The Last Sultan Page 21
In the words of Paul Marshall, who represented Berns, “Bert knew people in the mob and he liked to hang out with them and he carried a gun which I thought was very Freudian because he doubted his own masculinity. He had this whole thing about being tough and he wasn’t at all. It was a pose. He was a great songwriter, a remarkable talent, and a sensitive man. Had he lived, he would have been a great star. I liked him but I knew he was absolutely nuts.”
One day, Berns asked if he could introduce Marshall to some friends who were seeking legal representation. The friends turned out to be Tommy Lucchese, aka “Three Finger Brown,” the cofounder of the Lucchese crime family in New York, and Pat Pagano, a capo in the Genovese family. The two mobsters needed legal advice because they had just acquired a recording studio on 42nd Street where some “amateur” had been duplicating pirated masters and, in Marshall’s words, “they had taken the opportunity to have a discussion that helped him walk away from it.”
After he expressed his “enormous respect for them,” Marshall explained he could not act as their lawyer and advised them to seek representation elsewhere. Lucchese then hired another attorney, who came to Marshall for advice, which was not “of any criminal consequence.” When Marshall went to his summer house in the country, he found a thank-you gift from the mobsters—a purple Cadillac convertible. Marshall kept the car for the summer but then returned it. “I didn’t hand it back immediately because that would have been rude. It takes tact.”
Over lunch in Florida many years later, Wexler would tell a friend that during this period he and Ahmet discovered someone had “set up a pressing plant in the forests of New Jersey” where they were making and selling fake Atlantic 45s. Bert Berns seems to have offered to solve this problem by having “some mobsters go in with a baseball bat and destroy the record press and maybe whoever was running it as well.” According to Wexler, Ahmet not only knew about the plan but also “orchestrated or authorized” it.
That might have well been the end of it if not for what Wexler would later call Bert Berns’s “obsession with power.” When Berns demanded full control of the publishing company Atlantic had also established with him, Ahmet and Wexler refused to give it to him, and Berns then filed suit against them for breach of contract.
“The breach of contract suit was not particularly bitter or angry,” Paul Marshall recalled. “They were yelling at each other but it was just the usual lather, you don’t pay me my royalties correctly and that kind of thing.” Understandably, no one at Atlantic would have wanted to lose a skilled hit maker like Bert Berns. But as Wexler would later say, “When the Bang fallout began, the mob said, ‘You’re fucked. We did this for you. We own you. But we’ll just take Bang Records and call it a day.’ ”
In actual fact, it took more than just a threatening conversation to persuade Wexler to let Bert Berns leave Atlantic with artists like Neil Diamond, Van Morrison, and the McCoys in tow. Wexler’s daughter Anita was then fourteen years old. As her boyfriend at the time recalled, “I know there was one time that somebody had apparently threatened to break her legs. I think they threatened Jerry by using her. Apparently, Jerry had a very bitter breakup with Bert Berns and Morris Levy’s name was in the mix at some point too.” After the mob threatened Jerry’s daughter, the partners at Atlantic had no choice but to let Berns leave the label. According to Mica, “I think the mob threat came from Bert Berns but Ahmet told me not to talk about it.”
In a cash business where distributors had to make their own deals with local trucking companies and shippers, no independent record company could ever say it was completely free of mob influence. So they could shut down an illegal record pressing operation that was taking money out of their pockets on a regular basis, the partners at Atlantic made a decision that cost them more than they had been losing at the time. Having suffered from rheumatic fever as a child, Bert Berns died of heart failure at the age of thirty-eight. In his autobiography, Jerry Wexler made a point of noting that he did not attend the funeral.
