March 14, 2004

'Howling at the Moon': The Mighty Music Mogul

h! Methought this sin was bigger than the sins of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world,'' John Bunyan wrote in his spiritual autobiography, ''Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners''; ''nor all of them together, was able to equal mine; mine out-went them every one.'' Bunyan was overselling his uniqueness: the sin in question was the everyday (though mortal) sin of unbelief, which beset him even after he'd gotten past cussing and dancing.

Say what you will about Walter Yetnikoff, the former CBS Records chief executive, whose own publisher bills him as ''a monstrous music mogul,'' he probably was as egregious a jerk as he accuses himself of being. In his memoir, ''Howling at the Moon,'' he tells story after story (all much the same) of his drinking, drug use, compulsive horndogging and all-around boorishness; before Sony fired him in 1990, he seems to have succeeded as much by abusing and intimidating colleagues and rivals -- a distinction he seldom recognized -- as by his instinct for what would please middlebrow record buyers of his day. If such proteges as Billy Joel, George Michael, James Taylor and the ''Thriller''-era Michael Jackson seem safe and bland today, Yetnikoff was, by his own account, the Chief of Crazies. ''Sometimes I could see my own craziness,'' he writes. ''Sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes I used it to get my way. Sometimes it used me to destroy my world.''

The oh-what-a-jerk-I-used-to-be memoir, from St. Augustine's ''Confessions'' to Bunyan's ''Grace Abounding'' to David Denby's ''American Sucker,'' is a tricky form. We don't mind if the sinner still betrays, as Yetnikoff does, a sneaking admiration for his old, more colorful self -- that can complicate and enrich a book -- but the misfeasances have to engage us, and we also have to believe that the jerk is a jerk no longer. (Bunyan, with his anguished microscrupulosity, barely passes the first test; Denby, who ends up less onto himself than he thinks he is, flunks the second.) Today Yetnikoff is clean and sober, works with street drunks on the Bowery and sounds genuinely, painfully remorseful about having abandoned the wife and children to whom he dedicates the book. Self-reproach for being a corporate gangsta? ''I can live with that. . . . What's far more difficult to face is my conduct toward June, the woman who saw me as a boy, then as a man, then as a man who deserted her and our sons.'' But Yetnikoff loses us right from Page 1 by beginning his book with a tacky and maladroit episode that he soon reveals was all a daydream: ''After her third orgasm, Jackie O looked at me with a mixture of gratitude and awe. 'Jack was a powerful lover,' she said. 'Ari was a passionate man. But you, Walter Yetnikoff, you're nothing short of astounding. . . . Take me, Walter, take me again.' '' Presumably this is self-parody: a Brooklyn-born arriviste's fantasy of bagging the ultimate classy dame. But after such an opening gambit, St. Augustine himself could never recover credibility.

This grabby curtain raiser may be Yetnikoff's own idea, or it may be one of the touches provided by his collaborator, the serial co-author David Ritz, who's previously ventriloquized Ray Charles, B. B. King, Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson. One or both of them certainly brought a tin ear and a heavy hand to the job of reconstructing conversations: when our hero has a real-life lunch with Jackie Onassis, then a book editor at Doubleday, the crude smuggling-in of exposition makes the scene no more convincing than the earlier fantasy. ''I've been eager to meet you ever since I worked with Michael Jackson on his autobiography, 'Moonwalk,' '' she supposedly tells him. ''The list of those you've cultivated comprise a Who's Who of American music. . . . To take a company to a point where yearly sales have quadrupled to $2 billion must give you a deep sense of satisfaction. . . . To have won the loyalty of artists as diverse as Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan requires singular skill. I'm also interested in your timeline. You began working at CBS in 1961. . . .' '' The lines Yetnikoff gives himself are generally less printable but seldom more believable, though you can't help enjoying the episode in which, deep into his romance with cocaine, he attends James Taylor's wedding at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York and meets Bishop Paul Moore Jr. '' 'Bishop,' I said. 'Do you want a bump?' ''

This is the kind of stuff that allows a publisher to call a book ''rollicking'' and ''ruthlessly candid,'' but in the case of ''Howling at the Moon,'' it's largely false advertising. We get the man himself having an affair with ''the wife of a famous literary figure'' (''She was wild. . . . She was insatiable''), Mick Jagger arguing about business, Jon Peters bragging about pleasuring Streisand, Dylan dining out with his mom (''You're skin and bones,'' she tells him), Jackson trying to do Quincy Jones out of a Grammy for producing ''Thriller'' and telling Yetnikoff: ''I have to tinkle. Can you take me to the potty?'' And that's about the extent of the dish, except for seemingly endless confrontations with the likes of David Geffen, Larry Tisch and Tommy Mottola -- the very names make the eyes glaze over -- about who cares what anymore.

Yetnikoff tells surprisingly little about how the music business actually works or what an executive does besides stroke and yell. Maybe that is all. But add the childhood in Brooklyn (yes, he calls the Dodgers the ''Bums''), some boilerplate social history (''When John Kennedy took office in 1961, things started shifting. Youth, energy, glamour -- the country came alive''), the period of ''corporate climbing,'' the sex, the crash-and-burn and the rehab, and it reads enough like a memoir to publish. What Yetnikoff calls ''this wild tale'' finally seems insubstantial, real and immediate as it all may be to him, and forgotten as soon as read.

How real it may be to others who were there is anybody's guess; one memory he evokes from his adolescence makes you wonder. ''While I swept his hardware store or opened boxes in the back, Levine loved describing his latest sex adventure in glorious detail. I was a willing listener. It never occurred to me that he was exaggerating or inventing.'' Funny it should occur to him now.