Dinner on Top of the World + English Lessons

On Aug. 30, 1989, Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan met with top officials from Arista at the World Trade Center in New York.

According to Pilatus and ex-manager Todd Headlee, Arista brass Clive Davis, Roy Lott, Marty Diamond, Bill Burger, Robert Weiger, Richard Sweret and Melani Rogers wined and dined the pop duo and their German production crew, Frank Farian and Ingrid Segieth, as well as their new American management team, Sandy Gallin and Headlee, at the Windows on the World Restaurant on the 107th floor.

The topic of agenda: How to improve Milli Vanilli’s English-speaking skills. According to Pilatus, concern over lip-sync rumors in the American press prompted Davis to suggest that the company hire a dialect coach to prepare the duo for interviews.

“Every time we gave an interview,” Morvan said, “the reporters would hear my French accent or Rob’s German accent and they’d say: ‘No way. How could these guys have sung the songs?’ ”

“We didn’t want to do any more interviews,” Pilatus said. “The more we talked, the worse things got. We were afraid the truth would come out. But Clive said he would help us. He said we needed to take some English lessons.”

Davis also pledged the company’s commitment to Milli Vanilli’s future in the pop music market during a brief speech at the dinner, according to Headlee.

“Everybody around the table was keenly aware that Rob and Fab’s speaking dialect was a dead giveaway to the truth,” Headlee said. “If officials at Arista were not aware that the guys did not sing on the record before then, they realized it that night.”

Arista officials still insist, however, that they did not know Pilatus and Morvan hadn’t sung on the album until Farian revealed the secret last week. Arista says that earlier discussions held about the duo singing on the second album did not mean that company officials understood that the performers had not sung on the first. Arista executives believed the duo’s insistence on singing on the second album was a result of the performers’ increasingly tense relations--widely reported in the music industry press--with producer Farian.

The company calls claims otherwise “false and libelous.”

Furthermore, Lott, an Arista executive vice president, denies that he was at the Windows on the World dinner. Burger, also an executive vice president, says the dinner was a social affair, not a business meeting, that was held to honor the duo when its album went multi-platinum, selling several million copies. Burger also says that Davis “never mentioned dialect” at the dinner; Burger acknowledged that Gallin discussed the dialect matter with him.

“The issue of Rob and Fab lip-syncing during live performances was always of great concern to us, as were the negative critical reviews that resulted from those performances; and we communicated our concern about this,” Arista said in a statement issued Tuesday. “But the fact that they were lip-syncing during their performances (as others do) had absolutely nothing to do with whether they sang on the album.”

Dialect Accent Specialists, a Los Angeles firm that teaches accents and dialects, was hired in August, 1989, by Gallin Morey Associates and paid by Arista to accompany Pilatus and Morvan for a brief span on their MTV Club Tour. Allyn Parton, the dialect coach who tutored Milli Vanilli, said Pilatus and Morvan worked hard and learned fast.