Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, the money manager who made those three-chord wonders, the Rolling Stones, into multi-millionaires, just passed away. Unsurprisingly, his life was colorful. From his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin:
“On the most prosaic level, Prince Loewenstein got the group to stop accepting paper bags full of cash as payment. On the grand scale, he led in planning a tour — its biggest at the time — to coincide with the release of the Steel Wheels album in 1989. The tour grossed $260 million worldwide and represented a patching up of the strained relationship between Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards.
The prince once described himself as ‘a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny.’ He helped Mr. Jagger negotiate his divorce from Bianca Jagger in 1978 and his estrangement from Jerry Hall in 1999.
When Mr. Richards was arrested on heroin-trafficking charges in Toronto in 1977, Prince Loewenstein showed the extent of Mr. Richards’s casual spending — $350,000 in the previous year — as evidence that Mr. Richards was wealthy enough not to have to commit crimes to feed a heroin habit. The charge was reduced to ‘simple possession of heroin.’
Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry du Loewenstein was born on Aug. 24, 1933, into Bavarian royalty on the Spanish island of Majorca. An ancestor helped repel the Huns in 907.”
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“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste”: