The Last Sultan Page 19

  Mica and her husband stayed in Switzerland for a year. Along with many of the other high-born members of the Romanian court who were then living in exile at the hotel, they were about to emigrate as a group to Paraguay, where the authorities had said “we wouldn’t pay taxes for twenty years and they would help everybody to start industries,” until they were shown a movie about the country. “When they showed us the movie, it was such a catastrophe that nobody wanted to go. It was horrible. Absolutely horrendous. So then we each went our different ways.”

  The couple moved to Paris, where Stephen Grecianu “tried to find a job which was very difficult although he spoke the language.” While staying at the Dolder Grand Hotel, Mica had met the man who ran Bruyère, a couture fashion house on the Place Vendôme. “I put some clothes on and walked on the runway as a model but that only lasted for three or four months.” Some “very rich Canadians” whom the couple had also met in Switzerland then helped them go to Canada and lent them “some money to buy a farm.”

  In 1951, the couple emigrated and purchased a dairy farm on Lake Ontario. Her husband then converted the property into a chicken farm. “We had five thousand chickens and I would get up at five in the morning. The funny thing is you have to clean the eggs. You gather them three times a day and then you have to clean them and put them in cardboard and ship them. That’s why I really can’t look at a chicken anymore. But when you are young, everything is great. We were happy to be free. We were happy not to be persecuted.”

  The couple became Canadian citizens and although “it was pretty grim in the winter,” they stayed on the farm until the fall of 1960, when Mica came to New York to see if the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, who had met her father while serving in Romania, could help her get him out of the country. “I was married and I was quite happy and I didn’t come with any idea of finding a man. I really didn’t but then it just happened. It just clicked. Ahmet didn’t have much money then but he had marvelous cars and chauffeurs and he went out every night. El Morocco was his stomping ground, and Birdland. He was always living well and going to expensive restaurants and running to Fire Island every weekend. He fascinated me.”

  After Mica returned to Canada, Ahmet called her constantly on the farm, where she talked to him on a hand-cranked phone. A month later, Mica told her husband she had to return to New York to visit a friend and it was then that she and Ahmet began their affair. As he would later say, “If you see pictures of Mica in those days, she really was a beautiful young girl . . . Even though I think she was virtually penniless, she had an air about her.”

  During his whirlwind courtship of Mica, Ahmet ended his relationship with Betsy Pickering. At one point, however, he and Mica “nearly split” and she returned to Canada only to have Ahmet come with his sister and nephews to visit her at the farm. As she recalled, “Ahmet adored my husband. The two of them got along very well.” In an incredibly stylish gesture right out of one of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies Ahmet had loved as a boy, he arranged for a band to emerge from the closet of her suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal to play “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

  After spending six difficult weeks together in New York, Mica left for Europe without Ahmet and went to stay with a friend who “was against me getting married. Everybody said I would regret it and it would be a disaster and last two months.” From Baden-Baden in Germany, Mica sent Ahmet a letter in which she wrote, “I do not know if I am capable of fulfilling all your desires . . . in my own way I am very simple and I like to have a closeness and an understanding that is above all the problems life is presenting . . . I will always love you but I do not want to make you unhappy—I would have loved to be with you and close to you. I hold you in my heart.”

  On her way back to Canada after a Black Sea cruise that included a visit to Ahmet’s mother and sister in Turkey, Mica was changing planes in upstate New York when she heard herself being paged. Over the phone, Ahmet proposed to her. On Thursday, April 6, 1961, the two were married by a judge in an apartment in Manhattan with thirty people present, among them Nesuhi, Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Miriam Bienstock, and Jerry Wexler.

  As Ahmet would later say, “Mica is a very, very steadfast person. Where before I was kind of wandering around aimlessly, she suddenly gave me an anchor. We began having dinner parties with nicer and more interesting people and less bimbos. It was a delight to be married to someone who was so intelligent and had so much common sense and she lifted my spirits every day and really inspired me to work harder. But part of my life was going out to clubs and that I didn’t stop.”

