The Last Sultan Page 22

  Promoting the duo as “the greatest act you’ve ever seen,” Greene and Stone decided to break Sonny and Cher internationally. “Only two or three companies had international distribution so we had to release it country by country on the different labels Atlantic had deals with in each country.” Once the record began climbing up the charts, the managers asked Ahmet to put up the money so Sonny and Cher could tour overseas.

  “We told Ahmet we wanted to take them to Europe to tour so we could break them across the world. We said, ‘Ahmet, we’re going to bring a film crew and make a film called Sonny and Cher in London. He said, ‘You guys are crazy. How much is it going to cost?’ He never wanted to part with any money but we finally got him to agree to do it.”

  On their first day in London as Greene and Stone were checking into the Hilton with Sonny and Cher, “They saw what we looked like and would not let us in. Charlie was a hothead and he leaped across the desk and punched the guy. They said, ‘Get out of here,’ and we called a press conference outside the hotel. No one knew who Sonny and Cher were but we were on the front pages of all the newspapers for being kicked out of the hotel.”

  Years later, Greene and Stone would learn that “Ahmet, Jerry, and Nesuhi were trying to sell Atlantic at this point to ABC-Paramount. They were in terrible, terrible condition and they had a deal pending for somewhere between three and seven million bucks for Atlantic. After ‘I Got You Babe’ became a monster smash, they killed the sale to ABC-Paramount and Ahmet told me this was the biggest record he’d ever had in his life. It was his first million-seller worldwide and crossed Atlantic over into new markets.”

  Released in July 1965, “I Got You Babe” went to number one on the American pop charts and stayed there for three weeks. Delighted by their success, Ahmet threw “a giant party” for Sonny and Cher when they returned to New York after their European tour at which they met Baby Jane Holzer and Andy Warhol, whose art would reflect the outsized, cartoonlike image of pop stardom the duo were already projecting.

  Ahmet then called Greene and Stone in California to ask if Sonny and Cher could “play at this dinner party. It was the first time Jacqueline Kennedy was going out since Jack Kennedy had died and they asked her who she wanted to play and she asked for Sonny and Cher and we said yes, absolutely.”

  In less than two years, Sonny and Cher had gone from living with Charlie Greene and Brian Stone and two hookers in a house in the Hollywood Hills to mixing with the crème de la crème of café society in New York City. Their improbable rise from the street to a penthouse at the Waldorf Towers to perform for the former first lady was the stuff of dreams. It would soon become the paradigm for success in a business that Ahmet and Mica had somehow made socially acceptable.

  2

  Although Ahmet did not attend the dinner party for Jacqueline Kennedy, he did go to great expense to fly Sonny and Cher, their managers, and a five-piece band that included Mac Rebennack, soon to be known as Dr. John, first-class from Los Angeles to New York, where he put them all up in style at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. On the afternoon of the party, Greene and Stone went to the penthouse of the Waldorf-Astoria to check out the apartment owned by Charles Engelhard Jr. and his wife, Jane, a fabulously wealthy couple who were good friends of Ahmet and Mica. Known for his extensive mining interests in South Africa, Engelhard was the real-life inspiration for Ian Fleming’s fictional character Auric Goldfinger.

  “It was a regular living room,” Stone would later say, “about fifteen-by-twenty and we set up a five-piece band. We didn’t know where the hell we were and we were walking around this monstrous, unbelievable apartment with thousands of platinum plates on the wall and this daffy lady who turned out to be Mrs. Engelhard gave us a tip, a hundred-dollar bill, because she thought we were members of the band.”

  The guest list for the party was small, just thirteen people having been invited for dinner, Nesuhi and Diana Vreeland among them. Jackie Kennedy was so pleased by Sonny and Cher’s performance that she asked them to repeat it. After they had done so, the former first lady complimented Sonny by telling him he looked “rather Shakespearean” and then made pleasant conversation with the band.

