Bernard Cornfeld

Bernard "Bernie" Cornfeld (17 August 1927 – 27 February 1995) was a prominent businessman and international financier who sold investments in US mutual funds, and who was tried and acquitted for mismanagement of IOS.

Personal life Cornfeld owned a 12th-century chateau in France, Empress Josephine's summer house on Lake Geneva, a townhouse at 1 West Halkin Street in Belgravia, London, and the Grayhall mansion located at 1100 Carolyn Way in Beverly Hills, California, as well as a permanent suite in a New York City hotel and his own fleet of private planes. He is quoted as saying, "I had mansions all over the world, I threw extravagant parties. And I lived with several girls at a time." He had romances with Victoria Principal;; Alana Hamilton (née Collins — a model and former spouse of George Hamilton who subsequently married Rod Stewart); Audrey Hepburn, and Princess Ira von Fürstenberg.

Diane Halfin, later Diane von Furstenberg, worked as a receptionist at IOS in the early days.

Cornfeld settled in Beverly Hills and moved in a circle of movie industry people. He lived in the Grayhall mansion, built in 1909 and at one time leased by Douglas Fairbanks. Bernie numbered among his friends Elizabeth Taylor, Michelle Phillips, Warren Beatty, Laurence Harvey, Victor Lownes, Richard Harris, Al Capp, Tony Curtis, Howard Sackler, John Heyman, and Simon Reuben. Grayhall mansion doubled as the home of rock star John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born starring Barbra Streisand.

Bernie Cornfeld was a renegade financier whose Swiss-headquartered mutual fund company, Investors Overseas Services, a fund of funds, collapsed in the early 1970's. Building up capital of $2.5 billion by selling funds to small investors, primarily to American servicemen living overseas, Cornfeld was brought low by a bearish stock market that cut his ability to return dividends to investors and eroded the value of the stocks held in the funds. To cover his liabilities, Cornfeld was forced to make an initial public offering of IOS stock. Another bear market in 1970 saw the price of IOS shares drop from $18 to $12, and investors began bailing out.

Further compounding his troubles, IOS was looted of $500 million by Robert Vesco, who had offered his services as a white knight and turned out to be anything but. Vesco fled the United States for the Bahamas, and eventually settled in Cuba to stay away from the long arm of the law. The price of IOS shares dropped to $2 as now all its investors tried to sell off their shares.

The collapse of IOS caused bank failures in the US and Europe. Cornfeld, who longed to be a movie director, lived the life of a pasha in Beverly Hills, surrounded by beautiful women, of whom Victoria Principal was one. He partied with the likes of Tony Curtis and Hugh Hefner, but his popularity declined along with his income. Subsequently, he served 11 months in jail in Switzerland after being arrested in Geneva for fraud, as at the end, he essentially was running a Ponzi scheme.

Cornfeld returned to Beverly Hills, but was never again in the public spotlight, as he had been at the end of the swinging Sixties and in the early '70s. He died in 1995.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood