Lew Feldman: Stand-Up Guy

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Hanging on the wall of Lew Feldman’s office is a mock poster for the television show “Entourage.” Feldman’s face is crudely pasted onto a character sitting in the middle, and seated around him are the smiling mugs of some of the biggest real estate players in the country, including Sam Zell, former KB Home Chief Executive Bruce Karatz and Starwood Capital Group Chairman Barry Sternlicht. Feldman, a real estate attorney, has done deals for all of them. His current slate of projects includes the financing of AEG’s downtown football stadium project. As chair of the downtown L.A. office of Goodwin Procter LLP, he has helped build that firm’s presence in California from seven attorneys in 2006 to 140 today. But Feldman also wants you to know he’s not a corporate stiff. Once an aspiring stand-up comic, he speaks frankly, and peppers his speech with colorful jokes and the occasional profanity. He sat down with the Business Journal to discuss infertility testing, losing to Linda Ronstadt in a battle-of-the-bands contest and why he models himself as a “consigliere” in the style of Robert Duvall’s character in “The Godfather.”

Question: You’ve worked with a lot of big personalities. Who’s the biggest?

Answer: Oh, my gosh. That’s such a tough question. People are big personalities in different ways. Barry Sternlicht is one. Bobby Turner at Canyon Partners. Sam Zell is right up there with any of them. Sam is the owner of more real estate in America, Mexico and Brazil than anyone, loves to ride Ducatis. Alan Casden is certainly a big personality. One of the most wonderful people is Peter Lowy at Westfield.

Tell me one good Alan Casden story.

I’ve known Alan for so long, since the early ’80s when I was a young lawyer and when he really became a developer. He’s a smart, smart guy. In the beginning, he was so into his mind that, during meetings, he would only address the investment banker from Drexel that was doing his multifamily transactions. There’d be a whole room of people, and he’d only talk to the investment banker, and he’d say, “Tell them this.” We all knew what he was saying, because he would say, “Tell them blah blah blah.” The guy would turn around and repeat it.

What’d you make of that?

I thought that was really odd in the beginning, and then I realized that there was a certain aspect of him back then that was shy. And he could think better, kind of like some people who close their eyes when they talk or think or listen. That was his way of talking to someone he felt comfortable with and was able to just focus, and didn’t have to deal with his shyness with other folks. His brother Henry wasn’t like that at all. His brother was very boisterous; you know they split up and had the big fight and everything.

He’s in the middle of another split right now.

He has the properties with Cerberus we’re in the middle of dealing with. We just bought them out on Palazzo Westwood.

In the past you’ve compared your job to Robert Duvall’s character in “The Godfather.” Can you expand on that?

Tom, Robert Duvall’s character, knew that he would never be the person to take over. He knew that he could be objective. Oftentimes lawyers confuse their clients in transactional business for the business that they really wish they had, and they think they add more value than they do. They believe that they are making their clients rather than being advisers to those clients.

A Mafia boss is not the most flattering comparison for your clients.

(Laughs.) That’s true. And no comparison was intended in that regard. It’s probably not flattering to say that a client is a Mafia boss, but they were an organization that was certainly operating in a risky environment and needed a stable hand.

Describe some of the work you’ve been doing on the L.A. Live football stadium project.

AEG is (required to provide), like it did with Staples, a gap agreement: basically a guarantee that any gap in revenues coming in versus expenditures on debt service, we have to make up the difference. We have to do a lot of calculations of new parking structure revenues, new Convention Center revenues, looking at everything that would be positive to the deal. Because it’s far beyond just an NFL stadium, it’s a big events center.

How does having a large events center fit into AEG’s other venues there, such as Staples Center and Nokia Theatre?

Having all that different hardware allows you to put into play different acts and musicians. It’s four acres of property. S—, you could do Burning Man (the desert art festival) in that thing.

Do you follow music?

I do, actually. In college I DJ’d and I managed a record store for many years. That was my thing, I thought I would have loved to do comedy and radio.

How did that interest in music start?

I guess the whole thing started when I was young, when the Beatles came to America in 1964. I was watching “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and that was it for me – Beatlemania, rock ’n’ roll. When I was in fifth grade I got into a band. We ended up in 1967 playing in a battle of the bands and came in third behind Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies.

Linda Ronstadt?

I was 11, and they were much older. Linda Ronstadt is from Tucson also. I hadn’t heard them before, and she ended up sounding different from what she was doing then. Seeing all these bands and seeing the whole music thing was what kept me focused on it.

Who were your favorite musicians?

The thing that totally blew my mind was progressive jazz. Miles Davis became huge in my mind. My boys are named Jack Miles and Cole Davis. In the 1970s, all of a sudden I went into jazz fusion and kind of got lost in that for a while.

“‘Bitches Brew’?” “‘On the Corner’?”

Absolutely. Absolutely. That was just…

Do a lot of drugs?

(Laughs.) Yeah.

Care to say which ones?

Oh, you know. … (Laughs.) Certainly it was a time of expanding horizons and definitely the psychedelic era in a lot of ways. But I didn’t get all caught up in the drugs. Because if I did, I’d be painting your car right now. Or maybe just putting primer on it.

You said you grew up in Tucson?

I was born in New York, and the way we got to Tucson is there are three kinds of Jews: Ashkenazi, who come from Eastern Europe; Sephardic, who come through Spain; and Asthmatic, who come from New York to Arizona because of the air.

What was your childhood like?

When I was about 15, my mom got ill and moved back east with her sister, my dad moved away, and I was on my own. I wasn’t an emancipated youth and it’s not legal to live in a school district without a parent or guardian.

Your dad left?

