“I fell in love with Mica. I really wanted to marry her and I had to talk her into it. She had a greater elegance and aristocracy than any of the girls I knew. She was much more of a lady and it showed through and I think the most important choice I ever made in my life was to marry her.”
—Ahmet Ertegun
In the spring of 1960, Phil Spector blew into Ahmet’s life like a wild storm from the West Coast. Born on December 26, 1939, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, Spector was nine years old when his father committed suicide. Four years later, he moved with his mother and older sister to Los Angeles, where he attended Fairfax High.
After forming the Teddy Bears in 1958, Spector changed the inscription from his father’s gravestone in the Beth David cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, into the present tense and used it as the title for “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” A mellow doo-wop ballad that became a slow dance staple at teenage makeout parties all over America, the record sold a million copies and went to number one on the Billboard pop chart but offered no indication of the work Spector would do as a producer once he loosed his trademark “Wall of Sound” upon the world.
A year later, Spector began working for Lester Sill, who had discovered Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The songwriting duo had then written, arranged, and produced one big hit after another for Atlantic with the Coasters and the Drifters. At Sill’s urging in the spring of 1960, Leiber paid for Spector’s airplane ticket to New York. The songwriters signed Spector to an exclusive publishing contract, gave him a monthly advance, and made him their fifth guitar player on sessions. With a kind of self-confidence that verged on the monomaniacal, Spector regularly told everyone he met that he was a genius.
Blessed with what his biographer called the ability to “find his way around almost any instrument” as well as “a natural gift for sight-reading and improvisation,” Spector wrote the haunting melody for Leiber’s lyrics on “Spanish Harlem.” Ben E. King, the former lead singer of the Drifters, then beginning his solo career, recorded the song on October 27, 1960, and it went to number fifteen on the R&B charts.
Having lost his father under the most tragic circumstances, Spector also had, according to Leiber, a “terrific fear of abandonment” and “was frightened to death of being left alone.” His psychological profile made him the first in a long line of eager young record business men who adopted Ahmet as both mentor and surrogate father. “I’d never seen anybody like Phil before,” Ahmet would later say, “and I’m sure I’ll never see anybody like him again . . . He was really crazy, but charming, super-intelligent, and really talented.”
Jiving with one another in their own version of Mezz Mezzrow’s brand of hipster slang, the two very unlikely companions began going out on the town together night after night. Despite the disparity in their backgrounds and the sixteen-year difference in their ages, they soon became inseparable. Ahmet then offered Spector a job as his personal assistant and as a staff producer at Atlantic. For a twenty-one-year-old kid on the make, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
The fact that he had already signed a contract with Leiber and Stoller did not trouble Spector in the least and the contract itself soon somehow disappeared from their files. Adding insult to injury, Spector also signed a contract with the Hill & Range music publishing company, thereby making him “one hundred percent exclusive” with all three entities at once. Spector then began sleeping at night in the Atlantic office, while persuading the switchboard operator to let him call home long-distance as often as he liked at the company’s expense.
In vain, Wexler kept waiting for the pint-sized producer with the gargantuan ego to deliver the big hits he claimed he had come from California to make. In the studio, the two men clashed constantly. Working together in the worst possible way with a group called the Top Notes, they managed to screw up “Twist and Shout,” a Bert Berns composition Wexler would later call “a natural hit.”
Miriam Bienstock also soon came to dislike Spector because he would book studio rehearsal time at Atlantic and then turn up late or not show up at all, thereby forcing artists who had waited for him to return the next day. Despite his undeniable talent, the kindest thing many of those who met Spector during this period had to say about him was that he was an asshole. Others thought he was insane.
Overlooking flaws in Spector’s outsized personality that would have caused anyone else to fire him, Ahmet felt certain that in time the hits were “going to come. In the meantime, he and I were going out to clubs . . . and having a terrific time.” As Paul Marshall would later say, “I don’t know why Ahmet liked hanging out with Phil because I couldn’t stand him. He was not a lovable guy. He was egoistic and always rude to musicians and assistant engineers.”
