“At the moment when I met Ahmet, at the beginning of this decade, it was assumed that the style of the years to come would derive from the principal styles of the nineteen-sixties . . . but then as I saw Ahmet together with important custodians of the style of the nineteen-sixties and noted his greater power and presence, I began to understand that it would be his style (eclectic, reminiscent, fickle, perverse) that would be the distinctive style of the first years of the new decade, that Ahmet would achieve this new importance as exemplar precisely because he lacked the inflexible center I had confusedly looked for, and that he would achieve it through his intuitive, obsessive mastery of the modes of infatuation.”
—George W. S. Trow Jr.
Much like the subject of what many still consider to be the greatest profile ever to appear in The New Yorker magazine, George William Swift Trow Jr. was a child of wealth and privilege who adored black music, amassed an astonishing record collection featuring old 45s by Little Willie John, and regularly attended shows at the Apollo Theater. Born into “an extremely venerable family in the history of New York City” whose “style was that of the brownstone elite,” Trow was the son of the night editor of the New York Post and the great-great-grandson of the prominent New York printer whose city directory “was the precursor of the telephone book.”
Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, where he became president of the Lampoon and cowrote the 1964 Hasty Pudding Show, Trow joined The New Yorker two years later and began writing unsigned pieces for “The Talk of the Town” section of the magazine that were “jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic.” Due in no small part to his family background and social connections, Trow became good friends with Jacqueline Onassis and Diana Vreeland. In 1970, he helped found National Lampoon. A year later, Trow began working on the two-part profile of Ahmet that would establish him, in the words of New Yorker staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “as a cultural critic of the first rank.”
A social equal who was on a first-name basis with many of the wealthy and fashionable people Ahmet and Mica were seeing on a nightly basis, Trow had little trouble persuading Ahmet to grant him unlimited access. In the words of Ian Frazier, Trow’s good friend and fellow New Yorker staff writer, “George went everywhere with Ahmet, he hung out with Mica, and he had Ahmet to his club. A much much classier club than the Harvard Club, the Knickerbocker Club. It was not like he showed up, did the profile, and moved on. He became part of that group of people.”
In May 1971, Trow had flown to the south of France to celebrate the release of the Rolling Stones’ debut album on Atlantic. On June 27, Trow accompanied Ahmet and Mica to the final concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. In a story Graham loved to tell, Ahmet had walked into his office on the night the J. Geils Band performed at the theater for the first time. Wearing a “blue suit, white-on-white shirt, blue-on-blue tie,” Ahmet “looked like he had just won the dance contest somewhere.” Not realizing the manager of the J. Geils Band was also there, Ahmet asked Graham how the group had done. Cutting off the promoter before he could answer, Ahmet said, “I knew it! They sucked! I knew I shouldn’t have signed them. Terrible, huh?” Graham then said, “Ahmet, may I introduce you to the manager of the J. Geils Band?”
Without missing a beat, Ahmet called the manager by his first name, which he had only just learned, and then told him this was a game he and Graham often played. When the manager asked if he actually had seen the band’s set, Ahmet said, “I would miss their set? I wouldn’t miss the J. Geils set.” People began laughing so hard that they had to leave the room.
Having already earned a well-deserved reputation in the music business as a fearsome screamer and shouter whom no one could control, Bill Graham was also the nominal head of a label called San Francisco Records, distributed by Atlantic. Although Fillmore Records, the label the promoter had set up with Clive Davis at CBS, was far more successful, Ahmet and Graham never exchanged a harsh word.
The same could not be said for Graham and Jerry Wexler. Graham once so infuriated Wexler by screaming at him over the phone that Wexler promptly ordered the promoter to get into a cab and come to his office so he could “beat the shit” out of him. Unlike Wexler, Ahmet always knew exactly how to handle Graham and once made him wait so long on the phone as he dictated two long and incredibly complicated letters to a nonexistent secretary that when Ahmet finally got back to him, Graham had completely forgotten what he had called to complain about.
When Graham pointed out one day that he could not discuss business with Ahmet because there was so much else going on in his office at Atlantic, Ahmet promptly walked the promoter downstairs and instructed his driver to take them to an old office building on Broadway and 48th Street. Walking past a sign that read “Tango Palace,” Ahmet escorted Graham to the seedy dime-a-dance hall on the second floor, where both men were immediately approached by “five or six very sexy looking girls wearing dresses with their boobs popping out.”
