The Last Sultan
Page 40
As he was about to assume his new position, Fuchs ran into Joe Smith, the executive vice-president of Warner Brothers Records, at a party and told him, “We’re coming in there and you bandits won’t be able to operate like you used to anymore.” In a remark to which Fuchs apparently paid little heed, Smith replied, “Us bandits made the company you’re coming into.”
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On June 21, 1995, seven weeks after assuming control of the Warner Music Group, Michael Fuchs called Doug Morris to his office at HBO. Expecting to be told he was finally being promoted to run the music division, Morris learned how mistaken he had been when Fuchs handed him a press release that read, “DOUG MORRIS RELIEVED OF ALL RESPONSIBILITIES AT WARNER MUSIC GROUP.” Followed to his office by security guards who watched as he packed up his personal belongings, Morris was then summarily escorted from the building.
Fearing Morris and his loyalists were planning a coup backed by Edgar Bronfman to take the division away from him, Fuchs had persuaded Levin that Morris had to be let go. On November 16, just 195 days after he had assumed control of the Warner Music Group, Fuchs himself was fired by Levin. Like Bob Morgado before him, Fuchs received a $60 million golden parachute to ease his departure from the company.
In time, Doug Morris would go on to become the chairman of Universal Music. However, his sudden departure from the Warner Music Group ruptured his relationship with Ahmet. As Morris would later say, “I was very unhappy Ahmet did not stick up for me when that happened. He sort of went to Turkey and tried to avoid the flak. It was very disappointing to me. I wasn’t let go. I was brutally fired and I don’t think there was anything he could have done about it but he didn’t get on the phone and say this was a terrible injustice to the press and I guess I expected him to do that. I think he knew I was very angry at him.”
During all the years they had worked together at Atlantic, Ahmet had done nothing but praise Morris to anyone who would listen. “Of all the people I’ve worked with,” Ahmet told Fredric Dannen, “he’s the straightest person I’ve ever known. . . . It’s incredible but in all the years I’ve been with Doug we have never had an argument and we have never left the office without hugging one another.”
By then, Ahmet had already distanced himself from Morris during the power struggle for control of the music division. Ahmet’s new view of Morris was summed up by Jac Holzman. “When Morgado was tossing out Doug Morris, Ahmet was telling a small circle of people including me and a few others that he hardly knew Doug Morris and had never had him over to his house. This was about not going underwater with a guy who was being tossed overboard even though he would have been in the water for a very short period of time.”
Recalling the day when he and Ahmet had gone to Sony after they had both been briefly fired over the phone by Steve Ross, Morris assumed Ahmet would now join him. In Linda Moran’s words, “Doug wanted Ahmet to leave the company and go with him. To walk out the door and quit. He assumed Ahmet was loyal to him. First of all, Ahmet was loyal to no one. Only to himself.”
The parting between the two men was so bitter they did not talk to one another for five years. On October 15, 1998, Morris was invited to speak at a gala United Jewish Appeal benefit dinner chaired by David Geffen at Pier Sixty on the Hudson River honoring Ahmet on his fiftieth anniversary in the record business. After Geffen had told his “bumping into geniuses” story, Morris stood up and “I talked about how for fifteen years, every morning it was a high five and every night it was a hug good night and how it was fifteen years of real fun. I really told the truth about those years which were incredible and it was a very emotional thing.”
The next day, Ahmet sent Morris a letter saying he had made “the most lovely speech of the evening and the reason I was able to do it was because I knew him the best of everyone and he really appreciated it and everything was okay after that. Every time I would meet him, he would say to me, ‘I miss you.’ ” Just like Herb Abramson, Jerry Wexler, David Geffen, and Jerry Greenberg, Doug Morris was now someone with whom Ahmet had once worked at Atlantic. They were now all gone, but he was still there. In the end, this was always what Ahmet had cared about most.
TWENTY
Bawitdaba in Bodrum
“I’m not really interested in business as such. I’m interested in doing a lot of things that are pleasing to me and that I can afford. So over the last twenty-five years or so, I haven’t put myself into group discussions about sales methods or meetings on merchandising. I’ve stayed out of all that and left it to the younger people I’ve brought in to run those parts of the company because they don’t interest me.”
—Ahmet Ertegun
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In large part, Ahmet was able to withstand the corporate battles at Time Warner because he was now devoting so much of his time and energy to pursuits that had nothing to do with the record business. Foremost among them was his interest in art. As his longtime assistant Jenni Trent Hughes would later say, “Ahmet was an artist and he lived art. It was the Oscar Wilde thing—buy art, create art, or be art. And he did all three.”
Long “before the market for the work began to skyrocket,” Ahmet had begun collecting early American avant-garde art in the late 1970s. In the words of Elizabeth Moore, an art dealer at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, “Ahmet had this real talent for discovering the unknown, whether it was in music or art. I think that the chase itself gave him tremendous pleasure. Ahmet was always on the hunt . . . He loved to discover things, and I think that the art collection had something to do with that. It was the unknown, the thing that no one else was looking at, in which he could see the potential.”
In addition to his collection of Russian avant-garde Suprematist and Constructivist works as well as several paintings by René Magritte that Nesuhi had bought in Europe shortly after the artist’s death in 1967, Ahmet assembled a collection of 280 modern American paintings and works on paper done by eighty artists during the first half of the twentieth century. As Mica would later say, “When Ahmet got an idea in his head, nobody could stop him. He read a book about the American painters in Paris during the period when Gertrude Stein and Stanton Macdonald-Wright were there and started buying paintings and all of a sudden we had three hundred paintings and then he asked his friends if they also wanted to invest in this with him.”
Although the collection was, in the words of art historian Avis Berman, “corporate in its impetus and formation,” Ahmet did all the buying and so the works “reflect his eye and are conditioned by his comprehension of and intuitiveness about music. Ertegun embraced the modernist tradition in the arts, whether he found it in classic jazz or the rhythms and patterns of such painters as Arthur Dove, Oscar Bluemner, Burgoyne Diller, Werner Drewes, Morgan Russell, Paul Kelpe, Morris Kantor, or Fredrick Whiteman.”
In 1986, about eight years after Ahmet had begun the collection, the group he had formed decided to sell some of its holdings. Early modernist works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Max Weber were snapped up, but there was little interest in the American Abstract Artists group. That part of the collection was eventually sold to the Naples Museum of Art in Florida in 1999 for about a tenth of what it is now worth.
Having always expressed his fixation with his own appearance by filling the closets at his various residences with more elegant suits and expensive pairs of handmade shoes than he could ever wear, Ahmet purchased paintings in much the same manner. In Berman’s words, “If Ertegun spotted merit in art, he was not content with one or two examples of his or her work; often he bought in bulk from the galleries, and sometimes his purchases were redundant.”
By doing so, Ahmet was able “to assemble a large collection of esthetically and historically valuable paintings by this coalition of artists in a relatively short time.” Not surprisingly, many of the artists whose works Ahmet collected had also been inspired by jazz and “he enjoyed discussing the association he discerned between jazz and their grammar of seeing.” His preference for paintin
gs “with strong, even flamboyant color” was also “compatible with the jazz esthetic.”
In the soundproof room in his Manhattan town house, where Ahmet listened to music, a David Hockney painting of a Picasso mural hung over the fireplace. Although his personal collection constantly changed as he loaned pieces to museums all over the world, the room at one point also contained works by Jasper Johns, Le Corbusier, and Picasso. Having filled all his homes with art, Ahmet eventually had to keep some four hundred paintings in storage because he had no place to put them.