  Decked out in a pair of tight hip-high green suede pants and a short military jacket with a double row of buttons she had bought that day at Bendel’s, Cher caught the eye of Diana Vreeland. “My dear,” the esteemed editor of Vogue told her, “you have a pointed head! You’re absolutely beautiful.” As Cher recalled, “And the next thing I knew, Richard Avedon was coming out to take my picture.” At some point during Cher’s visit to New York, the usually taciturn singer also supplied Ahmet with the punch line for a story he never tired of telling.

  At a dinner party in Los Angeles some years before, Ahmet had met this “very tall, statuesque lady” who “looked as though she could have been a showgirl in Las Vegas.” When Ahmet asked her what she did, she told him she was interested in metaphysics. “Oh,” Ahmet said. “You mean Plato, Aristotle, that sort of thing. She said, ‘Oh, no, Dr. Wilson who has the Church of Metaphysical Science.’ ”

  Ahmet then said something that made everyone laugh “but she started to cry and said I was insulting her religion.” After Ahmet apologized for his remark, she told him, “I’ll only forgive you if you promise to go to the church with me tomorrow.” The next morning, Ahmet escorted her to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. After being ushered into a private box where “the only other occupant was the actor and fellow church member Mickey Rooney,” Ahmet dutifully listened to “a good sermon” that was “a cross between the usual kind of born-again Christian doctrine and Dale Carnegie advice on how to be successful in life.”

  After he had seen the woman a few more times, she said, “You know, I have a daughter who is a great singer.” Ahmet replied, “Listen, if we’re going to be friends, let’s not talk about daughters who are going to be singers, uncles who write songs, and so forth. It never seems to work.” She agreed and the two eventually ended their relationship.

  During Cher’s visit to New York to perform for Jackie Kennedy, the singer told Ahmet, “I was very surprised to find out that you were friends with my mother.” Perplexed, he replied, “What are you talking about? I don’t know your mother.” Cher said, “Yes, you do.” At which point her mother, Georgia Holt, walked into the room. As Ahmet would later say, “Who is it, except this woman who was interested in metaphysical science. She said, ‘I told you I had a daughter who sings.’ I said, ‘Oh, good Lord!’ ”

  3

  Emboldened by their success, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone continued doing all they could to promote Sonny and Cher in Los Angeles. Greene, who invented the term “heavy” to describe a song and then persuaded deejay The Real Don Steele to use the phrase as often as possible on his popular KHJ radio show, began offering the station the right to air exclusive advance copies of English hits for a week. “And in return,” Stone would later say, “they had to play us so many times and Ahmet would go crazy because we would put the record on the radio before there were even records pressed. We were acting like promotion guys.”

  Because a record could not be played on KHJ “unless it was in the charts,” Greene and Stone “had people who worked for us call stores and make orders and we sent people in to buy the record. KFWB and KRLA were in the same market and they would call Ahmet and scream at him and Ahmet would blow his top and call me and say, ‘You’re killing me with the radio stations!’ They would tell him they weren’t going to play any Atlantic records. He would say, ‘How did that record get on the radio?’ And we would say, ‘Ahmet, we don’t know. We’re not sure.’ He knew we were full of shit. But he forgave it all because we were making him money.”

  After the managers had set up a film deal for Sonny and Cher with William Friedkin slated to direct his first full-length movie, “Sonny became a real power freak and began going to all the writers’ meetings and telling everybody what to do and everybody was freaking out. His agents wer
e with him all the time and they were saying how much do your managers get and he would say 25 percent and they would say, ‘What? Are you out of your mind? I’ll do that for less.’ ”

  The rapidly deteriorating relationship between Sonny and his managers came to an end when a story about Sonny and Cher entitled “The Children of Bob Dylan” appeared in Life magazine. “There was a big giant picture of them and on the fifth page, there was a half-page photo of Charlie and me sitting in our limousine. We bought it because Ahmet had a limousine. ‘Oh, he has a limousine? We have to get a limousine.’ ” As Jimmy McDonough would later write, Greene and Stone bought “an $18,500 Lincoln limousine with a Blackgama mink interior, a bar with full sterling service, and an eight track player, with an elegant white-gloved black chauffeur with a sideline in all sorts of contraband.”

