Saving The Businessman’s Soul (October/november 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 6)

Saving The Businessman’s Soul

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Authors: Peter Baida

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October/november 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 6

Being a millionaire no longer counts for much if you’re consumed by the desire to be rich, and it counts for even less if you’re consumed by the desire to be famous. In the most recent figures I can find—from 1976—the Internal Revenue Service estimated that a quarter of a million Americans had amassed gross estates worth one million dollars or more. To get on Forbes magazine’s 1984 list of the four hundred wealthiest people in the United States, you needed a minimum net worth of $150 million. That seems like a significant sum, yet it would be absurd to argue that a significant percentage of the people on the list are famous.

Lee lacocca’s first real taste of fame came when Henry Ford II fired him. The negotiations that saved Chrysler brought him additional recognition and, eventually, wealth, but Iacocca never would have become a celebrity if he had not chosen the best salesman he had—himself—to plug Chrysler’s cars on television.

Another businessman who has gained something close to national renown is Felix Rohatyn, a partner in the investment banking firm Lazard Frères & Company and the chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which rescued New York City from the fiscal woes that threatened it in the middle 1970s. In a feat rarely achieved by a businessman, Rohatyn, like Iacocca, has become a darling of the press—the subject of adoring profiles in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine . I cannot deny that Rohatyn has made a name for himself, but it seems obvious to me that if he had stuck strictly to business, he might be even richer than he is, but he never would have become a star.

I thought of Rohatyn recently when I reread William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham , which celebrates this year the one hundredth anniversary of its publication. I did not think that the occasion should go unnoticed, but as soon as I proposed to myself the task of noticing it, I saw that I faced a problem. Was there any way to convince my readers that this hopelessly old-fashioned book was not, in fact, hopelessly old-fashioned?

The answer leaped at me before I had gotten halfway through the first chapter. Here Howells introduces Hartley Hubbard, a smart-alecky young journalist whose newspaper has given him the assignment of interviewing a prominent local businessman, Silas Lapham, for its “Solid Men of Boston” series.

What were those profiles of Felix Rohatyn, I thought, but contemporary versions of articles in a “Solid Men of New York” series? Sophisticated versions, to be sure, but not so sophisticated as to stop me from thinking that a novelist of our time might do worse than to take as a starting point the imagined encounter of an esteemed executive and a cynical young journalist like