Here Comes the Night (40 page)

Barry, who liked to wear cowboy boots and hats, looked at Berns, a few years older, as a man’s man. They tooled off on a road trip upstate on their Harleys. They left one of the motorcycles by the roadside after a flat tire and rode off on one bike into a rainstorm. By the time they found their way to the back door of an Italian restaurant, they were drenched and bedraggled.

They produced a Drifters record together, a serious effort at getting the group back up high on the charts, the first time the Drifters recorded any Barry-Greenwich songs. “I’ll Take You Where the Music’s Playing” made it halfway up the
Hot 100
. Although they hadn’t spent that much time together before, Barry always liked Berns. When Barry had first started making hits, he found himself invited to Morris Levy’s annual United Jewish Appeal fundraising dinner and seated between Levy and Berns. When the time came to write checks and Levy started to hound Barry to write a $10,000 check, Berns told Morris to leave the kid alone. Barry always recalled the kindness.

The fissures in the world of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich were cracking open. The girl group sound that kept them at the top of the charts all the years before had evaporated. Barry was so busy running
from studio to office to rehearsal, the New York police couldn’t find him for ten days when they were looking for him on a murder charge (a case of mistaken identity). Greenwich, despite the blonde bouffant, eye makeup, and lipstick, was still basically the same innocent girl from Levittown. Barry, never a talker, grew ever more remote in their marriage. She felt the shadows play into her music.
Maybe I know that you’ve been cheating
, she wrote by herself in the back of a taxi,
but what can I do?

Of course, she had to make it cheerful and use a major key.

With Shadow Morton, she and Barry cut an extraordinary Ellie Greenwich solo record for Red Bird, “You Don’t Know,” something slightly more mature than the teen romances they had been turning out for Lesley Gore and Connie Francis. It was going to be WMCA “Pick of the Week” until Jackie DeShannon’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” showed up. Leiber and Stoller made noises about sending her to England to promote the record, but Barry didn’t see the point of her spending time working as a performer. There were always demos, sessions, new songs. Leiber and Stoller lost interest in the record and it slipped away.

Barry quietly started seeing a voluptuous young brunette who worked as studio receptionist at Mira Sound named Nancy Calcagno. In October, just before their third anniversary, Barry and Greenwich separated. Greenwich spent a lot of evenings at the Berns apartment with Bert and Ilene. They kept everything quiet for business reasons, but she was privately destroyed, trying to hang on to what she could.

The hits just kept coming at Red Bird. Leiber and Stoller came up with a lucky number one with the Ad Libs’ “The Boy From New York City.” They were looking for acts to launch an r&b subsidiary of Red Bird called Blue Cat and found a demo tape of this quintet from Bayonne, New Jersey, with the song written by an amateur, some friend of the group. Leiber loved the jive talk lyrics—
he’s really down, but he’s no clown
—and Artie Butler’s cooking chart finished the package.

Goldner was a force of nature. He promoted those records up the charts by himself. He had Johnny Brantley, one of Alan Freed’s old bagmen, running around the country distributing largesse. Goldner loved hit records and he avidly attended playbacks at the studio. Dressed impeccably, he would ceremoniously place a chair in the middle of the control booth, and when the playback finished, he would stand up and smash the chair against the wall and demand to hear it again. This happened so often that the studio, understanding that he was a regular client, built a breakaway stool for Goldner, but it wasn’t as satisfying to throw and didn’t leave marks on the wall. Goldner was also losing at the racetrack again. There were a lot of meetings behind closed doors in his office with large, unattractive men. Everybody else in the office looked the other way.

Goldner’s wife’s name was Grace, but he called her Mona, and they could fight. She had that hot-blooded Latin temperament and a foul mouth. They got into it during an awards dinner sitting next to Hy Weiss. “Oh yeah,” said Goldner’s wife loud enough for all the table to hear, “you didn’t talk like that last night when I was licking your asshole.”

