14R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Not one woman was indicted in the insider-trading scandal that brought down Boesky and, soon after, Michael Milken, and got Drexel Burnham Lambert tagged by Giuliani as a “racketeering enterprise.” Statistically, there should have been at least one woman. But much like the men-only clubs of the past, much like the Harvard Business School’s informal study groups, insider trading was about creating networks of trust and brotherhood, and women—still—were not included. In the men’s locker room at New York’s Vertical Club an insider trading ring calling itself the “yuppie five” would exchange information, sometimes for no reward other than being one of the boys. As the New York Times pointed out, this tradition of keeping women out had kept women out of jail. But it also kept them out of M&As, LBOs, and arbitrage, which were all based on acquiring information, being let into the inner circle.

Milken and Boesky were now both serving time in prison, and Drexel Burnham Lambert had gone bankrupt, but there was some good news: the women of the New York Stock Exchange were finally getting a bathroom at the Luncheon Club. The lack of ladies’ rooms at the NYSE had long been a running joke, and early on, Mickie Siebert’s friends liked to send her dollhouse-sized toilets and chamber pots. When, much later, one of the men’s bathrooms on the exchange floor was finally converted into a women’s bathroom, it took some time before men stopped barging in, not having read the new sign on the door.

Twenty years after Mickie had bought her seat, however, there was still no ladies’ room near the Luncheon Club on the seventh floor of the NYSE (women had to go one flight down), and Mickie Siebert along with all the other women, paying members of the exchange and the club, had had enough. Mickie threatened the Board of Governors that if they did not install one, she would have a port-a-potty brought in. They relented. It turned out to be an easy fix, exactly as Mickie had said. All they had to do was rip out a telephone booth and repurpose a section of the men’s room. To think it took so long.

Janet Tiebout at Goldman Sachs, who’d had to watch Valentine roses arrive for her ex-husband, was thriving, but her clock was ticking. The men she wanted to date were more interested in young, “beautiful and sexy” women than those in their thirties working twelve-hour-plus days and looking the worse for it. How even to date when you were at your desk all day and often into the night? There was video dating, but it was a clunky process that meant signing up with an agency to go through books of profiles, asking to see someone’s VCR recording, and watching as they sat awkwardly in front of a camera saying too little or too much. She was feeling “tired and old,” drinking too much, and overweight.

Just before Black Monday, she’d sent out a company memo saying she was leaving. Unable to bring herself to tell the truth—“I was leaving because I was terrified that I’d never get married and have kids”—she said she was leaving to open a marina with her father.

Yet almost as soon as she’d left, she reconnected with Jeff Hanson, also at Goldman Sachs, whom she’d previously ignored, and by April 1988, they were married. Her first child, a daughter, was born in October of that year. Janet Tiebout (now Hanson) had done what feminist Mary Kay Blakely advised against: she had gone from working full-time to parenting full-time. Now seven months pregnant with her second child, and with a toddler at home, Janet wrote despairingly in her diary: “I’m sitting here paying bills, doing absolutely ZERO that is fulfilling or satisfying and wishing that I could close my eyes and make it all go away.” The next day: “I’m sitting here staring out my window wondering what I’m going to do with myself.… I’ll probably start watching soap operas and drinking martinis at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The boredom is excruciating.”

But the boredom also pushed her to imagine what she’d really like to be doing. She wanted to start a coaching consultancy for women on Wall Street. She wrote to a male friend at Goldman Sachs, Jon Corzine, who would become the CFO the following year, where she hoped she might begin developing her idea: “Women need help in how to handle a dual-career marriage, maternity leave, time management, and getting and staying ahead … In the last three years, I have seen women opt to leave the firm rather than try to articulate their problems to management in a way that makes professional sense … Regrettably, this is because women find it extremely difficult to ‘connect’ with their (male) managers.” Janet believed that there were two languages spoken on Wall Street: one by women and the other by men, and as a manager, she’d learned both fluently. She could now be that crucial translator.

Two months later, however, her son was born, and her consultancy plans were put on hold as she was hurtled back into postpartum depression.

Barbara (Moakler) Byrne was having a much easier time of it as a mother. After she’d had her first child just days before Black Monday (she would have three more in quick succession), she put a support system in place. She and her husband moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where her mother-in-law and sister-in-law lived, and could help in a pinch. Just six months after Black Monday, the markets recovering and a nanny hired, Barbara was again on the Street. She had started as an energy investment banker when she first talked her way from Mobil to Lehman, and she was now specializing in “IPO carve-outs and split-offs, and various ways of monetizing businesses.”

