Review: 'Einstein of Money' details life of Buffett's mentor

— -- Benjamin Graham— the financial wiz who taught Warren Buffet to invest — was not unduly interested in money himself.

Graham was a true intellectual — excited by math, languages and classic texts.

And women.

Although he was so honest that he repaid all his investors for their losses during the Great Depression, Graham was a thrice-married philanderer and an absentee dad.

He had so many affairs that Joe Carlen uses the word "swinger" to describe his sex life in a new biography, The Einstein of Money.

Graham divorced his first wife in 1937, when divorce was still socially unacceptable, leaving his four children stigmatized.

The next year, he married a young actress.

Next up, he married his young secretary.

Eventually, he took up with a Frenchwoman who was introduced as the former lover of his own deceased son.

All the while, the rest of Graham's life was the stuff of inspirational kids' books:

• When his wealthy father died abruptly, 9-year-old Benjamin sold magazines on city street corners to help keep his family afloat.

• He was valedictorian of his eighth grade class even though he was two years younger than the other rising freshmen.

• He always had a job — assembling telephones, working on a farm, tutoring fellow students in math.

• Graham won a scholarship to Columbia University and graduated second in his class and almost two years early, despite working full-time throughout college.

• He became the only person ever offered professorships from three different Columbia departments —math, English and the classics.

He left campus for Wall Street, though, where he prospered from the get-go with his extreme math skills and his trail-blazing system of value investing.

The nut of value investing is: prepare to buy one share of stock the same way you would if you were buying the entire company. Know exactly what's under the hood. Analyze the balance sheet. Do the math. If the stock is selling for substantially less than you figure it is worth, buy. If not, don't get caught up in the moment.

Graham taught his students: "You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right."

Using his own method, he earned $600,000 in 1928 — equivalent to more than $7.5 million in today's dollars.

Almost four decades after his death, Graham's financial advice books are still selling. The Intelligent Investor still ranks in Amazon's top 300, 62 years after it was first published, Carlen says. And, Security Analysis is still the preferred book for many college investment courses, almost 80 years after publication.

"No one ever became poor by reading Graham," says Warren Buffett, one of Graham's star students.

Graham hoped the commodity reserve currency plan he cooked up in the 1930s might move the country from the gold standard to a system based on a mixed basket of durable raw materials. It didn't happen then, but 21st Century economists are looking anew at Graham's theories in a push to do away with floating currencies worldwide, Carlen says.

For all his wisdom, Graham's personal life read like a novel:

• He wrote a Broadway play between working on Wall Street and teaching college classes. Reviewers panned it.

• His first play, which never made it to Broadway, was loosely based on his first wife Hazel's early adulterous affair.

• Graham held patents as diverse as mathematics and Morse code systems.

• Warren Buffet gave his first son the middle name "Graham" in honor of his teacher.

• A year after their first son, Newton, died at age 8, Graham and Hazel had a second son. They named him Newton, too. Decades later, the second Newton committed suicide in France.

• Graham's mother Dora was robbed and murdered on the way home from a bridge game in 1944.

• After Graham and his third wife moved to Beverly Hills, movie star Glenn Ford was the leader of their son's Boy Scout troop.

• While the family was living in Beverly Hills, Graham set up housekeeping with his deceased son's French lover in San Diego.

Carlen's writing style is not the easy read that Graham's The Intelligent Investor is.

His research captures voices that could have been lost to history, though. He interviewed Graham associates from Warren Buffett to 106-year-old Irving Kahn, who is still working on Wall Street.

Carlen also asked precise questions and got thoughtful answers from Graham's surviving family members.

Canavan is a freelance writer based in Wilmington, Del.