The great love for beauty Ahmet and Mica shared could also be seen in their summer home. While on a motor trip through Turkey in 1971, they had come upon a ruined house known as Aga Konak in Bodrum, a then undiscovered village on the tip of a peninsula in the Aegean near the Greek islands of Kos and Patmos. Known in ancient times as Halicarnassus, it was the site of the 140-foot-high tomb Queen Artemisia had built in 353 B.C. in memory of her late husband and brother, King Mausolus. The tomb became one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
After Ahmet bought the ruin from the fifty-four heirs of the original Ottoman owners, Mica set about restoring it with stones from the ancient Mausoleum. Situated on the water, the compound eventually comprised two houses joined together by a one-story kitchen beside a garden of mimosa, lime, orange, and pomegranate trees. At the bottom of the garden, there was an old well, a fountain, staff quarters, and a guesthouse.
The whitewashed walls of the main residence featured a collection of Arabic calligraphy as well as drawings and paintings of Turkish scenes. In rooms filled with furniture from the Ottoman Empire, brown wooden shutters kept out the blazing midday heat. An invitation to spend time with Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum in July soon became what Vanity Fair magazine called “the hottest ticket in town.”
Over the years, luminaries such as Princess Margaret, Princess Olga of Greece, Mick Jagger, Rudolf Nureyev, Oscar de la Renta, Pat Buckley, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, and a host of others came to stay with Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum. Each day began with a breakfast of “bread, honey, rose petal jam, yoghurt, and fresh ripe figs, apricots, and peaches.” After a short ride into town, where camel herds still wandered along the main street, to pick up the newspapers, Ahmet and Mica and their guests would visit tailors who made shirts and pants to order overnight and shop for kilim rugs and bolts of cotton cloth.
At noon, they would all board Miss Leyla, the traditional hundred-foot-long Turkish vessel known as a gulet named after Nesuhi’s daughter, for a leisurely sail to, in Ahmet’s words, “one of several hundred coves that surround us. After a swim in the clearest water to be found anywhere in the Mediterranean, we have a lunch of fish and local specialities.” Returning home “later in the afternoon for a quick siesta,” everyone then met for drinks and dinner in the courtyard of the house.
“After dinner,” Ahmet would later say, “we may go out to a few clubs and discotheques. At the end of a very late evening, we observe an old custom and serve the traditional Turkish tripe soup which is supposed to ward off hangovers.” In one of the most beautiful spots in the world where the staff was so dedicated to everyone’s well-being that Jenni Trent Hughes once came upon a young Turkish girl happily cleaning the stones in the courtyard with a toothbrush, the leisurely routine then began all over again the next day.
Even in Bodrum, Ahmet sometimes played the role of benevolent host to women with whom he had more than a platonic relationship. One of them was a striking thirty-four-year-old blond French dermatologist named Veronique Simon, who was often a guest at Bodrum and then became a friend with whom Ahmet traveled. As she would later say, “Ahmet was the last sultan of Turkey. It was the Ottoman blood in his body. A man of this dimension will never stay with one woman. In the East, you love only one woman but you have the woman who is the mother of your children, the favorite, the courtesan, and each woman has her place in the heart and brain of this kind of man. Ahmet was an Oriental man with the totality of the Oriental way. And in another way, he was an American man as well.”
Over the years, music business insiders delighted in trading stories about Ahmet’s latest indiscretions. As David Geffen would later say, “Cher loved Ahmet. He used to grab her breasts and she would say, ‘Oh, Ahmet.’ He liked to do that.” However, even in a business where the one-night stand was standard practice, many women were offended by Ahmet’s behavior. “He was a misogynist,” said Susan Joseph, who managed singer Laura Branigan while she recorded for Atlantic. “A guy who pinched your ass. I was in a hotel room with him and Laura, and he tried to put his hand up my skirt. I actually had to smack his hand. He didn’t have a lot of respect for women. He was sleeping with every artist he could, including Laura.”
By the end of his life, the list of women Ahmet had touched in social situations had reached epic proportions. Nor did Ahmet seem particularly discriminating when it came to the women he pursued. “His thing wasn’t just good-looking women,” Dorothy Carvello, one of his assistants at Atlantic, said. “Don’t think they were all off the pages of Penthouse and Playboy. It was equal opportunity and there were some you couldn’t believe. You would be scratching your head. That filter in his brain didn’t exist. Whatever felt good, he would go for. The guy always did whatever he wanted to do. He was free. He didn’t have to answer to anyone.” Nor could Carvello understand Ahmet’s attachment to a woman in the music business with whom he carried on a long-running affair.
