The Last Sultan

by Robert Greenfield

  In Greenberg’s words, “Mel goes, ‘Okay, we’re keeping our sales guy. Your sales guy is going. We’re doing this. That’s going to change.’ These were David Geffen’s marching orders. Then he says, ‘You know the Rolls-Royce?’ Ahmet had a Rolls-Royce in California that sat there with a driver so he could use it when he came to Los Angeles. So Mel says, ‘The Rolls-Royce has got to go. David says we don’t need it.’ I said, ‘Ahmet’s Rolls-Royce has gotta go? We don’t need it?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ ”

  Having carefully written everything down, Greenberg told Posner he would relay what they had discussed to Ahmet. As Greenberg put it, “I don’t walk back. I run back and bust into Ahmet’s office and I say, ‘Ahmet, David’s already got a whole list of who’s staying and who’s going but I want to start with the most important thing just to show you where all this is going. They want to get rid of your Rolls-Royce. David doesn’t think you need it out there full-time anymore and I just wanted you to know. But it’s your call.’ ”

  Telling Greenberg to hang on, Ahmet picked up the phone and called Steve Ross. With the deal having already been announced in the trades, Ahmet told Ross, “Steve, I’ve been giving this merger a lot of thought. Asylum has a certain image and a certain way of attracting artists and we have our own image. If you put the two together, it’s not going to work. We’ll be much more successful keeping them separate.” In Greenberg’s words, “The next thing I know, the merger’s undone.”

  As Ahmet explained, “So then I kind of postponed it, and David got very upset, and the whole thing fell apart. I think David was quite hurt. But I think everyone thought he would come on too strong, and be too disruptive.” Even in a tempestuous business where long-term relationships between the rulers of record labels could fall apart during a single phone call only to then be put back together before the end of the day, Ahmet’s decision to reverse a merger that had been front-page news in all the trades was extraordinary.

  While no one ever loved the perks that came along with running Atlantic more than Ahmet, he did not cancel the deal simply because David Geffen wanted to take away his Rolls-Royce in Los Angeles. In what must have come as a truly great shock, Ahmet suddenly realized that in Geffen he had found a student who in time would outdo his master. To protect himself and his position, Ahmet had to ensure Geffen was not given the opportunity to do so at Atlantic.

  Understandably upset by this bizarre turn of events, Geffen would later say, “Ahmet never cared about upsetting Jerry Wexler. Jerry was never a consideration. Ahmet is a big boy, and Ahmet does what he wants, and Ahmet is not that considerate of his employees. They don’t have that big a vote. Ahmet’s a little bit like the gorilla—he sits where he wants . . . Ahmet and I agreed on a merger but he got very upset because friends of his were calling him up to find out if it was a demotion for him.” Geffen would also note, “By the way, it wasn’t a rupture in our relationship.”

  While Ahmet’s decision to kill the merger was the first in what would become a long series of rifts, slights, snubs, perceived offenses, and misunderstandings between the two men, Ahmet and Geffen continued to consider one another friends. But even when they saw one another socially, Ahmet could not keep from doing everything he could to keep Geffen in what he still perceived as his proper place.

  At some point after the merger had failed, Ahmet found himself in Los Angeles without any plans for the evening. As this in itself was a unique event, Ahmet suggested to Tom Dowd, who was also in L.A., that he meet him and Bianca Jagger for dinner in a restaurant at nine that evening. Arriving with her and “another lady—some countess” at ten-thirty, Ahmet began ordering champagne before sitting down to a meal that did not end until one in the morning.

  By then, Mick Jagger had joined the group, prompting Ahmet to say, “There’s got to be a party somewhere.” Instructing a waiter to bring a phone to his table, Ahmet called singer Bette Midler to ask what she was doing. He then told her there was a party at Cher’s house and he would pick her up on his way there. Despite the fact it was now nearly two A.M., Ahmet then phoned Cher to tell her he was coming over with Dowd, Mick and Bianca, the countess, and Midler “for a nightcap.”

