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Three weeks later Rowena Gordon was back in business.
It could hardly have been more different to her last office. No expensive carpets and designer window space. No Eames chairs. Not even a filter coffee machine.
She set up in a cheap lot on Melrose with two phones, a
fax machine and an eighteen-year-old secretary. Things , were different when you paid the overheads bills yourself.
John Metcalf offered her anything she wanted - start-up capital, the use of an office in the Metropolis lot. Rowena thanked him but refused. ‘This is something I have to do myself,’ she said. ‘Taking help from anyone just wouldn’t be right.’
, ‘At least move in with me. Then you could sell your place and use the funds from that.’
She kissed him, a soft, wet kiss that stirred his groin. ‘I can’t. I nearly gave my independence up before. You helped me out of that, remember?’
‘This isn’t just for you,’ he admitted, an erection growing in his pants. She saw it and pressed her hand between his legs, caressing his hardness through the cloth. He groaned. ‘Please. I want you near me.’
‘You’re near me now,’ Rowena said, reaching behind her and unzipping her slip dress. The silk slid offher like water, and with a shock of lust he saw she was naked underneath it. The long slender legs had tanned to the colour of buttermilk, and her nipples were a beautiful pink against the golden skin of her small breasts. She leant back, displaying the blonde triangle between her supple thighs. ‘Want to get closer?’
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Without a word he unbuttoned his jeans and kicked them off, taking her in his arms. His cock pressed against the flat
of her stomach, hard and swollen with wanting.
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.
‘Too long,’ Rowena answered. She thought of the last time she’d made love to John, a week after the Martins’ party, and then, unbidden, a vision of the last time she’d touched Michael like this swam into her mind.
John felt heat flood her belly. He pushed a finger into her, probing. She was already, instantly wet.
‘Do you wanna fool around?’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Or do you wanna go right to it?’
For answer she smiled at him and spread her legs, an insolent, sensual movement.
John felt the urgency in his cock take over and he guided himself to the quick of her, pushing inside her, inch by inch, until he was sunk in right up to the hilt. She moved with him, pressing down, as though she wanted him to thrust even deeper, to fill her even more.
‘You feel so good,’ he said. Her eyes were shut tight and he could see her nipples harden and erect in front of his eyes. Metcalfbent to suck them, tugging at them lightly with his lips like a greedy child. Pleasure stabbed through her, and she felt herself getting hotter, needing a man’s touch, loving the strong grip of his arms and the muscled torso, which she could feel through the thin cotton T-shirt he hadn’t bothered to take off.
Eagerly he started to thrust, finding his rhythm, maddened by the feel of her tight, slippery clinch around his cock. As he got faster and faster her own body responded, until she blocked out everything except the sweet ripples spreading through her and his driving, rlentless cock, and white-hot release came in a violent spasm which physically shook her.
John erupted inside her, held her for a second, and then pulled out of her sweating, trembling body. He put up his hands and tilted her face towards him. ‘Like I told you,’ he said, ‘there’s no going back.’
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She took his right hand and pressed her lips to it, kissing him gently, gratefully. ‘Only forward,’ she replied. ‘Which is why I can’t move in.’
Nothing he could do or say would move her. She was with him almost every night, but she refused to sell her house. She was going to do all this by herself, and be beholden to nobody.
The choice of business was difficult.
She could work for a production company, or manage a band-not Michael or Atomic Mass, but others. However, that would mean working for somebody else and it would also mean she was on a percentage.
No. I never want to be in a position where I could be fired. And I want to own stock, not take a salary.
She could start a record company of her own. But any act she signed as a tiny independent would leave her for a major at the first taste of success. That was always the way. Recording costs had soared since David Geffen had founded his labels, and while it could still be done, it was much more difficult…
But that’s not the real reason, isit? she asked herself. The fact is that Atomic Mass and Josh and Barbara and all the rest of it .meant everything to me. When it was taken away I was devastated. Music is my life. Music is too much to risk.
No emotional capital. She would start again as a businesswoman, and keep her passions separate.
