Joy division

INSTEAD of enjoying the fruits of a stellar 50-year career as a promoter and a hit show that’s making a fortune, Kevin Jacobsen is besieged by creditors and his family is torn apart.

FOR someone who has recently been sued by his own brother, pursued across three continents by various business partners and expended several million dollars on lawyers, Kevin Jacobsen seems remarkably cheerful.

A lesser man might have been chagrined to reveal he would have to meet in a cafe because his office furniture was locked up due to legal disputes, but even this indignity didn’t dent the legendary Jacobsen chutzpah. “I can’t get into my office, it’s ridiculous,” he admits over the phone, before emitting a barking chuckle of the kind that a grandpa reserves for the unfathomable behaviour of the young.

Perhaps lawsuits and lockouts are mere ­trifles after you’ve spent decades dealing with the insane demands of megastars such as Elton John, Barbra Streisand and Placido Domingo. This is the promoter who, after all, once telephoned the Fraser government’s minister for immigration to ask whether he could import several kilos of top-grade Colombian marijuana to meet the religious needs of visiting reggae star Bob Marley. (The answer was no.)

At 75, Jacobsen should rightly be basking in the full glory of these and other tales from his half-century in show business. It’s now 50 years since he and his brother Colin scored their first No.1 hit as Col Joye and The Joy Boys, an ode to teen angst called Bye Bye Baby that launched them as Australia’s first pop stars. And at an age when many impresarios are contemplating the Gold Coast surf from a banana lounge, Jacobsen can claim credit for what may be the greatest box-office theatre smash ever to emanate from Australia – the Dirty Dancing stage musical, two hours of chest-heaving melodrama that has so far played to five million punters across the globe.
Since Jacobsen snagged the stage rights and debuted the show in Australia five years ago, Dirty Dancing has played Hamburg, Berlin, Utrecht, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago and London, where its West End run is still going strong after three years. Box-office takings are $500 million and counting, according to Jacobsen, who is currently negotiating its Broadway debut and believes the eventual gross could top an astonishing $2 billion.

Yet back home in Australia, all this dazzling success has been obscured by a locust-storm of lawsuits and feuds that have engulfed the Jacobsen businesses and torn the family asunder. The most enduring sibling partnership in Australian showbiz ended in late June when Kevin Jacobsen and Col Joye split the family assets in order to end the hostilities. The Jacobsen Entertainment website has been deactivated, and when Col Joye appeared on radio and at a gala dinner in Sydney earlier this year to celebrate his 50 years in showbiz, his older brother was nowhere in sight.

“It’s a King Lear-esque tragedy,” comments promoter Michael Coppel, one of many people chasing the Jacobsens for money. “He and Col were as close as any family I have seen in this business. They started playing in the same rock’n’roll band in the ’50s, and Col has always been part of the ­business arrangement … Now they’ve reached a truce with the aim of selling everything, taking their shares of their diminished empire and going off into the sunset. It’s as bitter a situation as I have ever seen.”

“Tragedy” is a word that even Jacobsen himself, in his more reflective moments, doesn’t dispute. Somehow his crowning achievement has torn the family apart. “Oh yeah… I think it’s irreparable,” he says of his relationship with Colin, and the booming voice is momentarily quietened. “Which is such a pity.”

Rollercoaster ride
survival at the high end of show business takes a rare combination of ego, energy and crazy-like-a-fox instincts, and even in his eighth ­decade, Kevin George Jacobsen can summon it all forth. The swept-back auburn coiffure has thinned, the jowls are a little heavier and the knees are creaky, but his guffaw still fills a room and the yarns are as beguiling as ever. In the space of a short lunch in a cafe, while ploughing through several courses with his tie askew, he’ll flirt amiably with a waitress, ­dispense morsels of celebrity gossip and offer the immodest assessment that he was once “the biggest promoter in the world, of rock’n’roll”.

Conversation with him is a rollercoaster ride of indiscretions, anecdotes and contradictions. His mobile phone rings and he says casually: “I better take this – I’ve got $2 million coming in and I need to find somewhere to put it.” Fifteen minutes later he points to the $30,000 gold Piaget watch on his wrist and quips: “It’s my only unencumbered asset.” The watch was won at a Labor Party fundraiser, he adds, launching into an amusing story involving Bob Hawke, Glenn Wheatley, a raffle and a Chinese businesswoman. The stories are endless and even he’s not sure which ones are true: after one anecdote, about how he secured a show by pulling $5000 cash from his wallet, he admits: “I’m not quite sure whether I did that or not, to be honest.”

