Dartmouth College). John hadn't been in America long and spoke with a
heavy accent, but he was brilliant at math. I wondered if this might be at
least in part a result of superior schooling he'd received in Hungary. So I
asked, "Is that because you're from Europe?" I hoped he'd say yes because
that would mean his advantage wasn't innate and I could possibly catch
him by studying hard. But the question just seemed to bemuse him. He
shrugged and said, "Everybody is."
I worked hard at George Washington but did not get uniformly great
grades. When I concentrated I was a good student, and I did really well in
Th e same competition expressed itself on the playing field: GW was a force among the city
schools in both baseball and football.
24
CITY KlD
math. But I did just okay in courses that didn't interest me, because baseball
and music took up so much of my time. Music was becoming ever
more central to my life. Playing was a source of cash—I joined dance bands
and could make $10 a weekend by playing a couple of jobs.
I remember exactly where I was on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor: in my room practicing my clarinet. I'd turned on the radio to take
a break, and there was the announcement. I didn't know where Pearl Harbor
was—nobody did. I didn't immediately think, Oh; we're going to war. Instead,
I hoped this calamity would just go away. When you're a fifteen-yearold
boy, you blank out a lot of things. You just focus on what you're doing.
Of course, the war was impossible to ignore. Rationing started that
spring, and most of the kids were going straight into the service as soon as
they graduated and turned eighteen. In the summer of 1942,1 joined a six-
piece band that went up to play the season at a resort hotel in the Catskills.
There weren't many young people staying there—we were mostly playing
for people our parents' age—and the mood was subdued. All spring we'd
been rapidly losing the war in the Pacific, and even after the decisive U.S.
victory in the Battle of Midway, the censorship was such that you couldn't
really tell what was going on. But it rarely seemed good.
I graduated from GW in June 1943 and had no interest in college. I
would turn eighteen in March 1944 and wanted to use the time before I was
drafted for more musical training. So I kept playing in small bands and
signed up for classes at Juilliard, the city's great private conservatory of
music, where I studied clarinet, piano, and composition. If I had any plan for
the future at all, it was the thought that maybe I could join an army band.
The draft board called me in that following spring. I took the long subway
ride downtown for my physical, which was at a big induction center
they'd set up at the old Custom House on Battery Park, a huge building
with sculptures and murals and high echoing spaces where hundreds of
men my age waited in lines. Everything went along routinely until I had my
fluoroscopy—that's when they check your lungs for tuberculosis. A sergeant
called me out of the line and over to his desk. "We found a spot on
your lung," he said. "We can't tell if it's active." With that, he handed me
some papers and the address of a tuberculosis specialist; I was to go see him
25
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
and report back. When I saw the specialist the next day, he was unable to
make a definitive diagnosis. He said, "We're going to have to watch this for
a year." I was classified unfit to serve.
I was distraught. Everybody was in the army; I was the odd man out,
excluded. There was also the deeper fear that I had something serious. I had
no symptoms, no difficulty breathing or anything like that—and as a clarinetist
and sax player, I'd have noticed. But the shadow on the X-ray couldn't
be denied. I remember sitting with a girlfriend later that week on a slope of
grass looking out toward the George Washington Bridge and saying, "If I
have tuberculosis, I guess my life is over."
It was my tenor-sax teacher, Bill Sheiner, who gave me a way out of this
limbo. Bill was one of the legendary mentors of jazz musicians. His method
was to organize small ensembles of four or five saxophones and a clarinet
and have the students compose some of the music themselves. In our little
ensemble, Sheiner had me sit next to a fifteen-year-old by the name of
Stanley Getz. Jazz historians today rank Getz in a league with Miles Davis
and John Coltrane; Sheiner's asking me to keep up with him was a little
like asking a cocktail-lounge piano player to trade arpeggios with Mozart.
Getz and I got along fine, but when he played, I'd just listen in awe. Sometimes,
when confronted with a supremely talented individual, you can see
the road to that level of ability, and hope that you might follow that road
yourself; with other people, the talent has a more genetic source, and no
amount of practice can help you match it. Stan Getz was in that second
category; I knew intuitively that I could never learn to do what he did.
Nonetheless, I did become a much better sax player from those sessions,
which testifies to Sheiner's shrewdness as a teacher. When I told him
I'd been rejected for military service he just laughed. He said, "That means
there's nothing to stop you from getting a job." And he told me there was a
slot open in Henry Jerome's outfit.
The Henry Jerome orchestra was a fourteen-man ensemble that had
become fairly prominent on the East Coast. When I auditioned and got invited
to join, it marked a big change in my life. It was not quite like making
the major leagues, more like AAA ball, but it was still a full-fledged professional
job in which I paid union dues and made a pretty good income for
those days. And since the band spent about half of its time in the city and
26
CITY KlD
half touring the eastern United States, it also got me away from New York
City on my own for the first time.
It was by far the best band I'd ever played with. Henry Jerome was
part of the avant-garde; his band later brought the bop sound of Charlie
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to conventional big-band fare by adding a lot of
percussion and flash. And though the band never achieved lasting fame,
a surprising number of my fellow musicians and our successors went on
to memorable careers. Johnny Mandel, one of our trombonists, went to
Hollywood and wrote "The Shadow of Your Smile" and the theme music
for M*A*S*H and won an Academy Award and four Grammys. A drummer,
Stan Levey, later played with Charlie Parker. Larry Rivers became a
major pop artist. And my fellow sax player, Lenny Garment, became President
Nixon's lawyer.
