Ben Stein's Diary: taking Stock
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Taking Stock Tuesday A visit to my genius shrink, Paul Hyman. I have seen him off and on for decades now about various problems, mostly having to do with...
...She was not there but I had a very long talk with my boy about vehicle design...
...Go online, of course...
...This is scaring me big time...
...That's an airline that prides itself on contempt to start with, and it got worse from there...
...That was my first job and it was what I felt like most of the time...
...Let's go...
...That night, he refused to clean his room...
...On a really good day, we would each make about as much as it costs to buy a car, although not a Hummer, my son's dream machine...
...I mean, here is a guy who has used his position of power to have sex with dozens, maybe hundreds of women...
...I wish," he said sadly...
...My room is also nice...
...I don't see any stethoscope or blood pressure machine...
...Now my moments before slumber were spent thinking of what to buy next for me and those I loved, and in what kind of dollar-a-year type of public service work Tommy might throw himself...
...It also has a hotel with elegant rooms on its top floors...
...What kind of doctor are you...
...After dinner, I had a drink at the bar and visited with a young woman who was in sales of ice cream freezers...
...If trends continued, I would make so much in a few more years of that fun and games that my son could spend his whole life doing what Phil and I were doing...
...I don't want to talk," he said...
...What exactly do you do there...
...When the airplane finally, blissfully, arrived, my driver was an Asian man walking with a pronounced limp, wearing black leather gloves...
...Earnings won't continue to go up as fast as they have, for one thing, and absolutely no one knows why inflation has not reignited...
...As it happens, today is Tommy's turn to read from the Haftorah, which is commentary on the Torah...
...They wanted my autograph...
...I have one picked out in Florida where they teach you to fly a plane...
...He, a highly acquisitive ten year old, was trying to talk me into buying a Wave Runner, a sort of powerful "personal watercraft" that's really a motorcycle on the water, that goes like a banshee and that ten year olds can drive without a license...
...Over long periods, the S&P always beats the managed funds, and it has no load, and it has the lowest administrative costs...
...We're having these rehearsals in a big, empty stage...
...We don't sell them overseas because we can't make enough of them," he said jovially...
...Nonsense...
...Thursday N ow I'm in Detroit, still doing publicity for my show...
...It is a pretty spot...
...God, it is great to be home...
...Our hotel, the Townsend, is small but perfectly kept, with cheery, kind help...
...All right," Paul said...
...The producers have gathered some evil contestants from last yearwho did well against me...
...It was sleeting...
...You can tell me where to find the bathroom...
...The flight was totally fine and uneventful, but when we got to Kennedy, our car and driver were nowhere to be seen...
...Do you want to talk to us now...
...But the exhilaration of these last few years has also been real...
...I love this life...
...Fantastic," said I. "That makes us the most profitable part of ConAgra," he said...
...Just talking to him, hearing his sweet voice while the snow fell on Michigan outside my window, made me so happy tears fell down my cheeks...
...Talk, you maniac," I said...
...How can he do them well with that kind of mental defect...
...He told me Snack Pack sells a billion units a year in the U.S...
...How will I ever go back to my pumpkin after this...
...It's far too expensive," I said to him...
...In fact, now that the bull market is teetering, and maybe worse, from the monsoon winds crashing in from Asia, I am already seeing the glorious days of the skyrocketing market through a kind of rapidly thickening gauze, as of events that are past...
...The man across the aisle, a jolly fat fellow, told me he was in the Snack Pack division of Hunt-Wesson Division of ConAgra...
...She looked amazingly, hauntingly beautiful, and I suddenly realized that she looked great to me because she looked like my wife...
...I also watched the TV news about Clinton...
...Be quiet," I said...
...I had to go talk to the beautiful flight attendant in the galley to escape...
...Didn't I just tell you to be quiet...
...Failure...
...It's realistic to think of limits...
...It gets better and worse, but it never completely leaves...
...Are you a tourist...
