The Last Sultan Read online

  When Atlantic released The Genius of Ray Charles album in November, it sent more than three thousand promotional EPs to disc jockeys and took out the first full-page ad for Ray Charles in Billboard. When the month ended without either Ahmet or Wexler having heard from Charles or his manager, someone called Atlantic to say the word on the street was that Charles had already signed with ABC-Paramount and the contract was on file with the musicians’ union.

  On December 7, 1959, Billboard announced the deal. A week later, the trade paper provided details of the “exceptional” 75–25 split Charles had been given at ABC-Paramount. Ahmet would later say that for him the news was “emotionally, a great blow.” Having always considered Ray Charles his friend, Ahmet could not understand why the artist had never given Atlantic a chance to come back with a second offer.

  Even though he had been considerably less personally involved with the artist than Ahmet, Jerry Wexler now had a real reason to worry and lay awake one night until dawn wondering what would become of Atlantic. Now that Ray Charles had left the label, Wexler feared they might also lose performers like Bobby Darin and perhaps even cease to exist. Expressing what everyone at Atlantic was then feeling, Herb Abramson’s former wife Miriam Bienstock would say, “We felt betrayed, it was a terrible thing.”

  No one at the label was more upset by what Charles had done than Ahmet. Unable to accept that Charles himself had actually done this to him, Ahmet would say he believed Charles’s personal valet, “the guy who was doing everything for him, including buying dope and getting girls” had been taken care of by ABC-Paramount and then persuaded Charles to agree to the deal because, “in those days with Ray Charles, his signature was an ‘X’ so someone had to bring him in to put the cross in and I don’t know to what extent Ray knew about it.”

  Larry Myers would later say, “I would be glad to convince Ahmet and Jerry that Ray knew all about it. Nobody put anything over on Ray.” Explaining his decision in his own words, Charles said, “Seventy-five cents out of a dollar and owning my own masters, that’s why I left Atlantic.” In Ahmet’s words, “Afterwards when there were explanations of how it happened, even though I knew it wasn’t so, I never said anything ’cause it didn’t matter, the fact is that we lost him.”

  “I worked with Chris Blackwell at Island Records after Bob Marley died,” Paul Wexler recalled, “and I saw that some of the joy of being a record man had gone out of Chris when his genius went away. Who was Ahmet’s genius? Ray Charles. Ray went away. And Ahmet never fell in love with another artist like that again. And to a great extent, he was also out of the studio after that point.”

  For Ahmet, the first cut was the deepest and he never did get over losing Ray Charles. Seven years after the artist had walked out on him, Ahmet was still carrying the torch. As a woman he was then seeing in Los Angeles recalled, “He was brokenhearted over Ray Charles leaving him.”

  By then, the real power in the record business was being wielded by the artists. Unlike Wexler, who refused to accommodate himself to the impossible demands of rock stars accustomed to having their every whim catered to like divine right kings, Ahmet always found a way to deal with them. In the most painful way imaginable, he had already been through it all with Ray Charles.

  NINE

  Love and Marriage

  “I fell in love with Mica. I really wanted to marry her and I had to talk her into it. She had a greater elegance and aristocracy than any of the girls I knew. She was much more of a lady and it showed through and I think the most important choice I ever made in my life was to marry her.”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  In the spring of 1960, Phil Spector blew into Ahmet’s life like a wild storm from the West Coast. Born on December 26, 1939, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, Spector was nine years old when his father committed suicide. Four years later, he moved with his mother and older sister to Los Angeles, where he attended Fairfax High.

  After forming the Teddy Bears in 1958, Spector changed the inscription from his father’s gravestone in the Beth David cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, into the present tense and used it as the title for “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” A mellow doo-wop ballad that became a slow dance staple at teenage makeout parties all over America, the record sold a million copies and went to number one on the Billboard pop chart but offered no indication of the work Spector would do as a producer once he loosed his trademark “Wall of Sound” upon the world.

