Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff
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any conventional career strategy at the Times, there really isn’t much advantage in having a relationship with the family. It presents more complications than benefits. The line of demarcation is too clear. It’s not just a hierarchical distinction, but a class line. And the family occupies a class of one—you can’t get into it. It would be like someone trying to rise up in Labor Party politics by befriending the Prince of Wales.
But Steve Rattner does befriend young Arthur (always called young Arthur). Indeed, young Arthur is befriended by an assortment of people in the Washington Bureau in the early eighties. That is young Arthur’s job at this point in time: to experience the Times as its reporters experience it—and to experience Times reporters.
But it’s situational. While he befriends these people now, he will unbefriend them as the situation changes. He will say later, in his surprising blunt-speak way, that he can’t be friends with Times reporters. That it doesn’t work. That it complicates things.
But the person he will stay friends with, best friends (they will later live in the same building in New York and, every morning, go to the gym together) is Izzy’s father—no longer at the Times, but now an investment banker, a media money guy, whose clients include the Sulzbergers.
I remember when I heard this: Steve Rattner had left the Times to go to Wall Street.
It was unclear what this meant, and yet it was clear to me that it was large—disturbing. If no one had ever done this, but someone, someone like Steve Rattner, was doing it now, what did it mean?
But I wasn’t that far from understanding.
When I had arrived at the Times, I’d known, within something like minutes, that it was all wrong.
It was Gothic. Dickensian. It did not look like the modern world. It lacked any feeling of affluence. It was dirty and gray and unfriendly. The men had tics and limps and hairpieces.
You could romanticize this—this was a newsroom, after all. And that’s what lots of affluent, suburban college boys must have done.
But I couldn’t shake the sense that this was a time warp, which, if you didn’t run fast, would catch you.
I sensed the grip of the place. The plantation quality. Still, I did not think that the career itself, the economic proposition, was flawed: to be a journalist. A writer in the culturally important person sense. A writer in the pre-rock-star sense. A writer in the sense of there being a recognized profession.
I left the Times, as Steve Rattner was moving up in the ranks, to enter what might fairly be called the late renaissance of the magazine business. These were terrible economic years, but in fact, there were plenty of alternatives to the Times in New York. It was (it borders on the bizarre to remember) a time of thriving, independent, Zeitgeisty magazines.
New York magazine, started in 1968, was a vast success. Rolling Stone moved to New York from San Francisco in 1977. New Times, a biweekly alternative newsmagazine, where I went to work, was started by former Time Inc.-ers. Mort Zuckerman bought the Atlantic with great fanfare. Harper’s was not that far removed from the era of Willie Morris (the great editor of his generation). Even Condé Nast, then just a rag-trade publisher, wanted in on the game, and launched a revival of Vanity Fair. Manhattan, inc., and Spy would shortly come onto the scene.
And yet, if you had a truly special sensitivity you might have recognized that there were roiling waters. You could have read these magazines themselves—so many of them doomed—and learned everything you had to know: The rise of Hollywood and the value of celebrities and the rise of a business culture full of its own Zeitgeisty cowboy personalities, which, every day, was setting a new baseline of what represented real and attainable wealth, was changing everything.
I was trying to make my writerly way when I heard that Steve Rattner was leaving the Times to go into investment banking.
How did he know, I have spent a lot of time wondering since then, that everything was about to change?
In hindsight, the business explanation is clear: One result of the late-seventies fiscal crisis in New York was that the financial industry and the power of finance, public and private, expanded vastly. Then too, there was the Reagan era of deregulation, an end to inflation, massive deficit spending, and the bulge of baby boomers in their prime earning years.
But this still does not explain the scale of the transformation, neither the economic nor the cultural transformation: Virtually everything became a reflection of how it was financed.
Corporate America, heretofore, was a white-bread, repressed, deeply uncool place to be—but then, all of a sudden, corporate man became a sexy thing.
My own favorite theory for what caused business to become such a compelling sport and transforming experience was the advent of the spreadsheet. This came in ’82 or ’83, shortly after the introduction and widespread adoption of the IBM PC: first VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, and then, of course, Excel. If you could work a spreadsheet, money suddenly became a highly fluid concept—the buck never stopped anywhere (oddly, during the eighties, bottom line became a metaphor for something absolute and irreducible when, in fact, the bottom line was becoming ever more elusive).
Financial strategy became like a war game. If you played it one way, you risked the end of the world, but if you changed a variable, you were safe and secure. Business reality became wonderfully plastic (running numbers has about the same relationship to actual business as sex fantasies do to sex—indeed, running numbers gets to be a sort of fetish).
Financial engineering (the term of art for the business that grew up around working a spreadsheet) becomes as complex as any activity becomes when you increase the variables exponentially. “Can he keep track of the moving pieces?” was what got asked about prospective managers of high-flying companies. The question was not, “Can he work hard and focus on the many details of the business?” Rather it was, “Can he appreciate that business has become a Rube Goldberg system of effects and countereffects, of balancing one representation against its counterrepresentation (what the Street is told versus what the media is told versus what the employees are told), of keeping not two sets of books but as many sets as can be imagined (the spreadsheet accommodates all fantasies)?”
In short order, business became way too complex for mere businessmen—the pallid, gray dad types of the past. Business suddenly demanded a different caliber of brainpower and temperament.
Everybody was catching the spirit. There was a revolutionary quality to what was going on—the old order was being swept away (indeed, almost everybody from the prior business generation was exiled).
Every day it was happening: Absolute nobodies, with only heart and imagination—and strange new ideas about how to analyze and manipulate numbers—took over heretofore unassailable, invulnerable, and oppressively dreary great American corporations. It was a class overthrow: outsiders against insiders, smarties against dopes, risk takers against old farts.
Business, which used to be a specialized, opaque, conservative activity—something like the military—became the national pastime. If you weren’t taking over companies, you were getting into the stock market, watching the miracle of those mutuals and 401(k)’s going up and up. If you weren’t an entrepreneur working spreadsheets to start your own dreamy enterprise, you were an option holder in someone else’s dream.
Everybody was in business. Everything became business—technology, entertainment, news, even academia. And if it was already business, it could always be made more businessy—Enron was a Texas oil company that transformed itself into a global financial enterprise. Financing something, or refinancing something—the moment when reality always suffered its