  Having long since parted company with Sonny, Cher was then living with David Geffen. When Ahmet and his group arrived at their home that night, Cher looked “beautiful in this gold lamé dress.” Everyone then went into the living room, where Jagger sat down at the piano as Cher began singing. Clad in a pair of tennis shoes and shorts, Geffen took it all in. “Look at that creep,” Ahmet confided to Dowd. “How can he dress like that?” Addressing Geffen, Ahmet said, “David, what a lovely outfit!” Ahmet then asked Cher if everyone could have some champagne. “Of course,” she told him, “we always have some chilled.” When Geffen asked her where the champagne was, Ahmet looked at him and said, “We never had that problem when Sonny was here.”

  “That was Ahmet,” Dowd said, “pulling people’s strings. Ahmet has a great deal of respect for Geffen but he doesn’t like him as a human being. He has no allegiance to him—because David has no allegiance to anything except for dollar signs. And Ahmet will not renege on a human being, like David would.” Loyal to a fault, Dowd would spend his entire career at Atlantic without ever being paid royalties for the many hit albums he produced for the label before dying at the age of seventy-seven in 2002.

  After Geffen’s relationship with Cher ended, he began losing interest in the music business and fulfilled his childhood dream of running a movie studio by becoming the vice chairman of Warner Brothers in 1975. Two years later, he was mistakenly diagnosed with transitional cell carcinoma and retired from show business to teach a course on the music industry and artist management at Yale.

  Eventually given a clean bill of health, Geffen decided to return to the record business in 1980 and asked Steve Ross for $25 million to start a new label called Geffen Records in return for a 50 percent stake in the company. A decade later, Geffen would sell his label to MCA for $550 million in stock, thereby making him, as The New York Times reported, “one of the nation’s richest individuals.”

  In Geffen’s words, “When I came back into the record business in 1980, Ahmet wanted me to come to Atlantic Records and I said, ‘Not a chance. I’m going to sign with Mo Ostin.’ And he said, ‘Why with Mo?’ I said, ‘Because for all these years I was retired, he never stopped calling me and telling me how much he wanted me.’ And Ahmet said to me, ‘You’ll never have a laugh.’ The truth of the matter was that Ahmet was an awful lot of fun. But you had to pay big time to be in his company.”

  When the two men saw one another for the first time after Geffen had decided to go into business with Ostin and Ahmet asked why Geffen had not returned to Atlantic, Geffen responded, “Are you kidding? You’re out of it. Without Jerry Greenberg, Atlantic is nothing! Atlantic is finished!”

  In time, Geffen’s own business acumen would far outstrip that of his mentor, resulting in a personal fortune of more than a billion dollars. Staying with what he knew best, Ahmet would spend seven decades as the chairman of Atlantic Records. It was a position he feared he would never have held on to for that long had he made David Geffen his partner.

  3

  Like a long-distance marriage that existed in name only, so long as Ahmet and Jerry Wexler were operating from different geographic locations, they could maintain the appearance that they were still partners. Although Wexler had continued to function as a skilled producer and a capable record executive, he and Ahmet had long since parted ways.

  When Wexler began coming into work on a daily basis to Atlantic’s plush new offices at the Warner Communications headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, he soon realized he had been excluded from the day-to-day operations of the label. With both the promotion and marketing departments now reporting to Jerry Greenberg, who had also signed many of Atlantic’s new acts, Wexler, in Greenberg’s words, “couldn’t slip back into what he used to do.” Unable to tolerate the situation, Wexler soon confronted Ahmet b
y pointing out he had specifically agreed Wexler would be included in all decisions made at the label. Telling his longtime partner he worked far too spontaneously to ever be part of such an arrangement, Ahmet also informed Wexler that those who now worked at Atlantic no longer felt the need to report to him.

  As always, Wexler’s personality was at the heart of the matter. Within the new corporate structure at Atlantic, Ahmet told Wexler he was “viewed as abrasive, derisive, and cynical, a maverick at meetings, a flaunter of my quick sales of option stock, an undiplomatic critic.” When Wexler had first begun working at Atlantic, nearly every independent record label had been run by men who shared these same traits.

