Interceding in the life of the preeminent artist on his label in a manner no other record executive would have ever dared to do, Ahmet had actually helped bring the two together. Before the Stones decamped for the south of France, Ahmet had visited Jagger in the house he then shared with pop singer Marianne Faithfull on Cheyne Walk in London, where they had both been busted for possession of heroin, LSD, and marijuana on May 21, 1969.
Unbeknownst to either man, Faithfull had been upstairs listening as the two talked about her. Because she was heavily addicted to heroin, Ahmet urged Jagger to think seriously about the damage she could do to the band. “I know it’s going to be tough on you,” Ahmet said, “but she could jeopardize everything.” When Jagger asked what he could do about it, Ahmet replied, “There’s only one thing to do. I’ve seen a lot of heartbreak with junkies. Believe me, old friend, it wrecks the lives of everybody around them, as well. It’s a bottomless pit, and she’ll drag you into it unless you let her go.” In light of all the money Atlantic was about to pay the Stones, Ahmet told Jagger he wanted “some guarantee that the whole deal isn’t going to be blown because of Marianne. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Shortly before Ahmet and Mica went to see the Stones perform the last of their three shows at the Palais des Sports in Paris some months later on September 23, 1970, Ahmet received a call from his old friend Eddie Barclay. A former jazz band leader born Edouard Ruault, he had founded Barclay Records, the premier label in France. A world-renowned playboy, Barclay would marry nine different women before his death at the age of eighty-four. As Mica would later say, “We brought Bianca to the show because she was living with Eddie Barclay and he came to Ahmet and said, ‘You know, Bianca would love so much to go to the Stones.’ So Ahmet arranged it and she spent the whole evening practically on the stage in her black cloak looking very beautiful and that was when it started.”
A stunning dark-eyed beauty whose affection for high society mirrored Jagger’s own long-standing fascination with upper-class life, the two soon became a couple. Unlike Faithfull, Bianca had little taste for the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and did not get along well with Pallenberg. A month after the band had settled into tax exile in France, Jagger stunned his fellow band mates by announcing he intended to marry Bianca, who was then four months pregnant with his child.
In light of his standing as a counterculture hero and his reputation as the greatest ladies’ man of his generation, Jagger might as well have announced he had decided to enter the priesthood. Nonetheless, the two were wed on May 12, 1971, first by the mayor of St. Tropez at the town hall and then in church by a Catholic priest from whom Jagger had been taking religious instruction. Attended by a host of rock stars from England and a sizable percentage of the European press, the town hall ceremony became a major mob scene.
Leaving a record business convention in Las Vegas, Ahmet had flown to New York and then chartered a plane to France because, in his words, “I was a witness at the wedding. They have witnesses rather than best men.” The actual best man at the wedding was Keith Richards. Wearing a pair of braided black tights and a long-sleeved white jersey under a green combat jacket, the guitarist arrived so late for the town hall ceremony that the local chief of police refused to allow him inside and both men were soon “standing there with their hands around each other’s throats screaming in their respective languages.” When Richards was finally granted entry, he chose for reasons known only to him to sit on the bride’s side of the aisle.
As Ahmet would later tell Jason Flom, who began his career at Atlantic in 1979, “Keith was the best man and he was walking around with a bag full of coke, scooping it out with his hand and shoving it in his face. The chief of police came up to him and said in French, ‘What is this powder?’ Keith had this dumbfounded look on his face. Reaching into the bag, I grabbed some, started patting it on Keith’s face, and said in French, ‘You don’t understand. They’re not just musicians. They’re also clowns. And this is their makeup.’ ”
Once Jagger and his new wife returned from their honeymoon, the Stones began recording in the basement of Richards’s seaside villa. Richards, who now was again using heroin, would often go upstairs during sessions to put his young son to bed and never be seen again. As work on the new album slowed to a crawl, drug use in the house increased to unheard-of proportions and Jagger began spending more time in Paris, where Bianca gave birth to their daughter, Jade, in September. When the word came down at the end of November that the villa was about to be raided by the local gendarmes, the Stones were forced to leave France so quickly that Richards and Pallenberg left most of their personal possessions behind.
For the next six months as Jagger and Richards worked together in relative harmony in Los Angeles overdubbing and laboriously mixing and remixing what they had now decided would be the band’s first double album, Ahmet made regular visits to the studio because, in bassist Bill Wyman’s words, he “was keen to check on his investment.” As Richards would later say, “We had a lot of tussles with Ahmet over Exile on Main St. We wanted a double album and he said, ‘A double album doesn’t sell as much as a single album.’ We won. But as far as the sound and the material was concerned, his reaction was, ‘That’s what we need. They’ve gotta rock with this.’ ”
That a double album, especially one featuring a cover consisting of images shot by famed photographer Robert Frank as well as an insert of twelve perforated postcards by photographer Norman Seef, would also cost far more for Atlantic to manufacture was yet another factor in Ahmet’s reluctance to issue Exile on Main St. as the Stones finally persuaded him to do. Six weeks before the album Mick Jagger had initially wanted to call Tropical Disease was to be released on May 7, 1972, with an extensive tour of North America by the Stones slated to begin on June 3 in Vancouver, Jagger and Richards were still trying to decide which mix of certain songs they liked best. Hand-carrying the masters with him, Marshall Chess flew to New York to deliver them personally to Ahmet so the record could be pressed at last.