ELEVEN
I Got You Babe
“After Sonny and Cher had become huge stars, we gave a press party for them in L.A. and invited all the Hollywood press and we had a receiving line that included Sonny and Cher and myself and some people from the company. One lady stopped and said, ‘Are you Mr. Mica Ertegun?’ I said, ‘What publication are you from?’ She said, ‘I’m from Vogue magazine.’ So I said, ‘Oh yes, I am Mr. Mica Ertegun.’ She said, ‘Who did you think I was?’ I said, ‘I thought maybe you were Women’s Wear Daily.’ ”
—Ahmet Ertegun
1
Forty-two years old, Ahmet now bore little physical resemblance to the gawky teenager in an oversized zoot suit he had once been. Sporting a full black goatee streaked with gray on either side and sharp black glasses through which his large dark eyes could be clearly seen, he projected an air of magnetic self-assurance that defined him as a serious player in the record business as well as a member in good standing of the rarefied social circle through which he and Mica now moved.
Blessed with a sense of personal style that transcended fashion, Ahmet and Mica had themselves become fashionable and were spending their evenings on the town with hip New York movers and shakers like Bill and Chessy Rayner; Baby Jane Holzer, whom Tom Wolfe had immortalized in 1964 as “The Girl of the Year”; her good friend Nicky Haslam, the British art director of Show magazine; Andy Warhol; and Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue.
Along with his great fashion idol Fred Astaire, Dean Acheson, Bill Blass, Miles Davis, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Diana Vreeland’s husband, banker Thomas Reed Vreeland, Ahmet had been named as one of the best-dressed men in the world in a piece entitled “The Art of Wearing Clothes” by his good friend George Frazier in the September 1960 issue of Esquire magazine. “Dedicated to chic living,” Ahmet, in Frazier’s words, “buys ready-made suits at J. Press (around $100 each and has them recut for around $50)” by “the legendary valet of the Algonquin Hotel in New York.”
Frazier also noted that when Ahmet “somehow came into possession of a suit” made by the famed tailor E. Tautz of Savile Row in London in 1923, the year of his birth, “he promptly put it into a protective cellophane covering and hung it in a closet. It has remained there ever since, emerging only when he wears it on some opulent occasion or when he permits clothes-conscious male visitors the privilege of admiring its splendid cut, caressing its incomparable stitching.” As Miriam Bienstock would later say, “Ahmet and George Frazier used to talk to each other about clothes like two girls shopping.”
In what even then seemed like the most unlikely manner imaginable, Ahmet put an end to the long dry spell at Atlantic by signing a husband-and-wife duo whose onstage garb became as vital to their success as their music. At a time when the hippie revolution was just getting underway in California, no one on the East Coast had ever seen anyone who looked or dressed like Sonny and Cher. And while the pair did not sound like anyone who had ever recorded for his label, Ahmet still somehow managed to hear money in their music.
The son of Italian immigrant parents from Detroit, Salvatore Philip “Sonny” Bono dropped out of high school in Los Angeles and went to work as a box boy and a meat truck driver before he started writing songs for Art Rupe at Speciality Records. After replacing the legendary Bumps Blackwell as a staff producer there, Bono left the label and began working for Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood.
With songwriter and arranger Jack Nitzsche, whom Keith Richards would later call “the man who actually made Phil Spector by putting the sounds together,” Sonny wrote “Needles and Pins,” a hit for Jackie DeShannon and later for the Searchers. A music business veteran who had not yet really made a name for himself, he was twenty-eight years old when he met his future wife and singing partner in Aldo’s Coffee Shop, a celebrity hangout in L.A.
Then sixteen years old, Cherilyn Sarkisian had been born in El Centro, a small city fourteen miles north of the Mexica
n border in Imperial County, a largely agricultural area. Her father, an Armenian truck driver, and her mother, Georgia Holt, born Jackie Jean Crouch in Arkansas, divorced when she was a child. Severely dyslexic, Cher dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles, where her mother was then pursuing a career in acting and modeling.
After Sonny brought Cher to Gold Star, she sang backup vocals on legendary Phil Spector productions like “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers. Jack Nitzsche hired Sonny and Cher as backup singers for a recording session attended by most of Phil Spector’s regular studio musicians, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jackie DeShannon, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys that Charlie Greene and Brian Stone were producing.