...It's making me think...
...As always in these moments, I think of my father-in-law, Col...
...I am sure he was just under some kind of personality delusion, but it still bothered me a lot...
...BENJAMIN J. STEIN iS a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...If that isn't a compulsive sex maniac, whatis it...
...I don't like this at all...
...I know that markets do not reach to the sky...
...My usual pattern of life had been to stay up nights or early mornings worrying about imminent destitution...
...I had a jolly ride to the airport, and then disaster...
...She smiled at me...
...I'm the bubble shark," he said...
...The woman at the ticket counter was of no help at all...
...It's as real as the opium addict's euphoria or the runner's high or the happiness of winning a prize...
...He's head of sales for Comedy Central...
...We're even at the point of talking about lifespan...
...As I walked through the terminal towards the man's car, I saw behind me a mysterious, slightly wacky-looking woman who had been traveling behind me on the plane...
...You will never really count to your boss and you can always be replaced, I said to them...
...What's going on with you...
...The LAAC is an ancient stone building at 7th and Olive, built about seventy years ago...
...She, as it turned out, was married to the flight attendant for coach...
...That's good sense...
...I thought I might have to stay over and that really upset me...
...You must have kids to understand what kids mean, and that's the truth...
...I asked him...
...Tommy and I have been going there lately to swim...
...All right," I said...
...It can't last...
...I stand on my previous comment," Tommy said...
...Paul and I talked about women who have strange tastes and then Tommy walked blithely in the door...
...They laughed at what a liar and creep Bill is...
...I told her that my Hebrew was a bit rusty after forty years of neglect but I would happily read in English...
...I know I couldn't...
...It bled and he sewed me up...
...When he left, Paul said, "He didn't speak because he has no complaints...
...Unlike Krupskaya, she has no ax of power to grind...
...Anyway, Paul and Tommy and I gathered in Paul's strangely colored office...
...Sad, because he has an amazing talent...
...It's not as if he were a rock guitarist...
...I know it has to stop, and probably so do most other people who have gone through The American Spectator • April 1998 53 the glory of the past few years...
...Then Mommy and I went back to our seats...
...The younger members of the audience liked it, but the older members, those with kids, loved it...
...My son's happy smiling face...
...They wanted to kiss me...
...The rest of Tommy's class had a discussion on what the plague of darkness might mean allegorically...
...Moments later, I felt a bubbly tickling under me...
...She just could not have been better, and I was relieved to have a way back to my little family...
...Nothing," I answered...
...Poor Chelsea...
...Capable...
...Tommy answered, "Well, you didn't tell me not to blow bubbles...
...he asked...
...I'll be out in a few minutes...
...I am mystified about why women like him so much...
...They were happy owners of many formerly stray dogs, cats, and geese and even some horses...
...Maybe, but what a character he is...
...On a decent day, we each would have made as much from the stock market gains de jour as I earned in an entire year as a 52 April 9 9 8 • The American Spectator young lawyer (when lawyers' pay was far, far lower than it is now) or he made as a young psychologist...
...Friday I gave a speech to about Soo advertising people in a hotel ballroom in Detroit...
...The flight back was torture...
...Tommy looked unhappy...
...In the car he said, "Thanks, Daddy, for taking me swimming...
...I'll try anything...
...Quiet...
...He spoke with what I thought was an accent...
...Every few seconds he would break the surface and laugh hilariously and then blow more bubbles...
...11 to in my own life...
...Larry Divney said he would pay to have me join the airline's World Club...
...Monday U p early to go with Tommy and wifie down to Temple Israel, where Tommy goes to fifth grade...
...When Tommy read his Haftorah, he stood on the shoulders of the men who died at El Alamein and Stalingrad and St...
...Unlike the wife, Chelsea did not sign up for this kind of humiliation...
...I love being at home...
...Then I went back to my hotel alone in the snow...
...For about eighteen years now I have had a rash on my side, just above my hip...