Our music was the style that crowds liked as the tide of the war turned
in 1944. For the next sixteen months, we played famous venues like the Blue
Room atthe Hotel Lincoln in NewYorkand Child's Paramount Restaurant on
Times Square. We played dances at Virginia Beach outside Newport News,
where the audience was mostly shipbuilders and navy families. We played
theaters where sometimes we'd share the bill with vaudeville acts—kid
dance teams that were warming up for a shot at Hollywood, and singers
who'd been prominent in Al Jolson's prime and were still around. We spent
the month of December 1944 headlining at the Roosevelt Hotel in New
Orleans, which was the farthest I'd ever been from home. One night I was
walking on a street near the river and looked up to see an oil tanker pass by.
It always stayed with me how far below sea level New Orleans is. When the
levees broke after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that early experience helped
me understand immediately the extent of the disaster.
During my time with the band, we followed a routine dictated by
union rules: forty minutes on the bandstand and twenty minutes off. I loved
the forty minutes on—the experience of playing in a good band is utterly
different from what you hear simply standing in front. Voices and overtones
come to you from all directions; you feel the rhythm section in your
bones; and all the people in the band dynamically interact. Soloists are able
to build on that foundation to express their view of the world. I idolized
the great improvisers like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, but I rarely
27
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
sought a soloist role. I was content being a sideman, playing notes written
by someone else.
I was known as the band's intellectual. I got along well with the other
musicians (I did their income taxes), but my style was different from theirs.
Between sets, many of them would disappear into the so-called greenroom,
which would quickly fill with the smell of tobacco and pot. I spent those
twenty-minute breaks reading books. In the course of a night, I could get in
maybe an hour of reading. The books I borrowed from the New York Public
Library weren't necessarily what you'd expect to find a young sax player
reading. Maybe it was because my father was on Wall Street, or maybe it
was my affinity for numbers, but what aroused my curiosity was business
and finance. One of the first books I read was about the British stock
market—I was fascinated to discover that they used exotic terminology like
"ordinary shares." I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a book by Edwin
Lefevre about Jesse Livermore, a famous 1920s speculator whose nickname
was the Boy Plunger of Wall Street. Legend had it that he made $100
million by short-selling on the eve of the 1929 crash. He got rich and went
broke three times before finally committing suicide in 1940. He was a great
student of human nature; Lefevre's book is a font of investing wisdom,
with Livermore sayings such as "Bulls and bears make money; but pigs get
slaughtered."
I also read every book I could find about J. P. Morgan. He not only financed
the formation of U.S. Steel, consolidated the railroads, and had a
hand in assembling General Electric, but also was the main stabilizing force
in the U.S. financial system before the creation of the Federal Reserve. I
marveled at his wealth—in breaking up the Morgan trusts just before World
War I, Congress heard testimony that Morgan controlled more than $20
billion. And I was even more impressed by Morgan's character: famously,
J. P. Morgan's word was his bond, and in 1907 it was his personal influence
on other bankers that helped stem a financial panic that could have thrown
the country into a depression.*
*As a member of the JPMorgan board in 1977, I would sit in the same conference rooms
at 23 Wall Street where much of the financial chaos of 1907 had been resolved. History overhung
23 Wall. I was sorry when JPMorgan sold it in 2003.
28
CITY KlD
These stories spoke to me in much the same way railroad timetables
had. Wall Street was an exciting place. It wasn't long before I decided, This
is where I want to go next.
With the war nearing an end; the future was opening up. The GI Bill
passed in 1944, and veterans were already coming home and going to school.
I was beginning to believe I had a future: the tuberculosis doctor had been
checking my lungs periodically and was increasingly certain that the spot,
whatever it was, was dormant.
I wasn't confident that I would succeed in finance. When I enrolled in
the School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance at New York University
for the fall of 1945, after being out of school for a couple of years, I was
apprehensive about how I'd do. So that summer, I got the textbooks for all
my freshman courses and read them before I took my first class. It surprised
me that I got two Bs and the rest As in my first semester, and then all As
after that. I was a far better student in college than I had been at George
Washington High.
The School of Commerce was the largest and possibly the least prestigious
part of NYU—it had ten thousand students, and people thought of it
more as a trade school than as a real college. (A dean once described it
proudly as "a huge educational factory") But to my mind that was unfair;
I got a very good education. I was exposed to an interesting curriculum
of liberal arts and, of course, accounting, basic economics, business management,
and banking and finance. I felt a pull toward the subjects that involved
logic and data, and I loaded up on courses in advanced math. Economics
appealed to me right from the start: I was enthralled by supply and demand
curves, the idea of market equilibrium, and the evolution of international
trade.
Economics was a hot topic in those first years after World War II (probably
the only discipline hotter was atomic physics). There were a couple of
reasons for this: Everyone appreciated that the U.S. economy, under the direction
of our government planners, had been the industrial engine behind
the Allied victory. What's more, new economic institutions were being created
and a new economic order was taking shape right before our eyes. The
leaders of the Western world had gathered in July 1944 at Bretton Woods,
New Hampshire, to set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
29
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
World Bank. This marked what Henry Morgenthau called "the end of economic
nationalism"—the leaders agreed that if world prosperity was to be
sustained, it had to be shared, and it was the responsibility of the industrial
nations to ensure that barriers were lowered in trade and finance.
The theoretical basis for much of this was laid down by the great Cambridge
economist John Maynard Keynes. His masterwork, The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, had provided the intellectual
underpinning for Roosevelt's New Deal, and as students we all read it. In
that book, Keynes created the discipline now known as macroeconomics.
