At lunch, Ahmet was not entirely comfortable with me, or I with him. We had known each other for several years. I first met him at a time when his hegemony in the music business had reached a climax. For some time after that, I tried to find the locus of his authority and could not. I was by turns infatuated and disappointed. In time, I learned that this was appropriate—that Ahmet was himself always infatuated and always disappointed, and that at the heart of his achievement there was no answer stated or question posed but, rather, only this: the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed. Then I found that to notice the manifestations of infatuation (which I had perceived at the start as ephemeral) was instructive. 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—and this expectation has not been disappointed entirely—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, amused, 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, this mastery having made it possible for him to absorb into himself the power of several archetypal American styles that had fallen into disuse among Americans but still had great power when they were expressed in a manner that the contemporary public could accept, which is to say when they were expressed in a manner that divorced style from substance and had no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. There was something moving about this—that so much was possible through restlessness—but there was something disturbing about it, too, and the fact that my approach to Ahmet had become as unstraightforward as his own mode (to which I had adapted myself) made it difficult for the two of us to see one another without some embarrassment.
Ahmet’s business involves negotiated relationships—courtships, separations, estrangements, reconciliations. At lunch, there were several of these to discuss. Ahmet had signed the Rolling Stones to a new contract (for the distribution of their records in the United States and Canada, and paying an advance against royalties said to be near seven million dollars). “Mick came to me,” Ahmet said. “I mean, Mick is at this point a very good personal friend, you know? And I told him that the Stones should make a killing, you know, on this contract, because, to be realistic, by the time of the next contract they’ll be near forty, and one can’t be sure what will happen then. So I advised him. And what happened was that they got so much for the European rights, and so forth, that they could stay with Atlantic in America.” Ahmet had brought the group Crosby, Stills & Nash back to an active career at Atlantic. “They only recorded one album for us as Crosby, Stills & Nash, you know, before they added Young. And then there were some things that they thought might be the company’s fault, and they wanted a change, and I said go ahead, and I released them from the contract with the understanding that when they recorded together again they would be with us,” Ahmet said. “And so they called me, and last week I went down to Miami. We met at Criteria Sound, and they prepared a place for me to sit, and they all sat around and they played the album for me and it is a very powerful album. Stephen Stills plays some of the best guitar . . . Stephen and I have been together, you know, since 1966.” And Ahmet had begun to negotiate with Ray Charles, the powerful rhythm-and-blues singer, who had given Atlantic Records its first real eminence, in the late nineteen-fifties, and who upon the expiration of his contract in 1959 signed with ABC-Paramount without consulting Ahmet or his partners. “We’ve always kept in touch, you know?” Ahmet said. “And B’nai B’rith asked him to be their Man of the Year, and Ray told them that he would only do it if I were chairman. That was about a year ago. I paid a visit to Ray. He has a very well-kept modern building in Los Angeles, on West Washington Boulevard. He owns it, and a government agency rents a part, I think. And he said that he wanted to come back to Atlantic, and we reached an agreement—the outline of an agreement. But then things got bogged down, you know, with the lawyers. And it began to take a while. So one day Ray called and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you and I do it? Not through the lawyers—just you and me.’ And we did that. And it was amazing how much he knew, you know, about contracts—returns, free goods, records shipped as opposed to records sold, and so on. And so I think we have a deal, you know, and he is going to send me a tape this week.”
Lunch was served by a European waiter. It was supervised by a slim young American captain, one of the new breed of slim young men who have taken an interest recently in running the new breed of cabarets and restaurants—impeccably but with no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. Ahmet told me—what I knew—that Atlantic was by some measures doing less well than the other record labels (Warner Bros./Reprise and Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch) in the Warner Communications conglomerate, of which it is a part. Ahmet said that this did not significantly affect his position, since he was executive vice-president for music of the parent company and so was, in a way, responsible for the success of all the labels taken together. Still, he said, he was turning his attention to building the Atlantic roster. He mentioned one or two new Atlantic groups. He mentioned with particular emphasis the groups called Firefall and Foreigner, which are, I believe, groups of no great distinction.
“But how are you?” Ahmet asked. “It seems that a lot of time passes, you know? I mean it’s very difficult, sometimes, to see the people you really want to see. We should have some fun—something amusing.” There was a small pause. “I went to Chicago with Mick, and we heard Willie Mabon,” he said. “Do you know who Willie Mabon is?” There was another small pause. “You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to record some white Chicago jazz.”
In April of 1971, Ahmet M. Ertegun, jaunty, well dressed, bald, forty-seven years old, and the president of Atlantic Records, went by plane to Cannes to celebrate a new conjunction (exquisitely negotiated) between his company and the Rolling Stones, a musical group that was by then generally considered to be the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band in the World. The celebration in Cannes did not capture the popular imagination, but in the music business (where manipulators of the popular imagination were ranged in novel hierarchies sensitive to movement and to intimations of aristocracy) the convergence of Ahmet Ertegun and the Rolling Stones had its resonance. This was not entirely due to the eminence of the Rolling Stones. By 1971, the Rolling Stones had recorded eighteen albums; they had introduced Threat, Excess, and Androgyny into popular music; they had been at the center of a metaphoric event at Altamont, in California—where a member of the audience was stabbed to death; and for nearly a decade they had made the most powerful mock-black music of their times. But Ahmet Ertegun, informed men knew, had done at least as much. He had founded a small record company; he had turned a small record company into a major record company; he had superintended the careers of celebrated people and had superintended for himself a success of unrivalled longevity; he had owned a Rolls-Royce for more than five years; he had dressed extremely well; and he had, at one or two important moments, applied his own aesthetic to the talents of certain singers and musicians in a way that had influenced the whole of the music. In a business in which entrepreneurs and executives, however successful, were overshadowed, as they saw it, by hippies, druggies, spies, spades, transvestites, and Englishmen, Ahmet Ertegun was an exception. He had the stature in his line of work that Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer had had in theirs. By 1971, Ahmet Ertegun (jaunty, well dressed, bald, forty-seven years old, and of very recent Turkish extraction) was the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World, and the men in the business—promoters, producers, corporate functionaries, managers, P.R. people—who were often cynical about the eminence of performers, were fascinated and sometimes moved by the eminence they saw in him.
The men in the business knew these things about Ahmet: that he was the son of a Turkish Ambassador to the United States; that he was married to a woman of fashion; that he wore, as a matter of strict custom, blue blazers, dark suits, and vividly polished shoes; that in 1947—already known at the Ritz-Carlton, already known at the Howard Theatre (already, for that matter, bald)—he had founded Atlantic Records with a partner named Herb Abramson (later eclipsed) and with the financial help of a friend who was a Turkish dentist; that in the nineteen-fifties he had taken on two new partners, one of them an expansive man from Washington Heights named Gerald Wexler and the other his own older brother, Nesuhi Ertegun; that during the nineteen-fifties he and Jerry Wexler had made records (with Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, Chuck Willis, Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, the Clovers, Ivory Joe Hunter, and other Negro singers) that constituted an important subgenre of the music that came to be called rhythm and blues; that he had been present when rhythm-and-blues music collided with an unexpected white audience, and thus was as much responsible as any man for the hegemony of rock and roll; that in 1967 he and his partners had sold Atlantic Records to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, Ltd., for stock then worth seventeen million dollars; that he was often to be found in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel; that he welcomed distraction, stimulation, and anomaly, and was reluctant to see an evening end; that he was called “Ahmet” by people who knew him even slightly; that in the course of pursuing his several inclinations he had taken Louis Vuitton luggage where Louis Vuitton luggage had rarely been before.
Some of the men in the business (but not all) knew that Ahmet, with his brother Nesuhi, had staged jazz concerts in Washington, D.C., in the early nineteen-forties; that with Nesuhi he had assembled a collection of twenty-five thousand jazz and blues records and then sold it; that during the most uncertain period of his young manhood he had spent a significant amount of time in the Washington record store of Waxie Maxie Silverman; that he had been a fan of a Negro singer called Little Miss Cornshucks; that under the name Nugetre (which is, of course, Ertegun spelled backward) he had written a number of songs for the Clovers, Ray Charles, Joe Turner, and others on his roster; that he had talked about putting together a band of young black blues musicians; that he had talked about making Western movies about black cowboys; that he had meant it when he said it, but had not done it; that, in fact, he had somehow ceased to be involved with black performers in any important way. A very few men in the business knew that the name Ertegun was properly spelled with an umlaut—Ertegün.
And stories. Informed men in the business knew several stories about Ahmet. Some of the stories they knew involved pranks (Ahmet had been known to leave fictitious, compromising messages for his colleagues whenever these colleagues stayed at a hotel respectable enough to make it worth the effort); other stories involved gestures (while courting his wife, Mica, Ahmet had hidden a five-piece band in her closet as a surprise); but, whatever their genre, all the stories that were told about Ahmet by people in the music business reflected a fascination with the varieties of his aesthetic. Ahmet was known to have access to a black style from the streets and to a white style from somewhere beyond Bendel’s. Successful people in the music business were familiar with styles you could buy—black groups under contract and expensive department stores did not, generally speaking, terrify them—but Ahmet seemed to have an easy familiarity with styles you could come by only through instinct or inheritance, and this made it seem likely to the men in the business that he existed in a state of special grace. Some music men suspected that Ahmet had come by his state of special grace in the same way they themselves had acquired their Tank watches, but the transactions were too complicated for them to follow and they left their doubts largely unpursued. So that many of the stories told about Ahmet were told with awe, and very many followed the pattern of a story that placed him in his office at Atlantic arranging a social engagement with a French diplomat, in French. “So he’s talking to this guy in French,” the story has run, “and this guitar player—a funky old spade dude—walks in, and Ahmet doesn’t even lose a beat. He finishes off the guy in French, turns to the spade dude, and says, ‘Say, home, what you know good?’ ”
Iwent with Ahmet to Cannes in 1971. Ahmet arrived late at Kennedy Airport—his travelling company was assembled by the time he arrived. The principal members of Ahmet’s travelling company were Jerry Greenberg, an energetic young man who had had his start in the record business promoting records in Connecticut and was assuming more and more of the day-to-day work of running Atlantic Records, and David Geffen, a young man more energetic and more vivid still, who had risen from the mailroom at the William Morris Agency to be an agent, and, seeing his chance, had put together Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young from the pieces of other groups and brought them to Ahmet (rather than to Clive Davis, of Columbia, an old patron), and who was, in 1971, making plans to create a new label, Asylum Records, to be co-owned by him and Atlantic. When Ahmet arrived, the group cohered out of its fragments. Ahmet wore a blue blazer, a cream-colored shirt of cloth that was almost voluptuously fine, and a checked tie so conservative that it could have been worn with a morning suit. Ahmet is about five feet ten inches tall. His most extraordinary feature is his eyes, which, to an effect that can be demure or threatening or ironic, he often keeps half closed. One notices as well his goatee, which he keeps perfectly trimmed, in the manner of Beverly Hills topiary, and one notices the effect of the bite of his teeth, which, framing his staccato accent, gives his conversation an arresting emphasis. Ahmet’s body is compact and slightly rounded, and gives the impression of denseness and invulnerability. Ahmet does not resemble David Windsor as the Prince of Wales: he does not easily sprawl; he lacks the languid looseness that Englishmen sometimes have, nor can he easily draw himself up to any formal bearing. A disparity exists between Ahmet’s clothes and his body, but neither yields an inch. Some of the disparities in Ahmet’s life are in the foreground and are noticed; others, by staying perfectly still, have acquired the solid texture of a frieze and serve as background. The disparity between Ahmet’s Levantine body and his Anglo-Saxon wardrobe is now a part of the background frieze and no longer surprises anyone; the internal contradictions have been raised to the standing of a style. At some earlier point, however, Ahmet and his clothes must have seemed strange together.