...Then I turned on the radio news and heard that the Dow had risen 250 points that day...
...I told the driver —Johnny— that the only smart move for long term investors is the S&P 500 no-load index fund...
...Paul does not need the business and he'll tell me the truth...
...Paul will be the most likely to say, "He's just lazy and he'll grow out of it...
...Johnny noted all of this in a notebook, and then brought me home to see my wifie and my boy and my dogs and our new Kitty...
...It was lively, brimming with happy people, men and women with intelligent, clean-featured faces...
...We would ride from Perry's bicycle stand, virtually in the middle latitude of Santa Monica, up the beach for a couple of miles to the end of the bike path at Temescal Canyon in Pacific Palisades, and then back south past the rental stand to the middle of Venice, past the knoll where men and women bang loudly on drums more or less constantly, near to Muscle Beach, and then back to a cool, lovely hotel called Shutters built out of the shell of an old drug treatment center called Synanon...
...A law professor, for heaven's sake...
...I scoffed at it, and so does Paul...
...It was great to have that money, even if it was only paper profits, pouring in...
...Tommy would not be my son...
...Be it ever so humble...
...No, she is a pure victim of her Dad's compulsions...
...Larry is sort of a dream sales executive...
...She got into the final round but then she only tied me...
...I'm telling you, I do not have one prayer against this kid...
...We would have sushi or hamburgers or salad in the lobby cafe and then go back to our cars at Perry's...
...He is already a lawyer...
...As you can imagine, this drove me wild...
...He wanted to talk about CAD-CAM programs...
...We were on our way to being rich compared with my standards as a statistical clerk in the Civil Service Commission, who made $67 a week...
...Thursday 0 ff to New York City to do some promotion for my show...
...It's like an affair too good, too illicit to last...
...Study is vital, but so is exercise...
...So, so, so proud...
...Today's group includes a very well-educated woman dog sitter, a well-informed actor, and a very well-informed woman cantor...
...A story came on that said Hillary had discovered the affair with Monica and had ordered all interns from then on to wear skirts of a decent length and to make sure to wear underpants...
...Saturday As usual, it's about nine in the morning, L.A...
...But they were amazing to me by any standards I was used44 was making money—good money— just by riding along that breezy stretch of beach...
...Yeh," she said...
...You'll live a long life yet...
...New flavors...
...Tommy sat for a moment and started to blow bubbles...
...I asked...
...I called from the car phone and bought the Wave Runner...
...Can I go, please...
...I went in, told the doctor my health history, and then he gave me an anesthetic and removed a giant chunk of my rash for a further biopsy...
...So last week I had it biopsied...
...I will have to actually work on my game show or at my computer to earn my living instead of having a wholesale markup of equity assets do all of my work for me...
...Then off for a few hours of being filmed by a camera crew that is doing a feature on little me...
...No driver...
...Truly great...
...Foreseeable to whom...
...he asked...
...It has to end, but, please, not for a hundred years or so...
...I have seen him off and on for decades now about various problems, mostly having to do with less than wholesome girls and my attraction to them and vice versa...
...What to do for four hours...
...I'm bored," Tommy said...
...I was making money, and good money by most standards, just by being there, just by being alive, just by riding along that breezy stretch of beach...
...I just went to a Korean deli, bought some pound cake, and went to bed...
...But you didn't say not to wave my arms," Tommy said...
...My kitty...
...What fine people...
...Gosh, he looks truly miserable...
...I went back to my room and called my wife...
...Moments after that, Tommy appeared on my side at the surface, laughing and grinning from ear to ear...
...What kind of hippie dippy free love commune was Bill running there...
...My bed...
...I am with a great guy named Larry Divney...
...That's a disturbing gesture," I said...
...She smiled at me— a concept unknown in New York or Los Angeles—and then strode past...
...Easy-going...
...I also know about the addictive personality within me, the selfish brain that craves only pleasure...
...All right, counselor," I said to Tommy...
