The 303,000-square-foot Class A building has received pre-build improvements to its mid-level and tower floors, which will have an added emphasis on high-end finishes and glass front offices, the company said in a press release. Sizes for those floors range from 2,000 to 9,000 square feet.

Prospective tenants will also have the option of leasing up to 45,000 square feet on three contiguous base floors of the building.

Christel Engel, senior managing director of Colliers International's New York Office, and colleague Michael Thomas will be heading 245 Fifth Avenue's leasing efforts.

Newmark Knight Frank previously handled the building's leasing.

Cassidy Turley will be handling the building's management, said Ms. Engel.

The newly designed asset has been renovated enough to make it a draw to an established–or newly formed–tech company, an industry that is already a darling in the Midtown South neighborhood.

"I think the building is extremely well-suited for the growing migration of the tech sector," Ms. Engel told The Commercial Observer.

Ms. Engel also said that the recent additions The NoMad Hotel and The Ace Hotel to the area, along with a super-tight vacancy rate – 9.5 percent in the last quarter, according to a Cassidy Turley report – have both given Midtown South enough cache to help turn 245 Fifth Avenue into an asset.

The 26-story Art Deco building, designed in 1927 by George F. Pelham, also counts Say Media and Big Brothers Big Sisters as tenants.

Daniel Edward Rosen is reachable at Drosen@observer.com

Cooper.

Truth is almost always stranger than fiction, but rarely scarier. This is certainly the case with The Devil’s Double, a deeply alarming film about the tormented life of Latif Yahia, the Iraqi Army lieutenant who looked so much like Saddam Hussein’s son Uday that he was summoned to Baghdad in the days leading up to Desert Storm and assigned the dreaded role of “fiday”, or “body double.”  What followed was a life fouled by corruption and madness at the hands of a lunatic. The centerpiece is a dual performance by popular British actor Dominic Cooper both powerful and nuanced.

Latif does not want the job, but if he refuses to stand in for the psychotic Uday his entire family will be executed. The impersonation is so accurate and the resemblance so uncanny, even Saddam sometimes fails to recognize him, and in addition to the danger of death every time the sun rises, there are also perks. Overnight, Latif goes from filthy soldier to Brioni suits, Versace silk pajamas and Rolex watches. He also trades K-rations for lavish banquets of caviar and champagne that turn into X-rated orgies. But while enduring both the praise and punishment dished out by the dictator’s sadistic son, he also witnesses some of the most criminal atrocities known to man. Saddam Hussein had two sons who were vital cogs in his reign of terror—Uday and his younger brother Qusay, both executed in 2003— but Uday was the homicidal psychopath of the duo. During his days in Saddam’s palace Latif witnessed depravity, debauchery, immorality, genocide and worse. Every attempt to escape failed, while Uday continued to thrive with his father’s protection—kidnapping, torturing, and raping underage schoolgirls he plucked off the street, choking on cocaine and wallowing in pornographic exploits with both sexes. While American bombs get closer, he even ravages a virginal bride on her wedding day, driving the disgraced girl to suicide.

Ultimately, Latif makes the near-fatal mistake of falling for Uday’s favorite palace concubine (Ludivine Sagnier) while trying to save her. Her eventual betrayal is final proof that in Iraq, the moon is not the only harsh mistress. The film’s weakness is a choppily edited script by Michael Thomas that exploits the perversions while ignoring the politics, reducing history to a few newsreel shots of George Bush and the first Gulf War. New Zealand director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of sex and violence, but leaves everything out about the political arena where it took place. Iraq was a country in Hell. The Devil’s Double was shot at a Radisson resort in Malta. Consequently, it plays more like Caligula than The Hurt Locker.

Still, you won’t find yourself yawning. It’s a great double stretch for an actor and Mr. Cooper plays both the smoldering Latif and the bombastic Uday with combustible energy. Childish, savage and impulsive, Uday has buck teeth and combed flat hair, while Latif is more like an Oxford student on a Middle Eastern holiday. Some objections have been voiced about an Anglo-Saxon actor playing an Iraqi, but who cares? Stripped half-naked, smoking cigars, waving guns and strutting like a peacock, Mr. Cooper gives a dazzling display of self-assurance as Uday and a remarkable display of restraint as Latif. The Devil’s Double is eons removed from his 2006 breakthrough performance as a cocky prep school lothario in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, and a far cry from his usual fluff like Mamma Mia! and Captain America. Without the ballast he provides, this would be an action epic without the stature and a runaway train without the brakes.

rreed@observer.com

THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE

Running time 108 minutes

Written by Michael Thomas

Directed by Lee Tamahori

Starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Raad Rawi

3/4

“It’s actually a real problem,” he explained, on a recent afternoon at his loft in Dumbo.

He had made himself comfortable in a leather chair, one leg flopped over an armrest, the other pushed up against his thigh. He was wearing shorts and a pair of orange clogs. Michael Thomas—novelist, columnist and renowned curmudgeon—is now 73. He had forgotten his teeth at the Century Club the night before (he resigned from the Brook, Whites, Deepdale and Grolier for reasons “varying from taste to penury”; Century is one of six he still belongs to), but that’s not what he was talking about with his doctor.

