The same could not be said for Graham and Jerry Wexler. Graham once so infuriated Wexler by screaming at him over the phone that Wexler promptly ordered the promoter to get into a cab and come to his office so he could “beat the shit” out of him. Unlike Wexler, Ahmet always knew exactly how to handle Graham and once made him wait so long on the phone as he dictated two long and incredibly complicated letters to a nonexistent secretary that when Ahmet finally got back to him, Graham had completely forgotten what he had called to complain about.
When Graham pointed out one day that he could not discuss business with Ahmet because there was so much else going on in his office at Atlantic, Ahmet promptly walked the promoter downstairs and instructed his driver to take them to an old office building on Broadway and 48th Street. Walking past a sign that read “Tango Palace,” Ahmet escorted Graham to the seedy dime-a-dance hall on the second floor, where both men were immediately approached by “five or six very sexy looking girls wearing dresses with their boobs popping out.”
Handing a befuddled Graham $20, Ahmet told him to pick out a girl and start dancing with her. At three in the afternoon in the otherwise deserted dance hall, Ahmet “took one girl and he took another. The music was playing and we were dancing and I said, ‘Okay. Now we can talk. What do you want to talk about?’ ”
On the night Bill Graham essentially ended the psychedelic music era in New York City by closing the Fillmore East, Ahmet appeared for the final show in a blue blazer, white pants, a yellow polo shirt, and yellow socks with a matching yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket. When a “minor record company executive” asked Mica, attired in “a striking black dress,” if she liked the Allman Brothers, who were on the bill that night and whose records Atlantic distributed, she said, “Yah. They are divine, no?”
When Mica asked Ahmet if they could get a drink, he explained to her that Second Avenue was crowded with people who did not have tickets and it would not be easy to find a place to go in a neighborhood then largely populated by working-class Ukrainian immigrants, hippie dope dealers, and the New York chapter of the Hells Angels. “But I think there must be hundreds of places to drink here, no?” she said.
On the same block where he had seen Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet teacher, when the musician first came to play in New York at the Stuyvesant Casino in June 1946, Ahmet led Mica outside. Crossing the street, they walked into a dive where anyone else who looked like them would have been immediately relieved of all their valuables. In a dire joint where six men sat at the bar drinking whiskey with beer chasers, Ahmet coolly ordered Mica a glass of white wine.
Trow also accompanied Ahmet as he discussed deals with Steve Ross, Sheldon Vogel, and Jerry Greenberg while flying to Los Angeles on the Warner jet. He dined with him at Martoni’s, the hip L.A. music business hangout, and then rode with Ahmet in a limo to a recording session where David Crosby and Graham Nash supplied Ahmet with the harmony vocals for a track they had just cut by singing them for him, “one at each ear.”
Trow went with Ahmet, Mica, and seven friends, among them Bill and Chessy Rayner, Mica’s partner in a design firm Ahmet had suggested they name MAC II, to the Rainbow Grill atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Duke Ellington and his band were performing. Nearly forty years after he had first seen Ellington at the Palladium in London, Ahmet listened far more intently to the music than any of his guests.
When the once handsome but still elegant Ellington, who in Trow’s words “looked ravaged,” came over to pay his respects to Ahmet after his first set, the two men kissed one another and Ellington said, “Such a wonderful party. I was wondering who was supplying that wonderful pastel quality.” Before the band leader began his second set, most of Ahmet’s guests left. Ordering a series of vodka stingers, Ahmet discussed Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” as “a burlesque song” and then told Trow, “A lot of my friends are very nice jerks, if you know what I mean. They’re very nice, but they’re jerks . . . They don’t deserve to have Duke Ellington play for them.”
On May 2, 1977, Trow ran into Ahmet in Studio 54. Jerry Greenberg, who by then had signed Chic and the Trammps to Atlantic and was a good friend of Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell, had asked Ahmet if he wanted to invest in the disco only to have him reply, “What do we know about that? No. Stay away.” In light of the drug and tax evasion problems that would eventually send Rubell and his partner, Ian Schrager, to jail, Ahmet’s decision proved wise. He did however become a regular at the club and in a photograph taken a year later can be seen sitting along the wall with Elton John, Andy Warhol, Jerry Hall, who in time would marry Mick Jagger, and the socialite Barbara Allen, who lovingly caresses Ahmet’s face with one hand while holding a cigarette in the other.
