Sam Zell, Poet Laureate 34767

There’s much you can say about Sam Zell. This week, the New Yorker tried to say it all with an especially lengthy profile of the possible future owner of Tribune Co. And Ken Auletta wasn’t even behind it!

Unlike the magazine’s Mort Zuckerman profile – what’s with the media mogul obsession? – this doozy is worth reading, if only for the anecdotal poetry. And the tidbit about the polyester jumpsuit.

Discussing January’s sale of Zell’s mega real estate group Equity Office to Blackstone, while using a bid from Vornado to drive up the price, Connie Bruck reports:

Over the next six weeks, Roth weighed his options, and by the end of the year Vornado had decided to bid for Equity Office. In mid-January, 2007, Equity Office???s share price was rising on the rumors of a Vornado bid. On January 17th, Roth was surrounded by bankers and lawyers in the Vornado boardroom, a penthouse suite overlooking Central Park, when his secretary handed him an e-mail from Zell:

Dear Stevie:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I heard a rumor
Is it true?

Love and kisses,
Sam

???We were at a disadvantage???we had nobody who could rhyme,??? Roth told me. ???Everything stopped, we put twenty people in a room, and finally we came up with ours???:

Sam, how are you
The rumor is true
I do love you
And the price is $52.

To see if this poem will rhyme
We should talk at a set time
While to talk like this is nifty
We should really talk at three fifty.

Forever yours,
Steve