The Last Sultan Page 15

  A stunning dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who looked somewhat like Audrey Hepburn and had already appeared on the cover of Vogue, Pickering sent Ahmet a postcard from Paris while waiting to be photographed in a Dior gown at the Château de Malmaison to say how hard she had been working and how much she missed him. Confessing she was not having much of a social life because she had been working so hard, Pickering ended her note by sending him her love.

  As Ahmet would later describe this period, “The girls I was going out with included some sub-deb types or post-deb types who were very American, some bohemian girls who were Village intellectuals, and many girls like Pat Jones, who was the number one model in California in those days, and Betsy Pickering, who I was living with at that time. These girls were very fun, charming, and amusing people and in some cases very good-hearted and in some cases very bitchy.”

  Ahmet’s boon companion during this period was Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Born into a very wealthy Colombian family, Santo Domingo had first met Ahmet in Washington while he was attending Georgetown and Ahmet was at St. John’s. A good friend of future Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez, Santo Domingo would become the chairman of Avianca Airlines while amassing a personal fortune of $4 billion through his control of more than one hundred companies.

  The two men shared an unrelenting love of the good times they always had when they were together, most often in New York. As Santo Domingo would later say, “Ahmet and I did not see each other in the daytime. Daytime was for sleeping. We used to go to El Morocco practically every night.” Spectacularly politically incorrect long before the term was invented, Ahmet once went to greet his good friend at La Guardia Airport with a sign that read, “Welcome home, spic.”

  “In those days,” Ahmet recalled, “when I don’t think I had ten thousand dollars in the bank, the society columns used to refer to me as ‘Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish millionaire.’ ” One reason they did so was that after he had been given too many tickets, Ahmet decided he could no longer drive himself around Manhattan and so traded in his “Aston Martin for a used Rolls-Royce and I got this fellow—his name was Frank—who was an old Irish retired policeman. I think I was paying him like 75 cents an hour. He was always very well dressed with a chauffeur’s cap and had white hair and with a Rolls-Royce, he looked very, very stately. We’d be somewhere and we’d all get in the car and I’d say, ‘Take us home, Frank.’ Which meant El Morocco, which was at 54th Street between Third and Lexington, an elegant club.”

  Known to its habitués as “Elmer’s,” El Morocco was then the place to be seen in Manhattan. The first club to use a velvet rope to separate its customers from the hoi polloi, El Morocco was famous for its blue zebra-stripe banquettes, where club photographer Jerome Zerbe regularly snapped photographs of celebrities like Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich consorting with the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the well-known and much married Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa that appeared in New York’s society columns. Not surprisingly, Ahmet took to the place like a duck to water.

  In Ahmet’s words, “I made a deal with John Perona, who was the owner of El Morocco that I would always have a check for $12. If I came and had one drink or I had dinner for ten people, I had one check for $12. It was a very small amount because I came there at least three or four times a week and I always came with a good-looking girl and maybe two or three other couples and we knew everybody. It was part of a scene and that made the club.”

  To accommodate all the friends he liked having with him at night, Ahmet began renting a bus for $3 an hour that he outfitted with a bar and enough room for a three-piece band. Stocking the bar with champagne, he hired a bartender “and a band of out-of-work immigrant musicians, and rode around town livening up parties.” While visiting Birdland one night, the basement jazz club on 52nd Street owned by Roulette Records founder Morris Levy, Ahmet kidnapped the entire Count Basie band and drove off with them on the bus. “Of course, they missed their next set. Those were very fun, marvelous days. I was a bachelor, loose on the town. I really started to go out with a lot of girls. I didn’t have very much home life.”

  Although Ahmet and Herb Abramson no longer traveled in the same social circles, Abramson was also living well in the luxurious San Remo building on Central Park West between 74th and 75th Streets. After having gone to Mexico in February 1957 to finalize his divorce from the woman he had brought back with him from Germany, Abramson began keeping company with Barbara Heaton, a coat and suit model who was attending Hunter College at night. After the two were married at the end of the year, they moved into a duplex with five bathrooms in the equally elegant El Dorado on Central Park West between 90th and 91st Streets.

