WOULD YOU HIRE a lawyer who doesn’t have a desk in his office, admits he rarely reads and won’t accept a memo longer than a single page from his legal colleagues? Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga, Elton John, David Zaslav and Bob Iger all did.
Allen Grubman, 82, is the last of a breed of entertainment dealmakers who have represented both the talent and old-school industry tycoons. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Sunday dinner meant going out for Chinese food; during the week, it was frankfurters with sauerkraut and mustard at the corner deli. At 11, a stint on NBC’s Horn and Hardart variety show exposed him to the glamour of the city—the steakhouses NBC treated the cast to and the limousines they sent to pick him up on Saturday mornings. He knew he wanted more.
Long before he would go on to become the only practicing lawyer honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Grubman was inducted in 2022 for negotiating agreements that allowed artists to maintain more creative control over their work), he attended Brooklyn Law School. Graduates were “encouraged to work for ambulance-chaser negligence firms,” he says, but Grubman took a different path, charming his way into a law firm after several others would not hire him.
In 1974, he founded his own firm specializing in entertainment law, a niche many highbrow Wall Street lawyers dismissed as frivolous at the time. At first he signed disco and funk groups such as KC and the Sunshine Band and Kool & the Gang. Within a decade, he’d landed Bruce Springsteen and Madonna as lifelong clients, followed by Robert De Niro, Rod Stewart, U2, J. Lo, Whitney Houston, the Weeknd and Ana de Armas.
Looking back, he attributes his success to his humble beginnings. “The greatest gift my parents gave me,” he says, “was the gift of giving me nothing. I knew I had to roll up my sleeves.
Is success fun?
Fantastic. I was an unimpressive kid from Brooklyn. For me, it’s a wonderful thing.
How’d you become a mega-lawyer?
Common sense, street smarts, the ability to communicate with people and have people respect you and like you and want to work with you. You can’t be taught that in school.
How much of your time do you spend being a psychiatrist for your clients?
100%. Seriously.
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