From the Magazine
May 2017 Issue

Mica Ertegun, the Nonagenarian Style Legend Who Shows No Signs of Stopping

Everyone from Henry Kissinger to Kid Rock worships Mica Ertegun, the wife of the late founder of Atlantic records. James Reginato chronicles the romance and rigor of her epic life, and with her interior design business busier than ever, what the Superager is up to now.
mica ertegun
PORTRAITS OF STYLE
Left, a Horst portrait of Ahmet and Mica Ertegun at Regine’s, in New York City, photographed by Bill Cunningham, 1977. Right, Mica Ertegun in her Manhattan apartment, 1969.
Photographs from the Conde Nast archive.

There can’t be another nonagenarian today who is as tight with Henry Kissinger and Annette de la Renta as she is with Kid Rock and the members of Led Zeppelin.

But, then, Ioana Maria Banu, “Mica” Ertegun, who turned 90 on October 21, is one of the most intriguing senior citizens around. For 45 years she was married to Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born co-founder of Atlantic Records, who reigned as the most influential titan of the music industry for five decades as he shaped the careers of artists ranging from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones. All the while, the couple was the virtual definition of sophistication, and they set a new gold standard for fine living at their homes in New York City, Southampton, Paris, and Bodrum, Turkey.

Mica’s unique personal style—her blend of the austere and the exotic—made her a fashion icon. (She was named to the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1971.) It infused not only her houses but also many others’. In 1967, she and her best friend, Chessy Rayner, founded a decorating firm, which they named with their initials, MAC II. (They liked the ring of it because “it sounded like a trucking firm,” Mica explains.)

With Rayner’s death from lung cancer at age 66 in 1998 and Ahmet’s sudden death at age 83 in 2006—after a fall at a Rolling Stones concert in New York celebrating the 60th birthday of Bill Clinton—many wondered if Mica would keep going. But there she was in Brooklyn, at 11:30 on a Friday night last spring, at the Barclays Center, toasting Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, and the other 2016 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Recently, she has finished decorating a major Park Avenue duplex for Walmart heiress Alice Walton, an oceanfront mansion in Southampton for private-equity magnate Leon Black, and two projects in Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, as Ertegun jets around to her various residences, she is overseeing significant philanthropic endeavors. In December, Aretha Franklin serenaded her at the dedication of the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Atrium, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, made possible by Mica’s $9 million gift. Several times a year, she travels to Oxford to check on progress at the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme, launched in 2012 with her $41 million pledge—the largest gift for humanities students in the university’s 900-year history.

On March 19, she was in Jerusalem, where her largesse accomplished arguably the most miraculous-sounding feat in the annals of modern philanthropy: the reopening of the tomb of Jesus Christ. Ertegun provided a lead gift of $1.4 million to the World Monuments Fund, which enabled the restoration of the Edicule, the structure inside the 4th-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre that covers the cave where, many of the faithful believe, Jesus was entombed. Since the 19th century, the limestone-and-marble Edicule had been in danger of collapse and was shored up by an ugly iron cage. At a ceremony celebrating the restoration, the costs of which totaled nearly $4 million, Theophilos III, Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and All Palestine, issued a proclamation naming Mica “Great Cross-Bearer,” the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem’s highest honor, and told her, “Mica, you made the impossible possible.”

Last summer, as Ertegun approached her 90th birthday, her sterling legacy seemed secure. But on August 16 many of her devoted friends were shocked and disturbed to open up the New York Post and see a blaring headline—“ERTEGUN’S WIDOW ‘TERRORIZED’ ”—at the top of Richard Johnson’s column.

According to Johnson, “longtime friends” of Mica “are worried she has fallen under the control of Linda Wachner, former CEO of Warnaco . . . [who] won’t let Mica, 89, see her old friends.”

“She controls Mica’s life,” claimed Sheldon Vogel, former vice chairman of Atlantic Records. An unnamed “old friend” went so far as to say that Ertegun is “being terrorized in her own home” by Wachner.

Had Ertegun’s life turned into some nightmare reminiscent of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Several close friends of Ertegun’s whom I contacted after the story was published agreed that Mica is now “frail” and that Wachner, 71, is her near-constant companion—but all debunked any sinister accusations against Wachner.

“I had lunch with both of them a few months ago. I see nothing untoward going on . . . and happen to think Linda is a blessing for Mica,” says close friend and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who went on to call the allegations “baseless and without credibility.”