  Ahmet also did not stop seeing other women. Even while he had been pursuing Mica, she knew “he was coming back to New York and going out with other people.” As Jean Pigozzi, the art collector and photographer who became one of Ahmet’s closest friends, said, “I really don’t think Ahmet ever got emotional about any of those girls. Zero.” By marrying Mica, Ahmet made it plain she was the one with whom he wanted to spend his life.

  3

  Always at the forefront of what was happening at night in the city, Ahmet was one of the first to make the scene at the Peppermint Lounge, a mob joint on 45th Street where formerly only hookers, dancers, and musicians from nearby clubs could be found. The shift in action from the elegant El Morocco to a seedy hole-in-the-wall near Times Square where Joey Dee & the Starliters performed “The Peppermint Twist” each night as frenzied socialites threw themselves about on “a dance floor the size of somebody’s kitchen” marked the end of the 1950s in New York as well as the start of a musically charged social and cultural revolution that would churn through America for the next half-century.

  Unlike most of those who lined up in the street each night to get inside the Peppermint Lounge while “laying fives, tens, and twenty dollar bills on cops, doormen, and a couple sets of maître d’s to get within sight of the bandstand,” Ahmet knew “The Twist” had originally been recorded by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on King Records two years before Chubby Checker cut his version and popularized the dance on American Bandstand.

  In October 1961, as Tom Wolfe wrote, “a few socialites, riding hard under the crop of a couple of New York columnists, discovered the Peppermint Lounge.” Greta Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Countess Bernadotte, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield, Perle Mesta, Jackie Kennedy, and the Duke of Bedford were soon among those doing the Twist alongside “sailors, leather-jacketed drifters, and girls in toreador pants.” A month later, Joey Dee, then twenty-two years old, was performing at a gala “fund-raising champagne dinner” at the Four Seasons restaurant as well as “a hundred dollar a plate Party of the Year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  With Mica by his side, Ahmet was at the Peppermint Lounge every night. The sheer incongruity of well-to-do socialites who knew nothing about this kind of music trying to dance to it like hormonally crazed teenagers made the scene irresistible. While living on their chicken farm in Canada, Mica and her husband had brought some girls in from the local village to help them package eggs “and I remember there was an Elvis Presley song playing on the radio and the girls were gyrating while they were cleaning those eggs and I was looking at them and I said, ‘They must be totally degenerated. What the hell are they doing?’ Little did I know.”

  As Arthur Gelb noted in the still very staid New York Times, “Café society has not gone slumming with such energy since its forays into Harlem in the Twenties.” Much like the Charleston and the Shimmy, two dances adored by bathtub-gin-swilling flappers during that era, the Twist was not only fun but also an authentic form of physical liberation, allowing people to dance alone with one another. The first teenage dance craze to be seized upon by adults, the Twist launched America’s newfound fixation with youth culture as well as a form of music that had previously been considered the exclusive province of juveniles seduced by what some in the South still called “jungle rhythms.”

  Even as Ahmet was twisting the night away at the Peppermi
nt Lounge, he was trying to sign Joey Dee & the Starliters. After learning through the mob guys who ran the place that Morris Levy of Roulette had gotten to the band first, Ahmet began repackaging cuts he had already released into albums entitled Do the Twist with Ray Charles and Twist with Bobby Darin. These albums then became popular with “a dance crowd” who “had never heard these records before.”

  Able as a couple to fit into virtually any kind of social milieu, Ahmet and Mica quickly slipped in and then out of the scene at the Peppermint Lounge. Although neither of them realized it at the time, the new life they were now sharing helped create what would become an ever widening rupture between Ahmet and the man who looked up to him as not just a business partner but also a mentor and friend.

