Bashing Greed for Fun and Profit

By John Greenwald

Doesn't anyone have a kind word for Wall Street's gilded '80s? The new decade is only six weeks old, and already stores are piled high with books that portray the past ten years as a sink of avarice and excess. The melodramatic titles depict the American free-enterprise system as overrun by barbarians and liars, ambition and greed. And readers are lapping it all up. Just as they reveled in stories of the rich and famous during the past decade, today's inquiring minds are hungry for colorful tales about the pratfalls of the mighty.

Quite a few of these jeremiads are headed for the screen. Producer Ray Stark (Steel Magnolias, Annie) last week acquired film rights to Barbarians at the Gate, a best-selling account of the $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco, the largest buyout ever. Warner Bros. has paid a sum estimated to be in the high six figures for the privilege of filming Liar's Poker, an I-lived-with- savages expose of the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers. And the cameras are ready to roll on the movie version of Tom Wolfe's blockbuster novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which stars Tom Hanks in the role of bond trader Sherman McCoy, the contemptible Master of the Universe.

From Hollywood to local bookstores, Wall Street bashing is big business. In Barbarians at the Gate (Harper & Row; 528 pages; $22.95), authors Bryan Burrough of the Wall Street Journal and former Journal reporter John Helyar depict the RJR Nabisco fight as a mud-wrestling match in which all the participants come out grimy. Ross Johnson, the RJR Nabisco chief executive who launched the bidding for his own company and stood to make more than $100 million if he prevailed, is described as "a man who devoted his life to shaking things up" and an executive "loyal to little but his own whims." Johnson's nemesis, buyout expert Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, was so obsessed with conquering RJR Nabisco that he entered the battle knowing little of substance about the giant food-and-tobacco company.

The book contends that KKR won, reaping $75 million in fees alone, partly because its opponents were bumbling latecomers to the world of leveraged buy- outs. Johnson's Wall Street advisers, who included the giant firms Shearson Lehman Hutton and Salomon Brothers, sometimes carried on like the Keystone Kops. At one point, lawyers carrying a Johnson offer became stuck in Manhattan traffic moments before the bid was due. In desperation, they leaped from their cab and raced the remaining two blocks on foot, arriving breathless and embarrassingly late. Said a disgusted RJR director: "This is the gang that couldn't shoot straight."

Obviously rushed into print, Barbarians is rich in detail and anecdote but poor in analysis, often reading like 100 Wall Street Journal articles pasted end to end. After a forced march through the history of the RJR fight, the narrative ends on a question that should have been raised -- and wrestled with -- from the start: "What did all this have to do with doing business?"

While Burrough and Helyar are encyclopedic, journalist Hope Lampert provides a more selective guide to the battles and generals of the RJR war. In True Greed (New American Library; 259 pages; $18.95) Lampert diagnoses the imperious Johnson as suffering from a "corporate royalty complex." Both Kravis and former Shearson chairman Peter Cohen, who despised each other, wanted to go down in history as the mastermind of the biggest deal of all. But after his victory, Lampert writes, Kravis reneged on his pledge to hold the company together and began to dismantle RJR Nabisco, indicating that the takeover fight was largely a battle to decide who would have the privilege of taking the company apart.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis (Norton; 249 pages; $19.95) is a mainstream hit that is likely to broaden the market for business books. A best seller for 14 weeks, the memoir of Lewis' two-year career as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman has become a must read among Wall Streeters. For everyone else, it provides a satisfying opportunity to gloat about the venality of Wall Street's high rollers. By depicting securities dealers as foul-mouthed telephone hurlers with open contempt for their customers, Lewis, 29, turned his former employer into a laughingstock. The last laugh, of course, belonged to the author: after earning $225,000 in his second year at Salomon, Lewis decided that money isn't everything and resigned from the firm -- and now is raking in even bigger bucks.

But few others in the '80s disavowed their money lust. In Circus of Ambition (Warner Books; 240 pages; $19.95), New York magazine contributor John Taylor shows that Wall Street had no monopoly on avarice. "The notion that money is good," he declares, was a "central tenet" of the age. Tracing the celebration of riches to Ronald Reagan's enthusiastic support for capitalism at its most freewheeling, Taylor presents a rogues' gallery of potent moneymakers. Among them are Mark Kostabi, a New York artist who hired assistants to create his pictures, paying about $100 for works that sold for $12,000 or more, and -- like a punk rocker who spits on the audience -- warned his customers, "You're a total idiot if you buy one of my paintings." No less smug were Hollywood producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Flashdance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop), whose slick blockbuster films glorified triumph. "We aren't interested in losers," Simpson told the author. "They're boring -- to us."

For novelist Michael Thomas, the big losers of the 1980s included old-line Wall Street firms, whose values of honor and loyalty were eclipsed during the decade. In Hanover Place (Warner Books; 479 pages; $19.95), Thomas chronicles the transformation of a venerable investment house called Warrington & Co. into the epicenter of '80s-style takeover fever. The founding Warrington family "reflected a certain standard of behavior," Thomas writes, but by 1989 "Wall Street seemed sealed off in a capsule of self-regard." As part of the plot, Thomas describes the rise of a group of Jewish financiers whose depiction as stereotypical villains has prompted reviewers like Judith Martin, who is better known as the etiquette columnist "Miss Manners," to condemn the book as anti-Semitic.

Taken together, all five books convey a deep distrust of the decade just past. The poet Robert Lowell once wrote in an ode to a friend, "Yet really we had the same life, the generic one/ our generation offered." In much the same way, these tales of the 1980s tend to merge into one generic portrait of vanity, ego and greed. Historians may come to see the '80s in a kinder and more diverse light, but the image of the decade in these books is unquestionably the prevailing one today.