Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (29 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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

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Page 144

Remember, my brother was a dreamer.

Well, we had leased a truck and one day, like a fool, Doug went out like three months before the lease was up and bought four brand-new tires for this truck

So now it's coming time to take the truck back. I go over to a gas station, I find flour old used tires and pay the station 20 bucks to put the cruddy tires on so we can keep these four really good tires.

My brother blows his stack.

He says, "Why did you undermine me?"

I said, "I'm not an idiot."

I said, "I'm not givin' those tires away."

They were like 400 bucks.

But he felt I was usurping his authority.

Of course, I was.

But of course, he was drinking, too, and wasn't thinking straight.

So we were in this little coffee shop where we used to have breakfast every morning. It was right next to our meat place.

It was The Bluebird Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Now we're sittin' there eatin' breakfast, and we're both wearing our cooler coats. He grabs me by the shoulder.

He says, "You son-of-a-bitch, you took those tires off the truck."

And I said, "Of course I took those tires off the truck."

And I can see him winding up to hit me.

So I sorta grabbed him by the neck and wrestled him down to the ground.

And he started swinging on me.

And I started swinging on him.

Next thing you know, it's something right out of a John Wayne movie and we tore apart about four or five tables. There were chairs all over the place.

And he didn't exactly make it into work that following Monday.

His back was just killin' him.

But both of us were pretty beaten up.

We basically beat the crap out of each other.

So that was a hairy fight. We had to pay poor Herman and Betty, the couple that owned the restaurant, to fix it up. It cost a few hundred bucks.

Just about the price of the new tires? Yeah, I guess it seems pretty stupid when you think of it that way. I could have just let the tire thing go and we'd have been money ahead.

Or about even, when you consider Herman's repair bill.

But it was a fight over more than a few hundred bucks.

It was about a basic business philosophy. More importantly it was about fundamental approaches to life.

My dad was teed off at me.

Page 145

He said, "Why are you doing that to your brother?"

I said, "That bum did it to me."

Why didn't my dad take my part in the fight?

Well, he usually did take my side more than my brother's side. He really did. But once in awhile, in the interest of fairness and justice, he'd take Doug's part. He'd try to be balanced.

Which was hard to do, considering my brother was a totally screwed-up human being in my estimation.

Herman was not real happy with us that day, either. But after it was over, he and Betty were fine.

Matter of fact, Herman came over to me a couple days later and he says, "Geez, Frank, when you got him in that hammer-lock, I thought you were gonna break his arm."

And I went, "Did I have him in a hammerlock?"

I didn't even know.

I said, "I was just tryin' to think as fast as I could."

He says, "You guys were really good."

This was after we paid for the damage.

I mean, there was no doubt we were gonna pay for it. We apologized to everybody. God, there was one couple in there, we sorta scared both of them.

But, to be honest, I wanted to hurt Doug.

I really wanted his butt.

I wanted to seriously rearrange his landscape.

He deserved it.

Inside me was a lifetime of frustration over Doug being a dysfunctional butthead, never taking responsibility for anything, then palming it off on someone else.

This was more or less the straw that broke the camel's hump.

It was time for me to hit the road.

We had passed up two huge opportunities to make the meat business really take off and realize its full potential.

I guess it was just too daunting for everyone else to contemplate.

We'd have had to push out and build a place next door. Put in a bunch of hamburger-patty machines and expand our cooler.

Probably had to borrow maybe 50 grand.

Back in those days, my dad thought that 50 grand was 50 million.

And to get the Weight Watchers would have probably cost us $200,000 to borrow.

Because we'd have had to put in all these machines to make Weight Watchers dinners.

Would have cost a lot of money, without a doubt.

But we could have made millions and millions and millions.

Page 146

I saw Weight Watchers comin' all the way.

It was a no-brainer.

I knew Weight Watchers would take off.

My dad thought it was a flash in the pan.

He thought that as soon as we built all this stuff, they were gonna walk away from it and give the account to somebody else.

He was wrong.

We would have kept Weight Watchers as long as we wanted. How? Simple.

I would have 'em sign a contract. It wasn't really rocket science stuff. But, basic as that sounds, my dad wasn't from that kind of thinking.

Besides, I knew the lady that founded Weight Watchers very well. Her name was Jean Naiditch.

She was a meat customer of ours in Brentwood. We had a lot of very famous customers and Jean was one of them. We delivered meat to her house every week.

Weight Watchers hadn't been going more than a couple of years when she approached us about preparing their meals.

Nice lady. Real nice lady.

I believed in her concept.

She believed in us.

