For years, the financiers Arthur Zankel and Sanford I. Weill discussed Wall Street and philanthropy at the posh Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. But when they slid into their regular booth one afternoon in June, the discussion was anything but routine.
Zankel told Weill that he was losing a long battle with depression — a “blackness”, he said, that was consuming him. For weeks, Zankel, 73, had hidden at home while fabricating trips and excuses to avoid business and social contacts. Even arranging and meeting for lunch had been a struggle.
“Nothing is working,” he said, distraught that drugs, counselling, exercise and specialists hadn’t helped to lift his depression. A self-made man who had amassed a vast fortune, Zankel was losing hope. After lunch, Weill lined up top psychiatrists and physicians to try to save his friend. But time ran out. Six weeks later, Zankel jumped to his death from the ninth floor of his Manhattan apartment building. A tearful Weill gave the eulogy at a packed memorial service attended by many of America’s corporate elite.
Advancements in the treatment of depression have helped millions and saved many lives. The disease, in its various forms, affects about 19 million Americans each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In Britain, about one adult in ten aged between 16 and 64 are afflicted, and this week the Premier of Western Australia, Dr Geoff Gallop, resigned, citing depression — and the need to treat it properly — as the reason.
Although most people recover from the illness, there are still cases of depression that do not respond to treatment, even for those who have access to all kinds of care and the strong support of a close-knit family. As he struggled sporadically with depression for 50 years, Zankel tried everything from hospitals to hobbies to antidepressant drug combinations. Ultimately, he couldn’t beat the disease.
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During his career, Zankel made hundreds of millions of dollars and rubbed shoulders with the titans of Wall Street. He donated millions to charities, including Carnegie Hall in New York, which named a new venue after him in 2003.
He first experienced depression in 1954, while a student at Harvard Business School, beginning a pattern of severe bouts of the disease, with long breaks in between. Suddenly, he couldn’t concentrate on his studies and felt oddly out of sorts. His brother Martin remembers Zankel telling him at the time: “I’m panicking.”
The panic dissipated a few months later. But by the early 1970s, with his financial career in full flight, depression struck again. With an official diagnosis, Zankel was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. It was a disaster. One night, despite being heavily medicated, he walked out of the hospital and wandered the streets for hours. Zankel eventually called a business colleague, who arranged for him to be taken home to his wife and four young sons.
Calling the hospital a “nightmare”, Zankel vowed to get better without treatment there. After a few months of psychiatric treatment, his depression lifted. It recurred around 1980, again with no clear trigger. A new psychiatrist suggested that pursuing hobbies might help. Zankel loved bridge, so the doctor urged him to begin playing again. He also tried gardening and baking. Eventually, his depression lifted.
The next medical crisis wasn’t his. In 1986, Zankel’s wife of 30 years died from colon cancer. For the first time, Zankel started taking antidepressants. Within months, he was well and back at the office. His business at First Manhattan, the investment advisory firm he founded, was thriving. He was also advising Weill, who had been ousted as president of American Express and was about to launch a second financial empire. In the late 1980s, Zankel joined the board of the company headed by Weill, which later acquired the brokerage firm Smith Barney, the insurance giant Travelers, and Citicorp. Weill says Zankel was his “most valued adviser”.
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A few years later, Zankel suffered another brief bout of depression, but a new combination of antidepressants, in addition to regular visits to a psychiatrist, pulled him out of it. In 1996, he began dating Judy Francis, a 49-year-old illustrator. He was open about his depressive bouts, but she recalls thinking at the time that although depression had had a big impact on his life, it didn’t dominate it. The couple married in 1997 and bought an apartment on Fifth Avenue. In a bathtub overlooking Central Park, Zankel liked to take a morning bath while reading newspapers and financial documents.
The next few years were Zankel’s happiest, say his family and friends. He and Judy engaged in an active social life, and Zankel launched a private-investment fund. It recorded a 31 per cent return in its first year. Depression seemed gone until summer, 2004, when Judy says her husband suddenly said to her: “I’m worried . . . I’m feeling depressed.”
When the couple went to their home in Cape Cod in July, the typically energetic Zankel became withdrawn for the rest of the summer. His depression continued until his doctor tried a new regimen of antidepressants. At a party that autumn to celebrate his eldest son’s marriage, he seemed like his old self.
