Mick Jagger (48 page)

If the Stones’ fame, or ill fame, was mostly generated by Andrew Oldham, Klein had apparently brought wealth on a commensurate scale to them all, regardless of rank within the band. Charlie Watts had moved into a luxurious cottage near Lewes, Sussex, formerly owned by the lawyer and politician Lord Shawcross; a perfect place for autodidact Charlie to tend his collection of American Civil War memorabilia and antique silver and for his wife, Shirley, to indulge her passion for horses. Bill Wyman had gravitated from Penge to a moated fourteenth-century mansion named Gedding Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, which brought the former electrician the feudal rank of lord of the manor. Even Brian, despite palpably having “no expectations,” had been able to pay £30,000 for Cotchford Farm, near Harefield, Sussex, the former home of the author A. A. Milne.

But only Mick so far owned both a town and a country house. The latter was Stargroves, a rambling Gothic pile located in the Berkshire village of East Woodhay, dating back to the sixteenth century and previously owned by an eccentric nobleman named Sir Frederick Carden. Mick had bought it at the same time as 48 Cheyne Walk for a mere £25,000, but both the house and its extensive grounds were in a badly run-down state and many thousands more would have to be spent on renovations. His unofficial realtor, Christopher Gibbs, advised caution, especially as Mick made an atypically snap decision to buy Stargroves after one late-night visit with a carload of friends and hangers-on including the American writer Terry Southern. But he insisted he’d finally found a place where “the atmosphere felt right.” Whatever it might cost—and with Marianne around, that promised to be a lot—he was determined to restore the property to its former magnificence.

In terms of opulent houses, flashy cars, unlimited clothes, and expensive holidays, all five Stones looked as though they must have millions in the bank. Actually, none of them had direct control over his own earnings and none—not even their keen-witted, calculating leader, the onetime economics student—knew exactly how much wealth the band had accumulated and continued to accumulate under Allen Klein’s aegis. Instead, a system had evolved, born jointly of young rock stars’ impatience with mundane details and Klein’s calculated policy of “keeping the talent happy.” In those pre-credit-card days, when one of them needed money, their office sent a request to Klein’s ABKCO organization in New York. For Mick, this could be as large as the purchase price of Stargroves or as small as fifty pounds to help out his brother, Chris, on the Nepal hippie trail. The money was always paid without question, from collective reserves he was encouraged to regard as bottomless.

Klein, in short, had fallen victim to one of the most familiar syndromes in pop. The deals he had made for the Stones that seemed so miraculous when they were young and hungry seemed much less so now that they were famous. The percentage they had gladly granted him then felt uncomfortable now, especially with Mick making most of the decisions. The old rule about familiarity breeding contempt had also come into play. Where once Klein’s attention had been entirely focused on them—as during the Redlands drug bust—he now seemed far more concerned with other matters in his empire.

The clearest sign of this was the increasing difficulty in getting money from him. Early in 1969, Keith took the opportunity to buy number 3 Cheyne Walk, a 1717 Queen Anne house, slightly smaller than Mick’s at number 48—but just as elegant and unspoiled—whose former tenants had included a president of the Royal Society, a St. Paul’s Cathedral organist, and the Tory politician Sir Anthony Nutting. To complete the purchase, Keith needed £20,000, and the usual request went across the Atlantic to Klein. But this time, there was no immediate payout, as there had been for the new homes of Mick, Bill, and even Brian. When volleys of phone calls and cablegrams to Klein produced no response, Keith had to send the Stones’ driver-bodyguard Tom Keylock across to New York to collect the money, Ronnie Kray style. Only with the hefty Keylock standing over him did Klein finally write out the necessary check.

Along with everything else, the Stones relied on Klein for the upkeep of their—far from grandiose—office at 46a Maddox Street. Here, too, the cash flow from New York had become increasingly problematic; there was a mounting a stack of unpaid bills, including one from the band’s invaluable publicist, Les Perrin, and red-printed final demands from both the London Electricity Board and Post Office Telephones. In his role as managing director, Mick sent Klein a sardonic telex message: “The phone and electricity will be cut off tomorrow. Also the rent is due. I am having to run the office despite your wishes. If you would like to remedy this, please do so.”

