The year was 1981. Having left the employ of Philadelphia Magazine six years earlier, I was busy cobbling together a living as a free-lance magazine writer. I gradually developed a reputation for expertise in perhaps half a dozen diverse fields– business, movies, media, lawyers, and Judaica, for example– so that editors thought of me when they needed someone to tackle those subjects.
Despite my lack of Jewish scholarly credentials— I had dropped out of Hebrew school after my bar mitzvah— my groundbreaking 1977 book on Jewish genealogy, Finding Our Fathers, tagged me as a Jewish expert. That reputation in turn led to an assignment from Geo Magazine to spend two weeks chronicling the decline of the once-flourishing Jewish community in Rădăuți, Romania, just over the border from the Soviet Union.
That’s how things worked in the free-lance world of the 1970s: One thing led to another.
A 1974 piece I had written for Philadelphia Magazine spotlighting “The Wealthiest Philadelphians” inadvertently added one more specialty to my résumé. That led in turn to a string of “rich list” assignments from other magazines— “Wealthiest Chicagoans,” “Wealthiest New Jerseyans,” “Wealthiest Texans,” “Wealthiest New York Women,” “America’s Wealthiest Jews,” “Wealthiest People in Golf” and, ultimately, “The Wealthiest Americans” for Town & Country. Since money is a subject of universal appeal as well as a topic everyone can relate to, the possibilities seemed endless.
Of course, in those pre-Internet days, wealth estimation was more of an art than a science. To guess the net worth of super-rich individuals, I relied on a combination of published books and articles, proxy statements, knowledgeable sources, and my own gut instincts.
Enter Julie Andrews
Typically, I would create a packet of three-by-five cards— one for each of my prospective candidates— and take them to presumed experts (bankers, say, or lawyers, or investment managers) in each city or region. Most were happy to cooperate, if only because they were curious to see who was on my list.
I would sit across from these experts and jot down their reactions as they flipped through my cards— “This one’s much richer than that one,” or some such thing. Rarely did anyone provide specific dollar amounts, but this exercise at least gave me some idea of the relative standing among my candidates.
For my piece on “New York’s Wealthiest Women,” for Town & Country, this process took me to an exclusive Madison Avenue boutique that catered to likely candidates for my article. It was a tiny shop, the sort of place that would be satisfied to sell just one high-priced outfit in a day. As the proprietor reviewed my cards in her cramped office off to one side of the showroom, suddenly she shifted her attention, like a hound who had just sniffed a fox nearby.
“Please excuse me,” she said, rushing out to the sales floor.
From my seat, the whole salon was visible, so the cause of the owner’s excitement became instantly clear: Julie Andrews had just entered the shop. Over the next half-hour or so, the owner devoted herself to this Hollywood legend, offering a succession of outfits for her famous client to try on. The tiny dressing room was situated directly across from the office where I sat, and it was covered with mirrors, to boot. So, as Andrews stripped down to her underwear to try on a series of dresses handed to her by the proprietor standing just outside the dressing room, I couldn’t have averted my eyes even had I wanted to.
The Trump exception
Many of the truly super-rich resisted my probing of their net worth. A few of them— understandably concerned about kidnappers, terrorists, or fund-raisers— threatened to sue me for invasion of privacy if their names were included on my lists. To such people, I argued that the public had a legitimate right to know who were the wealthiest people in any given community.
One of the rare exceptions to this resistance was a blatantly ambitious young real estate developer from Queens named Donald Trump, who actually lobbied to be included, claiming to be far wealthier than I sensed he really was. In retrospect, I take pride in noting that Trump never wangled his way onto any of my “Rich Lists.” That was my first introduction to a man who struck me then, and for years thereafter, as an amusing buffoon, until he became president of the United States and ceased to be amusing.
Forbes calls
Which brings me to 1981, when Malcolm Forbes aspired to launch an annual list of wealthiest Americans in his eponymous business magazine. His editor hated the idea, largely because he thought the challenge was impossible.
