He said, "I'm going to sing, Jerry. That's what I am going to do. When you go to commercial, I will be singing and when you come back, I will still be singing. That's live."
He taught me about spontaneity that night-this, too, helped me as a film producer. Live, let it happen. There's never a better take than the first: Sinatra knew that in his bones.
If you watch a tape of the "Main Event," you see me and Sinatra walk out of the dressing room and down the aisle side by side. He is Muhammad Ali and I am Cus D'Amato, the trainer, the cut man, the voice in the ear, saying, "You are the champ! It's yours! Now get in there and murder the bum!" I was, in fact, as white as a sheet, shuffling as if to my own funeral. You hear Cosell going though his routine: "… Here, coming through the same tunnel that so many champions have walked before, the great man, Frank Sinatra, who has the phrasing, who has the control, who knows what losing means, who made the great comeback, and now stands still, eternally, on top of the entertainment world…" Just before we went out, when the music started Sinatra leaned over me-well, I was a lot taller than Frank, so he looked up, but it felt like he was leaning over me, you know? And he asked, "How you doing now? Better?"
"No," I said, "not better."
"What the hell's the matter with you?" he said.
"Frank"-or Francis, that's what I said-"this is going live around the world, we have not rehearsed and have no markers or breaks. It could be the end of my career."
He pinched my cheek and said, "Listen, kid. You got me into this, and I'm going to get you out."
And he went through the ropes, and the music started, and it was all Frank from there. He was a genius. He held the crowd in his hand. "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Angel Eyes," "My Kind of Town," they poured out of him like Norse sagas. When he sang "Autumn in New York," it was as if he were leaning on a bar, spilling his guts out to a late-night, Hopperesque bartender.
Who thought this could work, intimacy in an arena filled with thousands and thousands of people, but he pulled it off. He turned the Garden into a shadowy, three-in-the-morning, Second Avenue saloon. You could have heard a pin drop.
Then, just like that, when it seemed no more than a moment had passed, the kid walked the aisle in the red coat and Frank launched into "My Way." The ignition was turned in the limo, the pizzas were pulled from the ovens, the plane raced down the runway, and we were laughing and eating pepperoni as the jet climbed into the stratosphere.
Firing Ferguson
Around this time, in 1978, Jane and I purchased land in Malibu and built the house where she still spends much of the year. I describe it as a beach shack, but it really is one of the great California houses, a compound more than a house, with stables and guest quarters and trails that run across six acres on the Pacific coast, where the land juts out and Catalina Island rises into view. If you leave Beverly Hills at 2:00 P.M., heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway, with the sea on your left and the hills rising steeply on your right, you will arrive before three, finally passing through a gate marked "Blue Heaven."
In the midseventies, Jane and I threw a lot of parties. She calls it the era of "extreme entertaining." We had people over most nights, the rooms filled with music and movie types, the windows glittering, laughter spilling onto the beach, where I stand with a bottle of wine knee deep in the surf. In the garage in Malibu, we have posterboard-size pictures taken in those bygone days. Jane with Walter Winchell. Jane with Darryl Zanuck and John Wayne. Jane, at a dinner party, with three different kinds of crystal in front of her, seated between Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant.
By then, my touring company, Concerts West, was booming. But no matter how well I was doing, I was always on the lookout for the new artist, the next big thing. When I think back on those years, it's me going from club to club, sitting at cocktail tables, meeting artists in cramped dressing rooms, pitching, cajoling, selling. (Breaking a new act is a special high; some agents spend their careers chasing it.) My most noteworthy find of those years was John Denver, who, as far as I am concerned, I cooked from scratch. By examining how I dealt with John Denver you can get a pretty good sense of the task and challenge of the manager, how he finds and builds an act, and how that act will eventually break his heart.
John was a military brat. His childhood was spent moving base to base, New Mexico, Arizona, Alabama, Texas. His real name was John Deutschendorf Jr. His father was an amazing guy, a test pilot and flight instructor who often seemed confused by his kid. The love of music and songwriting, the long hair and pursuit of beauty-where did they come from? John left home as soon as he was of age. He traveled the country with a guitar and a notebook of songs. He was going to write about everything, all of it, the mountains and plains, the continental divide, set it to music. He made a few solo records, which went nowhere, then scored one big success, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," which went top ten when recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, who, by the way, I managed. But his first real break came in the midsixties, when, answering an open audition, he won a spot in the Chad Mitchell Trio, a hot New York folk act.
I first heard about John when he left the Trio and was looking to make it on his own. He had been represented by Irwin Winkler, who was going into the movie business, and needed representation. A friend tipped me: "Jerry, check out this kid. He's playing a dive in Greenwich Village." So I went over. No one there. The joint was empty. Just this earnest kid with a pageboy haircut, singing and playing guitar on stage. I sat and listened. He made a connection immediately. That's how it was with him-his talent. With each song, you felt he had opened his chest and was showing you his beating heart.
Okay, you might think, Jerry Weintraub and John Denver, something does not compute, something is not right. How does a folk singer from New Mexico end up in league with a street kid from the Bronx? But the fact is, we were a lot alike, me and John, had a lot in common, which is why our friendship was so immediate and deep. He, too, had run away from home when he was a kid-he left in his father's car and turned up weeks later at a cousin's house in Los Angeles. He, too, wanted to get out into the world, see and experience everything, find his way. I saw all of this that first night in New York. I saw the talent, too. It was one of those rare moments you dream of as a manager-spotting the kid who will become a star, who is a star already, even if the world does not yet know it.
From that moment, I was determined to break John Denver. He would be a test case for all my theories on selling and packaging, for everything I had learned since I left home and before, on the streets in the Bronx and from my father. John Denver would be my Star of Ardaban.
I wanted to start by getting some noise going. Here was this gem, John Denver, playing five nights a week in Greenwich Village, virtually for free-he was making seventy dollars a show when I met him-and no one even knew it. I went all around New York and LA, talking my head off to all the big operators. John Denver. Have you seen this kid? John Denver. He's amazing. John Denver. I went on like this until my friends said, "All right. We get it! John Denver. Shut up."
"Shut up about who?"
"John Denver."
"Yeah, isn't he great?"
Then I started to embroider, embellish. I would say, "Wow, John Denver, this client of mine, he's so great, so on fire, that Bob Dylan has been hanging out in this club every night, watching him play."
Just get them there, that's what I believed. Just get them there, let them see this kid, they will love him.