“I’m not really interested in business as such. I’m interested in doing a lot of things that are pleasing to me and that I can afford. So over the last twenty-five years or so, I haven’t put myself into group discussions about sales methods or meetings on merchandising. I’ve stayed out of all that and left it to the younger people I’ve brought in to run those parts of the company because they don’t interest me.”
—Ahmet Ertegun
In large part, Ahmet was able to withstand the corporate battles at Time Warner because he was now devoting so much of his time and energy to pursuits that had nothing to do with the record business. Foremost among them was his interest in art. As his longtime assistant Jenni Trent Hughes would later say, “Ahmet was an artist and he lived art. It was the Oscar Wilde thing—buy art, create art, or be art. And he did all three.”
Long “before the market for the work began to skyrocket,” Ahmet had begun collecting early American avant-garde art in the late 1970s. In the words of Elizabeth Moore, an art dealer at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, “Ahmet had this real talent for discovering the unknown, whether it was in music or art. I think that the chase itself gave him tremendous pleasure. Ahmet was always on the hunt . . . He loved to discover things, and I think that the art collection had something to do with that. It was the unknown, the thing that no one else was looking at, in which he could see the potential.”
In addition to his collection of Russian avant-garde Suprematist and Constructivist works as well as several paintings by René Magritte that Nesuhi had bought in Europe shortly after the artist’s death in 1967, Ahmet assembled a collection of 280 modern American paintings and works on paper done by eighty artists during the first half of the twentieth century. As Mica would later say, “When Ahmet got an idea in his head, nobody could stop him. He read a book about the American painters in Paris during the period when Gertrude Stein and Stanton Macdonald-Wright were there and started buying paintings and all of a sudden we had three hundred paintings and then he asked his friends if they also wanted to invest in this with him.”
Although the collection was, in the words of art historian Avis Berman, “corporate in its impetus and formation,” Ahmet did all the buying and so the works “reflect his eye and are conditioned by his comprehension of and intuitiveness about music. Ertegun embraced the modernist tradition in the arts, whether he found it in classic jazz or the rhythms and patterns of such painters as Arthur Dove, Oscar Bluemner, Burgoyne Diller, Werner Drewes, Morgan Russell, Paul Kelpe, Morris Kantor, or Fredrick Whiteman.”
In 1986, about eight years after Ahmet had begun the collection, the group he had formed decided to sell some of its holdings. Early modernist works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Max Weber were snapped up, but there was little interest in the American Abstract Artists group. That part of the collection was eventually sold to the Naples Museum of Art in Florida in 1999 for about a tenth of what it is now worth.
Having always expressed his fixation with his own appearance by filling the closets at his various residences with more elegant suits and expensive pairs of handmade shoes than he could ever wear, Ahmet purchased paintings in much the same manner. In Berman’s words, “If Ertegun spotted merit in art, he was not content with one or two examples of his or her work; often he bought in bulk from the galleries, and sometimes his purchases were redundant.”
By doing so, Ahmet was able “to assemble a large collection of esthetically and historically valuable paintings by this coalition of artists in a relatively short time.” Not surprisingly, many of the artists whose works Ahmet collected had also been inspired by jazz and “he enjoyed discussing the association he discerned between jazz and their grammar of seeing.” His preference for paintings “with strong, even flamboyant color” was also “compatible with the jazz esthetic.”
In the soundproof room in his Manhattan town house, where Ahmet listened to music, a David Hockney painting of a Picasso mural hung over the fireplace. Although his personal collection constantly changed as he loaned pieces to museums all over the world, the room at one point also contained works by Jasper Johns, Le Corbusier, and Picasso. Having filled all his homes with art, Ahmet eventually had to keep some four hundred paintings in storage because he had no place to put them.
The great love for beauty Ahmet and Mica shared could also be seen in their summer home. While on a motor trip through Turkey in 1971, they had come upon a ruined house known as Aga Konak in Bodrum, a then undiscovered village on the tip of a peninsula in the Aegean near the Greek islands of Kos and Patmos. Known in ancient times as Halicarnassus, it was the site of the 140-foot-high tomb Queen Artemisia had built in 353 B.C. in memory of her late husband and brother, King Mausolus. The tomb became one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
After Ahmet bought the ruin from the fifty-four heirs of the original Ottoman owners, Mica set about restoring it with stones from the ancient Mausoleum. Situated on the water, the compound eventually comprised two houses joined together by a one-story kitchen beside a garden of mimosa, lime, orange, and pomegranate trees. At the bottom of the garden, there was an old well, a fountain, staff quarters, and a guesthouse.
The whitewashed walls of the main residence featured a collection of Arabic calligraphy as well as drawings and paintings of Turkish scenes. In rooms filled with furniture from the Ottoman Empire, brown wooden shutters kept out the blazing midday heat. An invitation to spend time with Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum in July soon became what Vanity Fair magazine called “the hottest ticket in town.”
