Branson. Tom Bower

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       3 Honeymoons and divorces

      Seducing Mundy Ellis, Branson’s girlfriend, had been an enjoyable challenge for Tom Newman, but stealing away Kristen Tomassi, Branson’s bride-to-be, on the eve of their wedding was ecstasy. In the three weeks before the wedding, while working with Newman in the manor, Kristen, a sexually adventurous girl, had focused on the rough diamond.

      Artistic, purposeful and coolly sophisticated in a manner still unknown among British girls, the American blonde represented a trophy for Branson. Chasing women was for Branson similar to chasing business, part of the great game in his consuming competitiveness. After bumping into Kristen in a bedroom at his Oxfordshire mansion, Branson decided to pounce immediately. Nothing, he had absorbed from his mother, was unobtainable. Racing in his own car after the woman as she and her boyfriend drove back to London, Branson had lured her to a meeting and soon after moved her on to his houseboat.

      Newman judged that Kristen, the daughter of an American business executive, had fallen for Branson’s status and wealth rather than eternal love. Branson, Newman believed, was similarly deluded. On the night before the stylish wedding at the manor, Newman and Kristen had a raucous sexual fling. Suitably, one session was across the bonnet of Newman’s green Bentley, bought by Branson for £1,000 and parked by The Ship public house. The following morning, 22 July 1972, Kristen smiled serenely to about three hundred guests dressed in hired, ill-fitting morning suits, top hats and flowing dresses. Most had barely recovered from a riotous dinner in a local hotel the previous evening and wilfully indulged at the reception in the frenetic fun of bun fights and pranks.

      After the honeymoon in Mexico, Branson moved from the houseboat to a three-storey Victorian house in Denbigh Terrace, Notting Hill, bought from Peter Cook with the help of an £80,000 mortgage provided by Coutts bank. Branson’s ability to meet the mortgage payments bewildered his employees whose salaries in South Wharf Road, after an unpleasant row, had just been increased from £12 to £15 a week. Branson constantly described his salary as ‘modest’, and Virgin’s first registered accounts disclosed Branson’s annual income as £1,820. His employees assumed that he benefited from a secret source of money.

      Kristen Tomassi’s passion for Newman had developed while he mixed and remixed the tracks of over twenty different instruments of an unusual forty minutes of music composed by Mike Oldfield, a diffident guitarist whose handsome looks belied a troubled personality. Newman and Simon Draper’s excitement about Oldfield’s extraordinary composition washed over Branson. To an unmusical businessman, Oldfield’s forty-minute track without a song was difficult to appreciate. Branson’s indifference was shared by every established record producer. All of them had rejected Oldfield. ‘Why don’t we produce Oldfield?’ asked Simon Draper. ‘We have nothing to lose.’ Draper’s suggestion that Virgin produce the manor’s first record, Branson appreciated, was risk free. Failure would cost nothing. Branson’s virtue was his willingness to gamble if the financial risk was minimal.

      Taking a standard record company contract, Branson added a refinement. Oldfield was contracted for a decade’s work at the low 5 per cent royalty fee and, acting simultaneously as Oldfield’s agent and manager, Branson tilted the contract further in his own favour by paying Virgin an additional 20 per cent of Oldfield’s income for ten albums. ‘We’ll put Oldfield on £20 a week,’ Branson told a friend, ‘like me and all the other Virgin employees.’ No one challenged Branson’s pretension to earn just £20 per week.

      ‘It’s got to have words,’ Branson urged Draper and Newman. ‘Everyone says that records without a song don’t sell.’

      ‘No way,’ replied the two men who by spring 1973 had developed what they had named Tubular Bells into a polished composition. Branson relented. From his new offices in Vernon Yard, Notting Hill, he was hectically marketing Virgin’s first record. To increase his profits, he had retained all the rights. Tubular Bells had developed into his personal challenge to the established record corporations. Brashly, he invited the DJs and critics to dinner on his houseboat to preview the new record. The unusual venue gave his sales performance unique style. Among those persuaded was John Peel, who a few days later devoted his entire programme on Radio One to the record. His audience was ecstatic. Overnight, thanks to Peel and others, Branson owned Britain’s best-selling album of 1973. The success was spectacular. Daily, tens of thousands of pounds poured into Virgin’s account. Atlantic Records, after buying the American rights for $750,000, sold the music to Hollywood as the soundtrack of the film The Exorcist. Branson’s personal wealth was assured. Some would subsequently carp that Tubular Bells effortlessly fell into Branson’s lap, but that reflected their naivety. Flair and energy had created the circumstances.

      At twenty-three, Branson was a millionaire. Wealth tortured many in that socialist era but Branson’s conscience was untroubled. He seized the moment to develop a formula for survival and success. Previously, the mystery about Branson’s finances was his fearless accumulation of debt. The new mystery was the cloak of secrecy he cast over his business and personal wealth. To disguise his ambitions from his low-paid employees he plotted a strategy to protect his new fortune from taxation and future creditors. Although he would boast, ‘we still paid ourselves tiny wages’, the whole picture was different.

      On the advice of his father, and against the background of family trusts, he sought the help of Robert Maas of Harbottle and Lewis, his solicitors, to establish his first offshore trust in the Channel Islands. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of royalties received for both Tubular Bells and the use of the Virgin logo, a newly registered trademark, were being deposited in the offshore trust. Ray Kite, the logo’s designer commissioned by Simon Draper, was paid £250 out of Virgin’s fee of £2,000 and received no further royalty. (Branson’s subsequent account about casually seeing a sketch of the logo drawn on the back of a serviette while passing through a dining room seems to be mistaken.) Beyond the view of the Inland Revenue and his growing Virgin family, Branson, Draper and Powell, the elite, could discreetly accumulate СКАЧАТЬ