The Last Sultan Read online

  In an article entitled “Collecting Hot” in Esquire magazine, the brothers were mentioned by name as prominent jazz record collectors. After the piece appeared, the headmaster at the Landon School counseled Ahmet’s father that his son should not be mentioned in the press as this would give him “a big head.” He added that he was not sure Ahmet “didn’t have Communist tendencies.” However, when the first Jewish boy ever to be admitted to Landon School was about to begin attending classes, the headmaster chose Ahmet to look after him because as a “European,” he “would be closer to the Jews than our other boys are.”

  In 1939, when Ahmet was fifteen, the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group open only to women whose ancestors had helped the United States win its independence, refused to allow the great black contralto Marian Anderson to perform before an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. President Franklin D. Roosevelt then authorized Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes to arrange for Anderson to give a free concert on Easter Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  Along with his sister, Ahmet listened to the radio broadcast that was heard by millions from coast to coast. As Selma would later recall, the entire family, “including my parents, were shocked and angry” about this “disgraceful episode.” Inspired in part by the controversy, Ahmet and Nesuhi soon began putting on jazz shows for integrated audiences in the nation’s capital.

  By the time he was sixteen, Ahmet had become what can only be described as a creature of his own creation. An astonishingly detailed account of what he was then like can be found on two pieces of typewritten paper in the Ahmet Ertegun Archive at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although the author is unknown, the monograph may have been written by George Frazier, the Harvard-educated jazz fanatic and columnist for The Boston Globe who became the ultimate arbiter of style in America.

  In handwriting at the top of the first page are the words “My first meeting with Ahmet at a very small cocktail party in Washington.” Describing Ahmet’s appearance in 1939 as “bizarre,” the author writes, “The little hair that he had was plastered down and combed in the middle of his flat head; his eyes were watery and, through his rimless glasses, I detected a look that inspired me with compassion . . . Over his upper lip he wore a very thin moustache that looked like the identification of a minor railroad line in a school map.”

  Perhaps to compensate for his physical appearance that night, Ahmet was wearing a pale blue shiny silk shirt, a blue tie held in place by “a gold pin that represented, either a fox or a wolf’s head, with encrusted rubies in its eye sockets,” a loosely fitted waistcoat over leather braces with “heavy regulator-buckles” as well as a large cobra-skin belt and a “key chain which must have been contrived out of thin wire covered also by cobra-skin . . . His suit was, more or less the color of brown chocolate with a trace of liver in it. When he got up to offer me a cigarette, I noticed that the broad shoulders that he seemed to have when sitting down were the result of an amazing amount of padding. His double breasted jacket was very much taken in at the waistline and the side pockets had buttons in its flaps, the whole accentuating the frailty of his constitution. Standing up, it was difficult to see his shoes, his feet and shoes being large enough—because the length and width of his trousers all but covered them. However cobra-skin shoes do not go unnoticed very often.”

  After the author lit the Melachrino cigarette Ahmet had offered him “out of his mother of pearl cigarette case,” Ahmet sat back down to reveal a pair of “light blue socks that matched his tie even to the clocks on their sides ending with a red fox or wolf’s head.” Asked what time it was, Ahmet withdrew “a large round watch from his front jacket pocket where he also carried two fountain pens and one automatic pencil and pressed a button on the lid. Presently I heard the first few notes of Auld Lang Syne; he pressed shut the watch—the music stopped—and told me it was nine o’clock. We were then in mid-August and I asked him about his plans for the summer.”

  And there the account abruptly ends. The only hint of the life Ahmet would lead was the outfit he had chosen to wear that night to a small cocktail party in the nation’s capital. It was a zoot suit, a look then much favored by black jazz musicians as well as “hep cats” who, just like Ahmet, worshipped this music.

  2

  In September 1940 when he was seventeen years old, Ahmet entered St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Founded in 1696 as King William’s School, St. John’s was a small, all-male school that was “not well known except in the most rarefied of pedagogy circles.” The program of studies, which was based on the University of Chicago’s one hundred Great Books program, was rigorous and consisted entirely of tutorials that met for two hours twice a week.