At one point, Goldner left town on a business trip with his girlfriend, but sneaked back into town early without telling his wife so he could spend still more time with the dame. His wife got wind and went crazy looking for him. She phoned Jerry Leiber at home and interrupted his son’s birthday party with all the little Rothschilds running around their Central Park West place. She started screaming a blue streak and all the children listening in on the extension picked up her chant: “motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.” Goldner was not Leiber and Stoller’s kind of people.

Leiber hadn’t heard from Jerry Wexler in some time and was moderately surprised to find him on the phone. Wexler wanted to talk about merging the Atlantic and Red Bird operations. He proposed a meeting. Leiber and Stoller hated the record business. They hated the record business when they were unsuccessful at it. If anything,
being successful only made them hate it more. They liked music. They retained both their youthful enthusiasm and gruff, hip cynicism about the music. It was the record business they hated. Goldner and his unsavory associates were difficult to ignore. The Erteguns and Wexler offered a possible solution.

A meeting was arranged for the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel, a dark-paneled, subdued brasserie more accustomed to Park Avenue dowager luncheons than high-powered business meetings. Leiber and Stoller had come to increasingly distrust Goldner, but they weren’t savvy enough in the sales and distribution end of the business to know if he was stealing from them. One of the advantages of joining forces with Atlantic was that Goldner would be fully contained, flanked by the Erteguns and Wexler, who would know. Stoller pointed out to Leiber, if they signed one more hit act, they could be stuck in this damn record business forever.

Leiber and Stoller brought Goldner and their attorney, Lee Eastman, to the luncheon. Wexler arrived with both the Erteguns. Goldner started gulping martinis. He quickly grew insulting toward Ahmet, which caught Leiber and Stoller by surprise. An uncharacteristically imperious Goldner acted as if he was going to run the company after the merger. Eastman, too, raised objections and argued with Wexler. Somewhere along the line, Ahmet got the idea that Wexler had sold him out to Leiber and Stoller.

He knew Wexler wanted desperately to unload the company—his company, not Jerry Wexler’s company—for some time, but it never mattered to Ahmet, one way or the other. He was certainly less inclined to sell than Wexler. Since the ABC deal fell through, only the latest in a long line of Wexler scenarios, it had been Ahmet who rescued the company with the Sonny & Cher record. He felt utterly betrayed by Wexler, whom he knew to be capable of the worst sort of treachery, but that he would conspire with these two knaves whom they practically invented only added to the insult.

The meeting went haywire quickly. As Leiber and Wexler exchanged bewildered looks, the Erteguns were gone before anybody could say anything. Not only were Leiber and Stoller still stuck in the record business, but also, since Goldner clearly set out to sabotage the meeting from the start, it would appear that their suspicions about their partner were well founded.

A dark cloud hovered over the Red Bird offices. Their marriage may have been disintegrating, but Barry and Greenwich were still one of the top songwriting teams in the country. They had picked up another slew of awards at that year’s BMI dinner and all Ellie wanted to know about was their marriage. “I don’t know,” he told her.

In December 1965, shortly before Christmas, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich obtained a Mexican divorce. Now it was over, but their careers were still entwined. They agreed to continue working together and, for business reasons, would keep up a front. The divorce would be kept secret. She pondered her circumstances with some bitterness as she wrote out cheery replies to that year’s Christmas cards to the couple.

Jeff Barry, Neil Diamond, Ellie Greenwich, Bert Berns

XVIII.

Up in the Streets of Harlem
[1966]

E
VER SINCE HE
was a kid, Carmine DeNoia Jr. was always called Wassel. At six-foot-six, two hundred–plus, Wassel was not little anymore but a bookmaker who frequented Broadway and kept his finger in the music business. Wassel was no made man—his brother John (J. J.) DeNoia was—but he knew all those guys. His father was a famous Broadway character; Damon Runyon based Nicely-Nicely from
Guys and Dolls
, on Wassel’s dad, a celebrated trencherman who once ate thirty-six servings of lasagna in an eating contest. Wassel grew up on the streets of East Harlem alongside Joey and Patsy Pagano.