Handing a befuddled Graham $20, Ahmet told him to pick out a girl and start dancing with her. At three in the afternoon in the otherwise deserted dance hall, Ahmet “took one girl and he took another. The music was playing and we were dancing and I said, ‘Okay. Now we can talk. What do you want to talk about?’ ”
On the night Bill Graham essentially ended the psychedelic music era in New York City by closing the Fillmore East, Ahmet appeared for the final show in a blue blazer, white pants, a yellow polo shirt, and yellow socks with a matching yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket. When a “minor record company executive” asked Mica, attired in “a striking black dress,” if she liked the Allman Brothers, who were on the bill that night and whose records Atlantic distributed, she said, “Yah. They are divine, no?”
When Mica asked Ahmet if they could get a drink, he explained to her that Second Avenue was crowded with people who did not have tickets and it would not be easy to find a place to go in a neighborhood then largely populated by working-class Ukrainian immigrants, hippie dope dealers, and the New York chapter of the Hells Angels. “But I think there must be hundreds of places to drink here, no?” she said.
On the same block where he had seen Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet teacher, when the musician first came to play in New York at the Stuyvesant Casino in June 1946, Ahmet led Mica outside. Crossing the street, they walked into a dive where anyone else who looked like them would have been immediately relieved of all their valuables. In a dire joint where six men sat at the bar drinking whiskey with beer chasers, Ahmet coolly ordered Mica a glass of white wine.
Trow also accompanied Ahmet as he discussed deals with Steve Ross, Sheldon Vogel, and Jerry Greenberg while flying to Los Angeles on the Warner jet. He dined with him at Martoni’s, the hip L.A. music business hangout, and then rode with Ahmet in a limo to a recording session where David Crosby and Graham Nash supplied Ahmet with the harmony vocals for a track they had just cut by singing them for him, “one at each ear.”
Trow went with Ahmet, Mica, and seven friends, among them Bill and Chessy Rayner, Mica’s partner in a design firm Ahmet had suggested they name MAC II, to the Rainbow Grill atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Duke Ellington and his band were performing. Nearly forty years after he had first seen Ellington at the Palladium in London, Ahmet listened far more intently to the music than any of his guests.
When the once handsome but still elegant Ellington, who in Trow’s words “looked ravaged,” came over to pay his respects to Ahmet after his first set, the two men kissed one another and Ellington said, “Such a wonderful party. I was wondering who was supplying that wonderful pastel quality.” Before the band leader began his second set, most of Ahmet’s guests left. Ordering a series of vodka stingers, Ahmet discussed Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” as “a burlesque song” and then told Trow, “A lot of my friends are very nice jerks, if you know what I mean. They’re very nice, but they’re jerks . . . They don’t deserve to have Duke Ellington play for them.”
On May 2, 1977, Trow ran into Ahmet in Studio 54. Jerry Greenberg, who by then had signed Chic and the Trammps to Atlantic and was a good friend of Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell, had asked Ahmet if he wanted to invest in the disco only to have him reply, “What do we know about that? No. Stay away.” In light of the drug and tax evasion problems that would eventually send Rubell and his partner, Ian Schrager, to jail, Ahmet’s decision proved wise. He did however become a regular at the club and in a photograph taken a year later can be seen sitting along the wall with Elton John, Andy Warhol, Jerry Hall, who in time would marry Mick Jagger, and the socialite Barbara Allen, who lovingly caresses Ahmet’s face with one hand while holding a cigarette in the other.
Along with the fashion designer Halston, Diana Vreeland, and Mick Jagger and a host of others that night in 1977, Ahmet watched Bianca Jagger celebrate her thirty-second birthday by riding across the floor of Studio 54 on a white horse led by a young man and woman with circus costumes painted on their naked bodies. As if to proclaim the dawning of yet another brand-new era in the city, the famous scrim of the man in the moon with a cocaine spoon to his nose then came down across the stage.
Precisely why it took Trow seven years to write his profile of Ahmet, no one knows for certain but at some point Ahmet may have asked him to hold off on publishing it because of the delicate nature of his relationship with the Rolling Stones. After Trow finally submitted the piece to William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, the writer was talking with Ian Frazier in his office at the magazine. In Frazier’s words, “There was a knock on the door and it was Mr. Shawn, which in itself was a thing of enormous significance. He said, ‘Oh, Mr. Trow, I was looking for you.’ ” The two men then stepped out in the hall to talk. Five minutes later, Trow walked back in “and closed the door and his face was tomato red. I said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ And George said, ‘Shawn said this piece is Proust.’ ”
Written in the dense and sometimes impenetrable style of a Victorian novel, the piece ran on sixty pages in two consecutive issues of the magazine. In a world not yet as media-saturated as it has since become, Trow’s massive and detailed profile of Ahmet was an immediate sensation. Becoming the cornerstone of his legend outside the record business, it also served as the template for everything that would be written about him afterward.