Over the years, luminaries such as Princess Margaret, Princess Olga of Greece, Mick Jagger, Rudolf Nureyev, Oscar de la Renta, Pat Buckley, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, and a host of others came to stay with Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum. Each day began with a breakfast of “bread, honey, rose petal jam, yoghurt, and fresh ripe figs, apricots, and peaches.” After a short ride into town, where camel herds still wandered along the main street, to pick up the newspapers, Ahmet and Mica and their guests would visit tailors who made shirts and pants to order overnight and shop for kilim rugs and bolts of cotton cloth.
At noon, they would all board Miss Leyla, the traditional hundred-foot-long Turkish vessel known as a gulet named after Nesuhi’s daughter, for a leisurely sail to, in Ahmet’s words, “one of several hundred coves that surround us. After a swim in the clearest water to be found anywhere in the Mediterranean, we have a lunch of fish and local specialities.” Returning home “later in the afternoon for a quick siesta,” everyone then met for drinks and dinner in the courtyard of the house.
“After dinner,” Ahmet would later say, “we may go out to a few clubs and discotheques. At the end of a very late evening, we observe an old custom and serve the traditional Turkish tripe soup which is supposed to ward off hangovers.” In one of the most beautiful spots in the world where the staff was so dedicated to everyone’s well-being that Jenni Trent Hughes once came upon a young Turkish girl happily cleaning the stones in the courtyard with a toothbrush, the leisurely routine then began all over again the next day.
Even in Bodrum, Ahmet sometimes played the role of benevolent host to women with whom he had more than a platonic relationship. One of them was a striking thirty-four-year-old blond French dermatologist named Veronique Simon, who was often a guest at Bodrum and then became a friend with whom Ahmet traveled. As she would later say, “Ahmet was the last sultan of Turkey. It was the Ottoman blood in his body. A man of this dimension will never stay with one woman. In the East, you love only one woman but you have the woman who is the mother of your children, the favorite, the courtesan, and each woman has her place in the heart and brain of this kind of man. Ahmet was an Oriental man with the totality of the Oriental way. And in another way, he was an American man as well.”
Over the years, music business insiders delighted in trading stories about Ahmet’s latest indiscretions. As David Geffen would later say, “Cher loved Ahmet. He used to grab her breasts and she would say, ‘Oh, Ahmet.’ He liked to do that.” However, even in a business where the one-night stand was standard practice, many women were offended by Ahmet’s behavior. “He was a misogynist,” said Susan Joseph, who managed singer Laura Branigan while she recorded for Atlantic. “A guy who pinched your ass. I was in a hotel room with him and Laura, and he tried to put his hand up my skirt. I actually had to smack his hand. He didn’t have a lot of respect for women. He was sleeping with every artist he could, including Laura.”
By the end of his life, the list of women Ahmet had touched in social situations had reached epic proportions. Nor did Ahmet seem particularly discriminating when it came to the women he pursued. “His thing wasn’t just good-looking women,” Dorothy Carvello, one of his assistants at Atlantic, said. “Don’t think they were all off the pages of Penthouse and Playboy. It was equal opportunity and there were some you couldn’t believe. You would be scratching your head. That filter in his brain didn’t exist. Whatever felt good, he would go for. The guy always did whatever he wanted to do. He was free. He didn’t have to answer to anyone.” Nor could Carvello understand Ahmet’s attachment to a woman in the music business with whom he carried on a long-running affair.
Jenni Trent Hughes, who also worked for Ahmet but never found his behavior offensive, was once riding with him in a car through the oil fields in Turkey when “the local mayor showed up with his wife and she was gorgeous and Ahmet went, ‘Oh, look at that one.’ And I said, ‘You know, it’s a shame you can’t find oil the way you find women. Because we’d be the richest people in the world.’ He laughed himself silly.”
Having grown up with servants who had catered to his every need, Ahmet expected his female assistants to deal with the consequences of his lifestyle. For many years, Noreen Woods, who eventually became a vice president at Atlantic, served as what someone would later call his “cleaner.” In Ahmet’s words, she was, “The only person I trusted totally with everything. If my wife was away and would be returning on a certain day and I was out at night in somebody’s house having drunk a lot or done some drug and holed up with two chicks somewhere, the chauffeur would call her and she would come in with him and defy the ladies keeping me there and grab me and put my clothes on and bring me home so I would be there when my wife returned. I mean, it was service beyond any expectation.”
As David Geffen saw it, “I don’t think any of these women were a threat to Mica. Ahmet came from a culture where people had many wives and Mica knew who she had married. His friends would find it intolerable for her but she was always patient. Mica is really an extraordinary person and she loved Ahmet.”
In Mica’s words, “Ahmet had tons of women before I met him and he probably had a whole slew while I was married to him. Not probably. I know it’s true. But I never knew their names. I couldn’t have cared less. I never felt threatened for one minute. When I was there, he was always there. If I traveled or he went to California and he had some chicks there, who the hell cares? I have a totally different outlook about this and I think that’s why our marriage was so good. Because we respected one another and gave ourselves freedom. He liked to have a good time and I’m sure he did a lot of naughty things.”
In 1998 at the age of seventy-five, Ahmet fell head over heels in love with a musician he called his “young Elvis.” Following in the footsteps of Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Stephen Stills, and Mick Jagger, Kid Rock became the last in a long line of artists upon whom Ahmet lavished so much of his time and attention that it sometimes seemed he cared far more about their personal relationship than the business they had in common.
