Hunky Dory (Who Knew) Read online

  ‘Fine,’ said he, ‘but they’ll be dancing in our next stop, Marseille.’

  Jane, my representative, came to greet me. I am not a great drinker but, on this occasion, I was in desperate need. I asked her for a drink. She did not look happy. ‘Laurence, there is no drink.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ I snapped. ‘You told me you saw it loaded on.’ She explained that our ouzo, wine and brandy was indeed on board but held in a bonded hold. Because the ship had arrived so late, French customs had closed and it could not be released from the bonded hold without them.

  Eventually the ship’s purser appeared and told me that the ship’s bar could be opened at discount prices and charged to me but – huge but – he could not keep out the passengers, all of whom were eager to join my stars. I would be buying drinks for five hundred holidaymakers and as many of my guests who could fight their way onto the ship.

  As I was desperately trying to deal with the escalating disasters, the bouzouki bandleader had been following me around, trying to get my attention. He informed me that there was no power on the bandstand and as they needed amplification nobody would hear them. Nico was still busy giving interviews to the Greek press, so could not help me. The bandleader said that he was an artist and refused to play. Remembering Peter Grant’s great line to Led Zeppelin’s drummer, I asked if he could play in a wheelchair, and he huffed off.

  So this was the situation thirty minutes after the party started. The guests who had managed to get to the ship were fighting to get up the narrow ladder, just as the guests who were on the ship, fearful of ending up in Marseille, fought to get down. I was having to pay a bar bill for several hundred cruise guests. The only press that had made it onboard were Greek and a local TV crew. The band were playing silent bouzouki music. The PR man for the cruise line was trying to make Quinn wear a branded T-shirt (which was one part of the contract that they had remembered!) and in the process ripped Quinn’s shirt. Quinn then – not unreasonably – refused to do any interviews. Jacqui Bisset and Irene Papas sensibly hid themselves away and I realised that Allen Klein was one of the hundreds of guests who had been stuck at the Gare Maritime, unable to join the party.

  PR man Dennis Davidson, who was more used to Cannes Festival party debacles than I was, actually got together the photo opportunity. QUINN THE GREEK (actually born Mexican of course) WAS GOING TO DANCE AGAIN. We were about to invoke that iconic dance scene in Zorba The Greek. The TV and photo press stood by and the unamplified bouzouki band strummed with their bloody, torn fingers as loudly as they could.

  Quinn was in fact a terrible dancer with little sense of rhythm but he was a pro and knew that this was the shot everybody wanted. He stood up and – looking around – said that he could not dance alone. He looked at me and said, ‘Hey, kid, come and dance with me.’ I grabbed Jacqui Bisset and we joined the man. Nico, who had been nowhere to be seen during the earlier dramas, suddenly appeared. Just then, the whole thing seemed worthwhile. Here was I, the boy from Finsbury Park, about to be beamed around the world in my white producer’s suit dancing with Anthony Quinn and Jacqui Bisset. The dance began, everybody started clapping, and I was smiling like the cat that got the cream. Then somebody shouted ‘Whoopa!’ in true Greek style. Then everyone shouted ‘Whoopa!’ and a glass of red wine came hurtling through the air, all over my white producer’s suit. I have the photo. It was an appropriate end to the party. I wanted my mummy.

  Notwithstanding the fact that the party was later described in one of the trade papers as the Greatest Disaster in the History of the Cannes Film Festival, we had created a great interest in the project. The next day, Allen Klein once again asked if I needed any help. Once again, I declined. I had a hot property and was determined to run with it myself.

