Ready for Higher Heights

Maybe he’s not quite as hunky as Ricky Martin. And no one really knows if he can sing. But that doesn’t matter. Jose Behar is still one of the two most powerful men in the U.S. Latin music industry--and by far the most powerful Latin music executive in Los Angeles. Indeed, nationally, the only other person to wield as much power is producer Emilio Estefan.

Behar, 42, is president and CEO of EMI Latin, the nation’s second-largest Latin music label. Only giant Sony Discos sells more music than EMI Latin. And when it comes to the Mexican regional market, EMI Latin, the only Latin label based in Los Angeles, is king.

While 10 years ago such a ranking might merit a curious shrug, these days it is the stuff of serious business. According to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, Latin music sales increased 24% in dollars between 1997 and 1998, a rate twice the overall industry’s growth. Latin music now accounts for close to 4.5% of the $13.7-billion industry and is growing.

A story like Behar’s could easily be told in numbers, as it was on the cover of Variety, where it was reported last month that his 10-year-old label just completed its most profitable year ever, with more than $108 million in revenues.

There’s also the company’s sustained 25% growth rate over the past two years, and the 1996 raise Behar got from EMI Recorded Music, which his lawyer John Mason said increased his annual salary by 500%--putting him somewhere in the low seven figures.

But it’s much more interesting to ride with Behar in his black two-door Mercedes to the gated North Ranch site in the city of Westlake Village, where he is building his “dream house.” The big, bulldozed lot is cut into the side of a hill, almost at the top; a neighboring hill is crowned by Heather Locklear’s mansion; close to that, Hulk Hogan’s. Down the street, Richard Carpenter, of the Carpenters, is building a new house; years ago, Behar used to deliver Carpenter’s letters as mail clerk for A&M; Records. “It’s a nice neighborhood,” Behar says with characteristic understatement. “And my kids can play with other kids. That’s why I’m doing this. If I was single, I’d be in a one-bedroom apartment. But the kids and my wife are a key motivating factor in all of this. I feel blessed that I’m able to build this compound for them, with a theater and a gym.”

Behar, well over 6 feet tall and dressed elegantly in black slacks and shirt, walks to the edge of the property, where he spies a bloody snake that has been mauled by the construction equipment. He frowns and squats next to it. “Is it dead? It is? That’s awful.” Behar looks up and says, quite sincerely, “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to live out here, you know. There are deer here, and rabbits. It’s peaceful.”

Behar walks back to the Mercedes. The passenger side mirror is cracked because, in his haste to make a 5 a.m. personal training appointment, a sleepy Behar drove into a wall on his way out of the driveway. It was a Sunday. He had to exercise early because he had promised his daughters, Siara, 6, and Deidre, 10, he would spend the day with them.

Behar’s spotless corner office in Woodland Hills, decorated in pale banana shades, is filled with photos of his kids. In addition to work, these are the things that consume Behar: family, charity and working out, all of which he approaches in much the same perfectionist way he approaches his career.

Behar’s wife, Jamie, a former speech therapist, met Behar in 1979, when he was a mail clerk and college student, and says even then she knew he was destined for great things.

“I knew I was attracted to him, and I’m not attracted to losers, or at least I wouldn’t admit it,” says Behar’s wife. “If he’d said his dream was to be a ‘Baywatch’ lifeguard on Santa Monica Pier, I would have said, ‘OK, let’s move on.’ I knew he would go places. He’s not happy with mediocrity.”

Behar’s personal trainer, Kevin Lewis, says the big problem with his client is that “you have to make sure he doesn’t overdo it. Like a lot of successful people, he usually pushes himself too hard.”

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Behar also pushes hard at EMI Latin, which he persuaded London-based EMI Recorded Music to launch in 1989. Until that time, the conglomerate had licensed its Spanish-language music to RCA Records as sort of an afterthought. Behar, then a high-ranking talent scout at CBS Records, came to EMI with a novel idea: Latin music was a profitable U.S. domestic venture that should be sold in the same stores as regular pop music.

“I met with the EMI head and I said, ‘I know my business is not of interest to you today,’ verbatim, ‘but I just want you to know that the future of this business is in Latin music,’ ” Behar says.

EMI gave Behar two small offices on its classical music floor, a couple of employees and a $1-million budget, which he used to sign artists such as Eddie Santiago and Lalo Rodriguez. Within three years, Behar had increased EMI Latin’s budget 800 times over, and EMI Latin took over the entire floor.

EMI Latin now employs 57 people and has offices in Texas, New York, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nonetheless, Behar is genuinely modest about his success, preferring to say he is “an enabler of greatness” than to call himself powerful. “At the end of the day, we’re all just employees here,” he says. “I just make it possible for the Carlo Ponces or the Millies to soar.”

