Old Beefeater over at Apple was right. His Brooklyn bloodhounds got their man. His fingers stop tapping when Todd Rundgren walks into his cubicle. His stiff upper lip twists in a little bemused British smile. After getting the introductions and other formalities over with, making some mandatory small talk, sending the bloodhounds yapping off for coffee. It's time to get down to the little bit of business at hand. Apple's man on the spot puts his elbows on his desk, fingers forming a London Bridge configuration that props up his chin. He stares probingly at the wizardly creature sprawled in his jester suit in the chair opposite him, and - voice hopefully somewhere in the George Sanders register - begins with a time-honored line: "I suppose you know why you're here!"

"Vaguely." The classic answer. Todd's slumped down in this chair propping his chin up with a hand and wrist configuration that is more like a hammock than a bridge, looking like a schoolboy who got sent to the principal's office for wearing his Halloween costume to class and is trying to psyche old Dough Balls out. Beefeater's moon-head is bobbing up there over London Bridge as he runs down this whole rap about how George Harrison has been trying to reach him to find out if he might be interested in possibly producing the Badfinger group for Apple. George himself was going to produce them, but in the wake of his exhaustion after the Bangla Desh concert in Madison Square Garden, he would like to be able to bow out of his commitment to the group knowing that he was leaving them in capable hands. George had taken a personal interest in the group and he thinks Todd might be the right producer to develop the group's potential.

Todd is slumped down there in his hammock, all elbows and knees, saying nothing, just staring straight at the guy in his impassive, snotty kid way, psyching him out with his cool. Beefeater's going a mile a minute now in his clipped whispery confidential Scotland Yard voice. He's going on at length about the professional history of the group, their trials and tribulations, their former and current production problems comparing Badfinger's music to that of the Beatles, citing the two distinctively different types of songs that they've been doing: raw high energy rockers like John's or - and here current Apple policy dictates a distasteful smirk, as though one were tasting a particularly unpleasant sourball - "gooey, cute little confections like Paul sometimes writes." At any rate, George would like Todd to get together with the Badfinger boys to see if they might be compatible in a producer-artist relationship. If so, Apple would like to assist Badfinger, a group for which they have very high hopes, in discovering their fullest musical potential. Todd sees an opening here and lunges for it.

"I'm afraid I really don't think in terms of the group's musical potential as much as I think of its recording potential," he says. "Their musical potential is abstract and vague and up to the group itself to worry about. As their producer I would be concerned in working with the level it's on right now and channeling it in the direction of making successful recordings . . ."

Beefeater's eyes widen. "Well, we do feel that Badfinger is a group with a great deal of potential...."

"Their potential for making hit records is what I would be concerned with if I finally agree to produce them," Todd tells him.

"Yes," Beefeater is clearly not used to such time-saving candor, but he can't say it displeases him.

"I think in terms of being effective," Todd adds, like a pastry chef putting some final flourishes on a cake.

"Tell me, how did you like London?" Beefeater asks suddenly changing the subject.

"Oh, I had a real good time," Todd says.

"Was it your first visit?"

"Oh, no, not at all. I've been there several times before. But this last visit was the best, actually, because I have a lot of good friends there now and I'm very much at home. The first time I went was during the whole "Swinging London" phase and everything was - well, sort of 'painted and tainted,' but I loved it. But this last visit was so nice that I'm seriously considering moving there."

"Oh, it's so very lovely there," Beefeater suddenly blurts, his voice cracking a little bit. "So very nice indeed!"

Come, come old boy! Stiff upper lip. Beefeater pulls himself together, bears up and says:

"I hope to have you on a plane before the week is out."

* * * * * *

According to rock encyclopedist Lillian Roxon, who says "don't quote me" as convincingly as masochists say "don't whip me," Todd's fabled mystique has a fatal appeal.

"He's such a beautiful little boy," she says, snuggling up to a gin and tonic in the surreal red light of Max's Kansas City's smoky back room like a cheshire cat to a cusion, "that most women and even some straight heterosexual men are completely captivated by him. It's very strange actually" - continuing in her insinuating Australian accent - "but the ex-manager of the Nazz wrote a novel, you know, that's just now making the rounds of the publishers. It's bound to be the next Valley of the Dolls. It's very decadent and dramatic and sordid and it's all about the rise and fall of the Nazz, and Todd is the hero."

"Does he come out well?"

"That depends upon how you look at it," Lillian says, an impish smile spreading. "He emerges as sort of an anti-hero . . . someone who is incapable of feeling real love . . . perhaps it's really rather sad . . . but he comes out seeming . . . quite cold and ruthless . . ."