The son of a wealthy car dealer who grew up on an apple farm in Romeo, Michigan, Robert James Ritchie had acquired his stage name as a teenage deejay working basement parties for $30 a night where patrons enjoyed watching “that white kid rock.” At the age of seventeen, he signed with Jive Records but was dropped by the label after his first album, Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast, was banned by the FCC from radio play for its sexually explicit lyrics.
After cutting two more albums for another label that then also dropped him, Kid Rock went to work as a janitor in a studio in Detroit so he could afford to record his fourth album there. A popular live act in his home state, he performed at a small club in Cleveland where Andy Karp, an A&R man for Lava Records, saw him. Karp then brought Jason Flom, the head of the label, to a special showcase performance at which they were the only record executives present.
Beginning his career at Atlantic in 1979 at the age of eighteen by putting up posters for the label in record shops for $4 an hour, Flom had risen through the ranks to become the head of A&R by signing Twisted Sister, Fiona, White Lion, and Skid Row. As Flom would later say, “When Twisted Sister became big, someone played Ahmet something and asked what he thought and he said, ‘I don’t like it but what the fuck do I know? I haven’t had a hit in seven years.’ ”
Flom went on to sign a variety of successful acts like Hootie and the Blowfish, who sold an astonishing twenty million records for Atlantic, as well as Jewel, Tori Amos, and the Southern rock band Collective Soul. When Doug Morris offered Flom the chance to revamp Atco, he decided instead to start his own label and formed Lava Records, which was distributed by Atlantic. With acts like Matchbox 20, Uncle Kracker, Sugar Ray, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the Corrs, and Evelyn King, Lava sold ninety million records over the next eight years and Atlantic bought the label outright in 2002.
After seeing Kid Rock perform at the showcase, Flom signed him for $100,000 and released Devil Without a Cause, his debut album on Lava, on August 18, 1998. In Flom’s words, “It was one of the incredible albums of all time but nobody else liked it. The people at Atlantic thought it was a joke, the industry thought it was a joke, radio hated it, press hated it, MTV, nothing was going.” The album languished on the charts for months until Flom arranged for Kid Rock to perform at an industry party in Los Angeles. “I dragged Ahmet to the show and the room must have had fifty people in it. During the set, Ahmet turned to me and said, ‘You know you found Elvis.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know but I need someone else to help.’ ”
The next day, Kid Rock came to the Peninsula Hotel, where he, Flom, and Ahmet “all sat around the pool in bathrobes and the two of them became thick as thieves. It was a perfect match. Ahmet was as happy hanging out with Kid Rock as Mick Jagger or the dauphin of France. He got it and he never wavered. For a few years, I was so close to Kid Rock that he used to introduce me as his dad and then it changed. Ahmet supplanted me as the father figure.”
As Kid Rock, whose friends refer to him as “Kid,” “Rock,” or “Bob,” would later say, “We did this show in L.A. Some celebrity shindig. Name ’em and they were there. Who’s Who. I was onstage playing and no one gives a shit. Everyone’s talking. Whatever. Got their noses up each other’s asses. And there was this old dude standing there with a cane staring at us. Watched the whole show. And the next day I get this call. ‘This is Ahmet Ertegun. I just want to know how’s my young Elvis doing?’ That was pretty much the first thing he ever said to me.”
After Lava released “Bawitdaba” as a single in May 1999, Kid Rock “proceeded to blow up overnight.” With a chorus that sampled Sugar Hill Gang’s classic “Rapper’s Delight” and a title that came from Love-bug Starski’s “Live at the Fever,” the song began with Kid Rock repeating the lyrics, “Bawitdaba da bang/a dang diggy diggy diggy/said the boogy/said up jump the boogy” six times before howling out his name. Repeating the introductory line four more times, he then went into his own wild, twisted version of an old-school rap over a thrashing, convulsive, head-banging heavy metal backing track.
A month after the song was released, Kid Rock’s debut album on Lava went platinum. After he performed the song at the 1999 Woodstock Festival, the album went double platinum and eventually sold seven million copies. In 2000, “Bawitdaba” was nominated for a Grammy Award in both the Best New Artist and Best Hard Rock Performance categories.
With his long unkempt blond hair flying in his face as he performed bare-chested in shades and a white panama hat or his trademark red fedora, Kid Rock was a natural-born hell-raiser who fused elements of rap, heavy metal, and country and western music while projecting an irresistibly authentic white working-class persona that immediately crossed him over into the mainstream pop market. Although Ahmet was old enough to be his grandfather when they met, the two men soon became close friends.
While working on his second album, Kid Rock invited Ahmet to come to Detroit with him to hear some of his new material. After taking Jason Flom and Ahmet to a little café “he fell in love with” where they ate barbecue pork sandwiches, the three men went into the studio together. As Kid Rock recalled, “I’ll never forget that day. I get into the studio, I’m a wreck, I’ve slept maybe an hour. We’re discussing me being a wreck and Jason Flom said, ‘You gotta slow down, Rock. You’re going to kill yourself.’ Blah blah blah blah. Ahmet leaned over and said, ‘You know what, man? Some of the best rock ’n’ roll records ever made were made on drugs.’ I don’t think he meant it like don’t stop. He was just being honest. He was always a very honest person.”
