A blockbuster manuscript is making the rounds about the “power, greed and ego” of the music business from a female executive’s perspective that could have top industry players quaking in their boots, Page Six has learned.
Dorothy Carvello — who started as a secretary to Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun and became the first female A&R exec at the label in 1985 — has penned “Anything for a Hit,” dishing on the excesses of the industry at its peak.
“At the time, there was so much money involved,” explains Carvello, who also worked for RCA and Columbia, among other imprints. Some “high-level executives had multiple mistresses who got anything from record deals to apartments. I had to buy one a refrigerator.”
The book proposal catalogues bad behavior, including an exec who was so depressed on vacation with his family that his wife sent for not one, but two, of his girlfriends to join them. The same philandering suit once “left work to go to Andy Warhol’s memorial service and came back with a date,” and had two doors on either end of his enormous office for his wife and girlfriends to be rotated in and out “like a Marx Brothers movie.”
Another married exec dated a jewelry dealer from whom he bought baubles “for his five or six other girlfriends, all on shareholders’ expense.”
Money was no object. As Ertegun’s assistant, the author says she was asked to book a company jet to fly her boss a case of Clamato to Turkey because it wasn’t sold there. Some execs pirated their own labels’ CDs by selling thousands of “cleans,” copies of hit records, with no bar codes, to stores for a 50 percent cut. The dough paid for “second homes and lavish lifestyles.”
The book will “name names” in an era ruled by icons such as Doug Morris, Irving Azoff, Joe Galante and Donnie Einer, and details signing bands repped by managers like Tim Collins, Doc McGhee and Guns N’ Roses’ Alan Niven, who “would do your horoscope before he’d take a meeting with you to see if the stars were aligned.” In 2008, Carvello left Columbia to become a p.r. pro and crisis manager.