Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “I know Michael Horowitz has approached you about your Miray stock,” she said.

  “Yes. He was here to see me the other day.”

  “And I’m sure he made you an attractive offer, but I think there’s something you ought to know. Though Michael hasn’t announced anything, we’re quite sure that he’s in the first stages of an unfriendly takeover attempt. Do you know how these things work, Louise?”

  “Not really. But my husband, Dick, is a lawyer, and I’m sure he’d know.”

  “Let me explain to you, very briefly, how these things work. Someone like Michael begins by singling out a company whose assets are worth a good deal more than the purchase price of its stock—a company like ours, for instance. He then borrows money and begins buying up stock. Let’s say he’s successful and acquires majority control. The first thing he must do is to repay his loans, and this can only be done by liquidating the company’s assets, turning them into cash or other tax-deductible items. People like myself must also be paid off—with so-called golden parachutes, often costing many millions of dollars. In Wall Street, these are called ‘opportunity costs,’ and they’re all tax-deductible. It’s our tax laws that make these takeover opportunities so attractive. After these costs, and after disposing of any divisions of the company that show a trace of red ink, the acquisitor takes what’s left, which usually doesn’t amount to much more than a prestigious name. Or a new company that’s saddled with debts to the past, instead of one dedicated to serving its customers and stockholders in the future. The result of these takeovers is nearly always a contraction, rather than an expansion, of a company’s worth. So, while I’m sure Michael’s offer may seem very attractive to you today, I’m asking you to think of the future of our company, and what it could mean for your children, and the generation after that, because by then, if Michael is successful, there’ll be no more Miray Corporation as we know it today.

  “I’d like to make one more point. Michael Horowitz is a deal-maker—a very good one, and a very successful one, I grant him that. He takes old rental buildings and turns them into condominiums. He takes defunct hotels in Atlantic City and turns them into casinos. He’s after us because he sees a chance to make a deal. But what he does has nothing to do with what we do. While our company doesn’t like to see red ink on the bottom line any more than anyone else does, we’re not a deal-making business. We’re called a glamour industry, and every now and then I like to remind the people who work for us what the word glamour means. It’s an old French word that means, literally, bewitchment. We’re in the magic business. We’re in the business of casting spells. We don’t simply sell beauty products; we also sell mystery, excitement, fantasy, and fun. If we deal at all, we deal with intangibles, such as hope and laughter and love and what makes the heart skip a beat. We wouldn’t be where we are today if we didn’t believe in make-believe and let’spretend, in people having fun and feeling happy. Is there a deal-maker in the world who believes in make-believe? I don’t think so.”

  I must admit I was impressed with her little speech.

  “Frankly, I was tempted by his offer,” Louise Bernhardt said after a moment. “And I should tell you that my husband wants me to take him up on it. Three children who’ll be in college all at once, I don’t need to tell you what that means. On the other hand, I did promise my grandfather that I’d never sell. He made us all promise that we’d never sell.”

  “Your grandfather was foresighted,” Mimi said. “And obviously I can’t tell you what your decision ought to be. But I will ask you this. We have a plan, which we’ll announce at a stockholders’ meeting, and put up for a vote, by which we can not only thwart the Horowitz takeover but which also, in the long run, could make all of us stockholders a good deal better off. Will you put Michael off until we’ve all met and we’ve outlined our plan? This may not be easy, because Michael is a very forceful persuader, and I’m sure he’ll keep upping his offer. But I do ask you to sit tight until we have our meeting and outline a counterproposal. That won’t be long.”

  “That seems a fair enough request,” Louise Bernhardt said.

  “Thank you. I’m sure you won’t regret it.”

