Ahmet Ertegun was the first person to ask Ella Fitzgerald for her autograph, in 1935. He lived long enough to party for days on end with Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson, and died in 2006, after falling backstage at a Rolling Stones show on the Upper West Side. It wasn’t the prettiest, most dignified death. But Ertegun – who appreciated good jokes, bad women, booze, bad jokes and good women, in any given order – would have enjoyed the obituaries.
Ertegun was born in Istanbul, in 1923. His father, Mehmet Munir, was Ataturk’s legal adviser, a practising Muslim who helped to build secular Turkey and became its ambassador to France, the Court of St James and the US. Ertegun – who’d fallen in love with black music after seeing Duke Ellington’s band perform in London, in 1933 – grew up in Washington and, together with his older brother, Nesuhi, put on a series of jam sessions and jazz concerts that were among the city’s first integrated events. He stayed on after his father’s death, in 1944, studying philosophy at Georgetown and hanging out at Waxie Maxie’s record store. In 1947 he moved to New York and formed Atlantic Records, with money from the family dentist.
Atlantic was scrappy (staffers pushed their desks aside when it came time to record), classy (the musical director Jesse Stone had done arrangements for Chick Webb’s band, where Ella Fitzgerald got her start) and inventive (the engineer Tom Dowd had been a junior physicist on the Manhattan Project). Ertegun had taste, luck and timing.
By the mid-50s, Atlantic had become the premier rhythm and blues label. And when its co-founder, Herb Abramson, was called up by the Army in 1953, Ertegun drafted Jerry Wexler, who’d coined the term “rhythm and blues” in the first place, to replace him as a partner. And, thanks in part to Wexler’s input – and his work with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke – Atlantic became one of the very few independent record companies to survive and thrive in the wake of the British Invasion.
This story has been told quite well, in histories of Atlantic by Charlie Gillett and by Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie. The music writer Robert Greenfield draws heavily on all these sources in The Last Sultan. But Greenfield’s book, the first posthumous biography of Ertegun, brings Ertegun’s story up to date, and put it in perspective.
Greenfield spends nine chapters on Ertegun’s early life and Atlantic’s glorious opening act: well-worn territory that he fleshes out and adds to. Take, for instance, the story of Herb Abramson, who returned from the Army in 1955 and was eventually booted from the label. According to Gillett, Abramson returned to find that “Jerry Wexler was in his seat and couldn’t be moved”. According to Wade and Picardie, Abramson – whose wife, Miriam, ran Atlantic’s day-to-day operations – returned from Germany with a girlfriend. In Greenfield’s account, Abramson returns with the girlfriend and a drug habit.
By industry standards, the ambassador’s son was a prince. And yet he had his weaknesses. Here’s Ahmet, “lying beneath a glass coffee table” while a call girl does “unspeakable things on the other side of the glass”. The Last Sultan takes its title from something one latter-day mistress tells the biographer: “Ahmet was the last sultan of Turkey.” She explains, “A man of this dimension will never stay with one woman.”
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In the later chapters, Greenfield describes Ertegun’s move away from the black music he loved and championed, toward white bands – Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones – whose affinity for black music drew them to sign with Atlantic, and, finally, toward Hootie and the Blowfish. Ertegun survives palace coups, mergers and acquisitions, and cocaine-filled nights at Studio 54. By the end, Ertegun ends up with four palatial homes, custom-made Louis Vuitton cases and friendships with Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger. His biographer ends up listing the “symptoms traditionally associated with listeria” (“fever, muscle aches and nausea or diarrhoea”). “Just like Herb Abramson, Jerry Wexler,...” Greenfield writes, in a passage that epitomises the book’s shift toward people most of us have never heard of ,“Doug Morris was now someone with whom Ahmet had once worked at Atlantic. They were now all gone, but he was still there. In the end, this was always what Ahmet had cared about most.” This is a strange, sad, “Citizen Kane”-like slide for a man who never lacked company.
THE LAST SULTAN
The Life and Times of
Ahmet Ertegun
Robert Greenfield
Simon & Schuster
431 pages; $30
©2011 The New York Times News Service