Think Big. Chapter Four

 "Hello Forney," said Kramer, taking the portable phone in hand from his son. He leaned through the window of the makeshift shed he'd built himself to work on his books.

            "Listen, the market's a story that we're missing," started Forney, "I think the DOW can be at 20,000 in a year. P/E ratios are low, dividend yields are attractive and productivity is through the roof."

There was no hello, just Forney's whir, laying out the facts he had gotten from a leggy Wall Street analyst seated next to him at a dinner party the night before.

            Kramer started throwing ice cubes from his drink at his sons wrestling in the yard.

            "I'm not sure who the winners are," continued Forney, "but there are going to be a whole new crop of billionaires."

            Kramer's sons started throwing the ice cubes back, crashing them against the windowsill. They were old enough now to really wing them.

            "What is that noise?" snapped Forney

            "Nothing," Kramer paused, crawling his fingers down into his glass for more ice "my son just fell off the roof."

            "It's been too long for this dreary market since the last tech bubble," continued Forney.

             Forney hadn't caused the change in Jack's attitude about the magazine but he was the symbol of all that was wrong with the magazine's new direction. Others may have set the heading, but Forney was the one screaming himself red in the engine room to get them all clattering to their fast doom. He was responsible for chasing after teen idols and pandering to mid-life Baby Boomer angst about sagging retirement funds or arthritic knees.

            "We're missing the market story," said Forney. He was on the attack now. He hadn't heard from Kramer. Only that damn noise in the background.

            Kramer pressed the window closed. An incoming ice cube exploded, leaving little comets and their trails spread across the panes. He started to push back. "Corporate earnings are still pretty anemic. Interest rates are coming back up. Consumers can't refinance any more. The tax cut didn't help. I think the market looks pretty far from boom times." He knew this was a bad idea. Forney wanted what he wanted.

            "We're missing the market story," responded Forney

Repetition. Clever. The next step would be for Kramer to mention the stories about the market he had suggested only weeks before but that the Deputy Managing Editor now sighing loudly on the other end of the line had shot down. It would do no good.

For months, all Forney had wanted were stories on what he called the second high tech boom. To get around Kramer, who was cool to such hype, Forney had assigned those stories to the editor of the Science section. The two had convinced themselves that "Wireless Wonderworld" would describe this period as "Information Superhighway," had the last. So like a highschooler eager to repeat the name of his sweetheart, Forney found it impossible to construct a sentence that didn't include it.

Kramer's frustration brought on the predictable internal dialogue. Did he want to leave the magazine? No. He needed the money. He didn't even need to look through the window at his boys dragging the cooler full of ice cubes-- the way the hero might in the key scene in the Movie of the Week-- to remind himself of his familial duties. Writing books didn't pay enough. He had had this conversation with himself before. Enough.

            "Yes Forney, we can do a market story," he said lamely. "But that means shelving that Jet Red story."

            "What?" Forney snapped back.

            Okay, Kramer hadn't completely given in. It was an old dodge, redirecting an editor's fancies with a prettier petticoat. Jet Red was a new regional airline based in Wisconsin. It's CEO, James "Red" Parry was a colorful, strident figure with flaming auburn hair who was constantly jumping out of planes, taming lions and keeping supermodels in swoon. 

            Kramer thought he might be able to distract Forney with the story because Forney considered himself not too much different than Red Perry. But more appealing was that Jet Red was a story full of gimmicks. The planes painted like Red Hots and the flight attendants wore vintage 1960s mini skirts. Both would look great in photographs accompanying the story.

This should have been an easy trick to turn. Forney had been pushing these kinds of gee whiz stories every week. But Jack didn't realize--the way trapped men don't-- that Forney quite fancied that leggy Wall Street analyst for CNBC who had filled his head with his latest hot dose of irrational exuberance about Wall Street. He'd asked her to write a piece accompanying the main story, so he needed a main story so that she could be grateful for his generous offer.

"Jet Red?"

            "The Jet Red story we talked about last week."

            "I never thought we'd run that story," Forney said with lightness in his voice. "But I think we can really be smart with a market story. Let's have it Jack."

