Visits: 4
In the aftermath of the crisis, whether out of a sense of guilt or anxiety about sending the wrong message, there were attempts at frugality. “People started to watch what they were spending,” he said. And nobody wanted to be showy: “Private events went way down.”
But that thriftiness evaporated in a matter of months. “Everything became the same again, because these people have money,” Mr. Niccolini said. “Don’t forget that part. They have money. They want to spend money.”
Bonuses returned to Wall Street by the end of 2009 — Goldman Sachs’s bonus payments reached $16.7 billion, the highest level in its history — and the financial power players returned to the Four Seasons.
“You know, half the people in this place could be prosecuted,” Oliver Stone, the film director, told me with a sense of glee in 2010 as he surveyed the Grill Room. It was just before the premiere of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” in which he revisited Gordon Gekko’s universe and a post-crisis “Wall Street.”
Even those laid low by the crisis, like Dick Fuld, the final chief executive of Lehman Brothers, found refuge at the Four Seasons. “He used to come once in a while,” Mr. Niccolini said. “He was not treated any different than any other people.”
There have been longstanding changes, of course. But the one that stands out to Mr. Niccolini reflects a change in societal attitudes more than industry ideals.
“Some of those guys, like Lewis Glucksman from Lehman Brothers, every time he used to come to the Four Seasons, yes, of course he had three-martini lunches,” Mr. Niccolini said of the now deceased 1980s Lehman chief executive, who helped groom Mr. Fuld. “There was nothing wrong with that, you know? Because those people had some kind of different constitution. There were people that could actually drink a three-martini lunch and go back to work.”