The Last Sultan Read online

  Due in great part to Mehmet Munir’s unrelenting efforts, MGM eventually scrapped its plan to film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Forty-seven years after the studio first purchased the rights to the book, what was generally considered an atrocious version of the novel finally made its way to the screen.

  As Peter Balakian, the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, would later say, “Munir Ertegun became a pit bull on this with the State Department. He was clearly a very successful political animal. Nevertheless, he was an absolute purveyor of the Turkish denialist narrative on the Armenians and the Armenian genocide, and it is really a dark and twisted immoral story of huge proportions.”

  “My personal view,” Ahmet’s sister Selma would later write, “is that my father did this because it was his duty to try to stop anti-Turkish propaganda in whatever form it appeared. He was certainly instructed by the government to do whatever he could to stop the film. This does not mean he condoned the actions of the Ottoman government. I was too young then to know what his personal thoughts were. All I can recall is that it was a very difficult and stressful time. I am still amazed he was able to succeed in his efforts to stop the making of a film in a democratic country like the U.S.”

  In 1994, Ahmet, who by then had become a very wealthy man, donated $3.5 million to create the M. Munir Ertegun Turkish Studies Foundation in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Four years later, Ahmet publicly conceded that deaths had in fact taken place in Armenia in 1915. Stating they were casualties of war and not part of a planned genocide, he added, “There are different interpretations of what happened.”

  In 1998, Ahmet also contacted Harut Sassounian, the publisher of The California Courier, the oldest independent English-language Armenian newspaper in the United States, to discuss the issue with him. After Ahmet’s death in December 2006, Sassounian wrote that as a precondition to their meeting Ahmet needed to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. Over a lunch that lasted for more than two hours at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, Ahmet “made it clear that he was not acknowledging the Genocide in order to appease the Armenians. He believed that it was, first of all, in Turkey’s interest to acknowledge the Genocide, because doing so would help Ankara’s application for membership in the European Union and get rid of the stigma that had haunted his native land for so many years.”

  Although Sassounian wrote it was “a shame that the public statement we had discussed regarding the Armenian Genocide never materialized,” he noted Ahmet had contacted him not because “he was pro-Armenian, but because he sincerely wanted to help erase the stigma of the Genocide from Turkey’s name.” Sassounian added, “I could not write this column while he was alive since I did not want to make him the target of hate mail and threats from Turkish extremists by alerting them that he was considering the possibility of issuing a public statement on the Armenian Genocide. Alas, he passed away without being able to do so, which is a loss for both Armenians and Turks.”

  TWO

  The Nation’s Capital

  “When I was just a record collector, a jazz fan hanging around the Howard Theatre, I got to know a lot of the sharp guys and there was this guy I called, ‘My Man Harvey.’ Everybody called him ‘My Man Harvey.’ He called himself ‘My Man Harvey.’ He was very, very well dressed and a big numbers man and everything was shiny and just perfect. There was going to be a party around midnight. ‘Come up. There’ll be a lot of girls.’ I said, ‘Fine. Yeah.’ He gave me the address and I had to walk up two flights and knock on the door. When I knocked on the door, a black lady opened it halfway and looked out and said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘Well, I was invited to come here.’ She said, ‘Who invited you?’ I said, ‘Harvey. My Man Harvey.’ ‘Just a minute.’ She closed the door and said, ‘Hey, man, there’s an ofay out here.’ So I hear Harvey’s voice inside saying, ‘What’s his name?’ She opens it and says, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Ahmet.’ She said, ‘Ahmet.’ He says, ‘Ahmet! Let that nigger in!’ ”

  —Ahmet Ertegun

  1

  In the nation’s capital, Ahmet’s life soon became as divided as the city itself. Although one fourth of its population was black, the District of Columbia in 1935 was still a Southern city where complete segregation was the rule. In great numbers after World War I, African Americans had migrated to the former “seat and center of domestic slave traffic” only to discover that because there was no industry in the city, jobs were scarce.