“You find yourself in the movie-theater bathroom, bouncing from one foot to the other, digging around in your pants, because if you don’t get your aim right you wind up pissing all over yourself,” he said. “It’s what happens. You get old. It shrinks. For the first part of my life, my problems were all caused by it being too easy to find, and now it’s impossible.”

Finding a publisher for his eighth novel, Love & Money, which was released earlier this month, took more than a decade. He estimates that around 25 publishing houses turned him down cold. Many wouldn’t even take the time to read it. The onetime best-selling author feels he’s been unfairly saddled with a reputation among agents and publishers for being “difficult.”

“When he expresses himself, he’s brutally honest, and if you’re brutally honest, some people can be the object to that brutality, really,” said Robert Shapiro, who became a partner at Lehman Brothers around the same time Mr. Thomas did.

“We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband.

“Jane was kind of uptight and a little bit prudish, but she had her bikini on and she was kind of showing off her bikini, and my father, right in front of me and my teenage friends and all these other people having the usual cocktail party out by the pool, got up and grabbed her and stripped her bikini off her and threw her in the pool, in front of his wife, too. I’m standing there and I’m holding the Polaroid land camera in my hand but I’m so stunned that I can’t take a picture.”

It’s a habit that, coupled with his abundant talent and ambition, might explain why he ended up “living my life backward.” By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels. His first book, Green Monday, published in 1980, was a critical and commercial success; it spent some two months on The New York Times’ best-seller list and landed his face on the cover of Institutional Investor magazine. In ’84, he signed a million-dollar, two-book contract with Warner Books. As a journalist, he came out swinging, writing important pieces for fancy national magazines like Vanity Fair and Esquire. For the last 15 years, he’s written a column for The New York Observer—with brief absences in the dozen or so times he either quit or was fired. For Love & Money, he was able to work out a deal with Melville House whereby he and the publisher share any profits after all printing costs are recouped.

Michael Thomas was born in New York City in 1936. He went to Buckley, then Exeter, then Yale. Freshman year he read Duveen, by S. N. Beharman, and decided he wanted to be an art dealer. His father, Joe Thomas, a managing partner at Lehman Brothers, had a healthy disdain for money and suggested that was a lot more dignified than banking.

When he wasn’t studying art history, he wrote a column in the Yale Daily News that he called “Looking Down.” He caused a wonderful stir with the line, “You cannot make a madam out of Mother Yale,” about the Miss Rheingold Contest bringing its despicable pimping business to town.

He feels that he crossed the line then, which happens from time to time. After graduating, he stayed on as a teaching fellow for another two years, but by that time he was married and had two kids with his first wife, Brooke Hayward.

Bobby Lehman helped him get a gig as the curatorial assistant in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making $6,000 a year. He felt like his life was pretty much set. Two years later, he was locking horns with some asshole who was up to no good at the museum.

Mr. Lehman asked him if might like to try out finance. How much? Six thousand five hundred. Deal! Then, of course, he had to go tell his father the news that his brilliant son had decided to sell out and take a meaningless job in banking.

Love & Money’s protagonist, Clifford Grange, is a once successful director whose career has come to a standstill when his studio distances itself from his controversial movie and makes him take all the heat. Grange doesn’t help things when he gets belligerent with the media about his producers. Grange is, throughout, engaged in a constant dialogue with his now-dead father, who had been his greatest ally, his best friend.

Grange’s career circumstance bears a certain resemblance to Michael Thomas’ own life experience—his book Hanover Place met with a mix of rave reviews and a personal attack by Judith “Miss Manners” Martin, née Perlman, who accused the author of being an anti-Semite. (Her lead: “Doing the author the courtesy of assuming that ‘Hanover Place’ is intended only as a dramatization of Wall Street anti-Semitism from 1924 to 1990, rather than an example of it, is a strain.”)

The father-son device, however, is fiction. Michael’s relationship to his father was one defined by distance, not closeness. But the dialogue does pop up at times: As sons do, Michael has spent a lifetime trying to figure what went wrong with the man who had so much friend-mentor-father potential early on.

“I’m the only person I know who was introduced to my stepmother after she had already become my stepmother,” he said.

Distance prevailed even during his tenure at Lehman, when father and son worked in the same building. In those days, the Lehman brothers ate lunch at the round table: “Let’s say there were 35 partners, and some would be out of town, and some would be in the smaller rooms with clients, and there’d be maybe 15 or 25 of us. But, by ’71 or early—yeah, ’71, when Joe Thomas sat down for lunch, he would have two or three martinis. So I’m sitting there, and I don’t drink during the daytime, and so I’m sitting there, and, you know, your father’s at the end of the table, and everybody can see he’s half in the bag. And it’s tough.”

And, much like his father, he found the work pretty uncompelling. He compensated for that by enjoying himself a little too much and boasting a little too loudly about the wonderful talents of Madame Claude.

