The Last Sultan Read online

  The most significant moment of Ahmet’s life in Bern occurred when his father brought home a motion picture projector. Ahmet would later remember watching silent films starring Charlie Chaplin. No matter how many times Ahmet’s father showed these films, his children never wanted them to stop. As a special treat, Ahmet and his sister would occasionally be taken to the cinema, which they adored.

  In 1931, Mehmet Munir was posted to Paris as ambassador. His family moved with him into a house at 33 rue de Villejust in the 18th Arrondissement, the bohemian district of Montmartre. Soon after moving to Paris, Ahmet’s mother began looking for a new governess to care for her two younger children. Ahmet and Selma were sitting on the floor of their playroom when their mother entered with the woman she was considering for the job.

  As Ahmet’s mother talked to her, Ahmet leaned over to his sister and whispered in her ear, “I don’t like this woman. See what I’m going to do.” Taking the scissors he and Selma had been using to cut up pictures, Ahmet crawled over to the woman and began cutting her skirt. She screamed, “I can’t take care of savages like these!” Ahmet’s mother, who had to pay for the skirt, was horrified and punished her son.

  A very imaginative child, Ahmet also invented elaborate fantasy games to play with his sister. Using a broomstick as a mast, he would pretend the sofa was a small boat in which they were sailing around the world and being tossed about by huge waves only to be marooned on an island where they were then attacked by natives.

  Along with his brother, Nesuhi, who attended the upper school, Ahmet was sent to the exclusive Petit Lycée Janson de Sailly on the rue de la Pompe in the 16th Arrondissement, where the poet and critic Stephan Mallarmé, the actor Jean Gabin, and the filmmaker Jean Renoir had been before them. Always a far better student than his older brother, Ahmet regularly achieved perfect scores in French and calculus and began studying English. Now listening to records by Josephine Baker, the Mills Brothers, Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and Louis Armstrong, Ahmet would travel with his mother each year to Deauville for the Concours d’Elegance, where the most fashionable cars of the day were on display.

  In 1931 at the age of eight, Ahmet was taken back to Turkey by his mother so he could be circumcised in accordance with Islamic law. While the family was living in Switzerland and France, Ahmet would sometimes say how beautiful his physical surroundings were only to be told by others in the household, “It’s nothing. Turkey is so much more beautiful.” He soon came to believe the land of his birth was “an incredible, wonderful paradise.”

  As Ahmet walked with his mother from the central railway station in Istanbul down a street full of holes with lights that did not work, he turned to her and said, “Mother, what happened here? Did a bomb fall? I mean, it’s so dirty.” As Ahmet would later say, “And then I noticed all the people walking around without shoes on. Instead of shoes, they had pieces of cloth that were tied together with strings and I said, ‘How could you talk—why did everybody lie to me about how fantastic this country is?’ It took me a few weeks to look beyond the poverty and to see an inner beauty which exists in a country.”

  At his own request in 1932, Mehmet Munir was transferred to England, where he assumed his new post as the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. In London, he and his wife were presented to the king and queen. Although Ahmet did not accompany them, Nesuhi did take him to see a duke who changed the course of both their lives.

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  Nine years old and barely able to speak English, Ahmet was wearing a beret as he stepped off the train from Paris with his family in London and immediately got into a fight with “a couple of ruffians who were hanging around the railway station.” Swept up into a rarefied life of luxury and privilege in a country where the class system was still in place, he would have no further contact with anyone from the street in England. In a city where the fog was often still so thick his mother panicked one day when she let go of his hand for a moment only to lose sight of him, Ahmet’s childhood soon became far more structured than before. In no small part this was due to the heightened nature of his mother’s social life.

  After Mehmet Munir presented his credentials to the Court of St. James’s on July 23, 1932, he and his wife were invited to dine with King George V and Queen Mary. Fearing she might lose her balance as she was introduced to the queen, Ahmet’s mother, who was overweight at the time, carefully practiced her curtsy before going out that night. When she called upon the Duchess of York, the mother of the future Queen Elizabeth II, the two women discussed their daughters, both of whom were about the same age.

