Bastard 1

What boro culture gives us is an insight into how all creativity, all innovation, is in one way or another someone’s, some project’s, bastard child. A bastard child who might be unloved, but, as Edward understands, is not necessarily unwanted. As with every bastard child, there is the memory of trauma: the powerful memory in which the child is abandoned. Strictly speaking, Edward is not a bastard, but he retains a sharp sense of that moment at which he is abandoned by his father—the father who abandons the son and his mother for another woman. We will address the role that the trauma of abandonment plays in Edward’s psyche later, but not before we recognize the other ways in which the “bastard” discourse manifests itself.

The thing about a “bastard” such as Edward is that, like any vulture capitalist, he doesn’t shrink from a fight. As he tells Vivian, he likes a “challenge.”

James Morse iterates his history to Edward and Vivian over their second dinner:

I’ll get to the point. I think you’re trying to take over my company. Given your track record, if you get it, it’s easy to guess you’ll liquidate it. I don’t want that to happen. I built this company up myself. I’ve run it for forty years. We’re in bad shape right now, but we’re going to get through it . . .

Morse is not going to make Edward’s most recent hostile takeover bid “easy.” And, James Morse is, if not exactly a street fighter, then certainly a pugnacious late industrial capitalist; sort of a Jimmy Cagney in a moderately priced businessman’s suit. Most important to James Morse, however, is his commitment to (his, metonymically speaking) late industrial capitalism. Given Edward’s track record, it’s not only that he will almost certainly liquidate Morse Industries but that Morse Industries is the last of a dying breed. Structured as it is, still committed to making things, Morse Industries is an anachronism, and Edward Lewis, very much a man of his time, is impatient with relics.

And so, as both James Morse and Edward know only too well, the older man is suffering from the economic delusion that Morse Industries can keep flying the flag of late industrial capitalism. Edward holds all the cards. He has stock in Morse Industries, and he has political capital in high places: the US Senate. It does not, for this reason, matter that Morse Industries is on the verge of securing another contract to build ten more ships for the US Navy. As soon as Edward catches wind of this, he has Stuckey contact a senator to make sure that the contract is not awarded to Morse Industries. Well, not yet, anyway. Edward wants the contract held up in Senate “appropriations.” Were Morse Industries to secure the government contract before Edward’s hostile takeover, the value of the company would increase, pushing up the value of the stock, thereby ensuring that Edward would have to pay much more for a company that is now ripe for his acquisition and at a price he likes, that is, a price at which he can reap maximum profits:

Anyhow, we figure Morse Industries is worth about 400 million. We hope we can acquire it for between two and three hundred million. No matter what, I’m going to make a profit. The question is how large.

Ruthless vulture capitalist that he is, Edward is under no illusions as to what it is he does. As he tells Vivian after their first unsuccessful meeting with the Morses, “We’re the same, Vivian, you and I. We both screw people for money.” Except, of course, that their profit margins are vastly different. For Edward the “question is how large”—“between two and three hundred million”: that is how much he stands to make, making of the $3,000 that he is paying her to escort him for the week, as the saying goes, “chicken feed,” a matter of no financial consequence, certainly not for a PEF such as Edward. The difference is obscene, which seems to be the only goal that PEFs pursue, their very raison d’etre. Vivian, a quick (economic) study,1 grasps Edward’s logic, and, it must be said, seems to admire the rate of return his line of business can command. It’s enough to make a working girl envious:

Vivian: So you can make all that money just by buying it and then selling everything?

Edward: Something like that.

Vivian: What a racket! It sounds so easy.

It is, as Edward is at pains to point out, not quite as “easy” as it sounds, what with all the negotiations, the political skullduggery, and the backroom wheeling and dealing. Still, the contrast could not be sharper: $300 million (potentially) as opposed to $3,000. A difference on the order of a magnitude too mindboggling to contemplate.

It is an economic contrast made all the sharper if we recognize that Vivian actually puts her body to work—puts her body on the line, on a daily basis—while Edward has a vast corps of highly trained, well-paid minds (accountants, a research team, to say nothing of his secretary and other support staff) to perform both the specialized and the drudge labor for him. Philip Stuckey included, although as Edward’s attorney, Stuckey is very well remunerated; so well remunerated, we would do well to remember, that he can afford that Lotus Esprit.