A Prince Among Stones (13 page)

Maître Michard-Pellissier dealt directly with the
préfet
for the Alpes-Maritimes. A deal was struck with the Alpes-Maritimes authorities whereby the Stones were allowed to reside and only had to pay a negotiated income tax (this arrangement later blew up when the drug problems reared their ugly head with Keith and Anita, and we had to hold extraordinary meetings, like something from a Fernandel farce, with the authorities and the police in Nice).

By and large the South of France was the right place because we knew people on whom we could rely regarding the taxation side. In those days, full exchange controls existed and it was most important to have this sorted out at the beginning of their residence if they later wished to leave.

Sam White, the
Evening Standard
's Paris correspondent, broke the story in October 1970. ‘The Rolling Stones, I understand, are discussing a plan to emigrate to France – physically and financially. The whole move is rightly shrouded in the kind of secrecy reserved for major financial operations.'

Once we had made the decision to decamp to France, I had people who could look for houses and villas for each of the band. They, sometimes with the Stones' various girlfriends and wives, or their secretaries, went on reconnaissance visits, to draw up a shortlist of suitable properties.

Charlie Watts still has the house he bought then, and Bill Wyman kept his for a long time. I told all the band that they should buy the houses freehold. Charlie and Bill listened to my advice, but unfortunately Mick and Keith chose not to. Mick decided not to buy a house, which in retrospect was short-sighted. Keith could have converted the rental deal he had on the house that he and Anita chose – the fabulous Nellcôte, high up above the bay at Villefranche – into a purchase but never did. At that stage the property might have been available for no more than £30,000 or £40,000.

With the assistance of the band's mobile recording van, which had driven down from London, Nellcôte became the location for the recording of the next Stones album.

I spent that period flying down to Nice on a regular basis – in those days flying was still a pleasure – and heading up to see the band from my hotel to discuss ongoing matters.

On one trip as I was about to leave Nice Airport, and was with Mick and Keith and one or two of the others, I suddenly looked at the French police in the way that the Stones must always have looked at them. I had always naturally viewed the police as people who would be there to help one if there was any unpleasantness and to keep the drug pushers away. But suddenly I saw them through Mick and Keith's eyes as a threatening presence and I realised how appalling that might become.

When I needed to see the group, I saw them. Alan Dunn, Mick's Leporello, and the other personal assistants always arranged the time for our meetings, and made sure that the band members would be available. I was there for business. I had no interest in going down to the makeshift studio in the basement of Nellcôte, where the sessions for the new album were rumbling on.

That new album in due course became
Exile On Main Street
, which may be one of the few top-selling albums, if not the only one, to contain a reference to tax planning in the title.

6

 

 

 

‘Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.'

 

Tennessee Williams

 

 

 

Very early on, because of Allen Klein on the one hand and Ahmet Ertegun on the other, I spent a great deal of time travelling to America, attempting to disentangle the Stones from Klein and to
en
tangle them with Ahmet's company, Atlantic Records. As the Stones' existing contracts drew to an end in 1970–71 there was an increasing urgency to clarify our rights and a definition of what, if any, ABKCO and Decca Records would still possess.

It was Ahmet Ertegun who really precipitated the time constraints. The band had recorded the best part of what was going to be their first record for him and Atlantic Records, and Ahmet was keen on releasing it. Since Atlantic had advanced some money for that record, which would eventually be
Sticky Fingers
, we had to come to a compromise with Allen Klein and Decca to know what, if anything, were their rights on masters and copyrights. As can be imagined, this affected us in many ways. I thought to myself that a really shrewd man like Ahmet was not going to be keen, really keen, to make friends with all of us unless he could see genuine potential.

I had first met Ahmet Ertegun at a dinner party given by the fashion designer Hardy Amies. Driving home I said to Josephine, ‘I was so pleased to meet Ahmet.' And she asked, ‘Are you talking about the man with the beard?' ‘Yes.' She said, ‘I thought your interest and the fact that you were talking to him so much was that you thought he was an Öttingen', who are an important Bavarian princely family. And I said, ‘No he's not an Öttingen, he's an Ertegun, a Turk in New York', whose father had been sent by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1935 to be the first ambassador to the United States for the recently created Republic of Turkey.

Ahmet Ertegun was one of the few people that one could say had a happy life. Most people encounter some major problem in their life which they have to overcome. Some succeed, some do not. Ahmet was always happy, cheerful and perfectly in keeping with the American concepts that everybody can try and do something for themselves, and that you never know whether you are going to succeed, but it's worth the risk.

To start the company, Ahmet had borrowed $10,000 from his family dentist and launched Atlantic Records in 1947 as a label initially concentrating on R&B and jazz. Atlantic proved to be extremely successful; Ahmet made a lot of friends and a lot of money. And he deserved both.

When I first talked to Mick he told me that he and the rest of the band had met Ahmet Ertegun and that Atlantic could be an interesting company for them to sign to, especially as it was an American rather than a British company. Of course, I was delighted to hear this because it would provide an additional reason for them to leave England.

After meeting Ahmet we set about working out the contractual details. Having a record company in place, who were extremely helpful, was a great advantage and from my own point of view I learnt a great deal from my involvement in so many lawsuits. Atlantic Records and all their lawyers were only too pleased to help me and teach me what was normal, and not normal, record industry practice. It was the steepest of learning curves, and an extremely good training that would stand me in very good stead in the years to come.