  Ahmet and Nesuhi were sent to school at the French Lycée in Cromwell Gardens in South Kensington. In the Turkish ambassador’s residence at 69 Portland Place in Marylebone, Ahmet and his sister ate their meals separately from their parents, whom “they hardly ever saw.” Their new governess, Miss Whittingham, who “was very British and very strict,” had previously looked after the Duke and Duchess of York’s daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and so made Ahmet and Selma dress each night for dinner.

  “We wore our party clothes and Miss Whittingham wore evening gowns, rose or yellow chiffon dresses with matching satin shoes,” Ahmet’s sister would later say. “We had dinner in the dining room but at a much earlier time than our parents. In accordance with Miss Whittingham’s rules of etiquette, I led the procession into the dining room with Miss Whittingham behind me and Ahmet third and last. I don’t know how we did it but we were even taught how to eat grapes with a knife and fork.”

  In London, Selma first realized her brother “was interested in women from an early age.” When their new governess wanted to undress both children so she could put them to bed, six-year-old Selma refused to let her do so but “Ahmet just sort of left himself in her hands and threw himself at her. He wanted her to undress him.”

  Ahmet was ten years old when Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, “the King of Jazz,” came to London for the first time on June 12, 1933, to perform with “His Famous Orchestra” at the London Palladium. The grandson of a former slave, Ellington was then thirty-four years old. Raised in Washington, D.C., he had begun taking piano lessons when he was seven years old, written his first composition at the age of fourteen, and begun his career as a professional musician four years later.

  Duke Ellington’s two-week engagement at the Palladium was a cultural event of major proportions, changing not only how he performed but also the way in which his music was perceived. Long before Ellington’s genius was fully appreciated in America, British audiences demanded he play his more serious extended compositions as well as the dance music “typically expected of black artists in the jazz world.” English critics compared Ellington’s work to Arnold Schönberg’s twelve tone system, while also noting its relationship to “the primitive, discordant, rule-breaking” rhythms of sixteenth-century Elizabethan madrigals.

  On Ellington’s opening night in the Palladium, the curtain opened to reveal an expansive stage decorated with three huge cardboard cutouts of cartoonlike black musicians, all of which would now be considered racist. In a pearl gray suit, white shirt, and tie, the impossibly elegant and regal-looking Duke sat behind a concert grand piano. Before he could play a single note, the audience of nearly four thousand, who had paid from 9 pence (about 20 cents) to 5 shillings (about a dollar and a quarter) to see the show, greeted him with the kind of extended ovation that had before been given only to well-known classical performers in England.

  Facing an orchestra composed of three trumpet players, three saxophone players, a banjo player, three trombone players, three clarinet players, and a drummer, Ellington kicked off the show with “Ring Dem Bells.” During what was a full-fledged variety show, he played “Bugle Call Rag” and “Black and Tan Fantasy” and brought out Ivie Anderson who sang “Stormy Weather” while leaning against a marble pillar. The dancers Bill Bailey and Derby Wilson gave “a display of neat and fast footwork,” Bessie Dudley, “the original snake hips girl,” did
“an impressive rhythmic dancing turn,” and trumpeter Freddy Jenkins sang the Sophie Tucker favorite “Some of These Days.” Ellington brought “the program to a happy conclusion” with “the somber strains of ‘Mood Indigo.’ ”

  The “scores of smartly dressed young English people” in the expensive seats, among them the Duke of Kent, the third son of King George V, stomped their feet, shouted, whistled, and applauded in approval as did the “hundreds in the hinterlands of the Palladium.” After the show, “a small army of autograph seekers,” sixty women among them, “besieged the Duke and his musicians” outside the stage door.

  In what one English jazz scholar would later call “a precursor to Beatlemania,” fans clung to Ellington’s limousine as he was driven from the hall. After paying Ellington the highest broadcast fee in its history so he would repeat his stunning performance on the radio, the BBC extended the program for five minutes so Ellington could play “Mood Indigo” in its entirety.