If Jacobsen ever writes his autobiography, as he’s contemplating, the cast of walk-on characters will be vast and the fact-checking will be a ­nightmare. Did he really dream up the “It’s Time” slogan for Gough Whitlam’s 1972 election ­campaign? Was the youth radio station 2JJ really his idea? Unfortunately his account of these events may be some time off, because the final act of The Kevin Jacobsen Story is still taking shape. And what a doozey it is.

Those who know Jacobsen place the beginning of his current travails in 2002, when he announced a plan to float the family entertainment company on the stock exchange and raise $18 million from investors. On paper it must have seemed a good idea. The Jacobsen name had a long and distinguished pedigree that went back to the earliest days of rock’n’roll, when Kevin pounded the piano in The Joy Boys while his kid brother Colin stood out front belting out tunes like Oh Yeah Uh Huh. Brought up dirt-poor on the working-class western fringe of Sydney, the brothers had parlayed their fame into a business partnership with its own unique synergy: Kevin had accounting experience and the brash charm of a born impresario; Col Joye was a beloved entertainer, a boyish crooner who’d discovered the Bee Gees in Brisbane in 1961 and rallied middle-Australia to support Whitlam.

On paper the brothers were 50-50 owners of a family operation: their sister Carol worked in the main office and their brother Keith helped build their recording studio. Kevin’s son from his first marriage, David, worked in the studio, and his second wife, Billie, had once been his secretary (“I jumped the desk” he once memorably remarked). In practice, however, Kevin drove the business, transforming it from a small talent agency into a diverse entertainment operation spread across many interlocked companies.

In the drug-fuelled milieu of the rock’n’roll touring business, Jacobsen stood apart as an old-school operator – disarming but wily. Paul Dainty once called him “a fabulous actor”. Michael Coppel recalls a meeting in Jacobsen’s office 30 years ago in which the two men became locked in tortuous negotiations over a possible tour partnership, until Jacobsen suddenly left to go to the toilet and never returned. “I sat there for half an hour waiting for him,” recalls Coppel. “I think he climbed out of the window and went off to another engagement.”

Jacobsen’s productions set a ­benchmark for high-wire financial risk-taking. When he brought Michael Jackson to Australia in 1987, the stage production required 21 semi-trailers and the bulldozing (and rebuilding) of a hill behind Paramatta Park in Sydney. His production of Aïda included live elephants on stage, and he paid The Three Tenors $12.5 ­million to sing at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1997, a concert whose $18.5 million gross still stands as an Australian record. In time the Jacobsens were managing venues such as the Sydney Entertainment Centre and Capitol ­Theatre, dabbling in US real estate and touring stage musicals such as Fame and Shout! By the time of the float, a new generation was ready to carry the name forward: Col’s 27-year-old daughter, Amber, had joined the business, and Kevin’s 23-year-old son, Michael, had just come aboard after completing a business degree.

But the float of Jacobsen Entertainment Ltd was a spectacular debacle that raised only $8 million, nearly half of which came from the family. It also coincided with a horror year in which two spectacular flops – The Witches of Eastwick and a Bruce Springsteen tour – pushed the company to a $12.7 million loss. The company was placed in administration less than a year after its launch; shareholders lost everything, and creditors are still awaiting payment. Today, Jacobsen distances himself from the episode: a biography he distributes claims the public company operated “quite apart and independent to the Jacobsen Group of which I was managing director”.

Like a vaudevillian pirouetting across a minefield, however, the old trouper was about to pull off the coup of his career. In 2001, while in New York, he had dropped in on a workshop for a proposed stage production of Dirty Dancing, the low-budget Hollywood movie musical that had grossed roughly $300 million since its 1987 release. The problem with Dirty Dancing was that its writer, Eleanor Bergstein, owned the rights to the story but the film studio Lionsgate owned the movie’s title, and no one had ever secured the co-operation of both. When the New York production fell through, Jacobsen hatched a crafty idea: he approached Bergstein and proposed a stage musical called The Time of My Life – The Story of Dirty Dancing.

