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

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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 compulsory.

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.”

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.

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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 Gottlieb 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.”

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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.

At another dinner at the embassy, Ahmet’s father told a joke in Turkish that caused everyone at the table to begin laughing hysterically. Unable to control himself, the German butler the family had hired because help was so difficult to find during the war began laughing as well. “At which point,” Ahmet said, “we realized he was a German spy. Because he spoke Turkish. He understood the Turkish joke.” The butler, who did not deny the charge, was immediately let go.

Because it was so “difficult, if not impossible to travel during the war,” Mehmet Ertegun continued to serve as the ambassador to the United States long after he might have been transferred to another post under ordinary circumstances. By 1944, he had spent more time in the nation’s capital than any other foreign ambassador and so became the dean of the diplomatic corps.

On March 14, 1944, Ahmet graduated with honors from St. John’s College. He then began taking graduate courses in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University while his sister, Selma, went off to college at Bryn Mawr. On the morning of October 29, 1944, as the “whole embassy was astir preparing for the reception that was to take place that afternoon to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Ertegun “suddenly complained of pain just under his left shoulder.”

Although the doctor who was called to the embassy “prescribed some medicine and complete rest, this happened to be a time when Turkey was being wooed by both the Allies and the Germans to enter the war on their side. My father thought his absence from the reception might be construed as a sign Turkey was on the verge of a decision. So in spite of his pain and the doctor’s advice, he got up and stood in the receiving line for at least two hours.” The ambassador then returned to bed.

In a photograph taken two days later, Mehmet Ertegun sits in a plush velvet armchair wearing a thick herringbone tweed jacket, a white shirt, a neatly buttoned vest, and a tie. In his hands are two tiger-striped kittens. Completely bald with his thick mustache having gone entirely gray, he looks much older than his years and not at all well as he stares into the camera through the thick lenses of his rimless glasses. Early in the morning on Armistice Day, November 11, 1944, Mehmet Munir Ertegun died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of sixty-one. Along with their mother, both Ahmet and his sister were with him.

I am deeply grieved by the news of the sudden death of my personal friend the Turkish Ambassador Mehmet Munir Ertegun,” President Roosevelt said in a press release issued that day. “Turkish interests in this country have been ably represented by him for more than ten years and during this period I, along with hundreds of others both in and out of the Government have come to esteem him as a diplomat of the highest type—kindly, sincere and accomplished. His personal integrity was outstanding.”

On January 25, 1946, President Harry S. Truman gave permission for Mehmet Ertegun’s body, which had been kept at Arlington National Cemetery for the duration of the war, to be taken back in state to Turkey on a naval cruiser. In April, the ambassador’s remains were transported to Istanbul on the USS Missouri. In Ahmet’s words, this was “the battleship on which the official Japanese surrender had been signed. The day the ship arrived, the docks were festooned with flowers and thousands of people were there holding banners in support of the Allies and the new leadership of Turkey.”

As Ahmet’s sister would later write, “Although we felt this was a great honor for us, we knew that the U.S. was using this as a show of strength to the Soviet Union, which had been making demands on Turkey for two provinces adjoining Russia. In a way, we were happy that even in death, Father was able to serve his country.” In the family graveyard in Sultantepe, Uskudar, in Istanbul, Mehmet Munir Ertegun was laid to rest alongside his Sufi grandfather.

No longer bound to follow in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career in the Turkish diplomatic service, Ahmet was now free to do whatever he liked in a country where the postwar economy was booming and jobs were available in every field. For someone who had never worked a day in his life, it was neither an easy nor an enviable choice. With no visible means of support, no marketable skills, and no real idea what he wanted to do with his life, Ahmet was now for the first time truly on his own.