Earlier, I had called Charles, my chauffeur, and told him to wait for me outside. I exited the building in a daze, found my limo parked at the entrance. I said to Charles, “Well stay here a few minutes.” Inside, I slid the privacy window closed. I had to assess the significance of my meeting with Phelan.
I glanced at my watch. 4:35 P.M. Squash with Daniel Spear at 5:00. Should I cancel? No. I’m going to take him today. Then call Karen. God, it’s been ten days. Par too long. How had I let so much time slide by without seeing her? Sometimes, Martin, you’re not as sharp as you think you are.
6
I SLUMPED down deep in the seat and closed my eyes. Thoughts and images raced through my mind like railroad trains bearing down on each other from opposite directions. One, Standard General; the other, Federated, the bank. Me in the middle, caught on the tracks. Phelan, the engineer on the first, a death mask, smiling. MacDougall, the banker, on the other. He’s got this horrific expression. Steve watching, grinning. And Jordan with the Standard General directors in the stands. They’re all conversing, paying no attention to the trains and me. I put up a hand in each direction for them to stop, but they don’t.
Fm lying there, waiting for the crash. MacDougall stands over me: “I told you Fd extend the loans and finance the tenant work when you got the lease signed. But you didn’t do it, did you?” He points at me. His words are almost drowned out by the roar of the oncoming trains. I open my eyes.
Months earlier, I advised MacDougall that at some point I would obtain a mortgage commitment from a permanent lender, like an insurance company or some large pension fund. With a tenant as strong as S.G. it would have been easy. Maybe mortgage out, which meant eliminate any permanent investment.
I had assured MacDougall that all but the loose ends were tied up, that we expected execution copies within days. Every major open item had been resolved. The entire real estate market had been talking about this deal Calls had come in from all over. Henry Sabatini Martin was king of the fucking hill! No, could have been. Damn. There must be, there had to be a way to save this deal. I knew how good it was: a ten-year lease with a big Triple-A company with a net worth of approximately $600 million. The rent was acceptable for the first five years — $46.50 a square foot, and there was a yearly increase of 2.5 percent. In the sixth year the rent would go up by 12.5 percent. With the debt service fixed and the tenant covering increases in the operating expenses and taxes, our net cash income should double. Our only additional investment would be in five years, for repainting, new carpeting, and minor repairs. We had already plugged those costs as reserves into our expense budgets.
A sweet deal. Standard General renting the whole building. It achieved my goal and provided options. We could milk the building for income. That income would be tax-sheltered to a large extent because of depreciation. The building would also appreciate in value over the years. Or, sell it now at a multiple of its cash flow. We’d have to pay the capital gains taxes, federal and New York State, and the “Cuomo Tax,” but we’d still make a huge profit. Or trade this building for another one, utilizing the device of a tax-free 1031 exchange. The idea was ingenious. As long as the debt in both buildings matched closely, it would work taxwise. Forty-five days to locate an exchange property and 180 days more to close title, enough time for the due diligence: the examination of the structure and the leases, any environmental problems. Also an exploration for financing and anything else that might have an effect on the value.
Ah, you’re fucking dreaming, Henry. Face it, will you? You’re dead, man. No, no, you’re not. Find some way to close the lease with S.G. Get Phelan to change his mind. Maybe do something to S.G.’s current building. Or mine. But what? You wouldn’t stoop that low. At least, I hope not. No one’s powerful enough to limit an earthquake to one block. Play with the wiring. Better, circulate a rumor about Legionnaire’s disease? I needed to clear my head.
I opened the privacy window. “Charles, I’m going to walk.”
He got out and opened my door. “Yes, sir. Five o’clock at the Club, And sir,1 fixed those plumbing and electrical problems at your place.” I nodded, then began to walk briskly. Charles followed ten yards behind.
The office buildings stood as straight as giant soldiers. Clean and rectangular. But I knew they were actually Trojan horses. Like the CEOs in them. Polite but ruthless. Beneath the Brooks Brothers suits they were feral animals, ready to rip one another apart at the first opportunity. Watch your back and your jugular. Pinstriped hypocrites. Good guys belong in classrooms and on farms. Flying airliners. Collecting salaries. C’mon, Henry, you know better.
