A Prince Among Stones (18 page)

In the legal presentations we had concentrated on the fact that (and I remember the phrase that I thought of) rich people tend to buy ten packets of Cornflakes for their kitchen cupboard in one go, and could then buy more as was needed, but you would never say that they were dealing in Cornflakes. This was the same thing: a rich man had bought a lot of heroin for his personal use because he thought the price was good. The argument may have helped, but it was a very dicey moment.

The suggestion was made that Keith should play a benefit concert; the judge and our lawyers agreed to this as part of the negotiations. The concert was to raise money for the Canadian Institute of the Blind. Keith remarked, ‘Why not a concert for the deaf . . . ?'

We always had to be very careful every time we crossed a frontier. In certain countries, like Japan, being caught with drugs would mean instant prison, so we could not be even the slightest bit relaxed. We had to speak to all the security people, and the heads of every department in the tour party and stress time and again, ‘For God's sake, see that there are no drugs in anybody's luggage.'

My view was that if somebody wanted to take too much alcohol and too many drugs once they were an adult, that was their choice and their life, but what I was most concerned about was the illegality and the possibility of a drugs arrest stopping a tour.

8

 

 

‘They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself'

 

Andy Warhol

 

 

 

The incident with Keith and the drugs charges in Canada seemed to mark – or perhaps underscore – a perceptible shift in the dynamics within the band. There was certainly a sense of change in the air.

Keith's bust, and the prospect of a spell in prison, was undoubtedly a factor in his own growing up. When I had first seen him after the news broke, it was not in any way an uncomfortable meeting, because he knew that I was going to be involved in trying to work things out for him, to resolve a very awkward situation. He was not particularly apologetic about what had happened – if at all – not that I was expecting or asking him to be. That was his business. But he had a very human attitude to what might occur: he was going to have to get used to the fact that he was no longer a riotous youth but a serious adult. Certainly the very real threat to his ability to make music as part of the Rolling Stones would have sobered him up. Music was always, and still is, his first mistress.

At this time Keith's relationship with Anita Pallenberg was nearing its end. I had known Anita from the first days that I started working with the band. She was the descendant of the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin on the paternal side of the family (her father, Arnaldo, was also an artist), and through her German mother, Paula Wiederhold, she was descended from one of the great German actors. Indeed, when I met her she looked set for a significant film career, having already appeared in Roger Vadim's
Barbarella
, and in Donald Cammell and Nick Roeg's
Performance
alongside Mick.

But she was gravely obsessed with heroin – to such a degree that even Keith could not take it. At least, that is what I thought. It is, of course, remarkable that they both survived those years. Shortly after the Toronto bust and its aftermath, Keith and Anita had gone through a further drama, when a teenage boy shot himself in the head at the house that she and Keith shared in upstate New York; Keith was recording in a studio in Paris at the time. The press was full of wild rumours. These were clearly troubled times for them and effectively marked the end of their life as a couple.

Keith then formed a relationship with the model Patti Hansen, a beautiful girl, eventually marrying her in 1983, on his fortieth birthday, with Mick as best man. Patti had grown up in Staten Island and came from Norwegian stock, a family of respectable God-fearing, Bible-reading Scandinavians. She brought, I felt, some much needed stability into Keith's life.

Mick was also going through a major change in his own life.

He and Bianca were getting divorced after seven years of marriage. They had got married in May 1971 in the town hall at St Tropez during the recording sessions for
Exile On Main Street
, although I had not attended the wedding. This was a strategic decision since I had worked for Mick on what in French is called the
séparation des biens
, whereby both parties keep their own assets in the event of divorce. I thought it better that I should not even be present at the wedding. I did not wish to compromise myself if I ever had to be involved in the drafting of such documents. I stayed away. Josephine, however, did go, riding in a convertible with Stephen Stills to head into the media scrum that surrounded the ceremony and the reception.

Thus it was that, following their separation, when I sat down with Bianca to arrange their settlement I said to her – as indeed I would to Jerry Hall two decades later – ‘I have to make it clear to you that as far as this business is concerned I am Mick's man. I am not your man, and therefore you must speak to your own lawyer about anything that I suggest to you because I am trying to do the best that I can for Mick.' It was fairest on both parties, I thought, to be totally frank and open about this from the outset.

‘However,' I said, ‘I do have a proposal for you here which is that you should ask a close friend of yours whom you trust to discuss these matters with me, because it is possible that we could resolve this whole problem first, only going to lawyers when the financial terms have been worked out. If you go to the lawyers sooner you will both be taught to hate each other. This is the downside of Anglo-Saxon adversarial justice.'

Bianca replied, ‘You don't understand what I want. I want to kick him where it hurts –
in the money
!' ‘Funnily enough,' I said, ‘what I am suggesting to you is a better arrangement than what you would get from the lawyers. You will be in a far stronger position if you can keep friendly relations going. Whereas you won't otherwise.'

She was simply not interested. My advice fell on very deaf ears, and, sure enough, things were extremely difficult after the divorce. Mick and Bianca could hardly bear to speak to each other, and when much later on their daughter, Jade, held an exhibition of her paintings, although they both attended the launch event they stood in opposite corners of the gallery. They were unable to treat each other civilly for years, nor to discuss the financial separation terms which were tougher on Bianca than mine would have been, and without which they most probably would have been able to maintain their friendship.

