“It's a White Man's World”

Coha_9780767919791_5p_all_r1.qxp 1/7/08 3:44 PM Page 385 CHAPTER 14 “It’s a White Man’s World” here is a much-discussed story in the Lazard annals about a private-jet trip that the CEO of an important client took with T Michel, Lou Perlmutter, and their wives down to a gathering at Caneel Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands. “And here they are at twenty-five thousand feet,” explained a Lazard partner. Three odd couples. The CEO is a good guy, Midwestern, good-looking, white button-down shirt. Just what you would expect. And somehow the discussion got to be about the difficulties of getting into college in the U.S. And the CEO starts telling the story about his seventeen-year-old son, eighteen-year-old son, who was going to be taking the SAT test and how they hired a tutor for the English and the math. Once or twice a week you have these prep sessions. Anyway, they hired a teacher from the school, he was at a private school, and they hired a teacher. So the CEO and his wife are out one night and the wife gets sick and asks to come home early. And they come back after forty-five minutes or so or something like that, and they find the kid in the sack with the SAT prep teacher. Lou Perlmutter can’t believe this story. The CEO is sort of bar- ing his soul a little bit. Well, Lou didn’t know what to say. The first per- son to speak was Michel, who offered his very French way of consoling, of expressing his sympathies for the CEO. His comment was, “Well, I think an experience like that can be very valuable to a young man.” Lou said that one incident just summarized Michel’s view of sexual harass- ment: It’s open season. It’s part of life. And everybody’s behavior in the firm, you know, followed down from that. And that led to the whole lack of discipline and lack of accountability. Sadly, this is an accurate assessment of the plight of women at Lazard. Equally discomfiting, there is no question that the firm’s treat- ment of its women over the years has derived from, shall we say, the Eu- PDF Coha_9780767919791_5p_all_r1.qxp 1/7/08 3:44 PM Page 386 386 ropean sensibilities of the firm’s most senior partners. André had many affairs, as did Pierre David-Weill. Michel said his father was “a natural” with women because he was quietly confident and very charming. “I have never seen it to that extent,” he explained. “He just found it so nor- mal and evident that if a lady was beautiful and he found her attractive why didn’t they go to bed together? Why not? I think women were pretty convinced but disarmed in a way. All their defenses were useless. So he was very gifted that way.” Michel’s stepmother was not happy with the arrangement but accepted it, more or less. “I mean it’s a fact of life,” he said. As for his client’s son, Michel said—years later—“He was a lucky young man.” Less than a mile away as the crow flies from Viking’s Cove, Michel’s Locust Valley home, sits Morgan’s Island, a 140-acre boot jutting into Long Island Sound, due north of Glen Cove and adjacent to the 110- acre tidal lake known as Dosoris Pond. Morgan’s Island, also known lo- cally as East Island, is connected to Long Island by a stone bridge J. P. Morgan Jr.—Jack—had constructed using stones taken from the demol- ished Harlem Bridge in Manhattan. In 1929, just to show that the partners of the house of Morgan still had plenty of cash at their disposal after the market crash, Morgan’s son, Junius Spencer Morgan, built Saluta- tions, a forty-room stone mansion on what has become known as West Island, or Dana’s Island, an eighty-eight-acre heart-shaped promontory adjacent to his father’s island. Son and grandson Morgan lived like the barons they were on these two adjacent islands off the Gold Coast of Long Island; many scholars believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald memorialized the two islands in The Great Gatsby as West Egg and East Egg. In April 1960, Junius Spencer Morgan celebrated at Salutations, along with eight hundred invited guests, the first anniversary of the historic merger of Guaranty Trust and J. P. Morgan & Co. He died six months later, at age sixty-eight, from ulcers suffered on a hunting trip in Ontario. After Junius’s wife, Louise, died in 1993, her estate put the mansion up for auction. The buyer, who paid “several million dollars” turned out to be Mar- garet “Margo” Walker, Michel’s longtime mistress. With Michel’s help, she had already purchased three of the five houses on West Island. At Salutations, there is an indoor