What none of us anticipated was that we would be engaged in litigation for the next eighteen years. I had thought it might take perhaps three or four years to work through all the contractual problems. Allen Klein had, of course, worked out that from his point of view the longer everything dragged on the better, and he knew that he could make difficulties both by not paying the royalties that were due to the Stones and by saying that certain masters and copyrights belonged to him.

One of my problems was that I was not able to send the Stones a bill for my time until an initial settlement with Allen Klein was achieved, agreed and signed off, and any cash due was paid over to the band by Klein. I was working very hard to achieve that, and I was still working for Leopold Joseph. My partners in the bank were saying, perfectly reasonably, ‘Rupert, you cannot spend all your time working on this, and travelling to America, if you don't get our fees paid.' However, if there was a chance that we would ever receive any money, I had to see to it that the Stones received at least some of the money from royalties and earnings to which we believed they were entitled, but this was entirely dependent on reaching a settlement with Klein.

In those early days there was a risk that there would never be any money. I knew that Atlantic would be putting out the next record, and so, as was usual with them, they paid for the expenses of managers while they were in America: the cost of cars and taxis would be covered, but the hotel bills and the travel to and from the States were all being paid for by Leopold Joseph.

Ahmet Ertegun made two valuable contributions to our ongoing battle with Klein. He made the point to Allen Klein that he, Ahmet, was there, that he was going to fund the Stones and that in his view it would be far better for Klein to leave gracefully rather than stir up an enormous amount of fuss. Ahmet also introduced me to an attorney, Mickey Rubin, Frank Sinatra's lawyer. But even with Mickey Rubin's involvement, the litigation crept painfully forwards.

Fortunately I managed to negotiate a satisfactory contract with Allen Klein at the end of a meeting in May 1972. This took place in the offices of our New York lawyers on Broadway, started in the late afternoon and finished at breakfast the next day.

I recently discovered, among the boxes and cartons of papers related to the Klein litigation, a paper I had prepared as a detailed briefing document a couple of months in advance: twelve pages of analysis on tightly typed foolscap paper which I entitled ‘Prolegomena on ABKCO/Stones Settlement'.

‘We are not all that far apart on settlement terms,' I wrote. ‘It is therefore consequently feasible that a settlement may be reached but further pressure may have to be applied.' That pressure could, I suggested, come from the Stones themselves and perhaps Atlantic, pointing out that Klein's ability to keep his clients, let alone to get new ones, would be severely endangered even if he won the lawsuit, since the case would disclose exactly how much profit he was taking for himself.

During the negotiations that May evening Mick and Keith went out and had dinner and brought back some dancing girls into these very correct lawyers' offices where the negotiations were underway. This vastly lightened the proceedings.

I was installed in one of the offices with Allen Klein and our respective key lawyers, with further lawyers in other offices waiting to be called in as required. Occasionally the noise of the party and all the fun that Mick, Keith and the girls were having wafted in from the room that they had commandeered. During the course of the evening Ahmet Ertegun dropped by and chatted to us all. Robert Frank, who was filming a documentary (which later emerged as
Cocksucker Blues
), was also part of the entourage swirling around the detailed, delicate, intensive and important discussions I was trying to guide to a conclusion.

At one point Allen Klein and I were left alone. He immediately started rifling through the drawers of a desk and found an internal memo itemising the fees that the partner was going to charge us. He was absolutely delighted by this discovery, and made a point of showing me those charges he thought were particularly juicy. It was typical of his cheek and bravado. We never became friends – the matters we were arguing over were far too serious and antagonistic for that – but we established a strange kind of rapport over the years of our seemingly endless legal wrangles.

At eight in the morning we reached an agreement. I went out to have breakfast at my hotel with Diego Del Vayo – the son of the Spanish Republic's foreign minister in the 1930s, and one of the most amusing people I have met. At one of Ahmet and his wife Mica's parties Diego, a stockbroker, was talking about various shares and the state of the market. Ahmet said, ‘Stop talking about these stocks and shares. I invested $20,000 in a stock you were pushing three weeks ago, called Liquidometer, and I realised you had sold the shares at a loss of $15,000. Call that good stockbroking?' Diego pushed up his glasses, and replied, ‘Ahmet, please remember that I lost much more money for people that I like!'

So Diego and I headed off for breakfast where both Mick and Keith joined us. The breakfast lasted a good couple of hours. We were in celebratory mood, because, although we had had to make a few concessions, the key result was that we had got some money. I had set myself the goal of extracting one million dollars from Klein's pocket and we had come away with more.

The key objective had been satisfactorily dealt with. The Rolling Stones were now free to record for a company of their choice and the sum they obtained would be greater than their old contractual commissions which had been withheld pending negotiations. They did not preclude us from future litigation since Klein found point after point of increasing triviality which had to be put before the New York courts and the federal courts. In the case against them and the Inland Revenue there were law suits spread over seventeen years.

In general I have kept my friends separate from the people I do business with, but from the outset Ahmet Ertegun and I got on very well and we became great friends. Josephine was equally fond of him and we sought out each other's company whenever we were in the same place. We stayed with Ahmet and Mica at their houses in New York, at Southampton on Long Island, and at Bodrum in Turkey. He had also taken a house for several years in Barbados which we often visited, and from there we would often fly over by small plane to see Mustique, which also became a regular part of our lives.

The island of Mustique had been bought in the early 1960s by Colin Tennant, a cousin of Josephine's and the brother of James, who gave the dinner where Josephine and I first properly met. Colin spent a substantial amount of money developing the infrastructure of the island and by presenting one of the houses to Princess Margaret, as a wedding present, took a significant step in making Mustique an amusing and entertaining spot.