A Prince Among Stones (12 page)

Going shopping for lawyers in New York I found hilariously funny. I had been given a number of names of large law firms in the city. As I contacted each of them I realised that this must represent an important piece of future business for them. Although I was new to the entertainment industry, I was not being put off by any of the law firms and all the meetings that were set up were with their most senior partners. Perhaps I may be being a little naïve about myself. I think the Americans were amused, maybe even amazed, to meet somebody with a name like mine, and therefore were interested to see what on earth this strange person was like.

In my own way I imagine I was as alien a being to them as the Stones initially were to me. Many people I came across were completely thrown by how they should address me. Over the years Josephine collected some excellent examples of misspellings and wayward appellations, which she would swap with Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire. One I particularly recall was being dubbed ‘the Orince', which my son Konrad thereafter used to call me for many a long year.

However, my unusual appellation was not the sole reason. I soon understood that the primary reason those senior partners were keen to arrange meetings with me was because they knew that there was money to be made in this field. Which, at the time, the British did
not
realise. Even the stuffiest of New York's lawyers did not want to turn down something which might prove to be a major source of income – and a few of the very bright ones were convinced that it would happen.

Popular music has always made a lot of money in America; the lawyers were well aware of the amounts of money involved and thought that a large chunk of that really ought to come to them. Whereas the English lawyers – who were paying the vast rate of tax in force at the time – could not be bothered to become involved with something which they considered not at all lucrative and therefore unduly troublesome.

This brings one to an important distinction between American and British lawyers. British lawyers at the time certainly would never have tried to be managers and involve themselves in taking a role which they were not trained for or not able to do, whereas in America lawyers, like the Eastmans, were already taking on those responsibilities.

The American lawyers were far more aware of the realities of the music industry, and hence keen to work with us. Most of them would have been happy to take on the work involved, but to employ them would have cost the Stones a vast amount of money.

In London at the time even senior partners could not charge much more than £50 an hour (in 1969 figures), whereas the American firms would have put five partners on the job each charging an average of $500 a day, plus expenses. If one had gone to the American equivalent of leading law firms like Freshfields or Slaughter and May, they would have put batteries of lawyers on it and the expenses would have been astronomical.

I realised that one had to be particularly careful with American lawyers because the list of lawyers whom one thought of as the best were prohibitively expensive, whereas those who were smaller and the ones who had music industry talents were at least available at an affordable rate.

Meanwhile, my partners in Leopold Joseph were rightly concerned as I appeared to be spending all my time on the work with the Stones with no charge. I was not even charging for the very frequent, and costly, trips to America which took up a lot of my time. It was all pure outgoings, with nothing to show on the income side – and in the event I was not able to send a bill to the Stones until 1972, three years after actively starting work on their affairs.

Despite the complications of the contractual arrangements, nonetheless I remained intrigued by the whole situation. My gut feeling was that in the end I would be able to prevail. Just as in a game of chess when at any given point the next move may determine whether you are going to win or lose, I could look ahead and see how the pieces might be moved successfully.

I did not think that we were necessarily going to make a huge amount of money, but I did think I was going to gain the Stones their liberty from Decca and therefore that they would be free to negotiate a new contract, which was key. Moreover, I believed that Leopold Joseph would secure a reasonable fee from the future earnings of the masters and the copyrights which the Stones had sold – most disadvantageously – to Allen Klein.

As far as the past earnings were concerned I knew there was a risk that I might not be able to achieve any improvement, since it was clear that when the Stones had signed the bewildering mass of contracts they had been represented and advised by lawyers and that, as the old American saying had it, they were ‘free, white and twenty-one', in other words masters of their own destiny, free to do as they pleased. I knew from the very early days of our investigations that this was the case. That knowledge, which was very depressing, was the advantage of having read every one of those seemingly endless documents. But it also made it clear that new commissions could be made for work they had not yet done during the early contract period.

How much money could be received from taking a larger share of what came in to Klein's companies depended on what the final summing-up would be by the lawyers and the arbitrator. I had settled on the law firm run by Harold Orenstein, an entertainment lawyer who had done extensive work in the area of copyright law, especially with the Broadway composer Frank Loesser. Harold Orenstein and his partner had just hired a bright young litigator, Peter Parcher, who in turn found us a first-class arbitrator, Lloyd Cutler, a senior partner of an extremely powerful Washington firm. Allen Klein had nominated as his lawyer Max Freund, of a well-known firm, who was an excellent, indeed fearsome, opponent. The legal battle would be long.

The shadow falling over my ability to negotiate a good deal was if Klein's arbitrators could show that the Stones had not been forthright about the work that they had ‘in whole or in part' performed during the period that they had signed up with Klein. This came to light for us when the arbitration had already started.

To extract the band from Decca required delicate negotiations. Decca were as unhappy with the Stones as the band were with Decca. The head of Decca was Sir Edward Lewis, an Establishment figure who had played an important role with radar during the war. He viewed the Rolling Stones with the same distaste as my partners in Leopold Joseph. Decca were amazed that the group sold so many records. The company did not understand rock music. Having famously turned down the Beatles and allowed them to be signed by EMI, though, they had been determined not to miss out on the Stones.

Against this the Stones did not see why they had to explain their position, or even discuss what songs they might or might not have written while under contract to Decca. They believed they had a God-given gift to write songs which people liked to listen to and watch being performed, and how dare other people have any title whatsoever to their craft? I and the lawyers had to point out that whatever their emotional feelings about that craft, they were in terms of the law wrong, and that the law alas was right.