  “There was one thing that Mr. Horowitz said that puzzled me,” she said. “Your son’s name came up, and he said, ‘He’s the one I’m after.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  Mimi shrugged. “Meanwhile,” she said, reaching in her bag, “I have a little gift for you, Louise—may I call you Louise? This is a five-ounce bottle of a new fragrance we’ll be introducing next month. And this is the companion men’s cologne—I’m giving you a bottle of the splash-on as well as the spray since I didn’t know which he’d prefer—that your husband might like to try. We’re having a launch party for these on September seventeenth at the Pierre, which ought to be fun. I’ll see that you get an invitation.”

  “So,” I said as we drove back to the city in her car, “that was why you wanted to come along with me today.”

  She laughed the ripply laugh. “Not a word to anyone!” she said. “Promise me. Not a word to anyone until we’re ready to announce our proposal to the stockholders. Then I’ll tell you everything.” She was in high spirits now and did not want to talk about takeover bids. “Listen,” she said. “I’ve got it all figured out. If the Mafia was involved with the company back in the thirties, as Mother says it was—back then, a lot of companies were—and if Leo was behind all that, as Mother says he was, then I’m sure his son Nate was involved in it, too. Nate, being the son, was probably the bag man, and Leo was the behind-the-scenes, mastermind one. So, here’s the script. Grandpa forces Leo out of the company in nineteen forty-one, right? Suddenly the Mob is out of a big hunk of business, right? They’re not pleased. They go after the bag man to try to get that business back. Maybe Nate even still owes them money for the last job they did. Nate’s caught in a bind. He tries to put them off with promises. But the Mob gets impatient, the natives get restless. Pretty soon, it’s put up or shut up, and by nineteen sixty-two they’ve had it with Nate. Okay, cut to the chase! They get out a contract on Nate, and he’s bumped off! I mean, strangled with a bicycle chain and thrown in a river! Did you ever hear of anything that sounded more like a gangland-style killing? What do you think …?”

  She went on with elaborations and variations on this hypothetical script all the way back to 1107 Fifth Avenue.

  Granny Flo Myerson (interview taped 8/30/87):

  I’ll tell you exactly how my husband got rid of Leo. It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that. It wasn’t easy because Leo was dumb. Smart people are easier to deal with than dumb people. A smart person would have seen the handwriting on the wall—Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, as it says in the Book of Daniel. But Leo was too dumb to see that he’d been weighed and measured and found wanting.

  How? My husband used psychological warfare, that’s how. Ever hear of psychological warfare? I know all about psychological warfare because I was taught by a master, my husband. Psychological warfare means warfare of the mind. It means working on the mind. There’s nothing illegal about it. It’s not like germ warfare, you can’t get arrested for it. What did Adolph do? Let’s just say he worked on Leo’s mind to get him out. You see, Leo was a bad person. He did bad things. I think I told you Leo was handsome, but he had a cleft chin. Beware of a man who has a cleft chin! You don’t have a cleft chin, do you? No? Well, thank goodness for that! A man with a cleft chin has a cloven hoof for a heart. That was what Leo had.

  Oh, but back to the psychological warfare. It was really something. I don’t remember all the exact details of it, though I suppose I could if I tried. It was all in Adolph’s diaries, but they’re gone now—gone with the wind, as they say in the movies. I just remember it was done step by step. That’s the only way to do it, step by step. Some of it was not too nice, perhaps. Some of it might not look too nice if you read it in the papers, and you write for the papers so maybe I’d better button my lip. Let’s just say that Jonesy helped.
Jonesy was my husband’s secretary. Jonesy was secretly in love with my Adolph. She’d have done anything for him. I think painting Leo’s face out of the portrait was Jonesy’s idea. That was a part of it. That was the final straw that broke the camel’s hump, right across his neck. That was the sword of Diogenes. That was the end of Leo.

  Why did they keep his office there? I’ll give you the answer in four little words. Psy. Chol. 0. Gy. Adolph kept that empty office there as a reminder to anyone else in the organization who might forget who was the boss. That empty office was there to say a warning: “This could happen to you!”

