If there is one rule all financial advisers should follow, it's to keep your damn mouth shut. Tell that to Prince Rupert Loewenstein – the man credited with helping the Rolling Stones go from broke losers to multimillionaires in the 40 some years he advised the band – who has just published a book about his "interesting" history as the Stones' trusted financial adviser.
“Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think your ex-bank manager should be discussing your financial dealings and personal information in public,” Mick Jagger told the Mail on Sunday. “It just goes to show that well brought-up people don’t always display good manners.”
Like any good adviser, Prince Rupert considered himself a "bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny" and claims he never really liked the Rolling Stones' music that much.
Here's a "fascinating" tidbit from A Prince Among Stones:
Towards the end of 1968, I received a telephone call from the art dealer Christopher Gibbs. ‘Could you look after the financial side of these friends of mine, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones?’
I said, politely: ‘Let me call you back tomorrow morning,’ not having heard of The Rolling Stones in any connection with anything that I might want to do.
I asked my wife Josephine to tell me about them. She reminded me of the famous Times editorial that had been written the year before by William Rees-Mogg following Mick and Keith’s conviction for drugs possession, the leader article headlined ‘Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel?’. I did remember the piece. I, of course, had been on the side of the wheel.
On the surface the Stones and I might have been seen as unlikely associates. My father was Prince Leopold zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, from a family that can trace itself back to Luitpold Markgrave of Carinthia and later Duke of Bavaria (who died repelling the Huns in 907).
My family is a branch of the Bavarian royal house. My mother, Countess Bianca Treuberg, was also Bavarian, although she had once owned one-sixth of the Brazilian crown jewels, because one of her great-grandmothers was a daughter of Emperor Dom Pedro I of Brazil.
At that time, I was the managing director of the merchant bank Leopold Joseph. Christopher knew Mick Jagger, and Mick had asked him to find somebody to advise The Rolling Stones on their financial situation, which was not good.
It had become clear to Mick that something was wrong. He knew the group was doing well and had a good contract with Decca. Their singles and albums were selling and they were playing to enthusiastic crowds. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t seeing a penny.
Christopher could find no one interested in looking at the finances of what virtually everyone in the City viewed as degenerate, long-haired, and, worst of all, unprofitable layabouts.
Could anyone else get through that self-serving drivel? You'd think a book about a Bavarian royal helping a bunch of high-flying rockstars avoid taxes would be… um… I don't know, a bit more readable? Yawn.
