Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  Money, though never far from his mind, was not an end in itself. Allen didn’t dream of being rich; he dreamed of being a success. And what was success? For Allen, it always came down to having the things he’d missed as a child: companionship, a sense of worth, and power over his own life.

  Philip Klein added insult to all the injuries by not attending Allen’s college graduation in June 1957. “My father was the pride of the street and the sorrow of the home,” Allen said. He and a friend, Lenny Kantzel, opted to celebrate on their own a few months later by driving to Miami in the car Allen had bought with his earnings as a waiter at a hotel in the Catskills the previous summer.

  Hanging around the hotels on the beach, they swam, ate, lolled about, and trolled for girls. On their final afternoon in Miami, Allen noticed a young and exceptionally pretty girl swimming in the pool at the Surfcomber Hotel. He tried to strike up a conversation with her but she gave him the brushoff.

  Betty Rosenblum was a seventeen-year-old Hunter College student who worked part-time in her uncle’s New York real estate firm, and, like Klein, she was on her first vacation with a friend. Guys had been hitting on them steadily. “I was tired and couldn’t be bothered,” she said. “When this man started to talk to me, I made him wait until I came out of the pool and got a drink of water. Then I said, ‘What do you want?’” Trying to keep Allen at arm’s length proved a poor strategy. Angered by the perceived insult, he yelled at her. “I really should have stopped talking to him,” Betty said. “But he wound up asking me out—and he had a car. That was a big deal; my parents didn’t have a car. What more can I say?”

  The date was a flop. She was flabbergasted when Allen had the nerve to announce that he was going to marry her. “I thought, This is going to be somebody’s father? You gotta be joking.”

  Though the evening went poorly, Allen wasn’t ready to quit. As he was leaving Miami, he convinced his sister Anna, with whom he’d stayed in Miami, to call the Surfcomber and track Betty down. By the time Allen got back to Newark, Anna was able to pass along Betty’s phone number and the name of a camp in Connecticut where she’d be working that summer. “I was very young,” said Betty. “He was seven years older and very persistent.”

  Klein was far more than persistent; the lasting legacy of his childhood was his all-consuming fear of abandonment. He detested being alone and would do anything to avoid it—anything. Now, through equal measures of intelligence, hunger, and fear, Allen was becoming extraordinarily adept at reading people in order to keep them close, developing an almost unfailing knack for identifying their needs and desires. It wasn’t altruistic; it was as necessary to him as eating and breathing. Generous and ingratiating when he wished to be, Allen overwhelmed his quarry with the force of his personality and intelligence. It wasn’t a conversation so much as a riveting performance crossed with an out-and-out assault; he told you what you needed and how he was going to get it for you, and you agreed. What started as a personal tool for battling loneliness would soon become his great calling card in business.

  “Allen would have been a great psychologist and an even better trial lawyer,” said Alan Steckler, creative director for ABKCO, Klein’s company. Steckler had never seen anything like Klein’s unique ability to identify what someone wanted or needed and then deliver it. “He could really hear; he was able to sort out people, their weaknesses and their needs. He could figure out what they needed and then give it to them. That’s why he was so successful with artists and with women. He was charming. And he was ruthless.” Said his friend and attorney Leonard Leibman, “Women were a pushover for Allen. He would tell them about the orphanage and have them eating out of his hand.” “Klein could recognize a vacuum,” said Harold Seider, who was Allen’s neighbor and the in-house attorney for ABKCO. “Call it leadership or whatever. And he was a terrific salesman—he was essentially a salesman.” The boy once spurned by the world was now ready to conquer it.

  “When Allen wants something,” said Betty Klein, “he sucks the blood out of you.”

  2

  * * *

  Allen Klein and Company

  KLEIN CONTINUED WORKING Saturdays for Brainen and Company in New Jersey and landed his first full-time accounting job with a Manhattan firm, Joseph Fenton and Company. The precursor to Prager and Fenton, a leading specialist in music- and film-industry accounting, the company already had a thriving practice among music publishers when Klein joined in 1957.

