Nancy was not a forgiving person. She took offense at the most innocuous of remarks and found disparagement in the most neutral of comments about her. Her reactions were swift and extreme. If she felt a friend, or even a relative, had slighted her, she would cut them out of her life without a further word. And it was permanent. Nancy did not relent. In this, she was similar to Bill. No Amish church practiced shunning with more rigor than Nancy.
Rob and Nancy remained at La Rochelle on West Seventy-fifth Street. Rob liked living in the same building as Mike Paradise, his old college roommate, who by then was married and practicing law in midtown Manhattan. The two couples socialized frequently. One evening the foursome had made a dinner date, but Mike’s wife canceled at the last minute, saying she was not feeling well. An hour later, Nancy looked out her window and saw Mike and his wife laughing happily as they climbed into a taxi in front of La Rochelle.
She felt as if she had been spat upon. She told Rob that not only was she never going to speak to either Mike Paradise or his wife again, but that Rob was not to do so either. So in thrall to her was he that for the next two years he did not say so much as good morning to his old college friend.
For their first anniversary, Rob bought Nancy a mink coat. Bill paid for it. Unable to express love in other ways, Bill sometimes compensated by bestowing expensive gifts. Rob made sure Nancy never found out that he’d bought the coat with his father’s money. She was thrilled to receive the coat. It seemed to change her personality. For the first time, she acted truly proud of herself—as if the gift were a reward for accomplishment. She glowed when she wore it and she wore it everywhere, nine months a year. At restaurants, she did not check it. Instead, she draped it over the back of her chair. The Madonna song had been written for her:
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl.
4. LAZARD FRÈRES
ROB GLOWED LIKE NEON AGAINST THE DRAB, GRAY LADENBURG Thalmann sky. He viewed his time there as an apprenticeship. It lasted a year; then Lazard Frères hired him. This was his big step up, even if by 1990 Lazard had entered a period of genteel decline.
Lazard traced its roots to the California Gold Rush, but its corporate culture reflected old-world—some said outmoded—attitudes shaped by the French billionaires who controlled it. In the 1960s and ’70s, Felix Rohatyn’s brilliance and flair carried the U.S. division of Lazard into the front ranks of American investment banking, but as larger, more aggressive, and more technologically advanced competitors muscled their way onto the scene, Lazard witnessed a dimming of its luster. Even Rohatyn wondered aloud whether the jaguar that was Lazard could survive among a herd of elephants.
Rob did not concern himself with such metaquestions. What he cared about was advancement. His competitive instinct had not waned. Even in a field where everyone worked preposterously long hours and where everyone was single-mindedly focused on the one goal that mattered—making money—Rob stood out. He knew that money—enough money—could buy his father’s respect. This mattered more to Rob than he liked to admit. It might even have mattered more than he recognized.
Rob didn’t have the polish needed for mergers and acquisitions. M&A, as it’s called in the investment banking business, required an element of salesmanship in addition to the necessary number-crunching skills. Rob found his niche in the more predatory realm of distressed debt. The idea with distressed debt was to make money from failure, not success. It worked like this: you find a bankrupt company or one on the verge of bankruptcy, buy the company’s bonds at a penny on the dollar, and use the resulting leverage to force reorganization. Then, instead of taking cash payment on the bonds, you take shares of the company’s stock. As your reorganization turns the company around and it starts showing a profit, your shares rise a few thousand percent and everybody is happy, especially your bosses. At the end of the year, when you get a bonus ten times bigger than your salary, you’re even happier.
The M&A stars and the ballsiest, craftiest, luckiest traders wore the crisp white uniforms adorned with epaulets and scanned the horizons from the top deck. The distressed-debt boys worked the engine room, out of sight. This was where Rob discovered his true talent: he could plow through thousands of pages of red ink and spot the single spark of life. He could find—among the halt and the lame, the sick and the dying—those few companies worth a bet. The work was more tedious than glamorous, the hours it demanded not merely unreasonable but grotesque. “I laugh when I think about forty-hour weeks,” Rob would say. “I’m putting in forty-hour days.” But he got results. He got such good results that he didn’t even notice that he’d begun to cross over: he was becoming an investment banker, not a mere man.
