Page 624 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
with plenty of leasing opportunities out there, but Roger, who was lead- ing the charge, was in love with Rockefeller Center. (I wasn’t; it was far from Grand Central and absolute murder around Christmastime. Charles agreed with me for different reasons; he was partial to modern, verging on glitzy, architecture.)
As I once told Kathy, real estate is destiny. And at Sutherland that semi-serious maxim would turn out to be true—or, at least, semi-true. It transpires that Roger’s desires were not consistent with those of Atlanta, the office that turned out to be the center of power in the firm at large to a far greater extent than we had been led to believe. First, Atlanta took the position that the firm should be in a more modern loca- tion. Next, we learned that Atlanta said that it would reluctantly go along with a renewal lease at Rock Center but remained concerned about the higher rents that the Center would demand, the length of the new term, and the amount of space in contemplation. Discussions went on over a period of more than a year, and, after a while, I got the sense that the problem wasn’t just location and terms; it was Atlanta and its commitment. They couldn’t or wouldn’t pull the trigger.
While the water torture of lease negotiations proceeded glacially, it turns out that Charles added to any institutional problems by intruding himself in firm politics, something that we, the members of his group, had implored him not to do. But Charles was Charles. His sense of self- importance, his view that he had a monopoly on the expertise that it took to run a law firm, his blind belief that those who heard him could not help but be convinced by him, and his inability to keep his thoughts to himself, none of which was backed up by the volume of his business, took over. Not only did he decide that he knew better than Burt and Roger, and told them so, but he committed the cardinal sin of taking his criticisms around their backs to the Atlanta and Washington leadership. I am sure that, far from solving the problems that Charles felt com- pelled to surface, he succeeded in exacerbating them.
What Charles did not know, and what we learned toward the end, was that the merger with the New York firm had been sponsored and
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