            Bing, the bell went off. That was it. Forney was in a unsafe mood.. Editors had learned that once you got a "Let's have it" from Forney, the conversation was over. Nothing more would sway him. In fact, every small particle rolled out against Forney's view would be recorded and marked against you.

            "Sure," "I'll get on it."

            "That's fine but what I want to know is: can we declare that the market will never go down again? I mean this is no French Tulip market?"

It was the Dutch Tulip bubble, thought Jack, but he kept quiet.

"Who are going to be the winners who are going to be the losers? Are hedge funds going to gobble it all up and win no matter what happens? What does Greenspan say? What does Bill Gates say? I want a chart on the five kings of the new bull market. And what's going to be the next Silicon Valley?"

            "Forney, it's a brilliant story," said Kramer spearing an arm up into the air as if preparing to fly. Forney had been wrong about nearly everything he had just asked about. "We must have it in the magazine immediately."

            "Exactly!" said Forney. "Listen and I want Quinn Connor to report on it out of New York. He's a new kid."

            "Does he know anything about the market?"

            "I want him to report on the story. Thanks. Let's have it all Jack," said Forney with a flourish, then click, the line went dead.

-*-

 

            The phone message light was on when Quinn arrived in his office Wednesday morning.

            "What do you call a lobster who won't share his toys?" It was his father, who had an addiction to bad humor. Quinn let himself search for a moment for the most corny answer.

            "Shellfish," said his father. "Have a good first week Quinn. I'm proud of you."

           

                                                -*-

 

            Wednesday's phone fun was much brighter for Quinn than it had been the day before. Messages he'd left with various Wall Street analysts started to come in. His early wake-up had paid off. People on Wall Street--about whom he was now already starting to talk to himself in a knowing tone--liked to get to work early.

            No one behaved as awfully as Bigelow had the day before. The rest wanted their parents to see their names in the prestigious newsmagazine.

            An analyst from SG Warburg was the first to call back. He held Bigelow's view that the market was going to do fine but not skyrocket. Unlike Bigelow, he bothered to explain his outlook. Phew, one in the bag.

            Then, an analyst from First Boston called back. Oh, things were going nicely now. But, she held the opposite view. The market was in a downturn. Each fact that the previous analyst had given, she shaved into a different animal. "Investor optimism is high which means the sky's the limit," said Warburg's man. Not for Mrs. First Boston. "Investors are hot which means there's no cash on the sidelines." What was once a puppy had become a penguin.

            The two cancelled each other out, or at least Quinn thought they did. Which was right? This trend started to repeat itself and Quinn responded the only way he knew how, by working harder. He called more and more experts. There was a solution that could be found, it simply needed to be worked at. But the more people he called the behinder he got. One analyst after another would only tangle the Christmas lights further. There was no consensus.

            The menagerie of Post It notes decorating his wall provided no answers. In thick block lettering he'd written, "Put = a purchase of a stock you want to go down." Next to it was another Post It note that read "Call=sell." Others were inscrutable ".04" with an up arrow crossed out with a down arrow, an equal sign and then "good." Each hieroglyph was meant to ferry him through the jargon of a conversation. They rarely worked. While he was working out what the ".04" was supposed to mean about the unemployment rate,  the voice on the other end of the line had moved on to business inventories.

            Quinn's stomach groaned. He had skipped Wednesday lunch. He'd only ventured out of his office for short dashes to the coffee machine. He still knew almost no one in the building other than Forney. The secretary in his section of the building was out and the note on her cubicle simply said: "having a procedure." There were other offices in his immediate area, but they looked like they hadn't been occupied for generations. One was open with the skeleton of a long dead plant scratching against the wall. Further down the hallway he could see a lot of activity but he was too intimidated to sally that way. He didn't know what went on in those long rows of offices but it all seemed to have a purposeful rhythm that he didn't want to interrupt.

 

                                                            -*-

 

The phone rang. It was Sanjay Gupta, from Credite Suisse. "He's very good with numbers," said the company's Vice President of public relations after listening to Quinn's pitch which had expressly asked for someone who would not talk about a lot of numbers.

            "It is a pleasure to be speaking with you," he said. 