  By 1957, as Abramson himself seems to have clearly understood, music in America had definitely changed. Although Atlantic was doing all it could to sell records to what was now primarily a white teenage market, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly were all recording for other labels. No longer at the cutting edge of the business, Atlantic found itself competing with labels whose records were more in tune with the musical tastes of these new consumers.

  In a very thoughtful and well-considered essay entitled “Rock ’N’ Roll—Seen in Perspective” in Cash Box magazine on July 28, 1956, Abramson had written, “No future history concerned with the life and times of the 20th Century can leave out Rock ’N’ Roll. It’s that important . . . it is the best dance music there is . . . Like the jazz and blues from which it is derived, good Rock ’N’ Roll is always fresh in improvisation and always swinging with a beat.”

  Having accurately assessed this new musical form, Abramson began trying to find an artist who could make the kind of records he had described in his essay. After being told by his partners that he had to choose between a black male baritone singer and a young white kid who sounded black, Abramson decided that what he really needed was an artist who could do for his new label what Elvis Presley had done for RCA. Passing on Brook Benton in the hope he could pick him up later, Abramson signed Bobby Darin to a recording contract at Atco.

  As a boy growing up in a working-class Italian American family in the Bronx, Bobby Darin—born Walden Robert Cassotto—had suffered from repeated bouts of rheumatic fever that left his heart so weakened that one doctor thought he would be lucky to live to be sixteen. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Darin attended Hunter College on a scholarship but soon dropped out to pursue a career in music.

  After working as a busboy in resort hotels in the Catskill mountains, where he performed as a comedy drummer and singer, Darin began writing songs with fellow Bronx High School of Science student Don Kirshner. In 1956, Darin signed with Decca Records and recorded his own version of “Rock Island Line.” A Lead Belly song that had been a huge skiffle hit for Lonnie Donegan in England, the record went nowhere in America.

  A driven and astonishingly talented performer with great personal charm who onstage projected his own version of Frank Sinatra’s ineffable cool, Darin had not yet decided in which musical genre he wanted to make his career. In 1957, Herb Abramson released three singles by Darin on Atco, among them the 1931 standard “(I Found) A Million Dollar Baby.” Spending what his partners at Atlantic considered to be an inordinate amount of money to promote these records, Abramson issued three more Darin sides during the following year. None of them made their way onto the charts.

  In a business where the brutal monthly bottom line could be met only by churning out a steady stream of hits, Herb Abramson was now mired in an authentic dry spell. Had he been able to strike gold by coming up with at least one big record, Ahmet would have most certainly found a way to accommodate him at Atlantic. Unfortunately, this did not prove to be the case.

  3

  For Ahmet as well as every other record company executive trying to gain entry to the white teenage market, the most powerful sales medium was radio and the most powerful man in radio was Alan Free
d. After bringing his “Moondog” show from Cleveland to WINS in New York in September 1954, Freed changed the name of his program to The Rock ’n’ Roll Party and began popularizing the use of this term (which he also tried to copyright) to describe the music he played each night for his dedicated young followers.

  Talking nonstop as he introduced records that often became hits simply because he was playing them, Freed would “shout incessantly into his open mike” as he kept time by ringing a cowbell or pounding his hand on a telephone directory. Backed by his business partner Morris Levy, Freed began hosting and promoting what soon became an immensely popular series of live rock ’n’ roll cavalcade shows where the audience was equally divided between blacks and whites. Adding to his considerable income, Freed also managed groups who performed at his shows and whose records he plugged on the radio.

  Although Herb Abramson was one of Freed’s good friends, Jerry Wexler was the one who went to a cloakroom in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway on the first Monday of every month to hand either Freed or his representative a paper bag containing $600 in cash. “The baksheesh didn’t guarantee play for any particular record; we were only buying access,” Wexler would later write. “He viewed the Erteguns and me as marks, paying customers.”