In 1988, she went to call on Burlington Northern in Seattle, a huge conglomerate whose executives, she’d heard, were not feeling much love toward Shearson Lehman. She was scheduled to make her pitch alongside one of the senior partners, but at the last minute he was unable to make it, and Barbara, still only a senior vice president—a step up from an associate but not yet a managing director—was on her own. She flew out to Seattle, only an associate with her. The pitch idea had been to split the IPO, to carve out the energy business from the railroad business. (This had yet to be done simultaneously.) What Barbara did not know was that Burlington Northern had already decided to do a split and had retained Morgan Stanley to do it, except that Morgan Stanley had pitched the split differently—an IPO for the railroad business but leaving the energy business intact.

Tom O’Leary, in charge of the energy subsidiary, welcomed Barbara to headquarters and let her go through her entire pitch before telling her they’d already retained Morgan Stanley.

But Barbara had done her research to figure out how best to approach him. “Mr. O’Leary, has anyone else come out here and pitched this to you? Has anyone else come out here?”

No, they hadn’t, he admitted. And, yes, doing an IPO of the energy business instead of the railroad business sounded like a better plan.

“Then why wouldn’t you allow us to come in as a joint road runner on this particular transaction that you’re considering with Morgan Stanley?” she asked.

O’Leary shook his head and started in about how he hated Lehman for something that had happened in the past.

She tried again: “Yeah, well, that’s why I’m here. It’s me and my associate, there’s the two of us … Don’t you realize how really upset they will be when they realize that you’re giving me the IPO? That I am getting it? Not them. Do you think the boys in the band would have been here if they thought there was a 500-million-dollar IPO, and a multimillion-dollar spin-off?”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“Success is the best revenge! Your success and my success!”

When Barbara and her associate walked out of the building, deal in hand, they were giddy—Lehman was now going to share the deal with Morgan Stanley. She returned to the New York office and announced it: “Look, we’re going to be doing an IPO, it’s going to be the energy company, and we’re going to be joint bookrunning manager on a $500 million deal.”

“You couldn’t have heard that right.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard that right.”

That year Barbara generated $57 million in revenue. The deal was monumental for her; she was put forward for managing director. She later heard from one of her advocates that when someone in the meeting objected, others turned to him and said, “You’ve never produced so much but we named you managing director!” Barbara was only thirty-four years old. By the end of the 1980s, even as 40 percent of jobs at Wall Street’s ten largest securities firms were held by women, they represented only 4 percent of partners or managing directors. Now she was one of the 4 percent.

What the Burlington deal had taught Barbara was that you don’t get if you don’t ask. It made her realize that she could ask for business. At Bear Stearns, Jolyne Caruso (now Caruso-FitzGerald), had Mitch Jennings, Beth Dater’s husband, looking out for her, but even so, she too had had to learn to ask for what was hers. She prided herself on not being a “militant” feminist, but at the same time, she found she cried a lot in the early years. When she was twenty-six years old, and Bear Stearns put out the list of new associate directors, her name was not on it, even as a guy, one year younger and with less to show for his time, was on it. She cried that night and the next day went to see her boss to ask why. It was almost as if they’d forgotten about her. Her boss corrected the mistake, and the following week, Jolyne’s name appeared in the Wall Street Journal as an associate director. But it would never have happened if she had not spoken up.

Barbara had long noticed that the men at Lehman, as elsewhere, did not hesitate to offer themselves up for a promotion even if they did not yet have the necessary skills. Women, in contrast, thought they not only had to have the skills but they needed to have perfected them. And if women knew their worth, and were unabashed in saying so, that too had its pitfalls. Patricia Chadwick, the former Feeneyite, was universally feared. When in 1985 Mitch asked Jolyne to take over the account for Chancellor Capital Management, a prestigious money-management firm attached to Citibank, he explained the problem: the portfolio manager there, who essentially ran the enormous Boeing pension plan money, was a client of Bear Stearns. But they were not getting enough business from her. She had chewed up Mitch’s salesmen, one-by-one, and spat them out. Mitch needed to get her over to their side, to start running her trades through them, and he was sending Jolyne in.