“There were thirty people singing background,” Stone recalled, “but Cher had this killer voice. We had her standing like fifty feet from the mike all the way in the back of the studio but all you could hear was her. After the session that night, we took them back to our office and signed them to manage them.” Greene and Stone also signed Sonny and Cher to recording and publishing contracts, thereby enabling them to control their future in the business.
As an agent would later describe the pair of legendary hustlers who would soon dominate the music management scene on the Sunset Strip, “Greene and Stone wore dollar signs on gold chains around their necks. That’s how obvious they were. And they signed up everything that moved and wound up owning huge publishing rights on a lot of acts.” In the words of bass player Bruce Palmer of Buffalo Springfield, whom the two men also managed, “Greene and Stone were the sleaziest, most underhanded, backstabbing motherfuckers in the business. They were the best.”
Born Charles Greenberg on Long Island, New York, Greene had “ferried performers” like Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis, and Louis Prima and Keely Smith “around Manhattan nightclubs in his job as low-level press agent for Rogers & Cowan.” Stone would later describe his boyhood friend and partner as “short and kind of stocky. He looked like John Belushi and he walked around with a phone attached to his head and he was a schmoozer. I had been an accountant and studied law and I was quiet and he was much more outgoing. That was why we were such a great team.”
After working briefly as publicists for Lionel Hampton, the pair hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where they set up shop in an unlocked dressing room at Revue Studios and began soliciting work as press agents from actors. When the head of the studio learned what they were doing, he had them thrown off the lot.
By the time the pair signed Sonny and Cher to a management contract in return for 25 percent of their earnings, Greene and Stone were “living with two hookers in the Hollywood Hills. Sonny and Cher were broke so they came to live with us. Cher was a clueless kid with pimples all over her face. She had a big nose and would never wear a dress, always pants. She was like this crazy pachuco kid who was very quiet. Cher’s mother was around but she didn’t like Sonny and did not want them to be together.”
While living with Greene and Stone, Sonny went to the piano one night and “wrote this song, ‘Baby Don’t Go.’ He wrote the lyrics on a shirt cardboard and woke us up in the middle of the night and said, ‘I want to play this for you,’ and we said, ‘We love it. It’s a great song. We gotta go record this.’ He said, ‘You think so?’ We had no money so we hocked this old dictating equipment from our office for five hundred bucks to a friend and went into the studio the next day.”
Greene and Stone then called the A&R man at Warner-Reprise Records with whom Sonny and Cher had already made a verbal agreement to release their remake of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” under the name Caesar and Cleo. Because the managers “just wanted our five hundred bucks back,” they persuaded Mo Ostin to come to their office at 7715 Sunset Strip to listen to their new demo. Born Morris Meyer Ostrovsky in New York City, Ostin had worked as Frank Sinatra’s accountant before being hired by the singer to head his label, Reprise Records, which was subsequently bought by Warner Brothers.
In Stone’s words, “We play him ‘Baby Don’t Go.’ He says, ‘I love this record.’ We say, ‘You’re going to be a little stunned by this. But this is Caesar and Cleo. Kill the other record and put this one out.’ ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘It’s scheduled to come out in a week.’ Charlie and I went crazy. We said, ‘Mo, put this out too. Under another name. Whichever one hits, you’ll have it.’ He says, ‘What do I call them?’ We say, ‘Why don’t you call them Sonny and Cher?’ ”
When Ostin asked the managers what they wanted from the deal, they told him Caesar and Cleo “were five percent artists. ‘Make it eight and a half percent and we’ll take a little piece of the override and give us back our $500. Send us the agreement and it’s yours.’ What we didn’t realize was that he was steaming about it. We expected them to sign Sonny to a long-term contract but they were so pissed off that they made it a one-record deal for ‘Baby Don’t Go’ for eight and a half percent and a thousand bucks and we signed it and said, ‘Sonny, you’re free. We can now sign you and Cher as a separate act to another label.’ ”
Although “Love Is Strange” by Caesar and Cleo went nowhere, “Baby Don’t Go” became a hit in Los Angeles and Dallas. After doing a session in L.A. with Nino Tempo and April Stevens, a brother-and-sister act for whom he had produced an unlikely B-side hit entitled “Deep Purple” on Atco in 1964, Ahmet and Nino Tempo were driving down Sunset Boulevard “with the radio on in the car” when Tempo said, “How can I get a sound like the drummer on this record?” Ahmet asked him who they were, “and he told me Sonny and Cher. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Sonny and Cher? That’s Caesar and Cleo.’ ”
Ahmet already knew Sonny as the “young man” who “played the tambourine and helped me get musicians when we had sessions in California. I put him in the band with the tambourine so he could get scale and make some extra money and he was very nice. He was a friend of Phil Spector’s and he had a girlfriend and he wanted to make records and they called themselves Caesar and Cleo.”