“I mean, this was a wonderful time,” he recalled. (At this point in our conversation, he asked his son Francis, who recently graduated from college, to fetch him another Scotch.) “Madame Claude loomed very large; she was the biggest madam in the world, she had the best-looking girls. I remember once when I was at Lehman Brothers, our French partner, Jean Francois Malle, who is now dead, who was the brother of Louis Malle, we were in the bar and this fabulous-looking girl was there, and Jean Francois said to me, ‘She has to come with us now.’ So I called Madame Claude.”

Her name was Annabelle. Later he would host a dinner party, eight men and Annabelle. “And she was fabulous,” he said. “Fabulous.” 

“We used to say if a girl is in a room and she’s better-looking and has good manners and that her conversation is better than any of the other women in the room, the chances are she’s from Madame Claude.”

It was a different time. Michael Jr., the first of three with wife No. 2, remembers fondly: “We had a German au pair, so when I was a toddler, I could speak German. But then he got caught in flagrante delicto with the au pair and, uh, my German lessons ceased abruptly.”

By 1972, “internal politics at Lehman were becoming intolerable,” Mr. Thomas writes in the three-page single-space résumé he’s kept up over the years for the hell of it—and he was a part-owner and director of the Rams; he owned a record store, Orpheus Remarkable Recordings!

Mr. Thomas started a corporate finance consulting firm with a fellow outcast, Herbert P. Peterson, who had been president of Chase Bank but was gay, which didn’t go over so well. In ’78, they moved the business headquarters to Dallas. Around this time, the economy started to fall apart, as did the business: Michael Thomas thought now or never, and holed up in a bar with a typewriter and an endless supply of the Famous Grouse whiskey. The result was Green Monday, about Arabs, oil and Wall Street.

Next was Someone Else’s Money, followed by Hard Money, which was loosely based on Bill Paley, founder of CBS. Paley was making a big stink about it because one of the society ladies was running around blabbing that it was going to be some kind of a vicious takedown. Michael got Paley on the phone and explained that the book could not possibly be about him, as the protagonist in the book had a conscience. 

He made big waves with a piece in Vanity Fair about John and Susan Gutfreund, who were the first of the emerging class of obscenely wealthy couples to throw parties and pay actors to imitate paintings on the wall and whatnot.

“I was fond of them both, but, you know, if you’re a writer, you can’t resist the material,” Mr. Thomas said, recalling the embarrassing incident that followed, when he arrived at a party in Southampton that was to be attended by the Gutfreunds. By Michael’s calculations, the article would not be published until the following Monday. Not so. He’s pretty sure his friend Jamie Niven, of Sotheby’s, made sure everyone at the party had read it.

“That’s not true,” said Mr. Niven, who considers Mr. Thomas a good friend and the smartest man he’s ever known.

Mr. Niven recalled a party thrown by Jan Cushing for Arthur Schlesinger to celebrate his book about the Kennedys. Needing to fill a last-minute chair, she called up Michael, who drank three Johnnie Walkers straight up before crashing in.

“When he got there, he saw this girl with enormous tits and immediately went over and started talking to her, and soon enough she was giggling a lot because, as I’m sure you know, Michael can be quite funny.”

The girl with the enormous tits was still giggling when Ms. Cushing tried to get everyone to focus up. She asked Michael to ask Mr. Schlesinger a question. “What’s the capital of South Dakota,” he said. The girl next to him giggled, as did George Plimpton and Mr. Niven.

Morton Janklow swept in after Hard Money and was able to wrangle Mr. Thomas the book deal with Warner Books, based on a hot potato of a manuscript he was working on called Rope Spinner. The title of Rope Spinner was changed to The Ropespinner Conspiracy, because every best seller had a three-word title. Then the president of Warner Books, Larry Kirshbaum, shuddered at the next book’s working title. The Firm.

“No one will read a book called The Firm,” Kirshbaum decreed. Screwed again. That became Hanover Place, the beginning of the end.

“He had a lot more anger back then. Now he pretty much vents it on rich people who have made tons of money through no ability of their own,” William told me, noting that in the old days, his dad used to aim his serve at the back of his neck during family tennis at the Meadow Club. “He’s the greatest. He’s such a unique individual. We wouldn’t trade him for the—although I have to say that he has been forbidden to ever get married again. Never allowed to get married again, it’s just like the old joke. Instead of marrying her, just give her everything you own.”

editorial@observer.com

To the Editor:

Re the headline “Hillary’s Chest Gets Bigger as ’08 Gets Closer” [Ben Smith and Jessica Bruder, Oct. 24]: What a cheap, cheap shot. What were you thinking? What decade—heck, what century?—are you all living in that you don’t see how this reflects upon you as journalists? How inappropriately sexist and sophomoric to use that headline. I find the humor (it was humor, right?) out of place. I’d expect to have to tune into one of radio’s “morning zoo” programs—the ones aimed at testosterone-riddled, unseasoned young male listeners—to find it. That audience would expect it and, at that juncture in their lives, appreciate the “joke.”

