NEW YORK CITY, 2006: MY phone rings. It’s Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records.
“Come visit me,” he says. “I’m lonely.”
Ahmet is perhaps the most revered man in the music business. If the word “legend” has any meaning, Ahmet is a legend. He started his career in 1947 with an interest in jazz, blues, and R&B. He signed acts such as Professor Longhair and Big Joe Turner, and he wrote several blues classics, such as “Sweet Sixteen” and “Chains of Love.” In the 1950s, he signed a young Ray Charles and wrote “Mess Around,” Charles’s first hit on Atlantic. In the 1960s, he made a deal with Stax Records to distribute genre-defining albums by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Solomon Burke, and he snatched Aretha Franklin from Columbia Records and took her back to her gospel roots, resulting in landmark albums such as I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and Lady Soul. In the late 1960s, he turned his gaze to rock music. He signed Crosby, Stills & Nash and convinced them to add Neil Young; he signed Eric Clapton, Yes, and Led Zeppelin; Zeppelin recorded four diamond records for Atlantic (awarded for ten million sales or more, this designation has been given to only ninety records in history). In the early 1970s, he made a label deal with the Rolling Stones, and they rewarded him with Exile on Main St.
He is more than just a record executive. He is a visionary. He created the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and his acts largely populate it. He is a statesman, fostering ties between America and his native Turkey. His friends include world leaders in art, finance, and politics—people like Henry Kissinger and Oscar de la Renta. He has earned a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievements, an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music, and a Living Legend award from the Library of Congress. None of that keeps him company, though.
He has a wife, Mica, but she was always more of a front than a spouse—a respectable veneer to hide the depravity within. His infidelity has long been an open secret. He even took a date to his own wedding. He also has an ex-wife, but he never speaks of her. I did see a picture of her once. Ahmet’s longtime assistant Noreen Woods was busy one afternoon cataloging his files when she found a photograph of the woman and slid it across my desk.
“Look,” she said. The woman looked like Ulla from The Producers—a total blonde bombshell.
“Whatever happened to her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Noreen said. “But I met her. I was with Ahmet at the Plaza Athénée in Paris when this beautiful blonde came up and started talking to him. I realized it was his ex-wife. When they finished talking she gave him a hug and a kiss—what you’d expect from an amicable ex-relationship.”
“I can’t believe you met her,” I interrupted.
“Wait, this is the best part,” Noreen continued. “When she walked away, Ahmet said to me, ‘Who was that?’”
Classic Ahmet.
That’s why he’s alone. It’s Classic Ahmet’s fault. Classic Ahmet was the guy who played with himself under his desk while dictating letters to his secretary. Classic Ahmet was the guy whose nightly routine included four lines of cocaine. Classic Ahmet was the guy who couldn’t be bothered to remember people’s names—he called Jann Wenner, cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone, “That Faggot,” not to be confused with Paul Cooper, general manager of Atlantic’s West Coast office, who was “That Fucking Faggot in L.A.”
Classic Ahmet had power and influence, which kept people close to him even while he abused them. Now his power and influence have waned, and those people have nothing to gain by coming to visit an old man. And so, he’s lonely.
I feel the need to be there for him. When I enter his double townhouse in Manhattan, I see the man I still revere despite everything, the man who gave me my first job in the music business and remained a trusted adviser during my two decades working for Atlantic and other major labels. He’s also the man who verbally, physically, and sexually mistreated me.
He’s worse for wear, blind in one eye and hobbling on two fake hips, yet he’s still the very picture of posh cosmopolitan life. He wears custom pajamas from Savile Row, velvet slippers, and a silk robe with an ascot. His apartment is littered with the works of masters like it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He leans on his cane and hobbles past his Picasso, past his Degas, past his Pollock, and past his Hockney, to greet me.
“Show me your pussy,” he says. “For old time’s sake.”
He’s never seen my pussy. That’s just more Classic Ahmet.
I sit down and we reminisce. He’s bitter—bitter about selling Atlantic to Warner CEO Steve Ross for $17.5 million in 1967, when he should have gotten more; bitter that his company is now privately owned; bitter that his perks have been cut back; bitter that he lost his grip on the awesome power he wielded for half a century.
It’s hard to feel bad for him. His sense of entitlement is enormous. He was raised in a well-heeled Turkish family. His father, Mehmet Ertegun, served as legal counsel to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Mehmet became the Turkish ambassador to the United States and counted President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a friend. When Mehmet died, Roosevelt arranged to have his body sent back to Turkey on the USS Missouri.
Ahmet is also a triple-digit millionaire. When Warner merged with Time Inc. in 1989, Steve Ross gave Ahmet inside information (highly illegal), and Ahmet made a killing (also illegal). The two men shared an enemy—David Geffen—and, in a move Ahmet should have appreciated, Ross didn’t give Geffen the inside info. In retaliation, Geffen pulled out of his deal with Warner and sold his company to MCA.
These men were petty, and Ahmet is as petty as they come. It doesn’t matter that Ross helped make him rich. He can’t see beyond his disdain. He calls Ross “the Undertaker,” a dig at Ross’s lowly beginning as a funeral-home director. As far as Ahmet is concerned, Ross is a peasant. Ahmet considers most people peasants. It’s his favorite insult. I can’t count the times he hurled it at me after I fucked up.
I don’t mention any of this, of course. And, truth be told, as we chat in his townhouse, I do feel bad for him. He reminds me of the old Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil”: “Please allow me to introduce myself / I’m a man of wealth and taste.” That’s Ahmet. Somehow, I’ve always felt sympathy for him.
Maybe that’s why he trusts me enough to air his most intimate regrets. He complains he didn’t get what he wanted out of life. He blames it on his mother—she loved his brother Nesuhi more than she loved him. He blames it on his wife—all those years spent with Mica, when Janice (his mistress) was the one he really wanted.
Why is it always the woman who gets blamed? I think, but I don’t say anything. My mind flashes back to our first meeting. I was a nervous twenty-four-year-old girl, fresh out of college, and desperate for a job in the music business, sitting across from Ahmet at his enormous desk in his palatial office. The difference between us couldn’t have been more pronounced.
Sitting across from him now in his townhouse, that old gulf between us evaporates. I realize how similar we are. I never found true love either. My career didn’t go how I hoped it would. He has many millions of dollars more than me, but he’s not better off than me, not when it comes to what truly matters. In a way, he’s teaching me one last lesson: when you get to the end of your life and wonder what it was all for, no amount of success, or fame, or money, or power, or pussy can replace love, or friendship, or happiness.
As Ahmet continues to pity himself, a heat rises within me. I want him to understand what I went through, to think of me just once after all these years. Finally, I say something: “What about me? I didn’t get what I wanted either. Why was I held back from my dreams?”
He looks at me with his one good eye. “What did you expect?” he says. “You’re a woman.”