Ahmet and Kid Rock then began hanging out together on a fairly regular basis. Scheduled to have lunch with Ahmet at his weekend home in Southampton one day, Rock called to say he couldn’t make it only to have Ahmet say, “ ‘I don’t care what shape you’re in. Get over here.’ I go over there, he goes, ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I go, ‘I been up all night. I haven’t been doing good things. I’m having girl trouble.’ I’m waiting to hear this fucking wisdom from this man who has seen and done it all and he’s like, ‘You want a Baby Ruth, man? A Baby Ruth will make you feel better.’ So here comes James with a fucking tray of Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and I had a Baby Ruth. Then Ahmet got on the phone with my girlfriend and straightened everything out.”
Rock then went to visit Ahmet and Mica in Bodrum. In his words, “I had never seen anything like that house. Unbelievable. I said to Ahmet, ‘What’s this?’ Ahmet goes, ‘That stone’s from the Mausoleum. Leave it alone.’ I was putting out cigars on it. I hadn’t met Mica yet so I put on a suit and tie. I just thought it was the right thing to do. Ahmet’s always sharp so I dressed up.”
As Mica would later say, “I arrived from Paris and I saw this man in this blasting heat in this navy blue suit with a tie on and I said, ‘What happened? Are you crazy?’ And he said, ‘Well, I knew you were coming and I thought I would get dressed up.’ Kid Rock is very smart and well educated and he’s crazy. He came and stayed with us in Turkey twice.”
At a dinner party in New York one night, Ahmet was busily talking to people at his table when Rock came over and asked his permission to ask Mica to dance with him. In the words of Erith Landeau, Ahmet and Mica’s longtime friend, “Ahmet sort of looked at him like, ‘What the hell do you want from me? If she wants to dance, go dance with her.’ He invited Mica to dance and he was holding her like she was made of Chinese porcelain. He was so careful not to hold her too tight and crease her dress. It was so cute and so touching.”
In the summer of 2000, Ahmet went to Detroit to record a young jazz saxophone player named James Carter whom Atlantic had signed. Jason Fine, who would go on to become executive editor of Rolling Stone magazine but was then a staff writer who had been assigned to interview Ahmet would later say, “They wanted to make a record in Detroit where James Carter is from in a club so it would have the feeling of an old jazz record and Ahmet loved the idea so they went to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country. A tiny funky old place where maybe fifty people could sit in vinyl booths and at an old bar.”
The club was so small that Ahmet had to set up a mobile recording studio in an RV parked outside. Seventy-seven years old and wearing a long wool sport coat, a crisp white shirt with an open collar, and pressed light tan pants, Ahmet was using a bamboo cane to get around but spent the entire night “running back and forth between the mobile studio and the club.”
Because Aretha Franklin was scheduled to sing and could not abide air conditioning, Fine recalled, “It was a hundred and ten degrees in the club. When you ordered a drink, the ice had melted by the time it came from the bar to the table. I was sweating like a pig but Ahmet looked as cool as he could be. He had an incredible multigenerational array of sax players onstage and was telling Aretha he wanted her to sing the blues on this one, calling out the songs, working up the arrangements, and running the session. It was unbelievable.”
After the session ended, Fine, who was then thirty-four years old, sat around drinking and talking with Ahmet until nearly three A.M. At eleven the next morning, Ahmet’s driver came to take Fine to lunch with Ahmet at “an incredible house in Bloomfield Hills designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s students that was owned by Ahmet’s old friend Alfred Taubman,” a well-known real estate developer and philanthropist who had pioneered the modern shopping mall.
In Fine’s words, “There was an absurd amount of art all over the house. Picassos next to Egon Schiele etchings and Lichtenstein and Degas. The walls were covered with this stuff.” Still hungover from the night before, Fine was escorted by the butler to the dining room table, where Ahmet was sitting with the multiple Grammy Award-winning singer Anita Baker, Kid Rock, and the current love of Rock’s life, Pamela Anderson, the buxom blond model, actress, and Playboy Playmate who had formerly been married to Tommy Lee, the drummer in Mötley Crüe.
“Kid was wearing long red shorts, a white shirt, and a white bowler hat with a red bandanna on it,” Fine recalled. “Pam was wearing a purple miniskirt and a white tank top out of which she was exploding. At one point, we walked to the bathroom at the same time and she stopped in front of this Lichtenstein and said, ‘This is so Pop.’ And I thought to myself, ‘You are so Pop.’ She looked just like the Pop Art on the walls.”
At the table, Ahmet presided over a discussion about the best jazz singers as well as the early days of Rolling Stone magazine and his relationship with Jann Wenner. At one point, he asked, “Ya boys want hot dogs?” Ringing a bell, he told a servant, “Hot dogs, please,” and they were then served on silver trays accompanied by silver bowls filled with condiments. After everyone had drunk a good deal of wine, Fine did a short interview with Ahmet. When the meal ended around four o’clock, a still “wiped out” Fine thought he would return to his hotel room for a nap.
