George William Swift Trow, Jr.,’s family called him Swift. The name fit his quickness of wit and spirit, and his grace. His friends, of whom I was one, called him George, pronounced in a descending tone as if in reference to his firmly grounded authority on subjects important to the rest of us, or not. The Trows had been in New York City for generations. When I came from Ohio, in 1974, I knew nothing about the city and had no connection to it except as a destination for ambition. In the nineteenth century, an ancestor of George’s had published what was known as “Trow’s Guide,” an early directory of the city’s residents and their addresses. Another ancestor had been on the Hudson River, in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton was being rowed back to Manhattan after his duel with Aaron Burr. George’s ancestor looked at the boat through a telescope and said, “My God, they’ve shot Alex Hamilton!” It’s not an exaggeration to say that all my visceral knowledge of old New York derives from that sentence, and from the way George said it (spoken, it doesn’t have a comma), and from other things George told me. I wasn’t a New Yorker, and George made me one.
He became a staff writer for this magazine in 1966, after Harvard, where he had been president of the Lampoon, and after a year in the Coast Guard. At The New Yorker, he first wrote Talk of the Town stories, which were unsigned back then. He loved R. & B. music and liked rock and roll mostly as Black music’s epigone. His first signed piece was about a promoter who went around to disk jockeys and tried to persuade them to play certain records on the air.
In 1971, George met Ahmet Ertegun, the son of Mehmet Munir Ertegun, who had been the Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. during the Second World War. It was said that the Turks did not join the Germans, as they’d done in the First World War, partly because of Mehmet’s influence. The family descended from sheikhs. Ahmet, who had a strong love for neglected American cultural artifacts like R. & B., knew a lot more about the genre than George did, and as the head of Atlantic Records had produced some of George’s favorite records. On top of that, Ahmet and Mica, his interior-designer wife, moved in the highly catered, endlessly shifting, almost transient version of high society in the New York City of that time. Nothing and nobody could have interested George more than Ahmet did. Soon, he began to do reporting for a Profile that would take him most of the nineteen-seventies to complete, and would become a portrait of that decade.
William Shawn, then the editor of The New Yorker, approved the idea and O.K.’d the expenses George ran up as he followed Ahmet to Cannes and Beverly Hills and elsewhere. Just from hearing George talk about Ahmet and his circle, Shawn probably got the same visceral sense of the guy that “My God, they’ve shot Alex Hamilton” gave me about old New York. Shawn had a gift for coming up with titles, and I’m sure that “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse” was his. Shaken together, those words add up to the adjective “restless,” which recurs several times in the piece. George and Ahmet were among those pure products of America whose craziness blooms as an intense restlessness.
The plot of the piece is: How will Ahmet and the Rolling Stones adjust to each other in the wake of the ambitious new distribution deal they have signed? He pursues them on two continents. They don’t exactly pursue him in return, but they do make themselves available. Ahmet describes his relationship with the band as a “painful, ecstatic courtship.” This is the record business of half a century ago; demeaning slurs are tossed around. One elaborate party follows another. Some are sparkly hits, others are flops. Dozens of famous and not-famous characters go rushing past. At first, Ahmet and George like each other a lot, then they like each other less.
When George finished the piece, after seven-plus years of work, he turned it in to Shawn, and he happened to be in my office when Shawn came to tell him what he thought. Shawn knocked on my door, and George stepped into the hall. After a few minutes, he returned to my office and closed the door behind him. His face was bright red beneath his blond hair.
“Shawn says it’s brilliant!” George said. “Shawn says it’s Proust!” ♦
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