  Now tell me what you’ve found out about Edwee. There’re a few things I know, a few things I could tell about Edwee that he wouldn’t want to see in print. Oho! But I need to know what he’s up to before I decide whether to bring out my heavy ammunition.…

  “I need to see you, kiddo,” he says. “It’s important.”

  “I really don’t think there’s anything more we need to say to each other, Michael,” Mimi says.

  “But there is. A lot.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “Well, for one thing, I owe you a long-overdue apology.”

  “Really? What for?”

  “Your grandfather. I used to think he was an anti-Semitic, despotic old bastard. But it turns out that he really wasn’t such a bad guy after all.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve been reading his diaries,” he says. There is a silence from her end of the connection. Then he says, “They’ve just reopened the Rainbow Room. It’s been done over just like it was in the good old days. What about that, kiddo, for old times’ sake?”

  18

  At the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, there was another letter waiting for her from her mother.

  Mimi dear—

  Aug. 1, 1957

  I don’t want to upset you, dearest, but there is something that I thought you ought to know. Your grandfather has been failing badly in the last few weeks, and we are all quite worried about him. He has suddenly lost a lot of weight, and his color is bad, and yet he refuses to see a doctor or to admit that anything might be the matter with him. I also fear that his mind may be going. On Sunday, at tea, he seemed to have trouble remembering my name, and at one point addressed me as “Ruthie,” which was the name of a younger sister of his who died in the typhoid epidemic of 1884! It is terribly sad to see him like this, but your father and I do not know what to do, except to remember that in two more months he will be eighty-eight years old.…

  Meanwhile, he insists on going to the office every day, though your father has been urging him to take a rest or perhaps a holiday. And of course he refuses to turn over any of the responsibilities of running the company to your father, which he really ought to do at this point. As your father points out, the company is really too big and complex an operation now for one man to run it single-handedly, the way your grandfather has always run it. Your father greatly fears that management details are being overlooked, and that decisions that ought to be made are not being made. But at this point your father’s hands are tied.

  Your Granny Flo has been spending the month of August at the Bar Harbor house, but next week, at my urging, she has promised to come back to the city and look in on him.

  I hate to worry you with all this, Mimi, but I thought you should know, just in case something should occur which might mean you’d have to cut your vacation short. Of course for your sake I hope and pray that this won’t happen.

  I read in the National Geographic that they sell natural sea-sponges in Greece. If you see any, and they are cheap, would you pick up a few for me? I am thinking of the little tiny ones that I can use for applying makeup. They would be lightweight, and you could tuck them into the corners of your luggage.…

  “Hypocrisy!” she said to Brad Moore after reading him the letter. “Did you ever hear such hypocrisy?”

  “Hypocrisy? She just sounds worried because your grandfather’s ill.”

  “This is the same mother who, a few days before I left for Europe, was screaming that Grandpa was too mean to die. She hates Grandpa! Now she’s acting all worried because he’s a little sick.”

  “Sometimes, when they’re angry, people say things they don’t mean. They say they don’t care about people. But then, when things get down to the wire, they care.”

  He was like this, that cautious, thoughtful, Harvard Law School mind that always looked at both sides of every question. They were sitting in the central, glass-roofed courtyard of the hotel, sipping Coca-Colas. He would begin a statement with “On the one hand …” and then end it with “But then, on the other hand …”

  “Stop being Mr. Lawyer,” she said to him. It had become one of their little jokes.

  “Is he very rich, your grandfather?”

  “Oh, yes. At least to hear him tell it. People ask him how he can afford to live the way he does. Three big houses. A yacht. ‘A hundred million dollars’ worth of the best gilt-edged stocks in America,’ he says.” She giggled. “Modesty is not one of my grandfather’s strong points.”

  “But, you see, that could be one of the reasons why your mother feels the way she does about him now. When he dies, I suppose your family will stand to inherit quite a lot of money. With that money will go an even bigger amount of guilt—over the unkind things she’s said about him in the past. Want to make a bet? I’ll bet when your grandfather dies, your mother is going to be one of the noisiest mourners at his funeral.”

