The Last Sultan

by Robert Greenfield

  At another dinner at the embassy, Ahmet’s father told a joke in Turkish that caused everyone at the table to begin laughing hysterically. Unable to control himself, the German butler the family had hired because help was so difficult to find during the war began laughing as well. “At which point,” Ahmet said, “we realized he was a German spy. Because he spoke Turkish. He understood the Turkish joke.” The butler, who did not deny the charge, was immediately let go.

  Because it was so “difficult, if not impossible to travel during the war,” Mehmet Ertegun continued to serve as the ambassador to the United States long after he might have been transferred to another post under ordinary circumstances. By 1944, he had spent more time in the nation’s capital than any other foreign ambassador and so became the dean of the diplomatic corps.

  On March 14, 1944, Ahmet graduated with honors from St. John’s College. He then began taking graduate courses in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University while his sister, Selma, went off to college at Bryn Mawr. On the morning of October 29, 1944, as the “whole embassy was astir preparing for the reception that was to take place that afternoon to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Ertegun “suddenly complained of pain just under his left shoulder.”

  Although the doctor who was called to the embassy “prescribed some medicine and complete rest, this happened to be a time when Turkey was being wooed by both the Allies and the Germans to enter the war on their side. My father thought his absence from the reception might be construed as a sign Turkey was on the verge of a decision. So in spite of his pain and the doctor’s advice, he got up and stood in the receiving line for at least two hours.” The ambassador then returned to bed.

  In a photograph taken two days later, Mehmet Ertegun sits in a plush velvet armchair wearing a thick herringbone tweed jacket, a white shirt, a neatly buttoned vest, and a tie. In his hands are two tiger-striped kittens. Completely bald with his thick mustache having gone entirely gray, he looks much older than his years and not at all well as he stares into the camera through the thick lenses of his rimless glasses. Early in the morning on Armistice Day, November 11, 1944, Mehmet Munir Ertegun died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of sixty-one. Along with their mother, both Ahmet and his sister were with him.

  “I am deeply grieved by the news of the sudden death of my personal friend the Turkish Ambassador Mehmet Munir Ertegun,” President Roosevelt said in a press release issued that day. “Turkish interests in this country have been ably represented by him for more than ten years and during this period I, along with hundreds of others both in and out of the Government have come to esteem him as a diplomat of the highest type—kindly, sincere and accomplished. His personal integrity was outstanding.”

  On January 25, 1946, President Harry S. Truman gave permission for Mehmet Ertegun’s body, which had been kept at Arlington National Cemetery for the duration of the war, to be taken back in state to Turkey on a naval cruiser. In April, the ambassador’s remains were transported to Istanbul on the USS Missouri. In Ahmet’s words, this was “the battleship on which the official Japanese surrender had been signed. The day the ship arrived, the docks were festooned with flowers and thousands of people were there holding banners in support of the Allies and the new leadership of Turkey.”

  As Ahmet’s sister would later write, “Although we felt this was a great honor for us, we knew that the U.S. was using this as a show of strength to the Soviet Union, which had been making demands on Turkey for two provinces adjoining Russia. In a way, we were happy that even in death, Father was able to serve his country.” In the family graveyard in Sultantepe, Uskudar, in Istanbul, Mehmet Munir Ertegun was laid to rest alongside his Sufi grandfather.

  No longer bound to follow in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career in the Turkish diplomatic service, Ahmet was now free to do whatever he liked in a country where the postwar economy was booming and jobs were available in every field. For someone who had never worked a day in his life, it was neither an easy nor an enviable choice. With no visible means of support, no marketable skills, and no real idea what he wanted to do with his life, Ahmet was now for the first time truly on his own.

  THREE

  Making Records

  “After the Second World War when there was a shortage of shellac, the major companies only pressed records by their biggest stars and the first area to suffer was what they called ‘race music.’ Which opened an area for anybody who could find a pressing facility. You didn’t have to have artists. You didn’t have to have songs. You had to have availability of pressing. A man named Al Green started National Records. The reason he went into the record business was that he was a tough guy from Chicago, a friend of all the famous Chicago racketeers. He was a very colorful personage with long hair who used to quote Schopenhauer and was always drunk all day long. Here was this Jewish tough guy from Chicago who had somehow acquired a couple of blocks in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, and discovered that on one of them was a derelict record plant and so he reactivated it. Because with the advent of the Second World War, the Depression was suddenly over. Black people had work. Women had work. Everybody had work and people had money. And there was a sudden boom for records and there wasn’t enough supply of records and there weren’t enough pressing plants. So when Al Green found he had a pressing plant, the next thing he had was a record company. Because he said, ‘Why should I press for these other people? When I can press something?’ ”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  Unlike the classical heroes Ahmet had studied in college, the sudden reversal of fortune brought about by the death of his father did not cause him to take dramatic action of any kind. With the kind of unflappable cool that would become the bedrock of his personality as an adult, he continued living much as he had before as the rest of his family did their best to cope with the harsh reality of trying to survive in America without the endless largesse of the Turkish government to sustain them.

