Wall Street: The Renaissance Banker

With a breakfast-time disquisition on “Stresses Within the Communist Bloc,” Washington’s WTTG TV last week began to broadcast a series of uncompromisingly erudite lectures on international affairs by professors of New York’s Columbia University.* Behind this brainstretching venture, which drew a rare rave from FCC Chairman Newton Minow, stood an unlikely figure: Investment Banker Armand Grover Erpf, 64. In 26 years as a partner in Manhattan’s prestigious Carl M. Loeb. Rhoades & Co.. elfinlike Armand Erpf has displayed an uncanny nose for investment opportunities that has led fellow financiers to label him “a professionals’ professional.” But whenever possible. Erpf likes to combine commercial profit with intellectual advancement—and in his eminently successful pursuit of both goals he has made himself perhaps Wall Street’s closest approximation of Renaissance man.

The Urge to Educate. The Columbia television lectures are characteristic of Erpf’s operations. Seven years ago, one of his investment sorties resulted in the creation of a profitable TV and outdoor-advertising chain called Metromedia. Inc.out of the ruins of the old Du Mont network. Recently, when he heard that Metromedia had an empty half hour of broadcast time in the morning, ardent Columbia Alumnus (’17). Erpf grabbed up the free time and got the lecture series under way with the financial backing of Columbia Associates, an organization of Columbia College well-wishers that he heads. The purpose of the programs, says Erpf, is to permit “adult people in this time of trouble and tensions to have not only the solace of entertainment but the spur of education.” By no means inciden tally, the TV series also may well turn a profit for Columbia Associates.

It was at least partly Erpf’s urge to educate at a profit that led him to invest in the Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. after it dropped Collier’s Magazine in 1956. In the five years since, Crowell-Collier has gone from losses to profits ($4,000,000 last year), and currently Erpf and his investing partners are adding new companies to Collier’s at a two-a-year clip. Last week, for well under $1,000,000, Crowell-Collier bought New York’s famed Bren-tano bookstore chain, which, like all conventional booksellers, has been hard hit by department-store and discount-house competition.

The Brentano purchase, explains Erpf, “adds to the bookishness of the company” and fits in with his dream of “changing publishing into a modern corporate enterprise to bring education to the masses.” If his dream is realized, predicts Erpf, “we’ll have a renaissance here that will make the Italian Renaissance look like a pond next to the ocean—and Crowell-Collier could become more interesting to investors than U.S. Steel.”

Chaos to Stability. Aloof and austere in his business contacts, Erpf has a profound sense of mission about his role as a latter-day capitalist. The function of investment banking, as he sees it, is to help guide new or individually managed companies into what he regards as the highest stage of capitalism—”the large institution run by professional managers with the public conscience glaring at them.” Only large corporations, Erpf believes, fully realize “the whole idea of capitalism, which is to bring solidity and stability into the market in place of chaos. I call that civilization.”

His belief in the importance of corporate bigness makes Erpf a strong dissenter from the economic doctrines that inspire the Justice Department’s trustbusters—whom he terms reactionaries. But he is by no means a man who refuses to listen to the other view: he is a guiding member of a New York club called The Dissenters, whose members embrace views ranging from far right to far left. Each month they meet to enjoy stinging disagreements. “We used to have a lot of Communists,” says Erpf, “until they got it through their thick heads how futile Marxism is.”

The Passing Show. Erpf carries his love of diverse viewpoints into his notable art collection, which so crowds his ten-room Park Avenue bachelor apartment that he has been forced to hang seven of his paintings in the bathroom. His tastes range all the way from ancient Chinese snuff bottles to the disturbing, threatening Tasso’s Oak by Modern Peter Blume (price: $5,000). Art connoisseurs, asked to characterize his collection, shake their heads in despair.

This week, with his usual mixture of motives, Erpf will head for London bent on 1) buying some new drawings and 2) finding publishers who might be interested in an alliance with Crowell-Collier. Says he: “The passing show has a lot of elements of interest—and you might as well be aware of them all. Otherwise you don’t get the full spectrum of experience, enjoyment and ecstasy.”

* Other TV stations scheduling the lecture series: New York’s WNEW, Kansas City’s KMBC, Peoria’s WTVH, Decatur, Ill.’s WTVP, Sacramento’s KOVR.