Klein’s appearance, in short, was as completely at odds with his reputation as is the outward aspect of the bright-eyed, cheerfully striped piranha fish. And indeed, as anyone could testify who had conducted negotiations with Klein or survived one of the lawsuits with which he pursued his heart’s desires, a piranha might conceivably have the edge in politeness.
Much about Allen Klein may be explained by an early life of almost Dickensian hardship and lovelessness. He was born in 1932 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a neighbourhood kosher butcher. His mother died when he was small and his father, unable to cope with both shop and family, put him and his two sisters into the care of the Hebrew Shelter Orphanage. Allen remained there for ten years, growing up in conditions of austere orthodoxy.
The many contenders for the title of Allen Klein’s worst enemy could not gainsay the solitary virtue he claimed for himself – his astonishing capacity of work. It was a virtue instilled in him in early childhood. As an accountancy student at the Lutheran Uppsala College, he completed a four-year course in three years, paying for his own tuition with two simultaneous part-time jobs. In class, he would frequently collapse forward on to his desk with exhaustion. Half-asleep as he was, he could still do a mental arithmetic sum quicker than any other student, rattling off the answer without lifting his head from his arms.
On graduating from Uppsala College, Allen Klein took his first ever holiday, in Miami. There he met a girl named Betty, a student of political science, and there and then decided he must marry her. The proposal was made with typical Klein abruptness. ‘When I took her home that first time, I told her I’d never hurt her,’ he remembered later. ‘She started to cry. “Don’t tell me you love me …” she’s saying. “Don’t tell me you want to marry me …”’
They were married in 1958. Klein’s income as a junior in a firm of New York accountants was $182.50 per month. Banished from his father’s home by an unsympathetic stepmother, he had lately been reduced to sleeping at seamen’s hostels, in genuine danger from a nightly cast of drunks, homosexuals and psychopaths.
His income sank further when, shortly after marrying Betty, he took a one-room office and set up as the newest and hungriest in the swarm of Manhattan’s accountants. Despite their poverty, Betty remembered, he would always take cabs to meetings across town. ‘To be successful, you gotta look successful,’ was another of his axioms. ‘Who’s going to put any trust in a guy who arrives on the subway?’
His big break came when he accepted a small retainer to handle the affairs of Buddy Knox, a teenage pop singer who had enjoyed huge success in 1957 with a song named Party Doll. Klein discovered that Buddy Knox’s record company, from a mixture of inefficiency and contempt for one so young, had failed to pay over a substantial part of what they owed him in royalties. A more interesting discovery was the worried confusion on the faces of record-company men whom Klein confronted with these discrepancies. The upshot was that Buddy Knox got what he was owed. Klein received $3,000 commission – enough to buy him and Betty their first new car.
To each of his subsequent clients from pop music and show business, Klein’s offer was bluntly simple: ‘I can find you money you never even knew you had.’ He would find it, as for Buddy Knox, trapped and forgotten in ponderously slow accounting systems, or in unpaid performance fees or miscalculated box-office percentages. He would then confront the miscreant company in the role of avenging angel, armed with writs and warrants and, occasionally, real live federal marshals. In a business traditionally fuelled by fuzzy bonhomie, the Klein experience was traumatic. Even record companies that treated their artists well and paid them properly could never feel completely sure that Klein’s intervention would not cause pain and embarrassment. ‘If a corporation is big, it has to make mistakes,’ was his dogged maxim. ‘There’s no corporation in the world that doesn’t have something to hide.’
The technique worked with spectacular success in the early Sixties on behalf of Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Bobby Darin and, most notably, Bobby Vinton, an adolescent crooner whom Klein approached at a mutual friend’s wedding with the unnerving enquiry: ‘How would you like to make $100,000?’
‘What do I have to do?’ the startled crooner asked.
‘Nuthin’,’ Klein answered. ‘It’s what I have to do.’ Shortly afterwards, a cheque for $100,000 in ferreted-out fees and back royalties was delivered to Vinton.
