Andre Meyer

André Meyer did not run a household name, build a factory, or sign his work. He worked the way the most powerful financiers have always preferred to work, out of a hotel suite, by telephone, behind a curtain, and from that obscurity he reshaped how American companies were bought, sold, and put back together ^[1][6]. For roughly three decades from the mid-1940s, Meyer was the senior partner and animating force of Lazard Frères & Co. in New York, and he turned a small, capital-light private bank into what one historian called the most venturesome investment house in America ^[1][6].

His instrument was the deal itself. Where the great houses of the era underwrote securities and waited for fees, Meyer treated finance as a creative act, buying undervalued or tangled enterprises, restructuring their capital, and reselling them at a profit Lazard kept for itself ^[1][6]. The textbook case became legend: Lazard bought the Avis rent-a-car company for about $7 million and a few years later sold it to Harold Geneen's ITT for some $52 million in stock, helping ignite the conglomerate boom of the 1960s ^[2][6]. David Rockefeller called him "the most creative financial genius of our time in the investment banking field" ^[1][3].

Meyer's power, though, ran on something less quantifiable: access. He was a financial adviser and trustee to the Kennedys, helped manage Jacqueline Onassis's affairs, counseled William S. Paley of CBS and Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, and was used by Lyndon Johnson as an unofficial economic consultant ^[1][2][3]. He collected men of consequence the way he collected Cézannes and Monets, deliberately, and for what they could yield ^[1][2].

The portrait that survives, drawn most fully in Cary Reich's biography, is not a flattering one. Meyer could be, in Reich's own catalogue, duplicitous, a schemer, vindictive, cynical, opportunistic, greedy, and a bully ^[1][5]. He treated his partners as clerks, berated them in public, and summoned them to early-morning and midnight meetings ^[1][5]. He amassed a personal fortune that Reich estimated at more than $500 million, and he trusted almost no one ^[1][5].

Yet the methods outlasted the man. The leveraged purchase, the friendly merger engineered for a fee, the banker as confidential adviser to titans rather than mere underwriter, these are the everyday furniture of modern Wall Street, and Meyer did as much as anyone to put them there ^[1][6]. His protégé Felix Rohatyn, who would later rescue New York City from bankruptcy, learned the trade at Meyer's elbow and called him his mentor ^[1][6][7]. The age of the deal-maker that followed, the M&A boom, the rise of the adviser, is in large part André Meyer's inheritance ^[1][6].

They called him the Picasso of banking, and like Picasso he reshaped his medium so completely that those who came after could not imagine it any other way ^[3].

He was born André Benoît Mathieu Meyer on September 3, 1898, in Paris, into a poor Jewish family ^[1][3]. His father, by Cary Reich's account, was an inveterate gambler who left a vacuum at the head of the household, and the burden of providing fell early onto André ^[1]. He left school at sixteen and went to work as a runner on the Paris Bourse, learning the markets from the floor up rather than from any university ^[1][3]. The trading floor was his education, and the lesson he absorbed there, that information, nerve, and timing beat pedigree, never left him ^[1].

He rose quickly. After the First World War he worked at a small Paris house, Baur & Fils, and his evident talent drew the attention of Raymond Philippe, a partner at the old and aristocratic firm of Lazard Frères, who arranged an offer ^[1][3]. Meyer joined Lazard in 1925 and was made a partner within about a year, an extraordinary ascent for an outsider with no family money and no schooling ^[1][3]. In the late 1920s he organized SOVAC, a consumer-credit company that pioneered installment financing for automobiles in France, and from 1927 he helped lead the rescue and reorganization of the foundering carmaker Citroën, work for which France made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor ^[3].

Then history nearly erased him. As a Jew in a France about to fall to Germany, Meyer fled ahead of the Nazi occupation, reaching the United States in 1940 with his wife, Bella Lehman, and their children and taking over Lazard's small New York operation alongside the senior partner Pierre David-Weill ^[1][2][3]. He arrived a refugee in a country where he was barely known; he became an American citizen in 1948 ^[3]. The man who had begun as a messenger on the Bourse would, within a few years of landing in Manhattan, take command of Lazard's New York house and never relinquish it ^[1][6].

André Meyer's deepest legacy is the modern advisory investment bank itself. By making Lazard, small, private, lightly capitalized, into the most influential deal house in America, he showed that the future of Wall Street lay in intellect, relationships, and the fee-earning art of the merger, not in the size of a firm's balance sheet ^[1][6]. The mergers-and-acquisitions business that exploded in the decades after him, and the celebrity deal-maker as a type, descend directly from his example. His protégé Felix Rohatyn carried the method into public life, using it to pull New York City back from the edge of bankruptcy in the 1970s ^[1][6].

The human ledger is harder to balance. He amassed a fortune Reich put at more than $500 million and assembled a museum-grade collection of Cézanne, Monet, and other masters that endowed galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death ^[1][8]. He was a philanthropist to Mount Sinai Medical Center and to Israel's Technion ^[3]. Yet the same biographer judged that, for all his genius, greatness eluded him, that a certain narrowness of spirit, in which the bottom line always carried a dollar sign, kept him from inspiring the people around him ^[5].

He died in September 1979 in a Swiss hospital and was buried in Paris, near his old partner Pierre David-Weill, a refugee who had arrived in New York almost unknown and left as the most powerful private banker of his age ^[2][3].