“After Sonny and Cher had become huge stars, we gave a press party for them in L.A. and invited all the Hollywood press and we had a receiving line that included Sonny and Cher and myself and some people from the company. One lady stopped and said, ‘Are you Mr. Mica Ertegun?’ I said, ‘What publication are you from?’ She said, ‘I’m from Vogue magazine.’ So I said, ‘Oh yes, I am Mr. Mica Ertegun.’ She said, ‘Who did you think I was?’ I said, ‘I thought maybe you were Women’s Wear Daily.’ ”
—Ahmet Ertegun
Forty-two years old, Ahmet now bore little physical resemblance to the gawky teenager in an oversized zoot suit he had once been. Sporting a full black goatee streaked with gray on either side and sharp black glasses through which his large dark eyes could be clearly seen, he projected an air of magnetic self-assurance that defined him as a serious player in the record business as well as a member in good standing of the rarefied social circle through which he and Mica now moved.
Blessed with a sense of personal style that transcended fashion, Ahmet and Mica had themselves become fashionable and were spending their evenings on the town with hip New York movers and shakers like Bill and Chessy Rayner; Baby Jane Holzer, whom Tom Wolfe had immortalized in 1964 as “The Girl of the Year”; her good friend Nicky Haslam, the British art director of Show magazine; Andy Warhol; and Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue.
Along with his great fashion idol Fred Astaire, Dean Acheson, Bill Blass, Miles Davis, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Diana Vreeland’s husband, banker Thomas Reed Vreeland, Ahmet had been named as one of the best-dressed men in the world in a piece entitled “The Art of Wearing Clothes” by his good friend George Frazier in the September 1960 issue of Esquire magazine. “Dedicated to chic living,” Ahmet, in Frazier’s words, “buys ready-made suits at J. Press (around $100 each and has them recut for around $50)” by “the legendary valet of the Algonquin Hotel in New York.”
Frazier also noted that when Ahmet “somehow came into possession of a suit” made by the famed tailor E. Tautz of Savile Row in London in 1923, the year of his birth, “he promptly put it into a protective cellophane covering and hung it in a closet. It has remained there ever since, emerging only when he wears it on some opulent occasion or when he permits clothes-conscious male visitors the privilege of admiring its splendid cut, caressing its incomparable stitching.” As Miriam Bienstock would later say, “Ahmet and George Frazier used to talk to each other about clothes like two girls shopping.”
In what even then seemed like the most unlikely manner imaginable, Ahmet put an end to the long dry spell at Atlantic by signing a husband-and-wife duo whose onstage garb became as vital to their success as their music. At a time when the hippie revolution was just getting underway in California, no one on the East Coast had ever seen anyone who looked or dressed like Sonny and Cher. And while the pair did not sound like anyone who had ever recorded for his label, Ahmet still somehow managed to hear money in their music.
The son of Italian immigrant parents from Detroit, Salvatore Philip “Sonny” Bono dropped out of high school in Los Angeles and went to work as a box boy and a meat truck driver before he started writing songs for Art Rupe at Speciality Records. After replacing the legendary Bumps Blackwell as a staff producer there, Bono left the label and began working for Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood.
With songwriter and arranger Jack Nitzsche, whom Keith Richards would later call “the man who actually made Phil Spector by putting the sounds together,” Sonny wrote “Needles and Pins,” a hit for Jackie DeShannon and later for the Searchers. A music business veteran who had not yet really made a name for himself, he was twenty-eight years old when he met his future wife and singing partner in Aldo’s Coffee Shop, a celebrity hangout in L.A.
Then sixteen years old, Cherilyn Sarkisian had been born in El Centro, a small city fourteen miles north of the Mexican border in Imperial County, a largely agricultural area. Her father, an Armenian truck driver, and her mother, Georgia Holt, born Jackie Jean Crouch in Arkansas, divorced when she was a child. Severely dyslexic, Cher dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles, where her mother was then pursuing a career in acting and modeling.
After Sonny brought Cher to Gold Star, she sang backup vocals on legendary Phil Spector productions like “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers. Jack Nitzsche hired Sonny and Cher as backup singers for a recording session attended by most of Phil Spector’s regular studio musicians, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jackie DeShannon, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys that Charlie Greene and Brian Stone were producing.
