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.”
3
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.”
The Last Sultan Page 35
