Around the Island

Island profile: A Californian at home on Cobbets Lane

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Nancy Cooley has always sought a life of change and adventure.

There are a lot of stories from her life that make it instantly clear what kind of person Nancy Cooley is, stories that her fellow Yacht Club and Gardiner’s Bay Golf Club members may not know.

Just after college at UC Berkeley, when she was in Europe and needed to get to North Africa to assist in an anthropological study, she found some sailors with a big yacht who offered to take her across the Mediterranean.

Although she and her future husband would go on to sail their own Doughdish out of Dering Harbor on summer weekends, she didn’t know a thing about sailing then except “which side to heave over,” as she put it in a recent chat.

She also wondered if the men who had invited her to sail on their 65-foot yacht “might be creeps.” She had stunned them when she’d asked them point blank if they expected some kind of quid pro quo. Spitting their coffee out and more than abashed, they assured her no.

They departed Greece even though a wicked storm had blown up overnight. Nancy could hear the trio — who turned out to be “perfect gentlemen” — talking through the walls of the stateroom they’d given her, predicting she’d flee before the morning’s departure. Not only did she stay for the ride, she realized they needed help on deck and proved an effective member of the crew, carrying out whatever tasks were thrown her way despite wind and roiling seas.

A sixth generation Californian, the child of a venture capitalist from the San Francisco suburbs who had been going to private schools all her life and, in summer, to her family’s big sheep ranch, she wanted to spend her last year of high school at a public institution, one with an effective bussing program. That ruled out her hometown near Palo Alto so she went to Menlo-Atherton, where she spent her free time helping classmates who had trouble with numbers and reading history books she’d conquered in grade school.

“I just decided I’d had enough of girls’ schools,” she explained simply. “No, it wasn’t hard.” She threw herself into it, as she’d thrown herself into her lemonade stands as a kid, serving as class president, or working with the Junior Red Cross and the elderly.

Before she went on to become a stockbroker, then a financial adviser and now a senior vice president at Morgan Stanley with her own wealth advisory team called the CMF Group, she was living in New York “and I decided I would be a baker.” So she got a job at Dean & DeLuca’s first store running their baking department. She was going to go on to John Clancy’s baking school but instead opened a gourmet shop at Ocean Beach, Fire Island with two friends.

The store, Fantasy Food, ran for nine years before closing. Meanwhile, Nancy had moved to Vermont with a boyfriend who was a surgical resident in Burlington. She landed a job in a women’s boutique, the owner of which had a back problem that soon left Nancy in charge of the place, including making the decisions about buying. It would turn out to be a lot like working in the financial industry, understanding trends and making decisions about where to put one’s money for the best returns.

“My standard answer to the question of how I became a stockbroker is it was an overreaction to heartbreak,” she said, explaining that when the relationship with the surgeon didn’t work out, “I went back to California and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next.” That, she said, proved to be a hard time — until she met a woman who had written a book about sales careers for women.

She read the book, got to know the author, and came to the realization that she was well suited to a career as a stockbroker. She had sales skills, for one thing. For another, success in that field would give her financial security. Also, the training would all be in-house, requiring neither the time or expense of further schooling.

After she had developed contacts in the field and interviewed at different firms, Drexel Burnham Lambert’s office in San Francisco called to tell her they were hiring somebody else. Her response startled them: “Big mistake!”

“What?” the caller asked.

“You’re making a big mistake. Not in hiring Reed but in not hiring me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to be one of the best trainees you’ve ever hired.”

After defending her sales skills and her ability to work on a commission basis, she was told, “Come in tomorrow.”

Nancy met her future husband, Alan Benesuli, whose uncle Abraham Pinto had a home in Shorewood since the 1950s on Shelter Island. Drexel had sent her to the New York office by then and a friend in the firm had invited her here one weekend. Alan, a global securities analyst at Drexel, invited them over for a drink. A couple of years later, after Alan and his wife were divorced, he called her. They were married in 1988 and lived in Manhattan and on Shelter Island, as Nancy does now.

Alan brought two children to the marriage: Marina, now 40, who is a teacher at Horace Mann; and Alex, 44, a former hedge fund manager who worked for George Soros and is now taking time off in London before deciding what to do next. Their mother died when they were children so Nancy has been their only parent for years.

Alan and Nancy’s child, James, 22, recently graduated from college and was on his way to Beijing last week to study Mandarin. All three children went through the sailing program at the Shelter Island Yacht Club.

Alan is buried on Shelter Island. He died in 2004, just a few months after he was stricken during a family vacation in Spain with an inability to speak. The symptoms cleared but, after false hopes and wrong diagnoses, it turned out to be a fatal brain tumor.

“I was not at all prepared for that,” she said. “I can’t imagine that the everyday person is prepared for such a thing.”
As for her own future, she said, “I’m a person who likes to build and I want to build things that are going to last.

Something could happen to me so I really want my clients to be taken care of.”

She formed a partnership in 1997 with Falisha Mamdani, whose parents live on the Island and whom she’s known since high school; Falisha is in her 40s. Recently Jason Friedman, who summers in Southampton, joined the partnership. He’s in his 30s.

Nancy has much to say about the need for families to have a disaster plan, like those her wealth advisory team at Morgan Stanley helps her clients set up. “We work collaboratively and holistically” with families to understand their concerns, problems and goals and to develop strategies to address them, she said.

“Life is dynamic. People need a plan. There will always be transitions, some happy, some not so happy. That’s how my practice evolved,” she said, explaining that she had been become uncomfortable as a conventional stockbroker. For “industrial retail brokers,” who charge a commission instead of a fee based on returns, there is an “inherent conflict in managing clients.”

“These crises that come in life don’t have to be as tragic as mine. One should have a plan.”