Allen Klein (Daily Mail, July 2009)

            Whenever screenwriters create a fictional ogre of a rock and roll manager, there is one person they nearly always turn to for inspiration---Allen Klein, the man who once managed both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and who died of Alzheimer’s disease in New York on Saturday.
            Certainly an element in the Beatles’ break-up, frequently loathed by record companies, and, let’s be honest, by quite a number of his clients when they were leaving him, Klein’s reputation in the late Sixties and early Seventies was fearsome.
            It was, however, a legend he enjoyed, having on his desk a plaque based on the 23rd Psalm, which read:“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for I am the biggest  motherfucker in the valley.”
            Well, I don’t know about the valley, but he was certainly the biggest manager in rock music in the world for a while, and though he once told me he really would like to be considered a nice guy, that was always pretty unlikely. Nice was not a word that would have sat comfortably on the shoulders of this no-necked, roughly spoken New York accountant, who had in his employ a couple of the roughest looking goons I ever met.
            “Why don’t you like me, Bill,” Klein would ask Rolling Stones’ bass guitarist Bill Wyman, as the Stones were being driven to distraction trying to get their hands on the money they’d earned, but which their manager was holding for them in his New York company.
            “Because I don’t trust you, Allen,” would come the unblinking reply.
            It’s unlikely Klein was offended. “Hey, Allen why does no one like you?” he told me Paul McCartney had asked him.
            His answer was that he didn’t have friends in show business or belong to the Variety Club. His job was to fight for his clients.
            And fight for them he did. He forced record companies to give artists both control and ownership of their records, which was unprecedented at the time but is current practise now. He demanded huge advances for artists, too, and, most painful for the record companies, he insisted that they went back and re-audited their books, where they would nearly always discover album sales, and therefore royalties, that had somehow slipped through the accounting net.
            Unfortunately for some of the artists, however, he also did terrific deals for himself with the result that most of the biggest Rolling Stones hits are now owned not by them but by ABKCO, one of his companies.
            All those old Sixties Stones records we hear all the time continue to generate healthy incomes annually, and Klein got doubly lucky when in 1997 The Verve sampled a violin orchestration used on a recording of the Stones hit The Last Time, and turned it into the worldwide hit and Grammy nominee Bitter Sweet Symphony.
            The Verve wanted the royalties, but so did Klein. He had to go to court to get the money, but he won. Of course he did. He was Allen Klein. He was tough.
            But then his background had been tough. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1931, his mother died of cancer when he was nine months old, and from the age of four until he was twelve he lived in a Hebrew orphanage.
            Aggressively ambitious, he worked his way through college studying accountancy and then law, then quickly realised that there was a gap in the market for a hard faced, no-nonsense guy like him.
            Artists were being ripped off by the record companies in those almost piratical roller coaster early days of rock music. “All those guys who sold a lot of records thought they had money,” he told me, “but they didn’t really. At least they didn’t end up with it.”   
            He was a very quick and a very smooth talker, with his unmanicured New York accent, wavy, greasy hair and unflattering turtle neck silk sweaters. (He could never wear wool next to his skin, he said, because in the orphanage he’d had to wear woollen underpants and he’d never got over it.) And sitting a client down he would do little sums on a pad showing them how much money was being stolen from them.
            In Britain we only really became aware of Klein when the Rolling Stones’ first manager Andrew Loog Oldham suddenly sold the group to him , without consulting them. Already involved in a minor way with the Dave Clark Five, the Animals and the Kinks, Klein’s business reputation had been built on clients that included Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, and, most notably, the great Sam Cooke.
            Very quickly the Rolling Stones regretted Oldham’s decision, but not soon enough for John Lennon. On learning of the royalty deal that Klein had arranged for the Stones with Decca Records, Lennon decided, following the death of Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, that Klein was the man for him.
            Unfortunately Paul McCartney wanted his father-in-law Lee Eastman, also a New York lawyer, to manage the Beatles. Battle lines between Lennon and McCartney, who were already disagreeing over Yoko Ono’s involvement in Beatle affairs, were further deepened.
            For his part, it has to be acknowledged that Klein played Lennon perfectly, being as knowledgeable as any fan about every single Beatle recording before they even met, and then stressing that Yoko’s music was just as relevant as the Beatles. He and Lennon, he reminded, even shared the loss of a mother.
            “I’m down to my last fifty thousand,” Lennon told an amused Press in 1969, explaining why Klein was needed to run the Beatles’ affairs. He wasn’t, but as Klein pointed out, the Beatles were nowhere near as rich as the public thought them to be.
            “And I don’t want to see Ringo playing the Northern working men’s clubs to survive when he’s in his sixties,” Lennon would tell me. Little could he have imagined that when he reached 68 Ringo would be supplementing his £120 million fortune doing adverts for the Norwich Union.
            McCartney stuck his heels in, but George Harrison and Ringo sided with John. They signed with Klein. And as Mick Jagger failed to tell them of his misgivings, Klein took control of Beatles affairs, immediately sacking staff who’d been with them since Liverpool in an unsentimental cost-cutting exercise.
            But it wasn’t all profit. He also, as his legions of enemies have always been quick to point out, immediately also lost himself and the Beatles a new fortune, when Peter Asher, who ran their Apple record company, resigned in protest, taking with him his then unknown protégé James Taylor.
            That said, at first, Klein did well for the Beatles, and even Paul McCartney must have had to bite his tongue when the American manager manoeuvred EMI into granting them the biggest royalty any artists had ever been paid at that time.
            But even for John Lennon the love affair with Klein didn’t last. Although it was Klein who put him together with Phil Spector for the Imagine album, a few years later all the Beatles were united in a legal battle to sever their connection with him.
            And Lennon being Lennon, he couldn’t resist the chance to put his feelings about his former manager into a song, Steel and Glass. “Your teeth are clean but your mind is capped, You leave your smell like an alley cat,” he sang. Klein’s reaction went unrecorded.
            Exactly how much of Klein’s reputation was earned and how much exaggerated only the artists he represented and their accountants will know. Recently May Pang, John Lennon’s “Lost Fortnight” mistress, who met Lennon when she was working as a secretary for Klein, told me that Klein “wasn’t as bad they said”, adding that he’d softened in his old age. He couldn’t have got much harder.
            And yesterday his publicist spoke of him as a great New York philanthropist, giving fortunes to many children’s charities. He undoubtedly must have had fortunes available to give.
            What Klein never knew was that when writing the film Stardust I originally based the character of the dodgy rock manager on him. At the time this character was to be played by fellow New Yorker Tony Curtis. But then Curtis dropped out due to a money disagreement and was replaced by Larry Hagman, which meant I had to rewrite the character as a Texan. In all his wildest dreams I can’t imagine Allen Klein, who was never a looker, ever expected to find himself the role model for a Tony Curtis character.
            “Do you still not trust me?” Klein said to me during an interview all those years ago.
            Not really. Not at that time, anyway.
            But then a rock and roll manager wouldn’t have been a rock and roll manager if you’d trusted him.

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