“The idea that Linda is keeping Mica away from her old friends is absurd,” says music-industry mogul Lyor Cohen. “They came over to my house in Sag Harbor a month ago, and both were in great spirits.”

Meanwhile, Boaz Mazor, a longtime Oscar de la Renta executive, had a “very jolly” dinner with the two ladies recently. “If I want Mica, I get Mica,” he says. “Maybe the people saying these things are people Mica doesn’t want to see.”

“Mica calls her own shots. She is still in charge of herself,” vouches Louise Grunwald, a leader of society and philanthropy in New York. “Linda is devoted to her, but she’s not getting anything out of it financially. She’s not stealing one penny.”

“Mica is a total original who has never copied anyone,” says Boaz Mazor, an Oscar de la Renta executive.

“There is no elder abuse here, nor is there going to be,” Grunwald adds. “Nobody who knows Mica is going to allow what happened to Brooke Astor to happen to her.” Certainly, Ertegun (who called the Post’s story “completely false” in a letter she wrote to Johnson, with Rupert Murdoch in c.c.) was not being kept from her old friends the night of October 21, when Wachner invited 37 of them to La Grenouille to celebrate Mica’s 90th birthday. In addition to the abovementioned friends and others such as Mercedes Bass and Princess Firyal of Jordan, the guest list included the Reverend Father Alexander Karloutsos, Ertegun’s Greek Orthodox pastor; several of her doctors; the staff of MAC II; and Bette Midler, who sang “Happy Birthday.”

“I think [the gathering] speaks for itself,” Wachner told me.

Mica and Bill Blass at Mortimer’s, in New York City, 1983.

By Tony Palmieri/Penske Media/Rex/Shutterstock.

Life During Wartime

‘We had a beautiful house in Romania,” Mica recalls of her childhood. “It was very luxurious.” She was the only child of Natalia Gologan and Dr. Gheorghe Banu, a physician who served in the Cabinet of the government that ruled under King Carol II. Mica acquired her nickname after her German nurse kept hearing her father call her “mic,” Romanian for “the little one.”

During bombing raids by the Allies in World War II, Mica was evacuated from Bucharest to her family’s country house, outside the capital. In 1942, when she was 16, she married Stefan Grecianu, son of another land-owning family, who was 15 years her senior and whose mother was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie of Romania.

On January 10, 1948, 11 days after King Michael (who had succeeded Carol II) was forced to abdicate by Romania’s new Communist government, Mica and her husband boarded one of the two trains on which members of the royal family were sent into their exile. “[The authorities] told us we could take everything,” Mica recalls. “When we got on the train, they took everything. But I was so happy to be out.”

Traveling on Nansen passports—issued to stateless people by the League of Nations—the party ended up in Zurich, where, according to The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun, a biography by Robert Greenfield published in 2011, they boarded at the elegant Dolder Grand hotel, though none of them had a dime to pay. By grace and favor, the group stayed for nearly a year.

Kind fellow guests they befriended helped get the young couple on their feet. Family friends shepherded them to Paris, where Mica got modeling jobs for a few months. Some “very rich Canadians,” as Mica describes them, later lent them funds to move to a town on the shore of Lake Ontario and purchase a farm. In spite of having had to take care of 5,000 chickens whose eggs she had to collect, wash, and box, Mica looks back fondly on the nearly 10 years she spent there, rising every morning at five to collect eggs but dressing at night for candelabra-lit dinners. “We had to create a world,” she says. “It was tough, but it was the best time of my life. When you are young, anything can be great.”

When She Met Ahmet

Mica’s life was transformed after she took a trip to New York in the fall of 1958 to meet with the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations in the hope that he could help her get her father out of Romania, where he had been imprisoned by the Communists. Because Mica seemed so sad, the wife of the ambassador (who, when he had been posted to Romania, had met Mica’s father) arranged for Mica to join a dinner party at the Bon Soir, a small but lively cabaret in Greenwich Village. Among the guests was Ahmet Ertegun, then 35.

When Ahmet was two, his father, Mehmet, the legal counselor to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was named minister to Switzerland. Two years later, he was sent to Geneva to be the Turkish observer to the League of Nations, and later he served as ambassador to France, the Court of St. James’s, and, finally, the United States, during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

The Erteguns had moved into the ornate Turkish Embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1934. Ahmet, then 12, and his brother, Nesuhi, 16, attended the elite St. Albans School. But the boys, fascinated by black culture, spent as much time as they could combing through record shops and visiting theaters in the city’s black neighborhoods.