Taking him right back to the club, Ahmet ran “another amazing session, saying things like, ‘The organ’s a little loud. Maybe we should change drummers on this song.’ He had unbelievable control of everything and Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson and Natalie Cole came down. All the generations of music Ahmet had been involved with were in this funky little club in Detroit—jazz and soul, Aretha and James Carter and Kid Rock.” According to Rock, “I never saw that kind of energy in a guy that age. He could keep up with me and anybody can tell you, I can go. But Ahmet would keep up with me.”
During the second week in January two years later, Rock was celebrating his thirty-first birthday with Anderson in a luxury villa with a swimming pool in Careyes, Mexico. “We’re by ourselves and after about two days, I go, ‘I love you but I got nothing else to say to you. I’m out of things to talk about. Can’t fuck anymore. We’ve done that. What are we going to do here for the next seven days?’ She says, ‘Why don’t you invite some of your friends?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t have friends with private jets and shit.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, wait a minute.’ So I called the town house looking for Ahmet and Mica answered. She goes, ‘He’s in L.A. I’m sure he’d love to come.’ I call Ahmet. Foop! He was there the next day.”
Flying to Mexico in a private plane with Veronique Simon and a couple who were Rock’s friends, Ahmet and his traveling companions arrived at the villa after a long drive. In Simon’s words, “The villa was fine but there was nothing to do and Kid Rock was absolutely drunk all the time. Pamela didn’t eat and she didn’t drink because she wanted to stay as she was and I started to build a relationship with her and Ahmet was in the middle of nowhere with Kid Rock and he was younger than all these people who were drunk with nothing to say.” Going into business with Simon, Anderson then became the spokeswoman for the Simon Solution Two-Step System for Fuller Plumper Lips, also known as the Pamela Anderson Lip Plumper.
“Ahmet hung out with us for five days,” Kid Rock said. “It was great because we had a Mexican chef who went to school in France and all we could say was fucking huevos rancheros and guacamole and chips. So all we did was drink Coronas and eat that shit for like two, three days. But when Ahmet finally got there, he would order for us in French. We also had a mariachi band and I got up and I was trying to jam with them and I was shit-faced and Ahmet was like, ‘Sit down. You’re drunk!’ ”
Later that year, Ahmet invited Rock to join him at a dinner after the New York premiere of the HBO movie The Gathering Storm, in which Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave portrayed Winston and Clementine Churchill. As Rock recalled, “Winston Churchill’s grandson was there and all the New York elite, and I’m like, ‘Ahmet, I got on a wife beater and cowboy boots.’ ‘No, don’t worry. Nobody’s dressed up. Come on over.’ Sure enough, I walk in there and you could hear a pin drop. I sit down next to him and go, ‘You motherfucker.’ And he’s like, ‘You look good, man.’ ”
In a photograph taken by Bill Cunningham that appeared in the Sunday New York Times on October 27, 2002, Ahmet and Kid Rock can be seen decked out in matching red fedoras looking very much like two high school buddies dressed up for the prom in clothes they just stole from a secondhand store. “Bette Midler does this thing for the parks in New York City,” Rock would later say. “So I’m like, ‘Let’s get sharp and wear identical suits and hats,’ Ahmet’s like, ‘That’s awesome. Let’s do it!’ Full matching black suits, red ties, and red hats.”
Ahmet had first seen Bette Midler perform for “a convention of hairdressers” in 1972 at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, a hip bistro on West 56th Street. Having already made a name for herself by appearing with her pianist Barry Manilow at the Continental Baths at Broadway and 74th Street where the audience was almost entirely male and usually attired only in bath towels, Midler knocked Ahmet out that night with her snappy patter, great pipes, and unmistakable style. Saying “I’ve never been so stunned by a performer,” he signed her to Atlantic and then co-produced The Divine Miss M, her first album for the label. Even after the singer had left Atlantic in 1995 to record for Mo Ostin at Warner Brothers Records, she and Ahmet remained good friends.
Recalling Ahmet and Kid Rock’s appearance at her benefit gala, Midler said, “It was hilarious, It was the best costume ever. I think the theme was, ‘Come as You Wish You Were.’ They were wearing matching red fedoras but when Ahmet took his off, he had a toupee under it. I laughed and laughed. Kid Rock liked to have a good time and had access to Pam Anderson so why wouldn’t Ahmet like to hang out with him? There was no Pam Anderson around Mick Jagger.” In the words of Lisa Robinson, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair magazine, “Ahmet always seemed as delighted to be around Kid Rock as he was around Mick Jagger. He really got a kick out of him. It was a very mutually affectionate relationship.”
