Monica Dodi
Entertaining Her Ambitions
On the "stresses-of-life" scale, moving, changing jobs, and getting divorced are all right up there. Any one of them alone is taxing enough, but Monica Dodi has experienced all three in the past two years. Yet the unstoppable entertainment executive, now a single mom, is still smiling and upbeat. "I'm happy and where I want to be," she says confidently.
Back in 1988, Dodi was living in London, traveling to the Continent several times a week to help launch MTV Europe.
By the following year she had left MTV, married a Frenchman, and moved to Paris, where she consulted briefly for HBO. After the birth of her first child, Daniel, Dodi joined Disney in 1990 to spearhead the company's European consumer products business.
In her first Bulletin interview in 1983, Dodi envisioned the future ideal of "a pregnant CEO of a corporation walking into a board meeting" while her other child was down the hall in daycare. But she says that when she found herself in a similar scenario - eight months pregnant with her second child, Clara, and delivering a speech to hundreds of Disney executives in Frankfurt - she recalls thinking, "This is ridiculous!"
Dodi explains, "More than anything, it was the travel that became impossible with children." So she downshifted by starting up a greeting card company that was licensed to use Disney images, and for the next three years she stayed put in Paris. With the help of a nanny, Dodi says she balanced work and family quite well, settling into the French rhythm of long midday breaks at home, reasonable working hours, and generous vacations.
"The pressures I felt didn't come from work," she notes. "The problem was that as a woman in France I was expected to do it all outside the office, as well - take care of the kids, cook, and entertain elegantly. The cultural expectations just wore me down after a while."
Dodi and her husband separated in 1996, and she moved back to the States, taking a job as vice president of operations with Warner Brothers Television in Los Angeles. "What I missed most about America was the attitude that you can be anybody and still get ahead in the world," she says. In the merger between Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting shortly afterward, however, Dodi's division was dissolved. Still under contract, she found herself with eight months of paid "vacation." "The time off helped me get the kids settled into a new culture," she says.
In August 1997, Dodi became president and CEO of the America Online subsidiary Entertainment Asylum, an entertainment-related content provider on the Internet. Despite the hefty title, she still spends quality time with her children in the evenings and on weekends. "I think it's actually healthy to have full lives and not to be together all the time," she maintains. "When we get together we have lots to share."
Dodi envisions resuming the traveling life once her children, now seven and eight, are in college. "I'd also like to get into politics," she muses. Governor Dodi? Stay tuned.
by Marguerite Rigoglioso