Chapter 12
The squire of West 12th Street, his good wife and family, and his switchblade chauffeur ... The music business as first-born
JAC: With a hot, hot group and a Number 1 record, Elektra was now moving at warp speed. My dance card was filled and my life was busier than I had ever known it. I traded up from my four-door Mercedes to a Cadillac limo, slightly used, that could carry up to eight people if we squeezed, plus boxes and recording equipment—everyone and the lawn mower.
My driver, George Graves, was from Harlem, in his middle fifties, about five-foot six and the color of burnished mahogany. George was very friendly but didn't say much unless you began the conversation. The entire office adored him. While waiting for me he would read—mostly paperback novels—or do personal chores: cuffing a new pair of trousers or giving himself a manicure. He would hold court at the pool table in the art department, casually pool-sharking the Elektra guppies.
I envied George's capacity to catnap and then re-awaken in an instant, fully alert. He moved with an air of understated bravado. His quiet dark suit and tie with a white shirt could not hide a ragged, bloated scar from a knife wound that almost bisected his neck, clearly not stitched by any surgeon. Once I asked about it and he said, "You don't want to have seen the other guy."
According to our gas receipts, the limo was getting about three miles per gallon. My guess was that George was filling up his neighbors' cars or getting a cash kickback. I mentioned my puzzlement over the poor mileage and it magically improved, to about seven. That was reasonable, because George paid his way in reliability, always there when he was supposed to be.
The limo was my only car, and if I traveled on a weekend I would drive it myself. One wet Saturday I braked suddenly, and from under the seat spun out a flick knife with an eight-inch blade spring-propelled from a wooden handle. I slid it back. Some weeks later when a Village lout hassled me about the limo, George burst from his seat, his right arm bringing the blade to the guy's throat, and that was that.
JAC: Elektra's three years in the Sperry-Rand building were great times. Paul Rothchild and Mark Abramson were turning out fine albums. Bill Harvey now had help in the art department, their offices enhanced with light from the east and south. My brother Keith was automating our accounting, with three on staff busy with billing, payables, and best of all, accounts receivable. Steve Harris was supervising radio promotion. Pearl Goodman was my super secretary. We had grown to fourteen, my fantasy Chinese banquet table magic number.
ARTHUR GORSON: Jac was a host. He set a table, and the table was Elektra Records. He created an environment, and he invited you in. It was like, "Come into my world."
DIANE GARDINER: I think that Jac Holzman is simply the ultimate performance artist. You have these performance artists who do their little set pieces in museums. I think that for Jac it's the world. He creates it and he gets to watch. Each set piece is ongoing, and because they're so big and they make money, people call it business. Jac knows how to make money, but it's just a small piece of his whole performance art. If you were to say, "What is Jasper Johns's most famous sequence?"—then with Jac, Elektra would be that.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac was very well raised, well reared, and at the earliest opportunity he equipped himself and Nina and their lives with the tools of the yuppiedom of the day. You know, a nice apartment—the first co-op I'd ever been in in my life in New York—great kitchen, great food on the table, well thought and bought stuff on the walls, good collections of this, that and the other thing.
It's just a new name for a very old concept—tradespeople who have accumulated enough money to compete in the buying market with the wealthy. The arts have always needed their burghers. You can't support art without burghers, you can't do it just with kings and queens and princes, you need the burgher class to support the arts, and Jac's company addressed the burgher class.
So Jac was like a friendly representative of money with good taste, much like a supporter of the arts would be, understanding of the arts, sympathetic to the arts. And Nina was a woman of great innate taste.
JAC: Nina was our special events coordinator, planning listening parties for new records, artists' events, and all with sumptuous food.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: She introduced Jac to haute cuisine. You know, the ubiquitous cheese parties at Jac's house, and at Elektra, which Nina staged for events—the release of a record, visiting dignitaries.
JAC: Nina was an accomplished cook. The French conductor and gourmand, Roland Douatte, pronounced her roast breast of duck the best he had ever tasted. Everyone looked forward to Nina's theme parties. They were scheduled after a concert, with the artist's favorite food—for example, Greek food and green Hungarian wine for Tom Rush. Nina would spend weeks nervously planning and then cooking, sneak out of the concert half an hour before the end, hurry home, do the final touches and greet the first guests while I was backstage with the artist.
NINA HOLZMAN: Very big parties. Never less than a hundred people. I have files of exactly what I served. I never truly realized how hard it might be to pull it off, but I always managed. I always felt let down when it was over, like a theatrical production when you go through post-partum blues.
