海归网首页   海归宣言   导航   博客   广告位价格  
海归论坛首页 会员列表 
收 藏 夹 
论坛帮助 
登录 | 登录并检查站内短信 | 个人设置 论坛首页 |  排行榜  |  在线私聊 |  专题 | 版规 | 搜索  | RSS  | 注册 | 活动日历
主题: 股市蜃楼,一个灰姑娘的故事,嘻嘻,友情提醒是英文
回复主题   printer-friendly view    海归论坛首页 -> 生活风情           焦点讨论 | 精华区 | 嘉宾沙龙 | 白领丽人沙龙
  阅读上一个主题 :: 阅读下一个主题
作者 股市蜃楼,一个灰姑娘的故事,嘻嘻,友情提醒是英文   
ceo/cfo
[博客]
[个人文集]




头衔: 海归中将

头衔: 海归中将
声望: 院士
性别: 性别:男
加入时间: 2004/11/05
文章: 12941

海归分: 491633





文章标题: 股市蜃楼,一个灰姑娘的故事,嘻嘻,友情提醒是英文 (4341 reads)      时间: 2015-6-09 周二, 00:40   

作者:ceo/cfo生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com

标题是:咱亏了美金一个亿,还真没那么高兴过。
I lost $100 million — and I’ve never been happier

Manhattan writer Suzanne Corso, 46, was once a card-carrying member of the 1% — until her financier husband lost their $100 million nest egg in the 2008 fiscal meltdown. Here, the mother of one, who has just published her third novel, “Hello, Hollywood,” tells The New York Post’s Jane Ridley her very New York story of survival.

My 6-year-old daughter doesn’t think twice about calling room service from our luxury residential hotel to order a $25 cheeseburger for herself.

It’s November 2005 and we’ve been living in an 11-room suite at the Ritz-Carlton on West Street for a little more than two years. And first-grader Samantha has developed quite the habit of ordering in.

Far from finding it cute, I’m appalled — I grew up on welfare in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, so the charm and appeal of the whole “Eloise at the Plaza” scenario is wasted on me as I consider that we might be raising a spoiled child.


How ironic, then, that just three years later that privileged lifestyle would come crashing down around our heads. My husband, Anthony, now 52, lost his entire fortune — more than $100 million — in the Wall Street financial crisis, leaving us wondering where our next rent check would come from.

Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened. Hanging out with the uber-wealthy was dull and empty. If someone handed me $100 million today, I’d give it back in a heartbeat. Why? Because I’ve found the fulfillment I’ve craved since childhood.

I call meeting Anthony 19 years ago my “Cinderella story.” Born to a teenage mom, I was raised on food stamps. It was tough growing up in Bensonhurst and, when I was 16, my grandmother bought me a secondhand Smith Corona typewriter. Since I loved writing, she told me “to write myself out of this story.”

She was right to be concerned. A year earlier, I’d gotten involved with a mobster. We were together for eight years, during which he abused me, physically and emotionally, and forced me to leave high school (though I got my GED behind his back). My escape was to write about my life, stuffing the manusc<x>ript under my mattress.

When he finally went to jail in 1991 for manslaughter and weapons possession, my own prison sentence lifted.

Anthony couldn’t have been more different from my violent ex. I met him on March 7, 1996, when I was 28. I was working as a temp for Chemical Bank and was running along Exchange Place to get to the office. Some guy came over to me, patted me on the shoulder and said: “Excuse me, miss, I think you’re beautiful. Can I take you for dinner or brunch?”

“What’s brunch?” I replied. We didn’t do brunch in Bensonhurst.

At the time, Anthony, then 33, had just become a managing partner of a specialist firm on the New York Stock Exchange. Specialists were the middlemen between the brokers and the companies (who have since been replaced with algorithms). He made a lot of money.

Our first date was cocktails at the Top of the Tower in Midtown East, followed by front-row seats at “The Phantom of the Opera” and dinner at Le Cirque, with limos in between.

Six weeks later, on a vacation in Bermuda, he proposed. He didn’t have a ring, but he got on one knee with a $20,000 Rolex watch.

I’d never seen such an expensive watch before but, if I had, it was stolen off a truck. I immediately said yes. Anthony later bought me a proper engagement ring — a beautiful 5-carat emerald-cut diamond from Cartier。

I quit my job and moved into Anthony’s apartment in Tribeca. He said: “You wanna be a writer? So why be a temp?” I had all the intentions of writing books and had kept my manuscript from my teenage years in Brooklyn. But part of me was still scared of my ex-boyfriend in jail. Besides, I was too busy living the high life.

We went back to Bermuda for our $350,000 wedding in November.

The chairman of the NYSE was there, and Renee Graziano (later the star of Bravo’s “Mob Wives”) was my maid of honor, since we were raised together and look at each other as sisters.

After that, my life was one big party. We’d take private planes or yachts for trips abroad. There were exotic safaris and cruises. Our social life revolved around charity galas and Yankees games, where we had Legends seats behind home plate and sat with the likes of Lorraine Bracco (another good friend), Penny Marshall and Lorne Michaels.


In August 1999, the same year our daughter was born, my husband’s company went public. It brought him a massive windfall and he made a series of what we thought were smart investments. At one stage, we owned four homes: our so-called “minimansion” at the Ritz-Carlton, two houses in the Hamptons and one on the North Fork.

