Kristen would afterwards declare that her decision to start sleeping with other people was a reaction to the fact that Richard had let his work get out of control. It was not a question of being unfaithful; even if she spent the entire night away from home, she never sought to be secretive about what she was doing. More, it was a cry for help. ‘I wanted some private life for us, that’s all I wanted,’ she remembered. ‘I just wanted half an hour a day.’ Branson, meanwhile, suggested that the couple should have children. His wife could not resist responding with sarcasm, asking him how he intended to fit in another obligation into a life which left little enough room for her as it was.
Matters came to a head when Branson asked Kristen to help him entertain a rock star whom he wanted to sign to the record label. The artist’s name was Kevin Ayers; it was he who had lent Mike Oldfield the tape machine on which he recorded his demo of Tubular Bells. He was older than Branson and Kristen, and he had all of her husband’s self-assurance without the naivety. The couple went to meet Ayers and his woman friend at the shop in Notting Hill Gate, drove the pair down the motorway to see the Manor, and then brought them back to the houseboat in the evening for dinner. Kristen cooked lobster while Richard told the jokes. Everyone drank too much; Ayers produced some cocaine, which the inexperienced Branson sniffed with him for the first time in his life – and the evening ended with Kristen in the arms of Kevin Ayers. She later claimed that Branson sought consolation from the woman that Ayers had brought with him; Branson denied that this was the case.
Although the spark of mutual attraction between his wife and Ayers was evident the following morning even to Branson, the marriage did not end immediately. Ayers pursued Kristen with flowers, presents, letters and telegrams. She went to Australia for a while to get away from everything and think, but Ayers found her there. She went to live with him briefly in France, returned to England for an attempted reconciliation with Branson – and then left again, this time for good. On the day she left, Branson was on the telephone at Denbigh Terrace, engrossed in a long negotiation to sign the Boomtown Rats to Virgin Records. The echo of his voice, raising the offer minute by minute, resounded in her ears as she slammed the door of the house for the last time. Months later, when she was living in a house in France without electricity and utterly cut off from the outside world, Kristen would imagine as she walked in the fields that she could hear the sound of the ringing telephone that had helped to destroy her life with Richard Branson. What almost broke her heart was the fact that Branson later offered to change his entire life in order to bring her back. He was willing to give up work, go and live in the country, make another life – and he told her so in letter after pleading letter. But it was too late. They divorced, citing Kevin Ayers as the co-respondent.
The irony was that Kristen’s relationship with Kevin Ayers was doomed not to last. After bearing his baby, she began to feel that he had laid siege to her mostly because it was a challenge to steal from Richard Branson his most prized possession. She was only to find happiness in marriage many years later. But as the wounds healed, Branson and his former wife were able to restore some of the old brother-sister relationship that they had had in the earliest days. Kristen and her German husband Axel Ball would be invited to spend holidays with their family on Branson’s private island. By the end of the 1980s, the two families were even in business together: Branson bought a controlling interest in a luxury hotel that they had opened in Majorca, and a new hotel was being planned in Hydra for which Kristen and her second husband would provide the architectural and managerial talent, and her first husband the money.
A matter of months after Richard Branson married Kristen Tomassi, his business partner Nik Powell married Kristen’s younger sister Merrill. A matter of months after the failure of Richard and Kristen’s marriage, the marriage of Nik and Merrill failed also.
But the twin marriages, at which Richard and Nik served as each other’s best man, said as much about the two founders of Virgin as about their wives. Nicholas Powell had been Branson’s earliest real friend; they had met at the local private school at Shamley Green at the age of four. They were, as the closest of friends can sometimes be, almost opposites. Richard was fair-haired, gregarious and rudely healthy. Nik was dark, shy and epileptic. Richard was an indifferent student; Nik was more academic. When Richard went to Stowe, whose foundation in 1923 made it a parvenu among public schools, Nik was sent north to Yorkshire to be educated in the gloomy tradition of Ampleforth College, founded by Benedictine monks before the Reformation. Richard was the leader, Nik the follower; it was not clear who needed whom more.
Powell had lived at Albion Street in the gap between school and university, and had helped out on Student. But it was only when he gave up his place at Sussex, returning to London to become Branson’s partner in the mail-order business, that the structure of their relationship was formalized in a business agreement. Powell was given 40 per cent of Virgin. As the venture grew, the two slipped into complementary roles. Powell would produce financial figures for the bank; Branson would take the figures to the meeting and persuade the bank manager to lend another few tens of thousands of pounds. Branson would decide suddenly that Virgin needed to open more record shops, and would galvanize everyone with the enthusiasm necessary to get the job done swiftly; Powell would do the stocktaking. Branson would rush off on one implausible scheme after another; Powell would provide the voice, sometimes gentle and sometimes not so gentle, telling him not to be such a damned fool. It was Branson whose gusto for life persuaded people that working for Virgin would be fun; it was Powell who stopped the biscuits in the coffee cupboard when times became hard. One did not need to know about the 60–40 split to know which was the senior partner and which the junior.
But there were other junior partners, too, who were given shares in the businesses they worked for because Powell thought that equity was the best possible incentive for hard work. One was Simon Draper, who was given a 20 per cent stake in the record company. Another was Tom Newman, who had 20 per cent of the studio business. A third was Steve Lewis, who received 20 per cent of Virgin’s management company. In common with the share split between Branson and Powell, these minority holdings were not negotiated. None of the three was asked to pay a penny for their shareholdings, nor to accept any financial risk on their own heads. Branson was prepared to take all the risks and to find all the money; the shareholdings were simply a reward, an expression of confidence in the future and a gesture of thanks for useful advice already given and work already done.
At first, this approach threw up no problems. In common with almost everybody else working for Virgin, Draper, Lewis and Newman were not much bothered by money. They were young and without responsibilities. Their salaries were perfectly adequate to cover the cost of renting a flat in London, going out for meals with friends, buying tickets to the movies, and, if they wished, smoking the occasional joint. Many of their living costs were paid by the company in any case. At the big communal dinners they all went out to, Richard would slip away and pay the bill before anyone had even noticed that he had gone. The fleet of company Volvos provided free transport for the trusted insiders. Perhaps most important of all, all three of the minority shareholders were doing what they wanted to do. Music was the passion of their lives; to be able to spend their days doing something they enjoyed, when many of their contemporaries were dressing up in drab suits and doing dull jobs in old-fashioned offices, seemed the greatest privilege of all. Who would be ungracious enough to start quibbling about equity?
Simon Draper was the first. In 1975 he went back to South Africa for a holiday and had a long chat about his work at Virgin with his older brother. He explained the way Virgin was structured. There was a holding company at the top, of which Branson owned 60 per cent and Powell 40. That company did business through a number of subsidiaries that it owned, covering records, studios, retail, mail-order and management. When someone at Virgin had been given a minority shareholding, it was always a shareholding in the subsidiary company. So Branson and Powell together owned 80 per cent of the subsidiary, and the rest belonged to the individual minority shareholder.
Draper’s brother told