Music manager Ron Weisner guided the careers of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, but one artist he couldn’t manage was Madonna — whom he calls “The Mouth from Michigan” in a new book.
“At our first meeting [in 1982] . . . Madonna was abrasive . . . but there was something about her that screamed success,” Weisner recalls in “Listen Out Loud.”
By 1984, shooting the “Like a Virgin” video in Venice, “Every time we packed up the cameras, she bitched. Every time we got into a boat, she bitched. ‘You’re all a bunch of f - - king idiots,’ she’d tell the Italian crew.”
When he and partner Freddy DeMann split, Weisner said, “You can have her. You belong together.”
Of walking away from millions, Weisner told us, “When you’re around people all the time, you think, ‘Do I really want to wake up to this tomorrow?’ I didn’t have the interest to be part of it.”
He’ll produce the Apollo Theater’s Spring Gala June 10 with artists including Gladys Knight and Smokey Robinson.
The Hollywood vet who grew up in Williamburg told us: “when I was 14, all my friends went to the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, but I used to sneak out and take two trains up to the Apollo Theater. I saw everybody — James Brown, Aretha [Franklin], Ike and Tina Turner. The challenging part will be that we’re capturing 80 years of music.”