Additional research material is footnoted to the narrative sentences based on it and is listed numerically, by chapter, at the back of the book. I am also grateful for the work of the extraordinary and very talented Heather Florence, who saved me from myself more than once in all of this.
PROLOGUE
It is a story of men and women—and of power, lust, greed, and betrayal—in the ever-changing, yet eternally unchanging interplay between flesh, blood, and the hormone testosterone. Of such pathos we now know the story of these men—and indeed of American business itself—in the runaway bull market of the 1980s and 1990s.
IS THAT A GUN IN YOUR POCKET, OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?”
Patrick's Day.8 In the doomed world of Salem's Irish Catholics, the boy found his place in life. IS THAT A GUN IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME?” 15 college program he was accepted into as a freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—an institution that sought to do little more than prepare its students for careers as cogs in machinery. of Western Massachusetts companies.
I WANT TO PLAY IN THE BAND!”
I WANT TO PLAY IN THE BAND!” 31 though not of a kind that Dennis might have wanted. I WANT TO PLAY IN THE BAND!” 33 Stewart, a writer for the New Yorker, who interviewed Kozlowski not long after his arrest about New York State sales tax charges.
A COURSE FOR NEW PROVIDENCE, OR THE DROWNING POOLS OF NARCISSISM?
Ron's father, Raymond, was the son of Lithuanian émigré Morris Perelman, who arrived in New York in the turn-of-the-century flood of Eastern European immigration. And they all soon realized that in a world of boundless uncertainty, claims of a world-changing vision of the future can captivate any audience.
GE LOVES ME!
When Welch joined GE in 1960, the Plastics Division's only significant commercial product - Lexan - had been on the market for barely two years. When he discovered soon enough that the title of "process specialist" in the Plastics Department was basically a joke, he began to blame everything—and everyone—around him for the sorry circumstances in which he found himself. He wasn't special, he wasn't unique, he was just another brick in the wall.
In 1929, Forbes ranked GE as one of the best-managed companies in the United States. In 1964, GE's newly appointed CEO, Fred Borch, listened to the advice of a group of the company's strategic planners that the company should compete with IBM in the mainframe computer market. Why did so many of them, in the words of a plastics engineer working for GE in Europe in the early 1970s, feel that “Welch, from the first time he met him, “was God”?
There were rumors about Jack and a secretary named Louise, who worked in the Pittsfield office.
AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE
At the end of the day, he turned around, took his clothes and left again. AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 71 throat of the company's volatile and unionized workforce. Meanwhile, the owner of the company, a fellow named Ely Meyer, had introduced Al to a bank teller named Judy Stringer.
The event was meticulously planned down to the second and was designed to make maximum theatrical use of the club's location overlooking Lake Ontario. But when the big night arrived, the two busboys who started wheeling in the cake managed to snag one of the cart's casters in a seam of the carpet. AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 79 when the highest stock prices on Wall Street were awarded to the trendy new business concept of the time, the so-called corporate conglomerate.*.
But he was no Harry Figgie or Jimmy Ling, two of the 1960s-era conglomerates Gaziano tried to emulate.
FOOLISH FAITH AND THE CASE OF SUZIE CREAM CHEESE
The building, built in 1930 in the depths of the depression by architect Rosario Candela, was said to express a kind of baronial splendor during times of distress. STUPID FAITH AND THE CASE OF SUZIE CREAM CHEESE 87 20,000 square foot triplex penthouse that was widely considered one of the most luxurious residences in the city. The young man behind the junk bond trick—another Wharton graduate named Michael Milken—was a few years behind Perelman in the MBA program.
By the summer of 1982, the green thumb had become a huge hit with the residents of Manhattan's East Side, one of the highest income neighborhoods in the world, and Suzie was raking in the dough. BAD FAITH AND SUZIE CREAM CHEESE 91 had not been savvy enough to notice at the time, though they had been staring her in the face. And the bill for it had instead been delivered into [drumroll, please] the wife's open arms.4.
The windows were up, the lights were on in the twilight and the car was idling.
QUESTION FROM THE CHAIRMAN
HOW MUCH DO I WEIGH?
But it was Welch who had set the tone for the country at Selkirk as its first leader. Did you know, for example, that Regina was seen in town the other day with one of the hard hats outside in the yard. Starvation occurs first in the brain and heart - the two internal organs of the body that have the highest metabolic rates and thus need more oxygen to function.