Piquantly, the first serious mutterings about Klein came from the very person who had handed the Stones over to him. Since walking out on the Satanic Majesties sessions two years earlier, Andrew Oldham had been in negotiation with Klein for a payoff reflecting his (actually incalculable) contribution to their success. Klein’s well-honed litigation skills were also needed in dealing with Eric Easton, Oldham’s original management partner, who was still seeking redress for having been dumped back in 1965. The sometimes farcical Oldham-Easton lawsuit—during which at one point each simultaneously tried to have the other jailed for contempt of court—brought adverse financial consequences for the Stones just when their income was becoming a matter of acute concern to Mick. Pending a settlement with the co-manager they had all but forgotten, $1 million of their record royalties was frozen.

Once the Easton case was resolved, the two cronies who had carved up the Stones between them turned on each other. Oldham started legal proceedings against Klein over the very transaction which had made him seem like the Stones’ savior: their $1.25 million advance from Decca Records in 1965. This, Oldham now claimed, had never gone to its rightful recipients, but had been intercepted by Klein and used “for his own benefit.” Instead of passing on the money to Nanker Phelge Music, the British-based company set up by Oldham and the Stones, he had paid it into an American-based one named Nanker Phelge USA, which he had specially created for the purpose and of which he was president and sole stockholder.

Klein indignantly denied that he’d diverted the band’s money into his own coffers by such barefaced sleight of hand. Nanker Phelge USA, he said, existed solely to protect the band’s income as far as possible from British income tax. All of them were guaranteed annual payments from the company (in Mick’s case, around £50,000) and the residue would go into a “balloon fund” which ultimately would be shared out among them. Nonetheless, the seeds of doubt had been sown in Mick’s mind, and he had hired a firm of London solicitors with no previous connections to either Klein or the Stones to look in detail at the whole financial picture. Ominously, the unanswered calls to ABKCO in New York had included several from the band’s accountants, Goodman Myers, asking for the information necessary to complete their individual income-tax returns and urgently requesting £13,000 already owing to the Inland Revenue—as it would turn out, the merest drop in the ocean.

Ten minutes’ walk away from the Stones’ office, on Savile Row, Mayfair, the Beatles had been taking their own doomed stab at self-management through their Apple organization, an attempt to combine youth-oriented businesses, like recording and clothes retailing, with hippie openheartedness and openhandedness. Run with an extravagance the very opposite of Mick’s regime at Maddox Street, Apple had quickly become a home for charlatans and scroungers and, although partly conceived as a tax write-off, was bleeding the Beatles whiter than the White Album.

Klein, of course, had coveted the Beatles since 1964, when they were under Brian Epstein’s seemingly unassailable control, and even bagging their archrivals, a year later, had felt no more than second best. His seeming loss of concentration on the Stones during 1968 was largely due to his close monitoring of the chaos at Apple and realization that the ultimate managerial prize might not have eluded him after all. Not a word of this reached Mick, even though Klein had laid a £1,000 bet with a mutual friend, Mickie Most’s wife, Chrissie, that he would have the Beatles by Christmas.

To sort out Apple and fill Epstein’s long-empty shoes, Paul McCartney proposed New York attorney Lee Eastman, whose daughter Linda he was on the point of marrying. But John Lennon, encouraged by Yoko, had other ideas. In January, Lennon told Disc and Music Echo’s Ray Coleman that if Apple continued spending at its present rate, the Beatles would be broke in six months; a few days after the story broke, he and Yoko had a secret meeting with Allen Klein at London’s Dorchester Hotel. Klein gave the same artful performance to Lennon as he had to Mick four years earlier, showing comprehensive knowledge of Beatles music and promising to make him so rich he could say “Fuck you, money!” Lennon’s response was to place himself unilaterally under Klein’s management, then persuade George Harrison and Ringo Starr that this New Yorker was far preferable to McCartney’s future father-in-law—thereby creating a rift within the band that would never be healed. Klein’s prediction of getting the Beatles by Christmas was only a month out, but Chrissie Most still collected her £1,000.