  While Mica had been living on the farm in Canada, in Ahmet’s words, “She did the beds, she did the cooking, and she did the farming with the tractor. She worked eighteen hours a day. When we could afford it, the first thing she wanted was neither a Cadillac nor a Rolls-Royce nor a diamond. She wanted to spend money on our style of life, which meant that we would have service. She wanted someone who would iron her dress or bring her breakfast in the morning. And she wanted me to have what I’d had as a child. As soon as I married Mica, I was back living the way I used to live when I was a kid which was wonderful because I also understood the value of that.”

  After Ahmet purchased a five-story brownstone on East 81st Street for $100,000 that Mica then began renovating and redecorating, Jerry Wexler dropped by one day and Ahmet invited him to stay for lunch. “When Jerry saw there was a cook and a butler to serve the lunch,” Ahmet recalled, “he turned to me and said, ‘Do you always live like this?’ As if to say, ‘This is not right.’ Living like that would never have occurred to him but I was very happy to get back to what I considered normal.”

  Wexler would later write that he and Ahmet had “begun moving in different directions back in the late fifties, early sixties . . . Gone were the days when Ahmet and I went off together to explore the back alleys of New Orleans.” In part, this was because “the business had gotten too big. Domains were separating, demands diverging.”

  When Atlantic moved its offices from 234 West 56th Street to 157 West 57th Street, directly across from Carnegie Hall and the partners’ favored spot for lunch, the Russian Tea Room, the two men still shared an office in which they faced one another, but with a sliding door between them that was often shut. When Atlantic moved again, to 1841 Broadway, between 60th and 61st Streets, the two men were separated by a long hallway.

  Despite Wexler’s great sophistication, his inability to realize that Ahmet’s marriage would also cause their relationship to change seems difficult to understand. The way in which Wexler chose to discuss this issue in his autobiography speaks to the incredible depth of feeling he always had for the man who had given him his start in the record business as well as how painful it was for him no longer to be the number one person in Ahmet’s life. Nor was it only Mica’s influence that caused them to grow apart. As always where these two men were concerned, the primary issue was music. While Ahmet was perfectly willing to accommodate himself to white rock ’n’ roll, Wexler preferred to continue producing the kind of black roots music he had always loved.

  The other issue was social class. While Wexler lived very well with his wife and three children in a house in Great Neck, Long Island, where he regularly hosted disc jockeys and promotion men at backyard barbecues, he was always too busy working and worrying about the future of the company to waste his nights in the Peppermint Lounge. Nor was it surprising he would view those who prepared and served Ahmet and Mica lunch in their East Side brownstone with the attitude of a kid from Washington Heights who had gotten his real primary education in a pool hall.

  Despite the growing tension between the two men, they continued to work well together at Atlantic. And then as just about every kid in America sat with his parents in front of the television set on the first Sunday night in February 1964, the impossibly cute and cuddly Beatles began shaking their moptops on Ed Sullivan’s very popular CBS television show. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the white teenage market for black music that had been keeping Atlantic in business.

  Once the British Invasion began in earnest, Ahmet and Wexler were no longer able to make the kind of music other labels could only envy. Instead, they had to start scrambling just to keep their company alive.

  TEN

  The Oak Room

  “If you didn’t have the Beatles in 1964, you didn’t have anything.”

  —Jerry Wexler

  1

  Shortly after the Beatles changed the nature of the record business in January 1964 by selling more than a million copies of their debut album in America on both Vee-Jay and Capitol, Ahmet informed attorney Paul Marshall that his services would no longer be needed at Atlantic. While Ahmet did not explain the reason for his decision, Marshall knew exactly why he was being let go. As he would later say, “Ahmet and I were friendly and he thought I had screwed him and been disloyal by not bringing the Beatles to Atlantic. I should have raised the issue of why he was letting me go but I didn’t. I had too much false pride. I wasn’t going to say a thing.”