“Ahmet had not yet become a cultural icon,” Jamaica Kincaid, a staff writer at the magazine who was also close to Trow, would later say, “and that piece placed him. George really gave the lifestyle the legitimacy it might not have had and a kind of grandeur because Ahmet was part of a social upheaval that really changed everything. The Ertegun profile was unequaled in my time at The New Yorker. It had an indelible taste. You could read it and taste something you had never tasted before and haven’t since. It was so good that it made me lose interest in writing profiles. You just read it and wiped your brow and knew there would never be anything like it again.”
While both Mica and David Geffen would later say Trow seemed to be in love with Ahmet, in Kincaid’s words, “I wouldn’t say George was obsessed with Ahmet any more than anything he was writing about. He was obsessed with his subject as any good writer would be. For George, Ahmet’s clothes were the details. Every detail for him was a revelation and an opportunity to describe.”
After the profile appeared, Ahmet and Trow lost contact. “When it was done,” Kincaid would later say, “George didn’t ever really quite know what to do with himself again. It just really changed everything and changed his relationship with Ahmet and Mrs. Ertegun. George was very much a part of their social circle to that point and I think it was a complimentary profile but the sharpness and magical-ness of George’s writing must have been searing to them in some way because there was never the same kind of intimacy after that. I think the piece stung both the subject and the author and they sort of drifted apart. It was the end of the marriage and the breach had a bit of the postcoital irritation about it.”
Nor was this the only breach the piece caused. As David Geffen was looking through The New York Times on May 25, 1978, he came across a full-page ad taken out by The New Yorker to announce the publication of Trow’s profile. Four days later, after reading what Ahmet had said about him in it, Geffen ran to the bathroom and threw up. Having been portrayed in unflattering terms, Geffen had good reason to be upset. As Ian Frazier would later say, “First and foremost, the piece is about Ahmet. It’s also a great portrait of David Geffen and the difference between him and Ahmet as well as being really prophetic in terms of what Geffen would later become.”
In one of the many interchanges between the two that Trow described, Geffen was waiting to talk to Ahmet in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel when he received a call from Joni Mitchell. As Geffen spoke to the singer-songwriter, with whom he had once shared a house, Ahmet told Trow, “He must be talking to an artist, He’s got his soulful look on. He’s trying to purge at this moment all traces of his eager greed.”
Trow also recounted an incident in which Geffen tried to persuade Ahmet to pay him an advance of $50,000 to cover the studio costs for Crosby and Nash’s first album, even though they had already negotiated a deal providing $5,000 in reimbursement for every $100,000 worth of albums sold. “We’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” Ahmet told Geffen, “and you can go to Santa Monica Boulevard and watch a couple of movies, or whatever you do all day.”
Pointing out it was “sound business practice, and besides, I want it,” Geffen said, “Why don’t you concede for once? Why not make a gesture of good will, taking into account the entire relationship? Why not give the fifty thousand dollars?” Telling Geffen he needed the money to run his company, Ahmet finally settled on an advance of $35,000. “If you’re in that kind of trouble,” Geffen responded, “I’m selling my stock.” After the two men had bantered about which one of them was “chintzy,” Ahmet said, “You know, a soldier is sometimes too good a soldier. Whatever happens, I’m your friend and I love you, but don’t squeeze the juice out of every situation.” Trow also managed to dismiss the future billionaire by writing, “There was a brief vogue for David Geffen.”
After reading the first installment of the profile, Geffen called Ahmet and yelled, “You’re responsible for this outrage! George wrote those things about me because you told him to!” Coolly, Ahmet said, “Don’t be ridiculous, David. I don’t have any control over what this man writes.” In the words of biographer Tom King, Geffen then decided he would never work with Ahmet again.
By this time, Ahmet and Geffen had already fallen out with one another after an incident on a plane when Ahmet had continued flicking ashes from his cigarette onto Geffen’s head as he sat in front of him. Geffen warned Ahmet that if he did not stop, he would pour a glass of water on his head. In Geffen’s words, “And he didn’t stop it and I did it and he went mad and then we didn’t speak for a while.”
After patching up their differences, the two men were flying on the Warner jet to Barbados when Geffen began talking about how much money he had only to have Ahmet tell him, “Oh, David, people who have any class or taste don’t talk about money.” Ahmet, “who liked pushing buttons,” then proceeded to get Geffen so “wound up and flipped out and angry” that they “had a huge fight when the plane landed and nobody who was staying at David’s house was allowed to go over to have dinner with the Erteguns next door.”
They reconciled only to fall out with one another yet again when Ahmet told Geffen’s authorized biographer that Geffen had been spreading rumors throughout the record industry that Ahmet was anti-Semitic. In light of all the years Ahmet had spent in a business largely dominated by Jewish executives and how closely he had worked with Herb and Miriam Abramson, Jerry Wexler, Jerry Greenberg, Doug Morris, and a host of others at Atlantic, the charge would have seemed laughable to anyone familiar with his history.