It was a devastatingly simple way, not only of attracting big clients but also of achieving power over them immeasurably greater than any conventional theatrical agent. ‘It’s natural …’ Klein’s nephew and ex-employee, Ronnie Schneider, says. ‘You hand someone a cheque for $100,000 and you’re a hero … you work miracles. After that, the guy is going to do anything you tell him.’
Klein’s other reputation in the music business was as a contract-buster, peerlessly adept in the extrication of his clients from seemingly iron-clad recording agreements in order to sign them to rival companies for large advances. Klein in negotiation could draw on an immense store of disconcerting devices, from cab-driver obscenity to lofty hauteur; from little-boy false naivety to conspiratorial winks and nudges; from predatory exultation to pained surprise that the world could be so indelicate. Two things sustained him through these marathons of boardroom bluff, bile and bad-mouthing. One was the unshakable belief that he, Allen Klein, was the very fount of all honour and square-dealing rectitude. The other was a readiness to engage in lawsuits that practically amounted to collector’s mania. At the peak of Klein’s career, his company was involved in some fifty lawsuits, their plaintiffs ranging from the US Internal Revenue Service to Diner’s Club.
Klein’s ambitions to expand into film production date back to a company with the odd name of Hunger Incorporated and a film entitled Without Each Other, whose appearance in the 1962 Cannes Film Festival resulted from a remarkable piece of hype. The film somehow got itself tipped in the American entertainment press as a winner of five awards, despite not having been seen by the voting jury or, for that matter, entered officially in the festival. ‘What I did at Cannes,’ Klein would frequently chuckle nostalgically. ‘That really was fantastic …’
Unable to make headway as a film mogul, despite a growing hoard of movie corporation stock, Klein devoted himself to a pop music market that had expanded beyond even his expectations. In 1964, he took over the affairs of Sam Cooke, a talented black soul singer then riding high on the twist craze. Klein negotiated an unheard-of million-dollar advance for Cooke from the RCA label against royalties which, unhappily, would never be earned. In December 1964, Cooke was shot to death in a lonely motel while with a lady other than his wife.
Klein’s failure to annexe the Beatles in 1964 he accounted but a momentary setback. He continued to boast that he would have Brian Epstein’s treasure, even setting the deadline as Christmas 1965. Meanwhile he applied himself to wooing the Beatles’ temporary chart rivals, a group of white-trousered Londoners called the Dave Clark Five. His next conquest was the young South African impresario Mickie Most, who had built up a roster of British groups such as the Animals and Herman’s Hermits.
His acquisition of the folk singer Donovan served as a foretaste of Klein’s awesome effect on the amateurish and ingenuous world of British pop management. Donovan, a gipsyish seventeen-year-old, had been discovered playing his guitar on the beach at Westcliff-on-Sea, and successfully launched by two young agents as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan. In 1965, Allen Klein decided he wanted Donovan, and flew to Britain in person. Within days, both of Donovan’s managers and his record label, Pye, had lost him forever. ‘Did I steal him from Pye? I stole him from Pye,’ Klein admitted afterwards. ‘But at that time, he didn’t even have a contract with them – or with Hickory in America.’
The British Invasion thus ceased to originate in London but became, as it were, short-circuited back to New York, into a lofty office suite in the Time-Life building, and a chunky thirty-two-year-old who smoked a statesmanlike pipe and quaffed inces
sant Coca-Cola, and who backed up his prodigious feats of mental arithmetic with portable file-cabinets, hauled incessantly back and forth across the Atlantic; whose hair was dressed with heavy oil, in defiance of all current fashions and whose favourite casual wear was woollen cardigans with mock leather facings.
The Rolling Stones met Allen Klein just a day or so after he had promised Andrew Loog Oldham a Rolls-Royce with darkened windows, exactly like the one owned by John Lennon. ‘We all went down with Andrew to the Hilton to meet him,’ Keith says. ‘In walks this little fat American geezer, smoking a pipe, wearing the most diabolical clothes. But we liked him. He made us laugh. And at least he was under fifty.’
Klein, at that one short meeting, managed to stoke up all the vague dissatisfaction the Stones felt over an income that remained so little commensurate with their success. It was Keith Richard who largely persuaded the others to go along with the deal that Oldham wanted to do with Klein. ‘I said we ought to try to turn everything around … to get right out of the cheapo English scene. Klein was big – he had the Animals and Herman’s Hermits, who were monster then. I said, “Let’s go along with someone who could turn everything round or fuck things up once and for all.”’