It wasn’t clever, it wasn’t even acerbic, it brought no insight to the article, and it reflects badly on The New York Observer and its content. The headline sends a clear message that The Observer doesn’t think the accompanying article is important enough to be treated seriously. I have to ask: Why then do you think your readers should treat it seriously?

This has definitely changed my impression of the level of reporting at your paper.

J.E. Cooper

Bloomfield, N.J.

Still Waters Run Deep

To the Editor:

I enjoyed Rebecca Dana’s piece on Michelle Kosinski’s canoe misadventure on the waters of the Passaic River [“Lovely Canoe-Gate Girl Tells All,” NYTV, Oct. 24]. Then, after reading it and mulling it over, it hit me that there was a more serious aspect to the story.

Ms. Kosinski said she had never been in a solo canoe before. Putting her in a canoe on floodwaters—even floodwaters that seem on the surface to be still—is like putting somebody on rollerblades for the first time.

Solo canoeing is something you shouldn’t try for the first time in the dark on floodwaters. People familiar with canoeing learn about the trickiness of eddy lines, and the danger posed by strainers and by foot entrapment. Flooded areas are notorious for those two dangers.

It’s a good thing she did stay embarrassingly close to shore. If she had paddled out to waist-deep water in the darkness, she possibly could have drifted out into a river current, been unable to control her canoe, and then NBC would have had a very interesting story to report.

Tom Butler

Tallahassee, Fla.

Don’t Mess With Texas

To the Editor:

Nicholas von Hoffman’s illuminating article made me feel a little better and gave me a new way to examine the Harriet Miers issue [“Cronyism on the Court? What a Shocking Thought!”, The National Observer, Oct. 24].

But a remark: My understanding is that S.M.U. Law School is the way to be a top Texas lawyer, perhaps mainly due to networking and being acquainted with the big guns there. It is a force to be reckoned with, not to be belittled. I think this would be a particularly important and not an easy career path for a woman lawyer in the state. For Harvard Law as well, “Who you know” is a major plus, isn’t it?

A Philadelphian by birth and an East Coast liberal at heart, I’ve lived in Texas for over 30 years. I never did convert, never felt quite at home, but I did grow to admire (or respect) the power and pride of the Texan.

Judith Goldman

Manhattan

Liberal Bias

To the Editor:

Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, am not happy with George W. Bush. Not happy at all. Then I read the musings of a frustrated liberal [“Who’ll Clean Up the Bush Mess? Gore and Clinton (Bill, That Is),” Michael M. Thomas, The Midas Watch, Oct. 17] and realized how crazy a lot liberals are. The second Bush-election vote was for the lesser of two evils, and 2008 will be no different for America. A Republican will be elected again just because of the fear of liberals like Mr. Thomas.

Mark Newman

Lutz, Fla.

Movie Madness

To the Editor:

I have been in New York for only a year and a half and so have never had the pleasure of reading Andrew Sarris’ column [At the Movies] until just last year. The breadth of his knowledge, his memory and his point of view make each issue a pure joy to read.

I hope he won’t be offended, but I’ve long thought that only Leonard Maltin’s brief pocket reviews come close to what I look for in a review to help me understand whether the movie is any good and whether I would want to see it. (Roger Ebert is way too gushy, and I was never interested in Pauline Kael’s point of view.)

I now add Mr. Sarris’ expansive reviews as required reading for films, past and present, to help point the way.

Steve Douglas

Manhattan

Ron Rosenbaum’s “Larry David, Have You Jumped the Whitefish? A New Fan’s Lament” piece [The Edgy Enthusiast, Oct. 17] was right on the money—very funny and insightful. What I liked even more about it was that it wasn’t a cheap-shots free-for-all; it was constructive criticism of the show and actually reverent of what Mr. David has done well. I liked Seinfeld the first year (no one else knew it was on). It was the latter-day fans, starting with year two, endlessly quoting “runners” and premises that were merely O.K. that forced me into creating a balance.

In other words, they thought Jerry was better than Groucho, so I wrinkled my nose, shook my head in dismay, became a vocal naysayer and rented old Monty Python episodes to get a giggle. And thanks to Mr. Rosenbaum for articulating the tuba problem. I heard it, bristled, groped for reason, but he nailed it.

Kim Crawford

Brentwood, Calif.

To the Editor:

“Have you jumped the whitefish?” Now there’s some edgy material! Give me a break. Mr. Rosenbaum’s rants about Curb Your Enthusiasm would seem much more scathing if he could offer us any reason to believe that he ever got the show in the first place. But hey, at least he wasn’t unfathomably condescending about it. He judges Larry for being “anti-P.C.”—and by the way, he claims to like the first four seasons, but no one I know can pinpoint any difference, myself included, which leads me to believe that the show has always been like this—but he flaunts his negative attitude about Seinfeld as being unheralded and different. Ken Tucker would be proud!

