Judging from the contents of the book, the partners of Lazard's New York arm never tried hard to conceal internal feuding and sexual licentiousness.

Those secrets that remained unspilt before Bruce Wasserstein seized control of Lazard from Michel David-Weill and propelled it to its 2005 initial public offering are entertainingly dished out here. William Cohan, a former junior Lazard banker, not only knows where the bodies were buried but got a guided tour of the graveyard from Lazard's big names.

Wasserstein would not speak to him but everyone else seems to have taken the opportunity to settle scores, reminisce about each other's private life and generally philosophise. By the time David-Weill takes the author on a tour of the nude paintings in his Fifth Avenue study, noting one "very, very charming and also relatively erotic" Ingres, the reader hardly lifts an eyebrow.

At 740 pages the result is long, but one sympathises with Cohan. What should have been left out? The account of Felix Rohatyn's jealous clash with Steve Rattner, conducted through various magazines? Or Rohatyn's affairs, culminating in one occasion when Andre Meyer banged on his locked door to shout: "Felix, why don't you go to a hotel room like the rest of my partners?"

If all this seems like strange behaviour, one must say they were under a lot of strain throughout most of the 20th century. Meyer, the mercurial and brutal senior partner from 1945 to 1977 ("I fought him every day for 20 years. You had to," recalls Rohatyn), gave way to the charming but Machiavellian David-Weill, who ruled by division.

The emphasis was on the "men". Cohan records that partners from Meyer to David-Weill and Rohatyn imported a French attitude to extramarital liaisons and the first women who worked there as bankers were apparently propositioned constantly. One young woman is even said to have been raped by two junior bankers, who were eased out to avoid embarrassment. Maybe some feuding and insecurity was down to the rootless past of Lazard's senior figures.

Rohatyn escaped from Vichy France to the US in 1942, while David-Weill's family had to change their names to avoid arrest as Jews. "Peace is relatively strange. But catastrophe! Ah, I think, back to normal," David-Weill says of his reaction to September 11, 2001.

After being put in charge of Lazard in 1977 when Rohatyn rejected the job, David-Weill repeatedly gave false hope to ambitious bankers such as Rattner and Loomis, causing them to believe he was willing to cede power to them. By the time Lazard hit hard times again in 2001, he lacked a successor in a divided and demoralised organisation.

Enter Wasserstein, who out-negotiated David-Weill to wrest control of Lazard from him. Cohan claims Wasserstein gained control of Lazard for a mere $US30 million, the price he paid for a 1 per cent stake (in spite of reports the figure was closer to $US150 million) and agreement to let him run the place.

Maybe so, but as he quotes one partner as saying: "Lazard is not a partnership. It's a sole proprietorship with fancy profit-sharing." After 30 years of intrigue, David-Weill had it coming.

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