Nonetheless, when Geffen learned what Ahmet had said about him to his biographer, the two men had a heated conversation over the phone and then did not speak to one another for years. In Geffen’s words, “He said it because he was jealous. He couldn’t stand that I had become so successful and so wealthy. It burned his ass.”
When both men found themselves at Barry Diller’s Academy Awards party in Los Angeles on March 25, 2001, Geffen angrily confronted Ahmet about his statement. Having been asked by Mica not to make a scene, Geffen decided to “simply get over it because what was the point? Ahmet was an old man and I thought, ‘Give this up.’ There was nothing he did that could have stopped me from loving him. But it sure was exasperating.”
For most of those who lived in Manhattan during the 1970s, the city had become, in the words of Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott, “a metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown with a side order of panic in needle park” where “the tourists looked scared” and “getting back to the hotel alive was one of the main items on their checklists.” Despite how dire life had become for some in the city, Ahmet had only to look out his office window at 75 Rockefeller Plaza to know just how well he was doing.
Befitting his status as the head of a record label that earned $75 million in 1973 while boasting an industry-high 25 percent profit margin before taxes, Ahmet’s well-appointed second-floor office, designed for him by Mica, overlooked “21,” thereby allowing him to watch the city’s most important power brokers step from their limousines each day so they could do business with one another inside the restaurant. As he would later say, “I like the view out the window. It’s a terrific way to keep track of who’s lunching with whom.”
In what was a banner year for the record business, the four labels that comprised the Warner Music Group, Atlantic, Elektra, Asylum, and Warner Brothers Records, sold a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of records and tapes worldwide. While David Geffen, Joe Smith, and Mo Ostin all held positions of great power within Warner Communications, David Horowitz, who oversaw the group’s financial operations, would later say, “Ahmet was first among equals because he was a legendary guy. He was our superman.” As chairman of the committee that coordinated the distribution system shared by all four labels, Ahmet now had nearly a thousand employees reporting indirectly to him. By any standard, he had finally reached the very top of the mountain in an industry that continued expanding beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
To celebrate Atlantic’s twenty-fifth anniversary in April 1973, Ahmet chartered an Air India 747 and took two hundred people to Paris for a gala four-day sales meeting. As soon as the plane was airborne, everyone on board “started lighting joints, snorting coke, and partying seriously.” After Jerry Wexler had fallen asleep on the plane, Ahmet took his passport and replaced his photograph with that of a woman having sex with a donkey. When Wexler presented his passport at the airport in Paris, the gendarme looked at the photo and then at Wexler and then back at the photo again. Trying to be helpful, Wexler said, “I used to have a beard” as Ahmet collapsed with laughter. The fun continued after the group had checked into a luxury hotel and gone out for “a ten-course gourmet meal at a five-star Parisian restaurant,” where the bar bill alone came to $16,860.
Born with “an apparently boundless appetite for the good life,” Ahmet continued buying his custom-made suits and jackets at Huntsman at 11 Savile Row in London. His handmade shoes came from John Lobb in Paris. The proud owner of a 1934 Bentley, a 1957 Sunbeam, and a 1965 Rolls-Royce, he was driven around the city in two Cadillac Fleetwoods, one green and one blue, by two chauffeurs, one white, the other black. Ahmet’s extensive art collection now included works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Larry Rivers, as well as a recently acquired painting by his “favorite artist, Henri Matisse.”
In their elegant five-floor town house on East 81st Street, which had been featured in House and Garden, Ahmet and Mica continued hosting lavish dinner parties while spending their weekends on Long Island in their equally fashionable retreat on Shinnecock Bay in Southampton. When Ahmet first saw the plans for a house Mica had modeled on a Russian dacha, he asked “Where do you put the orchestra?” and then had the living room enlarged. In accordance with Oscar Wilde’s dictum that three addresses always inspired confidence, Ahmet and Mica had also purchased and were reconstructing their summer home in Bodrum, then an undiscovered village on the Aegean Sea in southern Turkey. In time, they would acquire a luxurious apartment in Paris.
During a conversation Ahmet had with his assistant Jenni Trent Hughes about the trappings of success, she asked him how someone would know when he or she had finally arrived. “And he said, ‘When you have no keys. If you’ve arrived, there’s always someone there to open the door for you. When I go home in New York, Armenia opens the door. If I go home in London, Aurelia opens the door. If I get on the plane, Guy Salvador opens the door. If I go downstairs to the car, Ray opens the door.’ And he was right. The fewer keys you have in your life, the more you know you’ve arrived.”
