The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co (77 page)

What she may not have fully realized, though, was the effect she had on men. After graduating from Wharton in 1988, she joined Lazard full-time, in August, in New York, as part of the two-year analyst-training program. But the uncontrolled, unhealthy Darwinian Lazard environment may have been a seriously wrong choice for her. She was like catnip. "I was very naive," she explained. "I was very young, extraordinarily naive. I had no idea what I was getting into. I mean, remember I didn't grow up in New York and both my parents were professors." She said that various partners--Agostinelli and Loomis, among them--tried to "protect" her from the lecherous behavior. They "still wouldn't have been able to protect me, because you can't," she said. "There wasn't a culture there, in terms of the abuse, to prevent the abuse. And the obvious sort of sexual harassment."

Shortly before Thanksgiving 1988, she received a call from her former London colleagues telling her to be on a plane to London that night to work on a deal with Agostinelli, Langman, and Taipale. What was supposed to be a few days turned into a six-month assignment, living in a swank London hotel, ordering room service and expensive champagne--and charging it all to the client. "Back then, if I was a client and I had seen the amount of expenses that we had, I would've been, like, horrified, totally," she said. Her roommates in New York would bring her clothes to Lazard at Rockefeller Center, and her secretary would FedEx them over to London. "I lived at Claridge's for six months," she said. "And my bill was like PS87,000. They said I'd be home for Thanksgiving. I didn't get home for Christmas or Easter. So I just lived in a hotel and I worked from, like, eight in the morning until ten at night because room service closed at ten-thirty at Claridge's. I just did that every day." There is an old saw on Wall Street told to young new recruits: "You won't know your children. But you'll get to know your grandchildren really well." Bohner was quickly discovering the meaning of that remark. Her professional and social life revolved around her colleagues in the London office. Before long, she started dating Steve Langman, then a vice president and later a partner. Langman was married. They dated for the balance of Bohner's time at Lazard. Langman decided to leave his wife, even though she was around eight months pregnant. Bohner was also said to have dated the flamboyant Agostinelli, who had taken to having a gourmet chef prepare his meals for his overseas first-class flights and having Frette sheets FedExed to his hotel rooms in advance of his arrival.

When she returned to New York, she was put in the oil and gas group, working with the senior partners Jim Glanville and Ward Woods. This proved to be quite treacherous for her. She started working on the IPO of Sterling Chemicals, a private company based in Houston owned by the iconoclastic investor Gordon Cain. One late afternoon, she and Glanville were in Glanville's car on the way to the airport to catch the last plane to Houston to work on the offering. By this time, Glanville was well into his sixties, overweight, and craggy. According to Bohner, he had his driver purposely get lost in Queens, and then, when it was obvious that the last flight to Houston had been missed, he suggested that they take the first flight out in the morning. "I didn't understand that he was hitting on me," she said. "I was that naive. I was that weird.... And then he sent me flowers the next day, and the flowers, I didn't have a doorman, so the flowers came to the office, and I opened up the card [when she got back from Houston] and I was like, 'Oh my God!' So I just ripped up the card and threw it out and said they were from my brother."

J. Virgil Waggoner, the CEO of Sterling Chemicals, also gave Bohner an earful when she showed up for the meeting in Houston. He said to her: "I don't understand why a girl like you is doing this. You're a beautiful girl. Why don't you just get married?" Bohner described sitting at the conference room table with Waggoner--known to all as "Virge"--after he finished making his comments. "I took it seriously, 'Oh, I actually really enjoy my work,' like I actually answered the question. I mean, can you imagine?" Later, when she was at the printer putting together the prospectus for the Sterling IPO, the CFO of Sterling saw her and asked her to get him a cup of coffee, with cream and sugar. The man later apologized for thinking she was a secretary and not part of the deal team. "It was sort of just like constant," she said. The oil and gas group was clearly the wrong place for Bohner, and Ward Woods, of all people, recognized that fact. Woods recommended to Loomis that Bohner be transferred to another group. "She's getting killed," he told Loomis.

