The Rich and Famous Love This Banker, Even If She’s a Little Mean to Them

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When Martha Stewart signed a deal for her nascent housewares business with Kmart in 1987, she heard from a banker named Jane Heller. “Everyone who comes with me gets to be rich,” Heller said.
 
“Well, I want to be rich,” Stewart told her. She’s been a client ever since. 

Heller is the top private banker at Bank of America. Her clients are titans of industry like Carl Icahn and A-list celebrities like Stewart. She has spent four decades lending them huge sums of money for homes, yachts and business ventures—and making sure they pay her back.
  
Lending to the well-heeled was relatively niche when she started out as a young mom mining BusinessWeek for prospects. Now all the major banks are eager to lend to the wealthy, an important line of business where the fees are steady and the loans rarely go bad. It’s all part of a bigger shift in banking toward units that generate reliable streams of cash, and balance out the notoriously boom-and-bust cycles of investment banking and trading.

The 77-year-old Heller spends her days advising clients and working to get their often-complex loans quickly approved. Her client list includes Ron Perelman and real-estate investor Aby Rosen, people familiar with the matter said. The Steinbrenner family that owns the New York Yankees are also clients, and Heller sits in the front row at games. Michael Jackson borrowed millions from her, secured in part by his ownership stake in a song catalog that included Beatles hits “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude,” according to news reports at the time. 

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