She would be in control.
Rowena settled on the best compromise she could come up with. It had to involve music, because that was her area of expertise, but it also had to be as dry as dust. Something that would let her work to live, not live to work.
She got a piece of paper and listed her main talents. I. A&R. Well, that one was pretty useless now. 2. Promotion.
Rowena scored a line under this and sat staring into space. Promotion… now there was an idea. Hadn’t she pulled off
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the marketing rescue of the century when Atomic Mass booked the Coliseum too early in the US tour for Heat Street? And that was one thing Krebs hadn’t done for her.
All my own work, she thought with a smile. Damn, that had felt so good.
But unforeseen disasters didn’t happen every day, and the major companies had in-house marketing experts, as did the
big promoters and agents.
So who needed help?
Wasn’t it obvious? Everybody who couldn’t afford to hire marketing specialists. Indie labels. College promoters. Small clubs around the country.
Couldn’t afford them, though, that was the point. How could one of them afford her?
The answer came back instantly: one of them couldn’t. But a lot of them could.
That evening, Rowena drove up to John’s weekend beach house in Malibu tO tell him her plans. After she’d taken a long, refreshing shower, washed her hair and pulled on one of his huge paisley Turnbull & Asser bathrobes, he joined her on the terrace, carrying two frosted glasses and a pitcher ofmargaritas.
‘Do you still have that conference in San Antonio coming up?’
He nodded, a shadow crossing his face. ‘Yeah. And I still have problems with the record. The plan you dreamt up stopped the lawsuit, but now the act is refusing to help promote it. And “Face Up” is the first single.’
Rowena sipped her drink. Black Ice were one of the toughest groups to deal with, she knew that. They hated big companies on principle and nothing wa good enough for them: not enough posters in the stores, not enough radio play, not enough MTV. They raised objections at every stage from artwork to distribution. She remembered them and their stubborn manager, All Kahed, only too well.
Black Ice also sold a lot of records. They’d been the first big act on Musica North America that she hadn’t signed
herself, and they made the reputation of Steve Goldman, the young scout who’d risen to become her head of A&R. Their last album had debuted at number four in the Billboard charts.
Properly handled, ‘Face Up’ could sell a lot of records for Picture This, and a lot of Tshirts for My Heart Belongs to Dallas.
‘I can tell you what to do,’ she said.
‘Really? Jesus, I hope so,’ Metcalf said, pushing a hand through his hair. ‘Because this is a total fucking mess. The new Musica guys are terrified of Kahed and they won’t lift a finger to help out.’
Rowena lifted her glass to him. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘You’ve just become my first client.’
When Metropolis biked round the contract the next day,
,
Rowena signed on the dotted line in front of Joanne; her secretary, and the guy who sold leather boots in the store opposite.
‘They’ve left a space for us to include the company name,’ saidJoanne.
Rowena shrugged. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Call it Cowhide,’ suggested the bootseller, ‘can’t have rock ‘n’ roll without leather,’ and the Cowhide Consultancy was born.
For the first two hours Joannejust sat at her desk reading Impact. Her boss worked in silence, spreading large sheets of paper over her desk and writing down names, phone numbers and lists of stores, radio stations and music magazines with large coloured pens, occasionally doodling lines from one to another. Eventually she came out, her hands covered with bright inkstains, and handed Joanne a
small list with seventy names and numbers on it.
Joanne raised an eyebrow.
‘Oh, that’s just the first batch,’ Rowena told her. ‘Think you’re ready for this?’
Tm ready if you are,: Joanne said, smiling.
Maybe this job wouldn’t be such a dead loss after all.
Once Rowena got started there was no stopping her. Carefully she’d picked out her target audience: maverick programmers, store managers who owed her favours, and writers and TV execs who’d been closely involved with her work on Atomic Mass.
‘Christ, Rowena! How are you? Where the fuck have you been?’ asked Jack Fleming at Roiling Stone.
‘Black Ice? Yeah, they’ll play,’ said Joe Moretti at KXDA. ‘They’re on. My pleasure. When are you coming by?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Pete Meyer at MTV promised. ‘It’s good to have you back.’
