The Last Sultan Read online

  Over the years, one story Ahmet loved to tell about himself was repeated constantly by those who would have never dared to criticize him in their own words. God only knows who told it to Steve Ross but David Geffen first heard the story from him. Mo Ostin and Joe Smith in Los Angeles knew it as did Robert Stigwood in London. Outliving the man it was about, the story was posted on a well-read music blog after Ahmet was no longer around to tell it. In its simplest form, the story goes like this.

  During the early 1970s, Kit Lambert and Bill Curbishley, the current and future managers of The Who, found themselves locked in a particularly difficult and contentious negotiation with Ahmet in his second-floor office at Atlantic Records in New York City. Although Atlantic had made a ton of money distributing “Fire,” a huge but very unlikely worldwide hit by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown that Lambert had produced on his own label, their discussion soon reached a sticking point.

  No matter what Lambert or Curbishley said, Ahmet simply would not budge. Knowing he had nothing to lose, Lambert, who in Curbishley’s words could sometimes be “a bit Barnum and Bailey,” suddenly leaped to his feet and stormed out of the office in a rage. Returning a few seconds later, he threw open the door and shouted at Ahmet, “Do you know why there’s so much anti-Semitism in the world?”

  Always unflappable, most especially in situations where money was on the line and he was the one who would have to pay it, Ahmet said, “No, Kit. Why is that?” “Because,” Lambert replied, “Turks don’t travel.” Slamming the door behind him, Lambert then made his final exit as Ahmet collapsed with laughter behind his desk.

  More than most people in the music business, Kit Lambert would have understood the historical basis of his remark. Like his father, a well-known classical composer, he had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was also the grandson of the painter who had been commissioned by the Australian government to document that nation’s crushing defeat by Turkish forces commanded by Mustafa Kemal at the Battle of Gallipoli during World War I.

  Whether any of this was actually on Kit Lambert’s mind that day, no one can say for sure. However, the man who was the butt of his joke did not need anyone to explain it to him. In a business dominated by hard-driving Jewish businessmen, Ahmet was the ultimate outsider. On some level, this was also always his role in the world.

  Although Ahmet loved to mingle in the most rarefied circles of high society, he never truly belonged there either. In the most famous piece ever written about him, an unnamed woman who seemed comfortable in this world noted there was no one Ahmet did not “feel snubbed by.” Whenever another of his socialite friends sensed he was about to say or do something inappropriate, she would caution him by saying, “Ahmet, don’t go Turkish on me. Don’t go Turk.” In order to warn the Rolling Stones that Ahmet was about to appear backstage before a show, their tour manager would tell them, “Boys, Ataturk’s coming.”

  Although he left his native land at the age of two and was shocked to see what Turkey was like when he returned there for the first time six years later, everything Ahmet was and all that he became was shaped by the place of his birth. Had it not been for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent creation of the modern Turkish republic, his own life would have followed an entirely different and far more predictable path. And yet to the very core of his being, he could not have been more Turkish.

  For countless generations, “the Turk,” in the words of Stephen Kinzer, the author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, had always been viewed in the West as the “scourge of civilization. His chief characteristics were thought to include mendacity, unbridled lust, sudden violence and a passion for gratuitous cruelty.” Beginning in 1095 when Pope Urban II sent the Crusaders to reclaim the holy city of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire, “Europeans came to perceive Turks as the epitome of evil. They were presumed to be not only bent on destroying Christianity but also determined to kill or enslave every man, woman, and child in Christendom.” Five centuries later, Martin Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation, declared, “The Turks are the people of the wrath of God.” In a letter to King Fredrick II of Prussia during the eighteenth century, the famed French essayist Voltaire wrote, “I shall always hate the Turks. What wretched barbarians!”

  After the Allies defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the onerous conditions imposed by the Treaty of Sèvres were specifically designed to reduce a once great power to ruins. In large part, Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement blossomed because of his refusal to abide by the provisions of the agreement, which soon proved impossible to enforce. His subsequent rise to power eventually forced all parties to the treaty to return to the negotiating table in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1922.

  Mehmet Munir, who served as chief legal adviser and translator for the delegation from the Ottoman Empire during talks that went on for months, was present when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24, 1923, thereby bringing the modern Turkish republic into being. Seven days later, Ahmet was born, as he would later recall, “in a house on the rocky hills of Sultantepe in Uskudar on the Asiatic side of Istanbul, that grand old decaying city which had once been Byzantium and Constantinople.”

  A child of privilege like his older brother Nesuhi, Ahmet spent the first two years of his life in a truly primitive land where nearly everyone was illiterate, life expectancy was short, epidemics commonplace, and medical care virtually nonexistent. In a territory stretching for more than a thousand miles where most men eked out a living as subsistence farmers, there were only a few short stretches of paved road and the most common means of travel was by horse-drawn cart. Most villages did not have a central square or plaza, reinforcing the widely held belief that life was meant to be lived within the family or clan.