Having secured Bergstein’s consent he then flew to Hollywood and informed the head of Lionsgate, Jon Feltheimer, about the title of his proposed show. “He said, ‘I don’t think you can do that,’ ” recalls Jacobsen today. “I said, ‘Well, I can – I’ve had a legal opinion.’ He said, ‘It’s a long title.’ Long story short, we did the deal.”
Bergstein credits Jacobsen’s “great energy and rock’n’roll background” with winning her over; as part of her wooing he flew her to Australia, put her up in a flat overlooking Bondi Beach and introduced her to the best dance ­talent in the country. The small matter of raising nearly $7 million he solved by mortgaging his house, cashing in his superannuation and securing several million dollars from investors such as the British theatre producer Karl Sydow and the European company Stage Entertainment. Dirty Dancing opened at Sydney’s Theatre Royal in November 2004 and was an immediate smash, ultimately selling 650,000 tickets. By the time it opened at the Aldwych Theatre in London nearly two years later, the resurrection of the Jacobsen name was complete: with a pre-sale of more than $20 million, it was reportedly the fastest-selling show in West End history.

Shortly before the London opening, Col Joye appeared on ABC Television with his sister Carol, extolling the closeness of the family. Silver-haired and pushing 70, Col had suffered ­serious head injuries after a fall from a ladder in 1990, but after a decade-long hiatus he had returned to the stage to belt out his hits (and play ukelele) with his old irrepressible boyishness. The Jacobsen family, he and his sister told interviewer Peter Thompson, shared a unique bond. “We’ve stayed together as a unit and [a] family, and that’s blossomed,” said Carol.

The rot sets in behind the scenes, the bitter disputes that would soon tear the family apart were already festering. According to Kevin Jacobsen, they began soon after the Dirty Dancing deals were signed, when Col and his daughter, Amber, began demanding more say in the running of the company. Amber Jacobsen had been a ­protégé to her uncle on a number of tours, and he says he had always hoped his niece might succeed him as producer and his son Michael take over administration duties. But in 2007, he says, Amber and Col engineered a boardroom putsch that sidelined Michael as a director and gave them a controlling vote on key parts of the family business. “I don’t usually lose my temper,” he recalls, “but I was so f..king horrified I said, ‘Colin, if you weren’t my brother I’d deck you on the spot.’ That was the beginning.”

Neither Amber Jacobsen nor Col Joye would comment for this article, but according to several former company insiders the failed float had shaken their faith in the company patriarch, and their confidence in Michael was not high. To Kevin Jacobsen, however, it seemed a betrayal after his lifetime of toil on behalf of the family.
“I was the one who procured all the attractions, all my life,” he claims heatedly. “I not only procured them, at times I’ve mortgaged my house to finance them. Sometimes I had three or four shows in Australia at one time – I’d be running from John Denver in Brisbane to Barry Manilow in Melbourne. And all the successful shows, whether it was Man From Snowy River or Fame or Shout! were either my concept or I found them.

“I have never had a private life,” he adds, “in order to provide for the family in what I consider to be one of the toughest businesses in the world. I used to take pleasure, in the early days, seeing Colin going off water-skiing and enjoying holidays. I don’t begrudge it. It’s just what my life has been.”

With Amber Jacobsen living in New York, where she had relocated as a co-producer of Dirty Dancing, board meetings became long-distance telephone slanging matches. Accusations of mismanagement were hurled from both sides; longstanding executives left; board members came and went, caught in the crossfire. The phenomenal success of Dirty Dancing fuelled the feud, for suddenly millions were at stake.

“In any bad relationship it’s almost impossible to pinpoint when the rots sets in,” says Michael Jacobsen, offering his only comment on what sparked the dispute. “But I think sometimes it’s when people are having their greatest success that emotions tend to run highest. So I suppose from 2004 onwards, as Dirty Dancing took off and became one of most the successful shows in the world, it changed the dynamics of the family, perhaps subtly at first, and then not so subtly.”

Kevin Jacobsen’s son had by then become a lightning rod in the chaos. The youngest member of the dynasty, Michael had been captivated by show business since the age of six, when his father took him to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band rock the Sydney Entertainment Centre. By May 2005 he was running that venue as chief executive of Arena Management, the family’s venue operations company. Unlike his gregarious father, however, Michael had an impersonal style that many former employees found aggravating. During his tenure the Sydney Entertainment Centre had three general managers in as many years; employees and even family members were instructed to sign confidentiality agreements, and a former detective was hired to investigate staff.

