The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co by William D. Cohan Read Free Book Online Page A

million "at the disposal of the Trust." But David-Weill's other French partners were more cautious and wanted to know both George Blumenthal's opinion of the venture and how Altschul intended to divide the profits of the fund between Paris and New York. Altschul and Christian Lazard had some correspondence on the subject, but Altschul believed that Christian was pushing the idea too far, too quickly in Paris.

    AT THE END of December 1925, the feared and venerated George Blumenthal retired from Lazard, after twenty-one years as the senior partner, to pursue a life devoted to philanthropy and art collecting. The news made the New York Times. Two years earlier, Blumenthal had transferred--by a vote of "13 white, no black"--his New York Stock Exchange seat to Frank Altschul, who was then thirty-six years old.
    Blumenthal's departure coincided with--or perhaps facilitated--two major turning points in the turbulent history of Lazard to that time: Altschul's now unfettered pursuit of his desire to create the investment trust; and David David-Weill's now unfettered pursuit of a short, stocky powerhouse currency trader, Andre Meyer, later known as the "Picasso of banking." Although Meyer grew up in the Marais--Paris's old Jewish quarter--both of his parents were from Strasbourg, the Alsatian city hard on the German border. Jules Meyer, Andre's father, was said to be "some sort of printing salesman" or "small businessman."
    Andre Meyer attended school in Paris but was an indifferent student and left his secondary school, College Rollin, in July 1913, before graduating. He needed to earn money for his struggling family, as his itinerant father spent more time gambling than working. Andre had always shown a keen interest in the Paris Bourse, the French stock exchange, and was said to know, by heart, the prices of all the stocks listed there. He quickly found a job as a messenger at the Bourse, and soon thereafter a position at a small French bank, Baur & Sons. Andre was exempted from military service in World War I because of a "weak heart" and because of his important role in supporting his family.
    At Baur, he quickly learned the art and science of trading currencies as well as of government and corporate obligations. "It called for a quick mind, which the teenager certainly had," his biographer, Cary Reich, wrote in Financier, "a hardheaded sense of values, which he was fast acquiring; and boundless energy, a prerequisite that the nervous, fidgety boy had no problem fulfilling. Already as a youth he was awakening daily at four in the morning to study the financial tables of the newspaper and plot out his moves of the day. During family meals in the cramped apartment, he put his telephone on the dinner table and chattered away about the market between bites."
    Like other traders at the time, Andre would dutifully report to the Bourse during the trading hours of one to three-fifteen every business day to conduct Baur's trading. "So it is with a clear head, alertness and quick action that a foreign exchange broker in Paris can, by the manipulation of a very few million francs routed via London and America, drop the Paris currency several points," the New York Times Magazine reported. "He can as quickly in a few short rounds jack it up to his eventual profit." Andre's success as a trader at the Bourse during and after the franc crisis of 1924 brought him to the attention of David David-Weill, who asked him in 1925 to come to Lazard's Paris office, at Rue Pillet-Will, for a job interview. "He just took everybody to the cleaners," his grandson Patrick Gerschel said of Andre's trading ability. But the exacting Andre, then twenty-seven, drove a hard bargain with David-Weill. He wanted to know when, precisely, he would become a Lazard partner. But at first David-Weill would not commit to a timetable. Andre walked out and returned to Baur. (Other accounts have David-Weill "dismissing" Andre.)
    A year later, David-Weill tried to get Andre again,