I spoke with Billy Macklowe on the telephone in the summer of 2013; he was polite—but he told me he wanted to get a “clearer direction” of where the book was headed before deciding whether to participate. Ultimately he decided not to.
Harry Macklowe phoned me to say that his wife and son were pressuring him not to speak. I told him the truth: that this book is not about his wife or his son, or, for that matter, his daughter—except in one regard: the pressure they came to bear on him to sell the building that signified, more than any other, the sum of his achievements, and with which he most personally identified.
That they had exacted this price from the family patriarch was already public knowledge. Still, just how they had battled it all out—the details of those agonizing last weeks and nights—remained largely private, until the cast of this book stepped forward and put the pieces together.