Vol. 153: Five midlife crises

Once you’ve made it, then what?

Are you tired of reading about billionaires who can’t think of anything to do with their lives other than procure more assets so they can throw their weight around supporting loathsome politicians and/or crackpot educational theories? Wasn’t there once a time when people who acquired fortunes moved on to something else?

Indeed there was, as I was reminded this month when I read the obituary of Arthur Carter, a former investment banker who amassed hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street, then reinvented himself as a publisher of impudent newspapers and magazines (The Nation, the New York Observer), and ultimately wrapped up his 93 years on the planet as a sculptor of bronze, copper, and stainless steel works that were displayed in such venues as the General Motors Building in Manhattan and at an entrance to Central Park.

Back in the ’60s, Carter was one of five ambitious 30ish friends who shared an office as principals of an obscure fledgling brokerage then known as Carter, Berlind and Weill, later renamed (after Carter departed) Cogan, Berlind, Weill and Levitt (or “Corned Beef With Lettuce,” as they were sardonically known on Wall Street). Over the next two decades, through the partners’ own remarkable synergy as well as some 20 acquisitions, that firm changed its name nine times and evolved by 1981 into Shearson Lehman Brothers, then the nation’s second largest investment house. But by that time, all five of those fiercely independent overachievers had departed for new and vastly different adventures.

Soul-searching on a mountaintop

—Roger Berlind produced such Broadway hits as Amadeus, Sophisticated Ladies, Joe Egg, and Nine. Did he make money on Broadway? Probably, he told me, “But only if you ignore the time I’ve invested in what I could’ve done with the money somewhere else. This is nothing I would do if I had to earn a living. I’m just lucky enough to be able to do something I enjoy. Those years in the investment business made everything else possible. Now I don’t have to grow up anymore.”

—Arthur Levitt was president of the Corned Beef Kids’ investment house when, in 1976, he went on an Outward Bound survival trip, during which he was left alone on an Idaho mountaintop with nothing but an apple, a notebook, and a pencil. Thus forced to search his soul, “I wrote down the ten things I wanted to do before I died,” he recalled. By the time he came down he had resolved to change careers. Levitt subsequently became chairman of the American Stock Exchange (then the heartbeat of America’s entrepreneurial revolution). He also transformed Roll Call into a vital Washington gossip sheet. Then he served as chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission under Bill Clinton.

“I’ve had a number of different careers,” Levitt once remarked. “I think a man who has several careers has a richer life than someone who has the same job for 50 years.”

‘Can I learn something?’

—Marshall Cogan left the Corned Beef Kids to build General Felt Industries into one of America’s largest private industrial companies.

—And Sanford Weill, the last survivor of the original Corned Beef Kids, guided Shearson into an astonishing 1981 merger with American Express (a deal characterized as “the minnow that swallowed a whale”), then kicked over the foundations of his past to seek a fresh challenge as chief executive at the troubled Commercial Credit Corporation of Baltimore.

“Everybody told me politically I was stupid, that I should’ve stayed at Shearson, my power base,” Weill told me in 1987. “But my interest wasn’t in power. It was: Can I learn something? Can I contribute something to the whole?.... It was a necessary experience in my life. You only pass through once. Why not take advantage of it?”

It was during this period, too, that Weill got involved in raising money for the restoration of Carnegie Hall. That too brought some pleasant discoveries. “I found that people liked me for me,” he said, “not for my title.”

Losing millions on journalism

And then there was the aforementioned Arthur Carter, who had already left his buddies by1968, when he was 36. In 1986 Carter all but repudiated his previous Wall Street career in a New York Times op-ed essay which attacked Americans’ preoccupation with wealth. He proposed a tax on capital accumulation, which, he said, would “dim the attractions of such professions as investment banking, where fortunes are made for providing a service this country probably can do without.”

In some respects, Carter turned out to be ideally suited for his second career as a publisher. On the one hand, said a colleague at the New York Observer, “Arthur was absolutely fearless; he truly enjoyed it when reporters or columnists annoyed, and even infuriated, his friends and associates.” On the other hand, said another colleague, “He was willing to lose millions because he loved journalism and couldn’t think of a better way to spend his money.”

My toughest assignment

In 1987 I traced the peregrinations of these five friends in an article for Avenue magazine. It turned out to be one of the toughest assignments I’ve ever tackled, mainly because only two of the five— Weill and Berlind— were willing to sit still for an interview.

Arthur Levitt— whom I had really wanted to meet, because ten years earlier he had written a favorable review of my first book for Barron’s— declined to see me on the ground that, as his spokesman explained, “He doesn’t want to throw back to his past. He wants to be taken for what he is on his own, not as one of a group.” Cogan was gun-shy of the media because, at that moment, he was on the outs with the SEC, but he did refer me to his second in command.

As for Carter, he went to some length to explain to me why he didn’t want to talk to me on the record. The previous year, he said, he had sat still for a Vanity Fair profile, which he later regretted. “It wasn’t a bad piece,” he said, “but it took a lot of my time and energy. And once you start, you’re stuck.” I couldn’t argue with his underlying message: He no longer needed the media to ratify his value.

By comparison, Elon Musk

Carter traced his third avocation, as a sculptor beginning in his 60s, back to his childhood interest in geometry and sketching. In a 2016 book about his work, The Geometry of Passion, Carter suggested that after a lifetime of searching for a profession to fit his skill set, he had found it not in numbers or words, but in art. “Only squares and circles, lines and ellipses,” he wrote, “can elegantly explain and simplify the complex meaning of life.”

Elon Musk, allegedly the world’s richest man, seems to disagree. This year Musk negotiated a pay package with Tesla that puts him on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. Some analysts say that could happen by 2027.

Are you as excited about this prospect as I am? Well, as Sanford Weill put it to me back in 1987, “As far as I am concerned, whatever somebody needs to energize himself is what he needs to do.”

Fair enough. On the other hand, as Thomas Carlyle famously observed, “Everywhere in life, the true question is, not what we have gained, but what we do.” But suppose the only thing you can do is go on making money?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com