Working Assets

iStockAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowA streak of evening light filters into my suite at the Crillon, the legendary Paris hotel where I've always dreamed of staying. In my fantasies, this instant is pure bliss, the fashion-magazine moment when I kick off my Roger Vivier sandals, lie back on the featherbed with its infinite-thread-count sheets, and relish having at last found my way to the apex of chic, all expenses paid by my employer.
More From ELLEInstead, I'm standing in front of the closet, wearing little more than a black slip and a grimace, surveying the inadequate wardrobe I've brought from New York. There's no time for luxuriating; I'm here to do battle, and suddenly my armor seems pitifully lacking. In an hour I'll be at Guy Savoy, one of the city's most imposing restaurants, alone in a private dining room with nine men in bespoke suits and attitudes to match, each of whom I need to interrogate during a brief cocktail hour. You know how to do this, I tell myself, you've done it a hundred times.
But that was a long time ago, the small voice inside whispers back; what if everything has changed, if I've changed too much to pull it off? Maybe I shouldn't have been pulling it off in the first place....
There's no time for this. I pick a not-quite-transparent Dolce & Gabbana silk blouse, a slim black skirt, and a pair of Gucci sandals. My makeup is on the vanity table, arrayed like surgical instruments. Showtime, I think, ready or not.
For more than a decade, I spent my working hours in a strange pursuit: making many of the world's most powerful men uneasy. As a business journalist, I traveled thousands of miles a year to interview CEOs, grilling them about the way they ran their companies and their lives, confronting them about financial results, looking them dead in the eye and inquiring what they might say to a shareholder who had seen his life savings evaporate.
It was strangely pleasurable on many levels. What could be better than making men 20 years older and infinitely richer stutter and sweat? They'd grown up in an earlier era, one in which women were uniformly powerless; the only females in their lives were wives, daughters, mistresses, secretaries. And there I was, seated across from them with a pad and a tape recorder, asking questions that in any other context would have been intrusive or rude. Sometimes I felt as if they wanted to strike me, yet they had no choice but to offer a forced smile. It was utterly thrilling.
I knew the power of my unusual looks, and I made the most of it. I was young, tall, and angular, with dark exotic features. I dressed to undermine: "appropriate," but never bending to corporate convention. In an era when women hoping to infiltrate the ranks stuck to boxy dressed-for-success suits with floppy bows at the neck, I wore a vintage Yves Saint Laurent le smoking or a trim indigo Chanel suit. Jewelry was verboten in the corporate training manuals, but I always wore a little: a thin gold bangle, a long rope of pearls, a platinum skull pinkie ring.
To me, the approach seemed the ultimate in modern feminism; the idea was not to titillate but to disarm. My presence stood as a reminder that unlike their wives and mistresses and the gals in the steno pool, I wasn't on their payroll. Once we started talking, I carried myself as an equal, challenging the obsequiousness that they, like rock stars, were accustomed to. I did my best to make the interview a real conversation, eschewing a prepared list of questions; I may have been part shark, but the way their minds worked genuinely intrigued me. If they perceived as sexy my interest in their business and the depth of my understanding of it, that was their problem, not mine. In any case, most of them opened up under my ministrations like clams on a buffet.
A few got gloriously carried away. One guy, head of a multinational automaker, confessed that to calm his nerves before he got up to address shareholders, he imagined that the bitchy girl from high school—the one who called him Dr. Loser—was in the audience. Another, a Wall Street wunderkind, told me that his dream was to buy an island in the South Pacific where he'd live out his early retirement with his trusty black Lab and a string of models, each of whom would be replaced when they reached 20. A third guy told me about his not-yet-public plan to take over a competitor; the details came out as he rhapsodized about how proud of him his late father would have been.
The men I wrote about were sometimes aghast that they'd let so much of their true selves show after they read the published pieces. Or so I heard through back channels; they never called to complain. How could they? They were big boys and I'd made clear from the beginning what I was there for, regardless of what their egos, as meaty as their paychecks, might have let them believe.
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