As Ahmet grew older, his social standing became increasingly important to him. When the socialite author Barbara Howar accompanied him to a gala event thrown by a very wealthy A-list couple, Ahmet made it plain that, in her words, “He was not happy he had been seated with me. He didn’t even bother to pretend. He was just in such a snit, I cannot tell you. I found it amusing because I just didn’t care. But he thought he deserved better and was being wasted with people who already knew him.”
Over the years, Ahmet also became more politically conservative, making a generous donation to National Review magazine, for which William F. Buckley then thanked him with a handwritten note. Befriending Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, Ahmet staunchly defended him and the war in Iraq when Rumsfeld assumed the position of secretary of defense in George W. Bush’s administration. As Howar would later say, “For Ahmet, the lid came off everything when Ronald Reagan became president. Everything was deregulated, everybody was on Wall Street, and this was the time of Ahmet’s real ascendancy when he made the counterculture chic.”
While Ahmet had always traveled in a wide variety of different social circles, the music he was now releasing on Atlantic no longer interested him nearly as much as the lifestyle it afforded him. After Wexler had left the label, Ahmet said, “He is sad because he sees the music to which he gave his life is no longer important. It is a mistake to invest the music we recorded with too much importance. It isn’t classical music, and it cannot be interpreted in the same way. It’s more like old Fred Astaire movies. They’re fun, but they’re not great art. And they shouldn’t be seen as great art.”
Ahmet owed much of his newfound wealth to the apparently endless largesse of Steve Ross. As David Horowitz recalled, “Clever as he was, Steve was very vulnerable to certain people and it was like that with Ahmet.” In the words of Jay Emmett, Ross’s longtime friend who ran the movie and publishing divisions at Warner Communications, “Steve had a great philosophy when it came to our employees. He paid Ahmet, Nesuhi Ertegun, Joe Smith, and Mo Ostin absolutely outrageous salaries with bonuses and options. It was far more than they could have gotten anywhere else. Steve was super-generous with Ahmet but Ahmet never really truly trusted or liked Steve.”
Fixated on flying everywhere he went on the Warner Gulfstream II corporate jet, Ahmet came to Emmett one day to say he needed the plane to go to Turkey. In Emmett’s words, “So I looked at him and said, ‘Business or pleasure?’ And he said, ‘Jay, I swear, it’s business.’ He was going to Bodrum where he had a house. I said, ‘Ahmet, let me tell you about our plane.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘It can only be used for pleasure.’ ”
On another occasion after Ross had given options to Ted Ashley, Frank Wells, and John Calley in the movie division, enabling each of them to buy a hundred thousand shares of WCI stock at a very favorable price, Horowitz told Emmett that Ahmet was unhappy with the arrangement because he had “no shares.” Saying he found this hard to believe, Emmett learned that Ahmet had already sold his hundred-thousand-share option “at a very high price” and “made a lot of money.” When Horowitz informed him Ahmet wanted another hundred-thousand-share option, Emmett said, “Talk to Steve, don’t talk to me.” As Horowitz would later say, “Ahmet wanted the options and I was horrified but he hit Steve up for them. Steve had no intention of giving him more because this was like duplicating them. And he said yes. He was defenseless. I thought he might have waited a year but no.”
In Emmett’s words, “Steve gave him another hundred thousand shares because Ahmet had sold his and was running around saying, ‘What a cheap company. I don’t have any shares. What is that all about?’ Ahmet always pushed Steve for more of everything and Steve gave in each time.” Just as Ahmet had proven when he and Ross had sat down for their first marathon negotiating session at “21,” Ahmet always seemed to know just how to get what he needed from him. He also knew how to keep Ross happy by letting him know how profitable Atlantic had become.
Jerry Greenberg, who by now had become the president of Atlantic Records, recalled, “Ahmet would come in at four in the afternoon and call me in at six. ‘What’s going on?’ And I’d say, ‘Ahmet, we’re going to have a fucking big band. I just signed this group Genesis. They’re going to break. It’s going to be unbelievable.’ And verbatim, he would pick up the phone and call Steve Ross while I was sitting there and say, ‘Steve! We’re going to have a big fucking band from England called Genesis and they’re going to be . . .’ That was Ahmet. It didn’t bother me at all. I loved Ahmet.”
Making deals Ahmet would have never considered, Greenberg paid a $50,000 advance and a 12 percent royalty for a comedy album by the cast of Norman Lear’s hit television show All in the Family. It sold 750,000 records. He signed John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd to the label in their Saturday Night Live incarnation as the Blues Brothers and then shook hands with their manager, Bernie Brillstein, on a quarter-of-a-million-dollar advance for the soundtrack to The Muppet Movie.