Once on the plane, a 747, Ahmet sat in a beige first-class seat and was served by a French stewardess with a drop-dead manner. Ahmet is at home in a greater variety of circumstances than most people could be; aboard an airplane, he settles into a particularly effective repose. Jerry Greenberg came up to Ahmet, and Ahmet conducted two or three or four pieces of business—quickly. Ahmet, characteristically, does a number of things at once, talks on a number of subjects at once, seeks a number of satisfactions at once. It is an indication of his executive ability that he is often able to pull together scattered pieces into a whole; it is an indication of his restlessness that he is often led to break a whole into scattered pieces. As this small conference came to an end, Jerry Greenberg mentioned a rock-and-roll group, then still prominent, called Pacific Gas & Electric. He told Ahmet that he thought the group would be available at a certain price.
“I don’t think that figure appeals to me,” Ahmet said.
Jerry Greenberg left.
“It is amusing, I think,” Ahmet said to me. “For all their youthful charm, that group has as quotable a price as the utility for which they are whimsically named.”
I asked Ahmet a question about the early days of Atlantic Records.
Ahmet’s manner was unsentimental. He spoke at length. Throughout his speech, there were small, staccato pauses. “You want to talk about Atlantic?” Ahmet said. “The early days, and so forth? You know, I have a terrible memory for dates. I was recording people then and I’m recording them now. It’s very hard for me to remember what was yesterday, you know, and what was the day before yesterday.” He paused. “The point is that my father died before I started this company. I don’t think I could have started it had he been alive. There would have been a certain amount of pressure, you know what I mean? But America exerts a certain pressure, too, if you have a certain disposition.” There was another small pause. “America is remarkable, don’t you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way. But in America a twelve-year-old finds things that are not available elsewhere. For a while, I was sent to a school called Landon, in Maryland. It was run along English lines, but it was not in England, if you know what I mean. I got to know Southern men while I was going to that school. In certain ways, the South is so frightening, isn’t it? Not the easy South—Miami and so forth—but those rough towns.” Ahmet paused. “At Atlantic, we had an artist, Guitar Slim, who had never really talked to any white people in his life.” He paused. His eyes were half closed. He brought the fingers of his left hand and the fingers of his right hand lightly together. “I was so interested in America. In Washington, I used to walk around various sections of the city. I made the acquaintance of various types. I met a kind of medicine man. I would watch him for hours. I think he was from South Carolina. He did his business on Ninth Street, in a skid-row area. He used to do card tricks, magic tricks. He had a good, fast line of talk, and at the end he would sell some colored water. He was a man with a tough exterior who had a sentimental side. He worked from a suitcase with legs that could fold up very quickly. He gave me a quarter or fifty cents to make the first buy. I was what you call a shill. I was very happy, you know, that he let me in on what he was doing. He had a business coupé—the cheapest car you could buy in those days. He had kind of a blond girlfriend sitting there. He was a white Southern man of a certain type.” Ahmet paused. “From the beginning, the thing I was most interested in was black people. I think you could say that I was very interested in black people. In London, when I was ten or eleven, I went with Nesuhi to see Duke Ellington. I’ll never forget. I was enthralled and astounded by seeing these beautiful big—you know, glowing—men in these large formations, with the gleaming brass instruments, you know what I mean? And with the most powerful music I’d ever imagined could exist. It was music that I had heard on tinny little phonographs. And when I heard it in person, and saw those men, you know, it was an unbelievably exciting thing.”
The stewardess with the drop-dead manner approached, and Ahmet ordered a Scotch-and-soda. “Ummm,” he said, cultivating an afterthought. “What Scotch is it that you have?”
“Red Label,” the stewardess said impatiently.
“What Scotch do you have other than Red Label?” Ahmet asked.
“Brown’s,” said the stewardess.
“Brown’s? I don’t know what that is,” Ahmet said. “Is it Scotch ordinaire?”
“We have Chivas,” the stewardess said.
“Très bien,” said Ahmet. “Avec glace and soda.”
The stewardess left.
“I hate those expensive Scotches,” Ahmet said. “Twelve years old and all that. But somehow you always end up with one, you know what I mean?”
As Ahmet’s limousine arrived at the Hôtel Majestic in Cannes, his attention began to turn to his luggage. Ahmet had with him many of his Vuitton suitcases. Ahmet’s Vuitton was not the easy Vuitton. It was large, weighty luggage. It required the help of others. Ahmet knows how to route luggage efficiently. Within moments after the arrival of his car at the Hôtel Majestic, Ahmet’s Vuitton was spilling into the correct channels. If Ahmet were a workingman, he would probably take a job involving an attractive uniform. Possibly he might make use of his talent with luggage. He was going to rest, he said. “We might do something amusing tomorrow,” Ahmet said. “I thought we might take a boat to Saint-Tropez to have lunch with a friend of mine who married the nephew of Gianni Agnelli.”
As it happened, Ahmet did not rest—he spent much of the night talking with Stephen Stills, a singer and guitarist then undergoing a separation from his group—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the group that David Geffen had put together. Stephen Stills was staying at the Carlton, down the road. His presence in Cannes seemed to have to do with an urge to be near Ahmet, and was somewhat troublesome, since Ahmet’s presence in Cannes had to do with an urge to be near the Rolling Stones. In Cannes, over the next few days, the character of events involving the Rolling Stones was established by Ahmet and Mick Jagger; by Mica Ertegun, independently arrived from Paris; by Prince Rupert Lowenstein, the financial adviser to the Rolling Stones; and by David Geffen. It worked well for others—journalists, music-business men, and people in the habit of going to parties—but it never made a place for Stephen Stills. Around the celebration in Cannes were set the boundaries of a certain style. The boundaries of this style coincided with the area held in common by two ethics (each of which had been composed of bits and pieces of other, older ethics, but each of which could be recognized by 1971 as having an identity of its own). What met in Cannes was the ethic of café society (which is the ethic of aristocracy shorn of its specific responsibilities, its specific etiquette, and its specific geography, and reduced to self-parody) and the ethic of high drag (which is the ethic of satire shorn of its politics). The boundaries of this style encompassed wit, perversity, commercial utility, and an interest in finding the cutting edge, wherever that should be. Stills, whose manner was unsophisticated, found himself stranded over the border. Moreover, the French press, which knew the importance of the Rolling Stones and had learned the importance of Ahmet Ertegun, could not be induced to spell Stills’ name correctly. “Stephen Steel” was the best it ever did. In this unnourishing situation, Stephen Stills’ most important asset was his access to Ahmet, and Ahmet saw him often, privately.
On the night of Ahmet’s party for the Rolling Stones, a number of people assembled in the lobby of the Hôtel Majestic to wait for him. The lobby of the Hôtel Majestic was furnished with large, clunky velvet chairs, but the people waiting for Ahmet declined to use them. They stood together in a small, purposeful group. People waiting for Ahmet often stand in a small purposeful group. People waiting for Ahmet are drawn together in anticipation of impending movement. Prince Rupert Lowenstein was there waiting for Ahmet. Prince Lowenstein is a London banker, who had rather unexpectedly become the financial adviser to the Rolling Stones and had conducted with Ahmet the negotiations that led to the Stones’ affiliation with Atlantic Records. Prince Lowenstein, in his thirties, had the dignity and the manner of an older man. He spoke in a clipped fashion, and, like Ahmet, used the features of his face as tools of verbal emphasis. In conversation, Prince Lowenstein frequently moved his face forward, then tilted it slightly up in a way that implied interest, understanding, and distance at the same time. In conversation, he made frequent use of the remark “Exactly.” As “Exactly” was used by Prince Lowenstein, it took on different meanings at different moments. At times, it indicated agreement. More often, it had the effect of a noncommittal “I see.” “Exactly” is the tribute that an educated man of business pays to an unsatisfactory interlocutor who is likely to be insulted (or moved to further conversation) by “I see.”
David Geffen was there. Geffen is small and has hair with a curl to it. He had the first fraction of a beard. He was wearing a T-shirt. Stephen Stills was there. David Geffen paid a certain amount of attention to Stills, but he seemed more interested in his new proximity to Prince Lowenstein. He had established a mode of operating with Prince Lowenstein in public: he would call him “Prince Lowenstein” a number of times (even when, in direct conversation, it wasn’t necessary to call him anything at all) and then switch to “Rupert.” Geffen’s manner indicated that he and Prince Lowenstein were operating within a well-established rapport. Prince Lowenstein’s manner (which centered on the remark “Exactly”) indicated that they were operating from a useful temporary understanding.
David Geffen talked to Prince Lowenstein about the impending tour of America to be made by the Rolling Stones. He said that he should be the one to manage the tour. “I want to see them end up with sixty-five per cent of the gross. Maybe more like seventy per cent, but sixty-five per cent for sure.”