At the time, I was one of only two known specialists in the field; the other was Arthur Louis, an editor at Forbes’s competitor, Fortune Magazine. So, Forbes hired me to walk its editors and reporters through the process; the first edition of the Forbes 400 in 1982 was incubated in my Philadelphia office, where two Forbes reporters spent the better part of a week combing through my files as the nucleus of their maiden list. For this service, I was paid $5,000 for a week’s work, which struck me then as a bonanza.
It took a while for Forbes to get the hang of things. Donald Trump succeeded in finagling his way onto the list by posing as a Trump Organization publicist named “John Barron,” who claimed that Fred Trump had passed nearly all his Trump Organization holdings to his son Donald. Jonathan Greenberg, the Forbes reporter on the receiving end of this phone call, had the good sense to record it, with the result that even today you can listen in. (Click here.)
An editor fired
To its credit, Forbes eventually refined the art of wealth estimation into a science beyond my primitive methodology. Membership in the Forbes 400 became a status symbol, and this annual “rich list” became even more famous than Fortune Magazine’s Fortune 500 list of largest U.S. corporations.
That success inevitably led Forbes into a string of other lists. As its print advertising revenues declined, Forbes ventured into new businesses, such as selling commemorative plaques and holding ticketed events for professionals who made its coveted lists. These projects inevitably forced Forbes journalists into de facto partnerships with the big shots they were supposed to be covering objectively.
For example, since 2016 Forbes has subjectively ranked the top wealth advisers in the U.S., in partnership with a firm called Shook Research. The success of that list led Forbes and Shook to produce an annual summit in Las Vegas, which in the past drew executives from top financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Apollo. I have a sneaking suspicion that Shook Research receives more than $5,000 for its services.
My suspicions were confirmed last month when Randall Lane, a top editor of Forbes, was fired after the magazine discovered that he had received a payment of some $6 million last year from R.J. Shook, the founder of Shook Research. R.J. Shook, you see, had sold a majority stake in his firm and got out of it, and what better way to celebrate the sale than to gift Forbes’s chief content officer with $6 million?
Why R.J. Shook paid Lane isn’t exactly clear. Lane, it is said, considered the payment a gift in recognition of the advice he had provided to Shook over the years. In retrospect, Lane acknowledged that failing to disclose the gift to his Forbes employers was a “serious error in judgment.” Forbes, meanwhile, suspended its wealth adviser rankings and its annual summit in Las Vegas, at least until it can “restore trust with the adviser community, partners, and audiences,” according to the Forbes chief executive.
Hmm. Trust? Better look that up in my thesaurus.
My $50 opportunity
A similar, albeit somewhat smaller, opportunity came my way back in the ’60s when I was a daily newspaper editor in Portland, Indiana. The publisher of the nearby Bluffton News-Banner, Roger Swaim by name, harbored passionate feelings about the evils of gambling. Wars, plagues, terrorism, bigotry, and crooked politicians came and went without a word of censure from Swaim’s editorial page. But he and his paper hated gambling and railed against it constantly.
Well, it happened that one day I wrote an editorial criticizing the local state police post for ignoring the illegal slot machines that flourished in my county’s fraternal lodges. Swaim, upon reading my words, got so excited that he sent me a check for $50 as a token of his gratitude. I was still new at this game, so I took the check to my publisher, Hugh Ronald, and asked him what I should do about it. Hugh— still one of the wisest people I’ve ever known— replied that of course I must return it. If people— no matter how noble their motives— could reward us monetarily for the stories we wrote, we could kiss our most valuable asset— our credibility— goodbye.
Having happily, if naively, pocketed my $5,000 fee from Forbes in 1981, I, who had launched the “rich list” phenomenon, began to gag on these paeans to materialism. In the 1980s, I developed an antidote: “philanthropy lists,” which celebrated not those who had acquired the most money, but those who had given away the most money to worthy causes. These lists, which I compiled for magazines like Town & Country and American Benefactor, created a new— and, to my mind, more exemplary— status symbol.
In all my years as a wealth chronicler, no one ever paid me $6 million (or even $50) for old times’ sake. But at least I emerged with my credibility intact. Besides, I got to see Julie Andrews in her underwear. There will always be some delights that money can’t buy.
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Hal Freedman:
So, how did you select us, the non-super-rich, for the T & C assignment?
Loved your Vol. 191…and the Trump recording.