Kaiser Roll

“For the past 15 generations, nobody in my family has had to work,” said A. Laurance “Larry” Kaiser IV, the high-end Upper East Side real estate broker. “You work because you have to contribute to society.”

Mr. Kaiser, 66, was sitting upright in his small Madison Avenue office last month. A day earlier, two top executives at Lehman Brothers had lost their jobs and the Federal Reserve released a grim economic report: Manhattan real estate is “down sharply … inventories of unsold units have risen.”

Has Mr. Kaiser, a broker since 1968, been anxious? “Not in the past 40 years,” he said. “Why would I be worried? I have no problems whatsoever. And I constantly get calls from every broker, ‘Where do you get your customers?’ I was born with them. I went to school with them. They know exactly who I am.”

School was Harrow in England; then Switzerland’s Le Rosey, where Flavian Kasavubu, the son of the Republic of Congo’s first president, was a roommate. The sons of William Woodward Jr., the legendary banking heir killed by his socialite wife, were “my dearest friends.” And there was Princie Baroda, the son of the Maharaja of Baroda, “who was wonderful. We went on tiger shoots there, 500 elephants—and a thousand bearers.

“I went to school with people who are loyal years later. I mean I had many, many, many Arab customers before anybody did because I went to school with Saudi Arabian boys and the boys from Lebanon,” he said. “And I know them and I go to Marbella.”

At his office, one of Mr. Kaiser’s clients, the seller of the eight-room, hugely terraced Central Park South penthouse he’s listing for $16 million—who, according to an Observer article, is the arts philanthropist Iris Cantor—phoned twice. Two days later, Mr. Kaiser was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, treating Ms. Cantor, whose late husband co-founded the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, and three friends, including Walter Annenberg’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Kabler, to lunch.

He wore a light pink polo shirt, a light blue Domenico Vacca sweater around his shoulders, black Valentino jeans and black loafers; he ate a Cobb salad, without chicken, and shared an apple pancake with blueberry sauce and whipped cream for dessert.

“‘Larry, has there been any action?’” asked Ms. Cantor, the broker recalled later. “I said, ‘There’s lots of action.’”

It’s been more than 18 months since Mr. Kaiser first listed Ms. Cantor’s penthouse, originally priced at $18.95 million. Contracts were signed with two different buyers, but the first backed out on account of the stock market decline, and the second because of a wedding. Mr. Kaiser swears he’s sanguine: “I would think it’s going to go in the next two weeks.”

IF THE BROKER is comfortable around ladies of leisure, it’s because he was born to one—but his mother died when he was 6. (His father, who was married several times—“he was great friends with Howard Hughes, Errol Flynn”—died decades later, he said, after stepping out of his Park Avenue club into a pothole, cracking his leg.) After Le Rosey, Mr. Kaiser spent a year at Harvard, got his undergraduate degree from Wharton, spent a year at Yale Law, left after a car accident and graduated from Fordham in 1966.

He wasn’t the Woodstock type. “But why would I want to be in the counterculture? We had cars and drivers and planes and racehorses,” he said, “and I went all over the world and I knew everybody.” So after Fordham, he went to work for Meshulam Riklis, one of the first corporate raiders, or what Mr. Kaiser calls the conglomerateurs: “I was very highly paid and had a chef and chauffeur and whatever else.”