“Exactly,” said Prince Lowenstein.
Stephen Stills stood just beyond the boundaries of this conversation. A young woman called Jo Bergman came up to Prince Lowenstein. Jo Bergman had by that time worked for the Rolling Stones for a number of years. Her air was businesslike. She was wearing a long, colorful dress. Her hair was long and dark and curly. She interrupted Geffen to tell Prince Lowenstein that she wanted an osteopath to come on the Stones’ tour.
“Exactly,” Prince Lowenstein said.
Ahmet and Mica arrived in the lobby, and the group went to have a drink. Mica is a dark-haired woman, who was born in Rumania. She is contained within a strong outline of handsome appearance which is able to resist dissipation—or diffusion of any kind. To Ahmet’s dense strength she adds surface. “I wish David would not always wear a T-shirt,” Mica said to Ahmet.
“You know what? I think David is terrific,” Ahmet said.
“Terrific or not terrific is not the point,” Mica said. “I just wish he would not always wear a T-shirt.”
In the Majestic lounge, David Geffen sat to the right of Ahmet. Jo Bergman sat to the right of David Geffen. “Do they have recording studios in France?” Geffen asked Ahmet.
“France is like Brooklyn,” Ahmet said. “They have everything.”
David Geffen began to talk about the Stones’ tour again. “Their last tour was a joke,” he said. “What did they get out of it? Tell me. Stephen Stills got one hundred thousand dollars for one night at the L.A. Forum. The Stones only got seventy-five thousand. Think about that,” he said. One person who thought about that, presumably, was Stephen Stills, who was sitting one place away from David Geffen, two places away from Ahmet. “I know I can get them what they want,” David Geffen said.
“Good luck,” said Jo Bergman.
Ahmet’s group ate dinner in the dining room of the Hôtel Majestic. The conversation turned to the smoking of marijuana. Prince Lowenstein said he thought marijuana was a bore. “If you come to my house and smoke marijuana, you put me in danger of the law. If you come to my house and put me in danger of the law, that is bad manners. No question of right or wrong—it’s just bad manners.”
“It’s bad manners unless you ask,” David Geffen said earnestly.
There was a pause in the conversation.
Stephen Stills turned to Ahmet. “Ahmet, we’ve got to take you to this place in L.A.,” he said. “Roy’s Georgia Bar-B-Q. It’s got charcoal stuff on one side and an icebox full of strawberry soda on the other.” People who like Ahmet offer up bits of exotic Americana to him as tribute.
Ahmet told Stephen Stills, affectionately, that Roy’s Bar-B-Q sounded great. He paused. “We should leave here in fifteen minutes,” he said.
“As long as we get to the party by midnight,” Prince Lowenstein said.
“But we’re the hosts,” said Ahmet.
“Mick gave a big party before he left London and arrived four hours late,” said Prince Lowenstein.
“You’re not a rock-and-roll star, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be,” Ahmet said, using his jaunty voice.
Italked with David Geffen about Ahmet. “When I first met him, if there was any excuse to call him up I would,” David Geffen said. “He would always pick up my phone call. It made me feel very important.”
The party was not a success. It was held in a yacht club of no distinction. There was not about it that sense of ambitious juxtaposition which marks the best large parties given by the Erteguns. There were a number of journalists there, among them Nik Cohn, who had flown to Cannes for the party and was glad to find it dreary. “I love Ahmet, but I love to see him fall flat on his face like this,” Cohn said. “But it doesn’t matter. Ahmet still has it. Bob Crewe had it, and he lost it at thirty-two. Phil Spector had it, and he lost it at thirty-four. I’m not sure I’m willing to say that Geffen has it at all. The only man in a class with Ahmet is Colonel Parker, and Colonel Parker made it through just one thing. Because Elvis Presley is the greatest star in the world, Parker is the greatest manager in the world. But Parker is not the King of Rock and Roll. Ahmet is the King of Rock and Roll. Ahmet is more important than Jagger, for instance, and more interesting. Jagger is a narcissist—more vulnerable and more interesting than most narcissists, but still a narcissist. All narcissists are corny, in the sense that one has seen them before. Ahmet, on the other hand, is really a figure. Ahmet is really a figure, and Jagger is nothing more than a little rock-and-roll singer. And what is a rock-and-roll singer in the end?”
The Rolling Stones arrived at the party shortly after Ahmet. Mick Jagger and Ahmet embraced.
“We have to do the whole thing, don’t we?” Ahmet asked.
“If we had taps on our shoes, we could really do a number,” Jagger replied.
Although the party took no coherent direction, it was interesting in that it marked the first time that Ahmet and Jagger had paced out together the territory they held in common. The exact boundaries of this territory were yet to be determined, but it was clear that there would be room enough for Prince Lowenstein, Mica Ertegun, and a number of other more or less well-known figures from international café society, including a striking Central American girl named Bianca Perez Morena de Macias, who was engaged to Jagger. It was clear, in fact, that in the territory in which Jagger was now to be based he would have a certain amount to learn from Ahmet—more, perhaps, than Ahmet had to learn from him. Jagger had for years gone to parties given by rich people, and for years he had been courted by them, but he had usually made it a point to keep his edge—and his bad manners. The attitude he sought to establish was best seen, perhaps, in his song “Play with Fire,” in which he, of course, was the fire. But by 1971 this image—Jagger as menace—was dated. Menace is most effective when its limits are not known. The limits of Jagger’s excess had been established at the concert at Altamont, when events in the audience had overtaken events on the stage. It is damaging to the potency of a performer when events in the audience overtake his performance. Jagger’s “demonic” persona was not enhanced by the death at Altamont, as some people supposed; it was destroyed. In the face of one man’s real death, Jagger’s “demonic” posture was shown to be merely perverse. The lesson of Altamont was that Jagger was a performer in need of crowd control.
Control was what Ahmet and Prince Lowenstein had to offer the Stones. Both offered access to productive adult modes—financial and social—that could prolong a career built on non-adult principles. To make use of those modes, Jagger had only to accept the fact that he was now a known quantity: not static, exactly; capable of surprises, perhaps; but formed, established, known. As a known quantity, however bizarre, Jagger had something to contribute to the hegemony of the eclectic, perverse segment of the international upper class, and would be assured some permanent standing, if only as a picturesque bit. Andy Warhol, who has understood almost perfectly the social temper of his time, had successfully made this subtle move to a formidable adulthood by effecting the most minimal compromises, and Jagger was offered the same chance.
Prince Lowenstein was not particularly interested by the party. He established himself easily in one corner of the room and stayed there. He had reason to be at his ease, because he had negotiated with Ahmet a contract for the Stones that showed some progress toward making sense of their complicated affairs. Prince Lowenstein had become financial adviser to the Stones some months earlier, after they had extricated themselves from the regime of a man named Allen Klein, who was to have given them independence and wealth without the stigma of conventional management, but who gave them instead a very conventional company, which he controlled himself—mostly, it was said, for his own ends. Klein himself had come to the group in 1967. The fact was that at the time of their approach to Prince Lowenstein the Rolling Stones had not much ready cash, not much immediate income from their royalties and copyrights (much of which was committed to the company Klein continued to control), a number of loans from Klein outstanding, and some rather expensive personal habits. Prince Lowenstein set out to obtain for them a contract guaranteeing five million dollars or more against a royalty of more than ten per cent per record. He talked to almost every company (“Whenever I saw Rupert or Mick with someone else, my heart sank,” Ahmet said. “It was a painful, ecstatic courtship”), but he talked most to Ahmet. Jagger himself encouraged Ahmet, hung out with him in Los Angeles and elsewhere (Jagger invited Ahmet to hear Chuck Berry at a club on the Sunset Strip; Ahmet drank a lot and went to sleep; Ahmet’s capacity for uncommercial behavior reportedly impressed Jagger), and, from time to time, told him flat out that he wanted to be on Atlantic, because Atlantic was where the heavy black acts he admired had recorded. (“I think Jagger would have liked to be on a funky label,” Ahmet says. “I think Jagger would have liked to be on Excello. We were the closest he could get to Excello and still get five million dollars.”) Finally, when any further delay would not have been interesting, the deal was made.
“Everything you can say about Ahmet is true, multiplied to infinity,” Prince Lowenstein said to me. “As a negotiator, he is able, shrewd, and basically fair-minded. Ahmet’s integrity and tact are very rare, I have found. In the record business, I find that there is no sense that gentlemanliness matters. And, of course, it does. The concept of gentlemanliness matters in business, as elsewhere. That is why England did so well for so long. A gentleman can be very effective in business. A gentleman is aware that man is made of clay as well as divine afflatus, don’t you see?”
Keith Richards, the other essential Rolling Stone, left the party early. His rapprochement with fashion was less well established. He was looking for his dog. “I have to find that dog,” he said. “That was my only friend at the party, man.”
Ahmet arranged to meet Jagger at the Municipal Casino, but he arrived after the casino had closed its doors to new guests. There were sounds of life within. Ahmet argued in French with the man at the door of the casino.
“Do you know who I am?” Ahmet asked.
“Even if you were the President of the Republic, I would not let you in the casino,” the man at the door said.
“It is just as well that you do not open the casino for the President of the Republic,” Ahmet said. “The President of the Republic doesn’t make much money. The President of the Republic is not much of a gambler.”
Ahmet went into the night in search of Mick Jagger. He went, in his limousine, to a place called the Playgirl’s Telephone Club, which is the sort of place the French contrive when they wish to seem American. Jagger was not there, but Keith Richards was, fairly bored. After a while, Ahmet and Richards left the Playgirl’s Telephone Club in separate cars for the villa of Bill Wyman, the bass guitarist of the Rolling Stones. At that moment, all the Rolling Stones were living in the South of France, for reasons having to do with English tax law. On the way to Bill Wyman’s, Ahmet fell asleep several times, for a moment or two at a time.
The villa of Bill Wyman was called Villa Altirama. It was decorated in a style that involves usually the gentle treatment of pastel objects. At the Villa Altirama, the pastel objects had been pushed around a bit. Mick Jagger was there but had gone to bed. “Western Movies,” by the Olympics, was playing loudly on the sound system. Keith Richards talked with Ahmet about the arrangements for their impending tour. “What about this whole David Geffen scene?” he asked. “We’re being pressured very hard by Rupert. Now, one thing about the tickets. We don’t want to hit the kids for eleven dollars. Why not hit Coca-Cola and General Motors, and hit the kids for twenty-five cents? America is a capitalist country, right?”