Despite what the Rolling Stones had put him through while recording Exile on Main St., Ahmet remained fiercely loyal to the band. Able to spin any story to his own advantage, he would later say, “I was with them a great deal in the south of France. I went down several times and it was a bit mad but it worked out all right. That madness and extravagance is part of their way. It’s not related to the music and it is. To the average person in the street, their way of life is dramatic and everyone loves them for that. They enjoyed renting a castle in the south of France and having big parties with very good champagnes and Bordeaux wines and a great chef and all kinds of girls. The south of France was a great place for them. And while it lasted, it was great fun.”
4
Had it not been for Ahmet, the Rolling Stones might never have even been allowed to enter America for what became to that point in time the highest grossing tour in rock ’n’ roll history. While he would later deny he had done anything more than negotiate with the musicians’ union so the band could perform in the United States, Ahmet used his extensive social and political connections to ensure that Mick Jagger would be granted an entry visa to America despite his 1969 drug bust in London.
Ahmet had first met Senator Jacob K. Javits, the very liberal Republican who sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, through his considerably younger wife, Marion, a denizen of the New York art scene who was also a regular in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, then the hippest downtown hangout in Manhattan. Happy to do a favor for a friend, her husband helped to resolve the problems the Stones might have faced if they had gone through ordinary channels.
As Peter Rudge, who planned and managed this tour, recalled, “It was all done correctly but everything is done on technicalities in that world. I think the Stones were let in because Exile on Main St. was about to be released and it was good for their record sales. It got smoothed over through personal connections. Because that’s the way the system works, isn’t it?”
/> In each of the thirty-one cities in the United States and Canada where the Stones performed on their tour, the band became front-page headline news. Selling out fifty-one shows in support of their new album, which quickly reached the top of both the American and British charts, the band grossed an unheard-of $3 million in ticket sales. In 1969, only Ramparts and Rolling Stone had covered the band’s American tour. Three years later, the Stones’ publicists had no trouble lining up major features in Life, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and the band found themselves traveling with their own press corps.
In light of all the excitement the Stones were generating on the road without him, it was not long before Ahmet joined the party and began showing up backstage at various shows, most often with two girls whose collective ages just about equaled his own. Flying into New Orleans on the Warner Bros. jet on June 26, Ahmet arrived about six hours before the Stones. Knowing “Mick and Keith and Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts wanted to hear some New Orleans music,” Ahmet rented a studio in a warehouse at 748 Camp Street and hired “a good marching band and some of the blues guys like Professor Longhair to play for them.”
In his words, “It’s one thing to arrive in New Orleans like a tourist and walk around. You’ll luck into some music and might hear some band playing a bar. You might hear Raymond Burke or some of the old guys but what the Stones dig is black blues music and it’s not easy to find that in one evening. If they wanted to hear Longhair, he might be playing in Algiers and it would have taken them two hours to get there.”
Ahmet arranged for Roosevelt Sykes, a sixty-six-year-old Chicago-based boogie-woogie piano player known as “The Honeydripper,” Snooks Eaglin, a blind guitarist, and the fabled Longhair, whom Ahmet and Herb Abramson had first seen on their field trip down south in 1948, to perform with a New Orleans street marching band at what became the first great party Ahmet threw for the Stones on the tour.
In a huge room with bare beams, a dusty floor, and a single fan whirring overhead—the temperature soon hit a hundred degrees—Ahmet was in his element. By midnight, as Longhair began ripping through “Stagger Lee,” people were sniffing cocaine off the back of their hands as they danced and sweated to the music. By the time Jagger and Richards swept into the party, the joint was jumping and the music was going round and round.
When the street band Ahmet hired began strutting across the floor led by a magnificent old black man in a black hat and white gloves with a starred white sash across his chest and a stuffed pigeon dangling off one shoulder, everyone began walking behind them in time to the second line while waving white handkerchiefs in the air. The munificent patron who had made it all happen, Ahmet sat beaming in a corner of the room writing checks he handed to each musician after their set was done. As he did so, one old musician asked him, “Mick Jagger? Which one is he?”
The party in New Orleans was the kind of gift only Ahmet could have given the Stones and no one enjoyed it more than him. Aside from the overwhelming amount of money and the maddening artistic freedom the band had demanded in return for signing with Atlantic, this was the real reason the Stones had decided to record for the label. Three decades after Ahmet had first come to New Orleans, he was still the vital link between the music now topping the charts and all that had come before.
Ahmet also loved being out on the road with the Stones because it allowed him to indulge in his always unbridled sexual appetites. In the tightly closed community that surrounded the band on tour, stories about Ahmet’s nocturnal activities were often exchanged even as he stood in the dressing room talking to Jagger and Richards before a show.
