listening to cool jazz. When new artists come, I listen to that. I listen to goofy stations, like Fordham has a station. It's a great station because they have interesting programming. It's not exactly Mariah Carey.

Are there any bands that you'd try to sign if you were in the business today?

Is Pearl Jam free? Aren't they out of their contract? Maybe I should go talk to them. And David Bowie I saw at Madison Square Garden, and he looks good and sounds good. He's got a better facelift than Paul McCartney, and I just admire him. I think he's great.

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