Ahmet left the Villa Altirama at dawn. At dawn, one could see that the Villa Altirama was surrounded by other houses.
“The South of France has been ruined,” said a young German journalist named Florentine as Ahmet’s limousine pulled away from the house.
“Every place has been ruined,” said Ahmet. He leaned forward and addressed the driver. “We are very restless people. Please drive faster,” he said.
Entry in a diary: Went with Nesuhi Ertegun by limousine to Jersey City. Ahmet and Nesuhi very much at home in limousines. Easy to notice shoes in a limousine, framed against gray felt. Shoes as a climax to legs spread out at full length, resting on jump seats, etc. Ahmet and Nesuhi wear very good shoes. Take good care of good shoes and they begin to look like slippers. Nesuhi very reserved. Emphasis on achievement, etc. I told Nesuhi I thought that Ahmet was a great man but in spite of himself. Nesuhi said, “Yes, that’s it.” The Erteguns might do well in a South American country—Argentina, possibly. Limousines, good shoes deep into Andes, etc. Toward Jersey City—street after street bombed out. Tiny little concrete houses placed anywhere. Large Negro families in tiny concrete houses. Handsome men sitting outside tiny concrete houses placed in a bombed-out commercial zone where no one was ever meant to live. Public housing. Handsome Negro men wearing good shoes, too. Met Ahmet at tiny airport. Ahmet arrived from Southampton by helicopter. Went to Roosevelt Stadium. Watched Santos of Brazil play soccer against Bologna of Italy. Erteguns knew all the players. Erteguns very much interested in soccer. Very much interested in all competitive activities invented by Europeans. Erteguns have bought a team for Warner Communications. New York Cosmos. Pelé playing for Santos of Brazil. Ahmet says must get Pelé for New York Cosmos. Ahmet says favorite sport is bicycle racing, though.
Later, went with Ahmet and Mica to last concert at Fillmore East. Last bill: Albert King, Allman Brothers, J. Geils Band, Edgar Winter, Mountain, Country Joe. Several kinds of people. People in dishevelled velvet—fallen hippie aristocrats. People in stencilled T-shirts—the new edge of irony and ironic accommodation. Record-company presidents in casual clothes. What was obvious: Dishevelled velvet on the way out. Stencilled T-shirts on the way in. Record-company presidents able to order hundreds of thousands of stencilled T-shirts at a time. Fillmore East Security Detail (young men with long hair on to the hip that works as opposed to the hip that gets strung out) wore stencilled T-shirts reading “Fillmore East” and pushed the dishevelled hippie aristocrats around a little.
Ahmet dressed in white pants, blue blazer, yellow polo shirt, yellow socks, yellow handkerchief. Mica in striking black dress. Mica very good-looking. Other record-company presidents floored by Mica. Floored by idea of yellow socks. Floored by everything. Minor record-company president asked Mica if she liked Allman Brothers Band.
“Yah,” Mica said. “They are divine, no?”
Mica asked Ahmet if they could go out of the Fillmore for a drink.
Ahmet explained about hordes of refugee hippies outside Fillmore. Difficult to leave. Difficult, having left, to return. Explained, also, very few places to get drink on Second Avenue in East Village.
“But I think there must be hundreds of places to drink here, no?” Mica said.
Mica and Ahmet left Fillmore. Past long-haired security boys. Past long-haired security boy throwing minor tantrum. (“This is the last night. What do I care about your problems?”) Past doors. Into street. Hundreds of street hippies. No pretense of having tickets. No pretense of expecting to get in. Moved aside to let Ahmet and Mica out. No difficulty. Ahmet and Mica went across the street to a bar where six men were taking whiskey with a beer chaser. Mica ordered white wine and got it.
In the traditional hierarchy of the popular-entertainment business, record companies occupied a station below the theatre, motion pictures, radio, and vaudeville but above carnivals. Billboard, which is widely considered the most important music-business journal (though Record World, a newer publication, may be nearer the cutting edge), began its life as a magazine for the outdoor-advertising industry, while Cash Box, another music-business weekly, originally addressed itself to the jukebox and to the vending machine. The coverage of record news in Variety, the most respectable show-business journal, is skimpy and unreliable to this day. The forms within the popular-entertainment business which occupied the highest places in its old hierarchy dealt largely with adult archetypes. Adult experience and adult characters were simplified, often to the point of caricature, but it was not questioned that adult experience was the most powerful experience upon which one could draw. But just as the dismantling of the class system left the novel without much of its resonance, the diminishing of the ideal of dignity and the mode of adulthood recently has weakened the connections between the ambitious forms of popular entertainment and the mass audience. The theatre and ambitious films operate now in the twilight of the adult mode and have only intermittent access to the mass of people. Television has continuous access to the mass of people, but it deals in the detritus of adulthood and operates within a mode and according to an attention span that is essentially childish (and seems to have a thwarted child’s hostility to the ideal of dignity). To much of the public (especially that large and active part of the public born during the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties), the mode of authority in America, the mode that deals with real experience, the mode that is neither dead (as the adult mode seems to be) nor compromised (as the childish world of television seems to be), is the adolescent mode—the mode of exploration, becoming, growth, and pain. The adolescent mode is the mode of the music business.
In the new hierarchy, the movie business retains a vague authority, partly because it is seen as an art by those inhabitants of the adolescent mode who are interested in art, partly because the idea of stardom adheres to it (and stardom is the one adult state that inhabitants of the adolescent mode can imagine living in—because, of course, it is not really an adult state but is, rather, the ultimate adolescent fantasy of adulthood), and partly because there remains a wistful regard for the vanished world of adulthood. But the movie industry’s important energy has been surrendered to television. Television is pervasive, and has a subtle power over the society which no one, probably, is competent to measure, but it is dispersed so thoroughly throughout the society that is has ceased to be identified with choice, it is so fragmented that it cannot be identified with attention, and it has embraced a mode so childish that it cannot be identified with ambition. So that it is the music business that has been, recently, at the top of the real entertainment hierarchy in America. To the extent that the American public makes a decision about its entertainment, it makes the decision to buy records. The record business has absorbed most of the non-catatonic energy that Americans devote to entertainment. It should be noted that the record business has subsumed not only radio but vaudeville. In a city of a hundred thousand people, almost every radio station plays recorded rock-and-roll music, and if there is ever any currently celebrated entertainer to be seen live on a stage it is likely to be a rock-and-roll singer.
Record-industry sales in America last year are estimated to have reached almost three and a half billion dollars. If revenues from concerts are included, the gross revenues of the music business approach four billion dollars, which is a figure nearly twice that achieved by the movie industry. The most successful companies are CBS (Columbia and Epic labels) and Warner Communications. For the last two years, the Warner labels, taken together—Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, Warner Bros./Reprise, and Atlantic—have been the most successful domestically. In 1977, their gross revenues were three hundred and sixty-four million.
The record business is not, in its essence, picturesque. The processes of the work are straightforward, and while it is true that behind the scenes there are several coherent styles in operation, these styles (the style of engineers of twenty-seven or thirty-four with long hair and a nose for drugs; the style of press agents of twenty-seven or thirty-four with one small item of Vuitton and a nose for drugs; the style implied by stencilled T-shirts and access to rented limousines) lack the air of ingenious contrivance that was formerly found in the movie industry, for instance. There was about the old movie industry a feeling that adolescents—adolescent actors and adolescent moguls—were dressing up to play-act as adults. The superior candor of the record business has resulted in a formal recognition of adolescent styles. Styles that must be a little jittery, however, since they are juxtaposed with the real work of a cutthroat business.
In the door at Atlantic Records. A curved desk; a receptionist dressed in a style just one step ahead of hip; a floor covered in rubber, of the sort that makes for easy walking in West German airports; a long banquette on which are seated (as a matter of course) several musicians, several managers of musicians, several hustlers. There is no Back Lot at Atlantic Records to testify to the hopes and dreams of its consuming public. Just this Front Office. These offices are in the Warner Communications Building, at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, and succeed a series of more modest spaces on the West Side, the last of which, at Sixtieth Street and Broadway, remains in use as a recording studio. They are done in sharp white and warm beige and other shades of relentless good taste. They were decorated by Mica Ertegun, who, together with her friend Mrs. William P. (Chessy) Rayner, runs a decorating firm called MAC II. (Mica decorated Ahmet’s personal office in Atlantic’s Sixtieth Street headquarters, but his personal office only. That office was done in sharp whites only—this was before the warm beiges and the warm browns had come into their own—and its modernity was somewhat undercut by the fact that it directly overlooked a drugstore.) Around to Ahmet’s office. Turn right down a corridor, narrow and ungenerous. To a small reception area, where there are available contemporary (but not immediately contemporary) copies of Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World. To the left is the office of Noreen Woods, Ahmet’s assistant and a vice-president of Atlantic, who is a woman of deep intelligence, deep patience, and (probably) deep cynicism. Straight ahead is Ahmet’s office. Large and more relentless still. A space-age desk. Against the background of the office various things are seen sharply, in outline. A Humanitarian Award, for instance. Ahmet is offered several humanitarian awards a year but accepts only one a year. And Ahmet himself. Ahmet is a strong man, and seems more powerful still in this office, since he is so visible in it. Ahmet’s strength is that he works with considerable authority in a style not seen elsewhere in the Atlantic offices or in his industry. He works with authority in the style of the old movie industry: the style of ingenious contrivance, of theatrical impersonation; the style of costume, of luxury, of café society. In these offices, where everyone else has been reduced to a less potent style—Relentless Neutrality, Adolescence, One Step Beyond Hip—Ahmet acts like a magnate and dresses like David Windsor.
If there was ever a Back Lot at Atlantic Records, it was at 234 West Fifty-sixth Street, next door to Patsy’s Restaurant. Ahmet and Jerry Wexler recorded rhythm-and-blues music—R. & B.—in that office. “That was our office, man, and our studio,” Ahmet’s former partner Jerry Wexler says. “When we wanted to record, we moved the furniture against the wall.” Ahmet has many credentials, and to him the fact that thirty years ago he recorded Negro music that was in some way unexampled and that played a part in the evolution of rock and roll and the contemporary adolescent orthodoxy is not of compelling importance. It is, however, this credential which makes him “heavy”—to young musicians and, despite a serious estrangement, to his old partner Jerry Wexler, who now works at Warner Bros. Records. Recently, Jerry Wexler played a tape from the period of the office next door to Patsy’s Restaurant. Ahmet’s voice came over the large speakers of an elaborate sound system.