“There were thirty people singing background,” Stone recalled, “but Cher had this killer voice. We had her standing like fifty feet from the mike all the way in the back of the studio but all you could hear was her. After the session that night, we took them back to our office and signed them to manage them.” Greene and Stone also signed Sonny and Cher to recording and publishing contracts, thereby enabling them to control their future in the business.
As an agent would later describe the pair of legendary hustlers who would soon dominate the music management scene on the Sunset Strip, “Greene and Stone wore dollar signs on gold chains around their necks. That’s how obvious they were. And they signed up everything that moved and wound up owning huge publishing rights on a lot of acts.” In the words of bass player Bruce Palmer of Buffalo Springfield, whom the two men also managed, “Greene and Stone were the sleaziest, most underhanded, backstabbing motherfuckers in the business. They were the best.”
Born Charles Greenberg on Long Island, New York, Greene had “ferried performers” like Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis, and Louis Prima and Keely Smith “around Manhattan nightclubs in his job as low-level press agent for Rogers & Cowan.” Stone would later describe his boyhood friend and partner as “short and kind of stocky. He looked like John Belushi and he walked around with a phone attached to his head and he was a schmoozer. I had been an accountant and studied law and I was quiet and he was much more outgoing. That was why we were such a great team.”
After working briefly as publicists for Lionel Hampton, the pair hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where they set up shop in an unlocked dressing room at Revue Studios and began soliciting work as press agents from actors. When the head of the studio learned what they were doing, he had them thrown off the lot.
By the time the pair signed Sonny and Cher to a management contract in return for 25 percent of their earnings, Greene and Stone were “living with two hookers in the Hollywood Hills. Sonny and Cher were broke so they came to live with us. Cher was a clueless kid with pimples all over her face. She had a big nose and would never wear a dress, always pants. She was like this crazy pachuco kid who was very quiet. Cher’s mother was around but she didn’t like Sonny and did not want them to be together.”
While living with Greene and Stone, Sonny went to the piano one night and “wrote this song, ‘Baby Don’t Go.’ He wrote the lyrics on a shirt cardboard and woke us up in the middle of the night and said, ‘I want to play this for you,’ and we said, ‘We love it. It’s a great song. We gotta go record this.’ He said, ‘You think so?’ We had no money so we hocked this old dictating equipment from our office for five hundred bucks to a friend and went into the studio the next day.”
Greene and Stone then called the A&R man at Warner-Reprise Records with whom Sonny and Cher had already made a verbal agreement to release their remake of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” under the name Caesar and Cleo. Because the managers “just wanted our five hundred bucks back,” they persuaded Mo Ostin to come to their office at 7715 Sunset Strip to listen to their new demo. Born Morris Meyer Ostrovsky in New York City, Ostin had worked as Frank Sinatra’s accountant before being hired by the singer to head his label, Reprise Records, which was subsequently bought by Warner Brothers.
In Stone’s words, “We play him ‘Baby Don’t Go.’ He says, ‘I love this record.’ We say, ‘You’re going to be a little stunned by this. But this is Caesar and Cleo. Kill the other record and put this one out.’ ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘It’s scheduled to come out in a week.’ Charlie and I went crazy. We said, ‘Mo, put this out too. Under another name. Whichever one hits, you’ll have it.’ He says, ‘What do I call them?’ We say, ‘Why don’t you call them Sonny and Cher?’ ”
When Ostin asked the managers what they wanted from the deal, they told him Caesar and Cleo “were five percent artists. ‘Make it eight and a half percent and we’ll take a little piece of the override and give us back our $500. Send us the agreement and it’s yours.’ What we didn’t realize was that he was steaming about it. We expected them to sign Sonny to a long-term contract but they were so pissed off that they made it a one-record deal for ‘Baby Don’t Go’ for eight and a half percent and a thousand bucks and we signed it and said, ‘Sonny, you’re free. We can now sign you and Cher as a separate act to another label.’ ”
Although “Love Is Strange” by Caesar and Cleo went nowhere, “Baby Don’t Go” became a hit in Los Angeles and Dallas. After doing a session in L.A. with Nino Tempo and April Stevens, a brother-and-sister act for whom he had produced an unlikely B-side hit entitled “Deep Purple” on Atco in 1964, Ahmet and Nino Tempo were driving down Sunset Boulevard “with the radio on in the car” when Tempo said, “How can I get a sound like the drummer on this record?” Ahmet asked him who they were, “and he told me Sonny and Cher. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Sonny and Cher? That’s Caesar and Cleo.’ ”
Ahmet already knew Sonny as the “young man” who “played the tambourine and helped me get musicians when we had sessions in California. I put him in the band with the tambourine so he could get scale and make some extra money and he was very nice. He was a friend of Phil Spector’s and he had a girlfriend and he wanted to make records and they called themselves Caesar and Cleo.”