  In the years since World War II, the record industry had been growing in rapid and dramatic fashion. The 45 rpm single, introduced by RCA in 1949, and the arrival of rock ’n’ roll just a few years later ushered in both a change in the culture and a new market, one that was initially ignored by established major record companies like Columbia, RCA, and Capitol. This provided an opening for small independents like Sun Records in Memphis, Chess in Chicago, Atlantic in New York, and Specialty in Los Angeles to launch the careers of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and Little Richard, respectively. By the second half of the decade, the big labels saw the error of their ways. Even if they couldn’t wholeheartedly embrace rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll (“It smells but it sells” was a favorite old-guard witticism), the majors moved to secure a piece of the market. In October 1955, RCA purchased Presley’s contract from Sun for the then-exorbitant sum of thirty-five thousand dollars; the following year, Warner Brothers Films decided to start its own record company. The business was booming.

  If the record industry was getting a fashion makeover and hitting the town, music publishing was the sister who stayed home. Regardless of changes in trends and tastes, its business remained essentially the same: to copyright and exploit songs. The rock ’n’ roll record business was for wildcatters, a chance for the more daring independent artists, producers, and manufacturers to strike it rich; music publishing was the backroom, penny-counting, administrative equivalent of traditional banking: staid and comparatively boring, but steady and lucrative if you had the right songs.

  Klein’s first big assignment was to fly to California and assist Joe Fenton in an audit on behalf of a key music publishers’ organization, the Harry Fox Agency. Founded by music publishers in 1927, the agency grants and tracks mechanical licenses, the legal agreements permitting copyrighted songs to be recorded. The agency also collects royalties due and distributes them to the publishers, who then split that with the songwriters.

  The spur for the Fenton audit was the pending sale of Dot Records to Paramount Pictures. The Fox Agency, as the representative for music publishers whose songs had been recorded by artists on Dot, had to check Dot’s sales figures before agreeing to let Paramount assume liability. Allen found Los Angeles exciting. Staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he couldn’t help but notice that the other guests included Presley, Sidney Poitier, and Claude Rains. He had no one to hang out with, but that didn’t deter him from taking the measure of the town and lunching alone at the Brown Derby.

  Yet the trip’s most lasting impression came from the work, which also involved separate audits of several other record companies, including Liberty and Monarch. Allen hadn’t forgotten the tricks he’d seen at Essex County News, but he was nonetheless surprised to discover that each audit turned up widespread underpayment to publishers and writers. It got him thinking: If that was the situation for the music publishers—a group with the professional organization, money, and wherewithal to police record-company payments—how bad was it for the performers? They certainly didn’t have anything like the Harry Fox Agency representing them. “I said, ‘Holy shit! If there’s money here for the publishers, there’s got to be money for the artists.’”

  His suspicions were confirmed a few months later by a chance meeting. On his way home one day after visiting Betty at her parents’ apartment in Washington Heights, Allen was waiting at a stoplight when he heard his name called and saw someone waving from the corner of 187th Street and Fort Washington Avenue. Though the two hadn’t been friends in school, Klei
n recognized a former Upsala student, Don Kirshner. “Hey, bub!” Kirshner said. “Let me buy you an egg cream!”

  Best known on campus as a baseball player, Kirshner had taken a job as a seventy-dollar-a-week song plugger for Vanderbilt Music, a small publisher at 1650 Broadway. His job was to convince record producers to pair Vanderbilt’s songs with their recording artists. The company was owned by Al Lewis, an old-time Tin Pan Alley lyricist who’d scored hits with Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallee in the twenties and thirties and written such Depression-era classics as “Now’s the Time to Fall in Love” and “You Gotta Be a Football Hero.” Lewis’s career got its second wind in 1956 when a song he wrote in the forties, “Blueberry Hill,” was covered by Fats Domino and became a huge hit. He eagerly climbed on the R&B train. Kirshner paired Lewis—whom Klein remembered as “an old, diabetic Jew”—with Sylvester Bradford, a blind African American songwriter. The unlikely duo soon scored another modest success with Domino on “I’m Ready” and then hit pay dirt with “Tears on My Pillow,” a huge hit for the doo-wop group Little Anthony and the Imperials.