  When times got hard for the partners at Atlantic, Wexler felt certain Freed would understand their situation and asked the disc jockey if he would agree to play their records for free for a few months. Freed’s succinct reply, which Wexler would later say the deejay sent him in a letter from Cleveland, was, “I’d love to, Wex, but I can’t do it. That’s taking the bread out of my children’s mouths.” Freed then promptly stopped playing Atlantic’s records.

  The label had actually been paying Freed far more than $600 a month to play its records on the radio and book its artists on his live shows. To curry favor with him, Ahmet and Wexler had sent a bulldozer to dig the hole for a swimming pool they then paid for at Grey Cliffe, Freed’s sixteen-room stucco mansion on Wallack’s Point not far from where conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. lived in Stamford, Connecticut.

  Although Freed would proudly point to the pool as the most expensive feature of his house, he did not respond to this generous gift by playing Atlantic’s latest releases on his show. Interceding on behalf of his good friends at the label, Morris Levy went to the deejay and asked why he was doing this only to have Freed reply that just because Ahmet and Wexler had bought him a pool, they didn’t own him. Telling Levy he would begin featuring Atlantic records on his show as soon as they released something “good enough” for him to play, Freed added that if the partners at Atlantic did not like what he was doing, they could come and fill in the pool.

  Despite the friction between them, Ahmet and Wexler attended Freed’s annual end-of-summer record business party at Grey Cliffe on August 26, 1957. Herb Abramson and his future wife, Barbara, were also there as were Morris Levy, Bob Rolontz of RCA, Bob Thiele of Coral, and Sam Clark of ABC-Paramount. As everyone stood around the pool, Abramson went into the house and found a pair of swim trunks. He and Thiele then began, in Barbara Abramson’s words, “doing dives, enjoying themselves, and cooling down so that other people began wishing they had their bathing suits.”

  Wearing high heels, a tight red cotton Chinese dress, and “a beautiful $80 golden stole Herb had just bought me,” she suddenly felt Ahmet grab her arm and pull her toward the pool. “No, don’t do that,” she told him. “Herb just bought me this stole and it will get ruined.” Letting go of her arm, Ahmet said, “Oh, I didn’t realize. Here, let me fold it for you.” Taking the stole from her, “he folded it very, very nicely like a real gentleman and put it in the second row of chairs and I thought, ‘This is a very nice person. He doesn’t even want me to get splashed by people in the swimming pool.’ ”

  Walking back to her “with this beguiling smile on his face, he grabbed my arm again and threw me in the goddamn pool without even asking me if I could swim.” When Abramson dropped her off at her parents’ apartment that night, she “was missing one shoe, all the curl was washed out of my hair, my makeup was washed off, and the dress was all wrinkled and that was when my father said to Herb at two A.M., ‘What are your intentions regarding my daughter?’ ” A week later, Abramson presented her with an engagement ring.

  While the sight of Herb Abramson’s good-looking new girlfriend standing beside a pool for which Atlantic had paid may have just seemed like too good an opportunity for an inveterate practical joker like Ahmet to ignore, he would never have contemplated pulling such a stunt with Herb’s former wife Miriam. By acting like what Barbara Abramson would later call one of “the boys down at the public swimming pool at 59th Street tossing the girls in to get wet as part of rough horseplay,” Ahmet had clearly demonstrated how he now felt about his longtime partner. As he would soon prove, Ahmet’s patience with Herb Abramson’s role as the president of a label he was no longer actually running was nearing an end.

  On February 11, 1958, Paul G. Marshall of the law firm Marshall & Ziffer sent the “Principals of Atlantic Recording Co.” a memo in which he discussed overtures made by Max Youngstein of United Artists to purchase Atlantic Records with negotiations to “take place around a central figure of two million, five hundred thousand dollars but actually would be based on a formula of five times net before taxes or four times net before taxes, officers’ salaries.” As Marshall also noted, “Mr. Youngstein asked which of the personnel would come along in the deal. I refrained from comment and he ventured the opinion based on what he had been told, a minimum of three principals must come with the deal. Namely, Ahmet, Jerry, and Nesuhi.”

