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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (31 page)

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life

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Page 154

He taught me how to be wise. He had a wonderful family. And his family really, really adored him.

When I first met Melvin in 1984, I had been a big success in the business. When I met Melvin I was absolutely one of the experts on tax-free bonds, not only in California, but maybe in the whole country

I thought I knew everything. I thought I was a hot item.

But he taught me, and he didn't know what a tax-free bond was. It was just due to life and how things were constructed and what was going on. Melvin used to come into my office almost every day. And we used to sit there and talk. And salesmen used to come in and try to sell us stuff, and he had a ball.

And it was like a father and a son. It really was.

When he first walked into my office, he said his account was at Merrill Lynch. He was frustrated, he said. He said he'd heard about me.

He says, "Maybe you can help me."

I said, "I'll do my best."

At first, it was a greed thing because he was a very big client. But the greed didn't last long. It didn't last maybe more than a month.

All of a sudden I started failing for this guy.

When he died, it just crushed me.

See, one of the worst things that can happen to you in my business isthese people get under your skin. You get crazy about them.

I mean last year I lost David Loew from the Loews Corporation. I'd known him for 25 years. He passed away.

I had so many big clients who've passed away. Really, really good guys. And they mean a lot to you.

But no one ever meant as much to me as Melvin. Melvin was at the top of the list.

One of the things Melvin taught me more than anything elseis if something negative happens with an investment, don't wait to get out. Do it quickly. The first loss is your best loss. If something doesn't look right, get out of it right away. Don't sit and try to make something right that couldn't ever be right. There's always other fish in the ocean.

He also taught me: Deal with people who get right back to you immediately. If they don't call you back right away, you don't need to deal with them. All little things like that.

Any success I've had in business life comes from a few things.

One, I think my expertise in reading people comes from playing poker. Sounds silly, I guess, but I know it's true, and I'll explain more about that later.

Two, is a knowledge base that comes from reading the encyclopediaI guess it was good to be a geek at one time in my life.

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Three, being able to look at a good stock from a bad stock, which helps me to be honest with my clients.

Just like Melvin and my Dad preached to me.

I used to always laugh and say, "Well, my role models were Albert Einstein and Sandy Koufax."

Because those are my two biggest heroes.

But when you look at it they actually took a backseat to my dad and Melvin.

Melvin, like my dad, was a real good Jew.

And that means something to another Jew.

I mean, it's like when you're a Catholic and you meet someone who's a really good, devout Catholic, you look up to them.

Melvin was like that, a man of his beliefs.

So were a lot of my clients, which is why I loved them. I got to know some of my celebrity clients fairly well, too. Some better than others.

You know what? Kirk Douglas was one of them. He is a lot like Melvin. He doesn't hide anything. Kirk is a wonderful guy. I love Kirk.

He is what we Jews call "haimish."

It means he's a regular person.

He's thrilled about what happened in his life. Proud of who he is, but humble.

Kirk is a great guy.

I knew Kirk well enough because I was with Kirk on many, many occasions. We spent time down in the desert together, time in Beverly Hills together with his family and his wife, Ann.

His son, Peter, and I were very, very close friends. We used to go out together all the time. As a joke for his birthday, I bought him a beret, a riding crop and a whip, because I used to call him "C.B." for Cecil B. DeMille.

Peter went on to do some movies. Peter's a good guy.

Kirk's other son, Michael, was older and I think he'd already done "Cuckoo's Nest." I didn't really get to know him.

When Kirk and I first got together, it was around 1976. And that came through my relationship with Anita May.

You know, when I first met the Douglases, I could have walked in and giggled and laughed and said, "Omigod, it's Kirk Douglas." Because he's a Hollywood legend. But I couldn't do that, because, you know why? I was looking at a really nice man. And you can't do that to a really nice man.

The value and the wonderful things that he had given me my whole life of going and seeing his movies, I could repay, not by gushing, but by trying to do the best job I could for him.

And I understood what it was like to be in my celebrity clients' profession, which often helped.

I was one of them, in a way. Certainly nothing like the stature of a Kirk

Page 156

Douglas, but having been generally in the same industry, I had a sense of "been there."

They knew I would treat 'em right. They knew they meant something to me.

All my clients meant so much to me.

Lloyd Bridges was a wonderful family man.

Bud Yorkin is a genius.

Same thing with Aaron Spelling.

They were clients and I admired them both a lot, just on the basis of intellect.

But there's also a warmness.

A lot of my clients are very warm people.

