The Last Sultan Page 11

  In 1951, Ahmet came up with a slow, mournful blues entitled “Chains of Love.” Arranged by Jesse Stone, it became a hit for Joe Turner. The song featured the incredible piano playing of Harry “Piano Man” Van Walls, “an eccentric who dressed like a black Sherlock Holmes,” and so Ahmet gave him co-songwriting credit. Some years later, Van Walls asked Ahmet for $500 for his half of the song. Ahmet did not want to make the deal but when Van Walls said he would sell it to someone else because he needed the money, Ahmet bought the song back. As he would later say, “Some people still go around saying that I stole the song from him.”

  Ahmet had first realized he could write songs by watching Rudy Toombs come up with his own material. A tap dancer who had performed at the Apollo and so “had a great sense of rhythm,” Toombs would start snapping his fingers to a beat only he could hear and then begin singing lyrics he had come up with on the spot. “We’d get an arranger to transcribe what he was singing,” Ahmet recalled. “When I saw him do that, I knew I could do that. I must have written a hundred songs . . . I’d write these songs the day before a session and try to get one rehearsal in before we recorded.”

  While none of Ahmet’s songs was particularly original, his goal was to come up with material that would sell. In his words, “I wrote teenage records, not songs.” Still thinking he would at some point return to Turkey to serve in the diplomatic corps as his father had done before him, Ahmet hid his true identity by reversing the letters of his last name and using “A. Nugetre” as his songwriting nom de plume.

  When Ray Charles came into the studio in May 1953, Ahmet took a far more active role in the recording process than he had during their previous session by setting the tempo for one track and asking Jesse Stone to come up with a new verse for a song that was too short. When Stone suggested a tenor sax solo for one song, Charles rejected the notion by saying it would not help sell the record and he could not stand that sort of thing. Late in the session, Ahmet sat down beside Charles on the piano bench and began singing “Mess Around.”

  His inspiration for the song had come from “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” a well-known blues number first recorded in December 1928 by Pinetop Smith, who died three months later at the age of twenty-four from a gunshot wound. Having first come up with the song at a rent party in St. Louis, Smith talked as he played piano, instructing those listening to the song not to move until he told them to mess around.

  Ahmet set his own version of the song at a barbecue pit where both the band and the people were jumping and everyone was juiced as they did the mess around. With Charles on the piano, Ahmet can be heard performing the song in the studio in a flat, wavering voice. Since he never sings the line about the girl with the diamond ring who knows how to shake that thing, Charles must have come up with it on his own while he was recording the song. With Ray Charles ripping up the vocal in his own gut-wrenching manner and the horns blaring in a jump version of the song, “Mess Around” became a minor hit.

  One of the many maxims associated with the music that would come to be called rock ’n’ roll was that the form came about because white singers and musicians began imitating black singers and musicians, who then turned around and began imitating them. In May 1953, when the races in America were still essentially separate, Ahmet and Ray Charles had already begun the process of cross-pollination that would transform both the independent record business and popular culture in America.

  Because the nature of true genius can never be really understood, it is impossible to say how Ray Charles was able to take what Ahmet wanted him to do in the studio and make it sound as good as he did. But then as Ahmet himself would later say, “Whereas we thought we were producing Ray Charles, I realized by the third session that he was not only teaching me about music but also showing me how to make records.”

  2

  During a visit to New York in 1952, Nesuhi called his old friends Bill and Delia Gottlieb to say he was coming to Queens to see them only to be told Ahmet was also expected that evening. When Nesuhi told Delia Gottlieb he had a couple of women with him, she told him to bring them along. It was in her house that Ahmet met the woman who became his first wife.

  Jan Holm was, in Ahmet’s words, “a very attractive Swedish-American girl from California who looked like Greta Garbo.” The daughter of Carl Enstam, a minister, and Antoinette Holmes, Holm used a shortened version of her mother’s maiden name as her stage name when she began her acting career as a teenager in Hollywood. In 1938 at the age of seventeen, she appeared in eight different movies in a variety of roles so small that she received screen credit for just two of them. A year later, her image appeared as part of a series of “glamour girls” cards distributed inside packs of cigarettes by the Ardath Tobacco Company in the United Kingdom.