Marshall was in the studio one night while Spector was recording when Spector received a telegram informing him he had been drafted and was being ordered to report for duty at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma. The telegram was signed by General Curtis LeMay, the United States Air Force chief of staff. “Phil went crazy,” Marshall would later say. “Absolutely crazy. ‘They’re out to kill me! They’re out to destroy my career!’ I knew Ahmet had sent it so I called him and said, ‘This is great!’ ” After Marshall told Ahmet how badly Spector was melting down in the studio, “We got another telegram, ‘Orders canceled!’ ”
Whenever they found themselves together in Los Angeles, Ahmet loved roaring around the city in a souped-up Ford Thunderbird Spector had equipped with a 45 RPM record player under the dashboard. Whenever a music publisher wanted them to listen to new material, they would insist he get into the backseat and then take off at ninety miles an hour on Sunset Boulevard as the publisher screamed, “Let me out of here—I don’t care if you ever record one of my songs—just let me out of the car!”
In Los Angeles, Ahmet also took Spector to see Bobby Darin, who by then had married sixteen-year-old Sandra Dee, the beautiful blond actress who had played the title role in Gidget. After a couple of drinks as they sat around his pool, Darin picked up his guitar and began playing a new song he had written that did not impress Ahmet in the least. “That’s terrific,” Ahmet told him. Darin then played five more songs, each no better than the first. All the while, Ahmet kept telling him they were “fabulous.”
Unable to take it anymore, Spector finally exploded. “Are you fucking crazy, or am I? He can’t record these songs. These songs are pure shit!” Demanding to know who the hell Spector was, an incensed Darin screamed, “Get him the fuck out of here!” In need of a hit some months later, Darin told Ahmet it might be wise if they found “some new blood” to produce his next record. “There’s this kid, Phil Spector,” Darin said, “do you think you could get him to work with us?” Ahmet replied, “That’s the guy you threw out of your house!” In the end, Darin never worked with Spector.
After making a series of very conventional big band records for Atlantic that went nowhere, Darin eventually “succumbed to Hollywood pressure” from his managers and agents to begin recording for a major label. When his contract with Atlantic expired in the fall of 1962, Darin signed with Capitol. Ahmet accepted the loss of Atlantic’s first white star with an equanimity he had not had when Ray Charles left him.
By the spring of 1961, Ahmet’s social relationship with Spector had also ended. Having met the woman he was about to marry, Ahmet no longer needed someone to go out with every night. Spector formally left Atlantic on April 6, 1961, Ahmet’s wedding day.
Constitutionally unable ever to work for anyone else, Spector founded Philles Records with his mentor Lester Sill, whom he then forced out of the company. Producing one huge hit after another for the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Righteous Brothers, Spector earned $2 million by the time he was twenty-six and became the subject of a memorable profile by Tom Wolfe entitled “The First Tycoon of Teen.”
In a scene that would not have been out of place in a 1930s Hollywood movie, Spector was recording in Los Angeles when he crossed paths with a twenty-year-old starstruck kid from Brooklyn who in time would also come to regard Ahmet as his mentor. Going out of his way to humiliate David Geffen, Spector made him sit with his chauffeur at another table when everyone went out to eat after a night in the studio.
In 1966, Spector recorded what would come to be regarded as his masterpiece, “River Deep—Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner. He then went on to produce Let It Be by the Beatles as well as George Harrison’s multi-platinum album All Things Must Pass. His relationship with John Lennon ended in 1973 when Spector reportedly brandished a gun in the studio and then disappeared with the master tapes of the album the two were recording.
While Ahmet and Phil Spector never worked together again after he left Atlantic, they did remain good friends throughout their lives. As Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, would recall, “Ahmet loved Phil Spector for all kinds of reasons but one of them was that Phil was just incredibly witty and dark in that Lenny Bruce kind of way. Ahmet recognized Phil’s genius and thought he was this wonderful character because Ahmet always loved crazy, larger-than-life people.”