  When Kirshner heard that Klein had been auditing labels for music publishers and was now thinking about offering similar services to individual performers and songwriters, he not only agreed that there was a need for it but offered to introduce him to likely clients.

  “Don said, ‘I’m gonna make you a star,’” Allen recalled with a laugh. “I don’t know what he wanted, but he was a guy who would say, ‘I’m gonna make you a millionaire.’” The two struck up a friendship—“I used to drive him to work and he would chip in with me for parking”—and before long, Kirshner came through with several key introductions.

  “Man, he had all these contacts,” Klein said. “Bobby Darin was his buddy. He knew Connie Francis, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. He was a real good schmoozer, a good listener.”

  Kirshner’s abilities as both a publisher and a dealmaker would soon become apparent. In 1958 he left Vanderbilt to partner with Al Nevins, and their publishing company, Aldon Music, became a quick success. With a stable of top-notch young songwriters including Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka, and Howard Greenfield, Aldon cranked out hits and became closely associated with rock and pop’s Brill Building period, the late fifties and early sixties. The New York sound was a commercial marriage between singers and songwriters presided over by producers. Kirshner was the matchmaker.

  “In the beginning, it was Don Kirshner who had a lot to do with our early successes,” said Gerry Goffin, who, in partnership with his wife at the time, Carole King, wrote and published numerous big hits through Aldon, including “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “The Loco-Motion,” and “Take Good Care of My Baby.” “He would say, ‘Write a song for the Shirelles,’ and we did. He was a very good publisher. He would say, ‘I got these kids and they know what’s happening. Give me the artist, and I’ll give you the song.’ And he was right most of the time.” Like Kirshner, Klein was good at the work and intrigued by the opportunities inherent in the expanding music business. “I liked the action,” he said. But his tenure with Fenton and Company proved brief; he was fired after just four months.

  “Allen couldn’t keep a job,” said Betty. “He couldn’t get in on time. He didn’t mind working until two or three in the morning, but he could not get in on time. And for an accountant, you can’t work your own hours.” The parting was so bitter that the company wrote to the State of New Jersey, where Allen was to take the examination to become a certified public accountant, and strongly urged officials not to certify him. Klein opted not to sit for the exam and never became a CPA. He made a halfhearted stab at law school but couldn’t square his work habits with evening classes.

  Cut adrift, Allen had an abundance of energy and ideas but few solid prospects. He scraped by on day work with a midtown accountant and the occasional referral from Kirshner, who was an usher at Allen and Betty’s June 1958 wedding. The entertainment at the reception was provided by Klein’s first music-business client, Ersel Hickey. A rockabilly performer and songwriter from upstate New York, Hickey had just scored a modest hit on Epic Records with “Bluebirds over the Mountain.” Surprisingly, Allen’s label audit on his behalf failed to turn up any money.

  That gave Klein pause. After the record-company audits he’d conducted for Fenton, Allen assumed that looking for underpayments on behalf of artists would be a ripe area to explore, and he’d been hatching a scheme to set himself up in a watchdog role similar to Harry Fox’s. He had even picked a name: RAPA, for the Recording Artists Protective Association. The idea was to sign up performers and conduct audits in return for a percentage of whatever he found. But the situation now looked less promising—and perhaps more nefarious—than he’d thought. The record companies didn’t have to doctor their books to avoid paying artists; they were already stacking the deck against them in the recording contracts.

  “I learned a lesson,” he said. “The artists never had any money. They were always paid with an advance, which they would spend, and then the session costs [also] came off their money. So they were always in the hole. And they were frequently represented by someone who didn’t want someone else to come in and show them what they hadn’t been doing right.”