  When the Life magazine article appeared, “Sonny was really infuriated. He said, ‘That should have been a page on me. How did that happen?’ He was really pissed at us. Shortly after that, we got a letter from an attorney Sonny had hired who said our agreements with Sonny and Cher were terminated. Sonny never even called us. We never talked to them again. It wasn’t that our careers were dead. These were like our best friends who had left us without saying a word and wouldn’t talk to us anymore. We were broken.”

  Greene and Stone however did have Sonny and Cher “locked up in ironclad contracts.” When Ahmet began demanding that the duo get back into the studio, the managers told him Sonny and Cher had signed with them as recording artists and so he could not put out anything by them until the conflict had been resolved. “Ahmet was freaking out of his mind. He had this giant act and we had said no. And he said, ‘They don’t want anything to do with you anymore.’ We said, ‘Ahmet, we don’t care what they want. If they want out, they have to buy us out.’ Sonny hated us but he had no real money. We were in a deadlock that went for weeks.”

  In need of new product to feed the market Sonny and Cher had created for their music, Ahmet found himself in the middle of a dispute that was hurting not only his label but also all concerned. Stone then called Ahmet in the middle of the night and said, “Ahmet, I’ve got the solution for this. ‘What are you talking about, man?’ ‘I know how to solve this. Sonny buys us out because you put up the money and when he does, we give up all our percentages and you recoup the money. It’s airtight. You give us the cash and loan it to Sonny and you get your money back in front.’ And Ahmet said, ‘That’s great, man. We can do that.’ ”

  After a good deal of negotiating, the managers agreed to accept a buyout of $350,000. Greene and Stone also specified that the sum—today about $2.3 million—be paid to them in cash. The pair then flew to New York, where an Atlantic representative escorted them to the bank to withdraw the money. “We went in there with an attaché case and they had guards and we were in a private room counting it out. We had never seen that much money in our lives and then Charlie and I suddenly realized, ‘Holy shit, we have to walk through the street with this.’ So we hired an armed guard to protect us while we walked back to the Plaza Hotel. Charlie said, ‘What if this guard hits us over the head while we’re walking in the street?’ We were so paranoid. We got back to the hotel and we were hysterical, playing cards with big bundles of cash and throwing it on the beds. If it would have gone into our account, we would never have seen it. We wanted to see it.”

  While Sonny and Cher did not go on “to make that much money for Atlantic” and left the label in 1971 after a period of declining popularity, the deal proved to be extremely profitable for Atlantic in the long run. In 2009, the gross earnings from Sonny Bono’s songwriting copyrights were still “something like eight hundred thousand dollars, and that was for a quarter.”

  After their recording career ended, Sonny and Cher hosted a wildly popular variety show that ran on CBS until the couple divorced in 1974. A conservative Republican who served as the mayor of Palm Springs, California, for four years, Sonny was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1994. While serving his second term as a congressman, he died in 1998 at the age of sixty-two as the result of injuries suffered in a skiing accident. Having won the Academy Award as Best Actress for her role in Moonstruck in 1988, Cher continues appearing in films and still performs on a regular basis in Las Vegas.

  In retrospect, the most astonishing aspect of Ahmet’s dealings with their managers was that he could come up with the money to pay off Greene and Stone without having to ask for a loan or a line of credit. A payment that might have sunk a smaller independent label in 1966 did not even make a serious dent in the vast amount of cash the partners at Atlantic had by then salted away “in various and sundry places” to serve as the label’s operating capital.