Joey Pagano was a crazy, violent killer, short and swarthy, known by all the bosses of the New York families as uncontrollable and unaffiliated, a rare freelance thug. He went down in a bankruptcy fraud beef in December 1964 after milking dry the Murray Packing Company in New York City. Pagano helped arrange an $8,500 loan for the company, where he worked as a salesman. Before long, Pagano had been named president of the company, cosigner of every check. He sold meat at below-cost prices to a Mob-owned wholesaler and drained the company of $745,000 worth of merchandise in three months, leaving Murray Packing bankrupt and suppliers across the country holding the bag.

His younger brother Patsy Pagano, secretary-treasurer of Bricklayers Local 59, was fresh out of the joint. He had a varied background. He
and his brother were nothing more than neighborhood punks when they were recruited by Joe Valachi. Long before he became the Feds’ most celebrated stool pigeon, Valachi used the Paganos for a couple of hits in the early fifties. Patsy was a Genovese family soldier who ran the New Jersey docks for boss Tony Strollo. He put together an enormously successful heroin smuggling operation from France and, in 1956, took a three-year fall for bribing an IRS official and five more years consecutive on narcotics charges. Patsy and Wassel maintained such a close working relationship that singer Freddie Scott thought Patsy was his manager, not Wassel.

When Wassel signed the former Aldon demo singer to Columbia Records, the elite label’s patrician president, Goddard Lieberson, gave Wassel an under-the-table signing bonus of twenty thousand “clean” albums to trade at Colony Records. In the Broadway music business, records were wampum and Colony was the trading fort.

A “clean” album—one that didn’t carry any marks identifying it as a promotional copy—could be returned for full credit, and if a record company happened to press more copies of an album than the accounting department counted, they could easily end up entering this underground economy out the back door of the label. Even the white glove fat cats at Columbia Records understood how this worked. If you knew the right people, large amounts of records could be sold at discounts for cash, useful in certain off-the-book expenditures, and where there is cash, there are the racket boys. Hoods were plentiful in the record business, and not just small-time gunsels either.

Nobody had to look further than the card game at Roulette Records at 1631 Broadway, where the FBI kept a telescope trained from a room across the street in the City Squire Hotel. One of Levy’s silent partners in Roulette, Dominick Ciaffone, was an older, respected member of the Genovese family also known by the name Swats Mulligan and a frequent visitor to the office. His nephew was Levy’s long-standing associate, Tommy Vastola, Alan Freed’s old manager who continued to
keep his hand in show business, alongside fur warehouse heists, illegal gambling operations, loan sharking, and a wide variety of business enterprises that kept him in close contact with the DeCavalcante family of New Jersey, while maintaining ties with the Colombo gang and operating an outfit of his own around Manhattan.

Vastola took over handling the career of Jackie Wilson in 1961 with his associate Johnny Roberts. He previously had managed not only the Cleftones, but also r&b voodoo priest Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, another fixture on the Alan Freed concert bills. He also picked up a piece of Queen Booking. Started by the queen herself, Dinah Washington, and run by her former maid, Ruth Bowen, the agency was one of the few black-owned operations in the business and booked dates for a wide variety of high-priced rhythm and blues talent. After Washington’s death in 1963 at age thirty-nine from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, Bowen took on a number of questionable partners.

Vastola, a fixture at the Queens office, met Sammy Davis Jr. through the agency, and the two struck up a relationship that spanned the business and personal. Jackie Wilson’s previous manager, Nat Tarnopol, who ran Brunswick Records in partnership with Decca Records, turned over Wilson’s affairs to the gangsters after he decided to devote himself full-time to running the label, where Wilson also recorded. Before long, Vastola’s influence over the label extended to him cutting deals with other artist managers to sign acts to Brunswick and helping himself to kickbacks from the advance. Wilson, “Mr. Excitement,” who made his living in the often treacherous, cash-only world of a rhythm and blues attraction on the road, found having ice-cold Johnny Roberts on the job meant fewer problems collecting fees.