Chapter 8

FINDING WHAT MATTERS

“Every man dies, but not every man really lives.”

—William Wallace in Braveheart

We have all experienced moments when, instead of being buffeted by random forces, we feel a deep sense of exhilaration and enjoyment so distinctive that we cherish it for a long time afterward. In our memories, it becomes a landmark for what life should be.

In his classic book of the same name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it flow. It is not something that just happens to us. It can’t be bought with money or commanded with power, and it doesn’t befall us by chance. Instead, it has to be actively cultivated and defended by each of us.

The greatest moments of our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times, as we are sometimes led to believe. They usually happen when we deliberately stretch our minds or bodies to the limit in an effort to achieve something difficult but worthwhile. The optimal human experience that matters most to us is something that we make happen.1

Risk takers know this instinctively. Maybe we’re more prone to go after those satisfactions than other people, but what we strive for is an optimal part of human experience. Adventurers, explorers, investors, entrepreneurs, and innovators consistently admit that they are motivated to reach for the summit because, instead of being ordinary, high-risk activities are often life-changing experiences. Once you’ve had a peak experience with such profound rewards, it’s only human to want to do it again.2

It’s certainly been true in my own career. But if anything, my life has been changed even more by the risks I’ve taken in my personal life. After all, what is more life altering than love?

Nothing would’ve delighted my dad more than being a philanthropist. If he’d had the means, he undoubtedly would have given generously to the causes that meant the most to him. When I was growing up, he was always engaged in community affairs. For most of his life, he made only a subsistence income, but he contributed by volunteering.

Throughout my childhood, he was always helping to organize events, putting together fund-raisers, or serving as parade marshal.

When children see their elders continually helping others and volunteering to do more, it makes a strong impression. I still remember vividly going down the sidewalks in our town on Tag Day, asking for a dollar or two to help the local hospital. When people dropped their money in the plastic containers we carried, they were given a brightly colored tag to stick on their button, showing they had made a donation. (I may have asked such folks to give twice!) Soliciting donations from friends and strangers alike seemed to come naturally to me.

With his friendly but self-deprecating nature, my dad was very popular in town. When we moved to Marietta, Georgia, he was in a bigger pond and less a part of the establishment there. But in the smaller towns, he always made a big splash. The fact that he was a Jewish immigrant in the overwhelmingly Christian South in the 1940s didn’t hold him back, even when World War II was raging in Europe and most Americans wanted to keep the refugees out.3 As an impressionable boy, I was painfully self-conscious about being the only Jewish kid in the Boy Scout troop that met every week in the Methodist church.

Like every kid, all I wanted was a sense of belonging. Even if I was a loner, keeping mostly to myself, it wasn’t by choice. Some instinct told me that I could be just as gregarious and popular as my dad, but I was too busy fighting my own demons to bring that quality to light.

How could I hang out with the other kids when I was so ashamed of wearing my dad’s hand-me-down clothes and riding a junky old bike? How could I make any friends when my classmates spent the summers and weekends playing, while I had to work hard to save for college instead? Feeling as if I didn’t belong during those formative years followed me all the way to Wall Street. It took decades for me finally to accept myself and let go of the cloud of self-doubt that had hung over my head—and my father’s—since childhood.

When you earn enough wealth to become a philanthropist, people take note. But in many ways, after you’ve grown up doubting yourself, it’s difficult to convince yourself that you’re at least as good as—if not better than—the famous and wealthy people you now encounter.

Living well brings many pleasures, but the rewards of a deep sense of confidence outstrip them all. Every moment of the day is made better by it, whether you are alone in a room or surrounded by intimidating strangers. When someone criticizes you, it’s easier to shrug it off. If people try to push you around, it doesn’t hurt you anymore. You simply step aside without the need to pick a fight. When you win a victory, you don’t feel the same need to publicize it or even to take credit, because you’re not trying to prove yourself to anyone anymore. That kind of freedom can’t be bought. It’s priceless. I’m too old and too rich to worry anymore about most things.

In my college days, self-confidence was not my strong suit. Because I excelled academically, I fit into the culture better than I had in high school, but I never had any money. Working and taking classes, I was just scraping by. Despite that, the generosity I’d seen in the adults around me back home made me feel that something fundamental was missing from life if I was not involved in some sort of charitable activities.

Over the years, I continued to make philanthropic donations to my schools, but the scale was relatively small—especially in the years after my divorce. It was only when I got richer that I had the resources and standing to make a real impact instead of just writing checks.

Following in the tradition my father established, I looked for ways to become more active in the community as soon as I moved to Malibu. I wanted to make new friends among people who were active and involved.