  After spending weeks in bed grieving for her husband while being “visited by close friends who tried to console her,” Ahmet’s mother auctioned off some of her personal belongings to help settle the family’s debts. She then moved into an apartment at 2500 Q Street in Georgetown that was far too small to accommodate the huge record collection her sons had amassed while living at the embassy.

  In order to supplement the $100 monthly student allowance the Turkish government had agreed to provide both Ahmet and his sister from their father’s pension, Ahmet decided to sell what may have been as many as fifteen thousand 78 records. Originally purchased for a nickel or a dime apiece, each record was now worth from $5 to $25.

  Although the money he realized from the sale did not last long, Ahmet was not yet ready to accept help from his father’s powerful friends. When Eugene Meyer, the publisher of The Washington Post, offered Ahmet a job as a cub reporter that paid $20 a week, he replied, “I get more than that as my allowance.” He also turned down offers of employment from Wall Street bankers who were family friends.

  When his mother and sister returned to Turkey in July 1947, Ahmet did not accompany them because he was “working hard” on his master’s thesis in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University. He also “didn’t feel like going back to Turkey because that meant military service. So I wanted to put that off.” In a nation where military service was compulsory for all males between the ages of twenty and forty and the army was such an integral part of the social fabric that even to speak out against the draft was a criminal offense, such behavior would have been completely unacceptable.

  After Orhan Eralp, a good friend who had served as a secretary at the Turkish embassy and in time would become his nation’s permanent representative to the United Nations, took over the lease on the apartment on Q Street, he allowed Ahmet to continue living there for free. Ahmet also sometimes stayed with his steady girlfriend, a very attractive young woman from Nashville who worked as a secretary for the govern
ment, and with Dr. Tom Williston and his wife, Carol, a black couple whom he had first met through his brother.

  After moving to Los Angeles, Nesuhi had married a woman named Marili Mordern in 1945. Now running the Jazzman Record Shop she had founded on Melrose Avenue, Nesuhi somehow managed to send Ahmet $30 a month during this period. As their sister would later write, “Ahmet had some pretty hard times. He told me he had had to subsist on a cheap brand of canned fish and bread. He said he chose fish because it was the best nourishment he could afford.”

  Still looking for a way to support himself, Ahmet wrote her, “I have not found a really desirable job yet. They all pay so little except jobs like painter, butler, chauffeur, salesman and so on which no one thinks I should like.” Intent on finding a job that would pay him more than $25 a week, Ahmet noted he was also trying to put together a jam session with Bunk Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Teddy Wilson, Meade Lux Lewis, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, and Ben Webster that he hoped would bring him “about five hundred bucks.”

  By looking through the want ads, Ahmet found the only job he would ever hold before going into the record business. His term of service at U.S. Insurance, a fly-by-night company that tried to pass itself off as part of the government, did not last long. After Ahmet had signed up all the members of the local musicians’ union, his boss offered him a raise rather than the large commission he was due. By the time his boss reconsidered, Ahmet had scuttled the sale by telling the president of the musicians’ local the insurance company was run by “a bunch of crooks.” As Ahmet would later say, “After that, I said I was going to be in the record business.”

  Why it had taken Ahmet so long to reach this decision seems difficult to understand. Born with such a good ear for music that “he could memorize a tune he heard only once,” Ahmet would often sing the songs he and his sister had just heard at the movies on their way home. For his fourteenth birthday, Ahmet’s mother had given him a recording machine, which he loved.

  When he was nineteen years old, Ahmet had gone into “a cheap recording studio” in Washington to cut some sides with Mildred Cummings, a twenty-year-old singer known as Little Miss Cornshucks who performed with a bandanna around her head and a basket in her hand and “could sing the blues better than anybody I’ve ever heard to this day.” Having paid for the session out of his own pocket, Ahmet made the record strictly for himself and never considered its possible commercial value.

  Ahmet’s social standing was also a major factor in forestalling his decision to make his career in music. Able to mix comfortably with other ardent record collectors and passionate jazz fans in the nation’s capital, he had virtually nothing in common with those who then earned their living in the record business. While hanging out in what had now become known as Waxie Maxie’s Quality Music Shop, Ahmet had already met “all these guys who had these independent record companies and they were all a bunch of third-rate crooks. They were jukebox operators or they had nightclubs in black sections or whatever. Anyway, they were all like very rough-and-tumble guys who didn’t know much about music. I figured, ‘If they could make it, I certainly can. I know much more than they do.’ I knew much more about what black people bought in record shops than any of these people. I knew who the musicians were. I knew the singers. And I knew who was buying what and what to make.”

  Ahmet also felt he “knew what black life was like in America. I felt I knew what black music was in America. I felt I knew what black roots were—gospel music and blues from the Delta that went to Chicago and Texas blues that went to the West Coast. In loving America, I felt I knew more about America than the average American knew about it.”

  What Ahmet did not know about actually running a record company was equally staggering. Even after he finally came “around to thinking about running a record label myself, I figured I could do it by working on it one day a week putting out just a few records. I thought that if one of ten shops in America were to buy just one of my records, I could make some money. That was my projection, right? I had no idea about how records were pressed or who distributed them. It just never occurred to me how a record came to be in a shop.”

