HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022756.tif

become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, who has never had drink or taken any drugs, was a regular). If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other side there was a new sort of finance type able to embrace a level of acute abstraction. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a 50’s mentality. But in the mid 70s options started to be traded. In essence, the first formal derivatives. The movement of this instrument is not directly attached to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from relationships to math. In a sense I didn’t really make money as much as I tried to create it. This was intellectual activity of a fairly high order.” Intellectual activity aside, he meets Helen Gurley Brown and she makes him Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Bachelor of the Month in 1980. “What,” I ask, “was your social life like?” “Well, I was a playboy.” “That’s all? Not looking to get married?” “No. Never. I never wanted to get married. I enjoyed sex. I adore women. I wanted freedom. I was attracted to the rich because of their freedom. But I wanted also to avoid their burdens. And I didn’t want to hide. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I wanted to be free. I was not remotely ambivalent about what I wanted: to be free. That was the reason to make money.” His rise at Bear Sterns was a steep one. And he soon became the protégée of Jimmy Cayne (also hired by Ace Greenberg on a whim—he met him in a bridge game—who would go on to run Bear and to lose his fortune in Bear’s 2006 collapse). Epstein’s leave taking or ouster from Bear is the result of politics, envy, overreaching, or a securities violation, or...unclear. But, no matter, he leaves in 1982 with billionaire clients, including Marvin Davis, a real estate developer who owns Twentieth Century Fox, and Herb Seigel, a major media investor in the 1980s. Epstein is dating Morgan Fairchild, a television star in the new mega-rich-family soap operas, Dallas and Falcon Crest (plot lines from which Epstein might easily step). Now begins the Concorde phase of his life—and the Concorde phase of the 1980s. If the 80s are happening pell mell in New York, they’re happening at double time and catch up speed in London. Epstein is 30 years old and living, in Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous fashion (he befriends the show’s star, Robin Leach), at English shooting parties at country estates with HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022756