Three days later, Ahmet flew to the Bilbao Museum in Spain for the opening of a show of his good friend Jean Pigozzi’s collection of African art. Unable to accompany him because she had just returned from an extended business trip to Rio de Janeiro, Mica said, “I knew I couldn’t let him go alone because he wasn’t walking well and I didn’t want to send him with a nurse.” In the end, Veronique Simon went with him. In Pigozzi’s words, “Ahmet was not very well. He was a bit tired and he was in a wheelchair and I had never seen him go around in a wheelchair before.”
In Simon’s words, “We spent three days in Bilbao and Ahmet was in a bad mood and very tired. It was the first time in my life I ever saw him tired and he was a little afraid of traveling. When we arrived in Bilbao, he was afraid his suitcase would not arrive at the airport. He was very quiet and I had the feeling it was the end and I would never see him again.” Pigozzi, who had spent many wild nights with Ahmet, then arranged for him to fly back to New York on real estate developer and philanthropist Eli Broad’s Gulfstream IV.
On Wednesday, October 25, a week after he had sat in at a rehearsal for the Genesis reunion tour at a small studio in Chelsea, Ahmet addressed a company breakfast for Atlantic department heads and senior executives in a restaurant in Rockefeller Center. In Bob Kaus’s words, “Ahmet came and spoke and it was deeply moving. In essence, he said, ‘Atlantic is in better shape now than it has been in years and I’m very happy with the job that everyone is doing to continue the company’s legacy.’ In retrospect, I had this sense he was saying, ‘It’s all okay now. My company is fine and I’m leaving it in good hands.’ ” Craig Kallman recalled, “Ahmet was pretty frail but it was an amazing speech. I had been with him a month before at the Peninsula Hotel in L.A. and it was like one in the morning and toothpicks couldn’t keep my eyes open and he was like, ‘C’mon, we’re going somewhere else.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it. I’m crashing. Ahmet, it’s all you.’ ”
For Ahmet, the definition of hell had always been having to go home early. Recalling a night she had spent with him in New York when “we were all much younger,” his friend Erith Landeau described being with Ahmet on their way home after dinner when he suggested they head to a jazz bar on the West Side for a drink. “I said, ‘Fine.’ And we walked in and it was sort of a long room, very dark and smoky, and the minute we got in, the word was rolling from the door to the back—‘Ahmet Ertegun is here. Ahmet Ertegun is here. Ahmet Ertegun is here.’
“All the musicians who had either worked for him or knew him or played for him grabbed him and within two minutes I nearly lost him. I don’t know if you ever saw Ahmet when he was listening and really concentrating on the music. He would close his eyes three-quarters and listen and he would get the rhythm and he would move his foot. He went into a trance. It was magical. And all the musicians looked to see what he was doing and they sang to him and for him.”
2
Ahmet was scheduled to fly with Mica on Saturday, October 28, 2006, to Michigan in a small chartered plane so they could attend Kid Rock’s “hometown wedding” to Pamela Anderson. Having already tied the knot in St. Tropez, Beverly Hills, and Nashville, the couple intended to marry yet again, this time with Ahmet as the best man. After a powerful storm caused extensive travel delays at all the New York City airports, Ahmet called Rock from his town house to say, “I’m so fucking pissed off. We’re sitting here, Mica’s got her cowboy boots on and we can’t fly out. They won’t let us off the ground.”
Later that day, Craig Kallman called Ahmet to update him on a project they had first discussed some months earlier. Inspired by The Sopranos and Entourage, Kallman had pitched Ahmet on the idea of creating “a well-done dramatic series about the music business” that would deal with “sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, the Mafia, and every figure in the business” with Ahmet as the central character. Confident he “could get the show on the air” if it was done right, Kallman then contacted Taylor Hackford, who had already pitched HBO on a miniseries about Atlantic Records only to decide he could not do justice to the material in so limited a format. The two decided to become producing partners in “a full-blown dramatic hour-long scripted cable show” that would run over seven seasons and cover Ahmet’s entire career. Informed of Hackford’s involvement, Ahmet joked, “Make sure you do a better job on me than Ray.”