Mehmet, then the dean of the diplomatic corps, died of a heart attack in 1944, when Ahmet was 21. His body was kept in Arlington National Cemetery for 17 months before President Truman sent it back to Turkey on the U.S.S. Missouri, and Ahmet’s mother, Hayrunnisa, and sister, Selma, repatriated.

The brothers remained in America. In 1947, in partnership with a friend and bankrolled by a $10,000 loan from his dentist, Ahmet founded Atlantic Records. When he met Mica that evening at the Bon Soir, Ertegun had just resumed bachelorhood, after a two-year marriage to a Swedish-American actress who was said to resemble Greta Garbo.

“Mica has a mythic presence,” says Larry Gagosian. “She is flawless, kind of a Jackie O.”

Ertegun’s first impression of Mica, according to his biographer, Robert Greenfield, was: “She had a greater elegance and aristocracy than any of the girls I knew. She was much more of a lady.”

“He was a man like nobody else,” she tells me. “He was a man who fascinated me.”

After Mica returned to Canada, Ahmet called her frequently on the farm, where she talked to him on a hand-cranked phone. On one occasion he flew to meet her in Montreal, where he arranged a suite for her at the Ritz-Carlton. There, in a closet, he had hidden a small band, which emerged to serenade her with “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” among other songs.

“It was very hard to leave my husband—he was very, very nice,” Mica says. But on April 6, 1961, she married Ahmet in a small ceremony in a Manhattan apartment. “I think the most important choice I ever made in my life was to marry her,” he told Greenfield.

Yet his career puzzled her. “I knew opera—but I didn’t know what I was listening to with him,” she recalls. “Boom, boom, boom. After an hour, I said, ‘I can’t stand this!’ ” In time, whatever her opinions of the music, Mica became very fond of the artists in Ahmet’s stable who made it. “I like them all . . . some of them very much,” she says. (Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Eric Clapton, and Stephen Stills are among her favorites.)

While Ahmet immersed himself in the record business, Mica set about decorating the five-story town house they had bought on East 81st Street. The young couple’s charm clearly registered with the right people. “I had them to dinner before anyone you know had them to dinner. Ten—more than ten—years ago,” Diana Vreeland told The New Yorker in 1978. “But why did I ask them back?,” Vreeland pondered. “It was the energy. Of course, it was the energy.”

Vreeland’s quotes appeared in a two-part, 60-page, 33,000-word profile of Ahmet. Even by the standards of The New Yorker in its flushest days, the piece was completed on generous terms for its author, George W. S. Trow, who took seven years to write it. During that time he virtually embedded himself with the couple, accompanying them in first-class cabins, limousines, five-star hotels, and on private planes and countless champagne-soaked evenings. No wonder he stretched it out to seven years. But it was apparently worth the wait to the magazine’s editor, William Shawn. “This piece is Proust,” he told Trow after reading the manuscript.

At one point in the article, Mica and Ahmet are at the last concert at the Fillmore East. Trow’s diary entry after the occasion: “Mica in striking black dress. Other record-company presidents floored by Mica . . . . Minor record-company president asked Mica if she liked Allman Brothers Band.”

“Yah,” Mica said. “They are divine, no?”

Trow later goes on to parse this expression, which, he observed, was typical of her delivery of simple sentences, “in a manner that implied authority or indifference, or both . . . . This expression can mean ‘Yes, it’s divine, I couldn’t agree more’ or ‘Yes, it’s divine, but why bring it up?’ or ‘No, I don’t think it’s divine’ or ‘I wish you would go away.’ ”

Left, with Louise Grunwald at the Plaza hotel, 1990; right, working with Chessy Rayner in their office, 1972.

Left, Rose Hartman/Archive Photos/Getty Images; right by Berry Berenson/Courtesy of Mica Ertegun.

On the Town

As Ahmet reached the apex of the music industry, Ahmet and Mica summited international society. The lunches, dinners, and parties they gave, whether at one of their houses or the most fashionable venues of the day (La Côte Basque, Mortimer’s, the Cotton Club, Roseland Ballroom, and Cannes’s Hôtel Majestic, to name a few), always drew an exciting mixture of boldfaced names. Gianni Agnelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Andy Warhol, Brooke Astor, Kay Graham, and the like would be seated next to Ahmet’s music stars, such as Jagger, Plant, and Midler.