The documents covering their publishing deal stated that the Rolling Stones were tied up for their copyrights covering all the work they had done, or
had started but not finished
. This latter was the critical point as any demos or half-finished scraps of songs would be considered to fall under the existing deal.

We were dealing with Mr Rowe of Rowe and Moore representing Decca: established, old-fashioned solicitors, very bright. The early meetings were difficult, because they resisted very strongly having to show their documents to anybody else. I wrote many letters to Mr Rowe to which he never replied.

The specialist tax lawyer at Theodore Goddard, a Mrs Stacey, was absolutely brilliant, and she accompanied me to a meeting with Rowe and Moore. I asked Mr Rowe, ‘One thing has always disturbed me. Why did you never answer these letters?' ‘Mrs Stacey will inform you,' he said, ‘that we are not legally bound to answer your letters.' The prospect of a resolution looked unlikely.

This was exacerbated when the band's friend Marshall Chess – from the Chess Records family in Chicago – came to a meeting at Decca with Sir Edward Lewis. Sir Edward asked Marshall Chess, ‘I imagine you know the details of the state of the work the Rolling Stones were doing.' ‘Oh yes,' said Marshall. ‘You've got the complete list.' As we walked back across the bridge opposite the Decca building following the meeting, Marshall suddenly started hooting with laughter. ‘There's a huge amount of songs we've not talked about!'

Mrs Stacey and I were horrified. We had to ring Mick and the others and spell out in no uncertain terms that all of the negotiations would have to be changed because we would have to go back to Decca and tell them there was more unfinished work, in which they had rights. It also made the litigation with Allen Klein even harder.

During the British revenue case, when the group's earnings were under scrutiny, the Revenue's very able litigator thought he saw the basis for a large contractual sum due to the Stones on which they had not been taxed. My answer to this was that I much admired the Revenue's meticulous examination of the records but that the Stones themselves and their lawyers' accountants had also tried to find this sum but to no avail!

It was not easy to see where one could have changed things. The Inland Revenue performed a special audit, and they were equally mystified by all the contracts that they had seen and believed that there must have been more money involved.

I remember appearing before the Revenue enquiry, and having to give evidence. The prosecutor for the Inland Revenue was a very civil man, who said, ‘Well, there's all the money that was paid by the publishing, they must have got that, surely this contract allows for it?' I answered, ‘No, I can assure you that I've looked at that matter very, very carefully and I was as amazed as you are to find no money had arisen from it. Oddly enough I and the Revenue are as one on this matter, and I only wish you had asked Mr Klein what it means.'

There was laughter in court, but it was a very serious matter. Not only did the Stones have no money, but they were in danger of being sued by the Inland Revenue and put, as it were, in the spiritual equivalent of the Marshalsea, the old debtors' prison in Southwark made famous by Dickens, whose father had been sent there.

What had also become apparent to me was that the band would have to abandon their UK residence. If they did not do this, they could be paying between 83 and 98 per cent of their profits in British income tax and surtax.

Mick had appeared as an actor in Nick Roeg's film
Performance
and was now out on location in Australia, having been signed up to act in the title role of Tony Richardson's
Ned Kelly
.

Mick called me from Australia and asked me, ‘What shall we do?' I had reached a critical juncture. A week or so before I had explained what I had uncovered, that there would be long and unpleasant litigation to go through in order to extricate the band from the various contracts. This in itself would entail three sets of fees, the American lawyers', the British lawyers' and my own. It was a difficult decision for him to make, and he felt nervous about making the plunge. However, I now needed him to decide, as, if he did not wish to take my advice, I would have to walk away and leave him to sort out the mess alone.

‘My advice is contained in four words,' I told him. ‘Drop Klein and out.' By ‘out' I meant ‘leave the country'. Mick had been unwilling to make a break with Allen Klein until he knew what was going to happen. But now I had to underscore that there was simply no choice. ‘Drop Klein and out. You've got to do that. You must either say yes or no.' He said, ‘Yes', and so everything started from there.

Once the decision had been made to move out of the country for tax reasons, we had to find a suitable location. I felt strongly that it should not be far away. The Stones always struck me as a very English band, and, despite Mick and Keith's recent trip to Brazil, I did not think anywhere too far-flung would suit them.

I selected the South of France for that very reason: it was the easiest place for English people to go. I had thought of all the places where, taxwise, it would be convenient, certainly Ireland, also Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy. Ireland might have been suitable as a destination, but I felt not as sure taxwise, nor was I convinced that living there would be sufficient to overcome the residency requirements. And it was far too early to contemplate the band settling in America. It would never have worked.

There were a number of reasons why I thought the South of France would be appropriate. I knew the region very well from my childhood and had spent much time there subsequently.

After settling on France, I worked hard through my connections to organise a suitable place to live. To assist me in that, I consulted the senior French lawyer Maître Jean Michard-Pellissier and asked him to negotiate the French tax position. There were two well-known international lawyers in Paris at this time, the brilliant René de Chambrun (a descendant of Lafayette who married Pierre Laval's daughter Josée), and the equally talented Michard-Pellissier.

Alexis de Redé had introduced me to Maître Michard-Pellissier. He was a close friend of the Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, and had been the lawyer for Henri Charrière, of
Papillon
fame. I had used him on some earlier business deals, and he seemed ideal for the delicate negotiations required to come to an arrangement to define the financial basis with the authorities in the
département
of the Alpes-Maritimes; there was a lot of work to be done behind the scenes so that the artists could live in comfort in a foreign country.