Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (30 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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for the butt of their jokes is usually the greatest investment in the world.
Another example would be Orange County. When it went belly-up in the early 90s and everybody and his brother was riding the place unmercifully for being bankrupt . . . what a great opportunity.
My insights proved true on Orange County, too. In fact my fame and my knowledge as a business advisor and a stock advisor grew.
I mean, I had a radio show on the local CNN radio affiliate for three years in Kansas Citycalled "Frank Bank on Finance"and it was a joke how badly my predictions beat everyone else's. It was unbelievable. I was giving out stocks that tripled and quadrupled and hardly ever had a loser.
And now that you've got me here to advise you, here is a prediction you can take to the Bank. The Frank Bank Bank, if you will.
The stock market will go to 16,000 to 18,000 in the next 10 years.
We will have five billion new customers from around the world.
These figures may seem preposterous.
But they are what is going to happen.
At minimum.
My reasoning is simple.
I believe in America.
Five billion new customers? They will be all the former Communists, all the former Third World countries. They all want to become like America.
And we've got the products to sell and the technology to do it.
My business theories worked well enough from '73 to '89 that my family and I were living in style.
We had almost a full acre in Tarzana, a house over 5,000 square feet. Electric gates. Stables in the backyard that I tore out to put in a park.
It was a beautiful house.
Robert Wagner used to live across the street. Lee J. Cobb lived around the corner, but then he died.
But eventually, much like showbiz, I saw that I couldn't go any higher in MuniciCorp. I was the general sales manager. I was offered stock options to become a partner, and I didn't exercise the options.
Instead, I quit.
We had certain philosophical differences.
Equally important, I wanted to open my own firm.
So I opened F.T. Bank & Associates in Rancho Mirage.
"F.T.?"
Uh-huh.
I just decided to add an initial to my name.
My full name is actually Frank Bank. The name on my driver's license, the name on my diplomas, the name I use for the National Association of Security Dealers . . . everything . . . the name on my marriage certificate is Frank T. Bank.
 
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See, I was one of those equal-rights kids. And I remember when I was 5 years old that I made a rather traumatic trip to Minnesota for my grandfather Tom's funeral.
I knew that Frank Bank, the man I was named after, had died about the time I was born.
But I said, "Wait a minute. I'm named after my dad's father, but what's wrong with my mother's father? He got a raw deal."
So I said, "I'm gonna be named after both my grandfathers."
So I legally added "Tom," after the guy who accidentally shot Frank Jamesremember that gunfight back in Northfield, Minnesota?
Well, that made me Frank Tom Bank.
But more than anything, I use the initial "T."
One day I remember starting arbitrarily to sign my school papers, "Frank T. Bank." And my room asked what this was about.
I told her.
When my dad came home from work that night, my mother says, "Len, d'you know that Frankie took a middle name?"
And my dad was really excited, you know?
Like, "Who gives a damn?"
Who's pitching tonight for the Hollywood Stars, he's wanting to know. That's the important thing.
And he goes, "Oh yeah?"
And my mom goes, "Yeah, Frankie took my Papa's name for his middle name."
My father just sort of smiled and laughed.
I said, "Yeah, Dad. I'm Frank Tom Bank."
And Dad goes, "Good boy"
I remember that. He was happy for me, too.
So anyway, it had some extra meaning for me somehow when I opened my own securities firm, that's why I decided to make itF.T. Bank & Associates.
Making the business flourish was no problem, actually.
I had developed a distinguished list of clients by then. I took them all with me.
Famous clients?
Over the years, I've had clients such as Kirk Douglas, Jane Fonda, Aaron Spelling, Juliet Prowse, David Brenner, Norm Crosby, Red Buttons.
Mr. Irving Paul Lazar, impresario extraordinaire. You may know him as "Swify" Lazar.
He was a client.
Bud Yorkin, the guy that did "Sanford and Son" and "All in the Family" and pretty near everything with Norman LearBud was a client.
 
