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1985, Weill, Dimon, and McElvery expected new job opportunities to come pouring in. Letters of support did arrive, but there were no jobs to speak of. The two men often had lunch together at The Four Seasons—they called it the “company cafeteria”—and Weill’s taste for martinis led to afternoon naps on the couch in his office. He ate in The Four Seasons’ exclusive Grill Room so often that the restaurant assigned him a “negative reservation”—his table would be waiting for him unless he called to tell them he was
not
coming to lunch that day. Weill wore a suit to work every day, just in case a chance meeting might pop up. Dimon also took his non-job very seriously. “Jamie would sit on the floor and open up annual reports to see what we could do next,” McElvery recalls. “Once, we’d created our own merchant bank model, and Sandy hit some button on the WaNGcomputer and erased it before I had a chance to save it. Jamie nearly killed him.”
    James Calvano, who’d been vice chairman of American Express Travel Related Services—he’d run Avis Rent-A-Car previously—lasted just six months more than Weill at the company, and was now in the same boat, looking for his next gig. While playing golf with Calvano one day, Weill asked him, “What do you want to do?” Calvano replied that he wanted to run a company. “Well, come with us,” Weill responded, “We’ll go find one.” Calvano was intrigued. “Who have you got?” he asked. “Me and Jamie,” was Weill’s unembarrassed response.
    By that, Weill meant he would have meetings with people, then return to the office and offload any research about a prospective opportunity on Dimon, whose desk was littered with prospectuses and financial statements. Buried in the numbers for 12 to 14 hours a day, Dimon grew especially fond of Warren Buffett’s missives out of his Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway. “He was smitten whenever anything came out from Berkshire Hathaway,” recalls McElvery. “He would say, ‘You have to read this! It’s the greatest annual report I’ve ever read! He’s brilliant!’”
    One meeting that stuck in Dimon’s mind was with Ivan Boesky, then the reigning practitioner of “risk arbitrage” on Wall Street. His specialty was betting on whether proposed mergers would come to fruition or failure, and he was one of Wall Street’s flashiest players. “I remember thinking he was a little paranoid,” recalls Dimon. “Because in his office he had this phone bank from which he could listen into any one of his employees’ phone calls. It looked like a cockpit. And he had cameras in every room. It was totally bizarre.”
    The first exciting possibility for Weill and Dimon came in late fall 1985, when Warren Hellman, the former president of Lehman Brothers who had moved to San Francisco, alerted Weill to a possible opportunity. BankAmerica, one of the country’s most prestigious commercial banking franchises, was bedeviled by a rash of underperforming loans, its stock was in free fall, and the company’s management team was under fire. It was possible, Hellman told him, that the board might consider wholesale change at the top.
    After meeting with Hellman in San Francisco, Weill and Dimon crunched the numbers and determined that if Weill could arrange a $1 billion capital infusion—plus $10 million of his own money—he could reasonably propose to BankAmerica’s board that they install him as CEO. Weill even swallowed his pride and asked Jim Robinson and Peter Cohen if they wanted in on the deal by providing a commitment letter for the $1 billion. (Cohen was by this point a true Wall Street
macher
. He’d bought Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb the previous year for $380 million. It didn’t bother him, as Bryan Burrough and John Helyar pointed out in
Barbarians at the Gate
, that one critic of the deal—Lehman’s in-house chef—mused, “Shearson taking over Lehman is like McDonald’s taking over 21.” He had emerged from