I had always appreciated the fact that Bianca was ravishingly pretty, and yet she often acted like a child if she was in company, in that way she had of appearing to dress entirely for herself, completely at odds with the overall tenor of the lunch or dinner party. It was obvious that this was a deliberate choice on her part, to shock or draw attention to herself. Conversations with Bianca at these events were always somewhat limited: she conveyed her thoughts in an odd blend of Spanish, a little French and semi-incomprehensible English.

However, away from social occasions she was quite different. When Josephine and I were on Mustique for Colin Tennant's fiftieth birthday party in 1977, long before we bought a house there, we were parked with Mick and Bianca at their villa. What Bianca enjoyed doing most was sitting chatting with the Spanish-speaking servants about the fish and other household affairs. There was also talk at the time that she was having an affair with Roddy Llewellyn, who was in Princess Margaret's entourage. She refuted this idea point blank. ‘Non,' she said. ‘Not even Haslam can have him!'

I had been at Steve Rubell's New York Studio 54, during its brief flare of fame – the club, on West 54th Street, lasted less than three years – on the night that Bianca was photographed on the back of a white horse at a party to celebrate her twenty-seventh birthday. Rather than riding the horse into the club as the subsequent urban legend always insisted, she pointed out that the horse was brought in as a surprise, and she briefly sat on it wearing a long red dress by Halston. The shot of that moment by the photographer Rose Hartman inadvertently fuelled the myth that she had appeared in the club like some latter-day Lady Godiva. She had, however, made an entrée into at least one event in Mustique on the back of Colin Tennant's pet elephant, Bupa.

Mick was now involved with Jerry Hall, who had become a major influence in particular on his attitude to the drink and drugs that were such a part of the early tours. Jerry cleverly told Mick that drink and drugs were extremely bad for his looks. He took this warning very seriously.

Despite all this upheaval, commercially the Stones were doing well.
Some Girls
, which had been released in the summer of 1978, proved to be their best-selling album ever in the States, although there had been a great deal of trouble getting it released. The title song's lyric included the line ‘Black girls just wanna get fucked all night', which caused plenty of controversy, not surprisingly, with various organisations, including at one point Jesse Jackson's organisation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) – although Mick always claimed that the song was meant to be parodying racist attitudes rather than purveying them. Atlantic Records, however, would not accept the line of the lyric, and specifically the word ‘fucked' in that context.

Within the contract with Atlantic I had inserted a clause which said that if the company objected to a lyric, or to a cover artwork, and if we were unable to resolve the issue, the only solution would be for Atlantic to state that they refused to put the album out, in which case I had the right to go to another record company . . .

So I wrote a letter to Atlantic effectively saying, ‘Pursuant to Clause x of our contract, I note that you have refused to put out the following lyric, and we hereby give you notice. I am enclosing a letter from Jerry Moss at A&M confirming that he is happy to put out the album for the same advance.' Ahmet Ertegun got on the phone with a degree of alacrity and he and I found a way round the problem, part of which involved Mick mumbling the words so quickly that it sounded like something else.

I was also getting set for a major change in my own life. Throughout the 1970s I had been continuing my work as a managing director of Leopold Joseph. By the end of 1980 I had made up my mind to leave the bank. Throughout the previous decade, I had still been working on other deals for the bank – a complex reconstruction of Fairey Aviation, for example, that had required frequent trips to Belgium, where the company was based – as well as looking after clients and attending board meetings at the bank which I could not miss.

In those days if you were a merchant banker you had to pay extremely close attention to what was happening in the bank, because as a partner you were personally responsible for the money. One was in it up to one's last suit of clothes. At the end of every day we checked whether we were long or short in the particular currencies we were dealing with and tried to close off that currency position each night: it was our money. Only later, when banks no longer involved personal relationships with clients, did underlings start playing fast and loose, speculating with other people's money.

Leaving Leopold Joseph was a difficult decision, because at least I knew what my future might be in a small merchant bank, and I realised that I probably had a successful career ahead of me if I stayed. As things developed in the money markets of the world during the next years, had I remained on at the bank it would have been as remunerative or even more, as we would have sold our little bank to a larger one. However, that would have made me somebody else's employee, a prospect that did not appeal to me at all.

If I worked primarily with the Stones, I would be less constrained by the demands of all the regular meetings. I would no longer have to sit in on discussions about the rise of the Deutschmark, or analyse what we should do about the yen – although, that said, all of that experience was to prove enormously useful whenever we were planning world tours and having to calculate what we should do about the currency exposure. The years spent at Leopold Joseph had been of enormous value.

Above all, I was happy working with the Stones and rising to all the challenges that the role offered. I think that was as important a consideration in my mind as the fact that I also knew I was going to make more money more quickly from the band's touring activities.

My fellow directors at the bank were remarkably understanding. The official history of the bank suggests that there were tensions and disagreements between me and other board members, and differences of opinion over the future direction of the bank. My recollection is somewhat different. We were all great friends, and had been for many years, and they saw that it made sense for me to concentrate on my work with the Stones – and I am also sure that they were thinking quietly to themselves, ‘Well, Rupert's share in the bank's profits will now come to us . . .'

So, in January 1981, I left Leopold Joseph to set up my own company, Rupert Loewenstein Ltd. On 6 January that year I made a note in an occasional journal I kept: ‘My new career. Let us hope for the best. I am however so bored with Leopold Joseph that I want to see if I can achieve something on my own, in the business line.' Nine months later, on 15 September, I wrote, ‘For some reason I have not been able to enter anything in this diary for nearly four months. Why? A delayed reaction to my change of job, I suppose. After all I have broken the habit of a lifetime – school – university – Bache – Leopold Joseph all being safe havens and now the plunge: a totally new career with only myself to rely on.'