But the shenanigans did not stop. Michael Price, then a young Lazard partner, got a firm reprimand from Bill Loomis for joking with Jamie Kempner about whether or not he had had sex with Bohner yet. Bohner was working with Kempner on the Sterling IPO, and he was her mentor. Price's comment was inappropriate and outrageous--as Kempner was, and is, happily married--and Loomis let Price have it in the form of a warning that such behavior would not be tolerated. Christina Mohr introduced Bohner to a young banker from Salomon Brothers who was working with Mohr on a deal. The idea was that Bohner should meet some people her own age. They dated a few times and, the rumor goes, had sex in the small library at Lazard. Then there were the unfounded rumors going around the office that she had sex with the bisexual fellow in charge of the night word-processing department. And with Mark Pincus, a fellow analyst. And Luis Rinaldini. And there was the rumor that she had oral sex with Felix, also in the library. Felix used to stop by Bohner's office regularly to chat with her when her office was, briefly, on the thirty-second floor of One Rock. The rank and file couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that Felix barely knew the names of people who had been there for years but made a point of spending time with Kate, a twenty-two-year-old financial analyst. But these rumors persisted, even though some clearly were not true.

Kate recalled, "When somebody confronted me with the rumor about her and Felix, I said, 'You can't get fired for that. You can only get promoted for it.' So that's why it circled the firm, because I was just so pissed at this point. I was so tired of all the chitchat I couldn't take it anymore." Rumors about Bohner and all sorts of Lazard bankers had become a staple around the firm. "The tally of people Kate slept with around the firm got up to around fifteen," one former partner said.

Many of the stories about Felix pursuing the younger women at the firm were more rumor and innuendo than anything else. "I think that it is a remarkable sense of delusion for someone such as myself or perhaps even Linda [Pohs] or Michael [Carmody] to think that they were going to compete with Shirley MacLaine or Barbara Walters for Felix," Kathy Kelly said. "Did Felix ever put his hand on your shoulder and come close to you? Yes, that's Felix's way. He's a warm guy. But that's not sexual harassment. He's a flirt. And that's part of the goddamn job. And you know why it was part of the goddamn job? Because that's exactly what you do with your clients. You flirt." For his part, Felix claimed to be "blissfully unaware" of all the sexually aggressive behavior that had been so much a part of Lazard over the years and said he could no longer even recall names such as Gerowin, Pohs, Carmody, Kelly, Mohr, McArthur, and Bohner. "Without going into personalities," one woman banker explained, "I think that was the time at which there were some dark forces around Lazard. And I do think that there was at least one individual who was not fair. And who did not treat me well. And since at Lazard you were kind of waiting to turn fifty-five, I kind of looked at how old I was, looked at when I would turn fifty-five, and looked at these people and said, 'Maybe there's a better place for me to wait out the next ten years than getting picked on by these characters.'"

But there was more. A senior vice president of Lazard, well on his way to making partner, was a regular visitor to Bohner's office after she moved down to the thirtieth floor. The senior vice president would come by and chat, no doubt as he had seen Felix do with Bohner any number of times. Loomis became a little concerned by his increasingly random visits to see Bohner. Loomis's office was right next to Bohner's, part of the plan to try to protect Kate by letting people know that Loomis would be watching. After all, the senior vice president was married with children. And Loomis was becoming all too aware of the effect Bohner was having on the Lazard men.

Word had gotten around the firm about the various incidents. Loomis took Bohner out for lunch--a burger downstairs in Rockefeller Center--and just let her know that he was aware of and concerned about the senior vice president's increasing visits. Some two weeks later, Mary Conwell, a banker in Lazard's Chicago office, had come to New York for Christina Mohr's wedding and was staying at Bohner's apartment. Conwell was at the apartment the night that the senior vice president knocked on the door looking for Bohner. He was in an inebriated condition supposedly exacerbated by sleeping pills. At first Conwell told him to leave, that Bohner was not home. He apparently did leave, went for another drink or two, and then returned to the apartment. This time Bohner was home, and the senior vice president was let in. He proceeded to "throw me into a brick wall" in the apartment, Bohner said. He became ill. He supposedly announced to Bohner that he was in love with her and wanted to leave his wife and children.