  A month or so later, me and my newly cleaned white suit went to Los Angeles where we were installed in an expensive bungalow at the Beverley Hills Hotel. Not any old expensive bungalow at the Beverley Hills Hotel, but the super-expensive Bungalow 5: the one with a dining room and two or three bedrooms. Such was the interest in The Greek Tycoon, I actually had appointments with the heads of most of the major Hollywood studios. The meetings were cordial, but brief. They all said the same thing. Nice cast – come back when you have a script and a director. I was shattered. I, of course, knew that these elements were absolutely vital to the making of a good film but I had naively believed that the cast was so strong, the studios would trust me to get them right. Dispirited, I tried some of the smaller studios and distributors but with no success. Everybody wanted to see the script and be sure of the director. By now I was desperate. There was a young Englishman working in LA called David Blake who worked for Cinema Shares, a two-desks-andan-empty-filing-cabinet type of operation based in New York. I asked him if there was any point in meeting with his boss in New York, but he was quite certain that this would be a waste of time, so I had no idea what my next step should be.

  I really was in serious financial trouble. I had literally bet my house on this project and the options on Quinn and Bisset would soon evaporate, making my investment worthless. I decided to go home via New York for no good reason other than I did not want to immediately face the problems that were waiting for me in London. I checked out of the Beverley Hills Hotel. As I closed the door of Bungalow 5 behind me, I heard the telephone ring. Thinking that it could save me tipping the bell captain, I went back to answer it. It was Allen Klein asking how I was doing. The last thing I wanted was an ‘I told you so’ from my mentor so I told the first lie that came into my head: ‘Great, I’m flying to New York to make a deal with Cinema Shares.’

  ‘Never heard of them,’ said Allen. ‘If you don’t go with a major, I’d like you to go with me. Whatever Cinema Shares are giving you, I’ll give you a dollar more.’ Not wishing to give me a chance to refuse him, as if I would under the circumstances, he rang off and I nearly fainted with relief. I was close to Allen until he died some forty years later, but I never told him of my deception.

  Allen was nervous that I would meet with Cinema Shares and he had his driver meet me at the airport in New York and whisk me straight to his office, where he immediately asked me what my proposed deal was with his ‘rival’.

  ‘First,’ I said, ‘I get my investment of seventy-five thousand pounds back.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Allen. ‘What else?’

  ‘I get it back very soon,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, what else? What is your deal with Cinema Shares?’

  ‘Well, first I get my money back.’

  ‘And then?’ said Allen

  I, of course, had never even spoken to Cinema Shares and had given no thought to anything beyond getting back my money. ‘I can’t deal with you as I would with them,’ I said, ‘What do you think is fair?’

  Allen laid out a proposal but – such was my relief – that I did not even absorb it. I just nodded a lot as the blood returned to my veins. In the event, his offer was fair. He gave me my seventy-five thousand pounds back and the film got made, scripted by Mort Fine and directed by J. Lee Thompson.

  As expected, Allen took over the running of the project but – as he personally financed the production and the golden rule was He Who Provides The Gold Makes The Rule – this was his entitlement. Universal Studios had expressed a serious interest in the film and I begged Allen to do a deal once shooting started but he figured we would do better when the picture was finished. By that time Allen was in for eleven million dollars, which I knew he could not afford to lose. I persuaded him not to wait until the film was fully edited as he would have to stand by the film he had made. He took my advice and we showed Universal a rough cut – an assembly of the scenes without the final music, sound effects, etc. Universal went for it. We shook hands with the studio before Allen and I celebrated by going to Nathan’s on Broadway and each eating two of their famous hot dogs.

  It was not a great film. We claimed that the film was not about the Onassis family but a Greek ship owner called Tomassi
s who married the widow of a fictional American president. The film anyway had the usual disclaimer that ‘All the characters are fictitious’, but we were chary about upsetting the Kennedy and Onassis families, so we made a bland film where all of the characters were nice, which, of course, they were not. The film was released in 1978 but did no real business. Years later, Dallas and Dynasty proved my theory of the commercial value of stories about the rich and nasty.

  I never received a penny profit from the film but I still have the poster with my name on it, and I still have my house.

  The other benefit of the whole debacle was that when I was in LA Jacqui invited me to lunch with her and her then boyfriend Victor Drai at her home in Beverley Hills. She was a most charming and unassuming host and after lunch we all swam in her beautiful pool. The next film that Jacqui was going to appear in was The Deep – remembered by many because she spent a lot of the film in a wet T-shirt. Jacqui was finding it hard to swim underwater, a requirement for her part in the film. She asked me to help her practise by putting my arms around her and holding her underwater, which I did. I don’t remember what we had for lunch.