  For Ahmet, who was taken to the show by his brother, the evening was an ear-shattering, life-changing experience he would never forget. “It was nothing like hearing the records,” Ahmet would later say. “The engineers at the time were afraid that too much bass or too much drums would crack the grooves on the 78s so they recorded them very low. And when you heard these bands in person, it was explosive. This boom-boom-boom incredible rhythm. It went through your body. I went, ‘Oh my God, this is jazz. This is not this bullshit thing we hear on a record player. This is real jazz.’ . . . The very loudness of the sound, the reverberation of the bass and drum in the theater frightened me, it was so powerful . . . I’d never heard music with that kind of strength . . . For the first time, I saw these beautiful black men wearing shining white tuxedos and these brass instruments gleaming. It was an incredible sight.”

  A year later, Nesuhi took Ahmet to see Cab Calloway at the Palladium. Although Ahmet would later often confuse the dates of these two shows as well as what the musicians had been wearing, the transformative effect of those magical nights at the London Palladium made him want to make records as powerful as the live performances he had experienced as a boy.

  When in June 1934 Mehmet Munir was posted to Washington, D.C., as the ambassador to the United States from the Republic of Turkey, Ahmet was very excited. In his words, “I was twelve when I got to America so my impressions were that I knew about cowboys and Indians but the most important thing for me was jazz. And I was dying to see Louis Armstrong and I thought, ‘Well, that’s where we’re going.’ ”

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  Leaving his family behind, Mehmet Munir went by himself to Washington so he could begin representing his country’s interests in America as soon as possible. Ahmet’s mother then returned with her children to Turkey for a summer visit that extended for months as she prepared for the long journey to a land where no one she knew had ever gone.

  In the very formal, stilted English he had learned at school in London, Ahmet regularly wrote letters to his father in which he expressed his desire to come to America because he thought “there were very many cowboys there.” Although he had already received one from someone else, he also thanked his father for the gift of a new Kodak camera. Repeatedly, Ahmet asked for soccer journals, which did not then exist in America. He concluded one of his letters by writing, “I kiss you a hundred of times, Your dear son, A. Munir.”

  During the last week in December 1934, Ahmet, his mother, and his sister traveled to Genoa on the Orient Express and then boarded the ship that would take them to America. At a time when, as Ahmet would say, “making the trip from Europe to America was a major event,” his family did so in the grand manner to which they had all become accustomed. In first-class, they embarked on the SS Rex, the luxurious Italian ocean liner that in August 1933 had won the Blue Riband for the fastest westward crossing of the Atlantic by completing the journey from Gibraltar to New York in the astonishing time of four days, thirteen hours, and fifty-eight minutes.

  As they journeyed to a country gripped by the Great Depression, Ahmet, his mother, and sister occupied a suite that was “a rung above the first-class cabins and certainly the most luxurious accommodation the ship had to offer.” In an era when the average salary in America was less than $1,400, their passage cost more than most people in the United States earned in an entire year. Because it was the custom for ambassadors and their families to be sent abroad in the best possible circumstances, all their expenses were paid for by the Turkish government.

  With them from Turkey, his mother had brought two Armenian families who were in third-class on the Rex. “But when the sea got rough,” Ahmet recalled, “she went down to get them. We had this huge suite and we had all these poor people sleeping with us. Because down there, it was much worse. Where we were, at least you could look out the window. It had air.” Ahmet and his family spent New Year’s Eve on the ship but, in Selma’s words, because the passage was so stormy, “There were only a few passengers well enough to take part in the festivities, which consisted of dinner and a dance orchestra with nobody dancing. It was hard enough to keep one’s balance just standing up.”