On the West Coast, the leading people in town were on the board of the Music Center, the Philharmonic, the Joffrey Ballet, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and the museums. When I began to mingle with them, I discovered that not only did they become excellent contacts, but they were some of the most fascinating people I’d ever met.

All of them were involved in remarkable activities that they were knowledgeable and passionate about. As I got to know them, they introduced me to similar people who opened doors that allowed me to learn about life in new and interesting ways. To this day some of my best friends have come from the philanthropic part of my life. It’s rare to meet any one of them without hearing about the good they’re doing in a specific area that has real meaning to them, the new research that they’re helping to finance in the hopes of improving the world, or the far-flung adventures that they cultivate and enjoy.

Engagement with people like these, along with the pleasure of working together to solve the challenges we take on, has greatly enriched my life.

Today, when I want to join a board, I make my position clear. I don’t want just to show up for board meetings, vote yes, and go to lunch. I’m not trying to burnish my résumé. I want to get involved and to make an impact.

“I don’t like being passive,” I explain. “If I join this board, I’m going to say what I think. If that becomes a burden, you now have my undated resignation.”

My devoted board participation perhaps elicited rueful responses.

This approach is no doubt somewhat jarring for the social set that is careful to join the right boards and clubs, the ones that offer a luxury brand name in exchange for a safe yes vote at every meeting. Those of us who have always been strivers tend to rock the boat too much for that. We made our lives the hard way. We’re scrappers.

Ace Greenberg was like that, too. “You do some nutty things,” his wife, Kathryn, used to say, “but you’ve made your money and you can spend it any way you want.”

In 1998, Greenberg donated $1 million to New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery to underwrite Viagra prescriptions for impotent men who couldn’t afford it. “I guess you could say I’m kind of into basics,” Ace explained. “And I think it’s something that will give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.”4

After a visit to Jerusalem, he donated money to the Israel Museum there to replace the bathrooms. All he asked was that they add a commemorative plaque in honor of his brother, Maynard, who was living in Oklahoma City. He stood by the request even when people told him that the plaque made them wonder if he liked his brother or hated him. “I like him,” Ace confessed.5

My father had laid the groundwork for my concern for the community I lived in, but Ace demonstrated how to take that impetus out into the larger world with authority and style. He modeled a way of living that I could use as an inspiration to my own.

At his funeral, one of his ex-partners said, “It was such a pleasure to work with him. We could’ve made more money elsewhere, maybe, but we just liked working there. Ace brought authority, respect, and opportunity. It’s not that common.”

Of the many sayings Ace was known for, one of my favorites was the edict to cultivate a life outside with the same energy and devotion as you put into your work.

We never knew what all his outside interests entailed, but it was clear that they were many and diverse. I learned, for instance, that he had been made a knight in Sweden for some reason. Additionally, his skills as an amateur magician were so advanced that he was a highly regarded member of the Society of American Magicians (SAM). At his funeral, in keeping with their tradition, the SAM representatives broke his wand and placed it in the coffin with his body.

A major factor in my decision to move to Malibu was my determination to put my lifestyle first. Ace’s words had planted a seed in me that would become central to my life.

In New York, it was a given that those who were rich enough to cut the week short always left early on Thursday afternoons in the summers to head out to the Hamptons. The leadership at Bear Stearns was eager to show that we were not of that ilk. So I spent my years there stuck in the office in a full suit and tie until the final hour on Friday afternoons.

When I moved to the Beverly Hills office, I made up for it by not going in at all on Fridays. The beach came all the way up to my door. I could relax in shorts and a T-shirt, working on the phone. If something needed to get to New York, my fax machine at home was just as effective as the one at the office. I spent Fridays writing and reading—just like being at work, but with no need to shave!

I played tennis Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and I worked the rest of the time. California had a different rhythm. And I liked it.

My career in Wall Street taught me a lot about life in the fast lane, but I was starting to balance that with the considerable pleasures of the laid-back coastal style.

Trading my buttoned-up urban pallor for open-necked shirts and a proud, glowing tan, I soon was able to pass myself off as a native. Tennis and regular trips to the ski slopes kept me in vigorous good health. I was forty-four years old, but I looked and felt thirty. The presence of so many attractive young women, too, had a rejuvenating effect. Beautiful people had been responding to the siren call of Hollywood ever since 1914, when Cecil B. DeMille directed his first feature film, The Squaw Man, the film that put Hollywood on the map.6 The gene pool here is unmatched.

