The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co Read Online Free PDF Page A

sophomore year, he joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, whose national chapter had a policy against admitting Jews and blacks. Alpha Sigma Phi was founded in 1845 by three Yale freshmen. One day, the national organization sent a corporate executive--Felix thinks he was a vice president from AT&T--"to try to talk us out of this heinous thing of pledging a Jew and a Black." Felix sat through the meeting. The man had brought with him a couple of cases of beer to try to appease the fraternity members. Felix explained: "And this guy kept saying, 'You know, don't misunderstand me. Some of my best friends are Jewish.'" Soon after, "we gave him the beer back, and we took him to the railroad station and we sent him on his way." The local chapter got kicked out of the national fraternity for allowing a Jew and a black to join.
    Felix diligently pursued his studies in physics, but soon it became clear to both him and his favorite professor, Benjamin Wissler--the chairman of the Middlebury physics department--that he was reaching his limit of aptitude in the subject. Wissler recommended not only that he pass on the MIT curriculum but also that he take a semester off.
    Since he had not seen his father since 1941, Felix decided to go visit him in France in the summer of 1947. He took a ship across the Atlantic, and his father picked him up in the French port city of Le Havre. His father had remarried and was still managing the brewery, which had been relocated near Paris. They spent the summer in the south of France. His father then asked him to spend the year working at the brewery. So Felix went to work in the Karcher brewery cleaning out the beer vats, having slimmed down sufficiently to be able to climb inside them. He also helped out in the bottling operation. He worked twelve hours a day, beginning at six in the morning. "I just stank from this stuff," he said. "And it was still a pretty hairy period where--I mean, here I was an American in a part of the city that was totally Communist, and all the unions working in the factory were Communist unions, and there were a lot of Algerians, too. So a couple of times a barrel came rolling by pretty close"--and here he chuckled to himself with the memory of an American Jew surrounded by Algerian Communists--"and I was never quite sure what it was. But I also remember when I would go back to the apartment and I was in the subway just stinking of this beer, people would look. I decided quickly this was not for me."
    He returned to Middlebury for the second semester of 1948. He completed his degree in physics and graduated in 1949, thinking he might want to work at the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
    Fortunately, though, with the help of his mother and stepfather, he also had been exposed to Wall Street. During the summers of 1945 and 1946, Felix was a runner and a stock transfer clerk at Jack Coe & Co., a small brokerage. He remembered celebrating VJ Day at the firm. He was paid about $20 a week and would occasionally be rewarded with baseball tickets to the Polo Grounds, on 155th Street. But to Felix, it was nothing more than a way to earn a few extra bucks, not unlike his previous summer jobs working in a drugstore and teaching English to Edith Piaf, the glamorous Parisian chanteuse. When he graduated from Middlebury, his stepfather helped again, this time getting Felix a job at Lazard Freres & Co. in New York. Plessner and Felix's mother had returned to live in Paris after the war. Plessner knew Andre Meyer through a foreign exchange and bullion trading operation that the two men had created somewhere between Les Fils Dreyfus, in Basel, and Lazard Freres et Cie, in Paris.
    Patrick Gerschel, Andre Meyer's grandson, believed another reason that Felix was given a coveted spot at Lazard was that Andre was having an affair with Felix's mother. "It was about money and sex," Gerschel observed. "When has it ever been any different?"

CHAPTER 2
    "TOMORROW, THE LAZARD HOUSE WILL GO