In Greenberg’s words, “I said to Ahmet, ‘I just made this fucking great deal with Bernie Brillstein.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Heard of The Muppets?’ ‘No.’ I told him it was a big TV show. He said, ‘Nothing from TV sells. Look what happened to Sonny and Cher and Tony Orlando.’ I said, ‘This is different. A bunch of puppets.’ ‘What the fuck are puppets going to do?’ I said, ‘Kermit the Frog has this great fucking song, “Rainbow Connection.” ’ Ahmet dropped his glasses, looked in my eyes, and said, ‘Okay. If you say so.’ He thought I had lost my fucking mind. Sold a million albums.”
By then, Greenberg, who also signed Foreigner, had become Robert Stigwood’s go-to guy at Atlantic. Intent on bringing Greenberg to RSO Records, Stigwood offered him “a major part of the company, the film company, the whole nine yards. I said, ‘I’ll only go if I can take Sheldon Vogel with me.’ I went to Vogel and he saw the deal memo and he said, ‘I think I’m in.’ ”
Calling Ahmet while he was on vacation in the south of France, Greenberg said he was leaving the company to go work for Stigwood. “He said, ‘You’re leaving? You can’t leave. You have to come over here and talk to me.’ I said, ‘Sheldon’s coming too.’ ‘Sheldon’s going too? What are you, fucking crazy? Get on a fucking plane and get over here right now!’ ” After Greenberg and Vogel had flown to see him in Europe, Ahmet “called Steve Ross right in front of us and said, ‘They can’t take these guys. These are my guys. You gotta give them this, you gotta give them that.’ And they worked out a new deal for us.”
In a business where successful record executives had now become more important than rock stars and were constantly looking for an opportunity to earn more money than they were already making, everyone was in play. After Greenberg had passed on the opportunity to join David Geffen at Asylum, he asked for his own label at Atlantic only to have Ahmet refuse. Telling him to forget the label, David Horowitz offered Greenberg more stock in the company and then asked, “Is Ahmet a problem for you?”
In Greenberg’s words, “I said, ‘No, he’s not.’ I was not leaving because I wanted Ahmet’s gig. If I had wanted, I could have said, ‘Well, Ahmet never shows up and he doesn’t do this or that,’ but I didn’t because I loved Ahmet. He had built the company and I would have kept him there no matter what.” Twenty-four hours after Greenberg had informed Sheldon Vogel that Alan Hirschfield, who had negotiated the sale of Atlantic to Warner, had offered him his own label at Twentieth Century Fox, Greenberg was given a deal to start Mirage Records at Atlantic. By then, “the record business had taken a real dump” and five years later, Greenberg left to form United Artists Records with Jerry Weintraub.
As Greenberg said, “Sheldon Vogel was the unsung hero there. Ahmet used him as the bad cop. He was the money guy but it was Ahmet who watched every dime. We didn’t have a great year and Sheldon told me Ahmet and Mica were going somewhere and flying coach. Ahmet used to use the Warner jet like a taxi cab. All of a sudden, he called me into his office and said, ‘We can’t use the jet anymore.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘They’re charging us. They’ve broken it down. Take the plane and it’s three thousand an hour.’ ”
Greenberg would also sit with Ahmet each year as he went through the list of Christmas bonuses for Atlantic’s employees. “It would be, ‘Cut him. Cut him. Don’t give him anything.’ I’d go, ‘Ahmet, you’re not here all year. I’m here. I know what this guy did.’ Sheldon Vogel will tell you I had to fight to get a guy an extra $3,000. I don’t want to call Ahmet cheap, but he was cheap with some things, extravagant with others.”
In a business where boosting profits each year was now what mattered most, record executives had also become as fungible as artists had once been. In the spring of 1984, rumors began flying that Steve Ross was thinking of replacing Ahmet at Atlantic with Walter Yetnikoff, the tempestuous head of CBS Records, who was then on a hot streak.
In his strange and often fanciful autobiography, Yetnikoff would later write that Ross saw Ahmet as a snob who looked down on him and so offered Yetnikoff Ahmet’s job. According to Yetnikoff, Ross said he would pay him $8 million up front to become part of the Warner Music Group. After the two men shook hands on the deal, Yetnikoff sent his lawyer Allen Grubman to work out the details with Ross. As Grubman would later say, “It wasn’t to replace Ahmet per se. I started having some meetings with Steve Ross and he was saying, ‘I want to bring Walter into the record company.’ There was no specific job he was going to be jumping into. Ross was going to bring him over and put him in an enormously powerful position and then figure it out.”
Described by David Geffen as “a brilliant guy who knew how to deal with everybody,” Ross was so good at the game that, in Geffen’s words, “If you liked a particular kind of jam at his table for breakfast, the next day a case of it would come to your house. He would open the door for you, he would carry your bags, he would light your cigarette, and it would end up costing you a fortune. He was a very unique guy.”