“It was all very heady and glamorous,” says Midler. “I came from Hawaii, I had no background, and this was so rarefied. I remember being incredibly impressed by the experience—the house was so beautiful, the food was so exquisite, the service impeccable.”

“They could put a dinner together with a glamorous cast of characters better than anyone,” recalls TV producer Douglas Cramer, a friend of the couple’s and a client of Mica’s. “They reached into the worlds of art, music, theater, literature, business . . . . So you might find David Hockney, Joan Collins, David Geffen, Steve Schwartzman, Sandy Weill, Joan Didion, Larry Gagosian.”

“I prefer simplicity,” Mica Ertegun says. “Some people want to buy things just because they cost a million dollars.”

“They really knew how to do it,” says Gagosian. “I never turned down an invitation from them. They were a magical couple. Mica has a mythic presence—she is flawless, kind of a Jackie O.”

“Mica was surely one of the most sophisticated people I’ve ever met,” says another frequent guest, Jann Wenner. “She didn’t care if you were Eric Clapton or Henry Kissinger—she welcomed everybody in equally and brought these worlds together. But you came up to her level; she didn’t come down to yours.”

It was common knowledge, however, that Ahmet’s partying extended far beyond (or beneath) his refined evenings with Mica.

“I could never keep up with Ahmet,” Jagger said at the star-studded tribute in 2007 for the mogul. He “was a father figure, this is true. But to me, he was more like the wicked uncle with a wicked chuckle.”

“Sure, he fucked around,” says Wenner. “My interpretation is that she just loved him so much she was willing to let certain things slide.”

In the later years of his life, Ertegun’s favorite carousing companion was Kid Rock, whose albums were distributed by Atlantic beginning in 1998.

According to the entertainer, Mica was a model of understanding: “One time I was in Mexico with my girl at the time, renting out this most amazing villa,” he says. “But after two days, I had nothing to say to her. I was bored out of my mind. I thought, I want to get some people here. At that time, I didn’t know too many people with private planes—but Ahmet had one. So I called his house. Mica answered. I told her what shenanigans I was up to and said, ‘Look, I’ve got this great spot. I know Ahmet’s got a plane . . .’ She said, ‘Oh, call him. He’s in Beverly Hills—I’m sure he’d love to come.’ Next day he was there. She didn’t pay no mind.”

He also recalls the time “after a three-day bender” when he showed up at the door of the Ertegun house in Southampton. “I was a mess. She welcomed me right in, didn’t look down on me,” he says. “Some nights we got wild, me and Ahmet—music blasting, telling dirty jokes, on the table,” he continues. “And I never saw that look of disgust on her face that I’ve seen on so many other women, when they reach that point: Get out. She would either just hang out with us and smile or go do her own thing.

“But you held Mica in the highest regard and respect,” he concludes. “Ahmet demanded that, and she gave off an aura that was so wonderful you had no choice but to respect her to the nines. That’s just who she is.”

“Mica is very intelligent in a European way,” comments Jean Pigozzi, a close friend of both Erteguns. “She knew Ahmet always loved her and she was the No. 1 woman in his life, but obviously he was philandering. A typical Park Avenue or Beverly Hills wife would have made a scandal out of it and destroyed the marriage, but she behaved in a very elegant way, and they had a great marriage, bound by a remarkable, incredible mutual respect. A lot of American women should learn from Mica.”

Mica’s unflappable attitude extended to houseguests, though not all of them felt the same way, as Pigozzi recalls of a stay at a villa in Barbados that the Erteguns had rented. “Jerry Zipkin was there along with Jimmy Page and his girlfriend. Every day she got stoned, and after lunch she passed out in the nearest room, which was Jerry’s. He hated it!” Mica, he adds, “kind of elegantly ignored it all.”

Page and other members of Led Zeppelin certainly demonstrated their esteem for Ahmet after his death, when they re-united for their first concert performance in 27 years to play at London’s 02 Arena in his honor. The $5.2 million revenue from the event, per an agreement between Mica Ertegun and Led Zeppelin, was donated to education in the U.S. and Europe, including, at St. John’s College, Oxford, an undergraduate music program established in Ahmet Ertegun’s name.

“Perhaps more than anything else [Mica] is patient,” says David Geffen. “I have known her for almost 50 years now and have never seen her lose her temper even when there is nothing but chaos around her. Ahmet was a very lucky man.”

“I never minded, because I knew it wasn’t against me,” says Mica about her husband’s freewheeling ways. “I knew I was the best thing in his life.”

She was good for his business too. “When I was running Warner’s [which had acquired Atlantic Records in 1967], Kid Rock was frequently angry with me,” says Lyor Cohen. “Often, it was the steady hand of Mica who calmed him down.”

In 1978, it was Mica who resolved a major dispute with the Rolling Stones, over a lyric written on the title track of the album Some Girls:“Black girls just wanna get fucked all night.” It was meant, according to the band, to be ironic. But Ahmet, incensed by any form of racism, insisted the line be rewritten before he would release the album. A deadlock ensued for weeks, until Mica, who had become friendly with Jagger, persuaded Ahmet to release the disc, which subsequently sold more than nine million copies.

“She was my touchstone of civility during the overwhelming chaos of those tumultuous times,” vouches Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. “When fame struck the rube, she reminded me that, underneath it all, I was a gentleman.”

“She was impossibly spellbinding,” he adds. “She was, without question, the most classically elegant woman I have ever had the good fortune to know. She has a way of making one stand a little straighter and mind one’s manners.”

Mica, photographed in her office by Harry Benson, 2012.

Photograph from the Condé Nast Archive.

Designing Women

Early on in her marriage, Mica wisely decided to carve out a life of her own. “He was very busy, so I thought I would go to school.” Encouraged by the success she had had in doing up her own town house, she enrolled in the New York School of Interior Design. She soon went into business with Chesbrough Lewis Hall, a debutante from Ohio who had married William P. Rayner, an executive at Condé Nast, where her stepfather, Iva S. V. Patcevitch, was chairman.

“We became great friends,” says Mica. “She had no children, I had no children, so we started working. It became a business.”

In the early years, “the girls,” as they were often called, were treated somewhat dismissively by the decorating establishment; they were seen as rich ladies with time on their hands. “Mica does not have to work,” commented the fearsome Sister Parish (who no doubt didn’t like losing out on jobs to MAC II).

Soon they had major fans, and clients, among whom was fashion designer Bill Blass. “There aren’t any two girls in New York with more on the ball, more of a flair for food, for clothes, for living, than Mica and Chessy,” he told Vogue in 1972.

Their “look”—clean, crisp, pared back, unfussy—was a real breath of fresh air from the then fashionable heavy, chintz-filled interiors, and it had a significant influence on contemporary taste.

“Mica never puts a wrong foot forward. She has the most refined eye,” says Annette de la Renta. “It is minimalistic, but at the same time there are exuberant touches.”

There has always been a close connection between Mica’s style in fashion and in interiors. “Everything follows suit,” says Louise Grunwald. “Mica’s look is austere and strict. She is architectural in her dress, and in her interiors there is never any froufrou. No fringe on the lampshades for Mica. She likes bold, masculine furniture—like William IV or Charles X pieces, not spindly French things. She didn’t go for the glitz other people went for. But you can’t put a label on her style—it’s a very eclectic mixture.”

“Mica is a total original who has never copied anyone,” says Boaz Mazor. “Bill [Blass] and Oscar got a lot of ideas and inspiration from her. She would go to the bazaar in Bodrum and come back with some 19th-century embroidered tunic or caftan, for example, and Oscar would just flip over it. Sometimes we would bring it back to our studio to copy it. But no one ever wore it better than Mica.”

Initially, MAC II’s office was in a large closet in the Ertegun town house. In 1976, the firm moved into the five-story town house adjacent to the Ertegun residence, where it remains. Today, Mica’s clients marvel at her stamina and work ethic. “She’s on the job site at 9:30 in the morning on the dot,” says Douglas Cramer, for whom MAC II has decorated two houses (on St. Martin and in Connecticut) and overseen four Manhattan apartment renovations (most recently at River House). “And she shows up perfectly coiffed and made-up, looking like she’s just stepped out of Bergdorf’s window.”

Although there is grandeur in Mica’s interiors, there’s a sparseness and understatement to them as well. “I prefer simplicity,” she says. “I hate things that are rich and ugly. Some people want to buy things just because they cost a million dollars.”