  The crossing became so rough at one point that Ahmet’s mother, who blamed herself for having postponed their trip until midwinter, tearfully embraced her two children while telling them she was the cause of their impending deaths. Neither Ahmet nor Selma, both of whom “enjoyed roaming around the empty corridors of the ship, trying to keep our balance as we superiorly belittled those who were throwing up in their cabins,” took her seriously. To keep her children busy, she gave them “thousands of dollars” to bet on a “fake horse race with dummy horses” and a dice game that was held each afternoon on the ship. “My sister and I won every day,” Ahmet would later say. “We used to go back and give her all these huge sums of money.”

  After the Rex landed in New York, the family was greeted by the consul general of Turkey and two people from his staff. As Ahmet recalled, “We arrived in the evening and the first thing I said was, ‘I want to see 42nd Street.’ Because I’d seen the movie, right? We drove down 42nd Street, Times Square. It was incredible. It was America the way I expected it.”

  After staying in a hotel that night, the family took a train to Washington, on which Ahmet would later remember seeing “the black Pullman porters who would say, ‘Yes sir, I’ll give you a shine.’ ” At Union Station, the family was met by the Turkish embassy limousine, a navy blue Packard. Eleven and a half years old, Ahmet had finally arrived in the land he had only read about in comic books. His initial expectations of America had also been formed by Miss Whittingham, his “very strict” and “difficult” English governess in London, who had told him “Americans were savages. . . . They spoke like peasants and were not upper-class people at all. They were just ruffians.”

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  By the time Ahmet arrived in Washington, his father had already become embroiled in a heated controversy for which none of his previous diplomatic service could have prepared him. In the fall of 1934, a novel entitled The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, an Austrian Jew who had served as an Austro-Hungarian artillery corporal during World War I, was published in America to uniformly positive reviews.

  Written in a very grand, florid style, the novel recounts the heroic stand taken by its hero, Gabriel Bagradian, to defend his fellow Armenians against deportations, mass murder, and rape at the hands of the “Young Turks” who had led the Ottoman Empire in 1915. While as many as a million and a half Armenians of the Christian faith were killed during this period, the Republic of Turkey steadfastly denied that such acts had ever occurred. Any reference to the Armenian massacre as genocide was considered a grievous insult to Turkish pride.

  Although Mustafa Kemal had denounced the massacres as “a shameful act” in 1919, he wanted to distance his new nation from the actions of the Young Turks as well as the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. To bind his people into a single nation, he also “outlawed ethnic and minority identity” and removed all public reference
s to Armenians within Turkey.

  When Irving Thalberg, “The Boy Wonder” who was then the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began implementing the studio’s plan to film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the government of Turkey reacted swiftly to the news by sending its new ambassador to America to meet with Wallace Murray, the State Department’s chief of Near Eastern Affairs. During their meeting, Mehmet Munir told Murray he “earnestly hoped” the studio “would desist from presenting any such picture, which would almost certainly stir up anti-Turkish feelings in the country.”

  Pursuing the matter as though this was now his top priority, Mehmet Munir continued corresponding with Murray. He also visited the Hays Office in New York where the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced to insist the film be terminated and informed MGM’s legal counsel that all of the studio’s films would be banned in Turkey if the company insisted on making this movie. In June 1935, he agreed to accept two copies of the script so he could read one himself while sending the other to the Foreign Affairs Office in Ankara.

  In Turkey, the story had become headline news. On a daily basis, newspapers published anti-American and anti-Jewish harangues protesting the project. The issue soon became so inflamed that a group of Armenian intellectuals gathered in a churchyard in Istanbul where they set the book and a photograph of its author on fire as they sang the Turkish national anthem to prove their loyalty to the government.

  In September 1935, Mehmet Munir contacted Secretary of State Cordell Hull to inform him the Turkish government considered the script “utterly negative. Kindly exert your high influence with a view to precluding the carrying out of the project.” He then told an official at Loew’s, the company that owned MGM, “If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it. It rekindles the Armenian question. The Armenian question is settled. How else would you explain the presence of Armenians in the Turkish Parliament? The movie will only stir up troubles about a situation that has been smoothed out.”