Along with the fashion designer Halston, Diana Vreeland, and Mick Jagger and a host of others that night in 1977, Ahmet watched Bianca Jagger celebrate her thirty-second birthday by riding across the floor of Studio 54 on a white horse led by a young man and woman with circus costumes painted on their naked bodies. As if to proclaim the dawning of yet another brand-new era in the city, the famous scrim of the man in the moon with a cocaine spoon to his nose then came down across the stage.
Precisely why it took Trow seven years to write his profile of Ahmet, no one knows for certain but at some point Ahmet may have asked him to hold off on publishing it because of the delicate nature of his relationship with the Rolling Stones. After Trow finally submitted the piece to William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, the writer was talking with Ian Frazier in his office at the magazine. In Frazier’s words, “There was a knock on the door and it was Mr. Shawn, which in itself was a thing of enormous significance. He said, ‘Oh, Mr. Trow, I was looking for you.’ ” The two men then stepped out in the hall to talk. Five minutes later, Trow walked back in “and closed the door and his face was tomato red. I said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ And George said, ‘Shawn said this piece is Proust.’ ”
Written in the dense and sometimes impenetrable style of a Victorian novel, the piece ran on sixty pages in two consecutive issues of the magazine. In a world not yet as media-saturated as it has since become, Trow’s massive and detailed profile of Ahmet was an immediate sensation. Becoming the cornerstone of his legend outside the record business, it also served as the template for everything that would be written about him afterward.
“Ahmet had not yet become a cultural icon,” Jamaica Kincaid, a staff writer at the magazine who was also close to Trow, would later say, “and that piece placed him. George really gave the lifestyle the legitimacy it might not have had and a kind of grandeur because Ahmet was part of a social upheaval that really changed everything. The Ertegun profile was unequaled in my time at The New Yorker. It had an indelible taste. You could read it and taste something you had never tasted before and haven’t since. It was so good that it made me lose interest in writing profiles. You just read it and wiped your brow and knew there would never be anything like it again.”
While both Mica and David Geffen would later say Trow seemed to be in love with Ahmet, in Kincaid’s words, “I wouldn’t say George was obsessed with Ahmet any more than anything he was writing about. He was obsessed with his subject as any good writer would be. For George, Ahmet’s clothes were the details. Every detail for him was a revelation and an opportunity to describe.”
After the profile appeared, Ahmet and Trow lost contact. “When it was done,” Kincaid would later say, “George didn’t ever really quite know what to do with himself again. It just really changed everything and changed his relationship with Ahmet and Mrs. Ertegun. George was very much a part of their social circle to that point and I think it was a complimentary profile but the sharpness and magical-ness of George’s writing must have been searing to them in some way because there was never the same kind of intimacy after that. I think the piece stung both the subject and the author and they sort of drifted apart. It was the end of the marriage and the breach had a bit of the postcoital ir
ritation about it.”
Nor was this the only breach the piece caused. As David Geffen was looking through The New York Times on May 25, 1978, he came across a full-page ad taken out by The New Yorker to announce the publication of Trow’s profile. Four days later, after reading what Ahmet had said about him in it, Geffen ran to the bathroom and threw up. Having been portrayed in unflattering terms, Geffen had good reason to be upset. As Ian Frazier would later say, “First and foremost, the piece is about Ahmet. It’s also a great portrait of David Geffen and the difference between him and Ahmet as well as being really prophetic in terms of what Geffen would later become.”
In one of the many interchanges between the two that Trow described, Geffen was waiting to talk to Ahmet in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel when he received a call from Joni Mitchell. As Geffen spoke to the singer-songwriter, with whom he had once shared a house, Ahmet told Trow, “He must be talking to an artist, He’s got his soulful look on. He’s trying to purge at this moment all traces of his eager greed.”