Lillian snuggles up to her drink in the booth there in the back room at Max's, smiling in the way cheshire cats are supposed to.

* * * * * *

The New York poetess-turned-rock-singer Patti Smith sees her close friend Todd Rundgren in quite opposite terms. In the same surreal light, her tomboy Keith Richards features more emaciated than ever after a recent bout with the tuberculosis that has plagued her since childhood, her black eyes glimmering brightly in the shadow of the wide-brimmed white straw panama that covers her rat's nest of black witch hair, she talks of her friend Tod's whimsical nature. She understands Todd, she says, because, though they're different in lots of ways and what was once a romantic relationship is now just a close friendship, there are ways in which they are very similar -- a belief Todd expressed to you earlier.

They both had the same ugly-duckling childhood: Patti Smith grew up an awkward outcast and a lonely dreamer in the weedgrown-wilds of New Jersey, before becoming one of the beautiful creatures of the New York satyricon that shuttles back and forth between Max's and The Hotel Chelsea -- where the met at a party where they were both lurking in separate corners looking arrogant. There they were -- wizardly Todd bunched up and ready to spring like a painful ouch-cube of sensitive arrogance in one corner, and punky Patti Smith all coiled and ready to strike in the other. It was one of those depraved parties with Warhol superstars in drag flittering around and the host, Stanley Amos, running around like Nero with a laurel crown of pot-buds encircling his bald head, encouraging ancient Rome to burn, baby, burn ... Suddenly Todd and Patti glimpsed each other through all the chaos, their glares met across the crowded room, and -- Snarlllllll -- fantastic punk empathy! Almost by grim agreement and with grudging growls, they became close friends - and that's why Patti is willing to discuss her friend Todd. Although the poetess has been writing press releases and dong some part-time public relations for Albert Grossman's Bearsville records (she wrote Todd's current bio in which she likens him to "the great child poet Rimbaud"), she wants to assure you that her reason for meeting with you is more personal than professional. She is Todd's friend and she loves him and she would like to see something written about his wizardly Lewis Carroll whimsy.

She regales you with tales of Todd's irresistable cuteness and little boy impetuousness: sudden trips to to department stores to buy hundreds of dollars worth of electric train accessories (!); the time he had the whim to buy out an entire pastry shop (!); another sweet tooth time he went to Carvels and had an ice-cream cake decorated with dozens of tiny fuckyous (!); a small boy's love of mischief that inspired moonlight expeditions to deserted fields with enough fireworks for a private Fourth of July celebration, with flares and homemade rockets lighting up the night sky and streaking through the heavens like Todd Rundgren racing through the recording studios on his windmill legs, emblazoning his legend like skywriting through the record industry's galaxies and cosmos...

"Todd lives the fantasies that I only dream about," Patti tells you, "and what always amazes me about him is that he has absolutely no heroes. I worship Dylan, DeKooning, Rimbaud ... I've always had my heroes, everybody does -- but not Todd. Todd appreciates other people's work, but instead of idolizing them he absorbs them... "

When Todd likes something musically Patti explains, he absorbs it into his eclectic visions and makes it merely an element of his own sound, like an artist using disparate elements to make a collage. What he admires most is workmanship. Once she watched him take an expensive watch apart and put it back together again, delighting like a small boy in the intricate workings of the delicate mechanisms, and she flashed on the realization that he does the same thing with music, only when he puts in back together again, it's like a Mickey Mouse watch that only tells Todd Rundgren time!

For his latest album, Todd told her awhile back, he was going to create a Motown song. Patti had shook her head and laughed. "Todd! How can anyone create a Motown song except Motown?" But sure enough, a couple of days later he played her a tape and there it was: a perfect Motown song, a perfect Todd Rundgren sound collage, complete with the funky horns and wailing feminine spade-chick falsetto - Bay-buh, oooooooo, bay-buh, ooooooo - eee-ooooooo, bay-buh . . . Oooooooo-eeee-ooooooooOOOO ...!

* * * * * *

To the industry types he deals with whose aesthetics naturally tend toward the Arp-like sensuality of dollar signs, Todd's incredible versatility and facility seem infinitely marketable ... it has to happen ... it's only a matter of time ...

This guy named Sam Gordon who works out of Albert Grossman's office handles Todd's music publishing. Gordon is a real Brill Building-type who talks like a machine gun and dresses like a stolen car - not what you'd calls flash, but very flashy in the Broadway showbiz style. Despite their diverse sartorial tastes, however, he and Todd get on very well (returning from a recent trip to London, he presented Todd with a beautiful antique velvet blouse he had found in an out-of-the-way thrift shop, saying "As soon as I saw it, I thought of you. I said "That's Todd!" I said "That's not for me, but Todd will love that!")