But by the spring of 2005, business and society acquaintances started asking Judy if her husband was all right. She lied repeatedly, she says, telling them that the medication he was taking for kidney stones was knocking him out. Zankel attended functions only when he thought he could bear them.
But it became apparent to his friends and business associates that something was amiss. At dinners he barely talked, and he seemed to lose interest in work.
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In May, Zankel went on a long-planned trip to Tuscany with his wife, sons and grandchildren. He was distant and tired, and did little sightseeing. When he returned to the US, he avoided work and social engagements. Eventually, Zankel went to meet Weill for lunch and told him about the “blackness”.
Weill called Antonio Gotto, dean of the Weill Medical College. Dr Gotto arranged for a leading psycho-pharmacologist, a specialist in drug therapy for psychiatric illnesses, to see Zankel. After establishing that he had no other medical problems except for depression, the doctor weaned him off all medication, did more blood tests and prescribed a single drug to treat him. Zankel continued with his twice-weekly sessions with his long-time psychiatrist.
Still, he sat around at his apartment or his suburban home in Westchester County, New York. When faxed messages arrived from his office, he threw them out. He became more listless, staring blankly into space.
In June, Martin Zankel visited his brother, who stunned him with a warning: “I’m going to end it and you will be the executor.” Zankel had updated his will two years earlier, giving the bulk of his fortune, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, to charities. Judy says she didn’t believe her husband would act on the threat. But she stayed constantly by his side and turned down illustration work. For hours she would sit holding his hand and stroking his hair. “We just have to get through this one day at a time,” she told him. “I’ve ruined our perfect life,” he told her. She reassured him: “You’re just sick — the doctor says you will get better.” Zankel shook his head: “I don’t believe it.”
One afternoon in early July, Judy says he again discussed taking his life. “It’s not true that suicide is a big ‘screw you’ to the people left behind,” he said.
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He was sleeping more and told his wife that he was “tired of fighting”. During his morning baths he had trouble reading the newspaper. Unable to focus, he picked it up and put it down over and over. Sometimes he would go for hours without talking, even though Judy was at his side. His silence was broken by a sudden fascination with the back staircase to their apartment building. He asked his wife: “How high does that staircase go? It looks down on the courtyard, right?” Shaken, she e-mailed his sons and brother, telling them about her growing concern.
His son Tommy, a money manager, visited him and managed to engage his father with talk about the stock market. It gave Tommy hope that his father wasn’t so bad after all. But in the middle of the conversation, Tommy says his father’s interest waned. Zankel said: “Everything aches.”
That month Judy, Martin and Zankel’s sons exchanged more than 50 e-mails on his deteriorating condition, and discussed whether to hospitalise him — which they knew he did not want. Around the same time, Zankel phoned Martin and said: “I’m losing my mind. I have no ability to reason. I can’t live this way.” Martin told him the feeling would pass. In mid-July, Tommy came to see him again, and asked his father: “What would you tell me if I was feeling depressed?”
“Just hang in there,” said Zankel. “I’m pleading with you to hang on, Dad,” Tommy said. “I promise I will,” his father told him.
On July 27, another son, Jimmy, who was having an engagement party that weekend, visited his dad. He recalls that his father told him he planned to come to the party: “I intend to be there for better or worse — most likely the latter. It’s important to me.”
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On July 28, Judy accompanied her husband to his psychiatrist. After the session, she told him she wanted to speak alone with the doctor. “Promise you won’t move?” Judy asked her husband. He agreed, she recalls, saying that he would read his newspaper.
When she emerged from the doctor’s office 15 minutes later, Zankel was gone. Judy ran out on to the street. Perhaps he was getting a coffee? She called the doorman of their building, a brief cab ride away, who told her her husband was upstairs in their apartment. Judy told the doorman to go upstairs and stay with Zankel: “It’s an emergency!” She raced to the apartment, but by the time she arrived, it was swarming with police.
“Has anyone fallen out of the window into the courtyard?” she asked. The police said nothing.
Judy rushed into the lift and up to their apartment. There was no sign of her husband. Sprinting to the staircase at the back of their apartment, she climbed to a window and peered down into the courtyard. She didn’t see her husband’s body, but then her heart sank.
“Those are his shoes!” she screamed. “His shoes!”
This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe on January 17. Reprinted by permission of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE, © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. all rights reserved worldwide