  While those like Ahmet’s father who had been born and raised in Istanbul enjoyed a far more cosmopolitan existence, nothing in his background could have prepared him for the rapid succession of sweeping social changes that transformed the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish republic in a relatively short period of time. Born into a family from Uzbekistan in central Asia, Mehmet Munir was the grandson of a Sufi sheik who presided over the Ösbekler Tekkesi, a dervish lodge in Istanbul. His father was a career bureaucrat who spent his life working in the Ministry of Monuments and Antiquities. His mother was one of the first Turkish women to make the pilgrimage to Mecca by camel.

  Exempt from military service by imperial decree because he had been born in the city where the Sultan held court, Mehmet Munir graduated from Istanbul University with a degree in law in 1908. He then began working in the imperial chancery, rising to the rank of chief legal adviser eight years later.

  After his short-lived first marriage ended when he was in his twenties, his parents, in accordance with the custom at the time, arranged for him to wed Hayrunnisa Rustem. Fourteen years younger than he, she could play any keyboard or stringed instrument by ear, loved to dance and sing, and, as Ahmet would later say, “probably would have become a singing star or musician or performer if she had lived in a time when well-born girls were allowed on the stage. She was an outgoing, fun loving, good looking young girl who had been quite disappointed to find that the husband picked for her was a quiet, scholarly young law and philosophy student who did not share her love of music and dancing.”

  Three years after they were married, Mehmet Munir embarked on the journey that would change his life as well as the future of his homeland. On December 5, 1920, as part of a high-powered delegation headed by Salih Pasha and Ahmet Izzet Pasha, two of the Sultan’s most trusted ministers, he traveled about two hundred and fifty kilometers by train from Istanbul to the railway station at Bilicek to help negotiate an agreement to end the civil conflict between the Sultan and the new nationalist government in Ankara headed by Mustafa Kemal.

  Unlike the leaders of the delegation and the great war hero they had come to meet, Mehmet Munir had never seen combat on any of the battlefields where the fate of the
empire had been contested during the past two decades. Bespectacled, with a thick mustache and a receding hairline, he was then thirty-seven years old, the father of a three-year-old son, and a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day.

  After making the delegation wait for an entire day at the railway station, Mustafa Kemal finally arrived. Thirty-nine years old, with piercing blue eyes and high Oriental cheekbones, he had the commanding look of a fearless soldier who had already proven himself in battle. Introducing himself as the prime minister of the government in Ankara, Kemal shocked Salih Pasha and Ahmet Izzet Pasha by asking them who they were.

  Explaining he could not possibly speak to them as cabinet ministers because he did not recognize the government in Istanbul, Kemal said he was perfectly willing to talk with them as fellow patriots. After a discussion that lasted for hours, Kemal told both men he could not let them return to Istanbul. Instead, they would now accompany him to Ankara so they could get a sense of what life was like under the nationalist government. Knowing they had no choice in the matter, the entire delegation boarded a train heading in the opposite direction from which they had come the day before. Although the word was never used, they were now being held as hostages.

  Because the nationalists controlled the army and no one in Istanbul could mount an expedition to free them, the delegation remained in Ankara for the next three months. When Salih Pasha and Ahmet Izzet Pasha realized Kemal’s movement was directed not just against the foreigners occupying their homeland but the Sultan as well, they both made it plain they could never become part of it.

  Not so Mehmet Munir. After a period of intensive soul searching, he decided only Kemal and his followers could preserve what little was left of his beloved homeland. Switching sides, he threw in his lot with them. Born with the personality of a true diplomat, Mehmet Munir had a set of unique personal credentials that made him an immediate asset of great value to the new nationalist government.

  Having served two years earlier as the chief legal adviser to the Ottoman delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that forced Russia to return all the territory it had seized from the empire during World War I, he had already dealt with foreign powers across the bargaining table. Fluent in French, then the language of diplomacy all over the world, he also spoke English.

  On February 6, 1921, Salih Pasha and Ahmet Izzet Pasha signed a handwritten document giving Mehmet Munir official permission to attend the international Peace Conference that would begin in London six days later. To ensure his safety as well as their own, the signers made it plain they were being kept in Ankara against their will and that Mehmet Munir had been repeatedly and insistently pressured to attend the conference because of his personal ability and professional knowledge. Serving as an adviser and a translator, he then represented the Ankara government at peace talks in England to which the Sultan also sent his own set of representatives.

  In March 1921, Kemal finally decided to allow the rest of the delegation to return to Istanbul on the condition that Salih Pasha and Ahmet Izzet Pasha would not resume their government positions—which they both soon did. When Mehmet Munir’s wife read the morning newspaper only to learn that everyone but her husband had returned safely to Istanbul, she was furious. In every sense, he had now become the odd man out.

  Unlike those who had chosen to continue supporting the Sultan, Mehmet Munir had aligned himself with a movement that in time would change the modern world. For him, it had all begun with the decision he made after that fateful meeting in the railway station at Bilicek on December 5, 1920. And while Mustafa Kemal himself once proclaimed, “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions to the bottom of the sea,” Mehmet Munir steadfastly continued to roll out his carpet to pray five times a day even after he had become one of Kemal’s most trusted aides. In Ahmet’s words, “Although my father was basically a timid man, he had great stubbornness in living out his convictions and defending his beliefs. His sense of morality somehow governed all his actions.”