It’s easy to feel like a star yourself when you’re cruising down the beach on Pacific Coast Highway with the top of your Jensen convertible down and your arm resting casually across the back of the passenger seat—like being in a movie.

In the 1970s, the Jensen Interceptor was the epitome of cool yet unpretentious sophistication. Hand-built in Oxford, the body conveyed an old-world charm, but discreetly hidden under the hood was the no-nonsense power of an American V8 engine.7

You did need two Jensens, however, because one was always in the repair shop. I dropped one off whenever I picked up the other one. The shop owner loved me. When the day finally came that both were in the shop, I traded them in for a Rolls. (Sadly, the Rolls was in the shop often, too.)

It was an inspiring time. Determined to make the most of it, I zealously pursued the bachelor life. Actresses, lawyers, stewardesses, doctors, lifeguards—all products of the great fifty-year gene pool. But I began to notice a new phenomenon: great young women with outstanding educations and careers. In my day, they were married off by age twenty-two. Now, here they were, independent and appealing. I should have known that one day such a lady would knock my socks off. And she did.

As Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”8

RISKING MY HEART

Romantic risks use the brain cells in your stomach more than the ones in your head.

In November 1980, Suzanne Stockfisch talked her way past the guards at the gated Malibu Colony, parked her Volkswagen behind my house, and made her way to the beach in front. I was attracted immediately.

Feigning interest in how she gained entry, I offered her a glass of wine. Luckily for me, she accepted. To this day, she graciously allows me to think that it was I who picked her up.

We sat talking and drinking wine until the sun went down. There was a kind of natural rapport between us from the start. It was subtle at first, hard to articulate, but that may have been because the conversation itself was hard to get going. Her resistance to trivial chitchat was outmatched only by her resistance to probing questions. To my surprise I felt a kinship with her vaguely antisocial demeanor. It’s exactly how I had behaved before my own metamorphosis. It had taken me years of diligent effort to develop my social skills.

With a woman as fascinating as I sensed she was, I wasn’t going to let a little resistance to social niceties put me off. I wanted to know more. Between persisting and cajoling, I gradually wrung out her life story. As I’d suspected, she was indeed a remarkable person.

While the lifeguards and actresses of my previous acquaintance might’ve tried to woo their way past the guards by flirting and batting their eyes, it was soon obvious that Suzanne had a much more advanced skill set.

Whether or not she resorted to fluttering her eyelashes, she had enough intelligence and training to wield strategic guile. After finishing her economics degree at Stanford in just three years, she had completed a joint MBA/JD program at Berkeley and Hastings. By the time we met, she had just finished taking the California bar exam and was looking for a way to decompress.

She told me that she’d grown up as an only child in McLean, Virginia, and that her dad had been a government economist. As I listened to her talk about her background, I thought that we just might be an ideal match. She’d already been training in my own business disciplines at some of the top institutions in the world. She was clearly a brilliant thinker from a family of brilliant thinkers.

I immediately sensed that this was the kind of adventure I’d been looking for, but I hadn’t been conscious of it. I gladly replaced my fantasy of dating every attractive woman I could find with a new fantasy: making Suzanne my business partner. I’d certainly never had a partner as sexy and exciting as she was.

After a few days, she moved down to Newport Beach, where she started a job in the finance department of the giant Fluor Corporation. But she came up in December to attend the Joffrey Ballet gala and our firm’s holiday party with me.

When I told her in January 1981 that I was off to Europe for business and skiing, she made it clear that she wanted to join me. “Do you ski?” I asked. When she laughed and said, “Of course!” my heart nearly skipped a beat. She was starting to look like the perfect woman.

There were only two logistical problems: one for Suzanne and one for me. Since she had only been at her new job for two months, requesting a vacation was absurd. So we had to concoct a business scenario that would be appealing for her bosses.

My itinerary was taking me to New York, Paris, and Lausanne for business, then Courchevel for skiing. So I concocted a fake program with a business flavor.

“Very persuasive,” her bosses told her. “But you can’t go. You’re new. If anyone goes, it will be one of us!”

“I don’t want to date your bosses!” I moaned. “What do we do now?”

“I’ll quit!” she said emphatically. “This firm is a bad fit for me in the first place. I dread going in every day. I’ll just find another job when we get back.”

“Great,” I said, ignoring the sinking in my stomach over my own logistical problems.

I’d already lined up great dates with women in Paris, Lausanne, and Courchevel. It was going to be a little awkward to shake them loose now—especially the one in Courchevel. But I was infatuated with Suzanne, so it had to be done.

My dates were properly pissed at my bad behavior. Fortunately, I never needed to date them again!

