Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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******

”Oprah wants the emotional vulnerability,” Amy noted, hanging up the phones and rubbing her temples. ”She wants him to cry about the pressure of fame. Marvin doesn’t cry.”

”Exactly,” a smooth, resonant baritone echoed from the doorway.

Both Amy and Jeff instantly fell silent, turning their attention to the entrance of the home office.

—

The summer of 1997 arrived in Los Angeles the way it always did — not with drama, but with a slow, suffocating certainty. The marine layer that had kept the mornings grey through most of June burned off earlier each day now, and by nine o’clock the light over the canyon was the colour of hammered brass. Hot. Flat. Unapologetic.

June had gone by in a blur of obligations that Marvin had not entirely anticipated, though he supposed he should have. Fame, it turned out, was not a condition that arrived once and then settled. It was a living thing. It fed itself on attention and grew larger with every feeding, and it had developed a particularly healthy appetite for a twelve-year-old boy from the hills above Laurel Canyon who had written a children’s book, produced a platinum album, and whose name was appearing in places that made adults stop and stare.

The promotional cycle for *Kung Fu Panda* had entered its second phase in June, which meant school appearances, morning television, two separate magazine features, and a profile in the *Los Angeles Times* Calendar section that his publicist, an organised woman named Diane Chu, had described as ”the kind of piece that opens doors you didn’t know were closed.” Marvin had sat through the interview with the careful patience of someone twice his age, answering questions about inspiration and craft and what it felt like to be young and gifted without once saying anything that sounded rehearsed. He was good at that. He had always been good at that.

Through all of it, he had maintained his routines with the discipline of a monk. Early mornings at the desk. The Zenith Trust terminal reviewed before breakfast. Options positions monitored with the same calm attention a gardener gives to things already planted and growing — not anxious, not indifferent, simply present. He wrote in the evenings. New work, not promotional material. Quiet, private, unannounced. The next project was already assembling itself in the notebooks stacked on the window ledge of his home office, though nobody outside the walls of this house knew that yet.

And beneath all of it, patient and unhurried as a geological process, the calendar had turned.

July arrived.

---

The morning of July 2nd, 1997 began with an announcement out of Bangkok that the foreign exchange markets of half the world processed before most of Los Angeles had finished its first coffee.

The Bank of Thailand, its reserves bled to almost nothing after months of defending a currency peg that the markets had decided was already dead, issued a statement at 6:47 in the morning local time. The Thai baht, pegged since 1984 to the United States dollar at approximately 25 baht to the dollar, would henceforth be allowed to float freely against foreign currencies. The statement was four paragraphs long. It was written in the careful, bloodless language of central banking. It contained no word of crisis, no acknowledgment of panic, no admission of the months of futile intervention that had preceded it.

The markets received it as exactly what it was.

Within ninety minutes, the baht had lost seventeen percent of its value. Within the trading day, it had shed nearly twenty percent. The Thai stock exchange, the SET index, began to fall with the mechanical inevitability of a building whose foundations had been removed. By the close of Asian trading that Thursday, capital was already accelerating toward the exits across a region that had spent the better part of a decade being celebrated as the engine of the global economy. Indonesia. Malaysia. The Philippines. South Korea. Each market began absorbing the tremors of an earthquake that had not yet found its final magnitude.

In London, traders at the major currency desks had been arriving before dawn. In New York, the overnight desks at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and a dozen others had lit up by three in the morning. By the time the American markets opened, the financial press was using words they had not used about Asia in years. *Contagion*. *Currency flight*. *Systemic risk*.

CNBC ran the Bangkok story as its lead segment for the third consecutive hour. A rotating panel of economists and regional analysts occupied the studio, speaking with the particular urgency of people who have rehearsed catastrophe in abstract terms and are now watching it become concrete. The IMF was mentioned. Capital controls were mentioned. The possibility of sovereign debt restructuring was mentioned, carefully, by one economist who then immediately softened the framing when he saw the expression on the anchor’s face.

In the *Wall Street Journal* newsroom, editors were already pulling wire copy and running the word counts on the stories they would run in the morning edition. *Thailand Floats the Baht in Desperate Move to Stem Currency Drain.* The verb in the headline — *desperate* — was the kind of word that headline writers saved for moments when precision required honesty.

In hedge fund offices across midtown Manhattan, the phones had not stopped ringing since Asian markets closed.

In Los Angeles, Meyers’ home, a boy with dark eyes and the composure of someone considerably older set down his pen, closed the notebook he had been writing in, and looked out the window at the dry hills above the canyon.

He had known.