  In 1925, Kemal rewarded Mehmet Munir for his service to the new republic by appointing him the ambassador to Switzerland. As Ahmet would later write, his father “left behind the teeming hodgepodge of the Istanbul that he loved, the shoeless porters, the grimy street kids, the blind beggars, the black-shawled peasant women, the hawking vendors, all of whom hovered below the countless majestic mosques and minarets that formed the skyline of this mysterious city, crossroads of many civilizations; the last stop of the Orient Express, the last capital of the fallen Ottoman Empire, ‘the sublime port,’ the city of my father’s dreams.”

  Accompanied by his wife, his two sons, and their newborn daughter, Selma, Mehmet Munir set off to represent his fledgling nation’s diplomatic interests in Bern. Beginning what would become a life of constant travel, Ahmet embarked on the long and highly improbable journey that eventually brought him to the land where he would make his fame and fortune.

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  In “the clean quiet serenity of the capital city of Bern, with many green gardens, parks, churches, clocks, and chimes,” Ahmet’s first real childhood memory of himself was as a two-and-a-half-year-old boy playing in the immense gardens of the Turkish legation. Befitting his status as the Turkish ambassador to “this bland beautiful sterile country,” Mehmet Munir and his family were now able to live in a manner that would not have been possible in their still impoverished and chaotic homeland.

  Their large house at 18 Kalcheggweg was staffed by several servants the family had brought with them from Turkey. A young Swiss governess who spoke French took care of Ahmet, who was soon communicating with his brother and sister in “a mixture of Turkish and French with a sprinkling of the French-German patois that we picked up on the street and in kindergarten.”

  Charged with more responsibility than ever before, Ahmet’s father was always busy working. In addition to his diplomatic duties in Bern, he made regular visits to Geneva, where in two years’ time he became the Turkish observer to the League of Nations while also traveling to Paris to meet with other Turkish diplomats and statesmen. Unlike his wife, he had little difficulty adjusting to their new life.

  During the early years of their marriage, Ahmet’s mother had been able to avail herself of the loving support of both her own and her husband’s extended families. She had also spent a good deal of time traveling back and forth from Istanbul to Ankara by train and horse-drawn carriage, a journey that in 1921 had taken eight days. In Bern, where her primary job was to run a household where she was addressed in Turkish by those who served her as “Hanimefendi” or “Madame,” the fissures in her prearranged marriage grew wider.

  A short, stout woman with a broad face and straight brown hair she tinted auburn, Ahmet’s mother felt isolated in this strange new culture and sought solace in music. Over and over on the family’s hand-wound phonograph, she would play her favorite Turkish records until “the sad haunting Oriental music of Istanbul” brought tears to her eyes. In Ahmet’s words, “When she could no longer hold back her sobs, she would retire to her room so as not to upset the children. I could not tell whether it was because of her homesickness or her unhappiness with my father or her missing some unknown lover of the past, or whether it was just the music that evoked in her this deep melancholy.”

  The scene around the family dinner table when all the guests were Turkish was far happier. Once the meal was over, Ahmet’s mother would sing and play the piano or the oud and people would dance. Although Ahmet’s father “would never participate in these carryings-on,” he would “regale all those present with funny anecdotes about the anomalies between the Near Eastern and Western cultures and some of the ridiculous situations that resulted.”

  Still too young to go to school, Ahmet and Selma spent their days being looked after by “nurses, governesses, and maids.” Foremost among them was Madame Yenge (yenge being the Turkish word for aunt) whom Ahmet’s sister would later describe as “a beloved distant relative who was like a doting grandmother to u
s.” One day as she was walking with Ahmet, who was then four years old, “a miserable-looking beggar” approached them. Yenge was about to walk away when Ahmet grabbed her hand, “started crying furiously, and refused to budge until she had given him a few pennies.”

  In later years, Yenge would tell this story with tears in her eyes to show how compassionate Ahmet had been as a young boy. However, he could also be quite headstrong and, in his sister’s words, “perhaps a bit spoiled.” After Yenge had left Ahmet alone for a few minutes to fetch something from the top floor of the house, he began to scream, “Why didn’t you take me with you?” When Yenge came back to get him, Ahmet refused to go with her. Insisting she should have taken him with her in the first place, he continued crying while repeating she had “wronged him.”

  During this period, Ahmet’s only real companion was eight-year-old Nesuhi. “He was like a hero to my sister and me,” Ahmet wrote. “At seven or eight, he seemed to be a big grown-up man who had much more in common with the adults than with us.” In a photograph from this period, Ahmet sits on his brother’s knee peering at the camera with a shy, inquisitive look on his face. Enacting the role he would play for many years in Ahmet’s life, a broadly smiling Nesuhi has both his arms wrapped protectively around his younger brother.

  In the afternoon, the brothers often played soccer together on the large lawn behind their house. Some days, the two sons of the Swiss president, who were roughly the same age, would come to join them. Placing two caps at each end of the field to serve as goal markers, they would pretend Turkey was playing Switzerland in a match that “was always a bloody battle.”