Trow also recounted an incident in which Geffen tried to persuade Ahmet to pay him an advance of $50,000 to cover the studio costs for Crosby and Nash’s first album, even though they had already negotiated a deal providing $5,000 in reimbursement for every $100,000 worth of albums sold. “We’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” Ahmet told Geffen, “and you can go to Santa Monica Boulevard and watch a couple of movies, or whatever you do all day.”
Pointing out it was “sound business practice, and besides, I want it,” Geffen said, “Why don’t you concede for once? Why not make a gesture of good will, taking into account the entire relationship? Why not give the fifty thousand dollars?” Telling Geffen he needed the money to run his company, Ahmet finally settled on an advance of $35,000. “If you’re in that kind of trouble,” Geffen responded, “I’m selling my stock.” After the two men had bantered about which one of them was “chintzy,” Ahmet said, “You know, a soldier is sometimes too good a soldier. Whatever happens, I’m your friend and I love you, but don’t squeeze the juice out of every situation.” Trow also managed to dismiss the future billionaire by writing, “There was a brief vogue for David Geffen.”
After reading the first installment of the profile, Geffen called Ahmet and yelled, “You’re responsible for this outrage! George wrote those things about me because you told him to!” Coolly, Ahmet said, “Don’t be ridiculous, David. I don’t have any control over what this man writes.” In the words of biographer Tom King, Geffen then decided he would never work with Ahmet again.
By this time, Ahmet and Geffen had already fallen out with one another after an incident on a plane when Ahmet had continued flicking ashes from his cigarette onto Geffen’s head as he sat in front of him. Geffen warned Ahmet that if he did not stop, he would pour a glass of water on his head. In Geffen’s words, “And he didn’t stop it and I did it and he went mad and then we didn’t speak for a while.”
After patching up their differences, the two men were flying on the Warner jet to Barbados when Geffen began talking about how much money he had only to have Ahmet tell him, “Oh, David, people who have any class or taste don’t talk about money.” Ahmet, “who liked pushing buttons,” then proceeded to get Geffen so “wound up and flipped out and angry” that they “had a huge fight when the plane landed and nobody who was staying at David’s house was allowed to go over to have dinner with the Erteguns next door.”
They reconciled only to fall out with one another yet again when Ahmet told Geffen’s authorized biographer that Geffen had been spreading rumors throughout the record industry that Ahmet was anti-Semitic. In light of all the years Ahmet had spent in a business largely dominated by Jewish executives and how closely he had worked with Herb and Miriam Abramson, Jerry Wexler, Jerry Greenberg, Doug Morris, and a host of others at Atlantic, the charge would have seemed laughable to anyone familiar with his history.
Nonetheless, when Geffen learned what Ahmet had said about him to his biographer, the two men had a heated conversation over the phone and then did not speak to one another for years. In Geffen’s words, “He said it because he was jealous. He couldn’t stand that I had become so successful and so wealthy. It burned his ass.”
When both men found themselves at Barry Diller’s Academy Awards party in Los Angeles on March 25, 2001, Geffen angrily confronted Ahmet about his statement. Having been asked by Mica not to make a scene, Geffen decided to “simply get over it because what was the point? Ahmet was an old man and I thought, ‘Give this up.’ There was nothing he did that could have stopped me from loving him. But it sure was exasperating.”
2
For most of those who lived in Manhattan during the 1970s, the city had become, in the words of Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott, “a metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown with a side order of panic in needle park” where “the tourists looked scared” and “getting back to the hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists.” Despite how dire life had become for some in the city, Ahmet had only to look out his office window at 75 Rockefeller Plaza to know just how well he was doing.
Befitting his status as the head of a record label that earned $75 million in 1973 while boasting an industry-high 25 percent profit margin before taxes, Ahmet’s well-appointed second-floor office, designed for him by Mica, overlooked “21,” thereby allowing him to watch the city’s most important power brokers step from their limousines each day so they could do business with one another inside the restaurant. As he would later say, “I like the view out the window. It’s a terrific way to keep track of who’s lunching with whom.”
