On Golden Pond
Flying to New York for my first visit since moving to my own Golden Pond on our hilltop. I started at the airport and then for the first three hours of this flight (while pretending to sleep for a few hours) to listen to an audiobook which I just downloaded. It’s called Dark Towers and its about the rise and imminent fall of Deutsche Bank, including its strange and tangled relationship with Donald Trump. It’s an interesting story and I have my own history with Deutsche Bank to blend into the mix and make the whole thing that much more interesting to me.
In 1998 I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust and in some ways it was the pinnacle of my career. I was forty-four, which is prime-time for Wall Street Bankers. We were going great guns having caught our second wind after the derivatives problems of 1994 felled our prior Chairman (Charlie Sanford, rest his soul) and were under the stewardship of Frank Newman, who had joined us from the post of Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Bob Rubin. We were bulking up, having acquired Wolfensohn (and Paul Volcker in the package) and Alex. Brown, that venerable boutique investment bank based in Baltimore. We were riding high with our stock heading north of $175/share. Suddenly we got hit by two debacles in the same year. First there was the LTCM hedge fund collapse, which reverberated throughout the Wall Street trading community and portended the coming era of wild hedge fund games. And then there was the Russian bond crisis, which caught our trading desk flat-footed and winged us pretty severely. Suddenly we were forced to switch from hunter to hunted.
It so happens that Deutsche Bank was on the prowl to make its name in the Investment Banking World and we were just bite-sized enough to interest them. We sold ourselves to them for $93/share which was still a great price that brought me my biggest payday of my career, what with my Golden Parachute and all. I had been running the Global Private Banking business, but my Deutsche Bank counterpart had big plans to honcho the combined unit and it was clear that he was deeming himself to be best of breed given his German royalty status. That was when a guy by the name of Michael Dobson, who had run Morgan Grenfell and was now the only non-German on the Deutsche Bank inner-sanctum, called the Vorstand, came calling on me. He convinced me to stay to run Deutsche Asset Management.
This was so meaningful because in the Dark Towers book, the whole first half of the book is about the rise of a guy named Edson Mitchell, who was also recruited to join Deutsche Bank by Dobson (four years earlier than me and from Merrill Lynch). All of the characters in the book are people with whom I am quite familiar. I remember bumping into Edson in the Dark Towers of DB in Frankfurt as we both elevatored upstairs to the executive floor for separate meetings. He turned to me and said, “nothing good has ever happened to me in this building.” The book tells the tale in a very similar tone given that it was 2000 when that meet occurred. It was shortly after that when Edson was flying up to his cottage on Rangely Lakes in Maine (his version of Golden Pond) when his private plane crashed and he was killed. I left Deutsche Bank in 2000 but all the sordid stories of the machinations described in the book came rushing back to me while I listened.
The memories this tale of corporate intrigue brought back were pretty stark. Edison’s rise through his work in the early derivatives markets was particularly poignant to me given my own history with derivatives in those early days. There were plenty of Bankers Trust people mentioned that I knew well, but luckily, the asset management area was a bit tangential, so I wasn’t mentioned. I’ve had my own experience being mentioned in a Wall Street thriller in House of Cards about the Bear Stearns collapse. Once was plenty.
What I’m curious to find out on my next flight (when I will try to listen to the rest of the book) is how the Trump private banking connection unfolds. You see, In 1999 when I handed over the Bankers Trust Private Banking business to Deutsche Bank, we did not bank Donald, though we had been asked to many times. He was an important vestigial client of the Bankers Trust Real Estate Department and they were forever trying to scrape him off on us as his business became less and less real estate focused. Given that we had seen him through several bankruptcies as a banker to him, its not hard to understand my reluctance to take him on as a client. But that all changed after I left. The Deutsche Bank U.S. private banking unit (that was certainly part of what I used to run through most of the 1990’s) ended up lending Trump $350 million at the peak in 2016 and only stopped there because they denied him yet again more loans to prop up his Turnberry Resort during his presidential campaign. I find myself shaking my head about my own small version of feeling like Forrest Gump as my history tangentially touches all these great moments and people.
During the second part of my flight, after I had given up trying to sleep, I chose to watch Henry Fonda and Kate Hepburn work through their aging issues On Golden Pond. What a great movie about a human condition we all face in our own way, portrayed by two of the great actors of their day. Fonda played an 80-year old even though he died a year later at 77. Meanwhile, Kate Hepburn played a 69-year old even though she was 74 (she lived for another twenty-two years). Today, daughter Jane Fonda is the octogenarian (she is 82) and her baby brother Peter only made it to 79. The message of the movie is that as idyllic as we make our surroundings and as rose-colored as our memories may be, we must all open ourselves to new and renewed relationships because we are all only here long enough to barely make a few relationships work. The speech that makes the movie is when Kate tells Jane that Norman is 80 and when exactly did she think she might start to forgive him for the wounds of her youth.
Remembering the past can be fun, but we must all remember that if we all spend our time focusing on getting to Golden Pond and living in the rear-view mirror, we might miss the very reason why it can be and should be golden.