Oh my God, Jolyne thought to herself. That’s Patricia Chadwick.

Out loud she said: “Oh, I would love to cover Chancellor.”

But the fact was that Patricia was roundly known as “the witch of Wall Street.”

Patricia did not know that then, but she knew she was exacting. She expected people to step up, to do their homework, to be prepared when they pitched her stocks and bonds. She would have said that the female top players were always seen as aggressive, starting with Mickie Siebert, the Wall Street legend. One night, as Patricia was walking home from Citibank, she stopped in at a beauty salon to get her nails done, and as she settled back in the pedicure chair, she suddenly saw that right across from her was Mickie. Mickie had once told the New York Times, “I’m probably the only girl who walks into a beauty shop reading Missile and Space Daily.” But now she was asleep, out like a light, “snoring.” “Well,” thought Patricia, “I’m in her presence.”

Jolyne approached Patricia gingerly: “God help you if you did not have all the facts, all your research in order … intelligent, quick, articulate when you called her. Because she was impatient, she wanted the story right away, and it better be right.” Once Jolyne understood what Patricia needed, what she demanded, she passed on Bear Stearns’s best research to her—which stocks to buy, which stocks were being downgraded. She fought for Patricia to get shares of IPOs. In return, Patricia started executing her trades through the firm, helping make Jolyne the “golden girl” of sales; at barely thirty years old, Jolyne was made a managing director.

______

RONALD REAGAN, NOW OUT OF OFFICE, TOOK MIKHAIL GORBACHEV—also recently out of a job after the fall of communism—for a visit to the NYSE. It was 1992: two former Cold War rivals on a field trip together. Gorbachev was shown an enormous Fabergé urn, given to the Stock Exchange by Tsar Nicholas II in the early 1900s to commemorate the listing of Imperial bonds (which, following the Russian Revolution, became worthless). Gorbachev, admiring the urn that still today sits in the Board Room, quipped that he’d like to have it back. An NYSE board member, quick on his feet, replied: “I’ll give you the urn if you redeem your railroad … bonds.”

It was the early 1990s, and commuters were now more likely to reach for a minidisc player than a first-generation Walkman. 1980s power suits were giving way to 1990s Donna Karan silhouettes—simple lines, soft fabrics, flowy feminine luxury. The designer Marc Jacobs, talking to the Los Angeles Times about his collection for spring 1993, said: “The ’80s was Nancy Reagan and ‘Dynasty,’ huge shoulders, nasty little suits, dress for success, hard-edge, hard-core, mean, aggressive clothes.” Twenty-nine-year-old Jacobs admitted he had voted for the very first time in the recent presidential election, and he’d been rewarded with a “more liberal-thinking president, a less structured-looking First Lady.” The Clintons had just moved into the White House.

The seeming calm with the end of the Cold War was temporarily interrupted on February 26, 1993, when a bomb was detonated in an underground garage below the World Trade Center. Marlene Jupiter looked up and asked if anyone else had felt the building shake (the DLJ offices were a few blocks away from the Twin Towers, at 140 Broadway). Someone smirked and called her hysterical.

______

CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION ARE NOT ALWAYS SYNONYMOUS, especially for women, as historian Judith Bennett has noted. Change always takes place, but that does not mean that transformation necessarily follows. Change does not guarantee transformation. When in 1988, Margo Alexander, director of research at Paine Webber, was promoted to co-head of Research, Sales, and Trading alongside established trader Charlie Milligan, she received a chilly reception from the traders. It was finally a woman on the trading desk who explained the problem to her: the traders would not even tell their wives they were now reporting to a woman; in fact, trading desks at other firms were making fun of them, calling them up and saying, “Hey, how do you like working for a girrrl?!” After that, Margo worked hard on winning them over, buying rounds of after-work drinks.

In 1989, Alice Jarcho had returned to Wall Street. With her son now three years old, fighting back a working mother’s guilt, she took a job with Michael “Mike” Steinhardt at his hedge fund, Steinhardt Partners. Hedge funds were about to explode in number, and his was one of the first, but already hedge funds were, Alice knew, “sexy money.” The concept behind a hedge fund had been around since 1949, when Alfred Winslow Jones, a sociologist and economics writer, came up with a way to invest that involved risk but balanced it out. The idea was that while most investors only bought stocks that would generate profits as the shares went up in value (also called “going long”), a hedge fund would also “short” stocks of companies thought to be overvalued, profiting if those shares dropped in price. They were “hedging” their bets.

