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Warren, of course, looked up to Graham with worshipful awe. He had read the Northern Pipeline story over and over when he was ten years old, well before he understood who Benjamin Graham was in the investing world. Now he hoped to bond with his teacher. But outside the classroom, he and Ben had few hobbies in common. Graham dabbled in the arts and sciences in a quest for knowledge, writing poetry, failing spectacularly as a Broadway playwright, and puttering around filling notebooks with ideas for clumsy inventions. He also devoted himself to ballroom dancing, clumping around for years at the Arthur Murray studio, where he danced like a wooden soldier and counted the steps out loud. During dinner parties, Graham often disappeared in the middle of a course to work on mathematical formulas, read Proust (in French), or listen to the opera in solitude, rather than suffer the dull company of his fellow man.10 “I remember the things I learn,” he wrote in his memoir, “rather than the things I live.” The one exception where living took precedence over learning was his assignations.

About the only way a human being competed with the classic authors for Graham’s attention was to be female and beddable. He was short and physically unimposing, but people had told him that his sensual full lips and penetrating blue eyes reminded them of the actor Edward G. Robinson.11 There was something elfish-looking about him, and he was not a handsome man. Nonetheless, Graham seemed to be a Mount Everest for women who liked a challenge: they met him and wanted to climb on top.

In his three wives, Graham’s taste had ranged wide: from the passionate, strong-willed teacher Hazel Mazur to Broadway showgirl Carol Wade—eighteen years his junior—to his third wife and former secretary, the intelligent, lighthearted Estelle “Estey” Messing. Complicating all these marriages was his complete indifference to monogamy. Graham later wrote a memoir12 in which he begins, “Let me describe my first extramarital affair in the soberest fashion,” a sobriety he giddily abandons six sentences later as he explains the recipe for his liaison with the sharp-tongued, “by no means beautiful” Jenny: “one part attraction and four parts opportunity.” If more attraction was present, he needed less opportunity, making him shameless, even annoying, in his sexual advances toward women he found attractive. Combining two of his hobbies, Graham might dash off a seductive little poem to a woman he fancied on the subway. Yet he was so cerebral that, even for his lovers, it must have been a challenge to hold his attention. The darting from amour to business in the following passage of the memoir is pure Graham:13

I have a sentimental memory of the last hour we spent together in the cabin of her Ward Line steamer. (Little did I think then that my firm was later to control that old-established steamship company.)

He drove his wives to distraction with his philandering. But Warren at the time knew nothing about Graham’s personal life and was focused only on what he could learn from the brilliant teacher. On the first day of Graham’s seminar in January 1951, Warren walked into a smallish classroom containing a long rectangular table. In the middle sat Graham, surrounded by eighteen or twenty men. Most of the other students were older, some of them war veterans. Half were not Columbia students but businessmen who were auditing the course. Once again, Warren was the youngest—yet also the most knowledgeable. When Graham asked a question, inevitably he “would be the first one to have his hand up and immediately start talking,” recalls one of his classmates, Jack Alexander.14 The rest of the class became the audience to a duet.

In 1951, many American businesses were still worth more dead than alive. Graham encouraged his students to use real-life examples from the stock market to illustrate this, down-and-dirty companies such as Greif Bros. Cooperage, a barrel maker whose stock Warren owned. Its main business was slowly disappearing