  Each year, students were expected to master a different language. As a freshman, Ahmet would have studied Attic Greek before going on to Latin, German, and French. There were also math tutorials. In the words of Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, who attended St. John’s eight years later, “You started out with Euclid’s elements in Attic Greek. You then went to Apollonius, conic sections, algebra in the second year, Cartesian math, and Nikolai Lobachevsky’s theory of parallels in the fourth year. There would be philosophical discussions around the math. The whole idea was to stimulate you into rigors of thinking without being rigid. My guess is Ahmet was stimulated by the Socratic discussion and the seminars and the egality of tutors and students.”

  The “jewel of the program” was a tutorial in which students were expected to read The Iliad in a single week before moving to The Odyssey. Tutors began each seminar by posing a question that often led to fierce intellectual arguments. “My first question,” Holzman would recall, “was, ‘Did Agamemnon want to achieve immortality?’ You’d argue about all this stuff and then at the end of the two hours, you’d go down to the coffee shop and argue until three in the morning. That was the heart of the program and Ahmet would have loved that. Because he would have loved the argument.”

  During his years at St. John’s, Ahmet wrote papers on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Butler, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence. Throughout this period, Ahmet continued to look to his older brother for guidance and advice.

  In every way, the two brothers could not have been more different. Slight of stature but blessed with a full head of thick black wavy hair, large expressive eyes, and a ready smile, Nesuhi had the exotic good looks of a Latin playboy. Women were always attracted to him and over the course of his life he would marry four times, once to his own cousin. Far more athletic than Ahmet, Nesuhi was also an excellent tennis player. Even though he had no degree of any kind, Nesuhi was so knowledgeable about jazz that he taught the first accredited course in the subject ever offered at the university level in America at UCLA.

  Unlike Ahmet, who always gravitated to his father, Nesuhi adored his mother. Because she had cared for him herself when he was a child, Nesuhi was her favorite as well. As adults Ahmet and Nesuhi would often argue about anything and everything in Turkish, but the bond between them was incredibly strong. Growing up in the shadow of an overwhelmingly accomplished older brother who seemed to excel at everything he did was a major factor in shaping Ahmet’s own complex personality.

  Soon after arriving in America, Nesuhi began giving lectures on jazz at what Ahmet later called “an intellectual bookshop” in Washington that some people “said was a communist front.” The lectures were attended by “a mixed crowd” of blacks and whites, which was then “very unusual in Washington.” After one of Nesuhi’s lectures, as Ahmet would later say, “a young guy came up to him from the audience and engaged him in such informed and absorbing conversation that they came back to the embassy to continue their discussions and listen to some more music. That was the first time that I met my business-partner-to-be and good friend, Herb Abramson.”

  The coterie of white jazz fanatics in the nation’s capital was then still small. After a brilliant Lehigh graduate named Bill G
ottlieb began writing “Swing Session,” the first jazz column in The Washington Post, his wife, Delia, read about the sons of the Turkish ambassador being record collectors and suggested that her husband interview them. Before Gottlieb could do so, Nesuhi called him to say, “We’ve been reading your column and we’d like to meet you.” The only white people who regularly found themselves backstage at the Howard Theatre, the four soon became fast friends.

  In 1940, Ahmet and Nesuhi took the extraordinary step of inviting musicians they had seen perform at the Howard on Saturday night to come to Sunday lunch at the embassy. After being served by waiters in white jackets, the musicians would gather together for a jam session in the embassy ballroom.

  In a series of black and white photographs taken by Gottlieb, great jazz luminaries like Teddy Wilson, Mezz Mezzrow, Lester Young, Sidney DeParis, and Red Allen can be seen standing in a relaxed and casual manner with Ahmet and Nesuhi in front of a huge bust of Kemal Ataturk that had been displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Wearing impeccably tailored double-breasted suits with neatly folded white handkerchiefs tucked into the front pocket of their jackets, perfectly knotted ties, and expensive leather shoes polished to perfection, the musicians look more like delegates at some high-powered international diplomatic conference than men who made their living playing jazz night after night in smoky clubs.