Alice had personally known Mike Steinhardt for years, and she knew he was notoriously tough to work for, but she also knew that she would make a ton of money, seven figures easily. She assured herself that despite his reputation, they had an established relationship. She started at Steinhardt Partners in April 1989. From April until early January, Alice was “his darling,” but as soon as he had paid her (hedge funds pay employees after the end of the year), their relationship became transactional: “He owned me,” “I was his indentured servant,” and everything changed.

It was not easy. He would randomly scream at people, he would run into a room as if he were about to physically assault them, he would fire people whom he had recently hired, who had just moved their lives and families to New York. (Allegations of sexual harassment would come much later.) His stock-in-trade, Alice came to believe, was the humiliation of others, including herself. He wanted to degrade you, he wanted to make you feel degraded, she felt. In the three years she worked for him, she cried more “than I cried my entire life …” She also earned more in those three years than she had in the entire preceding years on Wall Street.

When the office politics of it all became too much for everyone, Steinhardt hired a psychologist for the office. Alice warned the psychologist that he, too, would end up on the chopping block, but he scoffed, which made it that much more interesting when Steinhardt fired him in the company gym while they all listened in because they were wired to one another.

Steinhardt went to his own therapist twice a week, and when Alice asked him what that therapist thought of his temper, he replied: “I’ve never told him.”

One day, Alice was called into Steinhardt’s office, and he let loose on her. She started to cry, fled for the ladies’ room, and then he started to run after her, shouting, “I’m so sorry. I love you, and I don’t want to hurt you!”

“It was like being a battered woman,” she said.

Hedge-fund guys, Alice concluded, could get away with anything because these were their own private firms—they were accountable to no one.

In 1992, Margo Alexander’s co-department head at Paine Webber, Charlie Milligan, left and the firm’s CFO took Milligan’s place. But he demanded that Margo be demoted so that she would now report to him instead of the company president. He got what he asked for and Margo felt “humiliated” and “embarrassed.” She considered leaving, but when she assessed the situation, she decided she had invested too much of her life in the company. She stayed, even as she licked her wounds.

That same year, 1992, Jolyne was being headhunted by JP Morgan, and it was hard for an “Italian girl from Long Island” to turn down a white-shoe firm. Bear Stearns and Mitch Jennings counteroffered—more money, better accounts—but it was too little too late. “It took me quitting for Mitch to say we’ll groom you to run the business.” She had always wanted to run something, and now JP Morgan was offering her that. But there was a caveat. She was already an MD, but she would have to come in as a VP and then go through a grueling first year to work her way back up to MD. Why? she asked. “We don’t hire people in as MDs.” Except they did; after her, Jolyne watched countless people be brought in on the MD level.

By 1993, Alice, still working for Steinhardt, had had enough. She felt—no, she knew—that she had sold her soul. She had made the ultimate Faustian deal. She had become that person who tolerates the intolerable for a buck. One time Steinhardt screamed at her what he considered to be the worst insult of all: “You don’t love money!”

And she realized that, yes, he was right.

As for insults, she could insult herself better than anyone. She’d taken to calling herself “the S&M whore.” Taking punishment for money.

She finally walked out after four years. Money could mean just so much. There was also self-respect. Alice Jarcho left Wall Street for good.

______

ELISA ANCONA, WHO HAD ONCE DREAMED THAT A MILLION DOLLARS would mean being rich, only to realize that it was peanuts for many, was finding Gabelli & Co. ever more inhospitable after seven years there. Mario Gabelli had a rule that no employee could take off two weeks in a row, “because he didn’t believe in fun,” and two weeks straight sounded like you were having a good time. But in 1990 Elisa was getting married and she wanted to go to Hawaii for her honeymoon. Gabelli eventually let her go, but he punished her for it when she returned. When he’d go looking for her, he’d scream through the offices: “Where’s the asshole?!” Having the name “Elisa” could no longer protect her. One day she too had had enough. Elisa stood up and screamed: “Go to hell!”