I will have to say, though, that I never quite understood Jane Fonda. And it had nothing to do with her politics.

I just couldn't quite understand some of the business moves she made. For instance, she would never buy bonds from places where there was a nuclear facility nearby.

But it wasn't the city's fault that there was a nuclear facility nearby. They were really good cities, and it didn't make sense to me.

I mean, my God, there are serial murderers living in Los Angeles, but I would buy Los Angeles bonds. Things like that.

On the other side of the coin, I'd have to say Jane carried her principles very highly. I think that's a good thing. I think she might have carried it to an extreme at the time, though.

But that's not a negative to say about Jane.

I only met her maybe a half a dozen times. She's a very serious person.

But she's a nice lady. She was always a lady. Always.

And I think she's a dynamite person. I like people who stand up for what they believe, whether I agree with them or not. And there's no doubt she believed them.

That old Hanoi Jane Stuff? Baloney.

People thought that she wasn't a good American?

That was a crock.

She was as good an American as any guy who's waving a flag. Believe me, she is.

She just didn't agree with what was going on with the war. You couldn't really help it. I mean, who the bell really wants to drop a bomb on all these people?

Other than a bunch of bloodthirsty ghouls.

I'm not one of those guys.

I guess I'm a different kind of an animal.

I'm a Republican, and fiscally I'm very conservative.

Socially, I'm kind of a liberal.

Page 157

I've got a lot of warmth and I've got a lot of feeling toward my fellow human beings.

I guess in doing all this name-dropping, it sounds like I'm just a suck-up to celebrities and that's all I care about.

Juice. Starpower. Box office muscle.

"I know (Fill in the Blank) and blah-blah-blah and yadda-yadda" and all this stuff about what good people they are is brown-nosing B.S.

Not true.

If you've gotten to know me at all by now, you know I pull no punches about what I think of people.

And your name or face aren't what dazzle me. It's what's inside that counts.

I had a lot of other clients who weren't major stars, but they're really good people. Boy, their money counts every bit as much as anyone else's.

I had one of the Jackson Five. I didn't have Michael. I had Sigmund. You don't even know who he is, but he's one of the Jacksons.

Sigmund Jackson had a lot of this rock 'n' roll money.

Besides, I never really set out to create a Celebrity Clientele Collection, and mount them like a bunch of butterflies on my wall.

The clientele just happened. Red Buttons chanced to be the first one. I ran into his agent in Century City one day. Things worked out pretty decently for Red, and things just sorta snowballed.

I didn't go out and say, "I only want to deal with famous people."

But it made me happy to know that a Jack Benny would be buying his bonds from Frank Bank.

Don Rickles.

Steve Allen.

They both did.

Oh, did Don Rickles ever "hockey-puck" melay one of his famous insults on me?

Uh-uh. Rickles was a nice man on the phone. Very. Nothing like he is in the industry. Real nice guy.

Ever since the first celebrity clients came my way, I think the thing I've tried to impart upon them is that I know that they are targets.

And they would never be a target with me.

I would have their best interests at heart.

Just as I would whether you were an actor or a mechanic.

I know that I have tried the very best that I can for them.

And that is why I believe I made a name for myself in business that rivaled any I ever had in the entertainment world.

Not bad for a lummox you only knew as Lumpy, eh?

Page 158

Chapter Eight
The Name is Bank . . . Frank Bank

It was New Year's Eve, 1964.

Las Vegas.

I was dressed to kill.

I was cool.

I was so cool, I could have frozen hell over.

But I was in heaven, actually.

I had on this beautiful suit. A black mohair suit with a silk dress shirt.

Beautiful silk pocket handkerchief.

Matching tie.

Gorgeous manicure.

I was looking good.

I was feeling good.

I had money in my pocket and we were playing chemin de fer, also known as baccarat.

The James Bond game.

The same game Ian Fleming always had Bond playing in Monaco or the Bahamas while he was makin' a fool of Ernst Stavro Blofeld or some other maniac trying to take over the world.

I thought I owned the world that night in Vegas.

I decided to go partners with these two other guys I was up there with, Richard Trugman and some other guy from L.A. I don't remember.

All three of us were at the Dunes Hotel.

And there was this Asian woman who was always at the tables. Every night she came out with her hair dyed to match her dressgreen or orange or whatever.

She was a highroller.

She was a red-hot rollin' mama who was too hot to handle and too cold to hold.

She used to bet like $2,000 a hand. In those days they played the game with cash. There were no chips. It was all cash on the table.

BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life

10.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

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