He ended up with a new family, stepkids and stuff like that. It’s one of those things that’s hard to ultimately put a finger on but he wanted to get along with his life and he did. I don’t think he intended to break the ties as much as he did, but he got caught up in it. Later in life we got back together, but it was long after. I didn’t quite understand until I got older the choice that my dad made.

Where’d you live?

I was paying $40 a month to live basically in a large closet in a house that I shared with some college students while I was still in high school. To make rent, I worked in gardening, at a grocery store. In the summertime, I’d do whatever I could, do some construction. I did oratory competitions through school like American Legion or Optimus, who always had a prize for $500 or something.

How did it shape you?

In being a caretaker for my clients it gave me the confidence that I could be resourceful. Certainly there are positives to not being coddled. And being a lawyer was just a continuation of having a lifeline to achievement. It was something I was told by many people: You want to do that? How could you possibly do that?

How did being left by your parents affect your own parenting?

It certainly has made me want to protect my kids from being in the same situation, and to give them a stable home life and the best education they can get. But I’d also say the opportunity to experience independence and personal accountability is something which shaped me and is something I want to make sure that they take to heart and weave into their own characters. It’s a hard balance, because I just want to love the hell out of them, but I know if I did that they’d be dressed in a giant diaper like Fat Bastard in “Austin Powers.”

You had other showbiz ambitions, too, though. You became a successful lawyer, but then took something of a detour into comedy.

I moved out to L.A. in ’86 as an attorney and saw a lot of comedy. UCLA Extension had a program for stand-up comedy taught by Richard Pryor’s ex-wife, Shelley Bonis, who used to work at the Improv. So I did it. And I filmed myself a lot, I wrote about things like the infertility my wife and I were going through, and some of the crazy stuff they make you do when they’re checking you out. They take your sperm and they mix it with hamster eggs to see if your sperm can penetrate a hamster egg.

No they don’t.

Cub Scout’s honor. I was a Scoutmaster, so I promise you. The guy sounded like Marty Feldman in “Young Frankenstein”: “I assure you no strange creature will result from this.” So I told stories about that. I told stories about growing up in Arizona as part of a kosher Boy Scout troop, which means you can’t camp on Saturdays, and we had to carry kosher meat in and have two sets of canteens. It was crazy. And I talked about my drug days, and talked about observational stuff.

By the way, given your issues, how did you conceive your children?

Thank God we ended up through (in vitro fertilization) having the boys and it’s been incredible. I saw some amazing science and you realize how close we are as human beings when you go through that process. You see surrogates. You have an African-American woman giving birth to a white kid, or an Asian woman giving birth to an African-American kid. You just realize we all, we are a species. My wife and I started really late, which is why we needed a little bit of assistance.

Is there any nexus or connection between music, comedy and the law, or is it all separate?

It’s all about performance, right? I mean service is about performance, music is about performance, comedy’s about astute observation and twisting it in a way that makes people think and see things that they otherwise wouldn’t see. I do think it comes together.

When you say service is performance …

There’s no bulls— when you’re doing comedy and you’re out there all alone. With music, your mistakes are gonna be known because you’re gonna be off-key. There’s a certain level of perfection that you have to have. When you’re at an elite level of practicing law and you’re charging lots of money, you have to add value beyond what you’re charging. And that requires real excellence, that requires constant learning. Comedy also gave me more courage than anything else. It gave me the ability to be myself and be OK with being myself.

Your most recent turn in career has been as chairman of this office.

I started California for Goodwin Procter in 2006. I started here and in San Francisco with seven lawyers and now we have 140 with four offices.

How would you describe your management style?

I treat people like adults. I look for adults. I want people who care. I once asked David Gold, who started the 99 Cents Only Stores, “How do you know how to pick employees? You’re expanding so quickly.” He said, “I take someone around the store and then drop a piece of paper. If the person walks by, I don’t hire them. But if they pick up the paper, then I know they care. And I hire people who care.” That’s what I look for. I look for people who aren’t just looking to pay off their student loans and then go find a life.

Was that the best advice you ever got?

The best advice I ever got was that you borrow people, you never own them. You can’t expect people to work for you for the rest of their lives. You shouldn’t feel ashamed if someone moves on because that’s expanding your network.

Who told you that?

Phil Nicholson from Cox Castle & Nicholson, where I worked for 14 years, when I moved on to Pillsbury. It was a really gracious thing to say.

How do you juggle it all? Your office has a Zen feel to it; is that on purpose?

I designed it. I meditate daily, before I come to work, for 20 to 25 minutes. I clear my head and deal with the fact that everything around us is kind of space. It’s space and you fill it up, with all kinds of stuff and activities and whatever. Going back and feeling that space and knowing it’s really a matter of choice of what you’re doing with it each day is a good reminder.

A motivator.

Yeah. Planning and executing plans is really valuable, but if that’s all you’re doing and you’re going from one crisis to the other, and you’re not taking stock and remembering that you’re choosing some of these things, your choices and plans aren’t going to be as good. That’s just my theory. So I try to reset the clock each day. And sometimes if I’m really stressed out, I’ll pull out the mantra and start going for it again.

It must help when you’re dealing with the egos you do.

Yeah, it does.

Lew Feldman

TITLE: Chairman of downtown L.A. office

FIRM: Goodwin Procter LLP

BORN: New York; 1956.

EDUCATION: B.A., environmental planning and economics, UC Santa Cruz; J.D., UC Davis.

CAREER TURNING POINT: Refinancing $120 million worth of apartments for developer Charles Heers in 1988. They were underwater and he was about to lose everything. Six years out of law school, “it showed me I was really a partner.”

PERSONAL: Lives in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Stacey, and twin 13-year-old sons, Jack and Cole.

ACTIVITIES: Going to see comedy shows, meditation, watching pro football.