According to Keith’s biographer Barbara Charone, the deal was mostly worked out in the high-priced darkness of Scotch of St James’s. At one point, Klein barked across at Oldham, ‘Which one makes the records?’ Oldham pointed at Keith and said, ‘That one.’
The arrangement was that Klein should act as Oldham’s business manager, leaving Oldham free for creative activities, as he put it. Oldham would retain responsibility for the Stones’ recorded output and for the more outrageous of their publicity stunts. Contracts, tour schedules, all the mundane details connected with the millions he promised to reap, would be in the charge of Allen Klein.
The flaw in this strategy was Eric Easton, Oldham’s managerial partner, who had largely financed the Stones as a professional act and whose office in Argyll Street, W1, was their London base and mailing address for their official fan club. Klein had brusquely intimated that Easton had no part in the deal.
Easton was informed, with all the cavalierness available to his twenty-one-year-old partner, that the Stones no longer wanted him, and that Oldham and a new associate were prepared to buy out his contractual interest. His response was to start legal proceedings against Oldham for breach of their original management agreement, and against Klein for bringing out that breach. His first attempt to serve court papers on his young opponent was thwarted – Oldham simply turned and bolted like a rabbit. ‘You’ll have to accept them sooner or later, you naughty boy …’ Eric Easton called after him.
Klein’s approach to Oldham had been made with his customary impeccable timing. The Stones’ two-year contract with Decca had expired in July 1965 and by mid-August was still not fully renegotiated. The new royalty deal, about to be concluded by Easton and Oldham, would have given the Stones 24 per cent of the wholesale price, or about 4p per disc sold. The situation gave scope for a classic Klein move – the ‘let me prove myself before I take a cent’ ploy. He offered to intervene in the Decca deal before Oldham and the Stones had officially hired him, to show what infinitely better terms he could get for them.
Decca’s executives were amazed, at what they presumed to be the final discussion of the new contract with Eric Easton, to behold instead Allen Klein’s squat figure leading all five Stones into the conference room. Klein’s tactic on that occasion was Olympian hauteur. He flatly refused to discuss anything with anyone but Decca’s chairman, Sir Edward Lewis.
The subsequent encounter between Klein and Sir Edward by all accounts presented the distressing spectacle of an elderly English greyhound trying to dislodge a mongrel terrier from its jugular vein. The upshot was that Lewis, in return for keeping the Stones, agreed to part with $1.25 million in advance royalties. The money was to be paid via Decca’s US subsidiary into the Stones’ collective company, Nanker Phelge Music.
To fill Eric Easton’s role of booking agent for the Stones in Europe, Oldham nominated Tito Burns, a former dance-band leader whose organization was best known for handling Cliff Richard. Tito Burns, in fact, had known Andrew Loog Oldham in days long before he became a teenage tycoon. ‘I’d met him around 1960, when I was on holiday in Juan-les-Pins,’ Burns remembered. ‘We always used to go to an English café called Butler’s Tea Rooms. Andrew used to be a waiter there.’
Tito Burns was in California when he received the call to meet Oldham and Allen Klein in New York. ‘I’d first run across Allen a few years earlier when, right out of the blue, he offered me $25,000 for a little music-publishing company I’d started. I could never understand why he’d wanted it so much. He told me it was just to get any sort of foothold in the English scene.
‘I was in two minds whether to go up to New York and meet him, but eventually I did. As soon as I walked into the room, Allen barked across at me, “Howdya like to be the Rolling Stones’ agent?” “Not particularly,” I said.’
On August 28, the London Evening Standard reported that the Rolling Stones had a new manager, Allen Klein, and a new agent, Tito Burns. The story added that, under Klein’s supervision, the Stones were to make five feature films over a three-year period, mainly financed by their record company, Decca, whose chairman had outbid ‘two overseas companies’ for the privilege. The first of these films, provisionally entitled Only Lovers Left Alive, was said to be already at the scripting stage.