  Then just twenty-five years old, Paul Marshall would over the course of his long legal career sell the music and movie rights to the Woodstock Festival while also representing a list of clients that included the Beatles, Akira Kurosawa, David Frost, Jacques Brel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Suge Knight. As he would later say, “I am the ancient history of the music business. Someone once asked me who was my first client. And I said, ‘Mozart.’ ”

  In Marshall’s words, “Max Youngstein came to me. United Artists was then just a film company that was going into the record business and they had two choices. They could either start up or buy. The reason Herb was not mentioned in the memo was very simple. Herb was in trouble in the industry and people knew it. In my first meeting with Jerry Wexler, he mentioned that Herb was not coming along if the company was sold.”

  Beginning a pattern that would continue throughout his years at Atlantic, Wexler was eager to make the deal. “Herb always told me,” Barbara Abramson would later say, “that Jerry used the oft-quoted phrase, ‘This is just a horse race. It can stop anyday now.’ So Jerry felt, ‘Cash in while it’s good. And get the money.’ ” In Marshall’s words, “Jerry was a very sound man who I really loved but he was always interested in selling. Always, always. He wanted to put money away. He hadn’t come from wealth and he was not financially secure and he had a wife and kid and the record business then was a fly-by-night business.”

  Although “the United Artists offer didn’t proceed much further,” Ahmet and Wexler used it as the impetus to change the long-standing corporate structure at Atlantic. “Herb didn’t particularly want to sell,” Barbara Abramson would later recall, “and Ahmet came to him and said, ‘We want to have another election because it won’t look good for a sale if in all these years, we’ve never had an election of a different set of officers.’ I said to Herb, ‘How do you feel about that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t like it at all. It’s like a gang-up.’ ”

  Having already given his former wife Miriam more than half of his original 30 percent share of Atlantic, Abramson knew the vote would go against him. “It was a cabal because they were also trying to freeze Miriam out,” Barbara Abramson recalled. “Herb spoke to me about it a number of times and said, ‘I should have told them, “Okay, you want to be president? I’ll be chairman of the board.” ’ But obviously they wouldn’t have liked that either.
”

  “Let me tell you the key to everything,” Wexler later said. “While Herb was gone, he got everything we got. Salary, cash, whatever it was, he got. When he came back, we gave him Atco to run but he started to act kind of eccentric and crazy. So Ahmet and I got together and said, ‘We’re going to have to do something about this.’ We decided to make Ahmet president and reduce Herb to executive vice president. When we called Herb in and told him that, he walked out and said, ‘See my lawyers.’ He could have stayed forever. We were not the kind of people that would get rid of breathing bodies, warm human beings.” In Ahmet’s words, “Herb insisted on being bought out. He didn’t have to go.”

  More than thirty years later, Abramson would admit, “I had a big ego and after a while I couldn’t take it, so I said, ‘Buy me out.’ It was the stupidest thing I ever said, but that was it. In entertainment entities there is cutthroat politics, but it is the way of the world.” After Abramson stalked out of the meeting at Atlantic, the partners began protracted deliberations with him during which, as Ahmet later said, “Herb tried to blackmail us to get the price up. He threatened us. So anyway, we paid him off and got him out. And I said, ‘Well, good riddance.’ We didn’t part as friends.”

  Although Wexler would later write that like all independent record labels, Atlantic was then cash poor, the partners managed to raise $300,000 to buy out Abramson. Using what would be today’s equivalent of about $2.4 million, Herb Abramson then founded the Triumph, Blaze, and Festival record labels, none of which was particularly successful. He produced “High Heel Sneakers,” a hit for Tommy Tucker on Chess Records, and cowrote “Long Tall Shorty” with Don Covay.

  Moving with his wife and young daughter to the fashionable Belnord apartment building at 225 West 86th Street, Abramson built and ran the A-1 recording studio, which was originally located in Atlantic’s former offices at 234 West 56th Street before moving to the ground floor of a hotel at Broadway and 72nd Street. Shortly after leaving Atlantic, Abramson also sold his “trick-track record” patent to the Mattel Corporation for use in its very popular “Chatty Cathy” doll, which uttered a variety of recorded phrases through the use of a pull string.