After contacting Greene and Stone, Ahmet, in Stone’s words, “came up to our office. I had never met him before but I knew who Atlantic was and I idolized the label. Sonny loved Ahmet and we adored him and he said, ‘I wanna sign this act.’ ” Even though love was flowing like water in Greene and Stone’s office on the Sunset Strip that day, the managers were not about to put Sonny and Cher on Atlantic without first determining how much Ahmet really loved them.
“We said, ‘Ahmet, we love you and Sonny loves you and we think you’re the greatest and we idolize you and Atlantic is the greatest. But you’re a black label. How are you going to break a white pop act?’ And he said, ‘Man, listen, no problem. Just in case you forgot, we had Bobby Darin.’ By then, Bobby was already long gone from Atlantic. ‘Ahmet, will you be able to break a pop act?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m gonna tell you something. I’m going to make this label a pop label.’ We said, ‘Ahmet, come on, man.’ And he said, ‘I’m gonna bust my ass to break this act. They’re great.’ ”
When Greene and Stone asked for an 81/2 percent deal for Sonny and Cher, Ahmet said, “No problem, man.” After the managers informed Ahmet they had also signed Cher as a solo act on Imperial Records, Ahmet replied, “Doesn’t bother me, man. I want the act. I want Sonny and Cher.” In Stone’s words, “So we ended up with three separate agreements. Each label allowed they knew of the other and everything was fine.”
What possessed Ahmet to give Greene and Stone everything they wanted in return for Sonny and Cher, whose music was as far from his own taste as possible, no one can ever say for sure. Tuned into a frequency only he could hear, Ahmet had recognized something in “Baby Don’t Go” that led him to believe Atlantic could achieve commercial success with a sound that can most charitably be described as pop masquerading as fake folk rock.
Although Stone would later say that “Ahmet had no clue as to what was then happening on the Sunset Strip,” he did understand that songs about youthful rebellion and teenage angst had always sold well. And while Sonny and Cher had already packaged themselves as a pair of shaggy-haired, vaguely psychedelic social outcasts, their onstage demeanor echoed that of a duo whose music Ahmet knew very well indeed.
As Brian Stone recalled, “Charlie and I had come out of New York where two of our best friends had been Keely Smith and Louie Prima. We used to handle them and they were our heroes and that was who we wanted Sonny and Cher to become. When they did their show onstage, they would be like loxes. Sonny would be a little more animated than Cher but kids really responded to them and loved this little love thing they had. They were like teenaged lovers. Although we never formulated it that way, Sonny and Cher were like a teenaged Keely Smith and Louie Prima. Years later, Keely ran into Cher at a party and she ignored her and Keely said, ‘She’s me. Doesn’t she know that?’ ”
A year after “Baby Don’t Go” became a hit, Sonny came up with “I Got You Babe.” Greene and Stone loved the song and when Bob Skaff at Imperial Records, who “had great ears” heard it, “He said, ‘That’s my record. I want that record. That’s the greatest song I ever heard. It’s a number one song.’ Ahmet heard the song but he didn’t get it. The other side of ‘I Got You Babe’ was ‘It’s Gonna Rain Outside.’ Nesuhi heard that first and said it was the hit. Ahmet wasn’t blown away by ‘I Got You Babe’ but we knew it was a big record, a smash, so we put it out.”