Sean T. Snell

Nova Scotia, Canada

Clinton Kerfuffle

To the Editor:

I know, of course, that Michael M. Thomas was being somewhat facetious [“Who’ll Clean Up the Bush Mess? Gore and Clinton (Bill, That Is),” The Midas Watch, Oct. 17], but still, his thinking is brilliant. Brilliant. That’s the only proper way to describe the scenario that he proposes. But now I wonder: Why not? To get around the constitutional problems, the Clinton on the ticket could be Hillary. This would create the kind of dream ticket that the boys in the “smoke-filled rooms” of my youth would die for. Thank you.

William A. Brown

Salt Lake City

To the Editor:

While I think Mr. Thomas’ aggravation with President Bush transcends party loyalties, I have to disagree that Gore and/or Clinton are the solution. While it is true that a Bush mess will apparently need to be cleaned up if circumstances do not change in the next three years, I doubt that Al or Bill could help. After all, Bush inherited a C.I.A. that was still fighting the Cold War, intelligence-spending cuts, Clinton’s missed opportunity to nab Osama bin Laden in the Sudan, a stock market with poor oversight and numerous other problems. Does Bush bear responsibility for many of these issues? Of course. But let’s be frank: Clinton was asleep at the wheel for eight years on a number of issues, and whether or not it is fair, Gore was a part of Clinton’s team and should be judged accordingly.

Chris Collins

Clearwater, Fla.

W. Stands for Wha?

To the Editor:

Richard Brookhiser’s column on Harriet Miers [“Modest Abilities Trump Modesty of Inclination,” The National Observer, Oct. 17] is the best I’ve read on the topic. He cuts to the heart of the matter and pulls no punches. The President deserves every bit of it.

David Schmitt

Alpharetta, Ga.

This is a pretty interesting book, though not as a business or how-to manual in quasi-autobiographical clothing. Don't buy this book thinking it will turn you into a demon C.E.O.; it might, but most probably won't-any more than parsing the score of a work by Mozart will equip you to write The Marriage of Figaro.

What makes it worthwhile, in my opinion, is that it gives a fairly good, often insightful picture of what an individual with an undoubtedly remarkable talent as an executive thought he was up to during his 20-year "reign" (I think that's the right word) as C.E.O. of General Electric, the company that is by consensus the most admired organizational artifact produced by postmodern capitalism. And, by omission, it leaves open to question aspects of Jack Welch's success that we might, with some justice, attribute to the operations of some higher power. "Luck," remarked Branch Rickey, the Jack Welch of baseball in his day, "is the residue of design." Those of us who have been around for a while, and have developed an appreciation of the role of contingency in human (and business) affairs, might also observe that luck seems frequently to be the residue of luck.

Not that Jack Welch doesn't admit to being lucky. He does so at the very beginning of his book, and he does so near the very end; in between … well, the mentions of Dame Fortune are not so frequent. Luck, by his definition, would appear to be a function, largely, of being thrown together over the course of a life with the right people-from parents to board members.

But there is a form of luck whose invisible hand orders the affairs of great men and midgets alike, and which also needs to be kept in mind. I caution anyone reading Welch on Welch to bear in mind that he was chosen to succeed Reginald Jones as chief executive of G.E. in 1981, which was, by any estimate, simply superb timing. Approximately 18 months after Mr. Welch took office, the U.S. and the global economy literally exploded in a 20-year boom. A company like G.E. was well-positioned to prosper. Under Mr. Welch's leadership-the word he prefers to "management," and I think he's right-G.E. not only prospered, it lapped the field: the right man in the right place at the right time. When this triangulation occurs, when the match of personality and style is so congruent, as it has been with Mr. Welch (and as it has been, I think, with Alan Greenspan), mortal genius-even if of a very high order-can seem transcendent, even godly.

Because I think this book is worth buying, I'm not going to paraphrase it, or summarize its contents. It contains enough in the way of sensible executive apothegms-"The people closest to the work know the work best"; "I've never seen a business ruined because it reduced its costs too much, too fast"-to satisfy the cravings of the sort of people who buy books about cheese-moving. The anecdotal material is O.K, the human interest adequate.

But the point of the book-and I write as one who has served as a director of or investment banker to companies run by C.E.O.'s ranging from the unspeakable (Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox) to the quite extraordinary (Ian MacGregor of American Metal Climax)-is to help us understand how Jack Welch got it done. If a reader wishes to measure herself or himself against the man, so be it. As it happens, I grew up with and around Litton Industries-a predecessor in the style of G.E. and a name to be conjured with on 'Change-and I kept wondering, as I read, how much better it would have turned out if Litton had been subjected to the same internal disciplines that Mr. Welch established at G.E. Quite a bit better, is my guess.

As a boy, Jack Welch picked up very useful values. A child of modest circumstances, he had strong, devoted parents who let him be himself. He played team sports, which developed in him an early appreciation of individual talent, that different folks are capable of different strokes. He caddied at a local golf club, which can only have sharpened his interest in people, his gift for observation and his respect for the rules of the game.

