Turning Record Profits : After Harlene Marshall’s husband and son died within four months of each other in 1985, she took the family record business and made it into a million-dollar company

It’s been nearly five years since Harlene Marshall’s life was suddenly and irrevocably changed one sunny afternoon on a Van Nuys tennis court. Marshall, the president of Bainbridge Records, still looks shaken when she describes the event.

“It happened in August, 1985,” she said. “My husband, Stan, and I were playing tennis. Suddenly, he said he felt lightheaded. He sat down, keeled over and that was it. His heart stopped. He was just short of his 51st birthday.”

Four months earlier, Marshall’s life had taken a similarly somber turn. “It was in March,” she said. “We were coming home around midnight when we ran into a long line of cars on Mulholland. When we got to our driveway, there was an LAPD car waiting for us. Our 15-year-old son, Matthew, had just been killed by a drunk driver.”

Marshall had little time to deal with the grief from the staggering loss of both child and husband in a four-month span. Survival for her and her daughter, Rebecca, then 10, was dependent upon the continued functioning of Bainbridge Records, a small, independent company she had started with her husband in the early 1980s.

“For a year afterward, I was crying every day,” she said. “And I didn’t know who I was crying for--both Matthew and Stan, probably, and maybe for myself and Rebecca, as well. But I was convinced that I had to at least maintain the status quo. I felt it was best for Rebecca and me to stay here, and the only way we could do that was to keep the business going.”

Bainbridge, which is named after a street in the Bronx on which Stan Marshall lived as a child, was created as a catalogue company. That is, its early recordings consisted of previously released material that was no longer profitable to the major labels. Stan, who had been a vice president of sales and marketing at Elektra-Asylum, moved to California in 1980 with Harlene and their two young children to start the new enterprise.

The Bainbridge office was initially--and continues to be--the pool house of the Marshall home in Bel-Air. The fledgling company’s initial set of releases resulted from the purchase of the Time Records catalogue. It included recordings made in the ‘60s, in the dawning era of stereo, by such artists as Hugo Montenegro, Al Caiola, Gordon Jenkins and Jerry Fielding.

“At first, it was a hard row to hoe because this was material that hadn’t been out in 20 years, and we were putting it out at top-line prices,” Marshall said. “The distributors who dealt in cutouts--older recordings which are sold at bargain prices to reduce inventory--said to me, ‘Why should we buy your stuff for full price when we can buy Percy Faith cutouts for two bucks?’

“But to the consumers, this was like new material. So we mostly stayed away from the distributors, and Stan made his deals directly with the big record store chains.”

The strategy worked, and things were looking bright for the company when Stan Marshall had his fatal heart attack. Harlene Marshall was on her own.

Steve Wolowicz, the Marshalls’ business adviser and accountant, sat down with Harlene and the company’s employees to discuss the future. “Steve had been involved with the company since the beginning,” Marshall said. “He was almost like a member of the family. That’s while I was still grieving, still seeing things in a blur. He polled the employees and told me that they--and he--were giving me a full vote of confidence.”

From the outside, the transition seemed smooth as silk. Kirk Andreasen, vice president of Precision Sound Marketing, a company that worked with Bainbridge at the Wherehouse and Tower Records, had high praise for Harlene Marshall.

“She took over very quickly after Stan passed away, and did an impressive job of promoting the product, contacting people and taking care of the accounts,” he said. “It was a marvelous job, especially for a situation in which some people would have gone to pieces.”

Marshall not only managed to keep Bainbridge Records going, she made it prosper. The company’s annual gross income has doubled to $1 million in the four years since Stan Marshall died. Harlene’s accomplishment makes her one of a very small group of women successfully operating their own companies in a business that has traditionally been dominated by male executives.

“Oh, the record industry is definitely a fraternity,” she said with a laugh. “But then what industry isn’t? Still, because of my relationship with Stan, and because I’ve proved that I can handle the job, I feel like--well, I hate to say it--one of the boys.

“The fact is that running an independent record company is difficult for anyone, period. Sure, some of the people I deal with are a little chauvinistic. I don’t think about it because I don’t feel it in their treatment of me. And I’m comfortable enough with my abilities now to say whatever I need to say to them if and when the issue comes up. But there’s no doubt that you need to have some sort of connection with the old-boy network, no matter what the industry is.”

The present Bainbridge catalogue is a cornucopia of musical goodies. At the top of the list is an unusual work by composer Michael Lee Thomas titled “Voyager: Grand Tour”--a New-Age-sounding work that incorporates actual sounds picked up by the Voyager spacecraft.

Other artists in the contemporary catalogue are jazz musicians Mark Lewis, Smith Dobson and John Handy, and there is a new recording of Art Ferrante (once of Ferrante & Teischer) performing music from “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The Montenegro, Caiola and Jenkins recordings from the company’s early years are still in stock, and an audiophile collection titled the Colossus Musician series features state-of-the-art recordings of music from universities and music conservatories.

Bainbridge also has a complete set of sound effects discs, as well as Indian classical music from Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Nostalgia buffs can find Bainbridge recordings featuring such former pop notables as Eddie Fisher, Jaye P. Morgan, the Anita Kerr Singers, Bobby Darin and Peter Nero.

“Bainbridge has done a first-rate job of reaching the upper demographic clientele that wants to buy easy-listening music,” said Terry Currier, operations manager of the Music Millennium record store in Portland, Ore. “Their product helps fill some of the void in what’s becoming an increasingly important market.”

Half a decade after circumstances obliged her to take over the company, Harlene Marshall believes that Bainbridge is just about where she wants it to be. Last year, she issued the first record completely produced and recorded by Bainbridge. Typically, it featured a classic pop music act, the New Ink Spots.

“We never wanted Bainbridge to become another major label,” Marshall said. “We wanted, and I still want, to be a kind of clearinghouse for all kinds of alternative products. And that’s exactly what Bainbridge is doing today.”

Since the accident that killed Matthew, Marshall’s time and energy has also been focused on her work with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). A former president of the Los Angeles chapter, she continues to play an active role in the organization.

“After Matthew died, I became vividly aware that I had probably driven under the influence a number of times myself,” she said. “And I’m just a social drinker. But I had to learn to think differently about the effects of even that kind of drinking.

“At the bottom line, it’s a matter of life or death. More than 20,000 people die each year because some fool refused to believe that he was too drunk to drive. My son was one of those people.”

Harlene Marshall gazed thoughtfully out her office window, through the dappled afternoon sunlight toward the winding road where the accident took place.

“I’m pleased with what I’ve been able to do with Bainbridge, and I think Stan would be proud,” she said. “Now if we could just have that much success with MADD--well, that’d really be something.”