Andrew Pain, who had managed the ­Capitol Theatre for the Jacobsens since 2001, recalls a “rather strange” occurrence after he handed in his resignation in April 2007. “I gave a month’s notice,” recalls Pain, “and then two days later I arrived at the theatre and the security guard and information technology man were waiting for me. Michael had said: ‘I want Andrew Pain off the premises – tell him to collect his belongings now."”

Asked to respond, Michael Jacobsen says Pain was escorted from the premises by the company secretary, which he views as standard practice. The confidentiality agreements and internal policing he likewise defends as necessary in an industry which is “a hotbed of industrial espionage”. He adds: “It’s nothing personal: business is business.”

Not long after Andrew Pain’s departure, Col Joye tried unsuccesfully to get the Arena board to fire his nephew. Hostilities reached a peak in June last year when police were called to the Jacobsen Group offices near Central Station in Sydney. A newspaper report at the time suggested that Kevin Jacobsen had turned up for work to discover the locks had been changed. That is rubbish, he says – in fact, he had locked out an executive who was working for Amber Jacobsen. Whatever happened, relations within the family had reached a nadir. By year’s end, Col Joye and his daughter had instituted legal proceedings in Britain and Australia to wrest control of the proceeds of Dirty Dancing, and Amber Jacobsen had made out an affidavit saying she no longer had confidence in her uncle’s ability to act in the best interests of the family.

The feeling, evidently, is mutual. “Amber has proven to be a total disaster,” says Jacobsen vehemently. “If her name wasn’t Jacobsen she would have been fired long ago.” Jacobsen had ­earlier expressed reluctance to discuss the family dispute; now he rails at length about his niece and the “village idiots” who are advising her. As for his brother, he still nurses a wound from the barbed remark he remembers Col throwing at him in the heat of one row. “I’ll never forgive Col for saying: ‘You’ve had your time in the sun.’”

Dancing with profits
On June 18, Dirty Dancing attracted its five-millionth customer for an evening show at the Aldwych Theatre. A rough tally of global box-office takings – which in London alone are said to be $100 million – suggests Jacobsen’s estimate of half a billion dollars is no exaggeration. But how much of that lucre has made its way back to the family that launched the show is difficult to fathom. In Australia, Dirty ­Dancing ran for 14 months but only became profitable in the final four. In Canada, where 800,000 tickets were sold, co-producer David Mirvish said it did not make a profit until more than a year into its 18-month run. “Not many people make much money out of this stuff,” comments one lawyer who has been chasing the Jacobsens. “There’s a lot of cash flow, but once you look at what’s left after costs, you might be better off buying a lottery ticket.”

Even some of the show’s investors claim to have no clear idea of the profits. British producer Karl Sydow sued the Jacobsens in January for unspecified box office and merchandising proceeds, saying he has not seen a proper accounting of profits. That lawsuit is just one of many legal actions that have swamped the ­family since Dirty Dancing was launched. Sydney businessman John David, an old friend of Kevin Jacobsen’s who once sat on the public company board, sued in April seeking repayment of $4 million in loans, an action that has since been settled. The American promoter Jack Utsick issued proceedings in 2004 claiming the Jacobsens reneged on paying him a share of the Dirty Dancing proceeds in return for his $1 million loan. (Utsick has since decamped to South America and his company has collapsed and been declared a Ponzi scheme, but a receiver is still pursuing the claim).

Meanwhile, the Jacobsens lost control of the Capitol Theatre and the Sydney Entertainment Centre when Arena Management was placed in receivership in July with total debts of $12.7 million. Michael Jacobsen, who resigned as Arena’s chief executive three months before the collapse and flew overseas, has since sent a letter to Arena’s administrator saying he is ­suffering great financial hardship and has come to believe the Sydney Entertainment Centre is “cursed”. “I have consulted God on this matter in recent days,” he said, “and it is his wish that I ­propose a [Deed Of Company Arrangement] and resolve this situation.” The suggestion was rejected by the creditors, who voted to liquidate the company.

