‘Working Girl’ Hits Home With Wall Streeters
Can an ambitious, frustrated secretary, masquerading as her boss, put together a $67-million corporate acquisition and get away with it? Probably not.
Still, Tess McGill, the heroine of the comedy-drama “Working Girl,” is eliciting cheers from women in the financial world who have battled their way from the back offices of brokerage houses in Southern California to visible positions of power.
“A lot of girls think their bosses would be nothing without them--and it’s true,” said Marilyn Cohen, president of Capital Insight, a Beverly Hills brokerage. “In this business, the sales assistant can really enhance the broker’s business.”
“Any woman with aspirations” should see the movie, she said.
“Working Girl” is a Cinderella story with a financial twist. Melanie Griffith plays McGill, a secretary with a night-school business degree who cannot seem to get ahead at her Wall Street brokerage firm. When her boss breaks a leg and is out of the office for weeks, McGill aggressively moves ahead on an acquisition idea of her own, not exactly impersonating her boss--but almost.
Scenario ‘Farfetched’
Her ruse, centered around a $67-million acquisition of a radio network by a firm called Trask Enterprises, eventually backfires. But it has enough credibility to carry the audience along and win praise from many successful women who have fought hard for their current positions.
“I started in the back office,” said Maureen O’Neill, who now sells mortgage-backed securities for First Interstate Bank in downtown Los Angeles. “I later had an opportunity to go on the trading desk as a sales assistant and was then promoted to a salesperson.”
O’Neill said it is common for assistants to fill in for their bosses, but the scenario depicted in the movie, where McGill not only puts the deal together but moves into her boss’ townhouse and borrows her elegant clothes, was “farfetched.”
Muriel Siebert, the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and founder of a New York City brokerage bearing her name, said a bright assistant like McGill could probably orchestrate a deal up to a certain point.
“If I know I’m going to be out of town, I will take people to meetings with me so they can follow through when I’m away,” said Siebert, who began her career as an industry analyst in the 1950s.
“There were no women on the Street when I started,” said Siebert, who for years was barred from the all-male private clubs where companies traditionally held their investor relations presentations. Siebert said she is disappointed in the progress women have made on Wall Street, especially since there are still so few women partners.
“It’s a shame, I get very angry,” said Siebert. “Women are not in the deal business (mergers and acquisitions)where the money is. And there are still very few women in the executive suite.”
Karen Hayes, a vice president in the Los Angeles institutional sales department of a major brokerage, said she started as a sales assistant seven years ago after graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in education.
“The hardest part was making the transition (from an assistant to a salesperson) within the same department,” said Hayes, who said she loved “Working Girl.”
Hayes said she had several mentors along the way, as well as an extremely supportive company. (Hayes said her firm had asked that it not be mentioned by name.)
Despite the support and encouragement, Hayes admits: “I’m the only woman in my office who does what I do.”
Another woman who sells preferred stocks to corporations for a Wall Street brokerage moved from a trading assistant to a vice president in 10 years.
Encountered Sexism
“Whether it’s a woman or a man, a secretary is going to have a hard time getting ahead,” said the vice president, whose said her firm also asked that it not be identified. “For me, it was a real struggle to get out from being a trading assistant--you didn’t see a lot of women on trading desks.”
Later, when she was promoted to a sales position in a field dominated by men, she said she encountered sexism. “One night I was at a restaurant with a client and he leaned across the table and said, ‘Where did you get those baby blues?’ ”
Dealing with jealous women colleagues also created problems for her along the way, she said.
While she never pretended to be her boss, she said she learned the most about the job when her boss was on vacation and she dealt directly with clients. (She had passed a securities industry exam to be a broker and was licensed to deal with clients.)
The securities industry has moved to improve its record of hiring and promoting women. “In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of women working at the Exchange,” said a spokeswoman for the New York Stock Exchange.
Although women worked on the trading floor during World War II and Muriel Siebert purchased her seat in 1967, women were barred from working there until 1971, according to the spokeswoman. Today, 375 of the exchange’s 2,700 employees are women, she said. Sixty-nine women own seats but only 24 are actively using them. The rest are leasing their seats to others.
At the Pacific Stock Exchange, 40 to 45 women hold seats out of a total of 551, according to spokesman for the exchange. There are 206 women working at the exchange, representing 46% of the 450 employees. In January, 1942, women worked on the floor of what was then called the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Venita Van Caspel was the first woman to purchase a seat in 1969, he said.
The National Assn. of Securities Dealers, the industry’s regulatory group, does not keep figures on the number of women brokers. But spokesman Enno Hobbing said: “We’ve had a healthy growth in the number of women in our examiner force.”
Hobbing said women are working in every part of the securities industry. He said they not only own their own brokerages, but several women are among the most respected securities analysts on Wall Street.
Many people who love the film want to know if it was based on a real-life McGill.
“I never met her,” said Kevin Wade, Working Girl’s screenwriter in a phone interview from his home in East Hampton on Long Island. “I sort of made her up out of whole cloth.”
Wade said he heard rumors of a mythical secretary from Brooklyn who fought her way up to a top job at a brokerage, but he could not find her.
To add realistic details to his script, Wade spent months interviewing Wall Street secretaries, brokers and female mergers and acquisitions executives. Liam Dalton, a former vice president at Bear, Stearns & Co., served as technical adviser for the film and dated actress Griffith for about a year.
Crash a Wedding Reception
The film deals with several serious issues, including the role of mentors, or more experienced advisers, in guiding one’s career. After several tries, McGill thinks she’s found a mentor in her new boss, a mergers and acquisitions expert played with delicious villainy by Sigourney Weaver. But instead of helping her loyal secretary, Weaver, as Katherine Parker, patronizes her and steals her brilliant idea for an acquisition by one of her cash-rich clients.
With Parker out of the office, McGill decides to pursue her idea with the help of a burnt-out, veteran deal maker played by Harrison Ford. Together they crash a wedding reception hosted by the chairman of the board of Trask Enterprises so McGill can seductively pitch her acquisition idea.
The chairman loves it and they move into serious negotiations. “I read a lot of books, read the financial pages of the New York Times and managed to come up with something that sort of holds water,” said Wade. “Working Girl,” directed by Mike Nichols and released by 20th Century Fox, is Wade’s first feature film.
In one hilarious scene, McGill is furious about being set up for a romantic interlude by one of her earlier bosses who told her it was going to be a job interview. Afterward, she types a nasty remark about him on the electronic ticker tape that is then displayed in giant letters along with stock quotations for the entire office to see. This, the Wall Streeters say, is something that could never happen in real life.