  In tiny wooden shacks that would not have looked out of place on some great Southern plantation before the Civil War, seven thousand African Americans still lived below the poverty line in more than a hundred ramshackle alleys littered with refuse. In the alleys, the crime rate was high, people drank heavily, knives and pistols were often used to settle domestic and gambling disputes, and few white faces were ever seen. Those who dwelled there considered “John Law” to be “the natural enemy.”

  As Selma Ertegun would later recall, one such collection of “rows of small squalid houses totally inhabited by ‘colored people’ ” was located just a few hundred yards from the palatial Turkish embassy on Sheridan Circle where she and Ahmet lived with their parents. The huge gray stone mansion had originally been built for Edward Hamlin Everett, the very wealthy industrialist who had invented the modern screw top bottle cap. Hamlin’s only instructions to George Totten Jr., the architect who had designed the American embassy in Istanbul and Izzet Pasha’s official residence while he was grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, were “to spend and to dream.”

  Totten then spent two years building a mansion at 23rd Street and Massachusetts Avenue that combined the “architectural elements of 18th century Europe with Romanesque and 15th century Italianate details.” Considered one of the most “remarkable structures” on Embassy Row, the mansion featured a huge ballroom with a parquet floor, a conservatory with stained glass windows and a mosaic ceiling, and a formal dining room in which heads of state could be entertained in style. Overlooking Rock Creek Park, the building’s rounded portico and impressive facade of fluted columns made it look much like a smaller version of the White House.

  In 1936, Kemal Ataturk decided the house should be purchased as the permanent residence of the ambassador of the Republic of Turkey to the United States. Fully furnished, the mansion cost $400,000. The modern-day equivalent of the purchase price would be more than $6 million. At a time when the president of the United States earned $75,000 a year, gasoline cost 10 cents a gallon, and the average price of a new house was less than $4,000, it was an astonishing sum.

  “So we wound up in Washington, which was nothing like 42nd Street or Times Square,” Ahmet would later say. “Suddenly, we were in this very staid, quiet, dull kind of place but the embassy was beautiful.” Even though his father was then already at war with the motion picture industry, one of the first things Ahmet did after arriving in the nation’s capital was to go with his sister to see Bing Crosby in the 1934 Paramount musical comedy Here Is My Heart. By doing so, he immediately made it plain that his life in America would be different from the one his father had envisioned for him.

  In Ahmet’s words, “I first found myself in a school called St. Albans and my sister went to National Cathedral. Very staid, conservative schools and there were no cowboys, no gangsters, no Indians, no Negroes, no nothing. No Jews. Also, no sophistication.” Ahmet liked St. Albans but “unfortunately mentioned” to his father one day that all St. Albans students were required to attend chapel each morning.

  On April 13, 1935, the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas, the headmaster at St. Albans, wrote Ahmet’s father on school stationery in response to the ambassador’s request that his son be “excused from both chapel and religious education.” Stating he would have been “glad indeed to accede to this request if by doing so a precedent was not established,” Lucas explained that because St. Albans was a church school, attendance at both chapel and weekly religious education was com
pulsory.

  Although in the past quarter century the school had admitted many non-Christian students, the Reverend Lucas wanted “Your Excellency” to understand that at St. Albans such students had “learned to regard Christianity in a more tolerant and sympathetic light.” Lucas closed his letter by writing he hoped Mehmet Munir would express his “sympathy with St. Albans’ position.”

  Three days later, Ahmet’s father replied to “Mr. Headmaster” by writing, “I am sorry to realize that you insist for my son who is a Mohammedan to attend your chapel and to have religious education. Such attendance and training being against our principles, I regret to inform you that I am obliged to send him to a school in which he will not have such obligations.”