The only reason people become investment bankers is to get rich. Not only do they have no problem worshipping Mammon to the exclusion of all else in life, they also lose the ability to understand people who don’t. They tend to believe that the only reason other people don’t become investment bankers is either because they’re not smart enough or they’re afraid of hard work.
It’s a unique perspective.
In his splendid novel A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer describes the breed. He writes that in lieu of happiness they experience “the grim, burnt comfort of thriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable.” The investment banker, Spencer writes, “spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain…. He has made an alliance with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride of the damned. His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter of a point less on a deal. Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream of fractions and deals that is the secret life of the world.”
This was now Rob’s world. He’d been drawn to it by the promise of outrageous wealth, but his years at Lazard added a twist: no longer was it enough to earn millions per year, or even to earn more millions this year than last. The only way to really succeed was to earn more millions each year than anyone else.
“What good does it do me to make ten million a year,” he would ask friends rhetorically, “when the guy down the hall is making twenty?”
Rob had been at Lazard for three years when he and Nancy had their first child. They named her Isabel. Her birth meant they had to find a bigger apartment. Nancy spent months looking for the right place. She found her dream flat in the mid-Manhattan district called Chelsea.
Then Bill entered the picture. He came across the river to inspect. He walked up and down the street in front of the apartment. Trash blew across his path. Glass from broken bottles crunched beneath his feet. He saw winos, panhandlers, and people who looked like drug addicts. He saw women who must have been whores. With even more distaste, he found himself gazing upon people of indeterminate gender.
“It’s a slum,” he told Nancy. “It’s a filthy slum filled with perverts. How could you think I’d let my grandchild be raised in that kind of squalor? I won’t permit you to live in that apartment.” Nancy asked Rob to try to talk some sense into his father.
“Are you kidding? Find someplace else,” Rob said.
Eventually, they moved to Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. Isabel’s room was in a basement down the stairs. The only outside light came through barred, street-level windows the size of manila envelopes. They needed an intercom to hear Isabel cry. Nancy liked it because the upstairs rooms were large and bright. She said Isabel would be fine. Rob was spending a hundred hours a week at the office, so he wasn’t much affected by where they lived. Soon enough, they’d have their multimillion-dollar condo—as long as he never slowed down.
Nancy showed great affection for her daughter, but she had inherited her mother’s lack of aptitude for parenting. In the right mood, she could spend
hours playing happily with the baby on the floor, but the tasks of motherhood bored her. Feeding a toddler three times a day—every day? Doing laundry? Taking the child out for fresh air? Such chores annoyed her. They dampened her carefree spirit. She felt they were depriving her of her right to remain irresponsible.
The apartment was only two blocks from Washington Square Park, where neighborhood toddlers played. Before wheeling Isabel there for the first time, Nancy girded herself for the banal chitchat she expected from the other young mothers—women, no doubt, who’d never partied from closing time until dawn. What she found floored her: there were no other young mothers there. The dozen or so toddlers running around were all in the care of their nannies. Rob got an earful that night.
Nancy had always worn a hard shell. She was easy to meet, but not easy to know. Even women who considered her a good friend sensed that she did not want to be known. You could talk to Nancy about what she’d bought, not how she felt. You could ask about the baby’s outfit, not how she and the baby were. Nancy didn’t simply have boundaries; her friends suspected she had built castle walls around her heart. It must have gotten lonely inside.
One of the few people to whom she felt close was Ira’s mother. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, both before and after the divorce, Ira’s mother had been a gentle, caring presence in Nancy’s life. In 1996, when Ira’s mother was dying in a hospice in Evanston, Illinois, Nancy flew out to be with her.