In Los Angeles during the mid-1960s, Ahmet and his former protégé shared many wild nights. By then, Spector had already begun exhibiting the kind of behavior that would doom him. “Even in those days,” Ahmet would later say, “Phil hated for anybody to leave and was known to sort of lock up people in his house and not let them go. He was always flashing his gun around but I never thought he would shoot it.”
On February 3, 2003, Phil Spector shot and killed Lana Clarkson, a forty-year-old former B-movie actress he had picked up in the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, where she was working as a hostess in the VIP room. Found guilty of murder in the second degree in April 2009, he was sentenced at the age of sixty-nine to nineteen years to life in the California state prison system.
“Ahmet brought Phil in,” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said. “But nobody could control Phil.” Although even Ahmet soon learned this was true, he had still been perfectly willing to delegate responsibility in the studio to Spector in the hope he would come up with a series of monster hits for Atlantic. While the first boy wonder in whom he had invested his time and energy failed to fulfill his expectations, Ahmet never stopped looking for the next young genius who might help keep his label at the top of the charts.
On the night Ahmet met his future wife through mutual friends in the Bon Soir, a small, crowded, and famously dark cabaret on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, marriage was the last thing on his mind. Still operating in full bachelor mode, he was seeing three different well-known models on both coasts while also escorting a variety of other girls on his nightly outings to Birdland, El Morocco, and the city’s newest hot spot, the Peppermint Lounge.
The only woman at the table that night whom Ahmet did not know spoke with a continental accent that immediately defined her upbringing. Svelte with long black hair and the regal bearing of what he would later call “a natural aristocrat,” she had come to New York hoping to find someone who could help get her cancer-ridden father out of Romania, which was then still under communist control. Because she seemed “so sad,” the wife of the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, with whom she was staying, arranged for her to join the dinner party.
“At the end of the evening,” Ahmet would recall, “instead of her going home with the person who brought her, I took her home and we became friends.” The next day, he called and they went out to dinner. After she returned to her home on a farm in Canada a few days later, Ahmet began calling her regularly. As he would soon learn, she was also a child of history whose background was in many ways as complex as his own. For the first time in his life, Ahmet was involved in a relationship that was a meeting of equals.
Born into a wealthy landowning family in Bucharest on October 21, 1926, Ioana Maria Banu was the only child of Natalia Gologan and Dr. Georghe Banu, a well-known physician who served as secretary of health in the right-wing government that ruled the country under King Carol II. As a young girl, she acquired the name by which she would be known. Because her German nurse kept hearing her father call her “the little one” in Romanian, “she thought that was my name. In Romanian, ‘mic,’ which is pronounced ‘meek,’ means ‘small.’ She kept saying, ‘Mica is here. Mica is there.’ And it stuck.”
After her parents’ short-lived marriage ended in divorce when she was eight years old, Mica was raised by her mother and grandmother. Although her father was “very caring” and she sometimes preferred him to her mother, he was also “very busy. He wrote a lot of books and helped pass a law that everybody in Romania had to be tested for syphilis before they got married.”
In 1939, Dr. Georghe Banu published a book about eugenics, in which he advocated a set of scientific beliefs very much in accord with the views of the Nazi government in Germany. Banu argued for the use of preventive sterilization of “pathological individuals” including “imbeciles, idiots, epileptics, criminals, and those affected by diverse psychoses” as well as those suffering from syphilis, tuberculosis, and leprosy. He wrote that sterilization was “a necessary formula for the conservation and improvement of the race.”
Too young to understand the full import of her father’s work, Mica was fourteen years old when half a million Nazi troops occupied Romania, then still a neutral country. On November 23, 1940, Romania joined the Axis and began supplying Germany with oil, grain, and industrial products. On August 1, 1943, the Romanian oil fields were bombed by the Allies.
