Diary of a Yuppie Read online

  Diary of a Yuppie

  Louis Auchincloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  …

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

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  11

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  1986

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON

  Copyright © 1986 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or trans—

  mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval

  system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act

  or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be

  addressed in writing to Houghton Mifflin Company, 2 Park Street,

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  Diary of a yuppie.

  I. Title.

  PS3501.U25D43 1986 813’-54 86-2870

  ISBN 0-395-41649-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  S 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A signed first edition of this book

  has been privately printed by

  The Franklin Library.

  For

  CHUCK KADES

  The Greatest Lawyer

  I’ve Ever Worked With

  1

  I HAVE BEEN WORKING such long hours on this last corporate takeover that I have hardly made an entry in my journal for six weeks.

  And right now I pull myself up.

  Is that what I have finally decided this is? A journal? After all these years? That whole file drawer that I keep in the office—away from Alice’s too curious eyes—the accumulation of jottings on long yellow foolscap: letters written but unsent, “personalities,” imagined dialogues, remarks I wish I’d made at parties (staircase wit), diatribes of hate, hymns of love, endless dissections of my own fears and neuroses—could they all have been gradually melding into a form, a shape, a journal? And just what is a journal? A novel with a narrator, an “I”? Henry James disapproved of these; he said that they limited the tale to what the narrator could observe. The greater drama, according to him, was to see the observer observing. But people know more about themselves today than they did in Mr. James’s time—or at least they should. And they certainly know more about themselves than even their closest intimates know about them. Or again—they certainly should.

  My first papers go back a dozen years to my undergraduate days at Columbia, where I majored in English, as the best preparation for law. There are bits and pieces of stories and novels, for there was that brief period in freshman year when I actually contemplated becoming a writer. Soon I gave up the idea because there are too few financially successful writers; the law has a much broader peak. But I suspected even then that I was going to use pencil and paper on some kind of regular private basis to maintain my mental balance in a world populated by humans obsessed with their own illusions. For surely most people live more in their own fiction than in their own fact. Fact is too thin, too dry, too small, too passionless. And they? Why they, of course, are great tawny roaring lions—at least in their own mind’s eye.

  But it is time I stopped meandering. That is, if I am really to follow the aim and drift that I think I begin to see emerging from the yellow mass in the locked file cabinet behind my desk on the fortieth floor of the Pan Am Building. A journal I have just now called it, and a journal, for a time at least, it will be. I am writing at home tonight, but I shall be sure to put this paper away in my pocket before Alice comes in from her Metropolitan Museum lecture. Alice would never go through my pockets, but she would not hesitate to read anything I left around. She plays the literary agent at home as well as in the office and insists that I have a book in me. Or is that just an excuse for vulgar female curiosity? But is male curiosity any less vulgar?

  I suspect that what may be orienting my words now on the yellow page before me is my suspicion that the new crisis in my office life is not an ordinary one. Like a good lawyer, let me state the facts, or what Mr. James would call the donnée.

  “I” am Robert Service, aged thirty-two, an associate in the law firm of Hoyt, Welles & Andrew (thirty-six partners, a hundred clerks), and I have been privately assured (not guaranteed—they never do that) of my ultimate promotion on the first day of this coming January, 1980. Partnership has been my sole ambition—you might even call it my obsession—throughout eight years of driving work, including most weekday nights and many weekends. And what do I feel, now that triumph is nigh? Very little.

  I have become a specialist in corporate takeovers. The one I am working on now, under Branders Blakelock, is the bitterly contested bid of Atlantic Rylands to take control of Shaughnessy Products. We represent the aggressor (I use the word advisedly), and the “target” is engaging in every defense of the game, including the “scorched earth” policy of encumbering its properties with debts and long-term leases to discourage the predator. It is also starting up new lines of business, closely allied to Atlantic’s, so that the latter may be faced with the menace of an antitrust suit in the event of victory. In such warfare all is fair.

  Or should be. Mr. Blakelock is my problem. It has come about this way. A routine procedure is the search, sometimes through paid informers, for evidence of improper conduct of the officers of a target company. Armed with such a find, one can sometimes blackmail the target into a compromise or at least, by means of a derivative stockholders’ suit, get rid of a troublesome officer. Examination of “abandoned property,” a euphemism for the contents of the target’s trash baskets, is often rewarding. Mr. Blakelock finds these tactics offensive, and I try to shield him from awareness of them, but I had to tell him about one shredded document, which we had pieced together, to get his permission to bring a suit against Albert Lamb, Shaughnessy’s president.

  It was a memorandum from an accountant to the company treasurer about Hendrickson Lamb, Albert’s younger brother, an alcoholic with a sinecure job and a salary paid by Albert personally. The interesting part of the memorandum dealt with what appeared to be an embezzlement of company cash by the brother. The memo read: “As you know, it is Mr. Lamb’s practice to refund such defalcations promptly from his own account.”