...Can I go next year...
...He is supposed to read from it in Hebrew, and the Hebrew in the Haftorah is void of vowels...
...asks a character in some novel of the 1920's, and I could tell myself that we were well on the way, if not by Henry Kravis's standards, at least by anything I might have reasonably expected in my own life...
...They're how you treat your family and friends...
...Oddly enough, when the men in the World Club heard that news they laughed like mad...
...Oy...
...he asked...
...I know that there is a complex relationship (maybe not so complex) among interest rates, inflation rates, earnings, and maybe even exchange rates that will govern stock prices eventually...
...New textures...
...I am a doctor who talks about what's going on in people's heads," Paul said...
...Nonsense," I said to him...
...You have any...
...If you keep acting this selfish, you're going to a military academy when you're in seventh grade...
...Success and failure have almost nothing to do with money...
...Your age or my age...
...And how can I be expected at age ten to know your standards...
...Confident...
...They love us...
...Knowledgeable...
...It was cold...
...The deputy rabbi, a woman, asked us if we—my wife and I— would make an aliyah (that means a trip) up to the dais to read from the Haftorah, too...
...What...
...I'm in charge of pudding research," he said...
...He talked to Chinich, too, and then settled into his seat wearily...
...time, and I am looking at the financial channel, seeing that the market is way down...
...We're getting more equipment and we'll make more eventually...
...And believe me, I have seen a sex addict in the mirror many a time...
...Well, it's Northwest," I said...
...Why don't you wait in the waiting room...
...Paul asked...
...Well, we're not going home, so just sit quietly on the couch while Paul and I talk," I said...
...I have studied finance at the graduate school level...
...The women seemed to feel sorry for him...
...Another said the darkness was meant to suggest the loneliness of losing the firstborn...
...I plugged in my lumbering ancient Canon Notejet, and soon was off 54 April 19 9 8 • The American Spectator and running, talking, chatting, answering my unbelievable quantum of e-mail...
...Look," I said...
...Clinton has real responsibilities...
...Or, speaking of my son, I think of one summer day when Tommy and I were driving from Coeur d'Alene to Sandpoint, Idaho, where we rented our summer house on Lake Pend Oreille...
...he asked...
...But he generally scoffs at anything trendy, so I want him to talk to Tommy...
...Are we rich yet, Daddy...
...Yes, we're on the front lines of pudding research...
...I'm from London...
...Tommy was supposed to be in the lane next to me, but he abruptly disappeared...
...Big things," he said, and started tapping his foot furiously...
...I guess that shows what kind of loser I am that you thought I was an immigrant...
...It's all pretty sad for her...
...I was born in Los Angeles," he said mournfully...
...Can I give you any directions...
...Offi 56 April 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Nastassia greeted me and hugged me as if she knew me...
...Tommy," I said, "the pleasure was all mine...
...I could leave the beach mildly winded from the exercise, tanned, filled with good seared tuna—and feeling that I was the best thing to be in the capitalist society—a capitalist...
...After that and many congratulations to Tommy, I headed off to my dermatologist...
...Considering that she had not heard the questions before and I had—we used them last year—I was amazed at her score...
...It's been haunting Tommy...
...This is kind of a treat for little me because I am traveling with my longtime pal, Michael Chinich...
...But today, I am here with my little angel, my perfect precious little Pan, Tommy Stein...
...Then, by a little miracle, I got a reservation on a flight four hours later (my travel agent was nowhere to be found...
...I know all of this...
...Gloomy and also happy thoughts...
...Dale Denman, Jr., and the other millions of brave men who fought and beat the Nazis in World War II...
...He won't lie just to get a new customer...
...Instead of fears of scarcity, for the past three years I have drowsed in the glorious anticipation of how to spend the excess...
...The doctor called me in Washington to tell me the cells were irregular and he needed another biopsy...
...He sat for a moment and started to wave his arms about...
...My fresh 55 The American Spectator • April 1998 orange juice...