Promoting the duo as “the greatest act you’ve ever seen,” Greene and Stone decided to break Sonny and Cher internationally. “Only two or three companies had international distribution so we had to release it country by country on the different labels Atlantic had deals with in each country.” Once the record began climbing up the charts, the managers asked Ahmet to put up the money so Sonny and Cher could tour overseas.
“We told Ahmet we wanted to take them to Europe to tour so we could break them across the world. We said, ‘Ahmet, we’re going to bring a film crew and make a film called Sonny and Cher in London. He said, ‘You guys are crazy. How much is it going to cost?’ He never wanted to part with any money but we finally got him to agree to do it.”
On their first day in London as Greene and Stone were checking into the Hilton with Sonny and Cher, “They saw what we looked like and would not let us in. Charlie was a hothead and he leaped across the desk and punched the guy. They said, ‘Get out of here,’ and we called a press conference outside the hotel. No one knew who Sonny and Cher were but we were on the front pages of all the newspapers for being kicked out of the hotel.”
Years later, Greene and Stone would learn that “Ahmet, Jerry, and Nesuhi were trying to sell Atlantic at this point to ABC-Paramount. They were in terrible, terrible condition and they had a deal pending for somewhere between three and seven million bucks for Atlantic. After ‘I Got You Babe’ became a monster smash, they killed the sale to ABC-Paramount and Ahmet told me this was the biggest record he’d ever had in his life. It was his first million-seller worldwide and crossed Atlantic over into new markets.”
Released in July 1965, “I Got You Babe” went to number one on the American pop charts and stayed there for three weeks. Delighted by their success, Ahmet threw “a giant party” for Sonny and Cher when they returned to New York after their European tour at which they met Baby Jane Holzer and Andy Warhol, whose art would reflect the outsized, cartoonlike image of pop stardom the duo were already projecting.
Ahmet then called Greene and Stone in California to ask if Sonny and Cher could “play at this dinner party. It was the first time Jacqueline Kennedy was going out since Jack Kennedy had died and they asked her who she wanted to play and she asked for Sonny and Cher and we said yes, absolutely.”
In less than two years, Sonny and Cher had gone from living with Charlie Greene and Brian Stone and two hookers in a house in the Hollywood Hills to mixing with the crème de la crème of café society in New York City. Their improbable rise from the street to a penthouse at the Waldorf Towers to perform for the former first lady was the stuff of dreams. It would soon become the paradigm for success in a business that Ahmet and Mica had somehow made socially acceptable.
Although Ahmet did not attend the dinner party for Jacqueline Kennedy, he did go to great expense to fly Sonny and Cher, their managers, and a five-piece band that included Mac Rebennack, soon to be known as Dr. John, first-class from Los Angeles to New York, where he put them all up in style at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. On the afternoon of the party, Greene and Stone went to the penthouse of the Waldorf-Astoria to check out the apartment owned by Charles Engelhard Jr. and his wife, Jane, a fabulously wealthy couple who were good friends of Ahmet and Mica. Known for his extensive mining interests in South Africa, Engelhard was the real-life inspiration for Ian Fleming’s fictional character Auric Goldfinger.
“It was a regular living room,” Stone would later say, “about fifteen-by-twenty and we set up a five-piece band. We didn’t know where the hell we were and we were walking around this monstrous, unbelievable apartment with thousands of platinum plates on the wall and this daffy lady who turned out to be Mrs. Engelhard gave us a tip, a hundred-dollar bill, because she thought we were members of the band.”
The guest list for the party was small, just thirteen people having been invited for dinner, Nesuhi and Diana Vreeland among them. Jackie Kennedy was so pleased by Sonny and Cher’s performance that she asked them to repeat it. After they had done so, the former first lady complimented Sonny by telling him he looked “rather Shakespearean” and then made pleasant conversation with the band.
Decked out in a pair of tight hip-high green suede pants and a short military jacket with a double row of buttons she had bought that day at Bendel’s, Cher caught the eye of Diana Vreeland. “My dear,” the esteemed editor of Vogue told her, “you have a pointed head! You’re absolutely beautiful.” As Cher recalled, “And the next thing I knew, Richard Avedon was coming out to take my picture.” At some point during Cher’s visit to New York, the usually taciturn singer also supplied Ahmet with the punch line for a story he never tired of telling.