As appalled as Bohner was, she would never have said anything about the incident, she said, because she had a sense that somehow the victim has a way of getting blamed for these types of things. "If I had gone to Bill Loomis and said a senior vice president came stumbling over to my apartment and threw me into a brick wall, nothing good can happen to my career for saying that," Bohner explained. "There's going to be fifty people in the firm that say it was somehow my fault." Conwell felt differently. She reported the incident to Ken Jacobs and also to Loomis. "The incident--what I observed of it--was the biggest injustice from a moral standpoint," Conwell explained. Loomis confronted the man. And the firm fired him instantly. Loomis had simply seen and heard enough after decades of the women at Lazard being sexually harassed. The senior vice president became the fall guy for his own lapse in judgment--and that of all the Lazard bankers before him. Bohner said she forgives the man. She even congratulated him years later on his accomplishments since leaving the firm. The incident has done nothing to damage the friendship between Loomis and the senior vice president, either. Loomis has had business dealings with him and they see each other regularly, both socially and professionally.

But after the firing, Bohner had had enough of Lazard--and vice versa. She was simply too disruptive a force at the firm. "I was embarrassed by the whole situation, quite frankly," she said. "I could tell that people were treating me differently inside the firm afterward. And I just felt depressed, and I felt like I'd been ripped off. There were certain people that were really on my side, and then I think there were just certain people that were like, oh God, what a troublemaker, but I don't know, because no one ever really said anything to me. I just sort of dropped into the background after that." She left the firm a few months later after fulfilling her two-year commitment. "They couldn't wait to get rid of me," she said. On that day, the former Lazard partner Ward Woods, who had become CEO of Bessemer Securities, called her and invited her to lunch at Le Bernardin, one of the best restaurants in New York City. While Woods's wife spent her time at their home in Sun Valley, Idaho, Woods and Bohner began a four-year affair. Woods, handsome and charming, had a long track record himself of sexual misadventures, according to his former partners. He also used to carry on his trysts in the corporate hotel suite of one of his Lazard oil and gas clients. Now Woods and Bohner became a public item. They went to parties and restaurants together. They lived together in Woods's Fifth Avenue apartment, where she became well known to his doormen and his driver. They had lunch every Friday at Le Bernardin. She became well known to the pilots of his private jet.

To Loomis, the firm's record in treating its women employees is nothing to be proud of. "There were a series of very difficult situations involving women ranging from equity to appropriate conduct which were very unpleasant for me, for Michel, and for other people, too," he recalled. But he maintained Lazard did improve in this regard over time. (Could it have been much worse?) "I'd say, in 1980, I think if the place had had a policy, it would have had a policy that there wouldn't be women partners," Loomis said. "And in 1990, if the place had a policy, it would say, 'You know, we need to have more women partners.'"

But to another of Loomis's partners, the firm's troubled experience with women was nothing less than an embarrassing, and long-hidden, fiasco, with the bad behavior condoned by the senior partners. "Kate came into my office one day and was in tears," this partner said. "She said, 'I don't know what to do, blah, blah, blah. I don't know whether to sue Lazard or not.' I said, 'Well, Kate, why don't you think it over?'" He also went to see Michel to talk about the deteriorating situation. "So I went to Michel, and I said, 'Michel, this could really be an ugly scene.' At that point, the Goldman litigation--remember when they got sued for $150 million? Sued by a secretary, there was a big litigation. I went to Michel and said this could be a really expensive thing. And Michel's comment to me was, 'I don't understand the way American parents raise their daughters.' My jaw dropped. I didn't know what he meant by that. As if his predatory partners were not at fault. But he was sort of blaming the women."

The Goldman litigation, though, hit a nerve with Michel. "Then all of a sudden he said we have to stop this," this partner explained. "He didn't send a memo around, but it was understood that you weren't supposed to do this anymore. It still went on, and there were a number of women who left this firm, really wonderful people who left this firm, after being sexually harassed." Lazard assiduously cultivated its image of having the highest ethical standards, of being an independent adviser beyond reproach. "And of being a class act," this partner said, "and it never was."