  For Ahmet, who always prized loyalty above all other virtues in those who worked for him, Marshall’s decision to place the group with another independent label (who then lost their rights to Capitol when they failed to pay royalties) became a crime of major proportions as the Beatles put an unprecedented twelve songs on the Billboard Hot 100 during the first week in April 1964. Before the year was out, the group would release nine singles and six LPs that sold 25 million copies in America, thereby comprising an astonishing 60 percent of all the records sold on all labels in the United States.

  At the beginning of what everyone soon realized was an authentic worldwide revolution in popular music, Atlantic suddenly found itself watching from the sidelines as the money Ahmet believed should have been his poured instead into other companies. While Ahmet continued doing business with Paul Marshall over the years, his personal relationship with the attorney ended on the day he let him go.

  While on holiday with his family in Turkey many years later, Marshall paid a social visit to Ahmet and Mica at their summer home in Bodrum. As they all sat down to lunch, Ahmet, in Marshall’s words, “began laughing and said, ‘You’re the guy who took the Beatles from me.’ And I said, ‘It’s not true. That’s not true.’ ” What Ahmet had never known until that day was that, as Marshall would recall, “The first person I had offered the Beatles to was Jerry Wexler, who was my primary contact at Atlantic. I was EMI’s general counsel and I had gotten this call from them, ‘Please can you do something to help because Capitol has turned the Beatles down.’ So I went to my friends at Atlantic and sent the record to Noreen Woods, who was Ahmet and Jerry’s secretary.”

  Marshall did not consider himself a musical expert and so “if someone asked me to listen to a record, I would double my fee.” Without ever having heard the music on the album that would be entitled Introducing . . . The Beatles, Marshall offered Atlantic the first shot at an LP that included smash single hits like “Please Please Me,” “Love Me Do,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” as well as the Beatles’ killer cover version of Bert Berns’s “Twist and Shout,” a song first recorded by Jerry Wexler and Phil Spector on Atlantic.

  “A couple of days later,” Marshall would later say, “Noreen Woods came back to me and said, ‘Jerry said they’re derivative.’ And that was it. It happened and I never discussed it with anyone and then after I had offered them to Atlantic, I placed the Beatles on Vee-Jay.”

  With good reason, Jerry Wexler himself chose to never mention this story in any of the countless interviews he did during his lifetime. Nor did he write about it in his autobiography. However, as he would say, “I was not anti–rock ’n’ roll. But if it didn’t have the blues in it, I couldn’t give it house room. That was why I didn’t care about the Beatles and I did like the Rolling Ston
es. The Beatles were totally devoid of a blues element but the Rolling Stones, that was in their DNA.”

  While no one could have known the Beatles would become the most significant group in the history of popular music and eventually sell more than a billion units worldwide, Wexler’s decision to pass on them must rank as one of the most grievous errors in the history of the record business. Over the years, every great record man, Ahmet among them, made mistakes that in hindsight seem impossible to understand only to then bury them by going on to make hits with artists no one else might have signed.

  That Ahmet never knew what Wexler had done speaks to the increasingly separate lives the two men had begun to lead. It also reflects the degree to which Ahmet had delegated his day-to-day responsibilities at the label to his partner. As songwriter Mike Stoller recalled, “In the late Fifties, Ahmet used to come into the Atlantic office at four in the afternoon—and leave at six.” Although once the Beatles hit it big in America, EMI would have done everything in its power to move them to Capitol, Atlantic would never have been so foolish or disorganized as to risk doing anything to lose them.

  The constant anxiety that had kept Wexler working long hours for more than a decade at Atlantic had now been compounded by a secret he could not share with anyone, his good friend and partner most of all. At a time when a host of other independent labels were experiencing hard times and being sold by their founders to bigger companies or cutting back on their releases, Atlantic in 1964 failed for the first time to increase its profits from the previous year. To survive, Ahmet and Wexler were forced to cut their own pay and then sold the Progressive Music publishing catalogue to Hill & Range, thereby giving up all future rights to songs like “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Money Honey,” and “Since I Met You Baby.”