Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? (29 page)

    From this point on, the affair becomes yet more sadly confused. The police doctor finds the woman sane, the police release her without telling IOS, whereupon she goes home, locks herself into her apartment and refuses to answer the phone. The IOS people scour the town for her apparently convinced she has fled - but then Cantor sights her entering her apartment block and the police are persuaded to enter her flat to see if she is all right. On the night of November 7, they get into Miss Drew's apartment via the balcony, where they find her in perfectly good health, but angrily accusing them of illegal entry. She declares that she doesn't want to go to New York, or to talk to anyone from IOS.

    It is only after this, in a letter dated November 14, that she actually sends off the override documents to the German taxmen, with a copy to
Der Spiegel.
The IOS Security Service has meanwhile decided it wants nothing more to do with the matter: but the affair is dramatically re-opened when
Der Spiegel
contacts IOS head office, saying that a special article is under consideration.

    Legal conference is swiftly convened, and the assessment is made that there is no solution but to discredit the lady by 'making known her instability and her mental state'.

    The file records that during the week of November 19-25 an IOS employee named Bob Walz has reported that Miss Drew is making threats to kill the children of Allen Cantor and another IOS executive if anyone should interfere with her plan. On November 29, Cornfeld sends word that he wishes to have legal process taken against Miss Drew, and on the following day the police are informed about the threats.

    The police seem to be impressed with the gravity of the situation, and request formal complaints from Cantor and the other father concerned. While these are being prepared, Walz comes back from a meeting with Miss Drew, and says that this time she has threatened to shoot the police if they come to arrest her. This is passed on to the police, who decide to arrest the lady before getting any formal complaint. According to the file, she shoots at the police when being arrested, but misses.

    IOS’s secrets were safe. On June 10, 1968, Gail Drew and Eckhart Trenkle were convicted of attempted blackmail by the Correctional Court in Geneva, and given suspended sentences of eight months and five months respectively. Gail Drew was also convicted of 'abuse of confidence' and the suspension of her sentence was made conditional upon her undergoing medical treatment. She was, however, acquitted of having made threats against the children and also of a charge of having resisted arrest.

    After her treatment, Cornfeld made himself responsible for seeing that Gail Drew had a roof over her head, and he did a good deal to help her out of her troubles. Many people in IOS who knew a little about the story thought that Cornfeld, and the company, had behaved generously towards her.

    Yet the fact was that IOS had used tactics against this woman - the telephone tapping, the bugged rendezvous, the round-the-clock surveillance, the 'turning-round' of Trenkle - more reminiscent of espionage work that of any ordinary business activity. To put it another way, a group of experienced and powerful men chose to submit an admittedly unstable woman to a series of pressures and harassments which could only worsen her condition. The episode shows all too clearly what wealth, fear, and years of clandestine operation, had done to the atmosphere of the happy IOS family.

    Cornfeld, of course, was a psychiatric social worker by profession. Apparently, his early training did not help him to recognize the real nature of the organization he had created.

    ‘I really don't see,' Cornfeld said once, 'why affluence should cause one to surround himself with ugly people, and gloomy surroundings. I think that if the affluence didn't exist, I'd also strive to surround myself with amusing, creative, if you like beautiful people, rather than gloomy, dreary people. And I really don't think it's a product of affluence, because I think that all of the same kind of people were around as far back as I can remember.'

    That was how Cornfeld saw it. Yet it did often happen that the amusing and creative people with whom he surrounded himself were linked, in one way or another, to his affluence. Oleg Cassini, a close friend, had been Jacqueline Kennedy's personal dress designer - author of the aphorism that 'it is easy to be humble when things are going well for you, but the trick is to be arrogant when you are a flop', and a great believer in the dictum of his mother, the Countess Cassini, that 'if you own a tuxedo, and are a gentleman, you cannot fail to make your way'. Cornfeld used to give the IOS girls Cassini scarves for Christmas, and he put up money for more than one of Cassini's business ventures.

    Jacques Lowe, the French-American photographer, who also had his Kennedy connections, was usually around at Bernie's parties. Lowe was in charge of producing the vast bulk of photographs that IOS used in its publicity material. (The IOS reports, prospectuses and handouts were brilliantly laid out and illustrated, even if their contents were less than adequate.) The actual creator of most of Bernie's surroundings was the interior decorator Serge Mourreau, something of a specialist in ornate interiors, which he did for IOS as well as Cornfeld. Guy Laroche, the Paris designer, supplied dresses for the IOS receptionists and Cornfeld put money into one of Laroche's companies.

    From the moment he became affluent, Cornfeld was open-handed with his fortune, as he had been, indeed, before he became affluent. When he was a fund salesman in New York, he would let his friends use his car. When he became a financier, he would let his friends use his bank account. This he did by guaranteeing them at the Overseas Development Bank, where he kept his cash reserves, and in this way Cornfeld became creditor for some very large sums, which he did not pursue for payment. In describing a deal which he did in partnership with Ed Cowett, Cornfeld once said to us: 'Our relationship was one where, if he had the money he paid, and if he didn't, he didn't, but I never asked.' It was an attitude he applied to more than one deal, and to many people besides Cowett.

    Perhaps the most attractive part of his reputation deals with his repeated acts of generosity towards IOS salesmen in financial distress. Thad Lovett told us a particular story about a Scottish salesman who suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown. The man's wife got a job in Woolworth's to make ends meet, and they were anxious to take an assisted passage to Australia and make a fresh start. But before a migrant can get a passage from the Australian government, he must prove himself free from debt. It turned out that the man owed IOS $3,000 and he asked the company to let him off. Lovett took the matter up with Cowett and Cantor, and they were arguing about it when Cornfeld walked in. Cornfeld was shocked that there should even be a question about the debt. 'What sort of company is this,' he snapped, 'if it can't help a man whose sales are in our funds under management?' (There are many such stories, and Cornfeld was especially generous with medical expenses when employees or their relatives fell sick.)

