Howling at the Moon
Walter Yetnikoff was the link man between Sony and CBS. He advised them on their Columbia deal. His book has just hit bargain bins in the UK so I got a quick read of his bits on Sony. Slight culture clash.
When Ohga and Morita suggested buying a film studio, WY says "With all the drugs I was taking in those days, it took a helluva piece of ass to get my dick hard but hearing this plan did the trick".
Book Excerpts
Ohga and Morita were my bosses, the heads of Sony, who bought out CBS Records for $2 billion and kept me on as ringmaster. I called Ohga and Morita the Happy Japs. The Happy Japs were delighted to have me run the waterworks from New York while they ate sushi in Tokyo. The Happy Japs understood me. When I was in Tokyo, they locked me up in my hotel room at night; during the day they had me followed as I went carousing, to make sure I didn't wind up lost, arrested or dead. Now, on my suggestion, Ohga and Morita were on the verge of paying $3-4 billion for Columbia Pictures. They were looking to me to pick management. I was looking to oversee this colossal operation of music and movies. That's why all the Hollywood moguls - Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, Rupert Murdoch - were calling. They wanted in on the action and needed my vote.
Walter Yetnikoff quick bio
"We had formed a joint venture with Sony in Japan," Yetnikoff recalls, "and I was the lawyer who went there to close the deal, so I got to know the Sony people quite well. In fact, at one time [Sony co-founder and chairman] Akio Morita had said to me, 'There are no John Waynes in American business anymore.' About a week later, I woke him up at three o'clock in the morning, and when he asked me why I was calling, I told him, 'John Wayne doesn't sleep, you know!'"
Walter Yetnikoff and David Ritz: Howling at the Moon
04.05.2004 Reviewed by GRAHAM REID
Yetnikoff, former head of CBS Records who helmed the company's sale to Sony, tells a racy, drug-fuelled story of 70s and 80s excess, fame and fantasy.
...Yetnikoff was an outrageous ego in their midst: conniving, ambitious and coked to the eyeballs.
...Howling at the Moon -- which he literally did when Sony bosses locked him in his Tokyo hotel room to keep him under control -- is thoroughly readable but irredeemably flawed.
...There is slight remorse for being buried in coke, fame and warm thighs, and the hedonism of an era which he rode and enjoyed.
..."To trace a lost soul is a tricky business," he writes. "I suppose if I knew where I lost it I could go back and claim. But in my case it was incremental ... I see it now. I sure as hell didn't see it then."
...These days, age 71 and comfortably inured from the vicissitudes of life, thanks to a gobsmacking payout from Sony, he's a man at peace with his present, if not that wildly excessive past.
