Star Trekker : Anaheim’s Michael Minutoli (Who?) Says He Feels Like Somebody When He Gets Up Close, Personal With Madonna, Whitney
Hey, who’s that guy with his arm around Richard Riordan? Didn’t I see him with Springsteen the other week? Come to think of it, it’s the same guy who had his arm around Axl Rose, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Tony Bennett, Bruce Willis, Whitney Houston, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Rod Stewart, not to mention Gary Coleman.
It’s Michael Minutoli! Boy, this guy must have some juice, to be hanging out with the stars like that! Listen to the sort of nights he and his son, Anthony, have:
“We went backstage during Madonna’s 1989 ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour at the L.A. Sports Arena. We hung around and we socialized amongst the celebrities and other people back there, and as the place was closing down, everybody was leaving and Madonna came walking out hand in hand with Warren Beatty.
“I introduced myself as Michael Minutoli, as I do with everyone. She said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and shook my hand, then she said, ‘Oh, you have a cute son there,’ and gave him a kiss. And then we just chit-chatted about the show. I introduced myself to Warren Beatty, then said, ‘Anthony, meet Dick Tracy,’ and Warren Beatty in his Dick Tracy voice said, ‘Hi Anthony, how are you?’ Then, Lionel Richie was amongst us also, and I went over and said hi to him.”
Minutoli, 34, spends a lot of his time amongst celebrity types. He’s not exactly an entertainment industry bigwig, though. Rather, the Anaheim resident said he’s “in filtration,” selling industrial filters for air, liquids and other things that get mucky. When it comes to his affiliation with the stars, though, he might better have said infiltration .
While others backstage at the aforementioned Madonna show did have some status-laden pretext for being there, Minutoli and son instead “saw an open spot when the security was busy in other areas. Sometimes it’s being in the right spot at the right time like that, where there isn’t a security person and you can just walk in.
“I don’t want to be negative when I say I sneak in. Let’s say I sneak amongst . I don’t force myself on them. But if nobody is there, I will just mosey on through.”
I might be disinclined to believe Minutoli’s tales of security gaps and all-access passes found on the ground, had I not experienced similar fortuitous instances back when I gave a hoot about meeting certain rock stars. It can be eerie how chance affords a way when the will is there. And Minutoli definitely has the will, saying, “I’m addicted to show business.” He also has a camera and can document most of his stories of meeting the rich and petulant.
When he was growing up in Attleboro, Mass., Minutoli recalls buying a magazine with a free record by the Supremes in it. He fell in love with the record, and said his life has revolved around music since. He said he can’t sing or dance, but he can certainly hang out with the best of them.
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Just the night before he talked to us last week, he and Anthony, 7, had gone up to, and gotten into, the American Music Awards ceremony. After fruitlessly hanging around the credentials window, he and Anthony moved to where the limos were parked and got a couple leaving early to give them their passes.
Sometimes even getting in can be a celebrity event, such as the time they ran into Henry Winkler in an elevator and he gave them his pass to a Simon and Garfunkel charity bash.
“We were amongst many, many celebrities there: Jack Nicholson, Neil Young, Steve Martin,” Minutoli said.
Last year, he went to the Grammys.
“My wife laughed at me, ‘You’re not going to get into the Grammys, Michael.’ I got to the show and walked around the building three times and couldn’t get in. I found a guy with a ticket for $300, but he wouldn’t sell it to me for the $20 I had. I was about to go home when I saw this (he held up a tattered pass) lying right next to a CHP officer’s foot. I picked it up, it was an all-access pass, and I went right in.”
Some of his entrances aren’t so dignified: He crashed a Guns N’ Roses bash by sneaking in through the kitchen, and he often gets into Universal Amphitheatre via an employee entrance in the adjoining theme park.
And some of his accesses are just weird. He showed up in a tux at an Elton John-sponsored AIDS fund-raiser, and, “Honest to God, it was like they were expecting me. They said, ‘Good evening sir,’ handed me a glass of champagne and said, ‘Enjoy yourself.’ Nobody ever asked me for a ticket. I found an empty seat and sat down, enjoyed the food and enjoyed the show.”
And then there was the New Year’s Eve Barbra Streisand show in Vegas. First, he got into the $1,000-a-pop show by borrowing the ticket of someone who had already been in and had a hand stamped.
“I enjoyed the show, bumped into Bill Clinton’s brother Roger afterward and started talking to him, and we were walking along. The security must have thought I knew the guy because I was talking with him, so they just let me keep on walking with him. So suddenly I’m in there at the New Year’s Eve bash, partying with Streisand’s orchestra and everything.”
Doesn’t it ever tug at his conscience that sometimes he’s enjoying a $3,000-a-plate charity event for free?