Ross’s real genius was the art of the deal. After working out precisely how much he was prepared to pay for a new acquisition, Ross would explain the offer to Jay Emmett and then ask him to repeat it. In Emmett’s words, “I’m not a financial brain but I could remember what he’d said two minutes ago. After I’d repeated it, he would rip up the paper he had written the numbers on and say, ‘No. If you understand this, they’re going to understand it.’ And then he would come back with a more convoluted deal. Steve was the smartest deal maker in the world and if he was acquiring something he really wanted, he would pay anything for it.”
As he proved one day at a meeting in his apartment with Allen Grubman, Ross also understood the art of war. When the lawyer asked why he was so interested in bringing Yetnikoff into his company, Ross instructed his butler to bring him a pitcher of water and two empty glasses. Taking the pitcher, Ross filled each glass halfway. “This is Warner’s,” he said, pointing to one glass. “And this is CBS. Now, watch this, Allen.” Taking the CBS glass, Ross emptied it into the Warner’s glass and said, “Now, do you see what I’ve done? Not only have I doubled the amount of water in the Warner’s glass, I’ve emptied the CBS glass.”
As Grubman would later say, “In those days, Walter was so identified with CBS, people believed that if he wasn’t there, it would have a dramatic effect. And maybe it would have. But unfortunately after the deal was basically made, there was a reversal because of the crash of the Atari stock and it didn’t happen.” Yetnikoff would later say that he saw taking over Atlantic, a single label in the Warner Music Group, as a comedown from CBS, where he was running all the labels, both international and domestic. Perhaps because of the money involved, Ross told Yetnikoff the board at Warner Communications would not approve the deal and so it never happened.
Despite Ahmet’s love for the life that his lofty position within the Warner corporate structure had provided him, he could have never spent a day working under Walter Yetnikoff. Nor would the two men have lasted much longer as associates. Having managed to survive this particular crisis, Ahmet went right on doing business as he always had at Atlantic by replacing Jerry Greenberg with Doug Morris as his new right-hand man.
Although Ross never completely lost interest in the music group at Warner’s, he soon turned his primary attention to the movie business, which had always been his first love. By leaving them to their own devices, Ross did, however, manage to keep some of the greatest record men who ever lived working together in comparative harmony longer than anyone else could have. In the process, he also created what has now become yet another standard feature of corporate life in America.
In the words of one music industry insider, “What Steve Ross was really good at was making it possible for all these guys who worked for him to make a lot of money. He would elevate the compensation of all those under him and then go to the board of directors because it would create a rationale for the board to give him more money as well. By any standard, he was one of the pioneers of monster executive compensation.”
Ever since Ahmet and Nesuhi had kicked a ball around the grounds of the Turkish embassy as boys, both brothers had been mad about soccer. Not long after Steve Ross acquired Atlantic, he learned Nesuhi was thinking of leaving the label. When Ross asked what it would take to make him stay, Nesuhi said, “I want a professional soccer team.” With Ross’s enthusiastic backing, Ahmet and Nesuhi then created the social and cultural phenomenon known as the New York Cosmos.
While attending the 1970 World Cup in Mexico City, Ahmet threw a party at which he persuaded eight other Warner executives to join him and Nesuhi in putting up $35,000 apiece to launch the Gotham Soccer Club, Inc. in the fledgling North American Soccer League. A year later when Nesuhi took Ross and Jay Emmett to watch the team play in St. Louis, there were 340 people in the stands. An ardent sports fan who had tried to buy the New York Jets, Ross soon became obsessed with the Cosmos and transferred ownership of the team to Warner Communications.
Two years later, Ross moved the Cosmos to shabby, run-down Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island in New York, where the team regularly drew fewer than five thousand spectators to their games. Seeking a superstar who would bring people into the stands, Nesuhi persuaded Ross to accompany him to Brazil, where the game’s greatest player, Edison Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, had only recently retired at the age of thirty-four.
Acting on a recommendation from Nelson Rockefeller, former New York governor and now the vice president of the United States, Ross brought in Henry Kissinger to persuade the Brazilian government to allow a player who had become a national treasure to join an American team. Having first fallen in love with the sport as a boy growing up in Germany, Kissinger was such a diehard soccer fan that he had continued attending his hometown team’s games even after the Nazis had made it dangerous “for anybody of Jewish origin to go to any crowded place.”
At a chaotic press conference at “21” on June 10, 1975, the Cosmos announced they had signed the world’s greatest soccer superstar to a three-year contract for an unheard-of $4.5 million. Ahmet also signed Pelé to a recording contract at Atlantic. Two years later, the brilliant striker performed two songs on the soundtrack album from a movie about him that was released by the label.