  In the very corporate world the record business had now become, where everyone was expected to be a team player while understanding precisely which rung he or she occupied on the executive ladder, Wexler simply no longer fit. Unlike Ahmet, a natural-born diplomat who could handle any situation with consummate ease and so was flourishing at Warner Communications, Wexler could not tailor his personality to suit his new environment. Ahmet also felt that Wexler had no real interest in the company itself but only really cared about his own artists.

  Wexler then demanded to know if Ahmet had now become his boss. Ahmet replied by saying that because of the position he occupied in the corporate structure, the final decision in all such matters belonged to him. As Wexler would later write, “For me it was parity or nothing. No parity, no Wexler.”

  “The problem,” Joe Smith said, “was that when Jerry came back to New York, he would fight off everything and deride anything that came down from Warner Communications, the parent company. Ahmet knew how to play the game very well. He had tickets to everything and tables at all the right restaurants and the corporate guys would run around with Ahmet while Wexler was being cantankerous.”

  Wexler wrote Ahmet a letter on May 3, 1975, in which he stated, “Under no circumstances, Ahmet, can I be your employee. That’s the bottom line.” Ahmet’s response was “Man, you can’t quit! It’s unthinkable.” Once he realized Wexler had made his decision and would not change his mind, Ahmet did all he could to ensure his longtime partner would get what he was due. As David Horowitz recalled, “One of my first assignments was to work out a parting deal with Jerry. We were prepared to be more than reasonable because the man had made a huge contribution to Warner’s, and Ahmet certainly didn’t bear him any ill will. I can’t say for sure but I think Jerry wanted out.”

  On July 17, Jerry Wexler formally announced his resignation as vice chairman of Atlantic Records effective August 1. As he would later say, “When I walked out, I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living or how I was going to survive. But I couldn’t abide the situation. Which was me becoming junior to Ahmet.” While the parting itself was amicable, the long friendship between Ahmet and Wexler ended when he left Atlantic.

  In the ensuing years, the two men had no contact at all with one another because, in Wexler’s words, “Ahmet sees only two kinds of people—social people and morons. And I ain’t either one.” Cuttingly, Wexler also suggested the words on Ahmet’s tombstone should read, “He Meant It When He Said It.” Wexler recalled, “There was a big draft between us for years. A big draft. But we very much came together again towards the end.”

  Two years after Wexler left Atlantic, he was hired by Mo Ostin to head the New York A&R department of Warner Brothers Records. After leaving the label, he produced albums by Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, and Carlos Santana. Nearly a decade passed before Ahmet and Jerry Wexler saw one another again as members of the nominating committee of the newly created Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York.

  As Suzan Hochberg, the director of the institution, recalled, “Jerry called me the day before the nominating committee’s first meeting and he was very nervous and apprehensive about coming. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen Ahmet in a long time and there was some friction when we parted. Is he really going to be there?’ When he walked in, Ahmet and Jerry saw one another and they hugged each other and that was it. The hatchet was buried.” Ahmet and Wexler were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

  By then, both men realized that the astonishing body of work they had done together during their twenty-two-year partnership at Atlantic would never be equaled. In every way possible, Wexler had given his life to the label. Working at a feverish pace, he had come into the office early, stayed late, and then spent his weekends at home calling distributors on one of the first multi-line push-button phones to let them know that, in his son’s words, if “they didn’t pay for the hit that was out right now by Solomon Burke, they would not get Ben E. King’s next record.”

  In the Atlantic office at 234 West 56th Street, where their desks had faced one another, the two men had staged elaborate charades whenever a manager would come in with an act they wanted to sign. Debating how big a royalty they could afford to pay without bankrupting the label, the partners would go back and forth with one another before finally reaching the figure they had both agreed upon beforehand. As the manager and the artist watched, they would then shake each other’s hands on the deal right in front of them.