  After a ten-day whirlwind Caribbean honeymoon with stops in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti, the newlyweds settled into a $185-a-month one-bedroom apartment on 190th Street in Washington Heights, near Betty’s parents. Getting an irresistible deal on pink wall-to-wall carpeting, they painted the walls to match; Allen’s desk doubled as the dining-room table. “Because of the pink walls, the apartment always looked warmer than any other when you looked up from the street,” said Betty. “We had my teenage bedroom set and a cot that we put a throw over and used as a couch. And that was it. And love.”

  What they didn’t have was money. Betty was still attending Hunter and working part-time in her uncle’s real estate office, and Allen was making $135 a month, which didn’t even cover their rent. Inexplicably, Allen insisted on taking a cab when he went to work in midtown, despite owning a car and living just a few blocks from the subway. But it was often difficult to tell what Allen was thinking or how his hectic mind arrived at a particular decision. He was a man of surprises.

  The day after they returned from their honeymoon, Allen didn’t come home from work. Frantic, Betty spent an interminable night thinking she’d become a widow in record time. It was after nine the next morning when Allen telephoned with the news that he was in jail. The car he never drove to work or, apparently, moved for alternate-side-of-the-street parking days had collected 110 tickets. Klein, who had been paying a neighborhood beat cop to take care of it and thought he didn’t have to worry, was surprised to discover he was one of New York’s biggest scofflaws. Betty’s father, Abe Rosenblum, bailed him out.

  After Allen’s father, his in-laws were manna from heaven. And as perplexing as their intense and unpredictable new son-in-law was, they embraced him. “My parents were very good to us,” said Betty, “and Allen loved my parents. My mother understood him. She said, ‘You can’t change the spots on a leopard.’ My father just wanted to be part of his life.”

  As co-owner of a health club in Manhattan, the Luxor Baths, Abe was the kind of even-keeled businessman that Allen, who could spin out ideas at an alarming rate and seemed to work best by making up the rules as he went along, would never be. Yet the elder man freely gave him respect and trust. Even more than that, when Allen concluded just prior to getting married that he would make it only if he worked for himself and that he needed to start his own accounting company, Abe agreed to provide the sizable twenty-five-thousand-dollar stake. “My father-in-law never understood how I could do this because he’s such a conservative guy,” Klein said. “He didn’t own a car, worked all the time. Yet he never, ever, ever asked me what I thought I was doing. He was just terrific.”

  Allen didn’t have the necessary CPA license to start the business, bu
t it wasn’t difficult to find someone who did—his old school friend and army buddy Henry Newfield. Henry and another CPA, Marty Weinberg, already had a scuffling startup practice in Lakewood, New Jersey. They agreed to work two days a week in midtown Manhattan for the new Allen Klein and Company, which subcontracted its midtown office space from S. T. Seidman, a small advertising company. Seidman was also, at $125 a month, Klein and Company’s biggest account. Along with a paint store in Washington Heights, Allen was counting on having two more clients: his father-in-law’s health club and his friend Don Kirshner’s publishing company, Aldon Music. As disappointing as the Hickey audit had been, Allen still believed his future was in the music business, and he was hustling like mad to meet people. His most important new contact was an attorney, Marty Machat.

  The Brooklyn-born Machat was, like Klein and Kirshner, a hungry, self-invented hustler. A stylish man, he favored the thin cigars of a grandee, the tailor-made suits of a dandy, and the company of young beautiful women. According to attorney and music executive Eric Kronfeld, who began his career working for him, Machat told him his original last name was Moskowitz and that he’d changed it to Machat because it sounded classy, although that story is disputed by Machat’s son Steven. Regardless, Machat proved a somewhat unfortunate name; as Marty’s practice grew and he conducted more and more business in Europe, he was frequently greeted by raised eyebrows when he introduced himself (Machat is pronounced like the French slang phrase mon chat, “my pussy”).