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Manager and his team.
Gladstone had reached the level of Supervisor, and one of the recruits who enabled him to do so was Bernard Cornfeld. But within a fairly short time, Gladstone found himself in the intolerable position of having a mere Basic Salesman as a rival for the informal dominance of his group. It was very shortly after having recruited Cornfeld that Gladstone came storming into Walter Benedick's office with a demand. 'I'm the greatest group salesman you've got,' declared Gladstone, 'And I'm asking you to get that Cornfeld out of my group.' It was probably a mistake on Gladstone's part to see Bernie as a rival; almost certainly, Cornfeld's ambitions already went beyond competing for a position as a supervising salesman in the IPC sales force. But the Benedicks, somewhat alarmed by the outburst, agreed and moved Cornfeld into another group.
What impressed Cornfeld's colleagues was his life style more than his sales. His most remarkable achievement, perhaps, was the apartment known jocularly, but incorrectly, as 'Bernie's Whorehouse' - which was also a considerable piece of financing, as far as it went. One day, he saw advertised in the New York Times a huge apartment in the West Sixties. It had ten rooms, a triplex living room of cathedral proportions, a room with an organ whose pipes ran up all three floors, and other splendours.
'Bernie,' said Richard Roberts, 'you must be mad. You can't live there.' But Cornfeld took the apartment, canvassed eight friends, and formed a syndicate to cover the rent: the result must have been the Ultimate Pad of the Fifties. The rooms were hung with tapestries, and in a corner of the master-bedroom stood an object of most outre fashion, an orgone box, crackling and flashing with electrical energy. It would appear that Cornfeld, the follower of Adler, had some consideration for the rival guru Wilhelm Reich, and his amazing theories about the relationships of 'orgone energy', orgasm and electricity. Of such feats is personal charisma made.
At this precise mid-point of the Fifties, financial charisma was accumulating at great speed around the person of a forty-year-old member of the New York Stock Exchange named Jack J. Dreyfus Jr, who had bought a mediocre open-end concern named the Nesbett Fund and relabelled it with his own name. On January 1, 1955, there was $2.3 million in the Dreyfus Fund. By December 31, that sum had risen by 143% to $5.6 million, and the fund was firmly established in its explosive pattern of doubling, or more than doubling, roughly every year over the next half-dozen years.
The daring, and eventually frantic 'go-go' funds which proliferated over the next few years nearly all represented some kind of attempt to emulate the brilliant assault which carried the Dreyfus Fund from obscurity to eminence inside a decade. And Dreyfus was also, quite clearly, the exemplar of the 'offshore' funds, and of the IOS funds in particular.
To people making their own discovery of mutual funds, there was a magic aura around Dreyfus. Especially, legend attached to his famous hunch about the Polaroid camera, and to the Fund's purchase, at $31¾ each, of 400 Polaroid shares which were not even listed at that time on the New York Stock Exchange, but which eventually rose to a value of $6,372 apiece. Hopes of encountering his own Polaroid glowed somewhere in the bosom of every money manager in New York, Geneva, or San Francisco who purchased an unregistered curiosity during the ten years after Dreyfus' coup. But the Polaroid legend misrepresented what Dreyfus was about.
Dreyfus capitalized on two propositions. One was that there was a new class of people available to become investors, willing to respond to the Dreyfus Lion in the television commercials for the fund, and to the efforts of newly-raised armies of salesmen using a prospectus in which Dreyfus made a serious effort to translate financial terms into language that
Gladstone had reached the level of Supervisor, and one of the recruits who enabled him to do so was Bernard Cornfeld. But within a fairly short time, Gladstone found himself in the intolerable position of having a mere Basic Salesman as a rival for the informal dominance of his group. It was very shortly after having recruited Cornfeld that Gladstone came storming into Walter Benedick's office with a demand. 'I'm the greatest group salesman you've got,' declared Gladstone, 'And I'm asking you to get that Cornfeld out of my group.' It was probably a mistake on Gladstone's part to see Bernie as a rival; almost certainly, Cornfeld's ambitions already went beyond competing for a position as a supervising salesman in the IPC sales force. But the Benedicks, somewhat alarmed by the outburst, agreed and moved Cornfeld into another group.
What impressed Cornfeld's colleagues was his life style more than his sales. His most remarkable achievement, perhaps, was the apartment known jocularly, but incorrectly, as 'Bernie's Whorehouse' - which was also a considerable piece of financing, as far as it went. One day, he saw advertised in the New York Times a huge apartment in the West Sixties. It had ten rooms, a triplex living room of cathedral proportions, a room with an organ whose pipes ran up all three floors, and other splendours.
'Bernie,' said Richard Roberts, 'you must be mad. You can't live there.' But Cornfeld took the apartment, canvassed eight friends, and formed a syndicate to cover the rent: the result must have been the Ultimate Pad of the Fifties. The rooms were hung with tapestries, and in a corner of the master-bedroom stood an object of most outre fashion, an orgone box, crackling and flashing with electrical energy. It would appear that Cornfeld, the follower of Adler, had some consideration for the rival guru Wilhelm Reich, and his amazing theories about the relationships of 'orgone energy', orgasm and electricity. Of such feats is personal charisma made.
At this precise mid-point of the Fifties, financial charisma was accumulating at great speed around the person of a forty-year-old member of the New York Stock Exchange named Jack J. Dreyfus Jr, who had bought a mediocre open-end concern named the Nesbett Fund and relabelled it with his own name. On January 1, 1955, there was $2.3 million in the Dreyfus Fund. By December 31, that sum had risen by 143% to $5.6 million, and the fund was firmly established in its explosive pattern of doubling, or more than doubling, roughly every year over the next half-dozen years.
The daring, and eventually frantic 'go-go' funds which proliferated over the next few years nearly all represented some kind of attempt to emulate the brilliant assault which carried the Dreyfus Fund from obscurity to eminence inside a decade. And Dreyfus was also, quite clearly, the exemplar of the 'offshore' funds, and of the IOS funds in particular.
To people making their own discovery of mutual funds, there was a magic aura around Dreyfus. Especially, legend attached to his famous hunch about the Polaroid camera, and to the Fund's purchase, at $31¾ each, of 400 Polaroid shares which were not even listed at that time on the New York Stock Exchange, but which eventually rose to a value of $6,372 apiece. Hopes of encountering his own Polaroid glowed somewhere in the bosom of every money manager in New York, Geneva, or San Francisco who purchased an unregistered curiosity during the ten years after Dreyfus' coup. But the Polaroid legend misrepresented what Dreyfus was about.
Dreyfus capitalized on two propositions. One was that there was a new class of people available to become investors, willing to respond to the Dreyfus Lion in the television commercials for the fund, and to the efforts of newly-raised armies of salesmen using a prospectus in which Dreyfus made a serious effort to translate financial terms into language that
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