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was chauffeur-driven to work in a station wagon, but Hart says the Dammann family was driven in Cadillacs except during the Second World War. According to Michael, Milton would even go out of his way to save a twenty-five-cent toll on the Triborough Bridge. (Hart says he never witnessed that but finds it credible.)
    The Dammann estate had horses, a few cows, poultry, and ducks. There was a pond where the children could swim and a grass tennis court that Patrick had to groom on Sunday mornings. Milton was “a strong person who commanded respect,” Hart remembers. Once, young Patrick told the very Republican Dammann that his father had voted for Roosevelt. “My father almost killed me for that,” he says.
    As a boy, Patrick attended the wedding of Margaret Dammann and Lester Eisner. Massive tents were erected on the lawn near the big wood-frame house. The young “Miss Margaret,” as Hart knew her, and her groom made an exceptionally handsome couple. But there was a definite sense that Maggie could have done better. “He was the one who was talked about,” Hart says. “He was not looked up to.” By the time that vows were exchanged, the Eisner family business was headed toward decline. And despite his Princeton and Harvard degrees, Lester Jr. lacked his father’s savoir faire. Even to Hart, it seemed obvious that Maggie was the stronger of the two. “Poor Lester never called any shots,” he remembers.
    During summer months, Maggie and Lester lived in the chauffeur’s cottage—rooms above the three-car garage. Patrick drove little Michael and Margot to their riding lessons. To Patrick, they seemed like run-of-the-mill little kids. But young Michael remembers being so frightened by his grandfather that when Milton took him on a tour of his razor factory, Michael wet his pants—twice.
    Meanwhile, Lester set about confirming everyone’s worst suspicions. It is unclear why he didn’t put his law degree to use, but instead, he started to dabble. He invested in a doomed Ecuadoran airline and then worked unhappily as a soap salesman for his intimidating father-in-law. His nextmove was to produce sports-and-vacation trade shows—an interlude that his young son, Michael, found vastly entertaining. But Lester lost that business, too, and even as a teenager, Michael wondered why his father had bungled matters so badly. Lester then turned to the public sector. He was a Republican who held several positions with the state and federal government.
    Meanwhile, Lester told Michael that Lester’s uncles had mismanaged the family uniform business—particularly his uncle Monroe. (When Monroe died in 1973, however, his obituary in the Red Bank Register said that his “success in business was parallel to his philanthropy.”) Whoever deserved the blame, the Eisner family business was shuttered in the mid-1950s. Lester told his son so many cautionary tales about his great-uncles’ supposed arrogance and overconfidence that Eisner developed a lifelong fear of taking success for granted. The lesson that loss might be imminent was so deeply inculcated that Eisner always obsessively anticipated doom even when he had become wealthy and powerful in his own right.
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    EISNER’S PARENTS MAY have been content to send him to an unpretentious summer camp, but their ambitions were not so modest when it came to college. The plan called for Princeton and then law school—presumably Harvard, which was the alma mater of his father, grandfather, and two of his great-uncles.
    Margaret and Lester packed fourteen-year-old Michael off to Lawrenceville, an expensive and elite boarding school that was supposed to feed bright young men to Princeton. Founded in 1810, Lawrenceville boasted a grassy commons, tennis courts, and a golf course. It was also homogeneous in terms of color, gender, and for the most part, ethnicity. Eisner remembers getting his first bitter taste of