At a dinner party in Los Angeles some years before, Ahmet had met this “very tall, statuesque lady” who “looked as though she could have been a showgirl in Las Vegas.” When Ahmet asked her what she did, she told him she was interested in metaphysics. “Oh,” Ahmet said. “You mean Plato, Aristotle, that sort of thing. She said, ‘Oh, no, Dr. Wilson who has the Church of Metaphysical Science.’ ”
Ahmet then said something that made everyone laugh “but she started to cry and said I was insulting her religion.” After Ahmet apologized for his remark, she told him, “I’ll only forgive you if you promise to go to the church with me tomorrow.” The next morning, Ahmet escorted her to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. After being ushered into a private box where “the only other occupant was the actor and fellow church member Mickey Rooney,” Ahmet dutifully listened to “a good sermon” that was “a cross between the usual kind of born-again Christian doctrine and Dale Carnegie advice on how to be successful in life.”
After he had seen the woman a few more times, she said, “You know, I have a daughter who is a great singer.” Ahmet replied, “Listen, if we’re going to be friends, let’s not talk about daughters who are going to be singers, uncles who write songs, and so forth. It never seems to work.” She agreed and the two eventually ended their relationship.
During Cher’s visit to New York to perform for Jackie Kennedy, the singer told Ahmet, “I was very surprised to find out that you were friends with my mother.” Perplexed, he replied, “What are you talking about? I don’t know your mother.” Cher said, “Yes, you do.” At which point her mother, Georgia Holt, walked into the room. As Ahmet would later say, “Who is it, except this woman who was interested in metaphysical science. She said, ‘I told you I had a daughter who sings.’ I said, ‘Oh, good Lord!’ ”
Emboldened by their success, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone continued doing all they could to promote Sonny and Cher in Los Angeles. Greene, who invented the term “heavy” to describe a song and then persuaded deejay The Real Don Steele to use the phrase as often as possible on his popular KHJ radio show, began offering the station the right to air exclusive advance copies of English hits for a week. “And in return,” Stone would later say, “they had to play us so many times and Ahmet would go crazy because we would put the record on the radio before there were even records pressed. We were acting like promotion guys.”
Because a record could not be played on KHJ “unless it was in the charts,” Greene and Stone “had people who worked for us call stores and make orders and we sent people in to buy the record. KFWB and KRLA were in the same market and they would call Ahmet and scream at him and Ahmet would blow his top and call me and say, ‘You’re killing me with the radio stations!’ They would tell him they weren’t going to play any Atlantic records. He would say, ‘How did that record get on the radio?’ And we would say, ‘Ahmet, we don’t know. We’re not sure.’ He knew we were full of shit. But he forgave it all because we were making him money.”
After the managers had set up a film deal for Sonny and Cher with William Friedkin slated to direct his first full-length movie, “Sonny became a real power freak and began going to all the writers’ meetings and telling everybody what to do and everybody was freaking out. His agents were with him all the time and they were saying how much do your managers get and he would say 25 percent and they would say, ‘What? Are you out of your mind? I’ll do that for less.’ ”
The rapidly deteriorating relationship between Sonny and his managers came to an end when a story about Sonny and Cher entitled “The Children of Bob Dylan” appeared in Life magazine. “There was a big giant picture of them and on the fifth page, there was a half-page photo of Charlie and me sitting in our limousine. We bought it because Ahmet had a limousine. ‘Oh, he has a limousine? We have to get a limousine.’ ” As Jimmy McDonough would later write, Greene and Stone bought “an $18,500 Lincoln limousine with a Blackgama mink interior, a bar with full sterling service, and an eight track player, with an elegant white-gloved black chauffeur with a sideline in all sorts of contraband.”
When the Life magazine article appeared, “Sonny was really infuriated. He said, ‘That should have been a page on me. How did that happen?’ He was really pissed at us. Shortly after that, we got a letter from an attorney Sonny had hired who said our agreements with Sonny and Cher were terminated. Sonny never even called us. We never talked to them again. It wasn’t that our careers were dead. These were like our best friends who had left us without saying a word and wouldn’t talk to us anymore. We were broken.”