Rock was with Ahmet one night “at this big party uptown” during one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction weeks in New York City “and everybody was there. Everyone. From Springsteen on down. Me and Ahmet are sitting there chilling and Mick Jagger walks in. And he recognizes me and comes over and says, ‘Hey, Bobby, how you doing?’ Gives me a kiss. Gives Ahmet a kiss. Walks around the room and walks out. And Ahmet goes, ‘You make him nervous, man!’ ”
On May 29, 2000, during the Memorial Day weekend, Ahmet suffered what Mica would later call “a pretty serious stroke” at their home in Southampton. Although he did not lose consciousness, Ahmet was rushed to a local hospital. By the time he was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, it was too late for doctors, in Mica’s words, “to puncture the retina of his eye to release the pressure” and he lost the sight in his right eye.
Continuing to maintain a schedule that would have daunted a man half his age, Ahmet never spoke publicly about being unable to see out of his right eye and many who were closest to him, Kid Rock among them, never knew he was partially blind. When Dave Marsh saw Ahmet using a cane at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame meeting, he asked him if it was his knees or his hips that were bothering him. Without going into further detail, Ahmet said, “It’s my stroke.” By then, he had begun taking anticoagulants to prevent blood clots from forming in his circulatory system.
A year later at the age of seventy-eight, Ahmet underwent triple bypass and aortic valve repair surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. As Mica would later say, “Ahmet wanted to go to the Cleveland Clinic to have it done but they told him they had the best person, Dr. Mehmet Oz, to do it. Ahmet said, ‘I don’t want to be operated on by a Turk’ but then he gave in.” Oz, who would become a media celebrity, was, in Mica’s words, “brilliant and he did a fabulous job. Ahmet recovered fairly quickly from that and he had no pain or shortness of breath.”
While Ahmet was supposed to be sleeping one night in the hospital, he overheard two doctors discussing whether he would survive the procedure. “Up to that point,” he would later say, “I was taking everything very lightly. I thought, ‘As soon as I get out of here, I’ll start drinking again. Booze. Smoking. Everything, right?’ But when I heard that, I said, ‘Oh.’ ”
One of the doctors then gave Ahmet a detailed analysis of the wear and tear that his tumultuous lifestyle had wreaked upon him. When Ahmet asked how he knew all this, the doctor replied, “I know because I’ve seen what it’s done to your body. Don’t think all that’s just gone by.” Having smoked cigarettes for years, Ahmet promptly quit cold turkey with “no withdrawal symptoms at all” and regularly began doing physical rehabilitation exercises. As his old friend Julio Mario Santo Domingo said of Ahmet in 2002, “He must be the strongest man in the world, like a Turkish wrestler. The abuse he has subjected his body to is not to be believed—he must have very special genes.”
Ahmet proved this point yet again by surviving a protracted bout with listeria, a rare but potentially lethal bacterial infection he may have contracted from eating unpasteurized cheese. Symptoms traditionally associated with listeria include fever, muscle aches, and nausea or diarrhea. If the infection spreads to the nervous system, it can cause convulsions and lead to meningitis and so is usually treated in a hospital with intravenous doses of antibiotics.
Mica at first thought Ahmet had “wisteria” and could not understand how a flower could make him so ill. After she understood the real nature of his illness, she said, “It was a very, very serious thing, and he had to spend two months in the hospital and was now a little more debilitated.” From his bed at New York-Presbyterian, Ahmet continued working with Frances Chantly, who had become his assistant in 2000 and always referred to him as “Mr. Ertegun.” In her words, “He said I was helping keep him alive by making him work.”
While Ahmet was still the patriarch at Atlantic and continued coming to work on a daily basis after being released from the hospital, his role at the label had become largely ceremonial. Jason Flom and Craig Kallman were now responsible for overseeing the music released by the company. A lifelong record fanatic who by the age of thirteen had already begun amassing the 350,000 LPs that would eventually comprise the largest vinyl collection in the world, Kallman had begun his career in the music business as a teenage deejay playing disco, punk, rock, reggae, New Wave, alternative, and electronic music in clubs like Danceteria, Area, the Palladium, and the Tunnel.
After graduating from Brown University, Kallman started his own record label, Big Beat, and released a series of hits that convinced Doug Morris to bring him in at Atlantic in 1991. “To me,” Kallman said, “Atlantic was the iconic label because Zeppelin had been my favorite band. I loved the Stones and Ray Charles and Aretha and when I walked into the building the first day, it was like walking into the sacred halls.” After Morris persuaded Kallman to sell Big Beat Records to Atlantic and join the company, Ahmet personally anointed Kallman as the last in a long line of his direct successors by telling the twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur, “We’re going to develop you to be president of Atlantic one day.”
Kallman’s eventual accession in 2002 was made more difficult by the digital revolution that had by then effectively destroyed the business Ahmet had spent his entire life building. In June 1999, Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year-old student at Northeastern University in Boston, came up with a program that allowed people to share MP3 music files over the Internet for free.
Calling the program Napster after the nickname he had been given for his “nappy haircut,” Fanning made his online music file sharing service available free to all who wanted to use it. Napster soon attracted hordes of college students who began downloading music without paying for it. At its peak, the service was used by more than sixty million people who downloaded 2.79 billion songs—on which record companies did not collect a penny.