When Kallman spoke to Ahmet that afternoon, he told him of his most recent conversations with Hackford and then said, “ ‘Listen, we’ve just been getting into how much poetic license we have.’ He said, ‘Craig, you can make up whatever you want. I’ll say it’s true.’ It was so Ahmet. I was laughing and we had a great conversation.”
After Kallman told Ahmet about a new band he was interested in signing, he said, “Hey, Ahmet, I may need you to come to London with me. ‘No problem. Tell me when you want to go.’ It was the fastest tell-me-when-you-want-to-go ever and I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Which girls am I calling? And what clubs am I going to?’ His energy level was unreal. He was absolutely ready to jump on a plane and go.”
The next morning, Ahmet and Mica went to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to attend the unveiling of the gravestone of Joyce Wein, the wife and business partner of George Wein, the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival. “The chosen burial ground for New Yorkers of African American and Afro Caribbean descent,” the cemetery is the final resting place for Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, W. C. Handy, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Illinois Jacquet, Jackie McLean, King Oliver, Max Roach, and Cootie Williams, among others.
As Ahmet walked with Mica past the graves, many of them marked by large, elaborate headstones, he noted that so many of the artists he had once known and worked with were now gone, while he was still around. Always so busy living that he seemed to give little thought to his own mortality, Ahmet did have a clear view of death. Two years earlier as he had sat listening to a minister talk about where people went after they died at the funeral service for soul singer Doris Troy at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, Ahmet had turned to his assistant Frances Chantly and, in her words, “made this motion with his hand as though to indicate that when we die, it’s over. There is nothing afterwards.”
When they sat together at the end of the day at Atlantic, Ahmet and Doug Morris would, in his words, “talk about death all the time. He once said to me, ‘When I die, I’m going to be buzzing around this building making sure who came to the funeral.’ He also said, ‘When I die, I don’t care what happens. Because I’m going to be dead.’ ”
After Ahmet and Mica left Woodlawn Cemetery that day, he told her, “Well, we should go to the Stones.” As she would later say, “Because we were rested, you know? If we had gone to Kid Rock’s wedding, we probably wouldn’t have gone to the Stones.” That night, Ahmet and Mica went to the Beacon Theatre, an aging three-thousand-seat venue on Broadway at 74th Street, to attend a benefit concert by the Rolling Stones for the William J. Clinton Foundation in honor of the former president’s sixtieth birthday. The show was filmed by Martin Scorsese for a documentary entitled Shine a Light, which was dedicated to Ahmet.
Wearing a midnight blue blazer lined with red silk, a thickly knotted white woolen tie, a white-collared blue shirt, gray suspenders, and gray pants, Ahmet entered the crumbling seventy-six-year-old former movie theater through the stage door and was sitting in the very funky downstairs lounge when Jane Rose, Keith Richards’s longtime manager, caught sight of him. As she would later say, “Ahmet was family. Whenever he showed up, everyone was happy to see him. I was thrilled he was there and I said, ‘You’ve got to say hello to Keith and the guys’ and everyone said, ‘No, he can’t walk.’ But he wanted to see the band so I took him up to the dressing rooms in the elevator.”
Rose escorted Ahmet to Richards’s tiny dressing room, where drummer Charlie Watts joined them. The three men began talking and, as Rose recalled, “I was sitting in Ahmet’s lap because the dressing rooms at the Beacon are so small. Ahmet was always Ahmet, grabbing me
whenever he saw me or he’d look at my boobs, smile, and go, ‘Hey, Jane.’ That was Ahmet. It was more affectionate and hilarious than any kind of sexual pass.” Rose then began taking photos of Ahmet, Richards, and Watts.
After having fallen while on holiday in Fiji six months earlier, Richards had suffered a subdural hematoma and then undergone surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. When Ahmet asked the guitarist how he was doing, Richards replied, “Feel the bumps, baby,” and let Ahmet run his hand over the places where six pins had been inserted into his skull. “He asked me how my head was after the bang. I said, ‘Have a feel.’ Because I have a big dent on the left side, front lobe. He was rubbing it and we were laughing our heads off about it.”