  As well as anyone, Ahmet understood that the record industry was a business of personal relationships founded on money. On the night he had thrown his huge party in New York to celebrate Sonny and Cher’s triumphant return from Europe, Ahmet had summoned Greene and Stone to a late night meeting with him, Nesuhi, and Jerry Wexler. After telling the managers how happy Atlantic was with what they had done and how proud of them they were, Ahmet said, “ ‘I’m raising your percentage from eight and a half to ten percent. And by the way, here.’ And they gave us a hundred grand as a bonus. In cash. Not recoupable. We split it fifty-fifty with Sonny. He had never seen money like that and he was blown out by what Ahmet had done and so were we. You talk about locking in a client, man. That guy. What a mensch, man.”

  In a business where it was understood that for every favor done, another favor was expected in return, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone now owed Ahmet. And so when the pair found themselves managing one of the greatest American rock bands of all time, they brought them to Atlantic.

  TWELVE

  Hey, What’s That Sound

  “When Ahmet walked into the room, you got good.”

  —Neil Young

  1

  A lifelong devotee of the sport, Ahmet was in Mexico City on June 12, 1966, watching the Tottenham Hotspur football club defeat the Mexico World Cup soccer team 1–0 when Jerry Wexler called from New York to say that Charlie Greene and Brian Stone were trying to reach him about a very talented new group they were managing who had already built up quite a following. When Wexler told him there was a lot of interest from other companies, Ahmet decided that instead of going back to New York, he would fly from Mexico City to Los Angeles to see them. As Stone would later say, “We talked to Jerry first but Jerry hated pop acts. He didn’t want to hear about it and hated all these scumbags. Only Ahmet would talk pop acts. So Ahmet came out and we all got together in my office.”

  The band Ahmet had flown to Los Angeles to meet was Buffalo Springfield. In his words, they were “very special in so many ways. First of all, the songs they wrote didn’t resemble anything that anybody else was doing. They also had three outstanding lead singers who were also great guitar players—Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay. I mean, a rock ’n’ roll band is lucky if it has one good singer and one guitar player who can really play—that alone can make them a great band. The power in Buffalo Springfield was too incredible. They were one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll bands I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Richie Furay first met Stephen Stills in Greenwich Village when they worked together in the Au Go Go Singers, the house band at the Cafe Au Go Go that Furay had formed in 1964. Born in Dallas, Texas, Stills had been raised in a military family that moved constantly. After graduating from high school in the Panama Canal Zone, he dropped out of the University of Florida to pursue a career in music.

  While touring Canada as a member of a folk rock group called the Company, Stills met Neil Young, son of the noted Canadian sportswriter, newspaper columnist, and author Scott Young, who was then performing with a group called the Squires. Musically, Stills and Young hit it off immediately and Stills told Young if he ever went to New York, he should look up Richie Furay. “A nice, uncomplicated guy” who “could sing like a bird,” Fur
ay was so impressed by Young’s songwriting talents after the two met that he began performing Young’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” as part of his solo act.

  Young and his friend bass player Bruce Palmer then drove Young’s 1953 Pontiac hearse to Los Angeles to find Stills. After searching for him for days, they were about to leave the city when they ran into Stills and Furay stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard with “music business eccentric” Barry Friedman, in whose house both musicians were then living.

  Smoking joints together, Stills, who along with Furay had already signed a personal management contract with Friedman, told Young he was going to start the “best band in Los Angeles” and invited him and Palmer to become part of it. After the four musicians added Canadian drummer Dewey Martin, who had played with Carl Perkins, the Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, the Standells, and the Dillards, they decided to name themselves after a steamroller made by the Buffalo-Springfield Roller Company that happened to be parked on the street outside Friedman’s house.

  Buffalo Springfield played their first gig at the Troubadour Folk Den on the Sunset Strip on April 11, 1966. After seeing the show, Chris Hillman, the bass player for the Byrds, booked the band to open for his group four days later in San Bernardino. That gig led to a six-week engagement at the Whisky A Go Go, where the Springfield soon became the hottest band in L.A. By their fourth or fifth concert, as Stills would later say, “We were so good it was absolutely astounding, and the first week at the Whisky A Go Go was absolutely incredible. We were just incredible, man, that’s when we peaked. After that, it was downhill.”