  So there it was. Perhaps not much, but enough to start a stockholders’ suit seeking the removal of Albert Lamb from Shaughnessy. And Albert was causing Atlantic’s biggest headache in the attempted takeover.

  I knew that I should have trouble with Mr. Blakelock, and I waited for some time this morning for the right moment to break it to him. He had called me to his office to discuss a motion in the federal District Court that I am to argue next Monday. He has great confidence in himself as a coach and likes to imagine himself as an impresario, a kind of Svengali who can inspire or even hypnotize a disciple into a brilliant performance. I always sit patiently and silently through these sessions.

  Indeed, I hardly look up at him. It is enough to sense him towering above me, standing tall and bony in one of those baggy black suits that he has worn throughout the eight years I have known him, booming or shrilling alternately down at me from the mahogany lectern at which he likes to stand as if he were so
me Abelard of old preaching to students.

  “And remember, Robert, when you have finished your oral argument, don’t trail off, or glance at your notes for some afterthought or final emphasis, but obey the immortal command of the late John W. Davis, the greatest pleader it was ever my privilege to hear”—here the reedy voice becomes suddenly stentorian—“and sit down!”

  But this morning I am tired of it. The job has been too long and grinding, and it is not half done. The knowledge that I should soon be a partner has not brought the anticipated ecstasy but instead a quickening anxiety as to whether I have chosen the right firm. Of course, I have always been like that; foretasting is so much of my satisfaction that I rarely enjoy even a brief elation upon fruition. It seems to me that I am weary at last of Blakelock’s paternalism. He has liked me, preferred me, perhaps even loved me. I have to some extent made up for the son he has never had, and that has been a fine enough thing while I was an aspiring clerk, but now that I am ceasing to be a clerk, should I not be promoted to the more equal status of younger brother?

  That has a rather nasty look, even to my eyes, as I reread it. Imagine how it would seem to Alice! But was it my fault that Blakelock chose to crowd me into the vacuum of his heart? I have always liked him—I still do—but he ought certainly to understand—who better?—how much it has been to my advantage to play along with a senior partner who has my destiny in his hands. Why do people persist in the illusion that their caring creates some kind of duty of reciprocation, or even respect, in the hearts of those they care for? Why do they kid themselves that there is something fine or noble or duty-creating in the fire of a passion that they have not only deliberately kindled in themselves but have huffed and puffed on to make it as large and crackling as possible? How many of them ever seriously try to douse it? They don’t because they’re afraid they might succeed. And they don’t want to succeed any more than they want to face the fact that the object of their affections is usually the creation of their fantasy.

  For what am I, Robert Service, to Branders Blakelock? Not what I seem to myself, anyway. I cannot be sure, obviously, just how he likes to picture me, but I hazard the guess that it may be as an Antinous on whose bare muscular arm the wise old leader of the ancient world does not disdain to lean. Should that not be enough for Antinous? What is he, poor Bithynian lad, if not the beloved of Hadrian? I do not suggest that Blakelock has lascivious designs on me—nothing, I am sure, would shock him more, even in his most secret thoughts—but I do note that his protégés have all been handsome, and we know what a cesspool the subconscious can be. Or, to put it more innocently, perhaps he conceives of me as a kind of faithful wolfhound, crouched submissively at his side but ready at a signal to leap, to rush, to kill.

  “Remember, also, Robert, that Judge Axeman, like so many of our federal bench, thinks of himself as a man who can change the world. While the president and Congress are paralyzed by party faction, he will ensure that discrimination shall be abolished, if he has to bus our youth a million miles a day; that votes shall be equal, if he has to redistrict all our states; and that the environment shall be preserved, if he must bring industry to a grinding halt! God bless him—I’m half on his side. But what, you will ask, can a reforming judge expect to accomplish in a corporate takeover? Is it not a case of two scorpions in a bottle? Perhaps. But remember that behind every judicial idealist there lurks a lover of power. Axeman likes to play with our big companies as a boy with an electric train. And that is where your role comes in. You must make him feel that the takeover of Shaughnessy Products is a more efficient way of distributing the loaves and fishes to the multitude! You must help him to don the toga of the public servant. Precedent must bow to the general welfare—that is, when precedent is against us!”

  But I have heard it all before. Looking down the long oblong sparsely furnished chamber—two rather fine English cabinets, a Colonial bench and some wooden uncushioned armchairs, signed photographs of judges on the walls and “spy” cartoons of British lawyers—it strikes me that litigation has survived in a world of computers like a Toonerville trolley on the track of a Metro-liner. Yet its very survival has made it curiously revered. The tricks and winks and chuckles of the courtroom technique, the voice of thunder, the sly insinuations, the throat clearings, the whispered conferences, the whole hammy vaudeville adored by judge and jury—and by television audiences—has become too sacred to be touched, has even in some crazy way taken the place of our empty churches as the shrine of the oldest American virtue.

  It is now that I choose to blurt out my discovery about Lamb. It is not the right moment—it is never the right moment—but at least I have his attention.