After contacting Greene and Stone, Ahmet, in Stone’s words, “came up to our office. I had never met him before but I knew who Atlantic was and I idolized the label. Sonny loved Ahmet and we adored him and he said, ‘I wanna sign this act.’ ” Even though love was flowing like water in Greene and Stone’s office on the Sunset Strip that day, the managers were not about to put Sonny and Cher on Atlantic without first determining how much Ahmet really loved them.
“We said, ‘Ahmet, we love you and Sonny loves you and we think you’re the greatest and we idolize you and Atlantic is the greatest. But you’re a black label. How are you going to break a white pop act?’ And he said, ‘Man, listen, no problem. Just in case you forgot, we had Bobby Darin.’ By then, Bobby was already long gone from Atlantic. ‘Ahmet, will you be able to break a pop act?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m gonna tell you something. I’m going to make this label a pop label.’ We said, ‘Ahmet, come on, man.’ And he said, ‘I’m gonna bust my ass to break this act. They’re great.’ ”
When Greene and Stone asked for an 81/2 percent deal for Sonny and Cher, Ahmet said, “No problem, man.” After the managers informed Ahmet they had also signed Cher as a solo act on Imperial Records, Ahmet replied, “Doesn’t bother me, man. I want the act. I want Sonny and Cher.” In Stone’s words, “So we ended up with three separate agreements. Each label allowed they knew of the other and everything was fine.”
What possessed Ahmet to give Greene and Stone everything they wanted in return for Sonny and Cher, whose music was as far from his own taste as possible, no one can ever say for sure. Tuned into a frequency only he could hear, Ahmet had recognized something in “Baby Don’t Go” that led him to believe Atlantic could achieve commercial success with a sound that can most charitably be described as pop masquerading as fake folk rock.
Although Stone would later say that “Ahmet had no clue as to what was then happening on the Sunset Strip,” he did understand that songs about youthful rebellion and teenage an
gst had always sold well. And while Sonny and Cher had already packaged themselves as a pair of shaggy-haired, vaguely psychedelic social outcasts, their onstage demeanor echoed that of a duo whose music Ahmet knew very well indeed.
As Brian Stone recalled, “Charlie and I had come out of New York where two of our best friends had been Keely Smith and Louie Prima. We used to handle them and they were our heroes and that was who we wanted Sonny and Cher to become. When they did their show onstage, they would be like loxes. Sonny would be a little more animated than Cher but kids really responded to them and loved this little love thing they had. They were like teenaged lovers. Although we never formulated it that way, Sonny and Cher were like a teenaged Keely Smith and Louie Prima. Years later, Keely ran into Cher at a party and she ignored her and Keely said, ‘She’s me. Doesn’t she know that?’ ”
A year after “Baby Don’t Go” became a hit, Sonny came up with “I Got You Babe.” Greene and Stone loved the song and when Bob Skaff at Imperial Records, who “had great ears” heard it, “He said, ‘That’s my record. I want that record. That’s the greatest song I ever heard. It’s a number one song.’ Ahmet heard the song but he didn’t get it. The other side of ‘I Got You Babe’ was ‘It’s Gonna Rain Outside.’ Nesuhi heard that first and said it was the hit. Ahmet wasn’t blown away by ‘I Got You Babe’ but we knew it was a big record, a smash, so we put it out.”