Crazy for Cornelia Read Online Free

himself to break tradition
     by removing the faces of the Lord men from the great foyer, he did take the life-sized paintings of all three ancestors and
     order them reproduced as shrunken eight-by-ten prints. It usually amused him to pass the tiny heads, which he’d cut down to
     size as surely as a Borneo headhunter. But today they managed to burrow annoyingly into his thoughts.
    In their line of one-child families that produced only sons, the Lords’ starter fortune came from Chester Lord I, who founded
     the Lord & Company investment bank in 1900. That mother lode made it difficult for his son to fail. Yet Chester II seemed
     bent on losing the money anyway, growing too fond of wintering in Palm Beach to shuttle back and forth to Wall Street and
     then cashing out all of Lord & Company’s stock market holdings. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Chester II barely got
     his hair mussed.
    Lucky Granddad.
    When Chester’s father, Chester Lord III, took over after World War II, he invested in the black arts of Madison Avenue—advertising
     and network television—pumping Lord & Company into an even richer and fatter enterprise.
    The tips of Chester’s ears burned whenever he thought about his father. Today had brought back his eleventh birthday party
     at the Westchester Country Club. When Chester missed a putt, his dad hectored him to keep shooting until all his friends and
     relatives drifted off. At twilight, forty-seven putts later, he finally sank the ball.
    Chester glumly forced himself to study business at Yale, aching to change his major to social anthropology. He envied those
     students with their beards, tangled hair, and sloppy jeans, who seemed to bear the real problems of the world. During his
     college years, Chester would gaze out the window of Finance 101 and fantasize. He had read
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead. How he yearned to run off to study those gentle islanders who only made love, not war.
    But, of course, Chester had to join Lord & Company.
    None of the cunning, pin-striped men who reported to his father took young Chester seriously. Sometimes he imagined that they
     snickered as they passed him. He knew that the top managers met after work at watering holes like “21” and never invited Chester
     to join them. They dismissed him until his father got a snootful and said at the firm’s Christmas party, “A Lord will always
     run Lord & Company, even if he runs it into the ground.”
    How prophetic. In the 1970s, Chester tugged at the short leash his father allowed him by investing in John Delorean’s new
     automobile. In the 1980s, he sought safe harbor in the savings and loan industry. But he was soon fleeced by its slickest
     operators, who bankrupted their S&Ls while buying yachts with twenty-four-karat-gold faucets for themselves. He constantly
     stood trembling before his father’s desk, explaining why money practically bled out of his business ventures.
    The berating only stopped when his apoplectic, workaholic father finally blew an artery and was wheeled out of his office
     on a gurney. Chester fearfully took over the presidency. He floundered while the crafty managers around him circled and snapped.
     He knew they were lining up outside buyers to force him out.
    Desperate to find a loyal right hand, he hired his old Yale roommate’s son as his protégé—a fierce blond Young Turk named
     Tucker Fisk, a football star at Yale with a Wharton MBA who had already cut a blazing swath through Wall Street.
    Tucker proved to be more protector than protégé. As much as Chester shrank from confrontation, Tucker roared with the joy
     of it. On the day they called Bloody Tuesday, Tucker lined up and summarily fired the executives who wanted Chester out. Then
     he terrified the loyal ones by demanding letters of resignation to keep in his desk in case they should even think about disobeying
     him. On Bloody Tuesday, the halls of Lord & Company rang with trembling voices swearing