  11. PIRATE RADIO AND THE STAR-CLUB

  In the 1960s, pirate radio was booming in the UK. Operated from ships outside of territorial waters and so beyond regulatory control, they filled the gap left by the BBC, which had a limited output of pop music. Radio Caroline had made a fortune and Mickie Most and I were convinced that we could do the same in Germany. The idea was brought to Mickie by Henry Henroid – a wonderful cockney character who had spent years working as a road manager for Don Arden without being hung out of a window or smacked.

  Henry’s job was to look after American acts that Don brought over to Europe and he had wonderful stories about his tours with Gene Vincent. Vincent was a notorious hellraiser, despite having a steel sheath around one leg following a near-fatal motorcycle accident. ‘Now ’e was a bleedin’ lunatic. You should ’ave ’eard ’im when there was a full moon. I had to smuggle the bastard out of the ’otel in a laundry basket and his bleedin’ leg wouldn’t fold in.’ Henry also toured with Little Richard: ‘I was wiv ’im on the plane when he saw the bleedin’ light and got religion. He got down on ’is knees in the middle of the bleedin’ aisle, ’allelujahrin’ to God, and renounced his material possessions. I copped ’is gold watch in all ’is tomfoolery. Lovely man.’

  Henry had looked after many of the acts that Don had booked into the Star-Club in Hamburg, the place where The Beatles famously honed their craft. Henry got to know Manfred Weissleder, the owner of the club, well. The Star-Club was in the red-light district of Hamburg and Manfred, who – according to Henry – was involved in soft pornography and all manner of shady deals, was open to any kind of business. Either Henry or Manfred – both claimed the honour – had come up with the idea of starting a pirate radio station under the Star-Club banner, broadcasting from a ship to be anchored outside German territorial waters off of the coast of Hamburg. Henry told Manfred that he could ‘raise the readies no prob’ and came to see Mickie and me.

  Henry and Manfred had already done some spadework. There was a German rum importer who was keen to come in on the deal. He owned a ship moored in Flensburg, a fishing town in the north of Germany, which was being used as a dormitory for imported Turkish labour. Telefunken, the enormous German electronics company, were, it seemed, keen to do a deal for the necessary broadcasting equipment.

  I did some preliminary research and it seemed that there was no German law that would inhibit the venture so Henry and I flew to Hamburg. We stayed in a hotel that Henry knew near to The Reeperbahn, where the Star-Club was situated. The Reeperbahn, the centre of Hamburg’s red-light district, is a walled-off street near the docks. It is lined with bars, dance clubs and brothels, and the Star-Club was one of the most successful operations. Manfred, eager to attract the custom of the young merchant seamen who frequented the area, had started booking English rock groups. Much has been written about The Beatles who, fuelled by amphetamines and God knows what else, played their fourteen-hour shifts alternating with one or two other bands doing the same. When I was there the policy had not changed, although the now-famous Beatles had not played for about three years. I saw lots of bands, the most memorable of whom were Freddie & The Midnighters. I had a drink with Freddie between sets and he was like the ball in a pinball machine, pinging from flipper to flipper and lighting up whatever he touched. I thought that he was on some sort of speed but later this zaniness found him fame back in England as the comedian Freddie Starr. All the bands played similar sets of American rock’n’roll standards and it seemed as though finishing with ‘Walkin’ The Dog’ was obligatory.

  Henry introduced us to Manfred in his best cockney German: ‘Das ist Herr Myers, dein Geschäftsführer von dein Animals und das ’Ermans ’Ermits.’ I was not the manager of The Animals or Herman’s Hermits, just a business advisor, but it seemed to impress Manfred, who had his thriving porn-film business and no doubt many other enterprises which in the UK would not have gained him a knighthood. He was in fact your basic dodgy geezer. He was, however, a shrewd dodgy geezer and recognised the financial potential of a pirate radio station.