He came to G.E. with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and-collaterally-with an engineer's faith in process and a graduate student's taste for thinking. "Ambition" is not a word I can recall being used much in this book, and I'm not sure it's quite the right word to apply to Mr. Welch in any case. What I think has driven him from the very beginning is a compulsion to get things done as well as they possibly can be. To be a scratch player across the board, in everything from quality control to golf, and to surround himself as much as possible with people who shared his commitment to being No. 1. At G.E., he made that happen. As someone who has spent 20 years dealing with publishers, his account of this process made me weep with envy.

This takes ingenuity; it takes a scientist's respect for (more or less) immutable laws; it takes an intensity of focus so remote from the capabilities of most of us as to be unimaginable. These are the qualities that glow in this book, that glow in the man. In the Welch view of things, mediocrity is unacceptable. Mr. Welch's genius was to implement practices, procedures and filters that made it almost impossible for mediocrity to gain a foothold. His was the equivalent, in management practice, of the great heavyweight champion Joe Louis' observation with respect to a notionally quick-footed opponent: "He can run, but he can't hide."

He calls this "differentiation," and it made him a hard boss-"Neutron Jack," a name he loathes-but as the saying goes, cruel yet fair. G.E. promoted a culture in which you knew where you stood: 10 percent of the underachievers were let go every year. Not to add a farthing to the shareholders' bottom line, but because, in a corporate culture dedicated to maximum accomplishment whichever way one looked at it, tolerance of people who don't cut it pollutes from the bottom up. I'm sure there are people out there to whom the name Jack Welch is anathema, but as someone with a quarter-century of investment banking in my past, I can only say that any man who realizes "There are more mediocre people making money on Wall Street than any other place on earth" can't be all bad.

On the whole, the book reads easily. Of certain technical passages, I can only say one would not wish them longer. There's not a human being on earth who can render a halfway-intelligible lay account of "Six Sigma," the quality-control scheme to which Mr. Welch attributes so much of G.E.'s success; I'm afraid this is just one of these things you have to see in operation to begin to understand. All in all, those readers will fare best who know a bit about business, and probably best of all those who own some G.E. stock.

At the end of the day, this isn't a blowhard egotistical exercise like Iacocca. As an autobiography, it's so-so. To do what Jack Welch did, he was perforce obliged to spend most of his working life in meetings, which doesn't make for adventurous or gossipy reading. So what? You read a book like this to try to understand how.

Above all, Jack: Straight from the Gut is about something so rarely encountered in American life today-something that, in a tragic way, has just blown up in our collective national face-that it should be widely read and reflected upon. That something is called getting it right. Getting it really right.

Or, as Jack Welch would probably say, "perfect."

Michael M. Thomas writes The Midas Watch for The Observer.

Art'otels are also in the works in Rome (Francesco Clemente), Berlin (Jim Dine), Los Angeles (Edward Ruscha), Miami (James Rosenquist) and New York, where an artist and site have yet to be designated.

Among those I spotted in the Malev Hungarian Airlines departure lounge who were apparently as swayed by the artistic possibilities (or at least by the offer of a free trip) as me, and who fell for the pitch letter's evocation of cobblestone streets, baroque palaces and poppy seed strudel, were the novelist Tama Janowitz; the crime reporter John Connally, on assignment for National Geographic Traveler ; and several dozen of Donald Sultan's downtown artist friends and family members. They included Ann Freedman, the president of the Knoedler Gallery, Mr. Sultan's dealers; Barbara Siebel Thomas, a highly personable house portrait painter (and former wife of my Observer colleague Michael Thomas), who was seated beside us on the plane and whose fear of turbulence quite possibly exceeded my wife's; and Mr. Sultan's mom Phyllis, an 82-year-old force of nature whose only regret was that the trip would make her miss her first yoga class.

When we landed in Budapest the next morning, the weather was cool and overcast, as it was to remain for the next two days, and somehow exactly what you'd have expected it to be in a former Communist republic. The landscape our bus passed on the way into town was a jumble of old and new: bouncy billboards hawking cell phones overlooking neighborhoods of dilapidated 50's worker housing.

Our hotel, on the other hand, which we spotted for the first time crossing the Danube over the Chain Bridge, shone with an inviting postmodern clarity of purpose and sparked thoughts of starched sheets, hot baths and sleep.

Unfortunately, our rooms weren't ready. I'd been under the mistaken impression that we were to be the Art'otel's first guests, but I discovered that the hotel had been undergoing what's apparently known in the hospitality business as a "soft opening" since July, and the previous night's residents were taking their sweet time departing. So we proceeded directly to the official grand-opening ceremony and champagne toast, where we heard from Mr. Sultan, who looks a bit like an affable, overgrown fifth grader with his moon-shaped wire-rimmed glasses and mop of unruly hair, as well as Jonathan Read, chairman of Park Plaza Worldwide (the parent company of Art'otel), whose mom was also along for the festivities, and Kimberly Tufo, the fetching young wife of U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Peter Tufo.