This was followed by the death of the Albany County Medical Examiner, DeForest Deitz, and the shredding of his files as well. In the process, virtually all traces of Regina Paulsen's life were effectively wiped from the face of the earth. In the midst of all this, the President of the United States was driven from office by the Watergate scandal.
Ten miles east of Schenectady was the Hudson River town of Waterford, home of GE's silicon products division, one of GE's many operations in the region that came under Welch's control as he rose through the company's ranks.
STRETCH ROLE TIME FOR GARY AND THE PREACHER’S DAUGHTER
Both Lorna and Gary played in the school band; he played the trombone, she played the oboe. Then he would rush in, like some animal hiding in the long grass of the Serengeti, and tear the man to shreds. Both were born in the depths of the depression, within months of each other in 1935.
Both came from financially struggling families of Irish Catholic immigrants who had settled in Massachusetts—in the case of the Bossidy family in Pittsfield, where Larry's father ran a shoe store. After that, more promotions followed until Welch was elevated to the position of president. You can find him buying chocolate chip cookies—one for himself, two for his assistants—in the company cafeteria.
Abrams, "Talks That Led to GE-RCA Pact Began By Chance," in the Wall Street Journal (December 13, 1985).
FITZY COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET
FITZY is coming out at some point, and Welch hadn't even announced who would be in charge of what. Clifton Park Board of Supervisors Chairman Roy McDonald spoke for everyone when he called for action. FITZY COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET 139 and all subsequent paperwork, was destroyed, as ultimately revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request.
As the troops moved towards them, one of the men entered the darkness. FITZY COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET 141 progressed, Welch became more and more animated and personal in his criticism. In the wake of the Employers Resurance acquisition in 1984, he promoted Bossidy up and out of GE Credit, making him vice chairman of the entire corporation.
FITZY COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET 143 easily recovers the expenses by selling advertising time on the shows.
CHAMPAGNE KISSES AND CAVIAR DREAMS
Dunlap moved next door to the Manville Corporation, where he lasted about eight months as head of the company's forest products operations. Forbes, What Happened to their Kids: Children of the Rich and Famous (New York: . Simon & Schuster, 1990). After the long bleak decade of the 1970s, it became good to be rich again in the United States.
Henry Kravis, the head of the leverage buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts, also had one in the person of socialite Carolyne Roehm. In the changing climate of the 1980s bull market, there was a gal in a Galanos beating a wood stove every day. But woe to the one who answers the call of the ultimate big game hunt.
Business-wise, things were good enough for Ron after the divorce.
JACK MEETS CELEBRITY’S DARK SIDE
Of the 50 individuals listed as the “new corporate elite,” 16 ran companies that eventually failed. That alone was enough to justify NBC's commendable first-term profile of the man and his career in January 1984. It was a model of proven success in the struggle of the individual against the entrenched forces of corporate bureaucracy, the status quo and .
In the process, Welch became an almost mythical figure to the employees of the Selkirk facility. With the chairman himself agreeing to deliver the keynote address at the celebration, the men and women of the plant worked hard for months to make sure everything would be just as Welch would have wanted it. All mention of the man was removed from the eight-page folio brochure prepared to chronicle the plant's twenty-year history.
Requests for an explanation from the book's publisher, Warner Business Books, yielded only a vague response that the change was nothing more than an inadvertent "scribal error."
THE SHIKSA GODDESS OF WALL STREET
Pat brought with her a head full of ambition to make a name and a career for herself in a man's world. And when they insisted, she engaged in petty manipulative negotiations to arrange the facts of the period as she wished. According to the report, at the same time Patricia was being informed "by her father" [emphasis added] that "she could no longer attend Barnard College, she came into contact with an old boyfriend named Tom Zabrodsky." The report states that she had known Zabrodsky during a period when they had both been students at the International School and that she now "found herself gravitating towards him as a replacement for her parents".
Claiming to have felt "emotionally blackmailed"—the same excuse she would give for marrying Perelman nearly twenty years later—she succumbed. Whether Zabrodsky was the control freak portrayed in the Dutton report is hard to know. SHIKSA GODDESS OF WALL STREET 179 How Patricia got her foot in the door in Washington, D.C., Democratic Party circles is itself a story of Rashamon-like variety, though it seems that much of the emotional inspiration for at least making a stab at politics came through her mother, Mary, who had struggled with her own frustrated career prospects as a Kennedy-era liberal.
Surprised greetings were exchanged everywhere and Melanie, who was a better friend to Patricia than Don was to Mike, suggested that the couple join them for dinner with "the man who owns Revlon."