“I’m there for the love of the music. If I had the funds, I would put a lot of it to any good charity. But because I don’t have the funds, I don’t,” he said. “Someone at one of these once asked me what I contribute. Well, I bought a beverage. I contribute whatever I can.”
Anthony accompanies him to many events and said he’s enjoyed them, particularly meeting Houston, Stewart and Joel. He’s a handsome kid, even with no hair on his head. He has a non-life-threatening condition that he can’t pronounce and I can’t spell that has caused his hair to fall out.
“Sometimes they think I have cancer, though I don’t,” he said, and his dad stressed that they don’t play on celebrities’ sympathies, always explaining the non-tragic nature of Anthony’s condition. Minutoli did say it’s sometimes easier to talk to celebrities when his son is present, but insisted that isn’t the reason he brings him.
“The Beatles are one of my favorite groups in the world. My family could have taken me to see a Beatles concert, and I know it would have been great. When I had my son I said I wanted to get him involved in the culture of life. So I’ve been bringing him to shows since he was 1. It’s only in the last couple of years he lost his hair.”
One such occasion was a Rod Stewart concert at the Pacific Amphitheatre in 1989, when the singer plucked the 2 1/2-year-old Anthony out of his dad’s arms to join him onstage on “Forever Young,” only to find that Anthony knew all the words.
While Minutoli and Anthony are out among the stars, his wife, Debbie, stays home with their daughter at the apartment complex they manage.
“She’s a homebody and likes her movies on TV,” Minutoli said. “When there’s a movie she wants to watch--she knows I can’t sit still for them--she asks, ‘What’s going on tonight? Go.’ I had it arranged once for her to meet Whitney Houston, and another time for Rod Stewart, and she didn’t want to come along. She’s not as outgoing as I am.”
Anthony had a slightly different take on it: “Mom doesn’t like to go with us because she thinks we’re going to get caught.”
Minutoli does sometimes get booted out of events, and sometimes the stars aren’t so nice. The first two times he tried to get Elton John’s autograph, the singer just kept walking, though he did relent on a third occasion.
He once approached Bob Dylan for an autograph at a hotel and was rebuffed: “No, go away.”
“Then I said, ‘Mr. Dylan, I’m not just a fan, I’m a big music fan. It’s my life.’ ”
“Go away,” reiterated the poet laureate of his generation.
Minutoli said most stars have been very nice, and some know him now. He said, “Whitney Houston would recognize me in a heartbeat, and Rod Stewart knows me by name.”
For example, when Minutoli approached Stewart and his wife in a restaurant one Valentine’s Day to hit him up for tickets to a show, he recalled, “Stewart said, ‘No, Michael . I can’t help you.’ He called me by my first name.”
He has sometimes tried to view things from the star’s perspective:
“Probably they feel, ‘Oh, here’s one more hounding me for an autograph or picture.’ My feelings are, when they’re at a concert, movie set or out there promoting their stuff, that’s their job and they’re in the public eye to make money. I realize it’s stressful and a pain in the neck for them sometimes, and one more fan is a pain in the ass, but I just feel that if they’re going to be in this business, they should accept their fan.”
He estimates he’s met 150 celebrities by now. I have to admit I don’t get the attraction. Sure, it may be fun to be able to tell others you were backstage with such and such, but the reality is usually you’re waiting around in a concrete backstage prison with a bunch of other people who are irked that you’re no more famous than they are. Then, maybe , the star flows past, in an orbit nearly unchecked by the shallow pleasantries being dispensed like cocktail franks to all and sundry. Then they’re out the door to their real lives.
Even when you get some serious one-on-one time with a star, as we journalists do, it can often be just the merest illusion of real communication. Day in and out they meet people who feel they know them or own them just because they’ve seen their craft amplified by a movie screen or stereo, and it makes them just a little bit weird, not to say guarded.
I once interviewed a country singer who hadn’t even recorded her first note in the studio, yet her label had already sent her through courses on what to say during interviews. With situations like that, it’s a lot more fun and real doing this column, and getting to talk to normal people, not that Fixations subjects with 350 G.I. Joes or miles of train track running through their home are especially normal.
For Minutoli, though, the sparks he gets from rubbing up against the famous is his sustenance.
“Because I’ve been emotionally involved in the music of some of these people for 15 or 20 years, to go up to them and tell them how much you like their music or ask what’s going on in the business or how’s their family, it makes me feel very good and like I’m being acknowledged.
“I want to be successful in life, and being next to successful people, it makes me feel successful. I would like to have been a performer of some kind. It’s a pipe dream of mine. I probably do this from me wanting to be that status of a performer, and it makes me feel wanted or acknowledged when I acknowledge them. Not that they’re going to remember me, but for those few seconds that we say hi greeting each other, it’s being acknowledged.”