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, stirring her Cola-Cola with her straw. “They never give you enough ice in these countries, do they. Mine’s already melted. My Coke’s warm already.”

  “I’ve had some relatives who were pretty rich,” he said. “There was an uncle who left my mother some money in a trust. But, on the other hand, we’re New Englanders, you know. We believe in living only on the income from our income. That’s why you and I didn’t meet earlier on this trip. You’ve been up there in first class on all the planes, and I’ve been back in steerage with the peasants.”

  “When my grandfather spends money, he doesn’t believe in cutting corners.”

  “New Yorkers and Bostonians. They’re a different species, I sometimes think. Or are they? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the first Bostonian I’ve ever met.”

  They sat in silence for a while, and then he said, “I was sent on this trip to get over a love affair.”

  “Really?”

  “She was a New York girl. At least, Long Island. Not that that’s important.”

  “And have you got over her?”

  “Yes. And you know why? Because now that I’ve had time to think about it, I realize it wasn’t love. It was only sex, and love isn’t just sex. I mean, on the one hand, I agree that sex is important—it is. But on the other hand—”

  “Now, Mr. Lawyer—”

  “I’m serious. Someone you love has to have more than just sex to offer, don’t you think? I mean, don’t there have to be other qualities like intelligence, and sensitivity, and a real interest in the other guy’s life? This girl had none of those things. You know what she was like? She was like one of those Stately Homes we toured in England—a beautiful facade, but no central heating.”

  “Oh, Brad!” she laughed. “I like that!”

  “Nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “I know what you mean, exactly.”

  “That was Barbara.”

  “Barbara?”

  “That was her name, Barbara Badminton.”

  She almost squealed. “I know Barbara Badminton! She was at Miss Hall’s!”

  “Were you at her coming-out party?”

  “No!”

  “Well, if you know her, would you say she was particularly … intelligent?”

  “No! She tried to copy my answers in chemistry quizzes.”

  “Then I gather you two weren’t exactly friends.”

  �
��Hardly. In fact, I disliked her intensely.” Then she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. She was your friend.”

  “Not anymore. I’m able to see through her now. All it was, was sex.”

  Mimi said nothing.

  “That would have been like her, to cheat on a chemistry quiz. She cheated on other things, too. You see, I found out that I wasn’t the only one she was involved with. In terms of sex.”

  “No,” she said quietly, “that really doesn’t surprise me. I might as well tell you, I really didn’t like Barbara Badminton, and she didn’t like me. Part of it was that I was on a scholarship at Miss Hall’s. That put me in a different social class from people like Barbara. Also, I was—or, rather, I am, Jewish. That makes a difference to people sometimes.”

  “Not to me,” he said.

  “And then, my family being in the beauty business—that made a difference to someone like Barbara, whose father is the president of some bank. But I’ve never been ashamed of the beauty business. It’s a fascinating business, very ancient, and I’ve done a lot of reading about it. For instance, did you know that in China, as long ago as three thousand B.C., women used nail polish? It indicated rank. Dark red and black were the royal colors, and women of lower rank were restricted to paler shades. Nowadays it’s all tied in with fashion. Did you know that cosmetics colors depend on the hemline? A few years ago, when Dior introduced the New Look, and hemlines dropped, nail and lip shades became very deep and dark. This was because, when a woman couldn’t show her legs, she wanted to draw attention to face and hands. Now that hemlines are up again, we’ve got the Pale Look in lipsticks and nail polishes. When I was at school, I drew up a chart showing how hemlines dictate cosmetics colors and sent it to my grandfather. But of course at home nobody pays attention to me because I’m just a girl. But I’m boring you with all this, aren’t I?”

  “No, no,” he said. “Go on. This is fascinating.”

  And she realized all at once, sitting there, that one reason she liked Brad Moore so much was that he was one of the first people she had ever known who actually listened to her.