Elisa, like Alice, found a job at a hedge fund: Porter Felleman. It was a three-person operation with two hedge fund managers—Alex Porter and John Felleman—and Grace Lonergan, their secretary. Porter had worked for Alfred Wilson Jones back in 1967, the man credited with inventing the hedge fund. Porter was six-foot-two, a former wrestler and football player, an avid reader and writer. Porter was a Southerner in the best sense of the word, exuding charm from his very pores. Women would fall all over him. His partner, John Felleman, was a sweet man who conducted much of his business out of the Blarney Stone pub on Forty-First Street and Park Avenue. Grace, the secretary, was a Grateful Dead groupie. Elisa soon got the name “Bulldog” because she’d clamp down on things and not let go. But unlike at Gabelli, where fun was frowned upon, at Porter Felleman, work-life balance was the company credo.

They had been in business for about twenty years when Elisa arrived, and had an impressive record of outperforming the S&P 500, but hedge funds were still a relatively secretive corner of the investment world, largely unregulated, which also made it a sort of Wild West for those in the know. There were a handful of hedge funds with enormous assets, such as Tiger Management, started by Porter’s fellow North Carolinian Julian Robertson, but in the early 1990s, most hedge funds were small, even tiny, like Porter Felleman. Elisa was twenty-six years old and was making $98,500 a year. Gifts would come streaming into the office sent by brokers wanting to do business: the signature blue Tiffany boxes, VIP concert tickets, impossible-to-get restaurant reservations, front-row basketball seats.

But then suddenly everything fell apart when Felleman died of liver damage, and Porter’s mother, a driving-Miss-Daisy rarefied Southern lady in her nineties, died soon after. Porter, grief-stricken, took a sharp turn in what had been a relatively staid life until then. Elisa would go into his office and find a thin coating of white powder across every surface, which she suspected was cocaine. He would call Elisa out of the blue from somewhere and tell her: “Wire 25k to this car dealership in North Carolina because I just bought this twenty-two-year-old girl a red Mustang.” Margaret, the office’s new Girl Friday, had to write checks to Porter’s “girlfriends,” and she and Elisa couldn’t help but wonder what these girls were doing for the $1,000, $5,000, let alone the $10,000 checks. Sometimes they would show up at the office—tall and stunning—to ask Porter for his American Express card, and he would grandly send them off on shopping sprees. One girl bought herself a $10,000 boa, which really got under Elisa’s skin. In part because “what do you do with a ten-thousand-dollar boa?” but also because it seemed she, Elisa, was having to do a heck of a lot more for a $10,000 raise.

Unlike the large brokerage houses, which were utilizing more and more (even if clunky) technology to systemize trading, hedge funds in the 1990s were largely operating on telephone calls and pen and paper. Within this throwback environment, Elisa was herself a throwback to the she-wolves of the 1960s and 1970s who took the circuitous path onto and through Wall Street. Elisa was, for all intents and purposes, the trader, the office manager, the head of compliance, and the entire back office. She would oversee the trades sent in from the partners, meaning she was on the phone with brokers, not only telling them what to sell and for how much but strategizing the best way forward. She then had to make sure the orders were executed correctly, and at the end of the day, she faxed pages of handwritten trade blotters, her view of the day’s business, to the prime broker (the firm’s central custodian of the portfolio). Back in the next morning, she’d be poring over reports to make sure all the trades were booked properly and then she’d begin a new day of buying and selling stocks. Now, on top of all that, she was taking care of Porter, picking up after him, covering for him.

As the popularity of hedge funds soared over the decade, Porter Felleman was doing better than ever, but instead of Elisa’s role being expanded, she was increasingly marginalized. Instead of promoting her to trader, Porter brought in a trader with a Harvard MBA. The partners’ compensations grew into the millions of dollars, whereas Elisa was still fighting for those $10,000 raises. She had had enough. If she had been of Alice Jarcho’s generation, Elisa, a graduate of Pace University who started off as a Girl Friday for Gabelli, might well have moved up through the ranks. But that pathway was now largely blocked by the influx of MBAs and Ivy League graduates coming to Wall Street. These types of credentials were now mandatory, and Elisa didn’t have them.

The only space that remained a meritocracy of sorts, and not dependent on fancy colleges and graduate degrees, was the trading floor—whether a firm’s trading floor or a stock-exchange floor. In May 1989, Mike Cassidy had finally promoted Louise from clerk to floor broker, making her an official member of the NYSE. She was twenty-four years old; the youngest woman to become an NYSE member while the exchange was still a private membership. Her assigned badge number was “18,” which in the Hebrew alphabet means “life.” (Over the years, she would receive countless necklaces with the life sign as gifts—“easily fifty”—as well as a steady stream of offers to buy the number from her. Floor brokers, like gamblers, had an obsession with lucky numbers and lucky objects.)

