Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 61)

knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t on the books. There was no Houdon. “Bring me the Houdon!” I didn’t know what to do, everybody is panicking, and he gets very upset and marches into the elevator. We all follow him down to the basement of the Wildenstein Gallery where he opens a closet and in the closet is a big plaster bust of his father Georges Wildenstein, and he gets a mallet and chisel and goes boom! The plaster falls open and inside the bust is a Houdon bust of Mirabeau, the triple agent in the French Revolution. That was the Houdon, but there was a lot of this sort of stuff and it was full of intrigue and interest and it lasted for maybe a year, and I realized that if I was going to make a career there I was going to have to wait for the Wildensteins to die, basically. From there I sort of stumbled onto Wall Street. Sartisky: I’m going to intercede here for a second. I wanted him to take a run with that because I had been told this man could talk. If I had said three legged cat, like at the Improv, and said, “Michael, talk about a three-legged cat,” I am absolutely convinced that he would be able to discourse at length and weave a tale. Here you’re at The Historic New Orleans Collection, you surrounded by – Lewis: By my ancestors; I’m related to all of them. Sartisky: Are you really? I’m sure. In New Orleans, everyone’s related to everyone else. There’s only two degrees of separation in New Orleans. Lewis: In a good family. Sartisky: Three in a bad one. Art is a wonderful thing. But truly one of the remarkable things is, if you read The Money Game, if you read Liar’s Poker, Michael makes he dry field of finance absolutely scintillating. He understands the players. He understands the psychology. When he went to work he was virtually a stock boy at Salomon Brothers as well, in the kind of rite of passage that they put one through. I’m going to transition you to that. You go into finance. You realize that a life full of beauty and meaning is not to be yours and so you pursue the real American object of desire: money. It’s a substitute pretty much for everything else even if you have everything else and certainly if you don’t have anything else. So you’re at Salomon Brothers. Did you succeed by the way? They have a quaint phrase for somebody who’s successful in that business. Lewis: You going to say it, or me? Sartisky: I was going to see if you wanted to. Lewis: Why don’t you, since you brought it up? Sartisky: It was anatomical as I recall. Lewis: It was “a big swinging dick.” Sartisky: There we go. Were you one of those? Lewis: I was a little swinging dick. You have to understand that when I went to Wall Street, LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION above: A 1969 Monroe family portrait taken on Christmas day. Nine-year-old Michael Lewis is center front, in a plaid jacket. below: Michael Lewis as a page in the 1971 Court of Comus Mardi Gras ball. when I took my job at Salomon Brothers, I thought that what I wanted to be was a writer. So I didn’t go in thinking that I wanted to make it on Wall Street. It just so happened that I went onto Wall Street at a time when it was sucking in lots of presentable young men and paying them outrageous sums of money very quickly. Right after I got there I thought maybe I can delay this writing for long enough to get rich, because everybody’s getting rich. I thought, “I’m going to do this for ten years.” Then I came to my senses and went back to doing what I wanted to do. While I was at Salomon Brothers — and I did well at Salomon Brothers — my training class had 120 people in it and they ranked you at the end of each year in terms of the bonus you were paid, and I was at the top of my training class. The reason for this had nothing to do with me and everything do with circumstances. I was sent to London after this New York training program and I made a cold call on Jacob Rothschild — a George Soros-like character; he’s a wizard investor, kind of a legend in Europe, very risk-loving kind of swashbuckling character—I made a cold call on him and he saw in me exactly what he wanted in his broker: Ignorance, a certain phlegmatic indifference as to whether I actually did business, and a kind of very loose charm associated with things other than business. Without actually saying it to me, he basically said, if you don’t pester me like all those other people who want to do business with me pester me, I’ll give you all my business. Within six months of my joining Salomon Brothers, London, Jacob Rothschild became the second biggest customer of Salomon Brothers world-wide. So all of a sudden I was powerful because other people would try to call Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 61 LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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