THE MAN WITH THE MIDAS WATCH'

JAMES WOLCOTT

Michael M. Thomas, columnist, novelist, and scourge of the gilded classes, reassessed

Mixed Media

Printed on sere paper, The New York Observer wafts onto the newsstands each week like a windblown leaf. It trembles at the touch. Slender in size, small in circulation, sleepy in format (Spy magazine has made sport out of such ho-hum headlines as UKRAINIANS EYE MILLENNIUM and KATE SMITH WILL BE BURIED AT LAKE PLACID), its pages bear the bylines of old plodders put out to pasture, old gray mares that ain't what they used to be. But amid all these rickety ribs one writer has managed to create some rolling thunder. His name is Michael M. Thomas and his "Midas Watch'' column has become a must-read in mediaopinion circles. Each week he tears an edible strip off the sleek flesh of the super-rich.

What gives the column its unique cutting slant is that Thomas is an insider turned outsider. An alumnus of Yale, he refused to attend his college reunion because so many of its graduates expressed the desire to work on Wall Street. A former partner at Lehman Brothers, he cold-shoulders Wall Street for its rampant quest of the quick kill. As he told Dick Cavett on Cavett's CNBC talk show, "I really don't understand why 1,600 people have to be let go in Winston-Salem or the price of a box of Ritz Crackers has to go up thirty cents ... in order to pay the junk-bond interest so that some clown can cut a swath in what passes for New York society.'' Presiding over what passes for New York society is the man Thomas has dubbed the Prince of Swine, Donald Trump. Well, he doesn't pick petty targets.

Name-calling isn't enough to make a

column roll, however. There has to be an operating life view, otherwise the nyah-nyahs become nothing more than the standby patter of a put-down artist. Thomas does convey his own sense of paradise lost. Unhurried pleasures are the headiest, he says, those leisurely strolls through art and literature that allow the mind time to mull. Browsing, however, has become a fugitive pastime for the few. The message of "The Midas Watch" is that the money mania of the mergers-and-acquisitions era has created a Day of the Locust stampede toward a giant billboard of a dollar bill. We're no longer allowed to be alone with our inclinations. Storm clouds of commercialism bully the little thought balloons above our heads. Culture offers no oasis. The polluted influx of megabucks into our museums leaves everyone choking in froth. Which way to the exits?

"Art exhibitions are jammed to the point of barbarism, so that the greatest, most studydeserving shows simply cannot be enjoyed," while the secondhand bookstores that served as side pockets of civilization along Fourth Avenue have been picked off by high rents. Dining out? Another mad rush to the mirror. All those faces! One of them mine! (To Thomas, Gael Greene's panting tribute to Brian McNally's celebritypacked restaurant 150 Wooster in New York magazine presented "a compelling argument for urban terrorism.") Travel is no alternative—the slippage is worldwide. The streets of London no longer accommodate the awkward gait of Dr. Johnson's ghost. "[London] seems infected by the pandemic virus of our time: impatience."

Impatience is the hallmark of the Reaganite, Thatcherite rich, says Thomas. There's a grab-happy hustle beneath their preeny gloss. Compared with the hale immortals of old Hollywood, these posh impostors are trash TV, as rigged out and wigged out as the cast of Dynasty. As evidence, Thomas cites the lavish coffee-table book Jean Howard's Hollywood: A Photo Memoir.

The party pictures are instructive. These were times when men and women drank and smoked, when bottles of whiskey and gin were plunked down on the table at even the fanciest dos and it would have been considered unthinkable to deploy squadrons of white-gloved ephebes behind every chair. People joked and talked and got drunk and were outrageous and otherwise behaved as living beings, not as if they themselves were part of the decor, props just like the Petrus in the Georgian decanter and the borrowed ancestor on the wall, to be sorted out and disposed by party planners and caterers and interior decorators and friend-creators.

Each week in his newspaper columnThomas tears an edible strip off the sleek flesh of the super-rich.