The lead statuette that Nancy’s mother and father had bought in Cincinnati thirty years earlier was by the old woman’s bedside when she died. Nancy, too, had come to treasure the statuette. In the figures of the two young and innocent little girls—so trusting, so seemingly full of sweetness, hope, and love—Nancy felt a link to something ineffable and precious and lost. Her older sister, Laura, reeling from her own rocky adolescence, had married and had moved to Oregon, severing all contact with the family. But on the statuette, Nancy believed, the two of them could stay forever linked. To Nancy, the statuette symbolized the capacity for closeness so lacking in her life.
She brought it back to New York from Evanston. It became her most valued possession, even more than the mink coat.
5. GOLDMAN SACHS
IN THE 1990S, THE POACHING OF INVESTMENT BANKING stars became the rule rather than the exception on Wall Street. Cadres of headhunters roamed the canyons like guerrilla bands. If you were an investment banker and you weren’t regularly offered a higher-paying job at a more prestigious firm, there was something you weren’t doing right.
Rob had been performing brilliantly at Lazard. And Lazard, though slowly sliding from the first tier of investment banks, remained a land of plenty for headhunters. In 1996, Rob’s was among the heads hunted and delivered to Goldman Sachs. If boys of an earlier era had dreamed of one day wearing a New York Yankee uniform, rookie investment bankers in the 1990s yearned for the day when they could hold in their hand a business card that said Goldman Sachs. By almost any standard of measurement, Goldman Sachs was the leading investment bank in the world.
“Money is always fashionable,” Henry Goldman, son of the bank’s founder, said late in the nineteenth century. For the next hundred years, Goldman set the standard for haute couture in the banking world. It achieved its preeminence by being, as senior partner Gus Levy said in 1969, “long-term greedy.” As a private partnership, Goldman did not have to answer to shareholders who expected spectacular earnings growth every quarter. Instead, the bank could formulate strategies that would play out over years.
The corporate culture at Goldman stressed teamwork. The slogan “At Goldman Sachs we never say ‘I’” was taken seriously. Nonetheless, the bank rewarded individual performance with salary and bonus packages that were stupendous even by the lavish standards of the industry. Rob was at the point in his career when promising young bankers were given three-to four-year tours of duty overseas. The world of finance was global, and banks wanted their rising stars to gain experience in nerve centers other than Wall Street.
In 1997, the most dynamic, hypersensitive financial nerve center in the world was Hong Kong. The myth of the “Asian miracle” still carried the force of doctrinal truth. For more than a decade, led by Japan, Asian societies had been honing their economic systems to the finest of points. The region had it all: the strong work ethic, the focus on education, the thrifty populace, and the ability to manufacture cheaply and export products that other countries were hungry to buy. Asia would own the twenty-first century—all the magazines and TV news shows said so. Everyone in the financial realm rushed to stake his claim. Banks loaned money, mutual funds bought stocks and bonds, investors built factories and office buildings, currency traders sold deutsche marks and dollars to buy baht and won and rupiah. On the receiving end, men who’d been driving motorbikes all their lives were suddenly debating the merits of various models of Mercedes-Benzes.
This was the future, the experts agreed. Asia ruled. The good times were rolling and they were here to stay. The first ones now would always be first. If it was already too late to get in on the ground floor, there was plenty of space on the mezzanine. The world’s leading financial journals spoke with one voice: any dollar not invested in Asia might as well stay under the mattress.
Hong Kong seemed the perfect place for a rising star like Rob Kissel to perfect his skills. He rejoiced when he learned he’d be heading there. “They only send winners,” he told friends. “This means I’m on the fast track to make partner. Hong Kong is the key to the mint.”
Hong Kong also offered temporary respite from the Kissel family’s intramural wars. Rob was ready to take a break. The extended Kissel family raised dysfunctionality to an art form. Family gatherings became emotional bloodbaths. Between engagements, members sharpened their elbows—and teeth—for the next.
