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As the bull market grew bigger, he grew more mysterious, more legendary. He locked himself and his staff of some 20 into a suite of offices in Manhattan's Squibb Building overlooking Central Park. The door, bearing no name, was guarded by a plug-ugly who kept its key locked inside a little green cabinet. No one could leave as long as the market was open; only outgoing telephone calls were allowed. Trader Livermore sat in a jungle of telephone wires, his sharp blue eyes glued to the private board which recorded the minute-to-minute gyrations of his vast paper empire. During trading hours he was nervous, excited, jubilant as a boy. At 3 o'clock, when the ticker went blank, he bit down hard on his cigar, retired in silence to an inner chamber to study his day's trades. Often he stayed until 8.
When the Coolidge market broke, there were angry stories that Jesse L. Livermore had smashed it. As the public began to get out of Wall Street, his fame receded. For the first time in 25 years he did not seem to prosper in a falling market. He gave up the big office over- looking the park. His second wife divorced him in 1932 and promptly married a onetime Federal Prohibition agent. For his third wife he took a brewer's daughter. The great Livermore estate at Great Neck, L. L, where the shrubbery alone was worth $150,000, netted $168,000 at auction. Last December Jesse Livermore was a 27-hour news headliner when he walked out of his Park Avenue apartment one afternoon, lost his bearings, spent the night at a hotel, returned home the next day (TIME, Jan. i).
Perhaps Jesse L. Livermore will come back as he has done three times before. That was what his lawyers had in mind last week when they declared: "Mr. Livermore has made three very large fortunes. ... He has failed three times, on each occasion has paid 100 cents on the dollar with interest, and hopes to do so again."