JAC: These events extended Elektra's sense of family beyond the office. Nina's quiet grace and fine food showed another dimension. I was mostly business. Nina added a softness.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I think that Nina was a very important part of Jac's emotional development. She was the yin to Jac's yang.
SUZANNE HELMS: Jac couldn't have found anybody more perfect for that period of his life. Nina related well with the artists, she loved the music, she helped with the company.
NINA HOLZMAN: There was a point at which I totally and absolutely understood the whole business, and I don't mean just Elektra, I mean the whole record business. I mean, I knew everybody's phone number.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: From the first day I joined the company, Nina was an active part of the A&R department. Never in title, but she was always actively involved. Elektra was not just the business her husband was in, she was an integral part of it. She'd go out to the clubs during times when Jac couldn't. And once the artist was signed, she was very much involved in liaison, maintaining loving and positive contact. She was very bright, very giving. She was—what's the word I'm looking for?—the patron saint of A&R.
JUDY COLLINS: Nina was a good friend, just a good all the way through person. I remember the first time I did Town Hall, my very first New York solo concert in 1965. I got this beautiful long dress, and she said, "Don't cut it off, leave it long." And it was such a big deal to me, I mean, you don't wear a long dress. She said, "Wear it, it's beautiful." I said, "No," and I cut it off. So wrong. She was so right. Then she said, "The day of your concert, I want you to go to Elizabeth Arden's and have a massage and a facial." I had never been to Elizabeth Arden's. She paid for it. She gave that to me. (And introduced me to sin. I spent a lot of time at Elizabeth Arden's after that.) I thought that was so sweet. She was thinking about the way that you feel on the day of the concert, how nervous you are, how uptight, because it's your first time solo in New York, and oh, my God, how your knees are shaking. She was just there, and you really felt her presence. Great woman.
NINA HOLZMAN: Within Elektra, what happened over time was that I became a kind of buffer. If some of the artists had difficulty communicating with Jac, they would come to me. I was sympathetic and they would tell me the whole thing, and I would translate it for Jac and make it a little more palatable, or try to point things out to him. And if he wanted me to get a message to somebody, it worked in the opposite direction too.
Jac and I in the business got on extremely well. We were very complementary, with different strengths, and it just worked.
JAC: In the early days of Elektra and my marriage, my absorption with the business was matched by Nina's. Dinner talk was all business. Nina would let me ramble on. In most households the wife would have gone nuts, but not Nina. She hung on every word.
By the early Sixties—when I think back, as early as 1961—the terms of the equation were changing. We had two children, and the business was demanding more of me. The business was my first-born and it took a first-born's precedence. In 1963 I even sold my airplane. No time.
What happened over the years was that the music portion of what I did could no longer be done in the office because of constant interruptions. Running any vital smallish business is like being a lone tennis player facing a hundred people, and they're hitting balls at you one after another, which doesn't leave you any quiet, contemplative time. So I'd deal with all the music at home. I would come home from work, play with the kids a bit, talk to Nina about the day, sit down for dinner, which was more record business talk, and then withdraw to my study. All my tools were there. I would work every night, head to bed about eleven-thirty, up the next morning at seven, and start all over again.
Business absorption was the same as self-absorption. I began to feel that every hour of every day I was president of Elektra and that was my job in life. It was more in my face than child-rearing, and whenever there were problems between me and Nina I'd retreat into whatever I was doing and not deal with it.
I undertook a project to edit all the Woody Guthrie Library of Congress recordings, transferring them scrupulously from acetate to tape, to be released as a three-disc boxed set on Elektra. Leadbelly too. I'd montage the music with short interviews, and after I finished I de-clicked everything, which meant finding every click, every imperfection, from the original acetate. We transferred to tape at 15 ips, which gave me room to edit, and I would just cut the click out of the tape manually. My cuts were undetectable. I think I got away with every one, and there were about a thousand of them. And I did this night after night after night.
NINA HOLZMAN: He was so focused, and so blind to everything but Elektra.
JAC: During the summers Nina would take the kids out of the city, to California, or to Connecticut, where I might visit with them on the weekends. I was happy to be by myself and cherished these quiet times when I stayed very busy and could focus exclusively on the only thing that really interested me.
Once, playing a mental game of What If, I posed the following question: "If I was forced to choose between my home life and Elektra, which would I choose?" And the answer was Elektra.