One of the keys to Behar’s success came from being the first Latin music executive to concentrate heavily on the U.S. Latino audience; not only did Behar correctly assume Latinos would buy music by their favorite artists in either English or Spanish, but he also secured important accounts for EMI Latin with major department store outlets such as Target, Tower, Kmart and Wal-Mart.

Most important, Behar says, he created EMI Latin to be an American company, geared toward American Latinos.

Behar says he also made an effort to be extremely professional.

“I always felt I had an incredible responsibility as a Hispanic not to screw up,” Behar says. “Words can’t describe the kind of discrimination I encountered at first, the additional pressures that are put upon you because you are Hispanic. That’s not the case anymore. I don’t feel that pressure anymore. But we’ve worked very hard to overcome that stigma.”

Billboard magazine Latin music writer John Lannert describes Behar as a “visionary” and says he was one of the first Latin music executives to conduct business professionally, by mainstream standards.

“Jose was the first guy who was really organized and polished,” Lannert says. “If he said an album would be released on a certain date, it would. That was unusual then.”

At one of his recent personal training sessions, Behar pushes himself hard through stomach crunches, his legs and feet elevated on a bright blue ball as Lewis counts out loud. It’s a weekday, about 5 p.m., and after exercising, Behar will return to the office for a meeting.

Asked what drives him, Behar replies: “Fear of failure.” He then refines his statement: “Actually, it’s more than that. I am terrified of failure. In this business, you’re only as good as your last hit. You have to constantly reinvent yourself.”

The words are puzzling, given that Behar was the man to discover the late Selena, an artist who remains the label’s top seller.

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EMI Latin’s active lineup is also impressive: singers Ednita Nazario, Millie, Carlos Vives, Graciela Beltran, Carlos Ponce and Thalia; and groups Los Tucanes de Tijuana, Jarabe de Palo, A.B. Quintanilla and Los Kumbia Kings, Los Originales de San Juan; and rapper Vico C.

So why can’t Behar relax?

Because Behar’s fear is not new. He has carried it since he was a child, uprooted from his native Havana by Castro’s revolution and thrown into exile in South Miami Beach at age 6.

“It wasn’t until I got older that I realized the impact of what our families went through,” Behar says. “Having to leave everything you know, having to give up everything. Most of the ones who came here had money, but we didn’t. We had to come and start from zero.”

Behar’s father was in the shoe manufacturing business in Cuba but took odd jobs to survive once he got to Miami. While the family eventually recovered financially, the initial struggles in the U.S. marked Behar for life, and, he says, made him the way he is today. There was an additional sense of being an outsider that came from growing up Jewish in a predominantly Catholic culture.

“When you know you have nothing to fall back on, you learn how to plan and make things happen,” Behar says. “You’ll find a lot of kids from well-to-do families don’t know how to do that, because they never had to.

“But even as a little kid I remember watching my parents and thinking it was very depressing to work so hard for so little, and the only thing you look forward to is one vacation a year, or getting to be 65 so you can get Social Security and retire.

“I always knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I always wanted to break out of that. I didn’t want to live for just that one vacation a year. I wanted, and not to sound like some jerk who goes on vacations all the time, but I wanted to be able to go on vacation whenever I needed to.”

While a student at Miami Beach High School, Behar worked in a bakery, cleaning refrigerators, while plotting his escape. Part of that plan was a move to Los Angeles in 1978, to study finance at Cal State Northridge.

While a student there, Behar took a job working in the mail room at A&M; Records.

It was at A&M; that Behar met Herb Alpert, one of the label’s co-owners and his first mentor.

“In the early ‘80s, when we formed A y M Discos, I knew that it was just a matter of time before Latin-based music would take a huge bite into the music industry, and Jose Behar helped push it forward and was always at the front,” Alpert says.

Behar impressed Alpert and others in the company with his strong work ethic and sense of humor, and within two years he was asked to take a job as marketing director for A&M;’s new Latin label, a job Behar says he took reluctantly because he feared he was not ready and it would lead to nowhere.

In spite of Behar’s initial reluctance, he excelled in his marketing position, launching the career of Maria Conchita Alonso, among others. And after five years on the job, he was wooed away by CBS Records, which wanted him for its new Latin division. He stayed in artist development there for six years, before starting EMI Latin 10 years ago.

Now, even as he stands at the helm of the second-most powerful Latin music label in the nation, as he builds his dream house, as his name and reputation grow, Behar remains restless.

“What I may have accomplished 10 years ago, or five years ago, doesn’t mean anything today,” Behar says. “When I sit down with senior management, they don’t want to know what I’ve done. They want to know what I’m going to do. We as a label have to constantly reinvent ourselves, to stay in tune with what’s going on. That’s what enables those of us who are lucky enough to make a living in this business to enjoy longevity. You can never get out of the fast lane.”