...I was desperate...
...Now, this is a major worry in my life...
...I asked...
...Usually the days were slightly hazy, burning off to strong sunshine...
...For some reason, Detroit has some of the best-looking people in America...
...But to your kids, you are irreplaceable, a star every time you show up...
...I told her I did that and she said she wanted to take me to lunch...
...Is there anything that could make you change your mind...
...He's with his buddy...
...Off then to a rehearsal of my show...
...She is a long-time friend of Chinich's and the two of them laughed and giggled and struck each other's backs and hugged and then re-hugged...
...I had a big, cheerful room with a bright city view...
...I have to be disciplined and expect that in the final analysis the chariot of the stock market might—no, must—turn back into a pumpkin...
...His teachers have said he is so incredibly lazy and yet so incredibly smart that they want to see if he has some learning disability...
...We had dinner at a place called Forte's...
...How much more obvious could his compulsive behavior be...
...I would not be here...
...To a reasonable person...
...In Northwest, the seats are so close together that the man behind me repeatedly kicked me just sitting there...
...That's worth recalling in moments of pride and hubris...
...the driver asked...
...That means the reader, even Tommy Stein, has to memorize the words as if they had vowels in them...
...Tommy sat on the couch and started to read aloud from a magazine...
...Warm...
...I was well impressed indeed...
...There is snow falling and it is great to be indoors...
...One of them said that the darkness was meant to suggest the darkness that one feels without belief in God...
...It has in it a beautiful dining room, a fabulously lovely bar, a wonderful series of athletic rooms, especially a super pool, and a Jacuzzi, a whirlpool, steam room, cold plunge, and many other great spots...
...I told her and she told me she wanted to be a commercial actress...
...I asked him...
...I have read history...
...I love him...
...Her name was Kathy...
...Friendly...
...He wants desperately to be a car and truck designer when he gets out of school, and I told him I would try to arrange to show him the GM design center in Warren...
...We sell 'em for a dollar forty-nine for four cups and they cost sixteen cents...
...Day after day, year after year, the savings of the little Stein family grew—without any real analysis on my part, because like any half-smart investor I just bought the index funds—until they were unrecognizable even by comparison with the beginning of the decade...
...There are a lot of smart people out there who did not necessarily go to Yale or Columbia...
...How can a rash I have had for eighteen years as I grew progressively fatter possibly be really bad...
...Tommy took out a silver-tipped pointer and read effortlessly from the Haftorah...
...As usual, I started to cry, and I read my little portion of the Haftorah through tears...
...Did you feel that...
...No, I want to go home," Tommy said...
...Our hotel, the Essex House, was fabulous...
...We are staying in a suburb called Birmingham...
...It is about a block west of Pershing Square...
...Imagine my being born here and still driving a car...
...I passed a bar where a beautiful woman in a fur walked out, carrying an immense plume of steam with her...
...You have to be clearer on your standards...
...Comically small by the standards of the day...
...Nastassia Kin-ski offered us a ride into town but Michael turned it down...
...He's like nirvana even on the phone...
...Without these brave men, flying flimsy bombers, stifling and freezing in tanks, running through machine gun fire—without the hundreds of thousands, the millions who did not come backto Boise or Manchester or Kharkov, there would be nothing...
...You follow Buffett...
...What country are you from...
...Dick Morris might possibly add that that's why so many pro-abortionists are of a sexual persuasion that does not usually produce children...
...That's the country I'm from...
...As the passengers slid on, who should come down the aisle but the lovely Nastassia Kinski, one of my heart-throbs and a true sex bomb...
...Money is not a big part of it...
...You just can't miss with it, over long periods...
...Of course, the sums of both capital and gain were miserably, unspeakably tiny by the standards of real players...
...We are both sitting in the last row of first class laughing and scratching and feeling like Hollywood big shots even though neither of us is particularly rich or famous...
...Do you have any Berkshire-Hathaway...