“In front, just get that good piano sound,” Ahmet’s voice said.
“This is Ahmet with Ray Charles,” Jerry Wexler told me. “This is a song Ahmet wrote.”
On the tape, Ahmet recited the lines of a song in a flat, staccato voice. “ ‘Hold your baby as tight as you can; spread yourself out like a fan, and mess around,’ ” Ahmet’s voice said. “ ‘Do the mess around.’ ”
“I always loved to hear Ahmet sing,” Jerry Wexler said.
On the tape, Ray Charles sang the words that Ahmet had recited to him.
“Ahmet and I used to spend a lot of time together,” Jerry Wexler said. “All the time but sleeping time. Circumstances crowded us very close together until 1960-61.”
On the tape, Ahmet recited a new verse. At some moments, Ahmet’s recitation approached the level of song. “ ‘Well, they all get juiced, you can bet your soul; they all do the rock with a steady roll. Well, they mess around,’ ” Ahmet’s voice sang.
“At a certain point, Ahmet stopped producing R. & B.,” Jerry Wexler said. “I don’t know why. I’ve never discussed it with him. During my last years, there were a lot of black artists who thought I was the president of Atlantic.” Jerry Wexler paused.
On the tape, Ray Charles sang the words that Ahmet had recited to him.
“You know one thing,” Jerry Wexler said. “I love the songs Ahmet used to write. I mean, they are not original. I mean, they all have something stolen from one song and something else stolen from another song. But every blues song has that. Every blues song is stolen from every other blues song.”
On the tape, Ahmet sang another verse. “ ‘Have you done the mess around at the cabaret? That’s where the playgirls go to play. And mess around,’ ” Ahmet sang.
Aman in the music business remembers seeing Ahmet late one night at the offices of Alan Freed, who was the most influential disc jockey in New York during the nineteen-fifties, and one who was known to play the original Negro versions of rhythm-and-blues songs, and not the white copies. “I saw this guy in with Freed, and I’d never seen anyone like that before,” the man recalls. “He was young—maybe in his late twenties—but he was completely bald, man. And he had this coat on—vicuña or some crap. He looked like a millionaire out on the town, you know what I mean? And I thought, How did Freed get to know a class guy like that? And then it turned out that this guy was a supplicant to Freed—you know, just like me. I found out that I had seen Ahmet out on his rounds.”
Warner Communications keeps a jet plane at the disposal of its major executives, it flies at forty-three thousand feet, which is higher than any altitude assigned to commercial jets. It is decorated in shades of toast and beige. It has oval windows, and ingenious tables that slip in and out of ingenious housings. The seats are covered in a nubby oatmeal-colored material. For additional comfort, there are numerous small, strange velvet pillows. In the world of private luxury, standards of quality are occasionally interrupted by humor and small evidences of human whim. In the world of corporate luxury, standards of quality (which are synonymous, usually, with beige nubby textures) are interrupted by promotional trinkets and strange velvet pillows.
In the late fall of 1971, several months after Ahmet’s return from Cannes, I went to California with him on this plane. Also on board were Sheldon Vogel, financial vice-president of Atlantic Records; David Glew, sales manager of Atlantic Records; Steven J. Ross, president of Warner Communications; and other executives of Warner Communications. During the flight, business was conducted at three levels.
At the first level, there was the day-to-day business of Atlantic Records. This was conducted by David Glew and Jerry Greenberg and then brought to the attention of Ahmet Ertegun. David Glew had with him an IBM printout that showed the sale of Atlantic records market by market during the previous week. The printout bore the head “Weekly Sales Net.” Under that head were three subheads: “BPI,” “City,” and “Figure.” The BPI, or Buying Power Index, was a hypothetical figure that served as a benchmark against which sales performance could be measured. David Glew circled in red those cities where the Figure (representing actual Atlantic sales) did not match or exceed the Buying Power Index. Not many cities were circled in red. Another column on the printout showed the overall performance of Atlantic records in release. This column showed these things to Glew: that an album of material from the television show “All in the Family” was going to be enormously successful, unexpectedly pushing the 1971 sales figures toward a new high (just as in 1970 the unexpected enormous sale of a three-record set of music from the Woodstock Festival had helped set a sales record in that year); that a new album released by the hard-metal English group Yes was going to be a heavy-selling album; that an album released by Country (a group managed by a friend of Ahmet’s named Earl McGrath) would not be a heavy-selling album; and that the previous week had been the biggest week in the history of Atlantic Records.
Ahmet looked at David Glew’s printout with concentrated interest. He ordered a big advertising campaign for the “All in the Family” album. Then he looked at the figures for the Yes album. He told Glew that he was about to sign a new contract with Yes. “We’ve got to get that signed,” Ahmet said. “I’m glad we’ve got that on the line. I wouldn’t give these figures to them.”
“They didn’t get last week’s figures,” Jerry Greenberg said.
“You could be cold with them, you know,” Ahmet said.
“I’ll cough the call,” David Glew said.
Jerry Greenberg brought up the problem of the Country album. “It’s a stiff,” he said.
“I’d like to break that album,” Ahmet said.
“We spent two thousand dollars on time-buys on L.A. radio—nothing,” said David Glew. “And I really dig Earl McGrath.”
Business at the second level involved strategic planning for Atlantic Records and touched, as well, on arrangements held in common by Atlantic and Warner Bros. Records and Elektra Records. Business at this level was conducted actively by Ahmet with Sheldon Vogel and Greenberg and Glew. Ahmet discussed with this group various problems that had arisen in the record distribution system set up by the Warner Communications Record Group. He also discussed the possibility of acquiring retail outlets.
David Glew mentioned someone who, he said, could set up a chain of retail outlets. “He’s in with some of the biggest builders in the country,” David Glew said.
“In five minutes, we’ll be in with bigger ones,” Ahmet said.
Steven J. Ross, founder and president of Warner Communications, passed by Ahmet, where he was conferring with David Glew and Jerry Greenberg and Sheldon Vogel. Steven Ross was dressed in a light-blue turtleneck and a dark-blue blazer. Ahmet was wearing a yellow polo shirt and a dark-blue blazer. Ahmet’s blue blazer and yellow shirt implied a different style from the style implied by Ross’s blue blazer and light-blue turtleneck.
Ahmet looked up at Ross. “The fellows just told me that last week was the biggest in history,” Ahmet said.
“Great! Just great!” Ross said. Ross, tall and athletic and powerful, had a manner that showed a curious mixture of assurance and insecurity. He seemed uncertain in the face of Ahmet’s sophistication and glibness, but confident that he would be listened to and treated well nonetheless. (“Steve Ross tells me he doesn’t know what to do,” a New York banker says. “There is Ahmet, and there are these other strange guys, and there is no way to understand what they are doing. They make half his profits for him, but he doesn’t understand how they do it. He says it’s a little scary.”)
Business at the third level was conducted by Steven Ross and dealt with problems and projects of the conglomerate. Ross sat in a beige chair; Ahmet stood propped up against one of the ingenious tables. This meeting dealt with issues arising from Warner Communications’ involvement in cable TV. Some time was spent on the subject of “diluted earnings.” The plane passed over the Rocky Mountains during this meeting, and everyone stopped talking to look. As the meeting came to an end, David Glew and Jerry Greenberg rejoined Ahmet and Ross. Glew gave Ross a promotional medallion. This medallion took its inspiration from a graphic logo developed for the Rolling Stones. A giant red tongue lolled out of a giant red mouth. “These medallions are the biggest promotional thing since the ‘Atlantic Is Heavy’ sweatshirts,” Glew told Ross.
“Great! Great!” Steven Ross said.
Ross and Ahmet talked about football. “He’s got the speed, got the moves,” Ross said, describing a player.
“We played football against WPOP in Hartford,” Greenberg said. “It was part of their Toys for Tots promotion.”
“Great!” Steven Ross said.
At a recording studio on Cahuenga Boulevard, in Los Angeles, Ahmet sat in a big-backed black vinyl chair. The chair rolled on big chrome casters. Ahmet wore cavalry-twill trousers with dark-brown piping around the pockets, and tasselled loafers. The big-backed black vinyl chair encased Ahmet awkwardly. Ahmet got up, pushed it away, and got a smaller one. Ahmet is not contemptuous of vinyl chairs—he has respect for the economic forces that give them their character—but he has no time for unsuccessful vinyl chairs, or for anything else that encases him awkwardly. Through the window of the control booth where Ahmet sat, he could see two young Atlantic singers named Batdorf and Rodney. Batdorf wore a green T-shirt marked with a peace sign; Rodney wore an unmarked green T-shirt. Both Batdorf and Rodney had long hair and wore sneakers. They were singing a song of Batdorf’s composition called “All I Need.” This song was descended, in a way that was hard to trace, from some cadet branch of the rhythm-and-blues family. It had lyrics that descended in a more direct way from the protest songs of the sixties. The song went like this:
This was the first verse. The second verse began, “I used to be a soldier boy, fighting for my world.” Batdorf sang this song. Rodney played the guitar.
Ahmet listened impassively, his face in repose. His eyes were half closed. He looked, in repose, very handsome and very inaccessible. What I imagined Ahmet to be doing was this: I imagined him to be tracing, very quickly, the provenance of the pieces of style that Batdorf and Rodney had used in contriving their performing personality. What Ahmet had in front of him was not any simple expression of talent; these young men existed in an aura of pastiche and derivation very far from any recognizable musical archetype. Ahmet had to determine whether there was any particular interest to their particular assortment of derived elements. He had to determine if their energy or their musicianship or their innocence lent any convincing authority to their performance. He had to decide if he should add a new element to the pastiche or subtract an element already present. It seemed to me that Ahmet had at his disposal a studbook of American musical archetypes and their descendants, and that he was using this document (one of the best of its kind) in an effort to solve the problem of Batdorf and Rodney.
There was a squeal on the tape as the engineer sitting next to Ahmet played back the tape of “All I Need,” by Batdorf and Rodney.
“Where did that squeal come from?” Ahmet asked sharply. “Are all the channels open?”
The engineer was a young man in jeans. His jeans had a patch on them that read “Keep On Truckin’.” “I don’t think they’re all open,” he said.
From within the studio, Batdorf signalled an interest in speaking over the intercom. He asked Ahmet if he had seen “Johnny Got His Gun,” the movie made from Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel. He said that the song “All I Need” had an important relationship to the movie “Johnny Got His Gun.”
“Everything sounds very muddy,” Ahmet said. “It all sounds very muddy.” He turned to the engineer. “The way you’ve got it set up, you’ve got a bad mike on the guitars. They’re getting depressed out there. That’s Batdorf there. The other one is Rodney. You’ve got them mixed up. You were bringing up the wrong guitar.”
The telephone rang. It was a call for Ahmet. It lasted several minutes. Batdorf, Rodney, and the engineer waited for Ahmet. “That was an ultimatum,” Ahmet said to me when the call was over. “I have been receiving ultimatums. I am used to ultimatums. Perhaps I should say ‘ultimata.’ Ultimata always involve money.”
Ahmet flipped on the intercom. “Better come in and hear it,” he said to Batdorf and Rodney.
He turned to the engineer and spoke in a pleasant, conversational tone, as though he were an observer talking to another observer. “It’s a very dead room, isn’t it?” he asked.
The engineer, who had, of course, set the room up and was responsible for its deadness, bumbled his words. “Well, it’s not a super-dead room,” he said, finally.
In the control booth, Batdorf and Rodney listened to “All I Need.” At the end, Ahmet was silent. Batdorf brought up “Johnny Got His Gun” again. “It’s about this guy who ends up a basket case,” Batdorf said.
“I know what you’re saying,” Ahmet said. “But the song. I think we have to worry about the song.”
“I was going to dedicate it to Dalton Trumbo,” Batdorf said. “People who know who Dalton Trumbo was would know what the song was about.”
After the session with Batdorf and Rodney, Ahmet went in his limousine to the Los Angeles house of his friend Earl McGrath, who was at that moment the head of Clean Records, an Atlantic subsidiary label. Earl McGrath was born in Wisconsin, came to New York in 1954, and met Ahmet in the early sixties. (“Our first conversation was about the last of the Great American Sin Streets,” Earl McGrath says. “We decided that East Baltimore Street in Baltimore was the last of the Great American Sin Streets. That was before sin streets came back.”) During the middle sixties, Earl McGrath worked for Twentieth Century-Fox in New York. During the late sixties, he lived on the West Coast and wrote screenplays. In 1970, he became the head of Clean Records. Through all these transformations, he had been a close friend of Ahmet’s—the person, perhaps, with whom Ahmet was best able to relax. Earl McGrath is tall and thin and wears a mustache. His distinctive characteristics are a smile that swallows up his face in a rather unusual way, a high-pitched laugh, and an ability to extract punch lines from unpromising material. When Ahmet arrived at Earl McGrath’s house, it was in comfortable disarray. In one corner of one room, large cushions were spread out on the floor. Ahmet arranged himself against one of these and had a drink.
Earl McGrath began to talk about Margaret Case, an editor of Vogue who had committed suicide some time before by jumping from a window of her apartment. “There she was,” he said. “A pancake on Park Avenue after fifty years in the world of fashion.” Earl McGrath smiled in a way that threatened to take over his face. Then he went to his sound system and played a tape. The tape had been made by a rock-and-roll group he wanted to sign to Clean Records.
“They want a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance,” McGrath told Ahmet.
“We can get them down considerably,” Ahmet said.
“If all the cunning of Islam is with you, it should be a piece of cake,” McGrath said.
After a while, Ahmet and Earl began to try to decide where they might eat dinner. Grand restaurants were suggested. Sleazy drive-ins were suggested. Finally, it was decided that they would go to Martoni’s, an Italian restaurant known to be popular with people in the music business. “It’s always a thrill to go to Martoni’s with Ahmet,” McGrath said. “If you don’t mind the ass-kissing.”
At Martoni’s, waiters hovered about Ahmet’s table with a devotion that did not quite obscure the dreariness of the food they served. Ahmet was greeted with deference by ten or twenty people. He returned the greetings with a jaunty grace that seemed to provide a high degree of pleasure to each of the people who approached him. Most of the people who greeted Ahmet were businessmen who worked for record companies, men who worked as performers’ managers, men who worked at recording studios. One, however, was a performer, a woman in her forties. Performers without a record deal sometimes came to Martoni’s in the hope of meeting the right businessman. Ahmet was graceful and affectionate with this performer—and he did a most skillful thing: he made it clear, through his grace and his warmth, that his interest was personal, and not professional. It was an un-awkward exchange, and one that nobody in the business but Ahmet could have brought off so well.
“The only thing about her that works anymore is the hair,” McGrath said when this performer had left. “And Cher does it better.”
Ahmet smiled but did not laugh. “She was very good in a certain way,” Ahmet said. “It wasn’t a big thing that she did, but she did it well.”
In Ahmet’s limousine, McGrath and Ahmet tried to decide which of two recording sessions to drop in on. At one session, there would be David Crosby and Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, and, probably, David Geffen. At another, there would be the Rolling Stones and Marshall Chess, the manager of the day-to-day affairs of the Rolling Stones. “I know what,” Earl McGrath said, smiling. “Let’s go where we can see Marshall Chess.”
Since Ahmet planned to end the evening with Mick Jagger, he went first to the Crosby-Nash session. Crosby and Nash were in the studio. Joni Mitchell and David Geffen sat in the control booth, and Ahmet and McGrath joined them. McGrath talked to Ahmet, and Geffen talked to Ahmet, but McGrath and Geffen did not talk much to each other. As McGrath talked to Ahmet, he made reference to spheres of humor and sophistication from which Geffen was excluded. As Geffen talked to Ahmet, he made reference to professional and financial issues of a significance that McGrath had not experienced at Clean Records. Ahmet played with a pocket calculator.
David Crosby and Graham Nash came into the control booth. They had about them the air of craftsmen. The simple ease they showed in pursuit of their craft made unalarming the signs they carried with them that they were in fact at the end of their youth. They were dressed like hippies, but like hippie carpenters. David Crosby wore a small woodsman’s knife at his belt. With Stephen Stills and Neil Young, Crosby and Nash had made music that had successfully merged some modes from hippie experience and country music. This had made them successful, and it had made David Geffen, their manager, successful as well. Geffen, as president and part owner of Asylum Records, came to preside over singers like Jackson Browne and, later, the Eagles, whose style descended from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and who made him more successful yet. Geffen had about him the air of a craftsman, too, but his air was more urban and more nervous. The engineer played back the track that Crosby and Nash had just recorded. The track was called “Southbound Train.” Since the harmony had not been laid in yet, Crosby and Nash sang the harmony to Ahmet—one at each ear.
Ahmet spent most of the next day in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The bungalow was large and comfortable. In Ahmet’s bungalow, there are tactful reproductions of French paintings and there are a number of telephones. Ahmet spends a large part of every day on the telephone. “I make between fifty and seventy calls a day,” Ahmet says. “That’s all anybody can make, I think.” That morning, Ahmet called Steve Ross to arrange a meeting to discuss retail record outlets; he called the comedian Flip Wilson about a movie; he called Earl McGrath and he called David Geffen and he called Mick Jagger.
In the early afternoon, Steve Ross came to talk to Ahmet about retail outlets. This meeting ran into the time that Ahmet had set aside for a meeting with David Geffen. Geffen waited in another room of the bungalow while Ahmet talked with Ross in the living room. Geffen wore bluejeans and a Western-cut shirt in a flowered pattern. He said that he had just bought a Rolls-Royce Corniche. “I just bought one of those cars, you know—the Corniche,” he said. “I always wanted one, but I was afraid it would be considered too ostentatious. Finally, I said, ‘The hell with it.’ I can afford it and I got it.”
Geffen had about him a vigorous energy. Since his trip with Ahmet to Cannes, he had set up Asylum Records, in partnership with Atlantic. He had begun to be a proprietor, and a successful one. With a certain humor, with a certain honesty, with an exuberant pleasure (but with no grace), he had shaken off the obscure world in which managers and record hustlers—however rich—scuffle unnoticed. The telephone rang. It was Joni Mitchell calling David Geffen. She told David Geffen that she had had the idea of putting out a book of her poetry for her friends. “It’s twenty-five thousand dollars, Joni,” Geffen said. “That’s two hundred and fifty dollars for each book. What we should do is keep the plates and then do another kind of book, too. Use a different binding for three ninety-eight, and yours will still be very special.” He paused. “To give them value, you ought to sign them one out of a hundred, two out of a hundred, et cetera. Like graphics.”
At that moment, Ahmet came in. Geffen was still on the telephone. “He must be talking to an artist,” Ahmet said. “He’s got his soulful look on. He is trying to purge at this moment all traces of his eager greed.” Ahmet left.
Shortly thereafter, Geffen hung up the phone. “I love Ahmet,” Geffen said. “Earl and I are sibling rivals for Ahmet’s affection—or, at least, Earl thinks we are. Ahmet is a very charming man, and the record business is basically so boring.”
Soon Geffen went in for his meeting with Ahmet. They discussed one aspect of Atlantic’s arrangement with Crosby and Nash. Geffen was acting in his capacity as their manager. Geffen was combative, but in a complicated way: he used his combativeness to win his points, but he used his brashness, also, to bring himself to Ahmet’s attention, so that there was a compliment implied in every demand he made, since the demand was for attention as well as money. Many people, sensing the force of Ahmet’s personality, want to be close to him; the more ambitious want his attention, which is scattered, usually, and hard to pin down. Part of Geffen’s ambition had to do with gaining Ahmet’s full attention. Later, his ambition had to do with gaining Ahmet’s full attention without having to ask for it.
The issue was this: The contract provided that Nash and Crosby would be reimbursed for five thousand dollars of their studio costs for every one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of records they sold. Geffen wanted fifty thousand dollars of this sum paid in advance—an amount that would assume sales of one million dollars. This sum paid in advance would show Ahmet’s confidence in the album, Geffen said.
Ahmet was annoyed by this request, but he treated it with a jaunty humor. “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.”