At lunchJoanne ordered them a pizza and a couple of Diet Cokes, and Rowena called John and listed all the stations and papers she’d delivered so far.
‘I don’t believe it. How the hell did you pull that off?.’ he asked, amazed.
‘Oh, I’m,not through,’ she replied. ‘That was the warm up. Now, how much money would you be willing to give me for an advertising budget?’
‘Advertising? Isn’t that Musica’sjob?°
‘Depends what you want. If you want to sell a few albums, we already have. If you want to help your film merchandizing …’
‘How much do you need?’ John asked, struck by the briskness of her tone. She was using his private line, but she was all business.
Jesus, we were making love.on the beach this morning.
She named a figure.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘My Heart Belongs to Dallas is opening two weeks after this single is commercially released. Do you think you can get publicity for the movie’out of this as well?’
That’s the idea,’ Rowena said. ‘I have something in mind, but I need an ad budget to do it.’
‘All right, Rowena,’John said. ‘You got it. Surprise me.’ ‘I will,’ she said.
That afternoon Rowena gaveJoanne the second list. This contained the names of programme directors and editors in
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the key markets whom she couldn’t count on personally; men that were still friendly to her, though. The trick was to spend a little money where it would buy the most exposure; she knew better than to simply go for the magazines and stations with the biggest readership or catchment areas. Influence meant everything. That was what working with Michael Krebs had taught her.
She knew all about My Heart Belongs to Dallas. It was a bittersweet modern romance, the story of a woman torn between a Texan lawyer, the love of her life, and a doctor who’d fathered her child and would make the better parent for him. She chooses the doctor for her boy’s sake, and then to her surprise finds herself falling in love with him after all.
Rowena didn’t think it was a bad film, it just wasn’t what Metropolis had expected. They’d wanted a very dramatic, highly charged Oscar winner. They’d got a wry, sexy comedy with a few tear-jerking scenes.
Personally, she thought that everyone who loved When Harry Met Sally would love this one too, but the Metropolis marketing guys felt differently. They’d pitched it as a classy weepy, Kramer vs. Kramer or Terms of Endearment. Rowena guessed that the reason the numbers were so low was that the Kramer vs. Kramer types at the previews were disappointed.
She hadn’t said a word. Films were John’s business, not
hers. If John had offered her advice on Atomic Mass when she was at Musica, she’d have yelled at him to butt out.
But the ‘Face Up’ single gave her an idea.
A wcck before the record went to radio, huge billboards appeared in New York, LA, and Dallas, plain black backgrounds with foot-high white lettering: FACE UP TO YOUR CHOICES.
Two days later, full-page ads ran in the New York Times,
the LA Times and other big papers, all with the same plain message. There was no mention of the movie, album or single.
The campaign was an instant hit. People started ringing
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radio talk shows to ask what the ads meant. At one intersection in Manhattan there was a logjam as drivers craned their necks up to look.
Then ‘Face Up’ was released.
The original work with her extensive network kicked in, and astonished Musica promo men found their brand-new single had already been plastered across the airwaves in key cities - by, get this, Rowena Gordon.
Then the competitions Rowena had set up started running on the other stations and in the magazines.
‘What’s the hardest choice you ever faced up to?’
‘What would you do for love?’
It was pop psychology at the simplest level. Everyone’s given something up, Rowena figured, everyone’s been in love, and she was proved right as switchboards jammed coast-to-coast.
Finally there was the video. Black Ice had refused point blank to shgot one, and the guys at Metropolis wanted to string old footage together and use that, but Rowena had a better idea. ‘We won’t show the act at all. We’ll show the movie,’ she suggested, and the result was a terrific promo, the best moments from Dallas segued together and laid over
the funky, aggressive pop of the song.
MTV loved it.
The last calls Rowena made were to old friends of hers who worked in the industry tipsheets, both film and music-Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, HITS magazine and the like, and every one of them ran an article along the lines of ‘Just when you thought it was safe…’