            "Thank you," said Quinn, laying out his pitch. Perhaps this would be all right. He cradled the phone's sticky goiter against his shoulder and spread his fingers across the keyboard to type. 

"I have a very concrete answer to your questions Mr. Connor. Let's take today's market for an instance. The CVR II signal is down. So is the CHADTP signal. Even worse, the McClellan Oscillator is flashing "overbought" signals. The TRIN Thrust reading and the TM Momentum Indicator are also down. "

            Quinn stood. "Thank you very much mister Sanjay," he said. "That is just what I was looking for. How do you spell your name again?"

"But that's only the first part of my analysis Mr. Connor."

            "Is that Sanjay with a 'y,'" asked Quinn trying hard to press over-ride.

            "No that's Gupta. G-U-P-T-A. I am senior statistical analyst for Credite Suisse. Thank you."

            "Yes," said Quinn politely. "Thank you for your time sir." He hung up the phone and looked at the red clock digits. It was almost six. His file was due in twelve hours.

            A sense of overwhelming calamity seized him and Quinn started to tingle just below his belly the way he did when he was a kid and got stuck trying to pull himself over the brick wall at recess.

            He closed the door. The situation was desperate. It was nearly the end of the day Wednesday and all he had was a mass of contradictory interviews and page after page of notes in his computer.

The phone rang. He couldn't endure another pointless 45 minute conversation about the Chicago Board Options Exchange put-call ratio or the Investors Intelligence measure of bears and bulls. He didn't answer it, slipping instead into a blank day-dream, his eyes settling into that middle distance stare.

           

                                    -*-

 

            A voice boomed from the hallway and jerked Quinn from his rest.

"Is this Mr. Pound of the expense department?" came a deep rolling voice speaking into a telephone. "Oh very good, I've bought all your albums and I thought your layout in Tiger Beat was very flattering but listen Mr. Pound, they do not send James Careen across the world for this magazine to then flatten him into submission when he returns with your penny pinching interrogations. Receipts do not come easy at the rail of a Belfast pub Mr. Pound. I can either do my job or keep track of these slips of paper to give you but if I am forced to ask the camel driver in Karachi to scratch out something that passes by your eye-dropper sized intellect, then I am going to get myself shot."

Quinn got out of his chair and peered in the direction of the assault on the expense department. It came from a dark office whose door was in the process of slamming. The reports from within continued to boom but were now unintelligible. Quinn returned to his seat feeling intimidated. That someone could be that commanding was a marvel. Quinn couldn't even pull off a crank call when he was younger for the embarrassment he felt for the person on the other end of the line.

 

-*-

By Late Wednesday afternoon, Quinn's call sheet of interviews, names were crossed out, secretaries names were scribbled in the margins next to the analysts he'd tried to reach. A check mark identified the ones he had found. A small circle signified the ones who hadn't rung back.

An email arrived from Forney. "Make sure you talk to Nelson Sliver," he wrote. "I'll look forward to your files. All best, FS." A fabulous time for mentoring at this hour, Quinn thought-- ten hours before the files were due. He added the name to his call sheet.

            This is what it had been like working for Forney at TVN. Quinn was constantly dispatched to massage and coddle the entries in the Forney Smart Rolodex. In fact, his first assignment ever on Forney's talk show had been to coddle his friends at the show's launch party which coincided with the launch of Forney's magazine "Smart Take." Held atop the Citibank building, the party had been the New York social event of the week. The dining room of Windows on the World was filled with the kinds of people that were regularly carrying home oddly shaped awards given to them at dinners held to salute their achievements. Of the other sort, were those with names regularly bolded in the Times.

            A six-foot version of Smart Take magazine was reproduced at the front of the room. It had been risky making a cover simply of Forney's smiling face. To blow it up so that his pores were saucer-sized seemed even more so.

But selling the Forney mystique was crucial to the success of the magazine and even more so for its talk show counterpart. For TVN, "Smart at Ten" was the first attempt ever by a rival to dethrone Larry King, CNN's dean of late night talk television. Everyone was convinced that Forney had the look of authority for it. His face was perfect for television-- long, and ecclesiastical, with a suggestion of Lincolnesque lines and a perfect arch of prime-time hair. Forney was considered just the kind of star that could introduce the audience to a wide range of products like the Mercedes 350 SLC, or Fidelity's new Middle East Stability Fund. His hair alone could sell an arm full of watches or at least put people in a trusting mood for the remedies being pushed to comfort mid-life disorders like hemorrhoids, wobbly bladder, and other conditions that we just don't talk about at the dinner table.