In 1992, Andrew, who had graduated from Boston University and gone into the real estate business, married Hayley Wolff, a former world-class competitive skier whom he’d met at Stratton Mountain. She’d worked part time as an instructor, and Jane Kissel had been one of her pupils. Hayley was smart and tough and fashionably blond. She could turn from charming to acerbic on a dime. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she’d obtained her master’s degree in finance at Columbia and was advancing toward a position as an entertainment-industry stock analyst at Merrill Lynch.
Bill admired her accomplishments but was miffed that she’d married Andrew instead of Rob. It didn’t matter that Rob had never even sought to date her. Bill felt that Rob deserved the Ivy League heiress with the steel-trap mind, while “the waitress” would have been good enough for Andrew. Hayley, on the other hand, though she respected his intelligence and drive, thought Rob was a one-dimensional bore. She saw Andrew as a witty, wounded, vulnerable work in progress, battling bravely against the low self-esteem caused by his father’s contempt. She was convinced she could find his hidden better side.
But it was Hayley’s pedigree—her “heiress” status—more than her attitude or personality that first caused problems with Bill. She was the daughter of Derish Wolff—Phi Beta Kappa at Penn, MBA from Harvard, and since 1982 president/CEO of Louis Berger Group of East Orange. Louis Berger was an international engineering firm that had designed everything from Burma’s Mandalay Road and the Bangkok International Airport to the Trans-Amazon Highway, the East Pakistan Road in Bangladesh, and the Stockholm subway system, to name but a few. Louis Berger Group made Bill Kissel’s Synfax look like a high school chemistry experiment, and Derish Wolff’s wealth made Bill’s look like chump change. Bill’s envy and resentment were predictable. He was a man to whom wealth and worth were synonymous. And Hayley didn’t even have to say anything. The look in her eye said it all: my father’s is bigger than yours.
A new front opened in the intramural war in 1994 when Andrew borrowed $500,000 from Rob to launch his own real estate company, which would focus, he said, on buying small apartment buildings in what he called “under the radar” neighborhoods
in Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City. He called the company Hanrock: “h” for Hayley, “a” for Andrew, “n” for Nancy, “r” for Rob, and the “ock” at the end to make “rock,” which would show that the company was rock solid. To Nancy, who often referred to Andrew as a “lizard,” the only “rock” in Hanrock was the one he’d crawled out from under. “You give half a million to your slumlord brother, while I have to go without a nanny,” she groused to Rob.
Andrew had been working for W&M Properties, a midtown real estate firm that according to The New York Times specialized in “identifying and acquiring distressed but potentially profitable properties and renovating them in a style that attracts first-class tenants.” There was no shortage of “distressed” properties in Jersey City. The trick would be to make them profitable.
But Andrew had another trick. In 1992, he and Hayley had bought a one-bedroom condo at 200 East Seventy-fourth Street. Within three years, he became treasurer of the co-op board. He viewed the position as a license to steal. Starting in January 1996, he regularly wired funds from the building’s reserve account into personal and corporate accounts of his own. His early success as an embezzler made him both edgier and more arrogant than he had been.
Meanwhile, Hayley manufactured excuses to avoid socializing with Nancy and Rob. “I hate it when she comes here,” she told Andrew. “She walks around the whole apartment, pricing everything I’ve just bought.” At the same time, Nancy complained to Rob, “Their house at Stratton is twice as expensive as ours.”
Bill remained the catalytic agent. He and the lady friend from Florida who’d been living with him since soon after his wife had died would arrive for a holiday dinner. Invariably, Andrew and Hayley would be the hosts, because Nancy simply wouldn’t do it. Just as invariably, within the first five minutes, Bill would make a caustic remark. He’d say something snide or belittling, then take a drink into an adjacent room and close the door behind him. Neither Nancy nor Hayley could understand his behavior: why the need to hurt and humiliate? Andrew and Rob were not perplexed. They’d never known him to be any other way.