  In an era when blatant racism was the order of the day, the elegant-looking men who came to jam at the Turkish embassy on Sunday afternoons were black royalty in America. Despite the esteem in which they were held by those who loved jazz, the only restaurant in the nation’s capital where they could eat at the same table with a white person was in Union Station. Forced to deal with segregation and prejudice on a daily basis even as they were being lionized for their talent, they lived such schizophrenic lives that many developed personalities as unique and distinctive as their musical abilities.

  Dubbed “The President” by Billie Holiday, Lester Young would later be called by a writer for Rolling Stone magazine “quite possibly the hippest dude who ever lived.” “Prez,” as he was known to his friends, even spoke in a language that was all his own. Perhaps the first man to call money “bread,” he coined the phrases “That’s cool” and “You dig?” Whenever he sensed racial prejudice, Young would say, “I feel a draft.” When he saw something he liked, his only comment would be “bells” as in “I hear bells.” Young’s trademark crushed black porkpie hat inspired bassist Charles Mingus, who recorded for Nesuhi at Atlantic, to write “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” after the great sax player drank himself to death at the age of forty-nine in 1959.

  No less a character in his own right, Milton Mesirow had been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago but decided at an early age, in his own words, “to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues as only Negroes can.” Renaming himself Mezz Mezzrow, he played clarinet and sax but became as renowned in the jazz world for smoking and selling marijuana as for his musical ability. For years in Harlem, a joint was known as a “Mezz roll.” His autobiography, Really the Blues, written with Bernard Wolfe in 1946, remains one of the essential hipster texts.

  Coming into such close contact with musicians he idolized at a young age, Ahmet appropriated not only the way they talked and dressed but also how they viewed the “squares” who comprised mainstream society. In the jazz world, the first commandment was always to be cool. On this principle, Ahmet founded his own personality.

  At some point after the Sunday lunch and jam session had become a regular weekly event at the embassy, Ahmet’s father received a letter from an “outraged Southern senator” who wrote, “It has been brought to my attention, Sir, that a person of color was seen entering your house by the front door. I have to inform you that in our country, this is not a practice to be encouraged.” As Mehmet Ertegun had often expressed the view “that God had created all human beings as equals and that it was a sin to look down on anyone because of his or her race,” his response consisted of what Ahmet would later call “a terse one-sentence reply. ‘In my home, friends enter by the front door—however we can arrange for you to enter from the back.’ ”

  In 1942, Nesuhi decided to begin presenting jazz concerts featuring black musicians to a mixed race audience in the nation’s capital. As Ahmet, who was then still functioning as his older brother’s “errand boy,” would later say, “When we gave our first concert, we couldn’t find a venue that would allow us to have a mixed audience as well as mixed players. The only place that would let us put on this concert was the Jewish Community Center and that’s where we gave our first concert. Not very big.” The first show, which had been “advertised in the white paper” as well as through “little flyers in the record shops in the black area” put up by Ahmet and Nesuhi, featured Sidney Bechet, Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, and Pee Wee Russell. In Ahmet’s words, those who attended the performance “didn’t know it would be integrated.”

  By threatening to “make a big scene out of it if they didn’t let us rent it,” Ahmet and Nesuhi then persuaded the National Press Club at 14th and F Streets to let them use its auditorium for their second show. On Monday, May 25, 1942, Teddy Wilson, Joe Marsala, J. C. Higginbotham, Zutty Singleton, Max Kaminsky, and Lead Belly (as he was billed and also called himself) appeared at a concert entitled “Swing-time in the Capital—A Jam Session of Jazz Giants.”