I looked down Park and saw the Regency Hotel. Big deal lunches. Larry Pineman, Herbert Rose, Donald Tramp, top bankers and brokers. I remember that unforgettable night at the Regency when I'd come back from Juarez, divorce in hand. Karen and I had a sumptuous dinner brought up to our suite. Never finished it. She left around eleven. I slept as if there were no tomorrow.
The buildings towering around me suddenly appeared completely uninteresting. Even the Seagram building, which had been unique in its day. There is a way to create an interesting facade and avoid drearily similar bands of windows and metal sheathing. It might cost a little more to design steel with curves, recesses, and indentations, but not that much more. And the payoff is in higher rental income. Look at the entrances — almost all are boring. Developers are so cost crazy, they limit their architects. It doesn’t take much more to make them distinctive. David Heyman and his sons achieved it. They had some graphic designer put mounds and sitting areas outside his building, and left the ceilings exposed. They painted the steel beams and ductwork in exciting colors. They also had the lobby receptionists wear different outfits every week. Smart. They rented fast, I remember David telling me.
Color and texture. Use them creatively and you’ll have a structure corporate real estate managers and CEOs go for. Except sometimes it makes no difference, I was beginning to realize. Not to Jack Phelan. Or Standard General.
I forced myself to think of something else. Like when I used to fly my friend’s Second World War biplane, the Pete Jones/Boeing Stearman. Really fun plane. It won prizes for restoration at air shows. Just then a striking woman in a filmy summer dress breezed by. I swear she gave me a smile.
I love the way women dress in warm weather. More of them to look at, more to appreciate. Fewer layers to divest. Hey, Fm no different than any American male.
Joyce, my sister-in-law. Now there’s a fantastic-looking woman. Joyce Stokke, Norwegian parents. Minnesota family and upbringing. Tall, willowy, very blond and very fair. Scrubbed. Moves with exquisite coordination. Almost a perfect body, athletic, naturally coordinated. Mole on her face she decided not to take off. Scandinavian blue eyes, fierce, they hold you while you fantasize about her. They almost close when she laughs. Her hands are the most beautiful Fve ever held; she tends to put a hand, with those long, perfect fingers, on your arm when she talks to you. Kisses on the mouth when she’s saying good-bye. Knows how attractive she is and uses it. Sometimes commits herself too soon, as she did with me. She was naive, but now quite sophisticated. Very bright, formerly a model, then a stewardess, now an attorney.
I met her on an American Airlines flight and couldn’t take my eyes off her. Immediately wanted to drag her off Anywhere, even into the lav. Took a couple of months to get her to bed. I wanted to love her as much as she said she loved me. I did love her. But not enough. Maybe I strung her along too long. She ended up marrying Steve. Yes, brother Steve. I couldn’t believe it when Joyce told me.
“How can you possibly be happy with him?” I had asked. “It makes no sense.”
“It’s no longer any business of yours,” she said, more than a little testily. “When I was involved with you, you had yourself a woman who was a lot more confused than she is now. And dependent. Looking for a perfect daddy. I thought you were him.”
I grinned. Don’t know why I did. Anyway, Joyce smacked me hard on the cheek. Then on t
he other side. I deserved it, but I was convinced she wouldn’t be able to stay away from me.
Once, long before we broke up, I asked Joyce whether women responded the same way as men. How do they react when they meet someone they find attractive, assuming both are available or want to be? Her answer was a long explanation about the difference between male and female chemistry. Yes,1 remember saying, of course we’re different, amen to that. Yes, I know women respond to strength and stability, affection and gentleness. And a man’s genuine interest in them. A women assesses whether or not he will be a good provider.
I told her that premise tended to be pretty old-fashioned. “Damn right!” Joyce exclaimed. “You sometimes see a beautiful woman with a dumpy guy, or vice versa. The reason is simple because, for those two, the fit works.” She patted me on the arm. “What really counts is there — the trust, the respect, the friendship. They don’t see the facade any longer. That’s when the relationship becomes the best. But let’s face it, Henry, every one of us is flawed.”
