Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson

become devoted followers of the man who could perform an act of liberation for them. In the beginning, Investors Overseas Services sometimes seemed more like a therapeutic community than a money-making device.
        Bernard Cornfeld told Time magazine in 1962 that he had started with a capital of $300. It sounds like a rags-to-riches beginning, but in fact he began in Europe with most of the things that his new acquaintances were struggling to get: a flat, a girl friend (two, by his own account) a sporty little Simca, a typewriter, and a promising source of income in good, green dollars. In Paris, no less than New York, Bernie was the boy who always knew how to get hold of wheels, a girl, a pad and a few bucks.
        Cornfeld had brought with him to Paris a rather tenuous relationship with Investors Planning Corporation, and on the basis of this he started, experimentally, selling a few mutual fund shares. He wrote off to the Benedicks for supplies of literature and propectuses, and for a while they kept him supplied. But Cornfeld, now that he had seen the large possibilities of the American expatriate market, decided to become an independent dealer - which would, of course, entitle him to a larger slice of the commission on any sales he could procure. Quite early in 1956, Jack Dreyfus in New York received a letter which reminded him of the young man who had dropped in and complimented him upon the readability of the Dreyfus prospectus. Cornfeld wrote that he had been hoping to sell for ipc in Europe, but that the arrangement was not working out as he had hoped. What about the prospects of selling for the Dreyfus Fund?
        The result was that Cornfeld exchanged his links with ipc for a dealership selling the hottest fund in New York. From Jack Dreyfus' viewpoint, his decision to accredit Cornfeld was nearly as good a buy as Polaroid: within three years Cornfeld's European-based sales crew were selling almost sixteen per cent of the fastest growing section of the Dreyfus Fund's new business. This was the category of 'contractual programmes', under which investors agreed to pay a certain amount into the fund every month, instead of putting up a single lump sum. Cornfeld was an early enthusiast for 'contractuals': from a salesman's viewpoint, the great feature was that commission could be calculated upon the total volume of money that the customer would eventually pay during the life of the programme. By 1962, IOS was bringing in close to forty per cent of all the Dreyfus programme business, and 31.1% of all the Dreyfus Fund's new money.
        The salesmen Bernie recruited did not at all resemble the salesmen of legend, or Arthur Miller's imagining. Robert Marx was reasonably representative.
        Like Cornfeld, he had joined the merchant navy around the end of the war. On discharge, he became a reporter, which he saw as an interim period on the way to becoming a novelist. By 1955, he was working for Reuters in Paris, on very slender wages indeed, which he eked out by contributions to an international veterans' journal. In March 1956 he was introduced to a girl friend of Cornfeld's, who suggested that Bernie might be able to provide some supplementary income. Marx trudged up to 22 Boulevard Flandrin, a small white house behind a big block of flats, to meet Bernie.
        'Physically, he was completely unprepossessing,' Marx remembers. 'His clothes were baggy-there was never a suit off the peg which could fit Bernie. But then he started to speak. His voice is very soft, and reassuring. His smile is very engaging.
        ‘I didn't at all like the idea of selling mutual funds. And he didn't seem to sell the idea very hard. But by the time I left the flat, I had agreed to give it a try.'
        There was nothing elaborate about the operation Marx joined. The firm's chief and almost only asset was a Chrysler Imperial convertible, which has become firmly established as part of the IOS legend. 'It was the