As Louise and Cassidy grew the firm, they started to cut out the middlemen and work directly with institutional accounts, increasing the size of their commissions considerably. It turned Louise into a heavy hitter on the floor, alongside Doreen and several other women, including Gail Pankey, in 1985 the first Black woman to become a member. Everyone had something they were known for that gave them an advantage; in Doreen’s case, it was her piercing voice, for Louise, it was her height. Louise, at five-foot-eight, had a good three inches on Mike Cassidy and many other men on the floor.

In 1995 Goldman Sachs approached Louise: they wanted her to run their trading floor. She couldn’t believe it. She agreed to speak with them, to start talks, but she was so unfamiliar with corporate culture that by the time she was sitting in her fifth interview making small talk, she couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you guys offering me? I don’t even know what it is,” she said straight out.

The answer was a seven-figure package flush with perks.

When she told Cassidy she was leaving for Goldman Sachs, he turned pale and said they needed to talk.

After closing, he walked her over to 60 Wall Street, where they sat down in the atrium. Cassidy always carried restaurant peppermint candies in his pocket, the cheap red-and-white striped kind offered in a bowl on the way out of diners. He reached into his pocket and started throwing them across the table at her, each candy another part of his counteroffer. One peppermint candy after another skidded across the table at her: how about a raise? Another went flying at her, along with another proposition. She kept saying no as the candies landed. Finally, he threw his last peppermint: “I’ll give you half the company.”

“But I don’t even know what that means!”

She didn’t. What was Cassidy even worth? They had built up the company together from the time she was first “pork-chopping” for him, picking up the ringing phone in his booth when he was out on the floor, but she’d never been able to take a look at the books.

Now he told her for the first time just how much the company was worth.

Hearing the number, she “got pissed.” This entire time she had been underpaid.

To make amends, he offered to rename the firm Jones, Cassidy—with her name going first. But she didn’t need that. Now that she knew she wouldn’t be taking a pay cut by turning down Goldman Sachs, she accepted his offer.

In that moment, inside the atrium, she became a multimillionaire.

It wasn’t just that Cassidy had handed over half the company and changed its name, but as a partner Louise now had a different kind of clout out there on the trading floor.

Louise Jones on the floor of the exchange.

Not only was the NYSE still then a closed private membership (in 2006 it would go public), it was a “fiefdom.” She could ask for favors, she could ask for charitable donations. She could ask, and she would get. It was the power and respect that spoke to her—“the money was just the gravy.”

Every year, on July 17, Louise gathered her friends and went out to the phone booth on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street where she’d been found, swaddled, a newborn abandoned. She brought Champagne to celebrate her “birthday.” She had long since stopped imagining that every blond woman who walked onto the subway might, just might, be her biological mother. She had hoped she would at least find Pedro Martinez, the man who’d found her and brought her to the police station, “but try looking up a ‘Pedro Martinez’ on Manhattan’s Upper West Side during this time and you might get ten thousand of them.” She had become a board member of the New York Foundling Hospital, the only foundling to ever sit on the board. But her own origins were still a mystery. The telephone booth remained the most tangible fact of her birth.

Doreen Mogavero had taken a hard fall. One of the last people to leave Ivan F. Boesky & Company, literally closing the windows behind her, it had not been easy. She had lost her job, and now no one was hiring. She was getting some offers here and there, but the salaries were a pittance. She didn’t know whether it was because the recovery from Black Monday was still taking time or if she had become a pariah, tainted by Boesky in the same way she had once been anointed by him, or if it was because she was a woman on the floor. She returned to working for a two-dollar broker, almost as if she were starting over again. But that was going nowhere and after a while she knew the only way forward was to start her own floor firm.

She began to ask around, trying to solicit advice from the men she’d known for years who ran their own floor businesses, trading for themselves or a select group of clients. How should she start? What was the best way of going about it? What were the tricks of the trade?

Even though Doreen had been working an exchange floor since 1975, first the Amex, then the New York Futures Exchange, and finally the NYSE, she was taken aback by their reluctance to offer help. Instead of encouraging her, they did what they could to dissuade her.

“Why do you want to do that?” they said.

“It’s so much paperwork for you. It’s going to be a lot of time away from home.”

Doreen, having worked as a floor clerk for many years, knew one thing: she had to find the best clerk she could so she’d be freed up to go out on the floor. She interviewed countless applicants, and many of the men said the very same thing to her: “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.” She scratched off their names the minute they uttered those words.

She finally interviewed Jennifer Lee, a former trading assistant at First Boston who’d just had a baby and whose husband was a specialist on the floor. The two women were around the same age and shared the same mindset. They went out to dinner and agreed: “What the hell? Might as well.” Doreen leased a seat on the NYSE, and Mogavero, Lee & Co. was born on May 1, 1989—the very same day of the month that she had first started on the American Stock Exchange in 1975.

The consensus on the floor was that she and Jennifer would never pull in enough business to make it. They both had experience as clerks and Doreen as a floor broker, but neither had sales experience—how were they going to find clients? But the two of them got on the phones and started calling everyone they could think of, asking for orders. It was finally a veteran trader, “Tubby” Burnham of Drexel Burnham, who rang them up and said that if they “were brave enough to start the firm, he was brave enough to give us an order.”

As Mogavero, Lee grew, they hired Joy Benfante as their back-office manager. When Joy asked for a computer, Doreen protested: “What do you need a computer for? I’ve been doing everything without one for years.” Joy had to drag Doreen, who loved her paper and pencil as much as she loved the floor, kicking and screaming into the computer age.

______

DOREEN WAS NOT THE ONLY WHO HAD TO FACE THE FACT THAT A new age was dawning predicated on emerging technologies. In 1993, NYSE chairman Dick Grasso decided to open up the floor to television viewers, to demystify Wall Street. He struck a deal with CNBC, and a pretty young reporter, Maria Bartiromo, just twenty-seven, arrived on the floor of the NYSE.

Grasso called Louise Jones in and said he needed her help: “There’s a young lady coming and she’s going to do something that’s never been done before. She’s going to report the news from the floor as it’s happening. I want you to show her how you do your morning market call, how you get your information.”

Maria Bartiromo on the NYSE floor in front of one of the yellow telephone banks.

“So she’s taking my job?” Louise quipped.

She was not exactly thrilled as they all watched a “little Sophia Loren” suddenly materialize. Some men were rattled to see a woman in full makeup when the women on the floor typically sported a more disheveled look as they dashed around, taking and executing orders. Louise considered herself lucky if she even had time to pull her hair back in a scrunchy.

But while some men were flirting with Maria, others were trying to intimidate her, jostling her to get out of the way when they needed to get to a trading post fast. Mike Robbins, a well-known independent floor trader who refused to utter the names of his famous clients and referred to them by code numbers instead, was furious with the exposure that Maria was bringing to the floor, yelling that he didn’t want her around. Maria would often walk around the entire stock exchange if it meant not having to pass him.

Even as she was dubbed the “money honey,” she grew on Louise. She was a quick learner, and ambitious, and Louise observed that she “knew how to throw a softball but make it look like a hardball.” Her family owned the Rex Manor Catering Hall in Dyker Heights (also Maria Marsala’s hometown), and in that sense, Maria Bartiromo was very much a creature of the NYSE floor, an “outer-borough girl” trying to make it in the finance world.

The look of the trading floor was changing. Doreen promoted Jennifer to broker and hired Debbie Raymond as their new clerk, making them an all-woman team; and when in 1994 they finally made the move from leasing to buying their own seat, Mogavero, Lee officially became the first and only women-run NYSE-member firm. Doreen hadn’t set out to do that, but along the way she’d tapped into the most underutilized source of talent that there was: women.

Now thriving, Mogavero, Lee subleased a room in Doreen’s accountant’s offices and when Doreen found herself unexpectedly pregnant, she installed a playpen, and in addition to her other work, Joy was put in charge of morning childcare, learning how to diaper a baby. When Joy tired of climbing over the playpen to get to her desk, they moved their offices to a studio apartment at 55 Wall Street. Next came a two-bedroom place on 25 Broad Street, right across from the NYSE, and then finally a three-bedroom apartment in the same building. As the number of employees grew, as well as the office square footage, so too did the number of children. In the three-bedroom iteration of Mogavero, Lee, one bedroom was configured into an office for Doreen and Jennifer, another was made into the back office, where Joy took charge, and the remainder of the apartment was arranged as just that—an apartment, with the third bedroom available for overnight stays in the city or emergency accommodations for sick children home from school. You brought your child in to work with you, put them to bed, and got on with your work.