swimming pool and an outdoor swimming pool; an indoor tennis court and an outdoor tennis court. There are beautiful gardens and a stunning view across Long Island Sound. In 2000, Walker bought the fifth house on the island and now owns the island and all the houses on it. She rents them out to a well-heeled crowd, once they have passed muster with her. Among the renters have been Stephen PDF Coha_9780767919791_5p_all_r1.qxp 1/7/08 3:44 PM Page 387 387 Volk, since July 2004 a vice chairman of Citigroup, and Richard Plepler, an executive at Time Warner’s HBO. Jeff Sechrest, a current Lazard partner covering the media industry, also rents a house from Walker. In years past, three former Lazard partners, Robert Agostinelli, Steve Langman, and Luis Rinaldini, now head of Groton Partners, his own advisory firm, have also rented from Walker. So far, she has refused the repeated re- quests of her A-list renters to buy the homes. After driving over the short stone bridge, all the renters arrive at a closed iron gate. To gain access, they punch a secret code into an elec- tronic monitoring system, which opens the gate. Two roads wind through the spit of land, Salutation Road and Pond Road, but access to them is restricted unless you have the code that opens the gate. Walker has been described less than favorably, when she has been described at all. “She has this house with birds that fly around inside,” a “friend” told Vanity Fair in 1997. A “New York fashion editor” also told the magazine, “She’s a total eccentric. She’ll walk you around her properties in spiky heels. Margo must be—what?—in her 50s? But she’s still the complete sweater girl, always perfectly groomed.” She has two children with her former husband, David Walker. Neighbors, of course, wonder where Margo, a local real estate bro- ker (whom, although he disputes it, Michel once tried to get his partner Disque Deane to hire; Deane declined), got the money to buy the properties, which are now said to be collectively worth around $100 million. All roads—correctly—lead to Michel. “Fees for services rendered,” sniffed one former Lazard partner. Having a wife and a mistress has occasionally led to some curious, schizophrenic behavior. A Lazard partner tells the story of how he was outside Michel’s office one day—waiting to go in to see him—when he overheard Annik having to juggle phone calls from the two women simultaneously. On one phone line was Margo, for whom Annik was arranging a private jet to take her to Moscow, at a cost of $100,000. On the other line was Hélène, reminding Annik to return rented videos to the video store in order not to be charged a two-dollar late fee. During one of our many interviews—this one at his magnificent Paris home—I asked Michel about his relationship with Margo. Mo- ments before, he had introduced me to Hélène, his thin and somewhat dour wife of fifty years, as she walked through the grand living room where we were meeting. Although New York disclosed the relationship in 1996, Michel seemed to shudder visibly at the question and asked me, for the only time in all of our many meetings, to turn off the tape recorder. He then proceeded to explain that while it may be difficult for an Amer- ican to understand, he had been able to create for himself loving rela- PDF Coha_9780767919791_5p_all_r1.qxp 1/7/08 3:44 PM Page 388 388 tionships with both of these women. He said he loved both Hélène, the mother of his four daughters, and Margo, whom he has been with for some twenty-five years. They both understand the arrangement, although he conceded that Hélène might be less sympathetic to it than Margo. Margo knows, he said, that he would never leave his wife but believes “half of Michel is better than the whole of someone else.” How very French. His sensitivity on the subject, while perfectly understandable, de- rives not from any personal shame but rather from, he said, the love he has for his wife. Hélène, he said, had suffered from the affair’s disclosure and from the chattering of her friends in New York. (In Paris, her friends are more accepting, he explained.) His concern is for “my wife, who is not terribly sensitive, but is fairly sensitive to the subject,” he said. “And I love her dearly.” Michel said that he lamented his wife’s pain in this re- gard but that Margo continues to be an equally important part of his life: they still travel together to exotic locations around the globe and see each other in the “country” on Long Island.

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