  When Huddie William Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly), who had spent much of his life in prison for violent crimes, saw the size of the crowd that night, he said, “Man, you gotta give me twice the price, otherwise I’m not going on.” As Ahmet would later say, “So of course we did—we gave him everything we could, and, you know, we certainly weren’t pretending to be experienced promoters, we were just doing it for the love of the music.”

  3

  Nine weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis in the spring of 1940, Mehmet Ertegun was called into the State Department by Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle Jr. for a frank discussion about the war in Europe. In the official memorandum summarizing the meeting Berle sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote, “The Turkish Ambassador came in at my request. I asked for definite suggestions he might have by which we could improve Russian relations. I don’t really know that he has any. . . . He thought that the German drive would begin to blow up the Balkans, possibly within a week’s time, yet devout Mohammedan that he is, he expressed faith in ultimate victory: the kind of thing going on in Europe simply could not succeed.”

  Berle, who had graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of twenty-one and was now serving as the State Department’s intelligence liaison with the White House, also noted, “There is a great gulf fixed between the devoutness of this wise old Mohammedan imam and the devoutness of my mother’s New England Puritanism; but somehow the two merged in a fantastic moment of realization that a great faith and a kindly God produces characters that are much alike. Even the voice and face for half a second seemed the same.”

  As always where matters of state were concerned, Mehmet Ertegun’s unwavering faith in God was not the only reason he was held in such high regard by Roosevelt’s administration. Even as the Turkish ambassador was meeting with Berle at the State Department, Franz von Papen, the former chancellor of Germany who now represented the Third Reich’s interests in Ankara, was doing all he could to persuade the Turkish republic to align itself with the Axis powers. On June 26, 1940, Turkey declared it would remain neutral. In Ahmet’s words, “My father was the main strength in the government against Turkey going into the war unless we went in on the Allied side.”

  After Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, and the United States went to war against Japan and Germany, uniformed soldiers filled the streets of Washington. However, life in the nation’s capital went on much as it had before. As the sons of the official representative of a neutral power, Ahmet and Nesuhi could not enlist or become part of the American war effort without compromising their father’s diplomatic position. Nor
had either of them ever been raised to bear arms. At the embassy, Ahmet and his family continued to live just as they always had. With servants to attend to their every need, they entertained a succession of famous and successful visitors while enjoying the endless round of formal lunches and dinners that comprised a diplomat’s social life.

  Always starstruck, Ahmet’s mother had driven with her children and a female Turkish journalist who was a family friend to California before America entered the war. Given, in Selma Goksel’s words, “the star treatment in Hollywood because of my father, we were able to visit several studios. We saw Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and Ahmet loved it.” They also met and had their photograph taken with Clark Gable, who along with Spencer Tracy and Claudette Colbert, was then filming Boom Town. That Gable had once been slated to portray Gabriel Bagradian in MGM’s ill-fated production of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was not discussed.

  A year later in July 1942, Cary Grant and his new wife, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, spent ten days at the Turkish embassy in Washington. Attracted to the tall, handsome butler who while serving dinner had retrieved the jewel-encrusted evening bag she had dropped on the floor, Hutton gave it to him as a gift. When the butler asked nineteen-year-old “Monsieur Ahmet” whether he should not give it back to her, Ahmet told him to keep the bag but that if Hutton summoned him to her room while her husband was out and asked him to do something for her, he could decide whether or not to return the favor. When the butler asked again if he should return the gift, Ahmet replied, “Listen, you return that to a pawn shop is where you return that to.”

  As Ahmet would recall, “I don’t know if they ever consummated anything but Cary Grant used to go sightseeing and my mother gave him our second car and second chauffeur to take him around. There was a big scandal because Cary Grant had stopped somewhere for lunch and asked the chauffeur to sit and have lunch with him at the same table and somehow this got back to my mother and she said to my father, ‘You see, you can’t really trust these Americans. They always do something wrong.’ ” By this point, her own social standing in the nation’s capital had reached such an elevated level that Ahmet’s “heart used to sink” whenever his mother would bawl out servants of whom he was very fond after making them all “stand at attention like soldiers” as she ate her breakfast each day.