  A year later, Spector began working for Lester Sill, who had discovered Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The songwriting duo had then written, arranged, and produced one big hit after another for Atlantic with the Coasters and the Drifters. At Sill’s urging in the spring of 1960, Leiber paid for Spector’s airplane ticket to New York. The songwriters signed Spector to an exclusive publishing contract, gave him a monthly advance, and made him their fifth guitar player on sessions. With a kind of self-confidence that verged on the monomaniacal, Spector regularly told everyone he met that he was a genius.

  Blessed with what his biographer called the ability to “find his way around almost any instrument” as well as “a natural gift for sight-reading and improvisation,” Spector wrote the haunting melody for Leiber’s lyrics on “Spanish Harlem.” Ben E. King, the former lead singer of the Drifters, then beginning his solo career, recorded the song on October 27, 1960, and it went to number fifteen on the R&B charts.

  Having lost his father under the most tragic circumstances, Spector also had, according to Leiber, a “terrific fear of abandonment” and “was frightened to death of being left alone.” His psychological profile made him the first in a long line of eager young record business men who adopted Ahmet as both mentor and surrogate father. “I’d never seen anybody like Phil before,” Ahmet would later say, “and I’m sure I’ll never see anybody like him again . . . He was really crazy, but charming, super-intelligent, and really talented.”

  Jiving with one another in their own version of Mezz Mezzrow’s brand of hipster slang, the two very unlikely companions began going out on the town together night after night. Despite the disparity in their backgrounds and the sixteen-year difference in their ages, they soon became inseparable. Ahmet then offered Spector a job as his personal assistant and as a staff producer at Atlantic. For a twenty-one-year-old kid on the make, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

  The fact that he had already signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller did not trouble Spector in the least and the contract itself soon somehow disappeared from their files. Adding insult to injury, Spector also signed a contract with the Hill & Range music publishing company, thereby making him “one hundred percent exclusive” with all three entities at once. Spector then began sleeping at night in the Atlantic office, while persuading the switchboard operator to let him call home long-distance as often as he liked at the company’s expense.

  In vain, Wexler kept waiting for the pint-sized producer with the gargantuan ego to deliver the big hits he claimed he had come from California to make. In the studio, the two men clashed constantly. Working together in the worst possible way with a group called the Top Notes, they managed to screw up “Twist and Shout,” a Bert Berns composition Wexler would later call “a natural hit.”

  Miriam Bienstock also soon came to dislike Spector because he would book studio rehearsal time at Atlantic and then turn up late or not show up at all, thereby forcing artists who had waited for him to return the next day. Despite his undeniable talent, the kindest thing many of those who met Spector during this period had to say about him was that he was an asshole. Others thought he was insane.

  Overlooking flaws in Spector’s outsized personality that would have caused anyone else to fire him, Ahmet felt certain that in time the hits were “going to come. In the meantime, he and I were going out to clubs . . . and having a terrific time.” As Paul Marshall would later say, “I don’t know why Ahmet liked hanging out with Phil because I couldn’t stand him. He was not a lovable guy. H
e was egoistic and always rude to musicians and assistant engineers.”

  Marshall was in the studio one night while Spector was recording when Spector received a telegram informing him he had been drafted and was being ordered to report for duty at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma. The telegram was signed by General Curtis LeMay, the United States Air Force chief of staff. “Phil went crazy,” Marshall would later say. “Absolutely crazy. ‘They’re out to kill me! They’re out to destroy my career!’ I knew Ahmet had sent it so I called him and said, ‘This is great!’ ” After Marshall told Ahmet how badly Spector was melting down in the studio, “We got another telegram, ‘Orders canceled!’ ”

  Whenever they found themselves together in Los Angeles, Ahmet loved roaring around the city in a souped-up Ford Thunderbird Spector had equipped with a 45 RPM record player under the dashboard. Whenever a music publisher wanted them to listen to new material, they would insist he get into the backseat and then take off at ninety miles an hour on Sunset Boulevard as the publisher screamed, “Let me out of here—I don’t care if you ever record one of my songs—just let me out of the car!”

