April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE

IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing.

“It was painful. Being chief of design at Nokia was a dream job, and I had so much invested,” he says, describing the creative crossroads at which he found himself. But when it came to hands-on design, he recalls, “I was talking about it rather than doing it. And I needed to go back to doing it before I talked about it anymore.”

So, four years ago, a few days after his 45th birthday, Mr. Nuovo stepped down — or up, depending on your point of view. Immediately, he set about re-educating himself, mastering new design tools, like Rhinoceros for modeling and Photoshop, that had become essential in the years he’d been busy with administration and corporate strategy. With Nokia’s blessing, he also became a full-time champion of Vertu, a subsidiary he had set in motion in 1998 and had been nurturing ever since.

Mr. Nuovo says Vertu, a maker of cellphones so high-end that he calls them “communication devices,” made him whole again.

Some may mock the idea that Mr. Nuovo relocated his soul by devoting himself to creating status symbols for the world’s richest people. Vertu phones, after all, are made of gold, platinum, titanium and stainless steel. Some are wrapped in hand-tooled leather and ostrich skin or set with pavé diamonds. Depending on their bling factor, most Vertu phones retail from $5,000 to $25,000. (Special editions start at $80,000; one sculpted gold-and-sapphire phone sold for more than $325,000.)

To ponder Vertu’s ruby bearings and laser-cut ceramic keys is to imagine Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American sociologist and economist, thrashing about in his grave. In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order. To this guy, even silver flatware seemed like wretched excess. Veblen would surely have seen Vertu as too-too.

One tech blog could have been channeling Veblen when it declared: “Overkill, thy name is Vertu.” But Mr. Nuovo, an amiable Californian who lives in Bel Air and tends to wear black blazers over black T-shirts, rejects that critique. Beautiful objects are desirable, he says. And as objects go, the cellphone is increasingly more ubiquitous than those old lions of luxury, fancy pens and wristwatches.

Vertu won’t release sales figures, but Mr. Nuovo says the company — which has more than 80 boutiques in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, Las Vegas and London and is opening one on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in May — is plenty profitable, even in these tight times.

“The watch is disappearing. And everybody in the world is walking around with these,” he says on a recent afternoon, spreading an assortment of cellphones — all of them Nokias or Vertus of his own making — on a table at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he was once a student.

BY: Amy Wallace

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was dinnertime when the 80 or so invited guests began arriving. Handing off their Benzes and Boxsters to uniformed valets, many of Hollywood’s most important agents, producers and studio and network executives followed a brick path to Sandy Grushow’s front door. Mr. Grushow is the president of 20th Century Fox Television, and his clout was reflected in the 8,000-square-foot Tudor house he shares with his wife, Barbara, and their two children. A pianist played standards on a baby grand in the foyer. An army of waiters in taupe Nehru jackets offered hors d’oeuvres on glistening platters.

“Mini-Reuben sandwich? Knish?” a waiter asked the guest of honor, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder. Rabbi Leder opted for a corned beef and Swiss about the size of a postage stamp, then climbed a few steps up the Grushows’ elegant staircase and quieted the crowd. “I thought we might begin tonight by taking an opportunity to turn to your left or right, to meet your neighbor,” he said. “Then, I would appreciate it if you would just share your net worth with them.”

The room shook with nervous laughter. No one complied.

Rabbi Leder is the senior rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, arguably Los Angeles’s most prestigious synagogue. The evening was a chance for him to unveil his new book, “More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul,” for some of the wealthiest members of his congregation: those who make the deals, call the shots and create the programming that ends up on America’s movie and television screens. While he didn’t mean to offend, he knew that the book’s central premise — that raging materialism and the relentless pursuit of money lead to moral bankruptcy — might strike some in his audience like a stick in the eye.

“The thought has occurred to me: Am I biting the hand that feeds the temple?” he said a few weeks before the book party. Not that “More Money Than God” is particularly incendiary. Close readers will find a few juicy tales (without names) about some in his flock, like the young woman who inherited tens of millions of dollars from her grandfather but feels as if her husband is a mooch, or the Oscar-winning movie director who died alone, with nothing but a tattered snapshot of his parents to soothe him. Overall, however, the book’s messages are hardly fire and brimstone: don’t be a workaholic; give generously to charity; teach your children that materialism, like racism, is not okay.

Nevertheless, in Hollywood, where who’s up, who’s down and where one stands in the pecking order are constant obsessions, Mr. Leder’s chosen topic is a thorny one. Money here is much more than a passport to comfort. For people whose success depends on something as amorphous as being able to predict the national mood 18 months into the future, the size of one’s paycheck (or profit participation, or back-end) is a crucial signifier. Perhaps more than any place on earth, money here, like corner tables in hot restaurants or middle seats at movie premieres, is a way to assert your rank. And the fickle nature of the business can make even the very affluent feel insecure in a way that makes no amount of money ever seem enough.

“This is a town where the next big script could be written by the person who’s handing you the cup of coffee at Starbucks,” said Stuart Krasnow, a temple member and an executive producer of reality programming at NBC. “Things change so rapidly. Success can go away rapidly.”

Which makes the rabbi’s supporters a bit worried for him. By focusing on money, said Erwin Stoff, a partner in the management-production company 3 Arts Entertainment, whose clients include Keanu Reeves and Matthew Broderick, Rabbi Leder had entered “a risky area.”

Leonard Goldberg, the TV and movie producer (among his many credits: “Charlie’s Angels” — the series, the film and the sequel), agreed. “This book will force people to look at themselves, and there may be some who don’t appreciate that suggestion,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We’re not building bridges here, or saving lives. We’re just making movies. And when you’re making so much money for what secretly you think may be the very little that you do, it can be very unsettling. The only benchmark some people have is what their peers are making. As somebody once said: ‘It’s not about the money. It’s about how much.’ “