For the truest depiction of Wall Street on film, I think you have to go way back before The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street. Mike Nichols’s 1988 film Working Girl vividly captures most of the best and worst of Wall Street—the sexism, the snobbery, the self-indulgence are all there, but so is the emphasis on talent, the competition, and the joy of solving problems. Besides, you get younger versions of Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and Alec Baldwin—all with clothes and hairstyles that only made sense in the 1980s.
Tess (Melanie Griffith) is a secretary from Staten Island anxious to make it in the high-stakes game of mergers and acquisitions. Her boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver), is the archetypal investment banker—preppy, brash, selfish, and deceitful. Katharine is in a relationship with Jack (Harrison Ford), the good-guy investment banker who works hard and wants to solve problems for his clients. When Katharine injures herself in Europe, Tess begins acting in Katharine’s stead and advises her client, Trask Industries, to merge with a radio station owned by Jack’s client. Jack meets Tess without realizing that she’s Katharine’s secretary, and as they work together on the merger, they fall for each other. Katharine returns and tries to disrupt the mergers, but Trask and the radio station, and Tess and Jack, are already beholden to each other.
In one of the most memorable scenes, Tess is hiding in the closet as Katharine is trying to seduce an unwilling Jack. Katharine gives voice to her romantic sentiments in a way that only an investment banker could. Tired of waiting for Jack to propose, Katharine pulls at Jack and says: “I’ve been thinking—let’s merge, you and I. Think of it, darling: Mr. and Mrs. Fabulously Happy!” While it is one of the least romantic proposals you can imagine (rivaling the proposal of Mr. Collins), the proposal hints at the parallels between the process of merging companies and the process of combining lives in a marriage.
Is it just obsessive investment bankers who see romance and finance as intimately linked? After leaving the Art Tatum Trio, guitarist Tiny Grimes ventured off on his own and partnered with Charlie Parker in 1944 to create one of the classics of bebop jazz, “Romance Without Finance.” Grimes’s conclusion was unequivocal—romance without finance just didn’t make any sense. Without a hint of irony, Grimes sings, “You ain’t got no money you can’t be mine . . . Romance without finance is a nuisance.” Charlie Parker and his bandmates repeatedly affirm the sentiment by shouting in the background, “You ain’t kidding brother!” and “It’s a drag!”
Fifty years later, the rock band Little Feat released a song with the same title but reversed the Tiny Grimes message, providing a more typically romantic view. Little Feat challenged the Tiny Grimes logic directly with these considerably more anodyne lyrics: “What’s money got to do with love? . . . I’ll take romance over finance every time.”
A similar contrast emerges from the first hits of Ray Charles and Kanye West. For his first hit in 1954, Ray Charles sampled a popular devotional song, “It Must Be Jesus,” to create “I Got a Woman,” and mixed the sacred and profane in new ways. In that song, he praised a woman for the purity of her love and sang, “She gives me money, when I’m in need. Yeah, she’s a kind of friend indeed.” Fifty years later, Kanye West, like Little Feat, reversed that original, romantic sentiment by sampling Ray Charles’s first hit.
The prelude to the song has Jamie Foxx imitating Ray Charles, but this time he’s providing a more cautionary tale by substituting key words. Foxx sings, “She take my money, when I’m in need, Yeah, she’s a trifling friend indeed.” Fortunately, Kanye turns out to not be quite that cynical. He then goes on to combine the two opposing views of the relationship between love and money in the rest of the song. He repeatedly overlays the sweet sentiment of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” with his own more cautionary advice. Just as Jamie Foxx / Ray Charles is lovingly telling us, in the original lyrics, that she gives him money when he’s in need, Kanye is adding his own cautionary tale about how she may well be a “gold digger.”
At certain times, we might choose to believe the sweet sentiments of Ray Charles and Little Feat. But the pragmatism of Tiny Grimes and Kanye West also resonates. History would seem to be on the side of Grimes and West regarding the deep links between finance and romance. From the financing of Renaissance Florence to the rise of the Rothschilds to the creation of the automobile industry to the early days of the internet, finance and romance have been inextricably linked—and the accumulated financial folklore and wisdom about mergers can provide some hardheaded insight into what makes romantic relationships work.
Excerpted from The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir Desai. Copyright © 2017 by Mihir Desai. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.