“Why don’t you move in with me before we go?” I asked Suzanne. “If we have a great time on the trip, you can stay. If we don’t, we’ll consider it a transitional arrangement till you get a new job and find another place of your own.” Wisely, she agreed.

We really hit it off and had a wonderful trip. The more we spent time together, the more I realized that her exterior of quiet reserve was a cover for one of the most unique, creative, and fiercely independent people I’ve ever met. Our life together keeps me constantly on my toes. But we did have one problem on the ski trip.

She claimed to be an experienced skier, so I took her to an intermediate run that had been chosen as the piste du jour. It was steep, but not too extreme. Visibility was poor, but I assumed she could handle it, even if she seemed a little nervous about jumping on one of the fast chairlifts on the way up.

At the top of the run, I noticed she was staying back a bit as I moved into position. “Come on!” I said, nudging her forward.

That’s when she started to cry. “I can’t do this,” she sniffed. “I don’t know how to ski!” With anyone else, I would had let the ski patrol take them down, but here was my chance to show off my machismo. I braced myself on the snow and hunched over. “Climb on!” I said. I carried her to the bottom, but that ended the idea that we would be skiing together, and no woman was going to interfere with my skiing. I insisted that she go to ski school.

On our first ski trip together, Suzanne put her boots on BACKWARD.

That should have been my first clue!

Unfortunately, she was assigned to an alcoholic instructor. He stopped at every lift station to take a swig from one of his carefully stashed flasks. We had laughs about it and worked together some on her skiing—the beginning of my adaptation to this new force in my life.

After a few lessons, Suzanne really enjoyed skiing. Soon she was my match on the race course. Racing in two or three annual amateur races over twenty years, we won our share! Even today, on our annual ski trip to the Dolomites, we love skiing the World Cup runs at Val Gardena.

Sometimes our type-A personalities bang into each other. My old girlfriend had already pointed out my old-fashioned, macho ideas and she’d forced feminism on me, going so far as to get me a subscription to Ms. magazine. But honestly, I never really understood that the macho era had passed until Suzanne came along. Her low-key but relentless personality has finally turned me into a modern man.

It was not what I’d expected, but like so many other things with Suzanne, I would come to appreciate the surprises.

Her eccentricity allows me to indulge my own. When I scheduled a breakfast business meeting the day after our wedding night, Suzanne called her Chinese American girlfriend and booked a flight to Hong Kong without missing a beat. It was fine with me. My deal was coming together and I needed time to work it out.

A few days later, she called and said, “I just got a visa to go to China.”

“I’d like to see that!” I said. “They’re not giving out visas to China.”

Somehow she’d finagled one of the first Chinese tourist visas in 1984. Ronald Reagan arrived in April for the second presidential trip to China in history. There were no tourist facilities in place. It was pretty rough. The hotels had mice. Very little English was spoken. She would have had to resort to drawings and hand gestures, even though she spoke a little Mandarin and had brought along her Mandarin-speaking friend.

It may seem like an unusual way to start our life together, but that distinctiveness is exactly what makes it work so well. From the beginning, she’s gotten to do what she wanted and I’ve gotten to do what I wanted. We have time together and time apart. If we’d designed a perfect life before we met, we might have invented mates with different qualities and dispositions. But now that I see how our life together has been, I am confident that any life we imagined would’ve been far less interesting than the one we’ve discovered together. There’s a chemistry between us that just seems to work.

Holding our wedding at the Malibu home we created together seemed perfectly apt. We invited about a hundred close friends to the beach and held the ceremony on the deck above the sand. Always practical, Suzanne chose a short white dress that she could wear again. Always whimsical, I made my entrance by bursting through a four-foot-wide piece of paper with a heart drawn on it. The local Malibu judge who performed the ceremony couldn’t help but exclaim, “What an unusual wedding!” To our way of thinking, an unusual wedding was exactly what we needed to get us off to the right start.

After she decided that neither law nor finance was to her liking, Suzanne took up estate jewelry collecting and dealing. She now is on the board of L’École des Arts Joailliers (the School of Jewelry Arts, run by Van Cleef & Arpels) in Paris. She is the author of two beautiful books on jewelry, The Jeweled Menagerie and The Jeweled Garden. The top auction houses and jewelry manufacturers seek out her views and patronage. Her interest in design and the arts led her to be an early buyer of David Hockney, Claude Lalanne, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among many others. Not only did she know Andy Warhol, but he made two portraits of her.

At our wedding. Removing Suzanne’s garter with my teeth.