“You should give me the fifty thousand dollars,” Geffen said.
“Why?” Ahmet asked. “No one else gets it.”
“Because it’s sound business practice, and, besides, I want it.”
“No.”
“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?”
Finally, Ahmet agreed to advance thirty-five thousand dollars. “I’m not giving you fifty thousand dollars, because I need the money to run my company,” Ahmet said.
“If you’re in that kind of trouble, I’m selling my stock,” Geffen said.
“You’re very chintzy,” Ahmet said.
“You are chintzy, not me,” Geffen said.
Ahmet ceased to be jaunty. “You know, a soldier is sometimes too good a soldier,” Ahmet said. “Whatever happens, I’m your friend and I love you, but don’t squeeze the juice out of every situation.”
That night, Ahmet and Earl McGrath went to hear two groups that McGrath wanted to sign to Clean Records. By the time they left the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Ahmet’s limousine, they were two hours late to hear the first group. The big black car travelled over narrow roads into the Hollywood hills. The big black car took the turns awkwardly. At McGrath’s direction, the car stopped beside a small, new ranch house. There was no driveway. The big black car pulled just off the road, parallel to the house. The car was almost as long as the house. The house was that peculiar California thing—a beat-up new house. The house looked like a mistreated late-model Chevrolet. Inside, there was woodlike panelling, vinyl flooring, acoustical tile ceilings, and no furniture. No furniture. Not a table or a chair. The group was set up in the garage. The garage had been insulated with Johns-Manville fibre glass. There were a pianist vocalist, three guitarists, and a drummer. Ahmet, wearing a tweed jacket over a blue polo shirt, sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I hope they understand,” he said to McGrath. “I hope they understand that we’re late and can’t stay.” The band played (and the pianist played and sang) “Slip Away,” an important rhythm-and-blues song. “Slip Away” had been a hit, on Atlantic, for Clarence Carter. McGrath moved with the music. Ahmet stayed still on the floor. At the end of the song, he shook hands with the members of the band and left.
Back in the car, Ahmet said to McGrath, “They’re trying to be black. The trouble is, if they make it they aren’t very far.” McGrath talked about the drummer of the group. The drummer had played with known groups.
“These kids are not going to play bars in the South,” Ahmet said. “I mean, that is not going to happen.” The big black car took some more curves, awkwardly. “They are playing songs by Clarence Carter,” Ahmet said. “Clarence Carter is a very great man. You know what? Clarence Carter doesn’t sell many records.”
The second group was found up a dirt road high in the hills. They lived in a house with real wood panelling and a fireplace. There were many women and children, and there were some Southern accents. There was a copy of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” The group was called Delbert & Glen and consisted, at that moment, of six musicians. They played, and Ahmet listened intently. “I tried to cut this song five times,” Ahmet said as they played. “Originally, it was a Cripple Clarence Lofton song called ‘Strut That Thing.’ Willie Mabon changed it around. Nobody ever gets the time right.” Ahmet paused. “Right there. They didn’t get the time right. It’s a bitch. You want to do it with a little spontaneity, but at the same time everybody has to know when to come in.” Delbert & Glen played another song—a country song called “Wine and Roses.” As soon as it was over, Ahmet went to talk with the group’s manager. He talked seriously and quickly. He wanted to know who was in the band, and he wanted to know if the band was going to stay together to perform. He wanted to know if the band could tour steadily. The manager told Ahmet that several members of the group were reluctant to tour and wanted to work on their own material.
“I tell you something,” Ahmet said. “It is a waste of time, you know, to listen to an unknown group that does not want to tour.”
“Hey,” the manager said. “You’re not talking to a corporation. You’re talking to people.”
“Umm,” Ahmet said.
The manager talked for a moment about the values Delbert & Glen sought to maintain in its professional life.
“The material’s not strong enough,” Ahmet said.
“Well,” said the manager, “we could listen all night to material.”
“I am not interested in staying all night,” Ahmet said. “I am interested in hearing material so strong that . . . it’s stronger than anything else around.”
On the way back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ahmet told Earl McGrath that he would sign Delbert & Glen. Delbert & Glen gave McGrath the only Top Forty song that Clean Records ever had.
Afew months later, en route to La Côte Basque, Ahmet said, “I think Wilson Pickett will leave the label. I think there is a certain kind of rhythm and blues that will disappear, you know? ‘Got My Mojo Workin’,’ and so forth. Black people are very ruthless about their own music. Wilson Pickett has one of the great voices, you know? One of the great rough rhythm-and-blues voices. But it is a little old-fashioned, as far as black people are concerned. I like it, you like it, but a lot of black people have had enough.” Ahmet paused. “It is like a marriage. I mean, the relationship between an artist and the label. There is the initial excitement, you know, and it goes on for a while, but it is very rare that it goes on forever. Either the artist finds someone richer or the label finds someone younger.” Ahmet continued, “R. & B. music can be very artificial. You know, very repetitive. I would say that at this moment R. & B. music is very artificial, with a lot of white influence, you know? And very insipid. R. & B. records can be very insipid. ‘Hi, everybody,’ you know? ‘I’m Archie Bell & the Drells,’ and so on and so forth. ‘And we’re gonna dance awhile,’ and so forth, right? Now, that’s not a great lyric. But I tell you, that swings more than any record by Crosby, Stills & Nash, or Led Zeppelin, right? Because that lyric is still somewhere in the cultural edifice of the black man. I mean, somewhere in that song there is still a little bit of the poetic message of the black man. His secret language.”
Ahmet is known at La Côte Basque. As he came in, a waiter slipped him a press clipping about a soccer game.
Ahmet said, “There is a certain sort of excess that is interesting, don’t you think? And America is, of course, the most excessive place. I came here as a child of twelve, but even before I came here I cared about jazz and gangsters and Chaplin. Nesuhi taught me all that. He also taught me that David Windsor was the best-dressed man in the world. Nesuhi at sixteen was a superstar. I am not an exception, you know? Everyone I knew was fascinated by America. There was then a colony of Turkish students going to school in Hollywood instead of going to Oxford. They hung around in cars, trying to go out with Linda Darnell.” Ahmet paused. “I had a friend named Harper Soules. He took me to Brooks Brothers. I put on a jacket, and it was two sizes too big or two sizes too small, or something. And I said, ‘This doesn’t fit.’ And the man from Brooks Brothers said, ‘This is your size,’ and I said, ‘But it doesn’t fit,’ and Harper Soules got very angry at me. ‘Fit, fit—of course it doesn’t fit,’ he said. ‘If you want it to fit, go to one of those cheap Broadway stores. This is Brooks Brothers.’ I was interested in that.” Ahmet paused again. He looked briefly at the clipping about the soccer game. “I should tell you about John Caskie, who was a friend of mine at college. He was the best-dressed man in America. We all knew that. He was the first to wear old tennis shoes. He had a Mercedes-Benz 540K. His father bought him a house in Middleburg filled with antiques, which he burned in the fireplace. He had his Mercedes reduced to a one-seater, because he didn’t want anyone to ride with him. He had marvellous tweed jackets, silk shirts, flannels with about five holes in them, tennis shoes. I don’t think he ended well.”
The waiter brought Ahmet another newspaper clipping about soccer. “Soccer is all I care about,” the waiter said.
“Iused to have a bus,” Ahmet said, riding downtown with Mica toward a loft on the Bowery. “I mean, I used to rent a bus. Because it was cheaper than a car and driver, and it was more fun, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t think there is any fun anymore,” Mica said. “I don’t think there are any amusing places to go. We went to some places the other night. We went to C’est Moi, and that was just nothing. And we went to a place called Tambourine. I was told that Tambourine was very nicely done. I was told, you know, that it was amusing, but it seemed to me that it was mostly transvestites. I am so bored with transvestites. Some of them are nice people, I suppose, but I think it is so boring now.”
“Mario Santo Domingo, my South American friend, used to come up and we would have a trio in the bus and go around to parties,” Ahmet said. “We would teach the trio very obscure songs. ‘And Her Mother Came Too’ and ‘Just a Personal Friend’ were two songs we sang in the bus. We kidnapped half of the Count Basie band from Birdland and took them to the Village. One night, we went to El Morocco and parked the bus in front. Two guys who worked in the men’s room were Turks and they loved me, and I took them and the hat-check girl and a couple of waiters and got them in the bus. As people came, we asked them into the bus. I mean, if one of us knew them. It was very crowded in the bus. We even had a cigarette girl going around. John Perona—who owned El Morocco, you know?—came out, because no one was coming into the club. He was very angry, but he forgave us later.”
The loft that was the Erteguns’ destination was the loft of Kenneth Noland, and it had been decorated by Mica. There were thirty or forty people there. Among the thirty or forty were two black men. Young, sleek, un-poor. Ahmet gave them a certain amount of attention. Ahmet identified one as the illegitimate son of a jazz musician. Ahmet went up to these two young men and began to tell a rather complicated story about going to East St. Louis to hear music. He seemed, at that moment, to require their approval. Later, possibly, their approval would be irrelevant or trying. The sleek young black men looked at Ahmet blankly. If they had any interest in his story, they masked it. One of them left to get a cigarette.
Ahmet talked to me about the bus again. “It became meaningless at a certain point,” he said. “Either we changed or the world became more sincere. You know, there is a certain sort of sincerity that is opposed to a certain sort of fun. Nobody gives those parties anymore. Except once in a while a Bolivian gives one in Portugal.”
With Ahmet’s friend Mario Santo Domingo. “We used to do lots of pranks and things like that,” Mario Santo Domingo said. “Ahmet was always the same as now. Always bald. I used to act that I was his secretary—secretary to Prince Ahmet. If there were girls, I would always make the waiter serve him first, because he was Prince Ahmet. Atlantic Records was just nothing then—just on a shoestring. We used to rent those buses, you know, and go to El Morocco on a bus. We would park in front of El Morocco and everyone would come in the bus. We used to be always with a band, you know? Once, I was sick at the Savoy-Plaza. I had a tiny little room, and Ahmet came to the room with a band. We used to have bands all the time. And we went to a cocktail party at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, where Mica was staying, you know? Before she married Ahmet. And we hid a band in the closet and they came out playing ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz.’ We used to laugh. Everything was done not to hurt anyone. It was just funny jokes all the time. There were certain things we used to like. We liked Fred Astaire, you know, and Henry James and Proust—that sort of thing. And Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields and Baudelaire and the Symbolists, and we all thought Oscar Wilde was great. You know, it was all mixed up. It was all the time fun, but really one doesn’t have time anymore. Except Ahmet. I think that Ahmet would like it still to be all the time fun.”