Mr. Sultan's remarks were admirably short ("It's the first exhibition you can go to in your bathrobe," he said), but those of Joseph Domberger, one of the hotel's developers-who had more people to thank than Britney Spears at the People's Choice Awards-tested our already-depleted endurance.

By the time Mrs. Tufo stepped to the podium and accepted a check from the hotel on behalf of her pet cause, something called the Children's Safety Service, I was calculating how many bodies I'd have to step over when the ceremony broke to make certain I was the first person on line at the reception desk to demand a room key.

My pugnacity paid off. We were awarded a lovely room overlooking the Danube with a view of the neo-Gothic pinnacles of the Parliament building beyond. Art'otel Donald Sultan doesn't aspire to be the Pierre or the Crillon-at the Art'otel, a double room runs about $150 a night-but the artist's confident touches lend it a certain elegance, even glamour. They include numbered Sultan lithographs on the walls, a metal songbird perched high on one wall-"I thought everybody should have a sculpture in their room," the artist explained-and playful red carpeting with a needle-and-thread motif that supposedly hearkens back to Hungary's history as a tapestry-making capital. Mr. Sultan even designed the matchboxes, which bear images from his Smoke Rings series.

The weekend's only off note occurred that evening, when we were all invited to dinner at an authentic Hungarian restaurant and many of us made the mistake of ordering the fish. My wife Debbie had been told by a friend who spent a couple of weeks in Hungary that, even though it may sound counterintuitive in a landlocked nation, the fish is superb. Apparently she wasn't referring to the catfish.

The following morning, we attempted to reverse the damage done to our stomach linings by taking the medicinal waters at the Gellert Hotel, one of Budapest's famous bathhouses, a basilica of early 20th-century Secessionist style. I received a 45-minute massage for the equivalent of $7, then soaked in the thermal baths.

An excellent piece of seven-layer cake-alternating bands of chocolate cream and marzipan-crowned a light lunch at Gerbeau, a famous Budapest café, and almost restored my faith in Hungarian cuisine. Dinner that night, our second and last, was at the hotel and included dancing and a charity auction of Mr. Sultan's work.

Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Tufo, the guests of honor, couldn't make it, the press of official business calling them to Vienna. We nonetheless managed to overcome their absence. Joining our boisterous group were the Mayor of Buda (the city is divided into several districts including hilly Buda, where our hotel was located, and flat Pest);Yoni (he doesn't use his last name), a 21-year-old Dalton School graduate and Manhattan club promoter ("You've got to bow before someone who can put together a club list from Budapest," noted Jori Finkel, an editor at Art & Auction ); and an abundance of beautiful young local ladies who weren't bashful about making eye contact.

With the exception of a flea market on the outskirts of town, where Ms. Janowitz scored a rather cumbersome piece of ornamental ironwork (she told us that on another recent trip she had purchased a ferret, so I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky) and Mr. Connally a pair of Soviet-era binoculars for $50, I didn't feel like I'd missed much when we boarded our buses Sunday morning for the trip back to the airport.

There was one brief moment of concern when we spotted several Hungarian mechanics huddling beneath the wing of our aircraft and were informed that our flight would be delayed an hour to allow "the glue to dry" on some impromptu repair. But we became airborne without noticeable difficulty, and the nine-hour flight home seemed to take half that long due to the amount of socializing that was going on in the aisles. Since we've returned, we've received a note from Ms. Thomas, who also sat beside us on the way back (and whose fear of flying remains acute), that a reunion is already in the works.

It does not appear to have entered the calculations of the author of this guidebook that disclosure might encourage streams of incremental traffic along quiet residential roads, with possible consequences to the safety, and assured consequences to the peace and privacy, of those living nearby. This is, after all, an area infrastructurally-let alone culturally-ill-equipped to absorb tourist traffic in any significant quantity. If you doubt me on this latter point, ask anyone who's been out this way this summer. East Hampton is like Venice. I might add that I don't live on any of the roads in question (although I have friends who do), but from my porch I watch the visitors stream by, footsore, confused and bladder-weary, and my heart goes out to them.

Now it has been my experience that gross insensitivity in such matters as the precedence, privacy and space of others is, as often as not, a function of upbringing. I therefore wrote, really quite innocently, that public disclosure of local lore reflected (I paraphrase myself) the author's "background and breeding." Or-by implication: lack thereof. Three little words (in an article of some 3,000) that appear to have embodied the precept of the immortal Wee Willie Keeler to "hit 'em where they ain't" (or "aren't"-as I was taught at school). Shooting for a single, I seem to have cleared the bases.

What I had failed to take into proper account, you see, was that the familial equation in this instance includes a male parent encumbered with the notoriously low flash point common to persons who, no matter how long they live in a place, no matter how fancy the address they secure for themselves, will never be regarded with respect, nor as "belonging," and who are aware of this to the point of paranoia. I suppose one can't blame them. For such people, life is full of invisible boundaries they keep banging into, and the more they bang, the more it smarts, I guess, and the more generalized becomes their resentment. Or-I suppose you could put it-the more acute becomes their awareness of a perceived (by themselves) inferiority.

