Tuesday Today, while I was visiting my son and daughter in law and granddaughter in wonderful Greenville, SC, marveling at the loving gift my son and his wife had given me for Father’s Day — a triptych of my Pop, me, and Tommy and his daughter, the roof fell in. I came back to my hotel room and opened the e-mail to read a simple e-mail from Pauline Yuelys, an editor at Barron’s . She told me that Jim Meagher, my idol, my hero, my mentor, my rock of Gibraltar, the greatest guy on this planet, had suddenly died on Monday. Now, let me tell you about Jim Meagher. When I first started writing lengthy pieces for Barron’s about ethical lapses by managers of public corporations, my boss was Alan Abelson, the legend who died about three or four weeks ago. But my editor, who edited my work, was an Irish-American man with the friendliest voice you could ever wish for. His name was Jim Meagher and he had been at Barron’s for a long time. “Meagher,” as I came to call him just as he called me “Stein,” was an adroit, even magically insightful editor. His touch was light and he knew how to connect the dots. He was invariably friendly and jovial except on a few occasions. Once, when I suggested a negative piece on a huge Investment Bank that had been a large advertiser in Barron’s , Meagher hesitated for a moment. I said, “Look, I know how the world works. If you don’t want a negative piece on a major advertiser, I will understand totally.” Meagher said to me in a fury, “Uhhhh, if you ever even suggest that again I’ll never speak to you again. That’s not how we work at Barron’s . Go ahead and do the damned piece for this weekend.” Another time, when we were eating lunch at Côte Basque, which used to be one of my favorite restaurants, and Meagher had ordered his usual two martinis (as we looked at Jackie Onassis), I asked him, “Can you really do an afternoon’s work after two martinis?” He said, “I can do a better afternoon’s work than you can after your damned Diet Cokes.” He apparently felt bad about this outburst because he then added, “What you don’t understand is that martinis at lunch are like breasts on a woman. One is not enough. Three is two many. Two is just right.” Point well taken. Many, many the day I would get threats of lawsuits from managers whose behavior I had criticized. I always passed them on to Meagher, whose invariable answer was unprintable, but it was something difficult that the threatening were supposed to do to themselves that did not involve litigation as normally understood. Meagher — like Alan Abelson — was fearless. Unlike many other editors in the finance space, he had absolutely zero respect for any man or woman in the world of money who had gotten the goods by acting badly. He had more admiration for the man who swept the floors at Dow-Jones than he did for the junk bond, Meyer Wolfsheim types ( Great Gatsby reference to the bond swindler for whom Jay Gatsby worked) and their billions. He was never for a minute a fan of Milken even as many around him at Dow-Jones were. Meagher, like Alan Abelson, was a Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur type of Front Page journalist who fancied himself unsentimental. (Again, he called almost everyone he worked with by their last names.) But he was in fact a kind, forbearing, generous spirited gentleman with a keen sense of humor. Many years ago, he required open heart surgery for some sort of occlusion. I wished him well, prayed for him, and when he came out of surgery, he had a story to tell. He said that as he was emerging from anesthesia, he heard me talking to him. No, it was not a delusion. The TV above his bed was playing one of my scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . “I can’t escape from you even in the ICU,” he said, in his typical, mock curt way. Meagher served for a time as editor of Barron’s after Alan Abelson went to work full time on his column. Then he retired and then he came back as a consultant and senior advisor/editor. I had the pleasure of talking to him but not often enough. He went through the worst kind of hell about a year and a half ago when his wife died. They had been married forever and when a man loses his long-time wife, it’s usually only a matter of time before he joins her. So, now, Meagher has joined his wife and his colleague, Alan Abelson, and the loss is overwhelming. He was my friend, my inspiration, the kind of man you could trust with your life and the kind of man the investor needs for the unvarnished truth. There is a sucker born every minute and two to take him and one Alan Abelson and one Jim Meagher to protect him. “Meagher!” I used to cry out when he answered the phone, “it’s Stein.” “Stein,” he would say, “it’s Meagher. How is life under the palm trees?” Lonely today, Meagher, lonely. Thursday Now I am back in Beverly Hills and just this morning a kind man named Jeff Saut from Raymond James, a great financial house, sent me some quotes from my father via another great guy, Dougie Kass. The main quote was from my father when he was being yelled at about inflation during his days as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (sic, not Advisors). He said, “Look, if you just take out all the things that went up in the CPI, it actually went down.” He also said, “We are against inflation. We are against deflation. We are for ‘flation.’” When I read these words, I sobbed again and then thought of Meagher and sobbed more. I am losing my mind with grief over loss. I should add that I am the Warren Buffett of wives. I have the best wife on the planet, which makes me the richest husband on the planet. I am not sure why I added that. I guess I really am emotional today.
Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s film version of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew (the screenplay adapted by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright) is worth seeing if only for the best performance by a child actor, in my view, since Freddy Highmore’s star turn in Finding Neverland back in 2004. Indeed, seven-year-old Onata Aprile’s achievement as Maisie is in some ways even more impressive than Master Highmore’s Peter Llewelyn Davies, as he was ten at the time Neverland was filmed. Hers is also a more passive character than his, which means that she has the harder task, particularly for a child, of doing most of her acting with her face alone. Her job is to make our hearts break, and she does it with seeming effortlessness. Complementing her performance are those of Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as the parents from hell — she a fading rock star and he an international art dealer — both of whom tend to forget about Maisie’s existence even when they are together and make a habit of it once they have split up. Each then marries a much younger person — he Maisie’s nanny (Joanna Vanderham), she a bartender (Alexander Skarsgard) — and their new partners prove to be much more concerned for Maisie’s welfare than her parents are, if no better suited to them as spouses than the parents were to each other. Maisie’s watchful waiting at the center of so much marital and emotional turbulence which she is ill-equipped to understand makes of her an unforgettable portrait of childish innocence, if not altogether the one James intended her to be. Still, the movie should be commended for setting about the updating of his novel in a more honorable way than Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
The 2003 winner of the Miss America Pageant is throwing her tiara, er, hat, into the ring for the Illinois 13th Congressional District GOP primary. Erika Harold, a 33-year-old Harvard graduate, is a Chicago-based civil litigation attorney who claims her pageant past would help her succeed in Congress. “Hopefully, it’s a thing that gets someone’s attention, but then they will see that I graduated from Harvard Law School…and in a wide variety of ways am qualified to be in Congress,” Harold told ABC News . During her reign as Miss America, Harold was the subject of controversy when she focused on sexual abstinence as part of her advocacy platform. Though she was pressured by pageant officials to drop the issue, she refused to comply. Harold hopes to focus on restoring economic growth if elected. “I’ll be focusing on the economy,” she said, “because I think one of the founding principles of the Republican Party is that when you can empower people to make choices for themselves, that is the best scenario.” The seat is held by incumbent Rodney Davis, whose position is precarious due to tension over sequestration. Davis won his seat last year by a very close margin: 1,002 votes . He has released a statement that he plans to keep his focus on his work in Congress. “I view this primary process as being very healthful to the party because we will be able throughout the campaign to debate the issues that are important to the party,” Harold told Politico .
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Former Miss America Enters GOP Primary
The IRS has called its targeting of conservative groups “horrible customer service”—a cold and trivializing apology befitting a federal government that sees itself as a corporate Leviathan. Officials who understood that they serve a government of, by, and for the people would never speak in such odd terms. What happened was not poor customer service but tyranny. Appearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Becky Gerritson of Alabama’s Wetumpka Tea Party, along with other targets of the IRS, gave the federal government a well-deserved shafting along those lines. Gerritson effectively put her finger on the central issue underpinning the scandal:
The answer is six, not to give away the ending. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) attacked victims of IRS targeting at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing today, saying that it was their fault they were targeted because they applied for tax-exempt status.