Returning to the downstairs lounge, Ahmet was having a drink with Mica and Rupert and Josephine Lowenstein when the wife of the Stones’ former business manager said she was going to the bathroom. In Mica’s words, “Ahmet said, ‘I’ll go too.’ And I said, ‘I’ll come and help you’ and he said, ‘No.’ The bathroom was two yards from where we were sitting and then Josephine came back and said, ‘Ahmet fell. You had better go there.’ The light wasn’t working in the bathroom and Ahmet pushed the door open with his back to leave and it wasn’t a step, it was just about ten inches of clearance, and with his legs like that, he fell backwards and hit the back of his head.”
Alan Dunn, who spent more than thirty-five years working for Mick Jagger and had flown with Ahmet on his private plane when he attended the Atlantic reunion in Las Vegas, recalled, “Ahmet was trying to get out of the bathroom and the door jammed and he pushed on it and he came flying out and the girl who had taken him there tried to catch him but he came out too fast. As he went down on the floor, he flipped over because the cut was on the back of his head and there was a good deal of blood on the floor and he kept saying, ‘Mica, Mica, where are my glasses? I can’t see out of my right eye.’ And she said to him, ‘You haven’t been able to see out of your right eye for the past five years.’ ”
After an ambulance had been called, Ahmet was put on a stretcher and taken by order of the Stones’ attending physician to New York-Presbyterian. In the words of Shelley Lazar, who was handling VIP tickets for the Stones that night, “Alan Dunn and I were standing there with tears in our eyes. It was quite emotional for me to see this powerhouse of a man totally helpless with a bloody bandage around his head strapped to a stretcher.”
“When I saw them take him out on a stretcher,” Jane Rose said, “I went to a bad place because of what had happened to Keith. I had a really bad feeling about it.” Never losing consciousness, Ahmet continued talking to Mica in the ambulance and then at the hospital. Because he was still bleeding and needed surgery, Ahmet was taken off blood thinners by his doctors. “A few hours after the operation was finished,” Mica would later say, “he talked and he was in a good mood and feeling good and then the strokes started because the blood thinners had been preventing the strokes.”
In the words of Jann Wenner, who had also been at the Stones’ show but had no idea Ahmet had fallen backstage, “The doctors told me he seemed to be okay when he arrived in the hospital. He was still conscious but he had swelling in the brain so they took him off the blood thinners and drained the blood from his head. After two or three days, he had regained consciousness and seemed to be making a recovery. He was talking and responsive and then he suffered a series of small strokes, possibly because they had taken him off the blood thinners. A series of small blood clots went to his brain and the cumulative effect was a huge stroke. And he never regained consciousness.”
Lapsing into a coma, Ahmet became the center of an extraordinary scene that went on for weeks as those who loved him tried to rouse him back to life. In Wenner’s words, “Mica came night and day, and Nesuhi’s wife and their kids were there, and they waited to see if he would improve and kept monitoring him, but it was pretty clear after the first couple weeks he was not going to improve. They had a boom box in his room playing jazz, and he actually looked calm and very healthy.”
“We tried everything to get him to wake up,” Erith Landeau said. “I was there with him alone one evening and I took his arm and I was so mad he wouldn’t talk, I shook his arm and said, ‘Ahmet! Kid Rock and Pamela are already divorced and you are still not up! Wake up! Wake up!’ I looked at myself and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I was just trying to help. Everyone did. They brought music. They spoke Turkish to him. Nothing worked.”
The first time Jann Wenner came to visit Ahmet in the hospital, he broke down and sobbed in Landeau’s arms. In Landeau’s words, “The way Jann spoke to Ahmet in the hospital was unbelievable. ‘You are bigger than life. You can’t do this. You can’t leave. I need you. We need you. There is so much more to be done.’ It was really wonderful.”
On November 15, Jane Rose sent the photos she had taken of Ahmet, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts backstage at the Beacon to him along with a note wishing him a speedy recovery. On the back of one photo was a handwritten note that read, “Dear Ahmet, Get well. I’ll see you soon. C.R. Watts, drummer, the Rolling Stones.” Believing the sequence of events backstage at the Beacon that night had been “ghostly,” Keith Richards had written, “Ahmet, never touch my head again. One love, Keith.”