  In Los Angeles, Ahmet also took Spector to see Bobby Darin, who by then had married sixteen-year-old Sandra Dee, the beautiful blond actress who had played the title role in Gidget. After a couple of drinks as they sat around his pool, Darin picked up his guitar and began playing a new song he had written that did not impress Ahmet in the least. “That’s terrific,” Ahmet told him. Darin then played five more songs, each no better than the first. All the while, Ahmet kept telling him they were “fabulous.”

  Unable to take it anymore, Spector finally exploded. “Are you fucking crazy, or am I? He can’t record these songs. These songs are pure shit!” Demanding to know who the hell Spector was, an incensed Darin screamed, “Get him the fuck out of here!” In need of a hit some months later, Darin told Ahmet it might be wise if they found “some new blood” to produce his next record. “There’s this kid, Phil Spector,” Darin said, “do you think you could get him to work with us?” Ahmet replied, “That’s the guy you threw out of your house!” In the end, Darin never worked with Spector.

  After making a series of very conventional big band records for Atlantic that went nowhere, Darin eventually “succumbed to Hollywood pressure” from his managers and agents to begin recording for a major label. When his contract with Atlantic expired in the fall of 1962, Darin signed with Capitol. Ahmet accepted the loss of Atlantic’s first white star with an equanimity he had not had when Ray Charles left him.

  By the spring of 1961, Ahmet’s social relationship with Spector had also ended. Having met the woman he was about to marry, Ahmet no longer needed someone to go out with every night. Spector formally left Atlantic on April 6, 1961, Ahmet’s wedding day.

  Constitutionally unable ever to work for anyone else, Spector founded Philles Records with his mentor Lester Sill, whom he then forced out of the company. Producing one huge hit after another for the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Righteous Brothers, Spector earned $2 million by the time he was twenty-six and became the subject of a memorable profile by Tom Wolfe entitled “The First Tycoon of Teen.”

  In a scene that would not have been out of place in a 1930s Hollywood movie, Spector was recording in Los Angeles when he crossed paths with a twenty-year-old starstruck kid from Brooklyn who in time would also come to regard Ahmet as his mentor. Going out of his way to humiliate David Geffen, Spector made him sit with his chauffeur at another table when everyone went out to eat after a night in the studio.

  In 1966, Spector recorded what would come to be regarded as his masterpiece, “River Deep—Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner. He then went on to produce Let It Be by the Beatles as well as George Harrison’s multi-platinum album All Things Must Pass. His relationship with John Lennon ended in 1973 when Spector reportedly brandished a gun in the studio and then disappeared with the master tapes of the album the two were recording.

  While Ahmet and Phil Spector never worked together again after he left Atlantic, they did remain good friends throughout their lives. As Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, would recall, “Ahmet loved Phil Spector for all kinds of reasons but one of them was that Phil was just incredibly witty and dark in that Lenny Bruce kind of way. Ahmet recognized Phil’s genius and thought he was this wonderful character because Ahmet always loved crazy, larger-than-life people.”

  In Los Angeles during the mid-1960s, Ahmet and his former protégé shared many wild nights. By then, Spector had already begun exhibiting the kind of behavior that would doom him. “Even in those days,” Ahmet would later say, “Phil hated for anybody to leave and was known to sort of lock up people in his house and not let them go. He was always flashing his gun around but I never thought he would shoot it.”

  On February 3, 2003, Phil Spector shot and killed Lana Clarkson, a forty-year-old former B-movie actress he had picked up in the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, where she was working as a hostess in the VIP room. Found guilty of murder in the second degree in April 2009, he was sentenced at the age of sixty-nine to nineteen years to life in the California state prison system.

  “Ahmet brought Phil in,” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said. “But nobody could control Phil.” Although even Ahmet soon learned this was true, he had still been perfectly willing to delegate responsibility in the studio to Spector in the hope he would come up with a series of monster hits for Atlantic. While the first boy wonder in whom he had invested his time and energy failed to fulfill his expectations, Ahmet never stopped looking for the next young genius who might help keep his label at the top of the charts.