Speaking from London, where he now lives, Michael Jacobsen vehemently denies reports that the company was trading while insolvent. He is, he says, planning to sue Arena’s administrator for defamation, one of the many legal actions that now take up 95 per cent of his waking hours.

By Kevin Jacobsen’s estimation legal ­disputes have already cost the family several million dollars, and he says he has set aside another million to fight his outstanding battles. His lawyers have filed court depositions disputing the claims made by Karl Sydow and Jack Utsick’s company, and he has launched a Federal Court challenge to stop the liquidation of Arena Management.

Creditors such as Michael Coppel are not convinced: he says Jacobsen owed him more than $1 million when Arena collapsed. “Kevin portrays himself as a bumbling, lovable, ­avuncular character who stumbles through life – the Mr Bean of the entertainment industry,” says Coppel scathingly. “But I think that’s an act. I think he portrays himself as a fool so people treat him as a fool and he can take advantage of them.

“It’s hard to understand, if there’s this river of money from Dirty Dancing, why it wasn’t used to pay off debts and to pay entitlements to people who have worked for him. Employees who’ve worked for Kevin for 25 to 30 years have been dudded. A lot of these ­people can’t afford to lose $40,000 or $60,000 but he seems to have forgotten the loyalty they have given him over that time.”

Kevin is not happy
Even by the gonzo standards of the entertainment business, Kevin Jacobsen is a mercurial character. Advancing age has rendered his memory less than faultless, and he carries a bulging filofax because he recently ran over his electronic organiser in the car. He has hired and fired so many lawyers that one businessman who wanted to sue him claims to have spent an entire day calling around Sydney law firms before he could find one that had not previously represented Jacobsen.

First approached to talk about Dirty ­Dancing and the events of the past several years, he ­readily agrees and suggests we meet almost immediately. Subsequently he cancels two photo shoots at short notice and becomes ­elusive for two months, apparently acting on advice. Then he agrees to another interview, driving all the way into the city from his home in Sydney’s leafy Hunters Hill to talk candidly for more than an hour. Two days later, after being informed that this magazine would need to ­contact his brother Col for comment, he launches into a blistering and obscenity-laden tirade over the telephone, saying he has been tricked. “I don’t want anything to do with journalists,” he shouts. “I don’t want to be a star. I don’t want to be in the f..king paper! … I’m Mister Nice Guy, until I’m ­double-crossed. I mean, you are just one of a thousand f..king interviews I’ve done. You are, to put it crudely, f..king me over.”

Here is the tough operator who denounces one opponent as a “scumbag” and depicts his brother as two-faced. “There’s Col Joye – ‘Hi folks blah blah Bye Bye Baby’,” he says. “And there’s Colin Jacobsen.” Yet a few days later he calls to apologise for his intemperance, sounding weary and chastened.

Asked how the family schism has affected his father, Michael Jacobsen says: “Kevin is not happy about it – he’s very upset about it. Both of them would feel, to a degree, that their right or left hand has fallen off.” In June, the warring ­factions of the family were brought together by mediators to sign a peace treaty. The terms of that agreement are confidential, but it split the assets between them and broke apart an incredibly successful partnership that had endured for half a century. The other lawsuits, meanwhile, could drag on for years. To those who’ve known and worked with Jacobsen, it’s all a tragedy from which only the lawyers will emerge enriched. “It’s been incredibly heartbreaking for Colin and his family,” says one former business associate, adding: “Kevin has a lot of people who hang around him, but he hasn’t got a true friend in the world. To me that tells you something.”

And yet Jacobsen keeps getting up and ­dusting himself off. In the midst of the court hearings, the depositions and the six-hour meetings with lawyers and accountants, he has negotiated a Julio Iglesias tour of Australia and jetted back and forth to New York to negotiate the Broadway debut of Dirty Dancing. After that, he’s talking about Las Vegas, and South Africa and Brazil. Maybe a tour of regional British cities. All the world is a stage and Australia’s oldest-surviving bodgie is still out there ripping it up.

As he leaves a cafe one afternoon he glances down at a newspaper spread over a table and spots a headline: “Tax Office Crackdown On Millionaires”. “Hey, I used to be one of those,” he quips. “How does that song go?” He snaps his fingers and breaks into the old blues tune. “Once I lived the life of a millionaire…” Then he walks off, chuckling to himself.