Rather than try to acquire the technology so they could use it themselves, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement against Napster in December 1999. Two years later, the file sharing service was shut down by order of a U.S. district court judge. By then, the damage had already been done. As Bill Curbishley would note, “It was like the record companies lived in this illusory world where they had built this castle on a mountain with a moat around it that was impregnable and no one was ever going to get in. And then lo and behold, someone dropped in by parachute. It was as simple as that. They shot themselves in the head. None of them paid any attention to the new technology and the Internet until it was much too late.”
In 2000, the record industry sold 785 million albums on CD and vinyl. Over the next eight years, sales fell 45 percent. As one industry analyst noted, “The Titanic that is physical media started slowly sinking in 2000. Certainly this is a traumatic event for those who worked there, but it’s an expected product of the digital transformation.”
That anyone could now download a single track from any album also put an end to the product that for the past four decades had been the mainstay of the industry. As David Geffen described the new reality: “What made the record business was that when the LP came out, it went from being a singles business to an album business. And now it’s turned it back into a singles business and that’s a miserable business. There’s still musical talent and there always will be and music is more a part of people’s lives than it has ever been before but unfortunately, it’s free. Try and compete with free. There will always be a record business and there will always be people paying for music but as long as it’s convenient to steal it, why not steal it?”
Two years after Steve Jobs of Apple announced the creation of iTunes on January 9, 2001, the iTunes store began selling individual tracks online for 99 cents (a dime more than the price of a single during the era of independent record labels). No longer able to earn a living from record sales, musicians began relying on revenue from live performances as well as the direct sale of CDs in order to survive. With consumers now able to view and listen to music for free on YouTube, Myspace, and Facebook, artists trying to break into the business no longer needed to audition for record company executives because they could sell their music directly online.
While rock superstars like U2, Radiohead, and Pearl Jam were still able to market albums in a variety of new ways, their sales were a fraction of what they had once been. In the words of one management executive, “There’s a prevailing wisdom that many established acts don’t need a record label anymore. This is the new frontier. This is the beginning of a new era for the music business.”
Although the digital revolution did not affect Ahmet personally, it did wreak havoc at the Warner Music Group. In desperate need of cash to pay off corporate debt incurred by its disastrous merger with AOL in 2000 and fearing the record industry would never return to the levels of profitability it had once generated, Time Warner sold the division for $2.6 billion in 2003 to a private investment group headed by Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Bronfman then persuaded Lyor Cohen, the forty-four-year-old head of the Island Def Jam Music Group to run the division. As Cohen would later say, “The basic architecture and plans of Def Jam were really written by Ahmet and Jerry Wexler. We started out as a rap label and through that, we attracted a lot of rock ’n’ roll artists. Which is similar to Atlantic because jazz had been the rap music of that moment in time.”
The son of Israeli immigrants, Cohen had been born in New York and then grew up in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. After graduating from the University of Miami, where he studied global marketing, Cohen began promoting shows in Los Angeles featuring rap artists and bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He then began working for Russell Simmons in New York and soon made a reputation for himself as a white man who could handle himself in a black world as the road manager for Run-DMC.
Nicknamed “Little Lansky” by rap producer Irv Gotti, Cohen became the president of Def Jam Records in 1988. When Doug Morris and the Universal Music Group purchased the label in 1999, Cohen earned $100 million. He then ran the Def Jam, Island, Roc-a-Fella, and Lost Highway labels, whose combined earnings amounted to nearly $700 million a year.
A few months before being named the head of the Warner Music Group, Cohen had come to Ahmet “because I had this wonderful artist named Kanye West and he really wanted to have Aretha Franklin on his debut album. So I ran over to Ahmet and played it for him and he went absolutely ga-ga and tried to get her to do it. At this point, Kanye was nobody and even though Ahmet was so convincing, she rejected the idea. But he said, ‘This is amazing. This artist is going to be someone special.’ He got it immediately.”
After Atlantic and Elektra were merged into a single label in 2004, Cohen had “to right-size the company” by letting “many, many people go. My whole life, I had been hiring people and this was my first experience of letting people go and I experienced a lot of mild depression so I said, ‘The way I’m going to pay myself back is that I am going to have lunch with Ahmet twice a week,’ and we started getting into a routine.”
Voicing what he had long been feeling about his role at Atlantic but had only expressed in private, Ahmet told Cohen “no one utilized him anymore and he felt completely marginalized. No one talked to him.” While in part this was due to Ahmet’s age and legendary status in the business, the problem had been exacerbated because “the previous regime had built an executive wing that separated the executives from the company and so it created even more isolation.”
In Cohen’s words, “What Ahmet needed was youth and excitement. He needed to keep teaching. So I reactivated him. I knocked down the walls of the executive wing and suddenly, it was like a stent in the heart. The blood started moving again and inside of a few months he went from a really awkward walk to a much stronger walk. Literally. He started to look better, feel better, straighten up, and have a real step in his walk.”
Over lunch served by a butler in a white suit in Ahmet’s office, the two men would regularly meet to talk about a variety of subjects, foremost among them Atlantic’s precipitous fall to sixth place in record sales. Ahmet “made me swear to him I was going to do everything in my power to resurrect Atlantic. Atlantic was dead. I should say it was dying which is worse than dead because you know it’s coming and it was very depressing for him. He wanted me to fire all the A&R people and all the management.”
