The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (16 page)

He was strongly aware of the enormous force exerted by luck in his life, however. He sometimes worried about what would happen if his luck deserted him. “When a man has lived by luck,” he remarked once to a Swiss banker friend, “he lives with fear. If luck departs, where do you go for a new supply?” Livermore’s luck began to evaporate during the giddy boom of the 1920s – a notably bad time for short selling. He recouped some of his losses in the 1930s, but his old flair seemed to be gone. In 1940, for reasons that never became clear, perhaps brooding about departed luck, he shot himself.

Kirk Douglas and Banana Nose Wilson, of Amsterdam, New York, are two more men who think long thoughts about luck. Oddly, Wilson seems more comfortably at home with his bad luck than Douglas does with his good luck.

Wilson says, “I stopped fighting it long ago. The hell with it. Life can take me where it wants. I’ll go quietly.”

Douglas says, “A man likes to feel he’s in control of his life, but it’s a damned illusion. The X factor is always there: luck, whatever you want to call it. You can have all the talent in the world, but without luck you go nowhere. It’s frustrating because you can’t control it; you can’t do anything about it.”

Issur Danielovitch was a tough kid from a tough neighborhood, with no apparent prospects for any great success. “I was going no place. I wasn’t interested in anything except girls. I was the kind of kid who, as an adult, would end up as a clerk in an Amsterdam department store. But then this crazy X factor blew into my life for the first time. In high school, by chance, I was assigned to a class run by a teacher named Louise Livingston, and one day she asked me to take a small part in a school play. There was no reason for her to do it; it just happened – it was a fluke. If it hadn’t happened, nobody outside Amsterdam would know my name today. But it did happen, and I got interested in acting, and Louise Livingston boosted me along, and that’s how it started.”

Young Danielovitch worked his way through college (partly as a clerk in an Amsterdam department store), went to New York City and tried to break into show business. “For a long while it looked as though luck had gone. I lived in a grubby little room in Greenwich village, worked as a waiter in a Schrafft’s restaurant. I got a couple of bit parts on Broadway. In one play I was an offstage echo – this was the kind of success I was having. When I went into the U.S. Navy in 1942, I seemed to be no further along in my acting career than when I’d started under Louise Livingston.”

But luck was operating in its own secret way. One of the girls whom young Kirk Douglas kissed goodbye when he went to war was a struggling young actress named Lauren Bacall. While Douglas was out in the Pacific, Lauren Bacall enjoyed her own run of luck and abruptly became a Hollywood star. (“Your own luck depends on other people’s luck. It’s crazy, crazy.”) She induced a Hollywood producer to watch Douglas act when he got back to civilian life, and his movie career began. “Oh, sure,” he says, “I guess I had some kind of talent. But if I hadn’t had this Lauren Bacall fluke, where would the talent have gone? Dozens of my friends back then had talent, too, but you don’t see their names in movies today. They didn’t have the luck.”

After acting in obscure second-rate movies for a while, Douglas one day had a Jesse Livermore-style hunch. He was offered parts in two movies. One was a big, expensive production by a wealthy company that could offer him a lot of money. The other was a low-budget production by a small company that could offer only a bare minimum in earnings. “Why did I choose the little outfit? I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know today. It was a plain, wild hunch.” The little company’s movie was entitled
Champion
, and this was the movie that made Kirk Douglas a star.

One day in 1958, producer Mike Todd invited Kirk Douglas to fly with him from the West Coast to New York. “At the last moment I didn’t go. There were circumstances – luck, I guess you’d call it. I had my bags packed, but I didn’t get on the plane.” The plane crashed, killing Mike Todd and everyone else aboard.

Luck. Issur Danielovitch plainly had it. Charles Alexander Wilson didn’t. While Danielovitch was going up, Wilson was going down.

Wilson was born in the same tough section of Amsterdam. He did well in his early years of school; he recalls that his grades were mainly A’s and B’s. When he was about 12, his father chanced to hear of a semiskilled job in Providence, Rhode Island, and the family migrated. “It seemed like good luck for my old man, because his wages went up a bit, but it was bad luck for me. I’d been happy in school before, but somehow I never made it in the Providence schools. I ran into some bad teachers. There was one who kidded me about my big nose, and the kids took it up from her, and I never got to be anything but an outsider. I was Charlie the Beak, the kid everybody laughed at. Well, hell, that kind of thing bothers a kid. My grades fell. I guess from then on I was marked as a loser. I had the loser psychology. I’d only just started, but I was already finished.”

