Think you know everything about Celine Dion? Did you know then that the singer was not discovered by René Angélil, as the story telling built around the story of the diva? If it was her late husband and manager who made her a world star, she had however entrusted the start of her career to another man.
While spectators are currently jostling in cinemas to discover Aline, true / false biopic around the life of Céline Dion, we can see a scene there many times told in the press: the young Céline victim of a teething problem, going to René Angélil’s office with her mother Thérèse for him sing in live his first song written by his mother, It was only a dream. Of course, all of this is true and very pretty, but before Céline met René and made him her manager, she was already under contract elsewhere!
“It was in the early 1980s that her mother Thérèse took charge of her daughter’s destiny (…) Thérèse wanted to make Céline a star. She knows she has what it takes, more than all her brothers and sisters, confirmed musicians (…) This rise to the star-system can only be envisaged if Celine Dion has a manager (…) ) In 1980, Thérèse decided to actively seek this mentor who can propel Céline of the smoky scene of Vieux Baril [le bar familial, NDLR] at the spotlights of the biggest stages in Quebec“, relates the book Céline Dion, between dream and reality by Loïc Tremblay.
During a rock competition organized in the region “his big brother Michel invites Paul Lévesque, a Canadian group agent“and it clicked: captivated by the 12-year-old girl who had resumed Let’s Get Physical Olivia Newton-John, he then wants to sign it. Another version relates that he would rather have seen Celine one evening at the Old barrel. December 5, 1980, “he was invited to a family council at the Dion’s, in order to set all the terms of little Céline’s first artist contract.” Become Celine’s agent, he struggles to have her record models in the studio, including that of It was only a dream, which he then sent to René Angélil, producer in charge of Ginette Reno’s career. After two weeks without news, Michel, Celine’s brother, manages to get René on the phone who promises to listen to the model. Everyone knows the rest of the beautiful story.
Between Celine Dion and Paul Lévesque, the partnership will ultimately be very brief. In 2007, the site of VAT News relates that the singer and her clan are suing Paul Levesque so that he stops allowing the use of It was only a dream for advertising purposes and claim the tidy sum of 1 million Canadian dollars. We then discover that the contract at the time only lasted a little over a year. “According to the Dions, Paul Lévesque no longer has any rights to this song, having ceded all its management and production contracts to René Angélil at the beginning of 1982“, relates the site.
By the admission of Celine Dion, who mentions this first contract in her biography My life, my dream, the feeling had never really passed between them. “There was a kind of cultural incompatibility between him and us which, from the start, complicated things.“, said the interpreter of my heart Will Go On. The diva explained for example that Paul Levesque was afraid that his agent contract “be canceled“because she often missed school to sing in shows when she was only 12 years old. He had thus gone so far as to send a formal notice to her parents to force them to send her to school It is understandable that the clan quickly did without its services …
Become in the eyes of the general public, the discoverer of Celine Dion, the late René Angélil had applied to remove Paul Lévesque from the painting. An attitude to put forward that had already reproached him Jean Beaulne, his comrade of the group Les Baronets, in which he sang in the 1960s. In the pages of the book And Angélil created Céline by Jean Beaunoyer, we can read that he has “ostracized Jean Beaulne as he will later do from Paul Lévesque, Celine Dion’s first manager (…) He knowingly failed to mention that Paul Lévesque was Celine’s first impresario and that he had signed a five-year agreement with his mother.” But can we blame him, he who made Celine the greatest singer of all time?
Between Paul Lévesque and René Angélil, the case will first go to court before being settled out of court.