  Ahmet was then sent to the independent, nonsectarian Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington. As he would later say, “My father took me out of that school and put me in another school where they didn’t have religion. Except they did have a religion which was American football. However, my father did not allow me to play American football because Europeans think it is a brutal sport. So most of the year when everyone was doing American football practice, I was let out and I spent that time unbeknownst to my family going to the skid row section of town looking things up and seeing what was what.”

  Never very athletic as a boy, Ahmet also broke his arm “at least three times and his shoulder once” during his childhood, thereby giving his father good reason not to allow him to play football. With his prominent forehead, thick glasses, and protruding teeth, Ahmet also looked far more like a skinny studious bookworm than someone who could compete for his school on the gridiron.

  At the Landon School, where the English accent he had acquired in London immediately set him apart from his classmates, Ahmet quickly learned how to imitate the way they spoke while also occasionally lapsing into “imitation black speech . . . like ‘What say, man?’ ” that he had picked up from Cleo Payne, an ex-fighter who worked as a janitor at the embassy. Payne, who also gave Ahmet boxing lessons, became the boy’s guide to the city’s black neighborhoods.

  Seeking refuge in music just as his mother had done in Switzerland, Ahmet set off to find the kind of jazz he had seen Duke Ellington play at the Palladium in London. “Washington was like a Southern city,” Ahmet would later say. “Totally Jim Crow. I wanted to buy jazz records. So I got in the car and the chauffeur took me to the biggest record shop in Washington, which was on G Street. They had only RCA and Brunswick records. I asked for Louis Armstrong. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t have those.’ I mean, they’d never heard Bessie Smith. This very nice woman took me aside and said, ‘Listen, if you want to buy those kind of records, you have to go to the nigger part of town . . .’ So then eventually I found the record shops in the black section, in the ghetto.”

  Telling his parents he was going to the movies, Ahmet would head straight for stores like the Quality Radio Repair Shop on Seventh and T Streets owned by Max Silverman, later known as “Waxie Maxie,” where old jazz 78s could be bought for as little as “a dime apiece or three for a quarter.” Living a dual life that would provide him with a rigorous classical education as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz that was second to none, Ahmet began learning “things that others my age did not know. I learned that at Brooks Brothers you could have ties made to your specifications from very good material for not very much more money than off-the-rack ties and I learned things about black America.”

  Demonstrating a taste for the low life he would never lose, Ahmet became “a habitué of the Gaiety Burlesque Theater,” where the skits were “like commedia dell’arte.” He also befriended a street corner medicine man for whom he “shilled for a while” by purchasing a bottle of hair tonic that “was really just colored water for 50 cents which was a lot of money because you could eat lunch for 40 cents.” After Ahmet had given the hair tonic back in return for his 50 cents, the medicine man would treat Ahmet to a sandwich or a cup of coffee in some “greasy place” and then take him backstage at the Gaiety, where he introduced him to “all the strippers and the chorus girls and the comedians,” who were “a tough crew of people.”

  Left to his own devices, Ahmet also spent time with an “Eastern European Gypsy who ran a sideshow freak show. They’d hook you in by saying, ‘Well, if you want to go in and see a hermaphrodite without any clothes on, it costs another dollar.’ ” He also frequented “beer joints where they had black jug bands. Some of these black bands played very funky blues and there was very rough dancing. I mean coming close to the sex act kind of dancing.”

  By the time he was fourteen years old, Ahmet was also a regular at the Howard Theatre on U Street, then known in Washington as the “Black Broadway” or the “Colored Man’s Connecticut Avenue.” At the Howard, which Ahmet would later describe as “the Washington equivalent of the Apollo where all the same shows that played the Apollo would go down and play the following week in Washington,” he “got to hear everyone but I used to be the only white person and I was just fourteen. The black people were very nice to white people because they were really scared of them.”