“Yeah, blind is blind and beauty is in the eye of the …” She placed her hand over my mouth. She held my face in her hands and gave me a long, deep Mss.
“You know, Joyce, most guys need and want love and affection. Sex is important, but not everything. And women, today’s professional women, seem to want gratification. They aren’t necessarily interested in commitment.” I liked scoring a point with her. When I did, she softened up like a cat, tender and warm.
“Nonsense!” she said. “Deep down the so-called modern woman is not all that different from her mother or grandmother.” She was beginning to sound like the lawyer she was. “She’s talked herself into believing she thinks and responds the same as a man. But it’s really only because men are not marrying as young as they used to, if at all. And anyway, half the men around here are gay.”
I opened my mouth, but Joyce was in high gear and high dudgeon. “Men are making out better than ever because of women’s lib. They shack up with Ms. Terrific for three, four, five years, whatever. Then he’s thirty-four, she’s now thirty, not quite as attractive as she was in her twenties, right? So, when Joe Shithead finally gets ready to tie the knot, he finds some twenty-five-year-old. Bingo, goodbye make-believe wifey, her chances of marriage and family severely diminished.”
“Okay, okay, maybe you’re right,” I said. Joyce looked at me incredulously. “I mean it, you’re right. Really.”
Of all the women I had ever known, Joyce was by far the sexiest. I absolutely lost myself with her.
It was like that with us. Magnets. Maybe the problem had been being together too long in the state I just described. Whose problem? Mine, I’m sure.
I was stirred from my reverie by a screeching of brakes and then the sound of metal against metal. It looked as if a cab had tried to make a right turn from the left lane. Typical Manhattan. Collision. Crash. Me. Caught between two trains. Just my imagination. Bad dream. I can prevent that from happening in real life. I can. I will.
Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that modern women were not all that different from their mothers and grandmothers? Joyce no different from my mother? From dear, sweet Barbara, the perfect wife and mother who never aspired to anything beyond loving and serving her husband?
7
THE squash game with Daniel Spear … Christ, I can’t think of playing him. Maybe cancel. No, too late. Body and mind do affect each other. The better my conditionings the better my ability to think clearly.
Spear, a high-stakes, high-profile real estate developer, was also originally from Long Island and, like me, had inherited a small construction company and then built it into an empire bigger than mine. Unlike me, however, he loved the limelight and employed not one but three full-time PR people. Self-centered and self-indulgent, he tried hard to appear classy, but his rough spots kept showing through. He’d been married twice, once to a woman who paraded as a Hungarian countess but who had about the same amount of blue blood as Daniel did. When he ditched her, the press had a heyday, as the “countess” kept feeding the press juicy stories about their marital life and his private avarice. He — whom the press had dubbed “The Daniel” (which he relished) — retaliated by marrying a ditsy model who was the spitting image of the countess. She retaliated by “writing” a novel whose seedy protagonist was a thinly veiled portrait of her ex-beloved.
The Daniel was compulsive about his physical conditioning. He wasn’t bad-looking, touched up his hair, and recently had had cosmetic surgery he didn’t want anyone to find out about. I did, and teased him, but assured him I’d keep it to myself.
The pompous bastard, I thought. Can just see him smirking when he hears about my losing the Standard General lease. Funny how your so-called friends love It when problems descend on you like fiends from a nightmare. Revel In your humiliation. Even more In your floundering. I'd love to beat his ass into the floorboards.
Fve never let anyone know when I've felt Insecure. That I didn’t belong up there with the big guys. Didn’t always know whether what I was pursuing was worthy. But I did understand charm. Learned It at a very early age. Except nothing I ever did seemed to please my mother. Why do guys like Allen and Phelan seem to have It all together? Study them. Reflect on the conversations with Phelan.
