La Comedie Humaine

The recent sale of the apartment occupied by Huguette M. Clark at 907 Fifth reads like a Balzac novel. Clark who actually spent the last years of her life in a special suite of rooms at Beth Israel Medical Center was the inheritor of a copper fortune and left according to the Times “a $400 million estate, two contested wills and no direct heirs.” (“Big Ticket/ Sold for $25.5 Million," NYT, 7/20/12) The apartment 12W was bought by Boaz Weinstein, the Hedge fund trader who held the other side of the now infamous London Whale in which JP Morgan’s lost its shirt. In the light of the continued problems with the trade (on which Weinstein undoubtedly profited handsomely) and the Libor scandal (in which JP Morgan was also implicated) the Times ran a front page picture of the once highly touted and now beleaguered JP Morgan chairman Jamie Dimon. Fortunes come and go as do major Manhattan residences. Recently the 15 CPW penthouse of former Citibank honcho Sandy Weill was sold to another heiress Ekaterina Rybolovlev, the daughter of the Russian potash billionaire, Dimitry Rybolovlev (whose mines have created sinkholes in the town of Berezniki) for a record breaking $88 million—which makes the $25.5 million Weinstein paid for his place at 907 Fifth seem like a pittance.  Actually Huguette Clark owned two other apartments in 907, 8E and 8W. As the Times also reported  Quatar’s Sheik Hamad bin Jaber al-Thani's $31 million offer for these “was turned down by the co-op board  because he wished to combine them.” Could the co op board’s fear about the residual effects of Arab spring have had an effect on the rejection? Balzac would have undoubtedly been fascinated by the lineage of acquisition with respect  to all three of Clark’s apartments and how they came to reflect the politics and economics of their time. But he would also have been interested in the mysterious inhabitant of these auspicious residences and how and why she recused herself from history.

Milkman the Clubman

In the old days, before the fall of Lehman, obits routinely listed the names of clubs to which deceased executives had belonged. They were the hallowed halls of the University Club, (housed in the auspicious McKim, Mead, and White structure on the corner of 54th and Fifth), the Union Club on 69th and Park, the Racquet and Tennis Club (housed in another McKim, Mead, and White structure on Park Avenue), the New York Athletic Club (the monstrosity on the corner of 57th and 7th, once famed for the turbulent masculinity of its naked steam rooms). And then there are the cultural fixtures like the Grolier on 60th and the exclusive Century Club, founded by writers and artists in the 19th Century (Winslow Homer was a member), and housed in yet another Stanford White designed structure on West 43rd street. Here, the upper echelons of business and art met (and still meet) to decide what the rest of society would eat, both figuratively, in terms of the nourishment provided by ideas, and literally, in terms of the valences accorded to the preeminent cuisines of the day.

But times have changed. Many corporate leaders will finish serving their jail terms just in time to vanish into the great beyond, which begs the question of how their obits will read. Let’s take an example that is a composite of Ken Lay, the deceased Enron chairman, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, who both served time for illegal marketplace manipulations, and a number of other masterminds of corporate crime, like accused insider trader Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon, who is likely to be indicted within the year—to say nothing of Marc Rich, whose pardon by President Clinton failed to spare him opprobrium.

Let’s call this composite miscreant Michael Milkman. After recounting Milkman’s education (Harvard MBA), early training (worked for Sandy Weill at Amex), and very early success, in which he is compared to the the famed Saul Steinberg—not Steinberg the artist who did all the labyrinthine NewYorker covers, but the one who attempted to acquire the old Chemical bank with its own assets—the obit will come to the obligatory paragraph about club memberships. Milkman, it will say, was a member of the Century, Union and Racquets Clubs from which he was later asked to resign. At the time of his death Milkman was a member of BJ’s and Sam’s Clubs and of Costco, for which he retained a family membership card.