Her own residences, of course, are the best illustrations of her style. In her 81st Street town house, she knocked down the walls of three rooms to create a dramatic loft-like drawing room, which she filled with a small but magnificent collection of modern art along with superb Russian, French, and German antique furniture.

In the early 90s, the Erteguns commissioned architect Jaquelin T. Robertson to design a house for them in Southampton. Boatman House, as it is named, resembles a neoclassical Russian dacha, where a staggering 40-foot-square, two-story living room is furnished with monumentally scaled Turkish portraits. Some inspiration came from their friend and neighbor across the street, William Paley, whose house also featured a large square room. (In building Boatman House, Robertson designed the exterior ocher-grained stone steps at a gentle gradation in order to accommodate a ramp for Paley’s wheelchair when he came to dinner: “the Bill Paley stairs,” as Robertson christened them.) One of the guest bedrooms was dedicated as “Swifty’s room” and was painted in sumptuous dark-Edwardian-green stripes to please “superagent” Irving Lazar.

The only residence at which the Erteguns infrequently entertained is their Right Bank Paris apartment. Mica still visits it several times a year, and it seems to be her private sanctuary.

Over the decades, the place where the Erteguns lived largest was Aga Konak, in Bodrum, on the south coast of Turkey. The 10-bedroom, 15-bath stone house served as one of the great pleasure domes for high society and rock ‘n’ roll from the 1970s onward. But when Mica and Ahmet found the property, it was a ruin with no roof. Mica transformed it into “a dream,” according to repeat guest Lyor Cohen.

“It was done in an easy way that was beyond elegance,” he says. “It is the only real elegance. Everything else feels fraudulent.” With Mica, he says, “it just is.”

“You were immediately enchanted,” says Midler, who, with her husband and daughter, visited several times. “There was a serenity about it.”

“The breakfasts!” she continues. “We had never eaten like that. Beautiful homemade breads and marmalades, feta cheese, honey, fresh-mint tea. And the figs! Figs, figs, figs. It was all just perfect.”

Fortitude and Faith

On October 29, 2006, the Erteguns were doing what they excelled at: mixing with the titans of music and society, at the Beacon Theater, in New York. They went to the lounge to have a drink before the Stones’ Clinton Foundation benefit concert to mark Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday. After exiting a bathroom, where a light wasn’t working, Ahmet stumbled on a step and fell backward, hitting his head.

A few days later, after a series of strokes, he went into a coma at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where Mica kept a near-constant vigil for six weeks as distraught friends came to visit. (Though there were moments of levity. “I was sitting there with Mica and looking at Ahmet,” recalls Wenner. “ ‘It’s amazing how good-looking he is,’ I said to her. ‘Why does he look so good?’ ‘Well, of course,’ she said, ‘he hasn’t been drinking.’ ”)

A few days after his death, on December 14, Ahmet’s body was flown to Turkey on Paul Allen’s 757 and buried in a cemetery overlooking the Bosporus, where his parents are interred.

“When he died . . . it was so unexpected . . . it was very difficult,” says Mica.

The death of Chessy Rayner was sorrowful as well. “It was a terrible thing. I thought I wasn’t going to go on . . .”

But on she has gone, and she has no plans to retire. “And do what?” she asks rhetorically. “Buy diamonds? I like to work . . . it’s not so tragic,” she says with the hint of a smile.

With seven people on staff at MAC II, the office is buzzing, and Ertegun on a recent day was preparing for yet another visit to Oxford. “I’m in love with it. It’s so civilized and fantastic,” she says about the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme there. Thanks to Mica’s gift, up to 35 graduate students annually will receive scholarships to study the humanities, and they will have the use of a study center, Mica and Ahmet Ertegun House, a five-story Georgian-era building that she also helped redesign. According to Antony Green in the university’s development office, Ertegun’s gift has been “absolutely transformative for the study of the humanities at Oxford University.”

“For Ahmet and for me, one of the great joys of life has been the study of history, music, languages, literature, art, and archaeology . . . . I believe it is tremendously important to support those things that endure across time . . . and make the world a more humane place,” she said when her donation was announced. In January, in recognition of this benefaction, H.M. the Queen made Ertegun an honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

“She’s a classy lady, to sum it up,” says Henry Kissinger. His sentiments are expressed just slightly differently by Kid Rock. “She’s one of the coolest ladies I’ve ever been privileged to know,” he says. “I wish she would start an etiquette school for young ladies.”