“Of course, I saw the bombardments,” she recalled. “I was going to school and the car was supposed to come pick me up because the planes took off from a place in Italy called Foggia and so you knew from the radio exactly when they had taken off and when they were coming.” Driven from Bucharest to her family’s country house in Baragan, where she “was shoved every holiday,” she would then return to the city once the raids were over.
Raised “to be a nothing,” as she put it, Mica was sixteen when she met Stephen Grecianu, whom she then married against her father’s wishes in 1942. Fifteen years older than Mica, Grecianu was the son of a wealthy landowner and had grown up in and around the royal court in Bucharest. Educated in Paris, he was serving as a pilot in the Romanian air force flying German Messerschmitt fighter planes into aerial battles against the Allies.
On January 10, 1948, a week after King Michael, who had succeeded Carol II, had left the country after being deposed at gunpoint, Mica and her husband, whose mother had served as lady in waiting to Queen Marie, left Romania on the same train as the king’s aunts, Princess Elisabeth, the former Queen of Greece, and Princess Ileana, the wife of Austrian Archduke Anton. Traveling on Nansen passports issued to stateless people by the League of Nations, the couple ended up in “the Dolder Grand, the most luxurious hotel in Zurich, but we didn’t have a dime because after everybody put all their jewelry with the Queen, they confiscated everything the night before we left.”
Mica and her husband stayed in Switzerland for a year. Along with many of the other high-born members of the Romanian court who were then living in exile at the hotel, they were about to emigrate as a group to Paraguay, where the authorities had said “we wouldn’t pay taxes for twenty years and they would help everybody to start industries,” until they were shown a movie about the country. “When they showed us the movie, it was such a catastrophe that nobody wanted to go. It was horrible. Absolutely horrendous. So then we each went our different ways.”
The couple moved to Paris, where Stephen Grecianu “tried to find a job which was very difficult although he spoke the language.” While staying at the Dolder Grand Hotel, Mica had met the man who ran Bruyère, a couture fashion house on the Place Vendôme. “I put some clothes on and walked on the runway as a model but that only lasted for three or four months.” Some “very rich Canadians” whom the couple had also met in Switzerland then helped them go to Canada and lent them “some money to buy a farm.”
In 1951, the couple emigrated and purchased a dairy farm on Lake Ontario. Her husband then converted the property into a chicken farm. “We had five thousand chickens and I would get up at five in the morning. The funny thing is you have to clean the eggs. You gather them three times a day and then you have to clean them and put them in cardboard and ship them. That’s why I really can’t look at a chicken anymore. But when you are young, everything is great. We were happy to be free. We were happy not to be persecuted.”
The couple became Canadian citizens and although “it was pretty grim in the winter,” they stayed on the farm until the fall of 1960, when Mica came to New York to see if the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, who had met her father while serving in Romania, could help her get him out of the country. “I was married and I was quite happy and I didn’t come with any idea of finding a man. I really didn’t but then it just happened. It just clicked. Ahmet didn’t have much money then but he had marvelous cars and chauffeurs and he went out every night. El Morocco was his stomping ground, and Birdland. He was always living well and going to expensive restaurants and running to Fire Island every weekend. He fascinated me.”
After Mica returned to Canada, Ahmet called her constantly on the farm, where she talked to him on a hand-cranked phone. A month later, Mica told her husband she had to return to New York to visit a friend and it was then that she and Ahmet began their affair. As he would later say, “If you see pictures of Mica in those days, she really was a beautiful young girl . . . Even though I think she was virtually penniless, she had an air about her.”
During his whirlwind courtship of Mica, Ahmet ended his relationship with Betsy Pickering. At one point, however, he and Mica “nearly split” and she returned to Canada only to have Ahmet come with his sister and nephews to visit her at the farm. As she recalled, “Ahmet adored my husband. The two of them got along very well.” In an incredibly stylish gesture right out of one of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies Ahmet had loved as a boy, he arranged for a band to emerge from the closet of her suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal to play “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
After spending six difficult weeks together in New York, Mica left for Europe without Ahmet and went to stay with a friend who “was against me getting married. Everybody said I would regret it and it would be a disaster and last two months.” From Baden-Baden in Germany, Mica sent Ahmet a letter in which she wrote, “I do not know if I am capable of fulfilling all your desires . . . in my own way I am very simple and I like to have a closeness and an understanding that is above all the problems life is presenting . . . I will always love you but I do not want to make you unhappy—I would have loved to be with you and close to you. I hold you in my heart.”