    Cornfeld revelled obviously enough in the pleasures of consumption that affluence brought him. He drank Coke but he drank it out of a silver tankard, and he indulged enormously his epicurean appetite for ice-cream. But it was his view, sensibly enough, that there was little difference in standard of living between a man with half a million, and one with three million. And indeed, he told Hubert Cornfield in 1962, probably accurately, that ‘I could retire now, with $50,000 a year for life.'

    Nobody, perhaps, can say exactly why he went on. But the more money he had, the more he could have his own way, and he often did act as though it was worth almost any sum to gratify a whim. At one point, he wanted to hire as an adviser Rosser Reeves, the advertising man who 'packaged' Dwight Eisenhower. (This was at the beginning of the image-brushing era.) Reeves didn't want the job, and it was hard even to persuade him to travel to Geneva. When Reeves did arrive, he swiftly concluded that Cornfeld didn't really want to do anything about his image - he just wanted to feel that he had done something. So Reeves decided to get out of the situation and, employing a classic technique, he told Cornfeld: 'You couldn't afford my fees.'

    'How much would you want?' asked Cornfeld. After a pause for calibration, Reeves said (this was 1965): 'A quarter of a million dollars.'

    'Fine,' said Cornfeld.

    'On contract,' said Reeves, slightly embarrassed. 'Fine,' said Cornfeld.

    'With expenses,' said Reeves, now groggy. 'Okay,' said Bernie.

    Reeves signed his contract the next day, and found exactly as he expected that was virtually the last time that Cornfeld expressed any interest in his professional services. Reeves spent a week staying with Cornfeld, but Bernie changed the conversation every time it turned to business. Eventually, Reeves gave up, and spent the time teaching Cornfeld to play backgammon. So what Cornfeld eventually acquired for his money was his enduring passion for backgammon.

    Reeves maintained a friendship with Cornfeld, and whenever they met, they would play three or four hours backgammon for ten cents a point. He says of Cornfeld: 'I like Bernie very much. In my life, I've met just about as many eccentrics as you could possibly meet. I'm like an orchid collector, and Bernie is the most exotic in the greenhouse.'

    Reeves also said: ‘I don't think Bernie could bear to be alone for more than two hours.'

    If the Emperor Cornfeld really wanted to avoid being alone, he succeeded most of the time. At any moment, he could fill his gilded rooms with bankers, journalists, actresses, artists, businessmen, politicians, designers, and specimens of the nobility and gentry of Europe. But sometimes, the guests noticed that Cornfeld, at the centre of the swirl, looked curiously inert. The grey eyes would become almost expressionless, and the soft, controlled voice become almost inaudible. The pauses, between whispers, sometimes seemed interminable.

    If Cornfeld had real friendships, it should have been the veterans of the IOS sales drives, the men who joined him when IOS was only an idea, and who rose to wealth and power with him. Yet a reporter, talking to these men, is likely to encounter the assertion of friendship more than its substance.

    There is, for instance, Eli Wallitt, who, on his own account, owes his considerable fortune largely to Cornfeld. He described himself as a lifelong friend - indeed, for that reason, he said that he did not want to 'psychoanalyse' Bernie. Then, in the context of discussing decision making within IOS, we asked this man what were his feelings towards Cornfeld. Almost as though the answer were obvious, he said: 'I'm terrified of Bernie.'

    He could not, it seemed, give any clear reason for this. But at last he said this: 'Mr Cornfeld is a man who surrounds himself with a circle of people who are to do his bidding.

    One by one, these people make mistakes. Then Mr Cornfeld picks the person up, the man, and castrates him, and he puts him back in his place in the circle.'

    Although it means a leap ahead of the narrative, that statement is most relevant when placed alongside something that another of the original circle told us about the events when Cornfeld was desperately trying to retain control of his empire in 1970. This man, who describes himself with great warmth, as a close friend and great admirer of Cornfeld's, held one of the bigger block of shares, and Cornfeld came and asked if he could rely on the votes of those shares in the battle he was planning.

    Firmly, the request was refused - and obviously, Cornfeld was stunned. 'Try and make me see,' said Cornfeld, 'why you have no loyalty.' He received, according to the old friend's own account, this reply: 'Bernie I'd give you my commissions, or my money, or my shares-but I'm not going to give you my proxy vote, because I'm loyal to the best thing about you, which is the company you built up. You are the best man alive at sustaining and nurturing a sales force, but I believe that there is no such thing as universal genius.'

    The request was made by Cornfeld, at the crisis of his career, of a man whom he had rescued from obscurity and raised to wealth. The reply that he received was a salesman's reply. But a court, of course, is about power, not about loyalty.

    

    

    

    
The boys find a way to beat the
sec -
operating through the City of London. They go into the life insurance business, and show the Bank of England a thing or two. In which it is shown how the Winston Churchill Close should be applied, and generally how sales techniques became refined.

    On April 14, 1967 a group of IOS executives met at the Savoy Hotel, London. They were there to thrash out the details of a system on which depended, it would be no exaggeration to say, the whole survival of IOS. However, the crucial members of the meeting were not the IOS executives, but two stockbrokers, one from New York called Arthur Lipper III, and the other, Henry Hely-Hutchinson, from London. On their cooperation would depend IOS’s ability to evade the results of the sec settlement (Ch. 9) and to continue buying and selling shares on the us stock exchanges.

    Arthur Lipper III had paid his first visit to
came in.