  Two years older than Ahmet, Jan Holm had been married once before to Walter “Bunny” Rathbun. After studying drama at Yale, he had served as an army lieutenant who put on USO shows in the South Pacific during World War II and then produced the first professional summer stock theater in Laguna Beach, California. In 1947, the two were divorced on grounds of mental cruelty. Rathbun, who then remarried and went to work for Universal Studios, died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1952.

  Moving to New York, Jan Holm became a model. Her Hartford Agency composite listed her as standing five feet seven inches with blond hair and green eyes, weighing 112 pounds, measuring 35-23-35, with a dress size of 10–12. Smiling broadly with her hair pulled back from her face in a photograph taken on the beach during the summer of 1951, she wears a good deal of lipstick and a fashionable floral print two-piece bathing suit in which she looks both stylish and thin. In New York, Jan Holm became involved with theater and, in Ahmet’s words, “did stage sets and stage management and directed certain things. She was involved in many different plays and thought of herself as a theater person.”

  Now making what seemed to him like the astronomical salary of $250 a week because Atlantic had released a succession of hits by the Clovers and Ruth Brown, Ahmet had moved to “a nice apartment” at 14 East 60th Street when he began double-dating with Jan Holm and her roommate, an aspiring actress who was seeing director Arthur Penn. The roommate then began dating someone who proposed to her. “When they got married,” Ahmet would later say, “Jan suddenly no longer had a roommate and we no longer had anybody to double-date with and I felt sorry for her. So I thought, ‘Well, the gallant thing to do is propose to her.’ She was a very nice girl but I was not madly in love with her and I don’t think she was in love with me. But anyway, I proposed to her and she accepted it because it seemed to be the only thing to do.”

  As curious as his explanation seems, Ahmet and Holm, who listed her occupation on their marriage license as “artist” while he referred to himself as a “Phonograph Record Manufacturer,” were wed on February 6, 1953, by a New York justice in the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. The ceremony was officially witnessed by Sadi Koylan and Jacqueline Donnet, but Ahmet would later say New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams was also there.

  After Ahmet and his new wife “finally found an apartment that she thought was all right,” her friend the actor “James Dean came and stayed with us for a while.” In Ahmet’s words, “She then became ill. She had psychological problems and she started going to an analyst two or three times a week and she slept most of the day and was up all night. So that really wasn’t working out. I had a lot of friends who liked her and she was a very nice person, a good person, but she had a lot of personal problems.”

  “They got married,” Miriam Abramson would later say, “and she had what was called a nervous breakdown and she was so attached to her psychiatrist that because they all used to stop practicing in the summer at that time and go to Maine, she went to Maine with the shrink.” On July 23, 1954, Jan Holm wrote Ahmet, who was then in Los Angeles, from the Lookout Club in Ogunquit, Maine, to say her doctor was in fact up there with her and she was “getting very tan and slowly gaining weight.”


  Noting that everyone was waiting for the arrival of Vice President Richard Nixon in August with his wife, Pat, and their daughters, Tricia and Julie, who were then eight and six years old, she asked Ahmet if his mother could possibly bring a coffee table, a brass tray, or a rug with her from Turkey when she came to visit him in America. She also asked if Ahmet had yet seen designer Rudy Gernreich, her mother in nearby Manhattan Beach, “Jim Dean,” who was then living at 1667 South Bundy Drive, or the actress Barbara Reed. Closing her letter, she wrote, “Have a good time, dear, I miss you. Love, Jan.”