To bring the label back to its former prominence, Cohen named Jason Flom as the chairman of the label with Craig Kallman as his cochairman. After Flom, who was “not getting along with Lyor” left the label, Cohen paired Kallman with chief operating officer Julie Greenwald. Having begun her career in the record business as Cohen’s assistant at Def Jam, Greenwald assumed essentially the same role Miriam Bienstock had occupied at Atlantic four decades earlier.
As Kallman would later say, “When Edgar and Lyor took over, they were able to clear up the morass and confusion and bring Atlantic back to the way it was when I got there. They also brought Ahmet back. Basically, they said it’s all about the music and A&R and the artists and focusing on what matters. Which is the talent. Finding the best talent and making great records and having the best delivery system. They did a stunning job in the face of a collapsing business.”
In 2008, Atlantic would become the first record label to sell more than 50 percent of its music as digital files. By signing artists to “360 deals” that gave the company a share of all their touring and merchandising revenue, Kallman and Greenwald managed to resuscitate the company by reestablishing the kind of hands-on relationships with musicians that had once been Ahmet’s stock-in-trade.
On February 21, 2005, Ahmet was interviewed for an hour by Charlie Rose on his PBS show. Eighty-one years old and wearing a thickly knotted yellow challis tie with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, Ahmet discussed a variety of topics, among them the current state of soccer, Turkey’s role in the modern world, and the astonishing volume of great music Atlantic had released over the last fifty-eight years.
Speaking in an occasionally halting manner but still sharp, Ahmet had the air of a dignified elder statesman who had spent his life negotiating alliances in a business he understood as well as anyone who had ever lived. When Rose asked him how he felt about Ray, the Taylor Hackford film about Ray Charles for which Jamie Foxx had won the Academy Award as Best Actor in 2004, Ahmet diplomatically said, “It’s a very difficult thing to direct a great film about a great artist and I think the film is very moving . . . People ask me, ‘Is that what happened?’ I say, ‘If that were what happened, it would be called a documentary and neither you nor I would have seen it.’ ”
Four days later, Ahmet, who earlier in the month had been honored with the first Grammy Industry Icon Award, told a reporter from the online magazine Slate that while he liked the actor who had portrayed him in Ray and thought director Taylor Hackford had “made a terrific movie, you must realize that I’m not the kind of shy little guy as portrayed in the movie. I don’t care what the man looks like or anything but it should have been somebody hip.”
Ahmet’s initial reaction to his portrayal by actor Curtis Armstrong, whose big break had come in Revenge of the Nerds, had been far more visceral. After Mica and Barbara Howar had accompanied Ahmet to a special screening of Ray arranged for him by Hackford in Los Angeles, Ahmet was, in Howar’s words, “absolutely crazed. We couldn’t shut him up. He was like, ‘I have never worn clothes like that! I’ve never worn a double-breasted suit! Two-toned shoes!’ Mica was going, ‘Ahmet! Ahmet! Ahmet!’ He was crazed and he stayed crazed and angry the entire night.”
As they walked into a restaurant in West Hollywood after the screening to have dinner with Hackford, “Mica said to me, ‘You keep Taylor occupied and I’ll try to keep Ahmet quiet.’ Mica and I were like two colonels keeping Ahmet separated from Taylor.” As Jerry Wexler, portrayed in the film by Richard Schiff, who had played presidential assistant Toby Ziegler in the long-running NBC series The West Wing, said, “Ray was terrible. I felt the same way about it as Ahmet. We were stick figures. Just a couple of suits.”
Having spent years working on the project before filming began, Taylor Hackford had spent countless hours interviewing Ahmet about the early days at Atlantic and had become part of Ahmet and Mica’s social circle. As the director noted, “The best time to talk to Ahmet was at two in the morning after he’d had many vodkas and the stories came out.” Acknowledging that Ahmet did not like the way he was portrayed in the movie, in which Ray Charles called him “Omelet,” as Otis Redding had actually done, Hackford said, “Eventually, Ahmet hosted a screening in New York and once people began recognizing him in airports after the movie became a hit, he got into it.”
Though far fewer people saw it, Ahmet had also been portrayed in Beyond the Sea, the 2004 Bobby Darin biopic written and directed by Academy Award–winning actor Kevin Spacey, who also played the lead role. For reasons known only to him, Spacey chose a forty-six-year-old Turkish actor named Tayfun Bademsoy to play Ahmet. With a full head of dark hair and the wrong kind of goatee, Bademsoy bore no resemblance to the way Ahmet had looked in 1958.
The single funniest cinematic moment in which Ahmet was involved occurs in Frank Zappa’s 1971 movie 200 Motels. Zappa, who was so fond of Ahmet that he named one of his sons after him, had asked Ahmet to play the part of a business executive in the film but when he was unable to do so, Zappa worked him into the script by having one of his leading characters say, “Ahmet Ertegun used this towel as a bathmat six weeks ago at a rancid motel in Orlando, Florida . . . It’s still damp. What an aroma!” Snorting it, the character then got stoned out of his mind.