Beverly Hills
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"ICM’s Sue Mengers would sign you, then invite you to the cocaine parties at her house in Beverly Hills. She’d also gossip about you—she called her stars “sparklies”—to her other clients. We built our business as her opposite: we’d take tables in the back of restaurants, where we couldn’t be overheard, lean in, and present ourselves as very square. “You won’t have a big social life with us,” I’d say. “We’re here to make you independent in every direction, to strategize for you. So what are your dreams?”"
"In November 1983, Joseph, Milken and members of their respective teams met with Cavas Gobhai in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, next door to Drexel’s new Beverly Hills office, to engineer the quantum leap. As Joseph recalled that meeting, “We started by asking, ‘Where does our financing muscle really come into play?’ One thing that’s hard to finance is unfriendly acquisitions. You can’t finance them, because you can’t tell people you’re going to do the deal, and you don’t know if you’re going to need the money, and you don’t know how much money you’re going to need, because you may have to raise the price, and you don’t have access to the inside information, and a lot of people don’t like to get involved in unfriendly deals.”"
"“Don’t take me literally,” this investment banker added, “but I used to think about what was happening in Beverly Hills as the ‘five-o’clock what-if sessions.’ In a sense, the most dramatic events in corporate takeovers in the last few years have come about because some guys out in Beverly Hills, tired at five o’clock after a day of trading, sat around saying, ‘What if. . . ?’ ” He gestured, one hand seizing the other. “And then, instead of going out and getting a beer, they’d get on the phone and make it happen.”"
"In November 1983, Joseph, Milken and members of their respective teams met with Cavas Gobhai in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, next door to Drexel’s new Beverly Hills office, to engineer the quantum leap. As Joseph recalled that meeting, “We started by asking, ‘Where does our financing muscle really come into play?’ One thing that’s hard to finance is unfriendly acquisitions. You can’t finance them, because you can’t tell people you’re going to do the deal, and you don’t know if you’re going to need the money, and you don’t know how much money you’re going to need, because you may have to raise the price, and you don’t have access to the inside information, and a lot of people don’t like to get involved in unfriendly deals.”"
"There was only one area that authentically excited me, and that was the world of entertainment. Simply, it resonated, not just as nothing else did, but as something I was instinctively drawn to. At least half of my friends’ parents were involved in front of or behind cameras, and to me they were a lot more interesting than the other half, who were involved in making light fixtures, egg farming, and other industrial pursuits. From the time I started to ride my bicycle from one famous Beverly Hills house to another, my eyes were starlit with every aspect of the entertainment industry."