On the day before Thanksgiving, Frances Chantly went to see her “beloved boss” and “was alone with him and I began talking to him and really pouring my heart out to him. I played some jazz music for him and said if he could hear me, he should move his eyebrows. His eyebrows were twitching like crazy and I knew he understood what I was saying and he could hear me. That was like my goodbye to him and when I saw him again, he was unconscious and there were no signs of life. For a long time, I blamed the Rolling Stones even though I knew it was not their fault.”
Six weeks after the accident, Ahmet’s family and his doctors reached what Wenner would later call “a kind of a unanimous decision they should not prolong it further. They didn’t exactly stop life support but they let him die. He had left a living will and after six weeks, his wishes were finally honored and he died peacefully with Mica and his family there.”
On Thursday, December 14, 2006, Ahmet Munir Ertegun, the greatest record man who ever lived, died at the age of eighty-three in the Weill Cornell Medical Center of New York-Presbyterian Hospital on East 68th Street in Manhattan. A year earlier, Ahmet had told an interviewer how he would like to be remembered by saying, “I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.”
Having always lived to the beat of his own drummer, Ahmet had died doing what he liked best—waiting to listen to music made by artists he loved at a funky joint in New York City. And while the way in which this happened was so perfect that no self-respecting Hollywood screenwriter would have ever tried to sell it as the final scene in the movie of Ahmet Ertegun’s long and eventful life, Neil Young, an artist whom Ahmet had always revered, put it best by saying, “It’s suitable his last conscious moments were at a concert because that was the way he lived. It’s too bad he had to go. But I’m glad he didn’t have to go with some debilitating disease where we had to sit and wait. He went to a show. And the encore was heaven.”
3
As he had sat having lunch with Lyor Cohen at Atlantic, Ahmet had, in Cohen’s words, “described some of the key points of his passing and what he expected from that and I basically executed his wishes. Because he said he didn’t want it to be a memorial, he wanted it to be a celebration.” Cohen then promised Mica he would see to it that Ahmet’s body would be taken back to Turkey in a manner befitting the way he had lived.
In Cohen’s words, “What I had not realized is you cannot rent a Gulfstream because to transport a coffin, it has to be encased in zinc and the zinc casing is too large to make it into a Gulfstream so I had to get a huge plane. I called all my friends who have huge planes and the only one whose plane was not in the shop was Donald Trump. He said yes without hesitation but we would have had to mak
e two stops for gas and suddenly Paul Allen lent me the plane he uses for the Seattle Seahawks.”
After loading Ahmet’s coffin on to Allen’s 757 on Friday, December 15, 2006, Cohen, Jann Wenner, Jean Pigozzi, Chris Blackwell, Earl McGrath, Craig Kallman, Kid Rock, Frances Chantly, Bob Kaus, Erith Landeau, and others accompanied Mica and Nesuhi’s wife and her two children to London, where the plane refueled for the final leg of the journey. As Cohen described it, “We stopped in London to pick up friends and I think there were like forty-three people on the plane. We were all basically numb. You know what it’s like to fly overnight. You kind of not sleep, you’re groggy, and it was completely surreal, like a Fassbinder film.” Arriving in Istanbul the night before the funeral, the group went to a hotel for dinner and then to a little jazz club to attend a tribute for Ahmet, where Kid Rock joined an impromptu jam session by performing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
On Monday, December 18, everyone attended a service at Marmara University’s Religious Studies Department’s mosque on the Asian side of the city. Along with the captain of Ahmet’s sailing boat, most of the staff from Ahmet and Mica’s home in Bodrum were there. Accompanied by a good deal of security, the foreign minister of Turkey spoke.
As Jann Wenner recalled, “The Islamic tradition is that anyone can come to the service. The mosque was so mobbed that you could get a little scared and Ahmet’s Western friends kind of hung off to the side. We all had laminated paper photographs of Ahmet pinned to our lapels, which is another tradition they have. It was extremely chaotic, which sort of seemed inappropriate to the dignity of the individual being buried but it was also somehow symbolic of Ahmet’s return to the land of his father and the Turkey he loved so much.”
The Last Sultan Page 43