  That the gulf between Ahmet and Holm may have always been insurmountable would seem to be supported by a story Ahmet told Jenni Trent Hughes, who worked for him many years later at Atlantic. “He used to be notoriously, pathologically late all the time. To the point where his first wife said, ‘Look, I can’t live like this. You’ve got to go see a shrink. I can’t deal with this.’ He went to see the guy two or three times and he was so late that the guy said, ‘Look, don’t come back. I can’t help you.’ ”

  Having grown up with servants who had catered to his every need, Ahmet, who could be fussy about not only his clothing but his surroundings as well, also had problems adjusting to the way Holm took care of their apartment. “When I was married to Jan, who had no feeling of any kind of formality in the household, we were kind of living a nomadic life. Just throw things around and nobody picks them up and eventually the dishes pile up which are not washed.”

  When Ahmet’s sister, Selma, who was then working in the Foreign Ministry in Turkey, came to New York in 1954 on a state visit with a group of officials accompanying the Turkish president, she sent Ahmet a telegram from the boat notifying him of her arrival. “He told me then she wasn’t well,” Selma would later say. “She couldn’t come out and be in crowds of people and he said she wouldn’t be able to meet me when the boat landed. He had been married about a year. She came to see us later and I liked her a lot actually. She was a very sweet, very nice girl.”

  “It was difficult,” Ahmet would later say. “To be married to somebody is not easy and to be married to somebody when neither person loves the other is even more difficult.” After two years, Ahmet and Holm “decided to separate and then we got a divorce. It was painful only in the sense that I was so anxious to get a divorce that when it came to a settlement, I agreed to give her everything. We had two cars so she got both cars. We had an apartment. She got the apartment.”

  What bothered Ahmet most about the divorce was that when he tried to claim the Picasso drawing Nesuhi had given him for his birthday, “She said, ‘Oh no, it says in the agreement that I get the furnishings of the house and that’s part of the furnishings.’ So she wouldn’t let me take it. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’m so happy to get out of this that I’m willing to give up everything. And I gave her 50 percent of what I made. At the time of the divorce, I was making fifty thousand a year. So I gave her twenty-five thousand. Plus, I gave her all my possessions. She didn’t want my records.”

  Miriam Abramson, who considered Holm “a good friend of mine,” would later say, “It was a mistake, that marriage.” In Ahmet’s words, “I was very sorry I had gone through that whole wedding thing with her but it was at a time when it seemed the natural thing to do and there were some good things about the marriage but I’m not angry or upset. Although she behaved rather badly at the end but I guess she was angry because I took it so lightly.”

  While another man might have taken the failure of his first marriage to heart, Ahmet used his divorce as a launching pad for the nonstop social life that soon became his trademark. Spending virtually every night out on the town, he became a fixture in Manhattan’s most exclusive nightspots, usually with a stunning young model on his arm. “After Jan and I started to get our divorce, I had a whole new group of friends because I was more set up. I didn’t have a lot of money but I spent a lot of money. And I always did that. I never spent more than I was earning but I would spend what I was earning. And it looked to a lot of people like I was spending much more than I did.”

  While Ahmet viewed the collapse of his first marriage with the kind of esthetic distance that would later enable him to survive the loss of many of his greatest artists at Atlantic, only he could have explained his reaction when a woman “who had put on a lot of weight and was wearing something like a muu-muu” came up to say hello to him one night many years later in a theater in New York. “I’m sorry,” he told her politely. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Well,” Jan Holm said, “I’m your ex-wife.”

  3

  Using some of the profits from the constant stream of hits they had been generating at Atlantic, Ahmet and Herb Abramson decided in 1952 to look for new offices where they could also record so they could stop paying studio fees. The space they found would in time also become a cornerstone of the Atlantic legend. Leasing the top two floors of a five-story wood-framed brownstone at 234 West 56th Street that had once been a speakeasy known as the 23456 Club, the partners converted the fifth floor into their offices while using the floor below for shipping and storage.

  In a cramped nineteen- by twenty-eight-foot room with a floor that sagged and creaked, a sloping ceiling with a skylight that had never been cleaned, and a tiny bathroom to which Ray Charles would repair to get high during a session, Ahmet and Herb and Miriam Abramson sat at desks they shoved aside at night to create a recording studio. Adding to the atmosphere, Patsy’s Restaurant, where reputed Mafia figures and celebrities like Frank Sinatra often came to dine, was next door.