The news reached Mick at the Stones’ office via Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, who had gone on to film the Beatles’ strife-torn recording sessions for what would become their Let It Be album. More than once over recent years, Mick had extolled Klein’s management to Lennon and Paul McCartney and urged them, too, to become ABKCO clients. Now he was so appalled by Lennon’s decision that he asked Lindsay-Hogg to “walk him over” to the Apple building on Savile Row to voice his forebodings firsthand. There he found Klein ensconced at a boardroom table with all four Beatles and—never one for confrontation—left again without unburdening himself. Later he phoned Lennon, warning him against making “the biggest mistake of your life,” but to no avail.

Not that Mick’s help was needed in projecting a negative picture of Klein. Virtually unknown to Britain’s media while managing the Stones, he was now catapulted into the headlines as a kind of transatlantic cat burglar who had made off with a national treasure second only to the Crown Jewels. By an unhappy chance, he was concurrently in trouble on his home turf for having bought a near-defunct record label named Cameo-Parkway, then talked up its value with fictitious suggestions that major music companies were in a bidding war for it. As a result, dealing in Cameo-Parkway shares had been suspended on the New York Stock Exchange and Klein faced an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had also attracted the notice of the London Sunday Times’s famous Insight investigative team, both for the Cameo-Parkway affair and his handling of the Stones’ $1.25 million Decca advance. Insight’s front-page exposé, headed “THE TOUGHEST WHEELER-DEALER IN THE POP JUNGLE,” accused the Beatles’ new manager of duping the Rolling Stones over the American Nanker Phelge company, “lying like a trooper,” and having bad breath as well.

Well before these revelations, Mick had decided that Klein would have to go. But as yet he had no idea when or how that tricky operation might be accomplished. Meantime, he decided to appoint a personal financial adviser who, since his and the Stones’ interests were inseparable (if far from equal), would effectively be representing the whole band.

For help in finding such an adviser he turned, as ever, to Christopher Gibbs, whose impressive family tree included a number of bankers and whose education at Eton College had bequeathed contacts far outside the antiques trade. Gibbs consequently could recommend his old Eton chum, thirty-six-year-old Prince Rupert Ludwig Ferdinand zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, a descendant of Bavaria’s elector palatine Friedrich I and a partner in the merchant bank Leopold Joseph. Despite his name and heritage, Prince Rupert looked and spoke like a purebred English aristo, was an Oxford graduate in medieval history, and a well-known party giver and socialite. “I thought he’d be amused by Mick and Mick would be by him,” Gibbs remembers. “They met at Cheyne Walk and instantly got on well, even though Rupert knew nothing at all about pop music. They liked many of the same things and the same people—often surprisingly.” It was agreed that Prince Rupert would wait in the wings, conducting a thorough review of the Stones’ finances—especially with regard to the looming income-tax question—until such time as an exit strategy from Klein’s grip could be devised. Thus did another person of exotic European antecedents come into the Kentish lad’s life, following after Giorgio Gomelsky, Alexis Korner, Andrew Loog Oldham, Marianne Faithfull, and Anita Pallenberg, but destined to do his wallet more good than all the rest put together.

Klein now spent most of his time in London at Apple with the Beatles, very clearly putting the Stones a long way second but still seemingly unaware that his hold on them might be loosening. In mid-February, he did find time to attend a first viewing of The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, which Michael Lindsay-Hogg had been editing for the past two months. Lindsay-Hogg felt elated with the various great performances in the film and the atmosphere of good humor and harmony—so unlike the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, which he’d gone on to shoot. Never mind that the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus had missed its intended Christmas television slot. The Stones’ seven-song set featuring Mick’s sacrificial striptease on “Sympathy for the Devil”—not to mention John and Yoko, Eric Clapton, and the Who—would make it hotly salable all over the world in any season.

But at the screening, doubts began to creep in. Keith felt that the Who’s mini-opera, “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” performed at the very start of filming when the audience was fresh, with Pete Townshend’s arm windmilling around his guitar and Keith Moon on drums going even more berserk than usual, made them look like the stars of the whole show. By the time the Stones appeared—after all the other acts, at almost 5 A.M.—the audience had been too tired to show proper enthusiasm. In vain did Lindsay-Hogg argue that the band provided an unforgettable climax, with lipstick-and-rouged, half-naked Mick giving the most mesmerizing performance of his career. Strangely, Mick himself could not see this and agreed with Keith: the Who had upstaged them in their own film.