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Pat Boone.
The girl from ''Rhoda," Valerie Harper was a client.
Dom DeLuise is a client.
Lloyd Bridges is a client.
These were my personal accounts.
A lot of very famous industrialists were clients, as well.
For one, the May family from the May Co. department stores.
I had a very special spot in my heart for Anita May. For many years, I treated her as a sister. She was my prodigy, if you will, and I taught her everything I could about my business. My ex-wife was her kids' godmother.
We were very, very close.
The industrial giants were my biggest clients. I loved dealing with very big people.
Because I can talk to them.
And they know they can trust me.
Doctors and lawyers usually drive me crazy (maybe it goes back to the classroom of my UCLA days). I don't know why, really.
The doctors and lawyersI'm not saying they're bad, but I've always preferred doing business with industrialists. They have more business savvy.
Here's why:
Because of their proclivity to understand the risk that they are taking in their investments.
I think that's a pretty good sentence, don't you?
I think the word "proclivity" is a particularly strong part of that sentence.
Makes me sound rather erudite, no?
Anyhow, what happened was, F.T. Bank & Associates was a huge success.
Larry Gordon was a client. He was a huge, huge producer.
Oh, geez, Ray Stark, I almost forgot about that one. Ray Stark, "Goodbye Girl," he's gotwhat?about six, eight Oscars?
He was a client.
Of course, I had virtually all the Beaverites.
Jerry and Kenny and Barbara are all very active clients to this day.
But virtually all of my clients have been very successful because of me. I have been good for them.
And I love it. There is nothing more thrilling than, after you've recommended something, to call up and say, "Well, you made about 40 grand today. Were you too busy to understand that?"
Or something like that and they love it.
They sit there and they go, "Really?"
And you go, "Yep."
And it makes you feel wonderful.
You don't ever, ever want to sell a client on something where they're
 
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going to lose money so you can make a commission. Because it's just as easy to make a commission on good merchandise as bad merchandise.
Sometimes you do try and find bonds maybe that are in trouble that'll give a client a higher yield. You love that. That makes you feel very, very good.
Oh, Jaclyn Smith was a client for a long time. One of the "Angels."
I keep bringing these people up as they pop into my mind.
As I'm talking about how wonderful the business is to me, the question might arise:
Do I like making people money for the ego stroke of being able to say I was right . . . or simply for the joy that accrued to the other people?
I think it comes back to the responsibility that my parents ingrained in me. How you have to try to be a good guy. You have to try and help people.
You have no idea the feeling, when somebody comes up to you and says, "Here. Here's my life savings. Try and invest it as good as you can."
That's an incredible responsibility.
It doesn't matter how much a client has to invest. It's the same principle whether he or she has 55,000 or $5 million.
You don't ever want to mess it up.
You want to try and do your best.
God knows, I'm not 100 percent. I mean, Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times.
But he also had a lot of mighty clouts. I have, too.
When a guy walks into your office and says, "Listen. I'm 65 years old. I've worked hard all my life. Here's how much money I have. Let's start doing some investing" . . . well, it's the greatest feeling in the world when you can tell that guy, "Look, we made 25 percent this year. We made 35 percent this year."
It's like a sacred, solemn oath.
You owe the general public the fact that you've got to do the best that you possibly can. If you don't do the best, you can't even live with yourself.
Because that's not fair.
You've gotta be fair.
I can't tell you how many times I've given trades away because maybe something didn't work out exactly right. So I didn't have the heart to charge people commissions just because the law says that I can.
I've got to do things that are right.
Otherwise I might not make it up to the Big Game in the Sky.
That's one game we all want to make it to.
You don't want to make that your 1,331st strikeout. You want to hit a home run on that one.
And, see, by doing the best, that's when you get referrals. That's the
 
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whole thing about my business.
The saddest part of my business is all the friends that I've lost because they've died. It's heartbreaking.
There was this man who I loved. His name was Melvin Berman.
I thought of him as my second father. He taught me so much. So much about life.
Melvin was a very, very wealthy man. Very wealthy.
He made a lot of money in the dairy business. And then he made a lot of money in real estate syndicationshopping centers and things like that. He was the chairman emeritus of the Rouse Corportation. He was the chairman of the board of Federal National Realty.
Here's a good example of who Melvin wasyou've heard of the South Street Seaport in New York?
One day, Melvin walks into my office. I didn't even know who he was. This was in the desert office in Rancho Mirage. And he'd bought, like a million dollars worth of bonds from me.
Well, while I was at it, I had just gotten a syndication on the South Street Seaport in New York.
And I said, "By the way, Mr. Berman, this looks like it might be a very, very good buy."
And I said, "How would you like to own the South Street Seaport?"
And he says, "Not very much."
And I said, "What are you talking about? This is a terrific project."
He says, "Well, if I thought it was that good, I wouldn't have sold it in the first place."
I said, "What?"
He says, "Yeah, I sold it to those guys."
In other words, to J & B Carlysle, who's a big real estate syndicator.
But I guess that wasn't all that impressive to Melvin since Melvin used to own the entire thing all by himself.
But see, the thing I admired most about this man, he was generous and he was brilliant. But he could drive people crazy.
Details. He was always worrying about details, and it drove people nuts.
But you know what? He was always right. The other people were always wrong. And it's scary how that worked out. There were people that could not talk to Melvin because he would say things that sounded like they were so far off base that it was ridiculous.
But, son-of-a-gun, the guy was right every single time.
Melvin taught me so much about people. He taught me that I have to be generous. He taught me how to share my love and my wealth with everybody else.
Because that's one of the reasons we're here.

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