Asked to comment on his friend Todd's career, Sam Gordon pauses to reflect there in the technicolor half-light of his office, the Billboard Chart tacked up on the rhapsody-in-blue wall over his left shoulder. He looks distant and wistful, like Tony Bennett when he sings "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." He sits pondering silently, sending out shocks of after-shave, letting an aura of sentimental thoughtfulness envelop him like a halo. It rises out of a Sy Devore collar with a roll of tailfins of an Eldorado, this monumental head with its hair as neatly razor cut as a perfect toupee, its cheeks glowing goldenly with Bloomingdale's bronzer - it rises up into the mind-lulling lushness of the room, and slowly, in impeccable testimonial rhetoric, it begins to speak:

"I've watched Todd develop from an eager and talented young artist and performer into a man of phenomenal talent . . . I've seen him absorb many influences and go through a lot of uncertainty and finally emerge and develop a tremendous confidence . . . He has worked very hard and now he's beginning to see the fruits of what he has struggled for in his music, where he has finally digested al of those diverse influences and made them harmonious. There are those who call what he does bubblegum music, but those are the same assholes who will be calling up begging for Todd Rundgren songs when he achieves the recognition he deserves. That's how it usually works. Take Gordon Lightfoot for example. Before he got so hot, I couldn't give his songs away. Now people like Peggy Lee call up begging for Gordon Lightfoot songs! Where were they when Gordon needed them? I give them his shittiest songs - and of course, heh, heh, Gordon Lightfoot never wrote a really shitty song. That's how it will be with Todd when people finally catch up to him. He could be bigger than James Taylor, bigger than anybody . . . But now he has to concentrate on doing it for himself instead of for other people all the time ... Todd has contributed so much of his talent to improving other people's work, but now it's time for him to make a big push and emerge on his own. When he does, Todd Rundgren can go ... anywhere."

* * * * * *

The objects on the coffee table of Todd Rundgren's cavernous wizard cave livingroom have not been moved. The half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels, the empty chocolate milk containers, the piles of tape cassettes, the miniature speakers, the disemboweled Sunday Times - nothing has been disturbed for days. Marlene still sleeps, a lump under the covers on the mattress in the far corner of the room and Todd is slumped on the sofa totally engrossed in an old Popeye cartoon on the tube. For some reason, probably because they are forced to spend countless hours in motel rooms, rock musicians excel at a favorite indoor sport of the sub-culture: making humorous running commentaries on the lameness of the programming as a way of establishing one's own hipper-than-thou superiority and commenting on the sad state of straight society in general (Paul Kantner and Grace Slick are the George Burns and Gracie Allen of the art) and Todd was indulging in this pastime until this Popeye cartoon came on. Now he is silently engrossed, for this is serious stuff: the battle of the tough resourceful runts with the dumb hulking idiots of the world as Popeye battles the big dope Bruto for the fair lady Olive Oyl's affections. A few minutes ago Todd was delivering a cleverly improvised Lenny Bruce-type monologue about the friendly Clubhouse Copper, as he conned the kiddies on the screen, but when this vintage Popeye flick came on his attitude turned almost reverent and he has been giving it his undivided attention ever since, collapsing in uproarious belly-clutching laughter at regular intervals, then sitting up and leaning forward again, engrossed...

Todd is reluctant to drag himself away, lets the phone ring five or six times before answering it. When he gets off he looks disturbed that the Popeye cartoon is over, replaced by some static Hanna Barbera effort, cheaply made and poorly animated, about which he says "that's the kind of stuff that makes kids today retarded."

Then he slumps down into the soft cushions of the couch and says, "That was the guy from Apple that called. They want me to leave for London the day after tomorrow. Man, the next couple of days are really going to be hectic."

"It looks like things are beginning to happen for you," you tell him.

"Yeah, it looks that way," he says, "but I've always believed that anything is possible, so none of it really surprises me. I guess it sounds like the corny old American work ethic or something but I've always thought I could get anything I was really willing to work for. I mean, this may sound incredibly egotistical or crazy or something, but I actually believe that I could run for President of the United States and get elected because . . . well, I think, for one thing, I set a pretty good example, and it would just be incredibly interesting to run a country with my kind of existential attitude and see how it turned out ... "

"Well, yeah, in theory, it's interesting to think about it, but you wouldn't really be interested in getting into politics ... would you?"

"No, not right away, anyway, because I'm enjoying what I'm doing for now ... but ... someday ..."

And he isn't even smiling.

Read Part One again?...