  Even as he was getting an education on the streets, Ahmet excelled at his studies in school. At Landon, where “everything clicked” for him, “I was good in math. I was good in history. Of course I was precocious in a sense because of my brother, who had made me start to read things like D. H. Lawrence which other kids had never heard of but the teacher knew and he would say, ‘Oh, you’re not supposed to bring that up yet. That’s two years from now.’ In French and Latin, I was superior to everybody because Latin is very rigorous in European schools.” After his second year at Landon, Ahmet was elected class president. In a school where “a lot of the teachers were politically very conservative” and there were often heated arguments about the Spanish Civil War, he often found himself at odds with the “school’s more traditionalist attitude.”

  As Ahmet would later say of his family, “We were always considered to be part of the upper classes but intellectually, we were friends with Woody Guthrie and I knew John Steinbeck and his wife and ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad.’ All that was very close to our hearts. We were leftist intellectually but we lived in an embassy with sixteen servants, with limousines. It never seemed like a contradiction. I also had a great love of high living. We belonged to the Chevy Chase Club, which is the most exclusive country club in Washington. It had no Jews . . . but I think we were members only because my father was an ambassador.”

  In 1936, the somewhat confusing matter of the family’s last name was finally resolved. On June 21, 1934, in accordance with the law requiring all Turkish citizens to adopt surnames of their own choosing, Mustafa Kemal had officially become Kemal Ataturk, the “father of all Turks.” From “a long list of names that were acceptable because they were ‘pure’ Turkish words that contained no foreign elements,” Mehmet Munir chose “Eren,” which in Turkish means “he who has arrived at the divine truth,” as his new surname.

  Two years later, he was informed by the Turkish government that the quota for this name in the district where he had been born had already been filled. Mehmet Munir then chose the name “Ertegun,” which, as his daughter Selma would later explain, “is a made-up word having two components: ‘erte’ meaning ‘following,’ ‘next,’ or ‘coming’; and ‘gun’ (with umlaut) meaning ‘day.’ My father probably chose it for its religious connotation.”

  During that same year, Ahmet persuaded his father to let him accompany a visiting Turkish air force commander to New York. After asking permission to go to the movies by himself, Ahmet bought a ticket, “waited till the coast was clear, hailed a cab, and said, ‘Take me to Harlem.’ ” In the Plantation Club on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Count Basie’s former trumpet player Oran “Hot Lips” Page was blowing the Kansas City blues. When Ahmet, then still a skinny kid in short pants, boldly asked Page to play “Satchelmouth Swing,” a song recorded and made famous by Louis Armstrong, Page laughed and turned him down but
said he would instead play “Lips Page’s special message to a young ofay!”

  At four in the morning, Ahmet was still in the club enjoying the music with a chorus girl Page had sent to his table. She then took him to a rent party in Harlem, where he saw James P. Johnson, the man who had taught Fats Waller how to play piano. Sidney Bechet, the famed New Orleans clarinetist, sax player, and composer, asked Ahmet what he was drinking. When Ahmet told him scotch and soda, Bechet took the drink from his hand and gave him a joint. That night, Ahmet smoked what he always called “ma-ree-wanna” for the first time.

  When Ahmet returned to the Turkish consulate in Midtown at eight A.M., he learned the police had already been alerted and a full-scale search for him was underway. Escorted back to Washington under the strict personal supervision of the Turkish consul, Ahmet was confronted by his understandably furious father. Hitting his son for the first and only time, he slapped Ahmet across the face. For Ahmet it must have seemed like a small price to pay for what had been his first thrilling taste of nightlife in New York City.

  In 1939, Ahmet’s family decided it was no longer safe for Nesuhi to remain in Paris. Twenty-two years old, he abandoned his studies at the Sorbonne and joined his family in America. With him, Nesuhi brought a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, a novel that had been banned in America for years and was still not widely available. By this point, Ahmet had already amassed a fairly large record collection but after Nesuhi arrived in Washington, the two brothers “started collecting very seriously and soon we had over twenty thousand 78 RPM jazz and blues records.”