In what was a banner year for the record business, the four labels that comprised the Warner Music Group, Atlantic, Elektra, Asylum, and Warner Brothers Records, sold a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of records and tapes worldwide. While David Geffen, Joe Smith, and Mo Ostin all held positions of great power within Warner Communications, David Horowitz, who oversaw the group’s financial operations, would later say, “Ahmet was first among equals because he was a legendary guy. He was our superman.” As chairman of the committee that coordinated the distribution system shared by all four labels, Ahmet now had nearly a thousand employees reporting indirectly to him. By any standard, he had finally reached the very top of the mountain in an industry that continued expanding beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
To celebrate Atlantic’s twenty-fifth anniversary in April 1973, Ahmet chartered an Air India 747 and took two hundred people to Paris for a gala four-day sales meeting. As soon as the plane was airborne, everyone on board “started lighting joints, snorting coke, and partying seriously.” After Jerry Wexler had fallen asleep on the plane, Ahmet took his passport and replaced his photograph with that of a woman having sex with a donkey. When Wexler presented his passport at the airport in Paris, the gendarme looked at the photo and then at Wexler and then back at the photo again. Trying to be helpful, Wexler said, “I used to have a beard” as Ahmet collapsed with laughter. The fun continued after the group had checked into a luxury hotel and gone out for “a ten-course gourmet meal at a five-star Parisian restaurant,” where the bar bill alone came to $16,860.
Born with “an apparently boundless appetite for the good life,” Ahmet continued buying his custom-made suits and jackets at Huntsman at 11 Savile Row in London. His handmade shoes came from John Lobb in Paris. The proud owner of a 1934 Bentley, a 1957 Sunbeam, and a 1965 Rolls-Royce, he was driven around the city in two Cadillac Fleetwoods, one green and one blue, by two chauffeurs, one white, the other black. Ahmet’s extensive art collection now included works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Larry Rivers, as well as a recently acquired painting by his “favorite artist, Henri Matisse.”
In their elegant five-floor town house on East 81st Street, which had been featured in House and Garden, Ahmet and Mica continued hosting lavish dinner parties while spending their weekends on Long Island in their equally fashionable retreat on Shinnecock B
ay in Southampton. When Ahmet first saw the plans for a house Mica had modeled on a Russian dacha, he asked “Where do you put the orchestra?” and then had the living room enlarged. In accordance with Oscar Wilde’s dictum that three addresses always inspired confidence, Ahmet and Mica had also purchased and were reconstructing their summer home in Bodrum, then an undiscovered village on the Aegean Sea in southern Turkey. In time, they would acquire a luxurious apartment in Paris.
During a conversation Ahmet had with his assistant Jenni Trent Hughes about the trappings of success, she asked him how someone would know when he or she had finally arrived. “And he said, ‘When you have no keys. If you’ve arrived, there’s always someone there to open the door for you. When I go home in New York, Armenia opens the door. If I go home in London, Aurelia opens the door. If I get on the plane, Guy Salvador opens the door. If I go downstairs to the car, Ray opens the door.’ And he was right. The fewer keys you have in your life, the more you know you’ve arrived.”
As Ahmet grew older, his social standing became increasingly important to him. When the socialite author Barbara Howar accompanied him to a gala event thrown by a very wealthy A-list couple, Ahmet made it plain that, in her words, “He was not happy he had been seated with me. He didn’t even bother to pretend. He was just in such a snit, I cannot tell you. I found it amusing because I just didn’t care. But he thought he deserved better and was being wasted with people who already knew him.”
Over the years, Ahmet also became more politically conservative, making a generous donation to National Review magazine, for which William F. Buckley then thanked him with a handwritten note. Befriending Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, Ahmet staunchly defended him and the war in Iraq when Rumsfeld assumed the position of secretary of defense in George W. Bush’s administration. As Howar would later say, “For Ahmet, the lid came off everything when Ronald Reagan became president. Everything was deregulated, everybody was on Wall Street, and this was the time of Ahmet’s real ascendancy when he made the counterculture chic.”
The Last Sultan Page 34