On her way back to Canada after a Black Sea cruise that included a visit to Ahmet’s mother and sister in Turkey, Mica was changing planes in upstate New York when she heard herself being paged. Over the phone, Ahmet proposed to her. On Thursday, April 6, 1961, the two were married by a judge in an apartment in Manhattan with thirty people present, among them Nesuhi, Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Miriam Bienstock, and Jerry Wexler.
As Ahmet would later say, “Mica is a very, very steadfast person. Where before I was kind of wandering around aimlessly, she suddenly gave me an anchor. We began having dinner parties with nicer and more interesting people and less bimbos. It was a delight to be married to someone who was so intelligent and had so much common sense and she lifted my spirits every day and really inspired me to work harder. But part of my life was going out to clubs and that I didn’t stop.”
Ahmet also did not stop seeing other women. Even while he had been pursuing Mica, she knew “he was coming back to New York and going out with other people.” As Jean Pigozzi, the art collector and photographer who became one of Ahmet’s closest friends, said, “I really don’t think Ahmet ever got emotional about any of those girls. Zero.” By marrying Mica, Ahmet made it plain she was the one with whom he wanted to spend his life.
Always at the forefront of what was happening at night in the city, Ahmet was one of the first to make the scene at the Peppermint Lounge, a mob joint on 45th Street where formerly only hookers, dancers, and musicians from nearby clubs could be found. The shift in action from the elegant El Morocco to a seedy hole-in-the-wall near Times Square where Joey Dee & the Starliters performed “The Peppermint Twist” each night as frenzied socialites threw themselves about on “a dance floor the size of somebody’s kitchen” marked the end of the 1950s in New York as well as the start of a musically charged social and cultural revolution that would churn through America for the next half-century.
Unlike most of those who lined up in the street each night to get inside the Peppermint Lounge while “laying fives, tens, and twenty dollar bills on cops, doormen, and a couple sets of maître d’s to get within sight of the bandstand,” Ahmet knew “The Twist” had originally been recorded by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on King Records two years before Chubby Checker cut his version and popularized the dance on American Bandstand.
In October 1961, as Tom Wolfe wrote, “a few socialites, riding hard under the crop of a couple of New York columnists, discovered the Peppermint Lounge.” Greta Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Countess Bernadotte, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield, Perle Mesta, Jackie Kennedy, and the Duke of Bedford were soon among those doing the Twist alongside “sailors, leather-jacketed drifters, and girls in toreador pants.” A month later, Joey Dee, then twenty-two years old, was performing at a gala “fund-raising champagne dinner” at the Four Seasons restaurant as well as “a hundred dollar a plate Party of the Year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
With Mica by his side, Ahmet was at the Peppermint Lounge every night. The sheer incongruity of well-to-do socialites who knew nothing about this kind of music trying to dance to it like hormonally crazed teenagers made the scene irresistible. While living on their chicken farm in Canada, Mica and her husband had brought some girls in from the local village to help them package eggs “and I remember there was an Elvis Presley song playing on the radio and the girls were gyrating while they were cleaning those eggs and I was looking at them and I said, ‘They must be totally degenerated. What the hell are they doing?’ Little did I know.”
As Arthur Gelb noted in the still very staid New York Times, “Café society has not gone slumming with such energy since its forays into Harlem in the Twenties.” Much like the Charleston and the Shimmy, two dances adored by bathtub-gin-swilling flappers during that era, the Twist was not only fun but also an authentic form of physical liberation, allowing people to dance alone with one another. The first teenage dance craze to be seized upon by adults, the Twist launched America’s newfound fixation with youth culture as well as a form of music that had previously been considered the exclusive province of juveniles seduced by what some in the South still called “jungle rhythms.”
