Présentation de l'éditeur
In The Fall of Princes, bestselling author Robert Goolrick brings to vivid life New York City in the 1980s, a world of excess and self-indulgence, where limousines waited for hours outside Manhattan’s newest trendy club or the latest dining hot spot. Where drugs were bountiful and not refused. Where no price was too high and flesh was always on offer. Where a quick trip to Europe or a weekend on the coast or a fabulous Hamptons beach house were just part of what was expected. When the money just kept coming, and coming, and coming . . . until it didn’t.
This is the story of young men, princes all. Too much money. Too much freedom. They thought it would never end. Looking back on a Wall Street career that began with great success and ended with a precipitous crash, Rooney tells the story of how he and a group of other young turks made it to the top in the financial world and then, one by one, took a fall. For some, it was tragic; for others, it was the simple but bruising act of yielding to a life of mediocrity. For Rooney, however, it became a lifelong struggle to maintain a sense of dignity and to cling to the illusion of the life he once led.
Stunning in its acute observations about great wealth and its absence, and deeply moving in its depiction of the ways in which these young men learn to cope with both extremes, The Fall of Princes takes readers on a journey that is both starkly revealing and dazzlingly entertaining, a true tour de force.
Extrait
CHAPTER SIX
One Reason I Don’t Go to the Beach Anymore
More than a decade ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English-country-house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.
It was like being in an episode of Masterpiece Theater. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut glass vases.
This was just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed.
I worked on The Street, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy helping rich people shift money around every minute of every day so that they could get even richer at the expense of people who had no money and never would—I was wracked with guilt at the same time I was insane with adrenaline and raging testosterone—the money was fantastic and the roll, the flow of it, was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins. Money was the big news, the lifeblood of the decade, and I was in it up to my elbows.
I worked in a big room that was basically like a casino; there were no windows, no clocks, nothing but the relentless flicker of financial news on dozens of TV sets. It was both timeless and relentless. The days were vicious, but the nights were filled with fat stogies in the cigar room at Frank’s and big steaks and then on to clubs where we swaggered in our monogrammed Sea Island cotton shirts and $200 scarf ties from Hermès and sat in the VIP section and ran up $2,000 bar bills and took town cars home at three in the morning when we had to be back at the office at seven-thirty. We did things like write our phone numbers on girls’ tits with Mont Blanc pens, and they always called us back. Always.
You could smoke then, that’s how long ago it was.
This was life. This was everyday life, and we didn’t understand people who didn’t live like this. We were the pulse, the heartbeat, of the decade and we were all young and mostly good-looking and we all found time to work out like dogs, weird times like six in the morning, so we had these fantastic bodies, well, not