But when my dad wouldn't let us take on this contract, that was it for me in the meat business. That and the fighting with my brother.

I just felt like it was time to take off on my own.

So I did.

I had been a finance major. I'd heard some friends, including Dennis Angel, a fellow Knight, were making a great living selling municipal bonds.

They worked for a company called MuniciCorp.

I went in and talked to them one day and I said, "Well, this is where I should be."

And they said, "You got a deal."

They hired me.

I didn't really know what a municipal bond was. So I went and found out, I studied and I took a chance.

I was married to my first wife at this time (after the annulment from Marlene, of course). We had a baby girl, Julie.

My parents helped me a little bit the first six months. Not much. But a little bit. As much as they could have. Which obviously, was very nice of them.

I said I started from scratch.

What's the level below scratch?

I started off with no salalry, no draw, no nothing.

It cost me 30 bucks a month to work there because I had to pay to park my car in Century City.

Page 147

The office was at 1888 Century Park East.

I was 30 and starting over.

I already had a big house in Tarzana to support.

It took me six months before I started making a living. In the first year, I did OK. The second year I did great. The third year I was a monster.

The first year I made about 50 grand. The second about a hundred. The third about 250, or 300 thousand.

By now I'm a vice-president. Then I became a branch manager. I opened up an office in Rancho Mirage, suburb of Palm Springs, California. And then I became a member of the board of directors.

In the Rancho Mirage branch I had about a dozen people under me. But in 1984 I became the general sales manager, responsible for 250 brokers.

I was back in Century City for this stretch, running sales for the whole company.

I was on the board and the executive committee of the company.

How much am I making now?

A lot.

And I had other things going, too. Real estate investing. Investing in stocks. Investing in bonds. Investing in partnerships.

I was in a bunch of limited partnerships on multi-family housing properties. I had some in Oklahoma. Some in California.

I had some of the craziest investments you ever saw in your life. I bought these oil wells once and we hit oil in Texas, up in the Panhandle.

The day we hit the oil, I went over to King's Western Wear on Van Nuys Boulevard and bought this big, huge old honkin' 10-gallon Stetson. Like J.R. Ewing?

OK. So it was a cliche. But I just felt like it anyway. Hell-fire, man, I was gonna be an oil baron.

And the very next day I get a phone call from the guy at the drilling site. And he says, "We got a lotta water comin' into the well."

He says, "It's gonna cost us more money to bring up the oil than it will to cap it off."

I think he left me swinging for two days before I found out what was happening.

So he capped it off. My J.R. Ewing persona went right into the trash basket.

But it was a good write-off.

What can I say?

The oil well did not exactly pan out. And the J.R. hat drew a little dust.

But you gotta try.

And overall I was doing quite well at the financial game.

And that is because of one major reason.

I loved it.

Page 148

I loved making people money.

Nothing made me feel better than to call a client and say, "Hey, these bonds that we bought for this price are now worth 'this,' and your income is more."

I really made my reputation in 1974 when I put all of my clients in New York City bonds right at the bottom of the market.

My clients made a fortune.

It worked because I had faith in the American way of doing business.

I knew that they couldn't take New York City and let it default and go broke. There were too many people there.

There was no doubt in my mind. When President Ford said, "I will not bail out New York City," he was lyin' through his teeth.

There was the famous headline in the New York Daily News:

FORD TO CITY:

DROP DEAD!

I knew right then and there when he said that, he had to bail 'em out.

You know why he had to? Because if you take 16 million people and let 'em apply for unemployment all at the same time, it'll cost them more money by that than it would to bail out New York City.

Everyone was making fun of New York and scorning it.

And I was selling bonds like crazy.

Johnny Carson was on "The Tonight Show" talking about how "Bombastic" Bushkin, as he called himhis business managerwas buying him New York City bonds.

And I wanted to scream through the tube, "Bombastic Bushkin did the right thing!"

Carson would be talking about his guy making a stupid deal for him.

And I'd be watchin' TV goin' nuts: "Shut up, man, you're shootin' me in the freakin' foot."

My clients were nervous about the whole thing with New York City. They were buying because they had faith that I knew what I was doing.

And, as it turned out, I did.

Johnny Carson was making jokes. New York City was great joke fodder, as always.

But my clients and I had the last laugh.

And you know what? It turns out this is normally the case in these situations.

My New York experience gave rise to one of my fundamental business precepts.

You've heard of the Latter Curve, which has to do with tax rates, government revenues and production?

We'll call this other thing the Laughter Curve.

The Frank Bank Laughter Curve.