  Functioning more powerfully as a unit than either could ever have done on his own, they had cajoled great artists into recording material they instinctively knew would be commercially successful. On the road, they had kibitzed and caroused together, goofed on everyone they had met like a pair of hip comics, and even shared a single bed. In the studio, they had clapped their hands in time to the beat while singing backup as Joe Turner cut “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

  On the day Jerry Wexler left 75 Rockefeller Plaza for the final time, he took with him something no one would ever replace at Atlantic. Except for Nesuhi, Ahmet had now lost his last real peer in the record business. As never before, Ahmet was now truly on his own at the company he had founded.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Years with Ross

  “At the moment when I met Ahmet, at the beginning of this decade, it was assumed that the style of the years to come would derive from the principal styles of the nineteen-sixties . . . but then as I saw Ahmet together with important custodians of the style of the nineteen-sixties and noted his greater power and presence, I began to understand that it would be his style (eclectic, reminiscent, fickle, perverse) that would be the distinctive style of the first years of the new decade, that Ahmet would achieve this new importance as exemplar precisely because he lacked the inflexible center I had confusedly looked for, and that he would achieve it through his intuitive, obsessive mastery of the modes of infatuation.”

  —George W. S. Trow Jr.

  1

  Much like the subject of what many still consider to be the greatest profile ever to appear in The New Yorker magazine, George William Swift Trow Jr. was a child of wealth and privilege who adored black music, amassed an astonishing record collection featuring old 45s by Little Willie John, and regularly attended shows at the Apollo Theater. Born into “an extremely venerable family in the history of New York City” whose “style was that of the brownstone elite,” Trow was the son of the night editor of the New York Post and the great-great-grandson of the prominent New York printer whose city directory “was the precursor of the telephone book.”

  Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, where he became president of the Lampoon and cowrote the 1964 Hasty Pudding Show, Trow joined The New Yorker two years later and began writing unsigned pieces for “The Talk of the Town” section of the magazine that were “jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic.” Due in no small part to his family background and social connections, Trow became good friends with Jacqueline Onassis and Diana Vreeland. In 1970, he helped found National Lampoon. A year later, Trow began working on the two-part profile of Ahmet that would establish him, in the words of New Yorker staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “as a cultural critic of the first rank.”

  A social equal who was on a first-name basis with many of the wealthy and fa
shionable people Ahmet and Mica were seeing on a nightly basis, Trow had little trouble persuading Ahmet to grant him unlimited access. In the words of Ian Frazier, Trow’s good friend and fellow New Yorker staff writer, “George went everywhere with Ahmet, he hung out with Mica, and he had Ahmet to his club. A much much classier club than the Harvard Club, the Knickerbocker Club. It was not like he showed up, did the profile, and moved on. He became part of that group of people.”

  In May 1971, Trow had flown to the south of France to celebrate the release of the Rolling Stones’ debut album on Atlantic. On June 27, Trow accompanied Ahmet and Mica to the final concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. In a story Graham loved to tell, Ahmet had walked into his office on the night the J. Geils Band performed at the theater for the first time. Wearing a “blue suit, white-on-white shirt, blue-on-blue tie,” Ahmet “looked like he had just won the dance contest somewhere.” Not realizing the manager of the J. Geils Band was also there, Ahmet asked Graham how the group had done. Cutting off the promoter before he could answer, Ahmet said, “I knew it! They sucked! I knew I shouldn’t have signed them. Terrible, huh?” Graham then said, “Ahmet, may I introduce you to the manager of the J. Geils Band?”

  Without missing a beat, Ahmet called the manager by his first name, which he had only just learned, and then told him this was a game he and Graham often played. When the manager asked if he actually had seen the band’s set, Ahmet said, “I would miss their set? I wouldn’t miss the J. Geils set.” People began laughing so hard that they had to leave the room.

  Having already earned a well-deserved reputation in the music business as a fearsome screamer and shouter whom no one could control, Bill Graham was also the nominal head of a label called San Francisco Records, distributed by Atlantic. Although Fillmore Records, the label the promoter had set up with Clive Davis at CBS, was far more successful, Ahmet and Graham never exchanged a harsh word.