When Pelé made his American debut on Randall’s Island, more than three hundred journalists attended the game. In a country where only ethnic minorities then understood and appreciated the sport, Pelé proved to be so popular that the stadium gates had to be locked to keep people out after the stands were filled. The Cosmos soon became what Jay Emmett would later call “a big ego thing for the Erteguns and for Steve” but the team was not profitable. When Ross was asked by a woman at the annual stockholder meeting how much money the company was spending on the Cosmos, in Emmett’s words, “Steve told her, ‘Five million dollars a year.’ Then he looked at her and said, ‘Three cents a share,’ and the whole place cheered. And they were losing five million dollars a year on them.”
Although Emmett would later say Nesuhi had far more to do with running the team, Ahmet became the public face of the organization. As the president of the Cosmos, he was “completely hands-on in wooing the succession of aging international stars who came to play for the team,” among them the flamboyant Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia, who soon became a cult figure in New York. A year after Pelé had joined the Cosmos, Ahmet helped engineer the signing of Franz Beckbenbauer, the legendary German sweeper known as “Der Kaiser.”
Giving Beckenbauer the full rock star treatment, Ahmet took him to dinner one night at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side literary hangout that was then the hippest spot in the city. Spying Woody Allen at a neighboring table, Beckenbauer asked Ahmet if he could meet him. Violating the unwritten rule that no one ever spoke to the reclusive comedian and filmmaker while he was dining in the restaurant, Ahmet began leading the soccer star toward his table only to have Allen turn around and say, “My God, Franz Beckenbauer!” Regularly, Ahmet also took members of the Cosmos to Studio 54 to join the bevy of stoned-out superstars, social climbers, and various girls of the moment who comprised what then passed for café society in New York.
Obsessed with the team’s fortunes, Ahmet and Nesuhi made certain that a piece of paper with the lineup they thought should be on the field was given to the coach before each game. For obvious reasons, their lineup always included the Turkish goalkeeper Erol Yasin. When David Hirshey wrote a story in the New York Daily News quoting Shep Messing, the regular keeper, as saying he had been benched because he had the wrong passport, Ahmet called up Hirshey and berated him for being anti-Turkish. The sportswriter replied that he was “anticorporate interference.”
Thanks in great part to Ahmet’s unceasing promotion of the team, the Cosmos became the hottest ticket in town. Ross persuaded celebrities with ties to Warner Communications to attend Cosmos games, and the team began drawing massive crowds to Giants Stadium in New Jersey, their new home playing field. On August 14, 1977, 77,691 people attended a playoff game between the Cosmos and the Fort Lauderdale Strikers. Among them was Ross, who would become so excited when his team played that he had installed a seat belt at his regular spot in the upper deck to keep him from falling over the edge during the game.
After Giorgio Chinaglia had scored three goals to lead the Cosmos to an 8–3 victory over their opponents, Robert Redford, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger made their way through the locker room to offer their congratulations “with the Erteguns following them around like puppies, stopping only to massage Pelé’s feet or rub Beckenbauer’s shoulders.”
In a series of photographs taken in the locker room that day by Ahmet’s good friend Jean Pigozzi, Ahmet can be seen in a soaking-wet white shirt with his pants down around his ankles swilling from a bottle of celebratory champagne alongside Cosmos coach Eddie Firmani and a player who wears nothing but a towel. As the defender Werner Roth, who had grown up in Queens and attended Brooklyn Technical High School, recalled, “Ahmet brought everyone into that locker room and every arrogant rock ’n’ roller turned into a pontificating little boy in front of Pelé.”
Two months later, Ahmet journeyed to Beijing with the team. As he would later tell The New York Times, the team’s eventual goal was to become the best in the world “and the way to get there is to play anywhere against the best at any time. We’ve never shied away from anyone.” Because of the unlikely marriage Ahmet had brokered between the sport and rock ’n’ roll, an ownership group composed of Peter Frampton; Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist of Yes; Paul Simon; Frank Barsalona of Premier Talent; rock manager Dee Anthony; and Terry Ellis and Chris Wright of Chrysalis Records was awarded the franchise for the Philadelphia Fury.
The calamitous collapse of the Atari game corporation in 1983 caused Warner Communications to report a post-tax loss of $418 million after twelve consecutive profitable years. As part of his plan to rebuild the Cosmos so he could sell it, Ross persuaded Ahmet and Nesuhi to resign their positions with a club that by now was no longer attracting rock stars and celebrities to its games. By 1985, Warner Communications had sold or closed ten separate ventures. A year later, the Cosmos folded.
While Ahmet had managed to have as much fun as possible with the Cosmos, he had also popularized a sport that youngsters all over America would eventually play, helping to pave the way for the United States to host the World Cup for the first time in 1994. In record business terms, Ahmet had helped break soccer in America.