Profile of Steve Schwarzman

This must be the season for gigantic profiles of financial bigwigs. Now, the New Yorker‘s James B. Grant takes 10,000 words to look at Steve Schwarzman. Here’s a teeny, tiny bit:

There were no dance performances on Yale’s all-male campus, but the New England women’s colleges were filled with aspiring dancers. It occurred to Schwarzman that with these women he could stage a dance performance, and charge admission. “Put attractive women in tights and you’d sell out,” he said. He got in touch with Walter Terry, the dance critic for Saturday Review, and persuaded him to attend. He scheduled the performance for a weeknight, when nothing else was competing for students’ attention. The event sold out, and Terry wrote about it in Saturday Review, in the issue of March 29, 1969. In the article, Schwarzman, asked about his future, said, “I can’t afford the arts right now. That takes money. So I’m going to a school of business administration.”
Schwarzman had majored in Intensive Culture and Behavior, an interdisciplinary subject, and hadn’t taken a single economics or accounting course. Law school or business school seemed a logical next step, but he had little sense of where either would lead. During his senior year, he had sent a letter to W. Averell Harriman, the wartime Ambassador to Russia and former governor of New York, who was serving as the President’s representative at the Paris peace talks. “There weren’t that many people in that era to admire, and I wrote him a letter saying I admired him and wanted to meet him,” Schwarzman recalled. Harriman, a fellow Skull and Bones man, invited him to lunch at his town house, on the Upper East Side, occasionally interrupting their talk to take calls from Cyrus Vance, in Paris. According to Schwarzman, Harriman asked him, “Young man, are you independently wealthy?”
“No, sir, I’m not.”
“Well, I am the son of a very rich man, which has made an enormous difference—that’s the reason you’re seeing me. If you have any interest in the political world, I advise you to become independently wealthy yourself.”

You gotta admit, that’s good advice.

Posted by on February 4th, 2008 at 12:00 pm


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