What flushed such casual grace from the scene? Thomas's favorite culprit, easy credit. "Most of the people Ms. Howard photographed were talented from within, whereas the principal, in most cases the sole, talent of most of today's lot is to make use of other people's money." And this new lot doesn't even know how to unwind. Their sense of fun is secondhand. Their big toys float in Robin Leach's bathtub.

Thomas has lived to see the low to middling cronies of his old Wall Street days being hailed as lords of leverage. Did success, he wonders, boost their I.Q.'s sky-high? "Having known and observed—at first hand—most of the present crop since they were knee-high to a nonentity, I am dubious how great an individual metamorphosis was possible."

He's more than dubious, say his detractors, he's jealous. He resents suits less smart than he is making tons more loot. He mans "The Midas Watch" because he lacks the Midas touch. True or not, this seems to me a so-what accusation—writers are always being accused of having their faces pressed against the shop window, often by other writers. It's the analysis a writer musters that matters and not his underlying attitude. (Motives are always fishy.) A more serious charge is that all the emphasis Thomas places on innate class and breeding is a code for something else. Because so many of his targets are Jewish (Ronald Perelman, Saul Steinberg, Ralph Lauren), the ink splats on their tuxedos have undergone a Rorschach test and been diagnosed by some as anti-Semitic. The charge has surfaced in the Observer. In one column Thomas notes receiving a letter from someone initialed L.J.B. that accused him of being "an anti semetic [sic] son of a bitch." Shifting around in his chair, Thomas pooh-poohs such charges and waxes ecumenical. "There are forms of behavior I find repellent, provocative, or ill-advised, given the larger scheme of things. No single group has a monopoly on them; they are as readily committed... by people named O'Hara or Stuyvesant or, indeed, Forbes, as by, say, Steinberg." So far so good.

As for the larger issues of antiand philoSemitism, I can only say that these are nervous times, times when sensitivities are raw and the edgy eye finds chimeras on every page that are, in truth, mere figments of its own paranoia. Writing in the East Hampton Star a few months ago, a self-declaredly Jewish correspondent observed that these days there seem to be quite a few people about who shout "Holocaust" when given a parking ticket.

Should have quit when you were ahead, Mikey!

In the end, I have to say that I find very little difference in kind, degree and intention between this note from "L.J.B." and an anonymous swastika chalked by night on a synagogue wall.

No wonder Evelyn Waugh said never apologize, never explain. It only makes things worse.

Interest in the news that Thomas was hammering out a new novel about Wall Street (his previous hits include Green Monday and Hard Money) was heightened by word that he would be homing in on the issue of anti-Semitism in light of the insider-trading scandal, where most of the major players were Jewish. How would he handle it? Published this month, Warner Books' Hanover Place (major printing, heavy advertising—the squadron leaves at dawn) traces the double-helix rise of two families on Wall Street, one Gentile, one Jewish. Blockbuster material, Hanover Place is a book-length mini-series with a large cast, numerous costume changes, addon chins and doddering walks to indicate encroaching age, and cameo appearances by carved-soap celebrities ("Lyda recognized Randolph Scott and Rocky and Gary Cooper. . . "). It's more than a people book. For context Thomas supplies newsreel footage and research-library filler. "Around him people talked of the events of the day: the Teapot Dome indictments and the Dawes Plan and the outlook for the market with the discount rate now at three percent; of the Leopold-Loeb murder and the gangland killings in Chicago; of the books they were reading, The Plastic Age and A Passage to India, and the forthcoming Scott Fitzgerald novel—which was said to be about all these dreadful people who were making money in the stock market," and so on. At close to five hundred pages, Hanover Place isn't a paltry effort.

