In his upcoming book, former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross shares his recipes for success in business — but also dishes on his time rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump, Sir Richard Branson and John Lennon, his onetime neighbor at the Dakota.
Ross — who became known as the “King of Bankruptcy” over 55 years on Wall Street — actually dreamed of being a writer in college.
“I was a real bookworm when I was a kid,” the author of Regnery’s upcoming “Risks and Returns: Creating Success in Business and Life,” recalled to Page Six.
“When I was an undergrad at Yale, we had a course to prepare people to become fiction writers… by 10a.m. you had to submit 1,000 words of fiction or poetry.”
Ross recalled, “The first week I was all right. The second week I was out of material.” But he figures, “Yale saved me from a life of poverty.”
At Harvard Business School, Ross studied under famed instructor Georges Doriot — a legendarily stylish and provocative Frenchman who became an American citizen to fight for the US in World War II.
Doriot advised his students to wear long socks and Hermes ties — telling them, “If you’re young and you intend to be successful… you must dress like the success you intend to be!”
As a banker, Ross later kept up with some great artists, however.
“I loved living in the Dakota, I lived there for 20 years or so,” Ross told us, mentioning he was “a little unusual being one of the few Wall Street types” at the famed Upper West Side address known for residents including composer Leonard Bernstein, ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev, “Killing Me Softly” singer Robert Flack and, of course, Lennon, at the time.
“The night of the awful assassination, I was the board head,” Ross recalled of the Beatles legend’s shocking death in 1980. “It was horrific.”
Ross recalled to us, “He was a great neighbor,” adding that every October the building put on “what amounted to kind of a country fair. Each family put up a table in the big courtyard and served their favorite food.”
He said of Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Naturally, they served macrobiotic food… they participated in this little social event with their neighbors. They were very nice people, very quiet, and nobody had a bad word to say about them.”
After Lennon was killed, “Crowds started the form, and they closed the huge steel gates to the building. If you lived in the building, you had a photo ID and only those people were allowed in. No work could be done, no nothing… and this kept going. The save the whale people were out there, the kill the whale people were out there, every group you can imagine was outside our gate.”
Ross recalled, “We had to figure out some sort of cathartic event,” for people to be able to move on.
One of the artsy residents knew David Geffen — a close friend of Ono — who Ross says helped her conceive of the Central Park Strawberry Field memorial. “Despite her grief — her enormous grief — she was going to do a kind of public thing commemorating the event,” he said.
Ross, 86, first met another famous New Yorker, Trump, a decade later when he and fellow Wall Street titan Carl Icahn were adversaries against Trump in a bankruptcy proceeding.
“The way I first met Trump was adversarially in the matter of the Trump-Taj Mahal bankruptcy… [Icahn] and I were partners in effect against Trump.” But, “it turned out that both of us wound up supporting him in the presidential race that he won.”
He said of their 1990 introduction on opposite sides of the table, “in that kind of a context you learn a lot about what someone was made of.”
Ross’ deal wound up helping Trump avoid personal bankruptcy at the time.
Years later, Ross said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he’d support Trump in the 2016 election, and later wrote a number of editorials for Trump’s campaign and appeared at the Iowa caucuses with Ivanka Trump to support the GOP candidate.
After Trump won, Ross recalls he was summoned to the former TV star’s Bedminster, NJ, golf club.
“I didn’t know why — but obviously it was a kind of a job interview,” he told us. “Here I am, 70-something years old and I haven’t filled out a resume in 50-some-odd years… It was the first time I was interested in a job that paid a fraction of what I was used to making.”
He wound up running what he calls “the most complicated conglomerate in the US government.”
“During my tenure, we had to hire over 400,000 part-time temporary workers and doorknockers to take the census, and get them trained in a couple months,” Ross recalled. “Who has ever had to hire 400,000 people in a few months? I knew it was a difficult job to be a census taker [because] I worked my way through Harvard Business School being a census taker.”
“I think I was the only Commerce Secretary to have been a census taker,” he mused, adding he was dispatched to “a very tough section of Boston, which was a bit of challenge,” since he had to wear a badge.
His oversight of the census also led to some controversy when the Trump administration decided to reinstate a US Census question about citizenship.
Ross’ new book has been blurbed by power players including Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, billionaire Trump donor John Paulson, philanthropist Leonard Lauder, real estate mogul Richard LeFrak, Fox News’ Bret Baier, Trump’s former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow and broadcaster Deborah Norville among others.
