The Black and the Red

By R.Z. Sheppard

ZECKENDORF: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM ZECKENDORF, with Edward McCreary. 312 pages. Holt, Rineharf & Winston. $7.95.

The time is September 1954. Spyros Skouras, Laurance Rockefeller and William Zeckendorf have just passed through an elaborate security screen to reach a Los Angeles meeting with the suspicious, secretive industrialist Howard Hughes. Through Skouras, Hughes has leaked his intention of selling his enormous holdings to devote the proceeds to medical research. Rockefeller, philanthropist and president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Zeckendorf at that time, the extraordinarily successful head of the Webb & Knapp real estate empire, have come out from New York to buy.

The meeting is a waste of time. First Hughes feigns ignorance of its purpose. Then Zeckendorf cuts through the mumbo-jumbo and makes an offer. Hughes rejects it out of hand but has what he wants: a free appraisal of his property's value from one of the nation's most astute and best-publicized business brains.

The anecdote, among the best in this personable, skillfully concocted autobiography, is characteristic Zeckendorf because, win or lose, he has always managed to come out sounding like a winner. After all, a man as shrewd as Howard Hughes would only send for the best.

Major in Real Estate. Immodesty becomes few men as well as it does Zeckendorf. Apart from the tangle of overextensions and bad luck that resulted in the collapse of Webb & Knapp in 1965, Zeckendorf seems to have little to be modest about. The son of a Long Island shoe manufacturer, he dropped out of high school, but entered college after attending a cram school and completing 16 regents' exams in one week. In 1925, after three years of parties and football, he dropped college to major in real estate.

During World War II, Zeckendorf won a reputation as an astute real estate manager by increasing the value of Naval Commander Vincent Astor's properties by $15 million. But it was the postwar building boom that finally made the ambitious and by now well-seasoned Zeckendorf a "bee in clover." Basically, a successful real estate deal is an economic snowball operation. You find a good property, make a minimal down payment, borrow as much as possible at low interest, then sell high to finance the next deal. In addition to having an uncanny instinct for all the complex variations of this pattern, Zeckendorf had the vision to expand beyond New York into the fastest-growing areas in the country.

Together with Architect I.M. Pei, he helped rebuild whole sections of Denver and Dallas. The two men were also prime movers in the renovation of southwest Washington, D.C., which began in the early 50s, and in the planning and building of the imposing Place Ville-Marie in Montreal. Zeckendorf devotes a major part of his book to detailing each venture. Outer leases, inner leases, sandwich leases, varieties of mortgages and credit, fees simple and not so simple--all are juggled so adeptly that even if the layman doesn't fully understand them, he is dazzled by the performance.

Through it all, Zeckendorf remains flamboyant and wolfishly charming. In 1946, when it appeared that the United Nations would make its permanent headquarters in Philadelphia, Zeckendorf blocked the move by offering the international organization its present New York site--at any price it felt like paying. He had assembled the 17 acres for other reasons, but he did not think that the U.N. would take advantage of him. It did not. Zeckendorf got $8,500,000 for land that had cost him $6,500,000.

These accounts of Zeckendorfs energetic maneuvers and beaux gestes in building are readable. They should also prove useful to the author. Like Nixon's Six Crises, this book is clearly intended to serve as an optimistic self-appraisal, attracting public attention to the author's comeback effort. Zeckendorfs essential superficiality is hard to disguise. For a man who has built, traveled and lived as widely as he has, he is too reticent about things that really matter. He conspicuously refrains from any substantive discussion of the intricacies of the tax structure that has created so many real estate millionaires. He begs off detailing the fancy over-extensions that finally led to the collapse of his company, with the feeble excuse that after four years, he is still too emotionally involved to give a proper account. And though he criticizes men of power and narrow vision who compromised some of his boldest conceptions, he offers too little about influence peddling and conflicts of interest, as well as the public and private corruption that afflicts the real estate and construction businesses. Zeckendorfs own career has been marked by a high degree of imagination, taste and honor. But he certainly has seen a great deal that he could have usefully told without being sued for libel. Instead, he has made his world seem too much like a gentlemanly extension of Monopoly.

. R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.