Anyway, I filed and then went off to Jamaica. On my return, I was greeted by a paternal eruption whose pyrotechnic "values" might make up for the show the East End was robbed of over the Independence Day weekend by inclement evening fogs. A full, 1,500-word "column" in a local giveaway paper accusing me of acting like a cross between Lady Bracknell and Dr. Mengele. I don't go looking for enemies, but luck or whatever seems to bless me with the right ones, and here we go again.

Actually, although on the surface it reads like an overwrought, gutterish attack on yours truly, I take the screed in question to be a riveting "affirmation by opposition" of everything I like to think my work in this space stands for. In addition, its defamatory recitation of the facts and circumstances of my life is almost wholly inaccurate, to the point that a number of people familiar with (and licensed in) the law, as well as with my own professional history, have urged me to bring an action for libel.

Ordinarily this is something I, who despise litigation, wouldn't consider for a minute. But their analysis seems persuasive and I have to say that, given who's involved, the opportunity to round out with financial ruin the social and political anathema this individual has already visited on himself and his family might be construed less as a matter of personal vindication than public service. And so I am looking, quite seriously, into the possibility. Worth noting also is the fact that the New York Post reprinted certain of these defamatory assertions without checking with me or anyone else for accuracy, and that paper's proprietor has deliciously deep pockets. That said, I fear I must stick to the guns of principle and reiterate, firmly, that, if anything, the gentleman's outburst only confirms the larger point I seem to have been making. Namely that, whether we're talking about life or advertising or running a restaurant or waste management or the development of character and taste, the same rule applies: garbage in, garbage out.

In life, one not only provokes outbursts, one can also produce an almost equally satisfying opposite: the stunned silence. Here's how that goes: "Hello. Is that Michael Thomas?"

"Yes."

"The Michael Thomas who writes for The New York Observer ?"

"Yes."

"Hi, Michael. I'm Such-and-Such, a producer for So-and-So a TV "news" or "talk" show. Would you be available tomorrow to comment on the media and John F. Kennedy Jr.?"

"No."

(Stunned silence.)

Here's another one, courtesy of a friend who owns a shop:

"Hello, XYZ Shop."

"Hi. It's So-and-So from Such-and-Such a vendor-supplier."

"Hi, So-and-So, what can I do for you?"

"Yeah, well, listen: If any celebrities buy any of our stuff, would you let us know their names so we can get our publicist on the job?"

"I wouldn't dream of it."

(Stunned silence.)

By now, you will understand why I welcome the opportunity to get away every summer, with my Beloved Stepmother leading the family charge, for a week in Jamaica.

"Jamaica?" people exclaim. "In summer?"

Well, I tell them: Here's the thing. At Tryall, near Montego Bay, where Poppi's house is, the temperature's the same, the water's more agreeable, the golf is right there, the food is excellent and the asshole quotient is one-100th percent of what it is out here. All I did was read, write a bit and watch Francis improve at golf, in one week, more than anyone I have observed in 50 years of playing the game. Even after I cut his handicap drastically, he beat the tar out of me, and he handled the psychological part wonderfully well and patiently, since fathers aren't the most understanding golf teachers. Tiger he may not turn out to be-that's up to him-but he knows he can play well enough to have fun, and I handed over my losings with pride and admiration and a vow to win it all back.

I must say that Jamaica stacks up well. Out here, people pay $50,000 to rent a house for the season (or for a month, if they want "oceanfront"), and look what they get: Beaches overrun by the public and private golf courses they have to abase themselves to get on-if they can. Chic restaurants happy to take them at 5:30 and 11, weekends excluded. Pretty towns where it's impossible to park and that are overrun with day-trippers. The gossip columns full of events that they're not invited to, or which they have to pay to attend. At Tryall, for half the same money (or less), you get a four-bedroom villa with five in staff; world-class golf and a turquoise sea at your doorstep, terrific food, amusing people from all over the world who are happy to see you. And just 10 minutes up the road, there's Round Hill, with its Ralph Lauren glamour.

Of course, you do risk gossip deprivation. Without noticing it, I missed all the excitement of the Talk launch and the Hillary interview-which was so calculated to produce buzz I wonder if money didn't change hands. Actually, what I'm really interested in is the new memoir of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, which I gather has some really good stuff about Barbara Walters finking for Bill Clinton and then taking the Eichmann defense. Boutros Boutros is a guy I admire, mainly for his choice of enemies.

My only regret is that I'm horribly out-of-date about this summer's big scandal, which involves a (purported) gazillionaire who has absconded with a media queen in a liaison that prompts me to paraphrase (I'm sorry, I can't help myself!) the immortal Oscar's description of fox-hunting: namely that what we're looking at is the unspeakable going down on the inedible.

The man in the case has a bad reputation out this way. He's also a big Clinton backer who may not have anything like the money people-or his new beloved, for that matter-credit him with. He has engaged John Scanlon to rep him, P.R.-wise, generally a useful indicator of dubious virtue, if not downright guilt. It should be interesting. Stay tuned.