Mogavero, Lee, the first and only women-run NYSE-member firm, on the NYSE balcony.

The “office” was filled with toys and bassinets, and everyone took care of everyone’s children. As a press profile of the firm observed, “Mogavero, Lee has instilled motherhood into its very culture.” Without thinking much about it, they had also set up an informal job-sharing system. If someone needed to be at home with their children, the office took care of her tasks. There were no set vacation days; if you wanted a vacation, you took one, no questions asked, and everyone covered for you. At its height, between 1998 and 2000, Mogavero, Lee would have twenty-one employees.

In May 1998, Mickie Siebert gave the commencement speech at her alma mater, now called Case Western Reserve University. She recalled how in the 1950s she had dropped out and left for New York in her beat-up Studebaker. Just as Beth Dater felt the Vomit Comet had taught her how to approach work, so the Studebaker had taught Mickie how to approach life: “That darned car door would never open right—it would always stick. I’d pull it, I’d cajole it, I’d shake it, I’d even plead with it. There were times I swore at it. Finally, I learned, I just had to kick it. And you know what? That is the real lesson that old Studebaker taught me. When a door is hard to open, and if nothing else works, sometimes you just have to rear back and kick it open.”

Two years earlier—she continued—she’d seen on the “broad tape” (Dow Jones & Co.’s streaming business news and information) that Calvin Grigsby had resigned abruptly from his firm, the largest Black-owned firm in the municipal bond business, and one of the largest altogether, which “underwrote more than all the other women- and minority-owned firms put together.” She called the two remaining partners, Suzanne Shank and Napoleon Brandford, and proposed they create Siebert Brandford Shank, a municipal bond-underwriting operation. The following year, they underwrote (“ran the books and priced the deal”) $250 million for Detroit Water. And just recently, they’d underwritten $200 million for the State of California, “and under us was Bear Stearns and Morgan Guarantee,” the very same “bank that wouldn’t make me the loan for the seat was under us for underwriting—and that’s important.”

But for others, maintaining one’s status on the Street as a woman was a precarious proposition. A year after Maria Bartiromo appeared on the floor for CNBC in 1993, becoming a star, Elaine Garzarelli, the Cassandra of Wall Street who had accurately predicted Black Monday, was fired from Lehman. Her mutual fund was not doing well, and her fortune-telling was no longer accurate, everyone said. She had been arrested in the Hamptons on a DUI. Her bullish take on the market—“Stock Market Correction Is Over”—appeared one day before Katherine Hensel, Lehman’s chief stock analyst, posted: “Market Is Up But the Coast Is Not Clear; It’s Time to Raise More Cash.” Garzarelli was becoming a hindrance rather than a help, and she was fired almost seven years to the day on which she’d made her prediction about Black Monday on Lou Dobbs’s Moneyline. The talk on the Street was that with a salary of over a million dollars, she was making too many mistakes. She’d become more of a risk than an asset.

Yet as any woman on Wall Street knew, mistakes and bad predictions, when made by men, were easily forgiven and forgotten. The Washington Post noted in the same year, 1994, “For all the attention paid to Michael Milken and greed on Wall Street in the 1980s, the surprising fact is that the real mountain of money has been piling up in the 1990s.” In fact, those working on Wall Street now had “nearly three times the compensation earned in the same period in the 1980s.” As for Garzarelli’s salary, was it too much or was it too much for a woman?

Two years later, another female Wall Street soothsayer, Abby Joseph Cohen, who had famously continued to live in Queens, where she grew up, taking a commuter bus to work each day, would be passed over for partner at Goldman Sachs even as she had called the bull market of the mid-1990s, making significant money for those who had listened to her advice. Many on the Street were outraged when she was passed over, including her friend Patricia Chadwick, who considered “not trading with Goldman after that.” The following year, in 1997, even Vanity Fair included Abby Joseph Cohen among spring’s hottest items, alongside the Lexus LX 50 and the Gucci thong. In 1998, she finally made partner, but she, too, would eventually be called out for being overly bullish and failing to predict the 2008 financial crash.