...When I think of the phenomenal bull market in stocks in the past three years, I think of afternoons riding on the bicycle path in Santa Monica with my pal Phil De Muth...
...Pudding research...
...Lo and Caserta Pass and Bastogne and Omaha Beach and Vella la Vella and Okinawa and New Guinea so that the war could be won...
...alone...
...I asked...
...Do you want me to leave the room...
...None of us would be here and this room would not be here...
...The airport was chaos...
...We can just rent when we feel like it...
...Buying is better...
...I loved it...
...Although we can certainly thank the poor South Korean and Thai workers and savers for some of the recent cooling of those fears about prices...
...Just go out and wait for me...
...I did it, and a woman at the club room got me a ticket...
...I am bound to say I was floored by the intelligence of the fifth and sixth graders...
...He is such a total phony, but I guess they fall for it...
...She looks like the bride of Dracula, but we shall see...
...In no time at all, Tommy, Alex, and I were called up to the dais (Alex is my wife and Tommy's mother...
...But how can I easily say good-bye to making real money while I pedaled a bike on the beach...
...We were mobbed by interns from CBS who might have been a little high from alcohol...
...She was as good and helpful an airline employee as I have ever encountered...
...Did you feel that...
...We changed into our suits, showered, and then got into the very well heated pool...
...How come it's taken Americans so long to realize that our president is a sex addict...
...Then, a rest—in many ways the best part of the day—and then a rocket trip downtown in the mighty Caddy to go swimming at the Los Angeles Athletic Club...
...He's ready to roll...
...My wifie and I filed into the huge sanctuary of Temple Israel...
...Yeh," she said...
...Isn't Northwest the one that Warren Buffett likes so much...
...I'm not Clinton though, so I didn't ask them over for a nightcap or offer them jobs at Ben Stein Co...
...I watched the news about Monica for a while...
...He blew his magic bubbles around me as I swam in the warm water, and he laughed and grinned until it was time to go home...
...Lately it's been itching more than usual...
...I know to tell myself that there may be a lot of air in this market and that we could hit an air pocket at any time...
...I asked her...
...He has cried over it...
...I get Daddies...
...Not an easy task...
...In his car, the driver asked me how my flight was...
...Then Peter Bogdanovich, looking as if he had a lot of bad thoughts on his mind, came on the plane...
...Tommy has picked up the confidence Yaniv gave him...
...Tommy went out...
...It'll be fine," he said...
...Instead of thoughts of what to sell—house, cars, boat—I could think of what to buy next...
...Gosh, what can we expect in the future...
...THIS KID IS TEN YEARS OLD...
...I might say, really great...
...In the room were only about two dozen students and their teachers...
...I felt like a Rockefeller, a Gates, a Perelman, skimming the waves of life from the cockpit of my imaginary racing boat, "Ben Stein's Capital...
...For the next two laps, Tommy swam under me, blowing bubbles that tickled me...
...But yesterday we had Yaniv, our Israeli bodyguard, come over and teach Tommy a few fine points...
...Isn't it a little scary that we have a sex addict for a president...
...Do not do anything that is foreseeably disturbing...
...Without them, this whole tableau would not be happening...
...This led to a long discussion of the stock market...
...I love that boy...
...Tommy asked...
...on Northwest...
...Michael and I went out for dinner in the heavy snow to a place called the Redeye Grille...
...So it was terrible...
...You look a bit lost...
...Some kind of mistake had been made and I had no valid ticket to return to L.A...
...I was so proud of him...
...truer words were never spoken...
...Stocks are attached to earnings and stock prices cannot just go up forever without some connection at a rational level with earnings...
...Don't make any disturbing gestures," I told him...
...The market went up by more than loo percent from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 1997...
...I'm bored...
...I spoke about how vital it is to put one's family first...
...Ooh," Tommy exhaled...
...My wifie's sympathetic wistful face...
...Targets is as brilliant a movie as I have ever seen...
...That was me...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
