Wall Street (1987): The Stockbroker's Son and the Decade of Greed

Arsenault | Wall Street (1987): The Stockbroker's Son and the Decade of Greed Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida, Tampa Wall Street (1987): The Stockbroker's Son and the Decade of Greed Cordon Cekko (Michael Douglas) and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) discusstheAmerican Dream. 16 I Film & History Oliver Stone as Cinematic Historian | Special In-Depth Section Louis Stone spent almost all ofhis adult life on Wall Street. For five decades, through war and peace, boom and bust, he put on a starched white shirt and a Brooks Brothers suit and made the daily trek to the financial colossus ofsouthern Manhattan. After graduating from Yale in 1931 he worked his way up from a lowly floorwalker at a bond trading company to a vice-presidency at Shearson Lehman. From the early 1950s on, he doubled as the editor ofahighly literate and influential market newsletter, demonstrating time and again that he had a special talent for wheeling and dealing with other people's money. In the process he became a rich man, wealthy enough to sustain a glamorous New York social life, to purchase fashionable residences on East End Avenue and in Connecticut, and to pay private school tuition for his son Oliver—first at a toney prep school and later at Yale. Sadly, Louis Stone's singleminded devotion to the Street also contributed to the breakup ofhis marriage in 1961 and to the growing alienation ofhis bright but troubled teenage son. Indeed , in the mid-1960s his overweening desire to become even richer led to financial reverses that nearly drove him into bankruptcy. But even these setbacks did not shake his faith in the dollar-driven values of the "seven-block alley" that ruled the financial world.1 It was a world that he hoped his son would embrace and ultimately inherit. As a student at the Trinity School in Manhattan, Oliver nearly "drove [his] father crazy" with his uncanny ability to lose money in mock investing exercises. But when Oliver went off to Yale in 1964, Louis remained hopeful that his son would eventually follow in his footsteps. It was not to be. At Yale, Oliver nearly flunked an introductory economics course—"my mathematics were suspect " and "I was never able to understand the Samuelson book," he later confessed—and he did not fare much better in his other studies.2 In less than a year, he abandoned New Haven and the security of his father's world, embarking on a bohemian odyssey that took him to Vietnam, Mexico, Paris, the NYU Film School, and finally to Hollywood. In the years that followed, the relationship between father and son became increasingly stormy, and the elder Stone never reconciled himself to his rebellious son's countercultural apostasy. Even after Oliver had become a successful screenwriter in the late 1970s, his father was still urging him to return to the fold, "to wear a suit, cut your hair, be a stockbroker." Oliver consoled his father with the promise that someday he would turn his talents to the production of "an intelligent business movie," one that avoided simplistic antibusiness cliches and caricatures. But at the time of Louis Stone's death in 1985, the wayward son, busy preparing for the filming of Salvador, seemed a long way from fulfilling his pledge.3 Louis Stone's passing coincided with one of the most tumultuous periods in American economic history . Thanks in part to the ultraconservative politics of the Reagan Administration, unrestrained materialism was the order of the day. "Deregulation was the theme," the financial writer Adam Smith later recalled, "the markets knew best. Junk bonds were invented, credit was easy to come by, and no government wanted to risk its tenure by limiting the supply of money too much. Money flowed."4 And at the center ofit all was a revitalized Wall Street driven by an unprecedented rush ofcorporate acquisitions, mergers, and leveraged buyouts. The traditional stream ofstock transfers became a torrent as investment bankers and corporate raiders flooded the market with junk bonds and hostile takeovers. By mid-decade, stock-fed fortunes ranging into the tens and hundreds ofmillions were achievable; indeed, as a bemused Smith noted, even "the M.B.A.'s...