Jenni Trent Hughes, who also worked for Ahmet but never found his behavior offensive, was once riding with him in a car through the oil fields in Turkey when “the local mayor showed up with his wife and she was gorgeous and Ahmet went, ‘Oh, look at that one.’ And I said, ‘You know, it’s a shame you can’t find oil the way you find women. Because we’d be the richest people in the world.’ He laughed himself silly.”
Having grown up with servants who had catered to his every need, Ahmet expected his female assistants to deal with the consequences of his lifestyle. For many years, Noreen Woods, who eventually became a vice president at Atlantic, served as what someone would later call his “cleaner.” In Ahmet’s words, she was, “The only person I trusted totally with everything. If my wife was away and would be returning on a certain day and I was out at night in somebody’s house having drunk a lot or done some drug and holed up with two chicks somewhere, the chauffeur would call her and she would come in with him and defy the ladies keeping me there and grab me and put my clothes on and bring me home so I would be there when my wife returned. I mean, it was service beyond any expectation.”
As David Geffen saw it, “I don’t think any of these women were a threat to Mica. Ahmet came from a culture where people had many wives and Mica knew who she had married. His friends would find it intolerable for her but she was always patient. Mica is really an extraordinary person and she loved Ahmet.”
In Mica’s words, “Ahmet had tons of women before I met him and he probably had a whole slew while I was married to him. Not probably. I know it’s true. But I never knew their names. I couldn’t have cared less. I never felt threatened for one minute. When I was there, he was always there. If I traveled or he went to California and he had some chicks there, who the hell cares? I have a totally different outlook about this and I think that’s why our marriage was so good. Because we respected one another and gave ourselves freedom. He liked to have a good time and I’m sure he did a lot of naughty things.”
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In 1998 at the age of seventy-five, Ahmet fell head over heels in love with a musician he called his “young Elvis.” Following in the footsteps of Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Stephen Stills, and Mick Jagger, Kid Rock became the last in a long line of artists upon whom Ahmet lavished so much of his time and attention that it sometimes seemed he cared far more about their personal relationship than the business they had in common.
The son of a wealthy car dealer who grew up on an apple farm in Romeo, Michigan, Robert James Ritchie had acquired his stage name as a teenage deejay working bas
ement parties for $30 a night where patrons enjoyed watching “that white kid rock.” At the age of seventeen, he signed with Jive Records but was dropped by the label after his first album, Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast, was banned by the FCC from radio play for its sexually explicit lyrics.
After cutting two more albums for another label that then also dropped him, Kid Rock went to work as a janitor in a studio in Detroit so he could afford to record his fourth album there. A popular live act in his home state, he performed at a small club in Cleveland where Andy Karp, an A&R man for Lava Records, saw him. Karp then brought Jason Flom, the head of the label, to a special showcase performance at which they were the only record executives present.
Beginning his career at Atlantic in 1979 at the age of eighteen by putting up posters for the label in record shops for $4 an hour, Flom had risen through the ranks to become the head of A&R by signing Twisted Sister, Fiona, White Lion, and Skid Row. As Flom would later say, “When Twisted Sister became big, someone played Ahmet something and asked what he thought and he said, ‘I don’t like it but what the fuck do I know? I haven’t had a hit in seven years.’ ”
Flom went on to sign a variety of successful acts like Hootie and the Blowfish, who sold an astonishing twenty million records for Atlantic, as well as Jewel, Tori Amos, and the Southern rock band Collective Soul. When Doug Morris offered Flom the chance to revamp Atco, he decided instead to start his own label and formed Lava Records, which was distributed by Atlantic. With acts like Matchbox 20, Uncle Kracker, Sugar Ray, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the Corrs, and Evelyn King, Lava sold ninety million records over the next eight years and Atlantic bought the label outright in 2002.