  “Where the hell did you dig that up?”

  I hesitate. “Do you have to know?”

  “I suppose it was an ‘abandoned property’ search? Very well, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. You’re surely not planning to use it?”

  “Of course I am. I plan to use it as the basis of a suit to remove Lamb as c.e.o. of Shaughnessy.”

  “You’ve got to be crazy, Bob. I knew about Al’s brother. He’s a kind of kleptomaniac. Al has always looked after the poor nut.”

  “Nut? Has he been judicially declared incompetent?”

  “Of course not. Al was much too proud. He handles his family problems himself. He’s supported that brother all his life and put his son and daughter through college. He even manufactured a kind of career for him in Shaughnessy, at his own considerable expense. I never heard of anyone who did more for a sibling.”

  “But a brother’s hand in the till is still a crime, isn’t it? And isn’t Albert’s covering it up another?”

  “I suppose, technically. But it can all be explained.”

  “Can it? And even if it can, would Albert Lamb like the exposure?”

  “Hell, no! It would probably kill the poor loon of a brother.”

  “Then there you are. Albert will have another inducement to settle. Isn’t that what we’re after?”

  “Robert, I can hardly believe my ears. Is it really you talking?”

  “Do you suppose Albert Lamb would think twice before using a weapon like this against any officer of Atlantic?”

  Blakelock has to pause at this. “Well, you have to remember that Albert feels that Atlantic is trying to destroy his very lifework in Shaughnessy. A man in that position gets pretty desperate. But you and I are not in that position, Bob.”

  “Our client is. Atlantic has very high stakes in this case. What can we lose, Mr. B, by taking the chance?”

  “Nothing, I suppose, but honor.”

  “Where is that? Didn’t we check it when we went into the takeover business? Why don’t you let me try it, anyway? There’s nothing like one bit of dirt to start up another. People hearing about the case may suddenly remember more. We may dig up enough dirt about Lamb to blow up his whole board of directors!”

  “No! Never! I won’t have it!”

  His indignation makes me bold. “You talk about honor. What about duty to a client?”

  “Can you really believe that it obliges me to pick up a tarnished piece of family gossip and puff it into a scandal that may destroy Albert’s peace of mind and perhaps his brother’s very life?”

  “Why is that relevant? It’s a fact, isn’t it, that Albert Lamb covered up the crime of a junior officer? And isn’t it our duty to use every fact at our disposal? Lamb knows that as well as we do. When he got into this fight he knew that everything in his past would be pored over and used. That’s how the game is played, Mr. B, and what’s more, I think it’s basically how it was always played. Only today we’re franker about it. And I think that’s better.”

  “I think it’s worse. Much worse. I think it’s obscene, and there’s no place in my law practice for obscenity.”

  In the silence following this I look up at last, intending defiantly to meet my boss’s eyes. But he has turned his back to me, and his shoulders are stooped with what strikes me as a rather me
lodramatic expression of dismay and grief.

  “You’d really sling that kind of mud, Robert?” the sad, now deep voice rumbles at me.

  “I’d sling any mud I could make stick. Albert Lamb is the key to the whole defense.”

  “Even admitting it’s mud?”

  “But legal mud, Mr. B!”

  “I had not been aware that mud observed these distinctions.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  “Robert, you appall me. You would really, for a dubious advantage to a client, so bespatter your adversary?”

  “You mean it would be all right if the advantage were less dubious?”

  After another solemn silence Mr. Blakelock speaks with a faint note of weariness. “Let me put it very simply, then. This material will not be used.”

  “Can’t we think it over for a day or so? Give me a little time to convince you.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind, Robert. The material on Lamb’s brother will not be used by this firm in a derivative stockholders’ suit or in any other way. I am no longer concerned about that. What concerns me much more is your amorality. It comes as a sad surprise to me. I feel almost as if I did not know you.”

  “Have you ever wanted to know me?”

  “Go home, Robert! Go home before I lose my temper! Take the weekend off; stay away from the office. Tell your darling wife what you have told me and listen carefully to what she says. I miss my guess if she will not agree with me. Let her help you, my boy. Let her guide you! I fear I must have been a false leader.”

  “Mr. Blakelock—”

  “Go home, son, go home! I’ve had enough of you for one day.”

  2

  OH, YES, I have a very definite feeling that this crisis is not going to pass. I may find myself making a significant addition to the file drawer of my penciled fulminations. What a crazy collection it is—hundreds of pages of myself recording or imagining my talks with others! Before I married Alice I even used to write love letters to girls I hardly knew, or didn’t know—sometimes to movie stars—which of course I was never mad enough to mail. When I was angry with people I would write down all the terrible things that I wanted to happen to them or draft legal documents dealing with their arraignment and condign punishment. I wrote out my dreams in the most copious detail and learned not to blush at my daytime erotic fantasies. I think I have learned the hard lesson that it is perfectly possible for a man to know himself if he will only accept the premise that he is probably not very different from his neighbor.