  Able to recognize talent in those with whom he worked as well as the artists he recorded, Ahmet had by now surrounded himself with a cast of characters who fit perfectly with the mise-en-scène. Nominally the office manager, Miriam Abramson had during the label’s earliest days done the books, hired musicians for sessions, which she regularly attended, and made certain everyone was paid on time. The fierce lioness who guarded entry to the gates of the inner sanctum at Atlantic, she could pin anyone to the wall with a cutting look or a sharp remark. She once asked songwriter Doc Pomus, “Are you coming in to beg for money again?” Because she understood the bottom line better than Ahmet or her husband, she constantly challenged both partners by asking, in Ahmet’s words, “What are these expenses? Why are we paying for this lunch?”

  Born with the kind of personality without which no woman could have survived for long in the male-dominated independent record business, Miriam was also in charge of chasing down distributors who owed Atlantic money. “Tokyo Rose was the kindest name some people had for her,” Tom Dowd, Atlantic’s resident genius in the studio, would later say. “At some companies, they would take it in turns to answer the phone if they knew that she was calling.” In her words, “If the distributors didn’t pay their bills, I was very nasty.”

  Ahmet had first met Tom Dowd back when Atlantic was using the Apex studios on 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues to record as many sides as possible before the musicians’ union strike in 1947. The studio was run by Dr. Fredrick Oetegen, who wore a monocle and a white coat and liked his recordings to be “as coldly neutral as a laboratory photograph.” When Ahmet made the great mistake of asking “Herr Doktor” if he could have more drums on a cut, Oetegen replied, “Nein, nein. We cannot have more drums.”

  The second time Ahmet recorded at Apex, Oetegen was busy doing a session for a major label. Angered because he expected “Dr. Schwein-foot” to be there, Ahmet asked who would do the session only to be told, “ ‘Oh, this young fellow. He’ll be your engineer. He’s very good.’ I turned around and looked at this kid and he literally looked to me like he was fourteen or fifteen years old.” With the musicians already there and precious studio time on the line, Ahmet had no choice but to go along. At one point during the session, he asked for more drums. The kid promptly gave him more drums. Ahmet then asked for more bass. Although he had been specifically instructed by Oetegen to watch the dials so the arrows would never
go in the red, the kid gave Ahmet more bass.

  When Ahmet asked if this would not damage the record, the kid replied, “Don’t worry. It won’t break anything.” As Ahmet would later say, “This kid was Tommy Dowd and he was just much brighter and very imaginative and a terrific engineer and he had the training and the degrees and all that. After that, we always insisted that he be our engineer.”

  Twenty-two years old when he first Ahmet, Thomas John Dowd was the son of an opera singer and a concert master who had grown up in Manhattan playing piano, violin, tuba, and string bass. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 1942, he attended the City College of New York while working in a physics laboratory at Columbia University. Drafted into the army in 1944, Dowd was part of the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. He intended to become a nuclear physicist until he took a job engineering at a recording studio.

  “He was a very, very bright guy,” Miriam Abramson would recall, “but he did not invent the atomic bomb. No question he was a genius in the studio. An absolute genius. If a musician didn’t show up, he would play the bass. Tommy Dowd was someone Herb had worked with at National. I had known him since he was a kid and I knew his parents. When Herb and I moved, Tommy Dowd used to install our sound system.”

  After Herb Abramson persuaded Ahmet to hire Dowd as a full-time employee at Atlantic, he began cutting records in both mono and stereo at the same time long before anyone else was doing so. Because of Dowd, who would become one of the great producers in the history of popular music, Atlantic’s records always sounded better than those made by its competitors.

  During 1951 and 1952, Atlantic released jazz sides by Billy Taylor, Mabel Mercer, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sylvia Syms, Wilbur De Paris, and Dave Brubeck. However it was the label’s rhythm and blues hits that kept it in business while also firmly establishing what soon became known as the Atlantic sound.