Unlike young Danielovitch, whose chance contact with a good teacher showed him the value of education, unlucky Charlie Wilson understandably came to hate school. He dropped out before finishing high school. He worked as a laborer. “Every now and then I’d try for a better job, but I had
loser
written all over me. I guess what I did was, I’d apply for a job believing I wasn’t going to get it. I’d apologize to the guy for wasting his time. Naturally, he wouldn’t give me the job.”

In 1939 a break came Wilson’s way. He got a job driving for a small trucking company. He and the owner of the business grew fond of each other. The owner, an older man, wanted to retire and began to talk about turning the business over to Wilson as manager and partner. Wilson saw a chance to succeed at last, grew excited over the deal, studied the company’s books and the economics of the trucking business. “I was going to be a businessman! I thought,
I’ve finally made it!
”

But then the United States went to war. One of the first men drafted into the army from Providence was Charles Alexander Wilson. By the time he returned to civilian life in the mid-1940s, the little trucking business and the owner were both dead.

He drifted from job to job. He had learned to like whiskey in the army, but he was not yet drinking much. A new chance to succeed came his way when the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company hired him in 1948 as a warehouseman. Like many big companies in those days, Firestone had ambitious peacetime expansion plans but was hobbled by a post-war lack of technically trained young men. The company was continually dipping down into its pool of unskilled laborers, lifting them up, sending them to school and channelling them into what, for some, became golden new careers. Charlie Wilson, lacking education but impressively bright, was one man so lifted. Firestone began by training him as a tire retreader, and there was talk of sending him to night school to complete his high-school education and then perhaps on to a chemical technicians’ school. “Once more I thought I had it made.”

Once more he was wrong. One Saturday night he was driving an arthritic 1938 Buick in New Jersey, when the steering mechanism gave way. He found the wheel spinning freely in his hands. “I was on a kind of country road. There was only one house anywhere near me. The rest was open fields. The car could have gone in a thousand different directions and it would have been OK. But what happens? Christ, the car heads straight for the house. I smash into the side of the garage, and the whole goddamn garage roof collapses.”

Charlie wasn’t badly hurt, but his career was. He had been drinking that night – but, he steadfastly claimed, not heavily. “I think I’d had three glasses of beer, nothing else.” He was charged with drunken driving. Nobody believed his story about the steering mechanism; the car was too badly smashed to yield supporting evidence. He was uninsured. The owner of the house sued him for several thousand dollars’ worth of damage, and his wages at Firestone were garnisheed.

That ended his bright career at Firestone. He drifted some more. One day in 1950, jobless and hungry and without hope, he passed an army recruiting poster that promised to teach him skills and a trade if he would reenlist. “It seemed like an answer. Here was a new chance to learn something useful. I figured that since you didn’t get shot at in the peacetime army, a man might as well earn his living there as anyplace else.”

He enlisted on June 15, 1950. On June 25 North Korean troops unexpectedly invaded South Korea across the 38
^th
parallel, and two days later U.S. forces were on their way to war, and a few months after that, Charlie Wilson was in Korea getting shot at.

“I figured, Nothing I do is ever going to turn out right. I figured, From now on, the hell with it. Korea is where I started drinking in earnest.”

Out of the army again in the late 1950s, he drifted to New York City, blew all his back pay and his frontline bonus and started looking for a job. “I was forty. I thought I had to make it this time or I’d be through forever. I quit drinking, dried out completely, got myself a decent-looking set of clothes. I mean, I was really determined to give it one last try.”

But he had no skills to offer any employer. And one day, sitting gloomily on a park bench scanning help-wanted ads in a newspaper, he had what he now considers the unluckiest break of his entire luckless life. “I’m sitting there, and a guy comes from nowhere and sits next to me. A bum, ragged, lushed up. He says, ‘Out of a job?’ I say yes, and he says, ‘I’ll tell you where to go.’ I figure he’s about to tell me about a job I can get. Instead, what he tells me is – well, it’s my doom.”

