transform the city’s landscape from neglected rentals to prized homes.
It’s my life’s work to find value where others don’t. The unknown authors and agents that I enlisted to build up my father’s literary agency after his death; the unrecognized talents who have turned Omi, my artists’ colony upstate, into an internationally prominent cultural center; and those discarded in prisons or the political underdogs I have championed: All have brought an unparalleled richness to my existence.
I don’t give up easily—not on people or properties—and I wasn’t ready to give up on 50 West, not even after a global financial crisis made the land practically worthless. I struck a deal with the lender even though they were initially calling for me to either turn over the property or pay the $55 million I owed them, which I didn’t have. Instead, I convinced the bank to sign a new agreement that turned the short-term line of credit for the foundation into a regular land loan. I offered up $10 million in good-faith pay-downs and a personal guarantee of $22 million to secure the loan, and I agreed to pay a higher interest rate.
Everyone told me I was crazy. Why would I pay $3 million a year in interest alone, in addition to property taxes and insurance that totaled another $2 million annually, for a piece of land with no income on it? Why take the risk when I could be done with the whole mess by giving it back?
Because that land was my chance to fulfill a dream of building an iconic skyscraper. Plus, I thought, one day it was going to be worth a hell of a lot more.
EARLY REMEMBRANCES OF THINGS PAST
My father accompanied the writer out of his office.
“Sandy, this book is going to be a big, big best seller,” the writer said to my father. “Big. Not just in Europe but here in America too. I’m going to make us lots of money. You’ll see.”
“Yes, yes, Lazi,” my father said with a slight note of skepticism.
The Hungarian writer Ladislas Faragó had made his name as a foreign correspondent in 1935 covering the Ethiopian-Italian War, an assignment he turned into a historically important and wildly popular book, Abyssinia on the Eve. But he was as much an old friend of my father’s as a valued client of Sanford J. Greenburger, my father’s literary agency. So Dad took special care in showing him to the door, walking past my desk, where I was busy balancing the agency’s checkbook, and my mother, who was tending to her usual administrative work. Faragó kissed her hand in the old-fashioned style before he was hustled out the door by my father—just as Leo was entering.
“What brought the Hungarian schemer?” Leo, lighting a cigarette, asked once my father returned.
It was true; Faragó, who had written many best-selling books on military history and espionage (including, later on, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph), had picked up a trick or two from his reporting. An expert on propaganda and other methods of using the mind as a weapon, he was assigned during World War II to a unit engaged in psychological warfare against the Japanese. When it came to his own business affairs, he was no less stealthy. Once, he sneaked into my father’s office and helped himself to the company checkbook, writing a check to himself and forging my father’s signature. Although the sum was not large, my father was perpetually broke, so even small amounts were a problem.
“Ah, Lazi’s okay,” my father said.
“You know, one can be a good writer and still not be a good person,” Leo said.
Leo Frischauer did not mince words. In fact, offering up his opinion, solicited or otherwise, was about all Leo ever did. Each day he arrived like clockwork to my father’s small office on 42nd Street that was half literary agency and half café for a variety of European intelligentsia, even though technically he didn’t work there. In the context of the parade of writers and publishers who created a constant flow of smoke, gossip, and eccentricity, it wasn’t odd that Leo had a desk but no title or work responsibilities. Efficiency was never a priority at the agency.
I watched my father and Leo smoke and talk as if this were new and exciting territory and not how they had spent every day of their lives for the last twenty years. I never asked my father how he felt about Leo; he was kind of just a given.
Like most everything else in the office, Leo’s story was mythic, unconventional, and not at all clear. My hazy understanding was that Leo—who came from a family of wunderkinds that included Paul, a well-known novelist, and Eddie, a champion bridge player who helped Austria bring home the 1937 world title—had made a huge sum of money as a very young lawyer in Vienna. He wanted to celebrate his windfall by taking his girlfriend on a trip around the world, but his mother disapproved. His girlfriend then committed suicide, which, although something of a Viennese habit during that period, gave Leo such a virulent hatred of money that he gave all of his away. Over five o’clock tumblers of whiskey, there were tales of Leo leaving the equivalent of a $100,000 tip for his favorite waitress at his regular café in Vienna. Once the money was gone, Leo decided he didn’t want to work anymore. Ever again.
When Leo first came to New York, he went to see my father, who knew his brother Paul. He walked into the office, introduced himself, and then asked my father whether he could come the next morning to read the newspaper.
“Sure,” my father said.
He came the following day and every day for the next fifty-odd years to read the newspaper. Leo not only read the newspaper, he read each edition of every newspaper. One of his early jobs in Vienna had been working at a daily, reading the competition to see whether there were any stories they had missed. Leo had loved this job and acted for the rest of his life as if he still had it. He even had an arrangement with the newspaper delivery trucks that came to the office building so that he didn’t need to wait until the paper arrived at the newsstand. The truck driver was instructed to hand the latest edition to Leo waiting for it in front of the building.
I loved Leo, who spent his days smoking relentlessly, refusing to use an ashtray, preferring instead to let the ash on his cigarette dangle perilously until it ultimately fell onto his chest, which he patted into his suit—and he’d been wearing the same suit for as long as I’d known him, which was my entire life. His indulgent style extended to me, for which I, the son of a cautious father who was sometimes hard to communicate with, was grateful. One of Leo’s and my favorite hobbies was throwing paper planes out the window of the thirtieth floor when the agency was located on 42nd Street. Watching our planes drift into the New York Public Library never got old with us.
Leo Frischauer at the literary agency
As Leo and my father continued their debate on Faragó’s merits beyond writing, I returned to my bookkeeping. I had already entered the precious few checks we had received that day, paid the office’s electric bill and a lawyer’s fee, and prepared statements for a few authors. It was rudimentary work that I could have done in my sleep. Numbers, to me, were simple; unlike my father’s clients, they either added up or they didn’t.
My father assigned value in ways that rarely made a profit. Indeed, his decisions usually translated into disaster for my ledger. It hadn’t started that way. His agency, which began in 1932, received a remarkable stroke of luck with the advent of World War II. While devastating for most of Europe, the war provided my father with an incredible opportunity. Because authors from the Axis powers couldn’t receive royalties from sales of their books in the United States, German, French, and Italian publishing houses needed someone to hold the money until the war ended.
Because of my father’s many European friends, he and a man named Marcel Aubry serendipitously found themselves approached by some of the continent’s biggest and most venerable publishers