Even as Ahmet was twisting the night away at the Peppermint Lounge, he was trying to sign Joey Dee & the Starliters. After learning through the mob guys who ran the place that Morris Levy of Roulette had gotten to the band first, Ahmet began repackaging cuts he had already released into albums entitled Do the Twist with Ray Charles and Twist with Bobby Darin. These albums then became popular with “a dance crowd” who “had never heard these records before.”
Able as a couple to fit into virtually any kind of social milieu, Ahmet and Mica quickly slipped in and then out of the scene at the Peppermint Lounge. Although neither of them realized it at the time, the new life they were now sharing helped create what would become an ever widening rupture between Ahmet and the man who looked up to him as not just a business partner but also a mentor and friend.
While Mica had been living on the farm in Canada, in Ahmet’s words, “She did the beds, she did the cooking, and she did the farming with the tractor. She worked eighteen hours a day. When we could afford it, the first thing she wanted was neither a Cadillac nor a Rolls-Royce nor a diamond. She wanted to spend money on our style of life, which meant that we would have service. She wanted someone who would iron her dress or bring her breakfast in the morning. And she wanted me to have what I’d had as a child. As soon as I married Mica, I was back living the way I used to live when I was a kid which was wonderful because I also understood the value of that.”
After Ahmet purchased a five-story brownstone on East 81st Street for $100,000 that Mica then began renovating and redecorating, Jerry Wexler dropped by one day and Ahmet invited him to stay for lunch. “When Jerry saw there was a cook and a butler to serve the lunch,” Ahmet recalled, “he turned to me and said, ‘Do you always live like this?’ As if to say, ‘This is not right.’ Living like that would never have occurred to him but I was very happy to get back to what I considered normal.”
Wexler would later write that he and Ahmet had “begun moving in different directions back in the late fifties, early sixties . . . Gone were the days when Ahmet and I went off together to explore the back alleys of New Orleans.” In part, this was because “the business had gotten too big. Domains were separating, demands diverging.”
When Atlantic moved its offices from 234 West 56th Street to 157 West 57th Street, directly across from Carnegie Hall and the partners’ favored spot for lunch, the Russian Tea Room, the two men still shared an office in which they faced one another, but with a sliding door between them that was often shut. When Atlantic moved again, to 1841 Broadway, between 60th and 61st Streets, the two men were separated by a long hallway.
Despite Wexler’s great sophistication, his inability to realize that Ahmet’s marriage would also cause their relationship to change seems difficult to understand. The way in which Wexler chose to discuss this issue in his autobiography speaks to the incredible depth of feeling he always had for the man who had given him his start in the record business as well as how painful it was for him no longer to be the number one person in Ahmet’s life. Nor was it only Mica’s influence that caused them to grow apart. As always where these two men were concerned, the primary issue was music. While Ahmet was perfectly willing to accommodate himself to white rock ’n’ roll, Wexler preferred to continue producing the kind of black roots music he had always loved.
The other issue was social class. While Wexler lived very well with his wife and three children in a house in Great Neck, Long Island, where he regularly hosted disc jockeys and promotion men at backyard barbecues, he was always too busy working and worrying about the future of the company to waste his nights in the Peppermint Lounge. Nor was it surprising he would view those who prepared and served Ahmet and Mica lunch in their East Side brownstone with the attitude of a kid from Washington Heights who had gotten his real primary education in a pool hall.
Despite the growing tension between the two men, they continued to work well together at Atlantic. And then as just about every kid in America sat with his parents in front of the television set on the first Sunday night in February 1964, the impossibly cute and cuddly Beatles began shaking their moptops on Ed Sullivan’s very popular CBS television show. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the white teenage market for black music that had been keeping Atlantic in business.
Once the British Invasion began in earnest, Ahmet and Wexler were no longer able to make the kind of music other labels could only envy. Instead, they had to start scrambling just to keep their company alive.