  Ahmet happened to be in a record shop one day when nineteen-year-old Bob Clark “breezed in” and said, “I’d like one of everything.” After reassuring the astonished clerk that he did in fact want a copy of every record in the store, Clark, whose father had “made a lot of money” as the owner of “a string of cheap hotels,” invited Ahmet to inspect his massive record collection. After Ahmet told Clark he wanted to go into the record business but did not have any money, Clark said, “Oh, I’ve got money. Don’t worry about that.”

  On August 22, 1947, Ahmet wrote Selma that Clark was “a rich friend whom I knew during my first year at St. John’s. He wants to form a record company with me and has deposited $8,000, of which we are half-and-half partners. He is also paying for all my expenses (around $200–$300 a month). I have been staying at the Ritz-Carlton [in New York] for the last 15 days. Last week we recorded our first records. They are not jazz but popular music. My friend is very rich. He is ready to give more if necessary. It’s such a good offer that I couldn’t help but accept. I am living like a lord.”

  After cutting four sides with Boyd Raeburn, “who had an avant-garde Stan Kenton-type band” fronted by his wife, a beautiful singer named Ginnie Powell, Ahmet took the masters to John Hammond, who was then working for Mitch Miller at Mercury Records. After praising the work Ahmet had done, Miller offered him a job. “I’m not interested in a job,” Ahmet replied. I want to have my own record company. I’m looking for a distributor.” When Miller told him Mercury did not distribute records it did not own, Ahmet decided not to sell him the masters.

  By then, Bob Clark had become friendly with Raeburn. Down on his luck and living with Ginnie Powell “in the Forest Hotel, this dumpy little place in Times Square,” Raeburn told Clark, “What do you need this Ahmet character for? You put up the money and we’ll do this together.” Telling Clark and Raeburn it was fine with him if they wanted to go into business together, Ahmet gave them back the masters. After Raeburn and Ginnie Powell were divorced, Bob Clark began dating her but nothing ever came of his partnership with the band leader. The four sides Ahmet had produced were eventually released on Atlantic.

  Having failed at his first attempt to start a record label, Ahmet then persuaded Lionel Hampton, the great jazz vibraphone player and band leader, to come up with $15,000 for a company they planned to call Hamp-Tone Records. To finalize the deal, Ahmet went with Hampton one night to the theater in New York where Hampton was performing. Because Hampton was managed by his wife, Gladys, “a very tough lady” who “held all of Lionel’s money,” she was what Ahmet would later call “the equivalent of the bank.”

  Along with the white sax player in Hampton’s band who was her boyfriend, Gladys occupied “the star dressing room while Hampton would be in the small room next door.” After knocking on the dressing room door “with the big star,” Hampton went inside to talk to his wife as Ahmet waited in the corridor. As Ahmet would later say, “It quickly became apparent that the walls in this particular theater must have been extremely thin, because I soon began to hear raised voices, mainly Lionel’s wife screaming, ‘You’re what? You’re going to give this kid how much? You’re going to give our money to this little jerk who’s never worked a day in his life?’ So that was the end of that.”

  Ahmet then approached Herb Abramson, with whom he had been “best friends for a long time.” They agreed to become partners but, in Ahmet’s words, “We didn’t have the finances so we approached Waxie Maxie. We had one label, Quality, and another, Jubilee, that was supposed to be only for gospel music. We made one record, Sister Ernestine Washington accompanied by Bunk Johnson and His Orchestra. Then we made a couple of records on Quality. None of them sold. Max Silverman said he didn’t want to put up any more money so that was the end of the Quality deal. Then I started Atlantic with Herb.”

  The false sta
rts were now over. With his good friend Herb Abramson, Ahmet was about to found what would become the most prestigious record label in a business about which Ahmet then knew woefully little.

  2

  Ever since he had first caught sight of the brilliant lights of 42nd Street at night as a boy and then spent a thrilling night on his own in Harlem as a teenager, Ahmet had known that New York City was where he belonged. The record company he was about to found would reflect not only his unique personality but also that of his new partner.

  Born in Brooklyn on November 16, 1916, Herbert Charles Abramson was a multitalented real-life golden boy who had also chosen to make his life in music simply because he loved it so much. His father, an amateur songwriter who at one point published a small newspaper in Oswego, New York, had died when Herb was twelve. Born in Russia, his mother had emigrated to the United States when she was two. His uncle was a state senator from Queens and his first cousin was Stanley Kramer, the noted film director and producer.

  After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in 1934, Abramson attended the City College of New York. In an era when admission quotas for Jewish undergraduates were actively enforced by Ivy League colleges, CCNY was known as “the poor man’s Harvard,” or more accurately “the Jewish man’s Harvard.” Wanting to become a doctor so “he could find a cure for cancer,” Abramson transferred to New York University, where he pursued a premed program. He was not admitted to medical school because, in the words of his third wife Barbara, “he was a Jew and the quota was filled.”