Greene and Stone however did have Sonny and Cher “locked up in ironclad contracts.” When Ahmet began demanding that the duo get back into the studio, the managers told him Sonny and Cher had signed with them as recording artists and so he could not put out anything by them until the conflict had been resolved. “Ahmet was freaking out of his mind. He had this giant act and we had said no. And he said, ‘They don’t want anything to do with you anymore.’ We said, ‘Ahmet, we don’t care what they want. If they want out, they have to buy us out.’ Sonny hated us but he had no real money. We were in a deadlock that went for weeks.”
In need of new product to feed the market Sonny and Cher had created for their music, Ahmet found himself in the middle of a dispute that was hurting not only his label but also all concerned. Stone then called Ahmet in the middle of the night and said, “Ahmet, I’ve got the solution for this. ‘What are you talking about, man?’ ‘I know how to solve this. Sonny buys us out because you put up the money and when he does, we give up all our percentages and you recoup the money. It’s airtight. You give us the cash and loan it to Sonny and you get your money back in front.’ And Ahmet said, ‘That’s great, man. We can do that.’ ”
After a good deal of negotiating, the managers agreed to accept a buyout of $350,000. Greene and Stone also specified that the sum—today about $2.3 million—be paid to them in cash. The pair then flew to New York, where an Atlantic representative escorted them to the bank to withdraw the money. “We went in there with an attaché case and they had guards and we were in a private room counting it out. We had never seen that much money in our lives and then Charlie and I suddenly realized, ‘Holy shit, we have to walk through the street with this.’ So we hired an armed guard to protect us while we walked back to the Plaza Hotel. Charlie said, ‘What if this guard hits us over the head while we’re walking in the street?’ We were so paranoid. We got back to the hotel and we were hysterical, playing cards with big bundles of cash and throwing it on the beds. If it would have gone into our account, we would never have seen it. We wanted to see it.”
While Sonny and Cher did not go on “to make that much money for Atlantic” and left the label in 1971 after a period of declining popularity, the deal proved to be extremely profitable for Atlantic in the long run. In 2009, the gross earnings from Sonny Bono’s songwriting copyrights were still “something like eight hundred thousand dollars, and that was for a quarter.”
After their recording career ended, Sonny and Cher hosted a wildly popular variety show that ran on CBS until the couple divorced in 1974. A conservative Republican who served as the mayor of Palm Springs, California, for four years, Sonny was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1994. While serving his second term as a congressman, he died in 1998 at the age of sixty-two as the result of injuries suffered in a skiing accident. Having won the Academy Award as Best Actress for her role in Moonstruck in 1988, Cher continues appearing in films and still performs on a regular basis in Las Vegas.
In retrospect, the most astonishing aspect of Ahmet’s dealings with their managers was that he could come up with the money to pay off Greene and Stone without having to ask for a loan or a line of credit. A payment that might have sunk a smaller independent label in 1966 did not even make a serious dent in the vast amount of cash the partners at Atlantic had by then salted away “in various and sundry places” to serve as the label’s operating capital.
As well as anyone, Ahmet understood that the record industry was a business of personal relationships founded on money. On the night he had thrown his huge party in New York to celebrate Sonny and Cher’s triumphant return from Europe, Ahmet had summoned Greene and Stone to a late night meeting with him, Nesuhi, and Jerry Wexler. After telling the managers how happy Atlantic was with what they had done and how proud of them they were, Ahmet said, “ ‘I’m raising your percentage from eight and a half to ten percent. And by the way, here.’ And they gave us a hundred grand as a bonus. In cash. Not recoupable. We split it fifty-fifty with Sonny. He had never seen money like that and he was blown out by what Ahmet had done and so were we. You talk about locking in a client, man. That guy. What a mensch, man.”
In a business where it was understood that for every favor done, another favor was expected in return, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone now owed Ahmet. And so when the pair found themselves managing one of the greatest American rock bands of all time, they brought them to Atlantic.