The architectural designs and the interiors of our homes have been enhanced by her artistic sensibilities. And her zany wardrobe is legend.

Suzanne’s quiet strength had shifted the arc of my life. Now dogs, books, travel, and even a reduced tempo reign. Where before I was rushing out to every major event, I’ve learned to be selective. Healthy eating and exercise have become completely integrated into my everyday life. It all fits perfectly with my goal to live to be one hundred! After thirty-seven years together, our life is still constantly exciting—sometimes too exciting, but that’s the price you pay when you put two A-type personalities together. Both of us have always needed lots of personal space. We have to be free to come and go spontaneously, and we often have disputes about our regimens. But I wouldn’t want to be without her!

As soon as I met Suzanne, I realized how brilliant she was. It was also evident that she is very private. She didn’t brag about her education and background when we first met, and I’ve never heard her brag about herself. But over the years, I’ve seen that almost anything she focuses on, she masters.

Perhaps because her father was a brilliant economist, she enrolled in a rigorous academic program herself. After learning some Mandarin in college, she went on to master Italian and French, as well as passable Spanish.

Her father, Jacob Allen Stockfisch, was one of the highest-ranked analysts at the Pentagon. The government sent him to Vietnam and Laos in 1962 to evaluate military logistics. He transferred to the US Treasury Department as a senior tax policy economist, then spent bulk of his career at RAND, one of most distinguished think tanks in the world. His writings, classic works in economics, are still available to analysts there.

As a boy, Jack had been given up for adoption shortly after he was born in 1922. In those days, unmarried mothers often gave up their babies. He was adopted by immigrants who had come to the States around 1911, about the same time as Suzanne’s mother’s parents came from Sicily.

Jack met Suzanne’s mother, Claire Bondello, and they became high school sweethearts. After junior college, he and Claire married. He then volunteered for the war, where he served as a bombardier officer. He flew over sixty missions and felt lucky to have survived.

While Jack was at war, Claire enrolled in Pomona College, where she earned a teaching degree. She taught English for many years. When Jack returned from the war, he finished college at Pomona, then went on to earn a PhD in economics at Berkeley.

When Suzanne was born, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Before she was two years old, he got a teaching post at UCLA and moved the family back to California. Soon thereafter, he was invited to work at RAND, where he worked on projects off and on for the rest of his career.

In the early 1960s, her parents divorced. As an only child, Suzanne had become an avid reader. After the split, her mother went back to her roots in Ontario to teach school, but she reconciled with Suzanne’s father in 1962.

The year before, Jack had been hired by the US Defense Department to work analyzing military spending under Secretary Robert McNamara. Her folks reconciled and relocated to Washington, DC. Jack later served in the Treasury Department as a tax policy expert, then worked for a series of think tanks, such as the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), RAND, and the American Petroleum Institute (API). Because her father did contract work, he often lived for short periods in different locations around the country. Sometimes Suzanne and her mother drove across the country to go with him. They enjoyed making detours to Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—all the major sights.

When Suzanne was in tenth grade, they lived in a hotel in Palo Alto for three weeks during the summer, while her father did analysis for a local think tank, SRI. As soon as she saw the beautiful campus at Stanford, she thought, “This is the place I want to go to school!” And she did.

Like me, she considered a major in the arts. I had been attracted to theater. Suzanne would’ve preferred to major in art. But both of us managed to override our creative instincts to make a practical choice instead. When I realized that most people didn’t make a living in the theater, I majored in engineering. For exactly the same reason, Suzanne chose economics and political science over art.

She didn’t like law school, but didn’t know what else to do, so she finished her JD degree while adding an MBA from Berkeley. She may have been uncertain about her calling, but once she chose a path, she stayed the course. Despite feeling that law was not exactly what she wanted to do, Suzanne took the California bar exam. About a month later, she met me. And the rest, as they say, is history.

She took a job down in Newport Beach, so we didn’t see each other for a while. But when we reconnected, we sort of grew on each other.

Two completely distinctive characters like us easily might have permanently clashed or have been unable to allow for the other person’s idiosyncrasies. As Suzanne says, “I’m an only child, so I’m kind of selfish. He’s in his own world a lot of the time. So we both were into whatever we were doing.” And for us, more often than not, it’s just worked.

No one’s more surprised than we are that we’re still going strong. At our 25th anniversary, Suzanne blurted out: “Who would’ve guessed?”

Suzanne’s own appetite for risk led her to choose the toughest schools in America, then sneak into the Malibu Colony and take up with a strange older man. Luckily, she agreed to marry me, and she continues to share my risky endeavors to this day.