            Quinn was instructed to serve the guests copies of the magazine, which he did with unquestioning gusto. It was his job to make sure that each luminary had been given a copy of "Smart Take." If they didn't have one, he was to provide. Of course, no one carries around a magazine at a cocktail party, so most guests had found a clever way to drop their copy. Quinn didn't know this, which lead to a lot of curt responses from those he approached. People tend to get irritated when they can't gesticulate about the Met without a magazine being slapped into their palm. Bobby Short was downright rude, singing very loudly: "You'd better beat it outta this town fella or I'm going to redden your sweet behind." That sent Quinn to the safety of the coat closet where he could hide under the cover of "getting more magazines." But the publicist discovered him and put him back to work.

"If there is a picture taken of John McCain without a Smart Take in his hand you will lose your job at TVN."

e

 

Forney owed much of the jewel encrusted guest list to his wife Christine Smart (nee Fielding), the daughter of the investment-banking pioneer Buster Fielding. At 33, she had taken over managing her father's wide philanthropic holdings. She kept two different caterers slinging chafing dishes just servicing her parties.

"A Fielding daughter party," is what most wives yelled to their husbands from the bathroom as they swirled their blush wand over their cheekbones earlier that evening. As a result, many guests were learning for the first time why they had taken the elevator 128 stories that evening when the man in the pin striped double-breasted suit looking a bowler hat short of a British M.P. took a skip onto the podium. "That's Fielding's son-in-law," whispered one half of the room to the other half.

            "Everywhere I've been, I have thought it was the place I'd never leave," he said to the quieting room. "When I was Esquire's youngest editor, I figured who could do better than one day running the only true magazine of men's culture. Then, when I was stolen away by New York, I couldn't imagine a more exciting opportunity coming along. Vanity Fair, The Current, GQ and even TV Guide, they all asked for me but I never wavered. Unless I was given a magic wand, I told them, and could create the magazine I wanted, the way I wanted, then they couldn't have me. And then poof, it happened," he said, raising his hand.  The 'M' in "Smart" on the magazine cover behind him framed his head like horns. "The Smart Set and The American Mercury, that is the target for which we're aiming," he said, naming H.L. Mencken's famous magazines. "Smart Take will be a magazine to carry under your arm cover out, or leave on the coffee table to show people that you are of the moment. Like the Harold Hayes Esquire of the '60s, Rolling Stone on the '70s, Art Cooper's GQ and Kurt Andersen's Spy in the '80s. We're the magazine, I'm the magazine that will tell people what to think in the new century. There has never been a more risky and rare opportunity and never a more supple and groundbreaking enterprise than this one. I have been given every possible tool to remake the world of magazine journalism and that is nothing short of what I intend to do."

There had been some applause but not enough. Quinn was shaken by the memory of the publicist trying to make up for the tepid response by clapping hard enough to break a walnut.

                                               

                                    -*-

Forney's pal Silver was head of research and initial public offerings at O'Neill and Lindsey. When Quinn called he was put through right away. Silver was happy to help and he was quite good. As he explained the forces moving the market it was as if the heavens had opened up and the light had come down the way it does on gospel album covers. Here was an English speaker.

Quinn didn't dare interrupt, but his typing couldn't keep up with all that Sliver was putting down in such neat order. Quinn just kept checking his tape recorder to make sure its wheels were spinning, getting all of it down. Every few minutes or so, he would say "What do you think accounts for that?" or "Do you think the market buys that?" Sliver just kept stringing out the lifeline.

When they hung up, Quinn's ear was warm from pressing his head so firmly against the receiver. He had been rescued. Sliver had shaved off the rough edges, and slaked the dragon of jargon. Finally, just 9 hours before his files were due, Quinn felt progress. He had something to go on. All he had to do now was write it.

CHAPTER FIVE