To Fleet Street’s pop music writers, the story made perfect sense. The Stones, propelled by their new American mentor, clearly were about to follow the Beatles’ path from Top Twenty to cinema box-office smash. Scarcely anyone bothered to report Decca’s subsequent indignant denial that they had agreed to finance five Rolling Stones films (although rights to a film and soundtrack album were included in the $1.25 million advance). Nor did anyone notice, as the months passed, that Only Lovers Left Alive – which was to have portrayed a devastated world, inhabited only by teenagers – seemed to hover at the scripting stage indefinitely.
The Stones accepted their destiny as film stars as they had accepted their two new protectors: without serious murmur or dissent. Tito Burns they remembered with vague goodwill for having said encouraging things to them after an early Albert Hall concert. ‘None of them ever gave me the slightest problem,’ Burns remembered. ‘It was all “’Ello, Teat,” or “See you later, Teat,” or “Sure, Teat, we won’t let you down.” And I can honestly say they never did. Charlie Watts, of course, used to sit and talk to me for hours about jazz and my days with the big bands.’
Only one feature of the new arrangement slightly puzzled Tito Burns. On the Stones’ next European tour he had strict instructions from Allen Klein to receive all concert earnings in person and pay them directly not into the Stones’ English bank account but into a company in Delaware, USA.
The first that New York heard of Allen Klein’s takeover was a hundred-foot-high Times Square billboard showing David Bailey’s album-sleeve portrait of the Stones in a blow-up 60 feet by 40 and bearing an inscription whose author could easily be guessed even before he himself appeared below it, staring up proudly through tinted glasses, along with numerous baffled Broadway citizens.
‘The sound, face and mind of today,’ ran Andrew Loog Oldham’s message to New York, ‘is more relative to the hope of tomorrow and the reality of destruction than the blind who cannot see their children for fear and division. Something that grew and related. Five reflections of today’s children. The Rolling Stones.’
Oldham’s new partner had insisted that a Stones album be rush-released in America only to absorb all possible benefit from the lingering aftershock of Satisfaction. The Times Square billboard was an Allen Klein device already employed on behalf of the late Sam Cooke. The album, December’s Children, was much less spectacular: a cobbled-together set of earlier LP tracks and studio out-takes which – as Keith was heard to mutter discontentedly – they would n
ever have dared foist on their British public.
All their music press poll awards and gold and silver discs had not lessened the pressure to stay ahead of other groups in the ceaseless scramble for the next Top Twenty hit. Their third British album, Out of Our Heads, though a vivid enough sample of the Stones’ developing fondness for soul music (most notably in a version of Sam Cooke’s Good Times), contained nothing as strong as Satisfaction. It was thus dismissed as ‘samey and boring’ by music papers like Disc whose lofty teenage pronouncements even Mick Jagger took as gospel. Disc insinuated, so it must be true, that the Rolling Stones were starting to slip.
‘It’s difficult to realize what pressure we were under to keep on turning out hits,’ Keith says. ‘Each single you made in those days had to be better and do better. If the next one didn’t do as well as the last one, everyone told you you were sliding out. After Satisfaction, we all thought, “Wow – lucky us. Now for a good rest …” and then in comes Andrew saying, “Right, where’s the next one?” It got to be a state of mind. Every eight weeks, you had to come up with a red-hot song that said it all in two minutes, thirty seconds.’
The new single, Get Off of My Cloud, was an upbeat dancer, with chords cribbed unashamedly from Twist and Shout, and a lyric – bawled by Jagger purposely in double time – which must represent the earliest attempt to infiltrate the British Top Ten with marijuana smoke. The vision of sitting ‘on the 99th floor … imagining the world had stopped’ and of a little flying man ‘dressed up like a Union Jack’ evoked all the apparently hilarious and harmless sensations of ‘highs’ as they were in 1966. One could write and sing about such things in absolute safety in a time when, to most English people, ‘stoned’ still meant tipsy; and even the starchy panellists on Juke Box Jury could be seen jigging up and down in delighted agreement with Bob Dylan’s exhortation that ‘everybody must get stoned …’
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 17
