FEBRUARY 2015 ISSUE
February 2015 Issue

Out to Lunch with Allen Grubman, The Music Industry’s Most Powerful Lawyer​

The titan, whose clients include Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga, shares the secrets to his success.
Image may contain Human Person Allen Grubman Clothing Sleeve Apparel and Face
Photograph by Platon

Allen Grubman, the most powerful attorney in the music business, kindly invited me to lunch for what he called “a pleasant schmooze” at his Park Avenue apartment, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and as schmoozers go, the good-hearted, expansive Mr. Grubman surely has no equal.

“Ask me anything!” he said when we met. But then he leaned in toward me and lowered his voice to a whisper, as if confiding something sacred. “You ever go to Barney Greengrass?” he asked.

The celebrated deli on the Upper West Side is a homey New York institution, and I know it almost too well. “It’s the best!” he cried happily, and a bond between us was struck. He quickly disappeared into the bedroom of the apartment and in time returned with a framed photo. “My Bar Mitzvah picture! Brooklyn, New York,” he announced. “I was a midget. My mother was five feet tall.” He looked small and slender. “That was prior to Barney Greengrass!”

Mr. Grubman, the son of a stagestruck mother and a garment manufacturer, reminisced that when he was 11 he was singing show tunes on NBC’s Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour. He sang a few bars of one. “Ooooh, Okla-homa!” And went on, “They picked me up in a limousine every weekend. The only other time you were ever in a limo was behind a hearse on the way to a funeral. And they took us to good restaurants. Then my voice broke! But I never forgot the restaurants and the limousine.”

The seeds of his career in the entertainment industry had been planted there and then, and the fruits of his success are apparent, and enjoyed—the chauffeured Mercedes, a personal chef, several homes (Sue Mengers’s fabled house, in Beverly Hills, is a recent acquisition)—all thanks to his A-list clients, such as Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Lady Gaga, U2, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Bette Midler, and John Mellencamp, together with sundry media types (including the editor of this magazine). When Mr. Grubman attended Brooklyn Law School, however, he was not an immediate success.

“You ready?” he said. “I graduated No. 1 in my class—from the bottom.”

“What’s the secret?,” I asked him as lunch was served.

“I was very, very fortunate. People disagree with me, but I’m a big believer that success in business is 75 percent luck, 25 percent brains. Maybe it’s 50–50. But there are a thousand people with the same talent, but they didn’t get the break. You need luck and you need sechel.” He translated the Yiddish word for us: “It’s a combination of instinct, balls, and common sense.”

His Irish chef, Stephen from Cork, came out to greet us. “Enjoy, gentlemen!” Mr. Grubman was on one of his permanent diets, and following a first course of shrimp, he had a sensible chopped salad of chicken, egg whites, and lettuce. “Not nearly as good as yours,” he said, eyeing my hearty roast chicken with delicious fingerling potatoes and carrots. “It’s so difficult, losing weight,” he said balefully. “And when you lose it—what happens? It goes back up!”

“What was the luck you had?,” I asked. “I’ll give you the answer. In 1974, I left the law firm where I’d worked for five years and was encouraged by two clients to go out on my own. It takes nerve. I had $5,000 in the bank. Within a month, two big breaks happened. I was introduced to a record that became a huge hit by George McCrae called ‘Rock Your Baby.’ If you heard it, you’d remember it. It was the start of disco. Then two French guys brought in a new all-American group called the Village People … ”

So he had the luck, and he had the ability to take advantage of it. Was he aware of the line from Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”?

“It’s inscribed on a pillow in my office!” he declared.

I wondered if he punched the clock as lawyers seem to do from the second you say, Good morning. “I don’t. We have annual retainers. When big deals are involved,” he added surprisingly about certain multi-million-dollar contracts, “most lawyers will say up front what they want—but I never do that. I wait until the deal is done. You know why? If I sat down with you and said, I’m going to do this deal for you and I’m going to charge you half a million dollars, you would fall off your chair. You’d say, Are you nuts? ”

“That is correct.”

“But if I got you $10 million, and I said now I want to charge you $500,000—you know what you’re going to do? Kiss me! Right? I get a kiss!” It was the least I could do.

Allen Grubman then disappeared again to re-emerge eagerly with his wedding-reception album. Deborah, his wife of 23 years, is among the leading real-estate brokers in New York City, and it was clear how much he adores her. She’s the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Their reception was held at the New York Public Library—a highly unusual arrangement agreed to by the library when he somehow gave the impression he was holding a law conference there.

We looked together at the party pictures of the great and the good who attended—David Geffen, Naomi Campbell, Ian Schrager, Mort Zuckerman, Madonna, Clive Davis, Harvey Weinstein, et al. “There’s chocolate cake and cookies coming,” he said. “You got to!”