  2

  On the night Ahmet met his future wife through mutual friends in the Bon Soir, a small, crowded, and famously dark cabaret on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, marriage was the last thing on his mind. Still operating in full bachelor mode, he was seeing three different well-known models on both coasts while also escorting a variety of other girls on his nightly outings to Birdland, El Morocco, and the city’s newest hot spot, the Peppermint Lounge.

  The only woman at the table that night whom Ahmet did not know spoke with a continental accent that immediately defined her upbringing. Svelte with long black hair and the regal bearing of what he would later call “a natural aristocrat,” she had come to New York hoping to find someone who could help get her cancer-ridden father out of Romania, which was then still under communist control. Because she seemed “so sad,” the wife of the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, with whom she was staying, arranged for her to join the dinner party.

  “At the end of the evening,” Ahmet would recall, “instead of her going home with the person who brought her, I took her home and we became friends.” The next day, he called and they went out to dinner. After she returned to her home on a farm in Canada a few days later, Ahmet began calling her regularly. As he would soon learn, she was also a child of history whose background was in many ways as complex as his own. For the first time in his life, Ahmet was involved in a relationship that was a meeting of equals.

  Born into a wealthy landowning family in Bucharest on October 21, 1926, Ioana Maria Banu was the only child of Natalia Gologan and Dr. Georghe Banu, a well-known physician who served as secretary of health in the right-wing government that ruled the country under King Carol II. As a young girl, she acquired the name by which she would be known. Because her German nurse kept hearing her father call her “the little one” in Romanian, “she thought that was my name. In Romanian, ‘mic,’ which is pronounced ‘meek,’ means ‘small.’ She kept saying, ‘Mica is here. Mica is there.’ And it stuck.”

  After her parents’ short-lived marriage ended in divorce when she was eight years old, Mica was raised by her mother and grandmother. Although her father was “very caring” and she sometimes preferred him to her mother, he was also “very busy. He wrote a lot of books and helped pass a law that everybody in Romania had to be tested for syphilis before t
hey got married.”

  In 1939, Dr. Georghe Banu published a book about eugenics, in which he advocated a set of scientific beliefs very much in accord with the views of the Nazi government in Germany. Banu argued for the use of preventive sterilization of “pathological individuals” including “imbeciles, idiots, epileptics, criminals, and those affected by diverse psychoses” as well as those suffering from syphilis, tuberculosis, and leprosy. He wrote that sterilization was “a necessary formula for the conservation and improvement of the race.”

  Too young to understand the full import of her father’s work, Mica was fourteen years old when half a million Nazi troops occupied Romania, then still a neutral country. On November 23, 1940, Romania joined the Axis and began supplying Germany with oil, grain, and industrial products. On August 1, 1943, the Romanian oil fields were bombed by the Allies.

  “Of course, I saw the bombardments,” she recalled. “I was going to school and the car was supposed to come pick me up because the planes took off from a place in Italy called Foggia and so you knew from the radio exactly when they had taken off and when they were coming.” Driven from Bucharest to her family’s country house in Baragan, where she “was shoved every holiday,” she would then return to the city once the raids were over.

  Raised “to be a nothing,” as she put it, Mica was sixteen when she met Stephen Grecianu, whom she then married against her father’s wishes in 1942. Fifteen years older than Mica, Grecianu was the son of a wealthy landowner and had grown up in and around the royal court in Bucharest. Educated in Paris, he was serving as a pilot in the Romanian air force flying German Messerschmitt fighter planes into aerial battles against the Allies.

  On January 10, 1948, a week after King Michael, who had succeeded Carol II, had left the country after being deposed at gunpoint, Mica and her husband, whose mother had served as lady in waiting to Queen Marie, left Romania on the same train as the king’s aunts, Princess Elisabeth, the former Queen of Greece, and Princess Ileana, the wife of Austrian Archduke Anton. Traveling on Nansen passports issued to stateless people by the League of Nations, the couple ended up in “the Dolder Grand, the most luxurious hotel in Zurich, but we didn’t have a dime because after everybody put all their jewelry with the Queen, they confiscated everything the night before we left.”