God, It’s competitive as hell out there. Bring home the meat. We all fight for it. Supposed to. No different from the cavemen. Only now we wear pinstriped suits and smile at our enemies before bashing their heads in. Oh, sorry, Is that your brain on the floor? Nature. Darwin. Knew that early on, didn’t you, Henry? You’re an aggressive sonofabitch, aren’t you? But still have those damn doubts. Never disclose ‘em, Henry. Reach the top. And stay there, but that’s even harder. Phelan said that.
Hasn’t always been easy or pretty, has It? You broke out and ran with the wind. You weren’t like Steven. What kind of a mother was she, trying to straitjacket me? Mom cared, but she favored Steven. I was a bother to her. Trusted her when I was little. Where the hell did It get me?
Dad always told me I had what it takes. But his warning was that to succeed unethically wasn’t succeeding, It was failing. Okay, so my ethics aren’t perfect. No one else’s are, either.
C’mon, Henry. Analyze it. Like In flying. Say I've lost my radios. Or clear Ice Is forming on my wings. In seconds it could impede the airflow that provides lift from the wings, drag Instead from the extra weight of Ice. Good-bye, Charlie. Where’s the out? Declare an emergency if necessary, but get the hell out of there. Request or demand a different altitude from air traffic control. Screw the metaphors. Explore all the choices. Check how they stack up to the planned projections and pursue the strategic plan.
You have the luxury to make some decisions over time; with others, the first one has to be right. No second chance. Flying solely on instruments.
I remember that deadline to close a permanent mortgage, one that I sorely needed. At the eleventh hour, the mortgagee’s attorney said he wasn’t satisfied with the Phase I Environmental Report and wanted an update. If the mortgage didn’t close, a chain of negative events would be triggered. “Sure,” I told Cal, my attorney, “we can get the report revised, but it’ll take ten days or a week at best. The commitment expires on Friday.” He advised that the bank was adamant.
“Okay, let me get in touch with Bob Goodman. See what he can do.” Bob had been our mortgage broker for years. I liked Bob and respected his experience. We played golf once in a while and went to charity dinners together. My bank would start to wonder if a delay in replacing their building loan with a permanent mortgage was unavoidable or whether the permanent was in jeopardy.
“Bob, what the hell are they trying to do, kill the deal?”
“Hang on, Henry. I just got off the phone with Greg Geluso, the lender’s rep on this deal. They’ll extend the closing for two weeks, but they want interest paid from the original date.”
“But we didn’t cause the delay, they did. They took their goddamn time approving all the
documents. Why should we be penalized? Their attorneys only care about keeping the meter running…. Would it help if I flew down to Atlanta?”
“No, Henry. Absolutely not.” I heard him sigh. “You know they’ve bought the money as of the closing date. They’ll stop the clock on the attorney’s fees. You want the mortgage, you’ll pay interest from Friday.” We both knew I had no other choice.
‘What about splitting it?” I asked. “More than two grand a day, including Saturdays and Sundays. That’s a lot of dough.”
“Forget it. They could have also made you pay amortization.”
“Shit. Next time we get ourselves another outfit. These guys are killers!”
“My dear Henry,” he had said in a didactic tone, “let me remind you the market is completely different from what it was even six months ago.” I owed Bob a lot. When I started creating income properties, he was very helpful, teaching me about the complexities of mortgages. I listened as he went on: “Most of the insurance companies and pension funds are out completely. This mortgage commitment was by far the best I could get from any institution. We’re lucky to have it at all.”
Bob was right. We’ve always had cycles. Like the weather: magnificent blue skies or lousy freezing rain. At least there was a solution, though it was expensive. That mortgage wouldn’t be lost. I could absorb the extra costs. In a transaction amounting to tens of millions, $20,000 or $30,000 was insignificant.
If I lost a prospective tenant during periods of strong demand, there was always another. Perhaps the rent would have to be a smidgen lower, but at least I’d end up with a lease. The permanent loan would also be lower, but the deal would still work.
The situation with Standard General was different. I had assumed the S.G. lease was locked up. Bad mistake. Should have had a backup. But if I had, S.G. might have concluded I was working another company against them. Then they would probably have considered other buildings, not to be caught short. So, I was screwed. Not by design, but screwed nevertheless.
The Ego Makers Page 7