The Lehman Trilogy [by David Lehman]

Stacey and I saw "The Lehman Trilogy," the much-heralded three-part, three-actor play, and we didn't have to pay the $2,000 per ticket that scalpers were demanding. Peter Marks of the Washington Post calls it "a sublime 3½-hour dash through the history of American capitalism." The director is Sam Mendes, the actors are Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the author is the Italian playwright Stefano Massini, and Ben Power did the adaptation. The play has received rave reviews. The Post reviewer considers it an "indictment of the unregulated capitalism the Lehmans and others practiced over the years — a catalyst for both the stock market crash of 1929 and the 2008 debacle that sank Lehman Bros."

The opening acts, about the emigration to the United States of the three Lehman brothers who founded the dynasty that evolved into the titanic Wall Street firm, are compelling, but as the lengthy play enters the twentieth century it loses more and more credibility. It is important to note that the Brothers and their progeny had shed their ownership and control of the company long before its colossal failure in 2008, so the effort to represent the history of the Lehmans as a parable of capitalism culminating in the fiasco of September 2008 requires an obscuring of facts, which as Michael Dukakis says "are stubborn things."

In brief, the author knows very little, if anything, about the modern history of my family.*

The play underestimates the major New Deal contributions of Herbert Lehman, the Williams College graduate who served both as New York State's governor for ten years and as the state's U. S. Senator from 1949 to 1956. When FDR was governor of  New York, Lehman was his lieutenant governor, and Roosevelt called him "that splendid right hand of mine.” High schools and colleges are named after him. Herbert's older brother Irving's distinguished career as a jurist hardly rates a mention, though the Columbia alumnus served for fourteen years on the New York Supreme Court. He married the daughter of Macy's and Abraham and Straus. Completely overlooked are Herbert's son Peter Lehman, an ace "Thunderbolt" pilot (in the 366th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Group) based in Britain, and Orin Lehman, also a pilot, also decorated with a Distinguished Flying Cross (and in his case a Purple Heart) who was seriously injured at the Battle of the Bulge but survived and went on to produce a Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play on the one hand and to succeed Robert Moses as commissioner of New York's Office of Parks and Recreation on the other.

Robert Lehman (left), the financier and philanthropist, who donated an entire wing of great art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is treated with unwarranted condescension. Bobby, as he was known, guided the firm successfully through the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. He made a brilliant bet on Pan Am airlines. In his spare time he played polo and owned race horses, five of whom ran in the Kentucky Derby, and perhaps in consequence the play lampoons him as a playboy millionaire. More importantly, he collected paintings and was especially proud of his Botticelli, Bellini, Velazquez, and two El Grecos. The gift to the Met contained 3,000 works of art, including paintings I love by Matisse, Goya, and Ingres. The Robert Lehman Foundation sponsors lectureships in art history and other worthy activities.

When Robert Lehman died in 1969, after forty-four years at the helm, no Lehman was active in the running of the venerable firm.

The following years were somewhat chaotic, and the firm was sold to the Shearson division of American Express in 1984. The new company merged with E. F. Hutton four years later. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the latter had mounted a brilliant ad campaign with the tag line "When E. F. Hutton speaks, everybody listens." But Hutton was riddled with scandals in the 1980s and the firm died -- only to be revived in 2021 by owners who have absoluterly nothing in common with those who drove the firm into its grave. 

By 1990, my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name. We received quarterly and annual reports but only from afar could we monitor the ill-fated outfit under the direction of CEO Dick Fuld. 

So viewer beware. What you're seeing is a play that is certainly at a higher level of intellectual content than most but deviates from historical fact and biographical truth in order to push a thesis regarding Wall Street practices and the dynamics of capitalism.

* Department of clarification: Although I am only distantly related to the Lehmans who distinguished themselves as investment bankers, public servants, and philanthropists, and I undertook this piece as an exercise in plausible invention, all the facts are valid with the exception of the statement that in 1990 "my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name." I have no brothers, and my investment in the Lehman Brothers mutual fund cost me its market price on the day I bought it as a young man. As I wrote in my book One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, "It has happened that people meeting me have assumed that I belong to the great Lehman family that has been notable in public service and philanthropy. It is possible that the frequency of this and similar errors were sources of invention when I went to the computer and wrote my five hundred words of the day."-- DL

Comments

[Suzanne Lummis]

Thanks for this. I'm sharing the link with one of my students who recently saw the play in NYC. While I know that elements of history and hard facts have to be reworked in order to create a cohesive and dramatically engaging story, on stage or on film, it gripes me when people play fast and loose with facts in order to push a sociopolitical point of view.
Of course, it matters whether the work presents itself as largely historical, or fiction-inspired-by-history. The movie "Chinatown," for example, is the latter -- none of the characters have real-life counterparts; all the character names and many plot elements are entirely invented. Here, on the other, the playwright -- and before that the author -- propose to tell the story of real people. So... The production hasn't come to L.A. yet but I'm glad to be apprised before-hand that the material's slanted a certain way. If someone's working an angle I like to know it.

[Mindy Aloff]

Thank you very much for your posting, David. I was thinking of trying to see the play, but I'm going to give it a miss. In light of the ticket prices, my bank account also thanks you. Lots of high flyers of many kinds in your family! How about writing a nice, long Department of Clarifications fact piece in The New Yorker?

[Caroline Seebohm]

I never realized you were a Lehman Lehman. Silly of me. But poets and bankers don't necessarily go together. I salute you.

Caroline Seebohm, (a banker's daughter)

[David Lehman]

Thank you for your comments. Because of the apparent credibility of the persona I take in writing about "The Lehman Trilogy," I have appended a clarification. As it happens I know a lot about the Lehmans. I was always curious about my namesake and have done a lot of reading. Stacey and I share the feeling that the play's depiction of Robert Lehman in particular was shabby and that making Lehman Brothers a metonym for Wall Street's periodic breakdowns since 1987 is bogus. That tickets cost an astronomical amount is an irony worth mentioning.

[Denise Duhamel]

Wonderful piece, David!!

[Bruce Kawin]

Thank you for a marvelous review!

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Denise. . . and Bruce. . .