The bum told Charlie Wilson about New York’s Municipal Lodge – “the Muni,” its patrons call it – where destitute men can get free meal and bed tickets redeemable at restaurants and hotels in the Bowery. “When I got my free meal that night and went to bed in a free dormitory, I just gave up. The pressure was off. I didn’t have to hunt a job anymore. From that day on, I was trapped.”

Today he makes his daytime home at the Bowery’s rather ill-named Majestic Bar, where wine is served at 15 cents a glass. Banana Nose, as they call him (and, curiously, he likes the name), still clings to his self-respect. He shaves daily, his hair is neatly combed, his fingernails are clipped short and perfectly clean, his clothes are old but neat. He also clings to a certain sad optimism. “Most of what has happened to me is probably my own goddamn fault,” he told me recently, “but some of it has been plain bad luck, and I keep thinking maybe my luck will turn some day. Luck can turn, can’t it?”

I nodded. Banana Nose Wilson’s ugly but pleasant face suddenly brightened. “Maybe it just turned,” he said, “just now when you came out of nowhere and buttonholed me. Out of a thousand bums, you happened to pick me. Now, is that luck or isn’t it?”

I thought maybe it was. I had bought Banana Nose a meal and a carton of cigarettes. Now, as we parted, I gave Banana Nose ten bucks.

But what is luck? “You can read case histories like these in any of several ways,” says Dr. Jean Rosenbaum, a New Mexico psychoanalyst who is fascinated by what he calls “the syndrome of the chronic loser.” A man’s own character may help shape his luck, says Dr. Rosenbaum, but luck may have shaped his character to begin with. “It’s very hard to separate the two factors.”

If you examine a chronic loser’s life story, he says, you usually find that he invited much of his own bad luck. Dr. Rosenbaum once had a patient, for example, who was accident-prone to an almost ridiculous extent. He was a machinist. He had lost three fingers in three separate accidents. He had broken both arms and a leg at various times. He has been scalped in another accident and nearly blinded in another. “Around the plant where he worked, they called him Hard-Luck Harry. On the surface it did seem that he was a victim of outrageous and almost continual bad luck. But when he came to see me – he suspected his luck might be his own doing, you see – we discovered an interesting fact: Not more than a couple of hours before each of his accidents, he had had an argument with some supervisor or other. It seemed as though he then injured himself as a punishment for having bad thoughts about an authority figure!”

Dr. Rosenbaum pauses. “So his luck was caused by his character. But what had shaped his character? Where did this hang-up about authority figures come from? It went back to his childhood and his relationship with his father – back to events that were not his doing at all. Luck, you see, had shaped his character.”

This is one explanation of certain kinds of luck. But there are other kinds that cannot easily be explained that way. The kind Sherlock Feldman sees at the Dunes, for instance. “We have chronic losers around here, too,” says Feldman. “The law of averages says everyone should win once in a while, in an honest game – but there are people who almost never win. Why? You tell me.”

Feldman’s most poignant story concerns a sad-looking man who wandered into the Dunes one night and stood around watching a roulette game. Noticing that somebody had dropped a five-dollar bill under the table, he shouted to the dealers, “There’s a five on the floor!” The dealer misheard it amid the noise, thought the man had said, “Five on four!” Accordingly, the dealer put a five-dollar chip on the number four. The wheel spun, four came up, and the sad-looking man had won $175. The dealer shoved the chips across the table. Stunned, the man left them where they lay – by chance, on red. The wheel spun again, and red came up. The sad man had won again.

He was quivering with excitement. “My God,” he said to a bystander, “this is the first time in my life I ever won anything! I’m the unluckiest guy alive. I’ve never even won a dime in a poker game!”

“Well,” said the bystander, “if this is your lucky night at last, let it run.”

He did. He played that wheel until he had won more than $5000. Then, unable to stand the tension any longer, he gathered his chips and went to cash them, laughing and singing.

A firm rule at Las Vegas states that if a player calls a bet without actually putting up cash, he must eventually show that he had the cash in his pocket to cover that first bet. Otherwise the house will refuse to cash his chips. In this case the sad man was required to show that he had five dollars on him – the price of his first chip.