  We drove to Flensburg, where the rum importer’s ship was moored. For six months I’d owned a half-share in a rarely functioning twelve-foot speedboat so I was, of course, the expert in all matters maritime. We climbed onboard and it seemed to me to be big enough compared to the photos I had seen of Radio Caroline’s vessel. Being the maritime maven, I demanded to see the engine (this from a man who cannot change a lightbulb or a car tyre). I was invited downstairs – they call it ‘below’ – where the smell from the dormitories was, as Henry put it, ‘absofuckinglutely reels’ (reels of cotton: rotten).

  Back on deck, I dug my heels into the planking a couple of times and pronounced that the ship had passed my preliminary survey. We returned to Hamburg for a meeting with executives of Telefunken. As Henry had indicated, they were prepared to barter the supply and fitting of all of the required equipment in return for favoured advertising.

  The next day Manfred went on national television in Germany where, by use of graphics showing sweet little white-dot radio waves beaming from the radio mast of a ship, he demonstrated the proposed reach of the station. By the time we got back to his office his phone was ringing off the hook from people interested in taking advertising. We went back to London in a happy frame of mind. In just three days we had lined up a ship, the equipment and a line of probable advertisers.

  My interest in Mickie’s music companies was 10 per cent but in recognition of my efforts in this venture, Mickie offered me 25 per cent. Henry Henroid would also have 25 per cent (‘Tasty, tasty,’ said Henry) and Mickie, who would be overseeing the programming, would have 50 per cent. We would follow Radio Luxembourg’s example of taking song-publishing rights in return for special promotions. We were going to be very rich. Then it occurred to me that we should get a proper survey of the boat, find out the specifications of all required equipment and obtain advice on the legalities of the operation. The cost of this preparatory work was considerable, so clearly we were going to become very much poorer before we became very much richer. Fortunately, before we actually spent any money, I received a call from Manfred saying that he had been informed that the German government would vigorously oppose our scheme. I explained that – subject to verification and further research – the law was on our side. He explained that Telefunken and the Rum Man were not prepared to take on the government. Also because of his own ‘rather specialised business interest’ he was reluctant to do so himself. Bearing in mind that the FBI got Capone on tax evasion, and presuming that the German taxman had seen one of the relevant movies, I could see he was right.

  I thought about taking the project forward on my own. I imagined myself standing proudly on the bridge of my own pirate radio ship, an Englishman once more defiant against German aggression. I then imagined a periscope cutting towards me through the wave
s and forgot the whole thing.

  There is no doubt that my involvement with Mickie was the key to my later success in the music business. I was Mickie’s consigliere at a time when there were no other accountancy firms specialising in the world of popular music, a relatively new industry. Many of the artists in Mickie’s musical circle became clients of Goodman Myers. The most important to me personally was Mike Leander, a young writer-producer who, in 1970, would have an absolutely life-changing effect on my career.

  Mickie was sixty-four when, tragically, he died in 2003 from a form of cancer relating to asbestos, which had been liberally used in the walls of recording studios. We had drifted apart over the years, but for some time he had been very much part of my life. I was very moved when I learned of his death.

  12. TETRAGRAMMATON RECORDS AND TINY TIM

  I had first met Greg Smith when he was an office boy for some theatrical agents who took temporary office space at Goodman Myers’ Albermarle Street premises. In 1968 he became the London representative for Tetragrammaton Records, a new-ish record company in Los Angeles. Tetragrammaton was planning to open London offices and Greg kindly recommended that I should represent them.

  They flew me out to Los Angeles first-class to meet up – always a good start. Then they put me up in a very nice room at the Beverley Hilton and even provided a hire car for my use. Tetragrammaton was a strange name for a record company. It is the Hebrew theonym (name for God), a translation of which is used by observant Jews who do not wish to say ‘God’ aloud. Now you know too.

  The driving force behind the company was Roy Silver who, with his partners Bruce Post Campbell and Marvin Deane, ran a very successful management company in LA. They managed Bob Dylan, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor and other stars. Bill Cosby was Roy Silver’s personal client and I suspected that Mr Cosby was the major financer of the Tetragrammaton record company.