Ahmet and Mica gave a dinner party at their house and took their guests on to Max’s Kansas City to see Delbert & Glen, who had been signed to Clean Records. Andy Warhol was at the Erteguns’ house, and an Italian diplomat, and a fashionable young girl with frizzled hair. In Ahmet’s car on the way down to see Delbert & Glen, the girl with the frizzled hair complained about a man at dinner she found boring.
“I’ll tell you about him,” Ahmet said. “Sometimes he bores you, sometimes he bores me. But you know what? He comes from the kind of people you can always trust. Flashy people aren’t everything, you know. Even when they have frizzled hair.”
At Max’s, the Italian diplomat had a question to ask Ahmet. He could not make himself heard in the noisy room. Ahmet took him into the kitchen, where it was quieter.
“Which is Delbert? Which is Glen?” asked the Italian diplomat.
Ahmet told him.
The Italian diplomat left the kitchen.
Ahmet explained his intrusion to the kitchen staff. “That was the Italian Ambassador,” he said. “He’s one of the most important people who ever went to a rock-and-roll show.”
Later, Ahmet suggested that the group go to another club.
“That place is boring,” said the girl with the frizzled hair.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s boring or not boring,” Mica said. “Ahmet just wants to go.”
Ahmet likes to know how things work—exactly how things work—and how much, at any moment, has to do with genuine feeling and how much with worldly compromise. Ahmet despises neither genuine feeling nor compromise. Most people are not so versatile, so Ahmet finds himself, often, with people who fail to understand at least fifty per cent of his complexity.
“Uncle Ahmet knows the big secret,” said the fashionable girl with frizzled hair. “Uncle Ahmet knows that everyone wants a little fun, a little flash. I mean, basically Uncle Ahmet is fabulous. If you’re in a room and Uncle Ahmet walks in, you’re having a better time right away. Ahmet loves rich Wasps, and so forth, but basically he’s more fabulous than all the Wasps. He thinks Wasps are decent and honorable, and so forth, but you’ve got to be kidding, a lot of those Wasps are monsters. Bottom line, it’s Ahmet who’s decent.”
Ahmet and Mica took a few friends to hear Duke Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. The Erteguns and their guests assembled in the cocktail lounge outside the grill. The Erteguns’ guests included (to give each his genre) a clothes designer, a publishing heir, an actress, a rich man, and a woman from Southampton. Also present (as they are at every Ertegun gathering above the level of a rock-and-roll brunch) were Chessy Rayner, Mica’s partner in MAC II, and her husband, William Rayner, editorial business manager of Vogue. For anyone with an interest in speech patterns, it was an interesting American group. There was a flat drawl and a voice that dipped and rose. Chessy Rayner spoke in a slight whisper. Mica, whose accent allows for little in the way of inflection, showed her admirable sense of timing by punctuating the conversation with simple sentences delivered in a manner that implied authority or indifference, or both. (Crucial to the understanding of Mica’s speech is the expression “Yah. It’s divine, no?” This expression can mean “Yes, it’s divine, I couldn’t agree more” or “Yes, it’s divine, but why bring it up?” or “No, I don’t think it’s divine” or “I wish you would go away.” Mica uses it frequently, and in almost all circumstances it defies response and ends the conversation.)
Ahmet moved with confidence through the syntax of his gathering. Ahmet’s Public Manner is like a racing car that has been pieced together from parts of older, impressively credentialed vehicles. One can spot, from time to time, an ornament, a mechanism, a bit of eccentric behavior with a legible provenance, but the serial numbers have been effaced and one cannot say with confidence just exactly what has been plundered to give it life, so that the first thing one notices about Ahmet’s Public Manner is that it is unexampled (no one else has this particular vehicle at his disposal), and the second thing one notices is that it is endlessly reminiscent. What one notices next is that Ahmet’s manner is vastly too powerful for many of the jobs it is asked to do. It is as though, bored by a series of routine household errands, Ahmet had decided to do them in a Bugatti. This means that in mundane situations (and Ahmet is involved in many mundane situations) the most interesting transactions are the transactions between Ahmet and his Bugatti-like Public Manner, not the transactions between Ahmet and the situation itself. Ahmet’s Public Manner has a complicated gearbox, and even in the dullest surroundings Ahmet can give himself a moment’s pleasure by executing a well-timed downshift or a rapid acceleration. These maneuvers evoke admiration from onlookers, but eventually people who are with Ahmet when he is doing his errands begin to notice a certain inattention—an important clue to the real nature of their role in the transaction under way.
Ahmet and Mica led their guests into the Rainbow Grill. They had arranged for two tables by windows that faced uptown. The card in front of Mica’s place read “Mrs. Mica Ertegun,” which annoyed Mica. Ahmet defended the secretary who had written out the place cards. “She’s not a social secretary, she’s a rock-and-roll secretary,” Ahmet said.
The Ellington band began to play. Ahmet gave to the band a kind of attention he had not given to his guests. He looked intently at the band. The fingers of his right hand touched the fingers of his left in a gesture that was partly nervous and partly in keeping with the music and that, in any case, could have accommodated the beads some Turkish men keep in their hands. There was a certain attempt among the people at Ahmet’s table to mimic Ahmet’s intent enthusiasm for the music of Duke Ellington. The publishing heir snapped his fingers. “Don’t snap your fingers on the beat,” Ahmet said to the publishing heir. “It’s considered aggressive.”
Since it seemed to be difficult to successfully mimic Ahmet’s enthusiasm for the music of Duke Ellington, and since Ahmet’s interest in the music kept up for longer than was really convenient, the other people at Ahmet’s table abandoned any serious attempt to Appreciate Ellington and began to eat. Their interest picked up somewhat when, after the end of the first set, Duke Ellington himself came over to the table.
Ellington looked ravaged in a way that was only slightly softened by his courtesy. He looked like a man who was depleting his capital—not so much by spending it as by giving it away. Ahmet and Duke Ellington kissed one, two, three, four times. Ahmet introduced his guests to Duke Ellington. “Such a beautiful party,” Duke Ellington said. “I was wondering who was supplying that wonderful pastel quality.”
Most of Ahmet’s guests left after the first set. Ahmet said he wanted to stay to hear the second. Before the second set began, Harry Carney, who was playing baritone saxophone in Duke Ellington’s orchestra—just as he had been doing since 1927—came over to talk to Ahmet. Harry Carney was dressed in one of the blue dinner jackets worn by members of the Ellington orchestra. He kept his back straight in his chair, and talked in a manner that was easy, engaging, and accessible, but nevertheless formal. Ahmet sought not to be formal.
Ahmet told Carney that he had admired him for years. Ahmet said that as a young man he would have done anything to have Carney’s talent. “I have to appreciate what he’s saying,” Carney said simply to me. “Music started out as his hobby. It started out as my hobby, too. I wish my hobby had turned out like his hobby.”
Ahmet turned to me. “This man is the cornerstone of music,” he said. “If the cornerstone is on anyone’s shoulders, it’s on his. There is no American music without this man. He is carrying it on his broad shoulders.”
Harry Carney laughed, a little embarrassed. “I wish my hobby had turned out like your hobby,” he said.
Ahmet talked to Carney about the early Ellington orchestras, and the conversation continued in fragments. “I joined Ellington in ’27. It will be forty-five years in June,” Carney said. “In 1927, I knew nothing about jazz.”
“In 1933, you came to England,” Ahmet said. “You played the Palladium. I had never seen any black people in my life. The idea of seeing you was so powerful.”
“And so far removed, because it was boat travel,” Carney said. “So slow.”
Harry Carney returned to the floor, and the second set began. Mica sat with the Rayners. Ahmet ordered a series of vodka Stingers. “This is Tricky Sam Nanton’s song, ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ ” Ahmet said to me as the set began. “I could have taken you to such clubs in Harlem. I went every night. The first time I ever smoked marijuana was in Harlem, in a parlor flat, listening to James P. Johnson, the man who taught Fats Waller how to play the piano.” Ahmet paused. “That’s the only thing I get excited about. That kind of thing. ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ is a burlesque song. Clarinet. You never hear this kind of thing anymore.”
Ahmet said that he had come across a black taxi driver he wanted to hire as an assistant. “This kid is terrific, you know? I want him to work with me. He’s going to be a policeman while he studies law. I want a black guy, you know? I had a guy from Princeton. He was very nice, but he was a jerk, if you know what I mean. Very nice, but a jerk. There are a lot of people like that. A lot of my friends are very nice jerks, if you know what I mean. They’re very nice, but they’re jerks. You know what? They don’t deserve to have Duke Ellington play for them. You know what? That’s the trouble with Duke Ellington—he has to play for the nice jerks. ‘I love you madly,’ and all that crap.”
Duke Ellington’s orchestra began to play “Mood Indigo.” Ahmet sang it lightly under his breath. Ahmet does not sing well; nor does he really dance. He can, however, talk his way through a lyric and walk his way through a dance in a way that leaves his authority unimpaired. During “Mood Indigo,” he abandoned his usual style and tried to carry the tune. It was a good try—almost a gentle try.
“Some Tin Pan Alley guy wrote lyrics to this,” Ahmet said. He was quiet for a moment. “You’ll never know the feeling I had when I just saw the Duke Ellington Band. I knew everyone so well. They were such great stars. Listen to that. Thirty years ago, I heard that—better than that. They were such powerful men. There was this thing . . . you know?”
Ahmet and his remaining guests left after the second set. On his way out, Ahmet was greeted and then embraced by a man of middle age. Ahmet and the man talked for a minute.
“What is your name, anyway?” Ahmet asked at the end of this conversation. “Your name is Morgenthau, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the man said, abashed. “Yes, it is.”
“One of the rich Morgenthaus?”
“Yes,” the man said nervously.
“Good,” said Ahmet.
He continued to the elevator. He turned to the elevator man. He spoke quietly, seriously, with considerable dignity. “Downstairs, please,” he said. “We want to go downstairs.” ♦
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)
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