Indeed, it's big—it's bold—it's awful. Considering how daggered Thomas's column can be, how jewel-encrusted its handle, it's a shock to find him shading himself beneath a parasol here to write ladylike piffle. " 'Very grand indeed,' said Lyda's aunt with a touch of asperity, refusing to shed her socialism even in this hour of glory for her adored niece." " 'In other words, you're trying to tell me Daddy wasn't my real father?' Miranda's question was tempered with uninterest." I'll bet! Wait, it gets worse: "She looked around at Andy and Jay. 'How d'you like that! I won't even sleep with him, and he wants me to marry him! Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!' " That's what's known in the trade as a Horrible Laugh. There are also minor nobodies in the novel with names like Dolly Dewveall ("Dolly Dimples"), Foster Klopp, and Nugget Newton. Foster Klopp? Nugget Newton? Where was Thomas's head?

On the main battlefront Thomas can breathe easy. He's in no danger of being called anti-Semitic or even anti semetic on the basis of Hanover Place. He pretty much douses the hot topic altogether. He shirks the case of insider trading to fashion a facile morality tale in which the ruling Wasps talk in spittle. " 'I'm disappointed in Miles, I'm bound to say. Here we took the fellow up, scrubbed the stink of the ghetto off him, set him up on Park Avenue like a scarlet woman, and what thanks do we get!' " We do and do and do for these people. Perhaps the push-pull of Jewish selfidentity is no-go territory for a Gentile writer, unless it's handled as comedy, as in John Updike's Bech books. A Jewish writer might feel more unfettered and willing to let fly (for example, I. J. Singer in The Family Carnovsky). Perhaps to quiet the qualms created by some of his columns, Thomas takes the easy out offered by melodrama and banally ennobles his Jewish characters, depicting them as brainy achievers and stoic scapegoats. But his tone is off, his inflections forced. A concentration-camp survivor who suffered at the hands of Dr. Mengele's henchmen leaves a chaste kiss on a central character's lips, explaining, " 'As for the kiss, ah, Lyda, that for my part was also just for old times' sake. If you begged me to take you, I could not. I regret to report that not only did I contribute one rib and a kidney to the cause of the Thousand Year Reich's noble experiments in genetics, but they also removed certain other valuable parts of me.' " Yikes! None of this fancy diction is imparted to the black characters, who drawl like minstrel-show darkies. "It did not seem appropriate to pass on the wisdom of another Negro, besides whom Leo had worked in a meat-packing plant one summer. He had observed, in a voice as deep and liqueous as a swamp: 'Leo, mah fren', you always talkin' 'bout how what them Nazi folks do to Jews was special...' ''

But not so special that it can't be repeated. In a farfetched It Can't Happen Here fright-show finale ("a credible scenario on the wages of fiscal sin"— Kirkus Reviews), Hanover Place has America turning into the Fourth Reich when the country blames the Jews for economic collapse. A Reverend Falwell type riles up the far right until they're on the red-assed move. Roving bands of youths rampage through Jewish suburbs, and military aid to Israel is cut off. Everyone enjoys a good scare, but this is really wrestling a whore to the ground. Thomas even echoes The Great Gatsby in the fade-out, for a borrowed air of elegiac regret. Oh to have the wings of a gull, "to travel back, back, across the immemorial centuries to the end of the ocean, the beginning of the world, when everything was green and innocent and time itself was young." Cue the music, fade to black. Roll credits. (And featuring.. .Ed McMahon as Foster Klopp.)

Derivative as it is, Hanover Place may be able to haul itself onto the bestseller list. It's a fireplace read, for those long winter nights. But it isn't very warming. The attraction of "The Midas Watch" is that it's spoofy and unreined. "I don't do anything I do as a passport to popularity," Thomas told Dick Cavett. Hanover Place, however, is opportunistic, and opportunism isn't what one expects from a man who castigates junkbond kings in his column. Perhaps it's all a put-on—a Horrible Laugh. "Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" But methinks Michael M. Thomas is serious. Why else would he attach the citation "Bridgehampton, 1986-1989" to the end of his narrative, like James Joyce commemorating where he wrote Ulyssesl He's honoring his own mighty labor. Living proof that ego doesn't necessarily need money to lead it astray.