Our daughter went to a top Upper East Side prep school and we had a live-in nanny. We even had a twin-engine helicopter to fly us back and forth to the Hamptons.

By the mid 2000s, however, I was bored out of my mind. I’d produced some plays and a documentary, which Bracco narrated for me, but mostly I went shopping on Madison Avenue.

I loved getting dressed up in Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci, but I felt hollow inside. I’d be sitting at some charity event where the tables were $100,000 each, trying to relate to these women who could only talk about their kids’ schools and whether or not their husbands were cheating. I was an outsider, a Brooklyn girl at heart.

And then the financial crash of 2008 happened. Anthony would come home stressed every night. After a while, he said: “You know, we’re going to have to get rid of the helicopter.” We started to cut back — I took my clothes to consignment stores and sold one of my Birkin bags to settle one AmEx bill — but there was too much being leveraged. Anthony is a brilliant guy, but when you buy stock, and then all of a sudden it drops, what are you going to do?

I’ll never forget the morning Anthony said to me: “I’m sorry, Sue, but we have to sell your Rolex” — the one he’d proposed with.

But you know what? I happily handed it to him, because it was only a material thing.

In December 2008, Anthony told me that we’d lost everything — around $100 million, including his salary (his firm got whittled down and then sold) and investments. Although I was upset at first, I kept to my mantra: “Money doesn’t define you.”

The last straw was leaving the Ritz-Carlton and moving into the two-bedroom rental in Battery Park City, where we live now. There was a lot of strain and many arguments about how we could afford to pay the rent. Anthony fell into a depression. We had therapy, but all he would say was, “I’ve got to get back on my feet.”

Luckily, we’d helped a lot of people before, and some of them returned the favor when the bad times hit. As soon as the s–t hit the fan, a handful came out of the woodwork to help us, including paying for Samantha’s school. I love that school — the only thing I really cared about was Samantha having consistency in her education. Now, she’s a straight-A student.

As for me, the answer came a year later, shortly after my 41st birthday, when I dusted off that old manuscript about my days in Brooklyn. Getting it published had been in the back of my mind for years, but now I needed to make this book happen. So I knocked the novel into shape and sent it to 50 agents. They all hated it but one.

Called “Brooklyn Story,” a thinly veiled memoir of my romance with the mobster, the book sold to Simon & Schuster within a week. To my amazement, I was offered a six-figure deal. And, when the book hit the best-seller lists in 2010, they asked me to write a trilogy, culminating in my last novel, “Hello, Hollywood,” published last month.

Looking back, I can’t help thinking of my grandmother’s birthday gift of the Smith Corona. Her prediction came true: I wrote myself out of my own story. They haven’t all been easy, but the stages of my life have inspired my writing, and now support our lifestyle.

Anthony still dabbles in the financial markets and, between the two of us, we now make as much as he’d been making before the crash — after eight years of struggle, and with all our investments wiped out. And though our marriage may have been through a rocky patch, we’re taking things one day at a time.

I’ve kept a few tokens of our wealthier days — like my two Birkin bags — but otherwise I am happy to shop at places like Zara.

Our main priority is that Samantha has grown up, not as the girl who orders room service, but into a beautiful person who knows the value of family and love.

Yes, the greatest thing that ever happened to me was losing $100 million; I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know exactly who I am.

I’m a storyteller and a survivor.

This article first appeared on NYPost.com by Jane Ridley

作者:ceo/cfo生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com









相关主题
哈爵,友情提醒: 海归茶馆 2007-7-06 周五, 01:28
【伪专家友情提醒】股市上涨点:中国,能源 海归主坛 2008-8-27 周三, 21:59
【友情提醒+倡议】今天大家可能只注意到了《茶馆》和《酒吧》没有关注《行行摄... 风情茶馆 2010-8-26 周四, 06:26
虱多不痒,债多必愁!英文版的,有情提醒。呵呵 海归主坛 2010-3-27 周六, 05:43
友情提醒,作企业的朋友,注意您在中,小银行的存款, 海归主坛 2008-7-15 周二, 23:54
友情提醒,历史的经验值得注意。最近俺从温了34年前的 海归主坛 2008-7-08 周二, 11:54
友情提醒:原告代理,你可能得等待法官指令在法庭中发言 海归酒吧 2008-5-23 周五, 12:32
友情提醒,在美的茶馆小资们,该置产了 海归茶馆 2007-11-29 周四, 20:46

返回顶端
阅读会员资料 ceo/cfo离线  发送站内短信
显示文章:     
回复主题   printer-friendly view    海归论坛首页 -> 生活风情           焦点讨论 | 精华区 | 嘉宾沙龙 | 白领丽人沙龙 所有的时间均为 北京时间


 
论坛转跳:   
不能在本论坛发表新主题, 不能回复主题, 不能编辑自己的文章, 不能删除自己的文章, 不能发表投票, 您 不可以 发表活动帖子在本论坛, 不能添加附件可以下载文件, 
   热门标签 更多...
   论坛精华荟萃 更多...
   博客热门文章 更多...


海归网二次开发,based on phpbb
Copyright © 2005-2024 Haiguinet.com. All rights reserved.