The single most scurrilous tale concerned an elaborate practical joke Mick Jagger played on Ahmet by respectfully requesting he have dinner with a very proper young woman who planned to enter the diplomatic corps and wanted to discuss her career plans with him. Taking great care to underline the point so Ahmet would behave himself, Jagger stressed that the girl was the daughter of a high-born family who only wanted his sage advice. At some point during the evening, Ahmet found himself lying beneath a glass coffee table in a hotel room as the girl, a high-priced hooker whom Jagger had hired for the night, did unspeakable things on the other side of the glass.
As Peter Rudge would later say, “Ahmet brought so much of the glamour and glitz and sex to that tour because I think he saw it as an opportunity. For Ahmet, Mick was a prize and a capture. Ahmet could read Mick perfectly and he knew exactly what buttons to press with him. I can’t believe any record executive ever had a relationship with an artist like Ahmet did with Mick. There were also other moments with Ahmet that were horrendous. He was a tough negotiator. In the 1970s, Mick was really the manager and we were all de facto managers. So Mick would have me working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have Marshall Chess working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have Rupert Lowenstein working Ahmet on an angle, he’d have someone talking to Jerry Greenberg, someone talking to Nesuhi, and someone taking Jerry Wexler out to dinner. That was how Mick was.”
When the Stones finally hit New York during the third week in July, with their final show at Madison Square Garden scheduled for Jagger’s twenty-ninth birthday, Ahmet pulled out all the stops. In his words, “There were three days of concerts in New York and it was a nightmare because of the number of people who wanted to come. Originally, I was just going to give one party but then I made it two. The first was supposed to be a general reception for the Stones and the official people on the tour and the other was a personal thing I wanted to do for the Stones for being on Atlantic for the first time but it grew out of all proportions because the same people wanted to go to both parties.”
On Monday night, June 24, 1972, six hundred people, David Geffen and Andy Warhol among them, crowded into two large banquet rooms at the exclusive Four Seasons restaurant on East 52nd Street. The party quickly became a zoo scene. As the burnt carbolic smell of amyl nitrate poppers filled the air, the Stones themselves seemed bewildered by the insanity.
As a very weary Richards sank into a chair to avoid being run over by those who wanted to get close to him, he noted, “Right now is when you realize you’re a product.” To the sound of a low grumbling roar from the other side of the room, Mick and Bianca Jagger made their grand entrance as a bevy of photographers walked backward in front of them popping flashbulbs in their faces. Moving steadily, Jagger just kept going until he was out a side door and riding back downstairs in an elevator, leaving the party before most people even knew he had arrived.
Two days later, Ahmet and Mica arrived late for the Stones’ last show at Madison Square Garden only to find their seats had already been taken by people who had no business being there. Making no attempt to evict them, Ahmet spread his white handkerchief on the concrete step beside the seats so that Mica, looking very fashionable as always in a black dress accented by an ivory bracelet trimmed with gold, could sit down. When someone handed Ahmet a joint, he passed it on.
Backstage at the Garden that night, chaos reigned. As Dick Cavett nervously interviewed Jagger for his late night network talk show, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote sat side by side taking it all in like a pair of elder vampires. After appearing with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show to discuss a band he repeatedly called “The Beatles,” Capote would say his “intuition told him the Rolling Stones would never tour this country again” and “would not even exist in three years time” because “they were evanescent people who were not at all important.”
Six years earlier, Capote had invited five hundred of his best friends to his masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel. The guest list that night included Senator Jacob and Marion Javits, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford, Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, Jacqueline Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Mr. and Mrs. John Steinbeck, Frank Sinatra, Harper Lee, Henry and Clare Booth Luce, Stavros Niarchos, Prince Stanislaus and Lee Radziwill, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, Penelope Tree, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Andy Warhol, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy, as wel
l as assorted Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts, Rothschilds, and Whitneys.
The event of the season, if not the era, the party brought together luminaries from the disparate worlds in which Capote felt very much at home. It also set the gold standard for all New York City high society gatherings until Ahmet and Mica decided to throw an intimate little bash for their friends and the Rolling Stones on the Starlight Roof of the St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. Although Capote would later say, “Ahmet and Mica Ertegun are simply two people on the make. Their party was an Ertegun affair and had little relationship to the Stones,” he was there as well.
By the time Ahmet and Mica arrived at the St. Regis, the lobby was already jammed by drag queens with white paint on their faces, who “lolled in gilt chairs, desperate for an invitation.” Before being allowed entry to the inner sanctum, those who had actually been invited to the party had to be carefully vetted by secretaries with private security guards by their side. As many as a hundred people still managed to crash the event.
One of them was Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian-born actress and socialite whom Ahmet’s father had helped bring to America with her husband, a left-wing Turkish journalist, before World War II. Then seventeen years old, Ahmet had turned Gabor on to marijuana for the first time by passing her a joint. As he would later say, “She never got very high.”
In her tie-dyed evening gown, Gabor began working the party as if her life depended on it. Although she had no idea who Bob Dylan was until her escort, A&P heir Huntington Hartford, informed her he was the most famous rock star in the world, Gabor said, “Oh well, then. I luhv him!” At Dylan’s request, she had her photograph taken with him while saying, “Dollink, ven you’re hot, you’re hot.” As Ahmet would later add, “And when you’re not, you’re not.”
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