Not because he had guessed. Not because he had extrapolated from available data or run sophisticated econometric models or employed a team of regional analysts to monitor Southeast Asian monetary policy. He had known the way you know a fact that you carry inside you — completely, without doubt, without the need for confirmation. The Thai baht had been dying since the moment the speculators had begun testing the peg in May of 1996. The Bank of Thailand had spent the intervening fourteen months fighting a battle that its own reserve levels made mathematically unwinnable. The float was not a policy choice. It was a confession.

Marvin had told one person this. He had told him in November of last year, on an evening when the Santa Ana winds had been pushing dry heat down through the canyons and the eucalyptus trees in the garden had been shaking their grey-green leaves against the dark.

He reached for the telephone.

---

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened the morning of July 2nd down 148 points, though it would recover most of that loss by midday as American investors processed the Bangkok announcement with the particular confidence of people who believe, at least for now, that what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. That confidence would prove catastrophically wrong over the coming months, but it was a Wednesday morning in July and the sun was shining over Wall Street and the S&P 500 was within three percent of its all-time high and the cognitive distance between a currency crisis in Southeast Asia and the quarterly earnings of American companies still felt, to most participants, very wide indeed.

The rupiah in Indonesia had begun to weaken even before the Bangkok announcement was official. Currency traders in Jakarta had been watching the baht for months, understanding with a professional clarity that currency pegs in neighbouring economies are rarely independent variables. The ringgit in Malaysia was moving. The Philippine peso was moving. The Singaporean dollar, backstopped by reserves that were a different order of magnitude from its neighbours, was holding — but even the Singaporean exchange was watching the screens with something that on a human face would be called apprehension.

George Soros, whose Quantum Fund had spent much of 1992 dismantling the British pound’s participation in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and collecting a profit that British newspapers had estimated at one billion dollars in a single day, had been watching Southeast Asia for some time. He would later deny that his fund was a primary catalyst of the baht collapse. The evidence of the subsequent months would suggest a more complicated picture. The markets did not particularly care about the philosophical question of cause and attribution. The markets cared about the direction of the trade, and the direction was now established and moving with considerable momentum.

In the Reuters wire feed that scrolled across the bottom of the terminal in Marvin’s home — a feature he had requested installed six months ago, to the mild puzzlement of Grant Meyers— the Bangkok story was updating every three to four minutes. The ticker was efficient and affectless. It reported facts. Facts were enough.

Marvin read the wire for eleven minutes.

Then he picked up the phone.

Irving Meyers was eighty-one years old and had been awake since five-fifteen in the morning, as he had been awake since five-fifteen almost every morning of his adult life, a habit acquired in ranching years that had survived long after the ranches themselves had been sold and consolidated and converted into other instruments of wealth. He was in the study of the house in Pasadena — the old house, the one he had refused to leave despite the sustained and diplomatically phrased objections of his son Grant, who had opinions about security and staff ratios and the impracticality of maintaining a seven-bedroom craftsman property that was now occupied by one old man, a housekeeper named Mrs. Okafor, and an unreasonable number of books.

The study smelled of lemon oil and old paper and the faint ghost of the pipe tobacco Irving had surrendered seventeen years ago on the advice of a cardiologist he had respected and a wife he had loved more, both of whom had used nearly identical arguments. The pipe itself still sat on the corner of the desk in its stand, a relic he had kept not out of sentiment exactly but out of a belief that objects that had been present for important moments deserved to remain visible.

On the desk, beside the pipe stand, sat the morning edition of the *Financial Times*, its salmon-pink pages folded to the international markets section. Irving had read the Bangkok story at six-forty in the morning, the moment the paper arrived. He had read it twice, which was his standard practice for pieces of genuine consequence. Then he had set the paper down carefully, poured himself a second cup of coffee from the thermal carafe Mrs. Okafor left at his door each morning with the punctuality of a Swiss railway schedule, and sat for a long time in the leather chair behind the desk with both hands wrapped around the cup and his eyes somewhere considerably further away than the middle distance of the study.

He had been waiting for this call since November.

Not every day. He was not a man who spent his hours in anticipation. But somewhere beneath the surface of his daily routines — the morning papers, the weekly calls with his attorney, the slow walks through the rose garden at the rear of the property that his wife Miriam had planted in 1961 and that Mrs. Okafor maintained with a devotion that Irving found both touching and quietly heartbreaking — somewhere beneath all of that, a small part of his attention had been pointed toward Bangkok and the baht and the particular chain of events that his grandson had described to him on an evening in November with a precision that had made the old man’s chest feel strange in a way he had not experienced since his own father had spoken to him about money and markets and the long view of history.

He had thought about his father a great deal since November.

The phone rang.

Irving looked at it for one full ring. Then he picked it up.

”I wondered,” he said, without greeting, his voice the measured baritone of a man who had conducted enough important conversations to understand that preamble was not always necessary, ”when you would call.”

*****

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