Ben Up for Bill’s Old Spot?; Morr on Ports Drama

Anyone else see former Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke around Pimco’s HQ in Newport Center last week? Anyone else pick up on vibes that the bond house still needs a game-changing hire to stem outflows that have continued since Bill Gross left for Janus? … Anyone else hear that Ed Thorp—author of Beat the Dealer, a book on card-counting that helped Gross pay his way through graduate school at UCLA back in the day—has an autobiography in the works with Random House? Tentative title: A Man For All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street. Thorp reports that he recently sent the latest draft to his editor and expects the book to hit the market in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of next year … Seems Actavis CEO Brent Saunders had good reason for a trip of his own to Pimco’s neighborhood last week, when his company sold $21 billion in bonds—the second largest corporate offering in U.S. history—with an eye on its upcoming $70 billion-plus acquisition of Irvine-based Allergan. Both companies are slated for votes on the deal this week, with Saunders in line to oversee the combined operations, which are expected to retain the Allergan name (see related Mergers & Acquisitions graphic, page 1; Special Report, page 17) … Don’t know what Saunders ate during his stay, but anyone holding out hope that he might consider a move to OC should get him a bowl of Chef Marc Johnson’s cioppino at Island Hotel’s Oak Grill, which has added plenty of flavor lately … There was some extra drama from an unlikely source before the stage could be set for the American Ballet Theatre’s recent run of The Sleeping Beauty at the Segerstrom Center. The performance was born as a co-production with the La Scala Theatre Ballet in Milan, where various pieces of the stage scenery were made. They were sent along to the Segerstrom via the Panama Canal and the Port of Long Beach, arriving amid the recent round of labor discord. Segerstrom Center Executive Vice President Judy Morr spent an anxious week staring at a blip on an online tracking map, which showed the ship bearing the stage scenery stacked up outside the harbor. A settlement came in time to get the scenery to the Segerstrom for Sleeping Beauty’s opener on March 3—and ballet fans can rest assured that the show would have gone on in any case. Morr told the Insider that a contingency plan called for projections of various images to take the place of the actual scenery pieces if the goods hadn’t made it from Milan for the opener … Kudos to Tom Tierney, president of Tustin-based vitamin and nutritional supplement maker Vita-Tech and Vietnam vet, who recently joined his wife, Elizabeth, in making the largest single donation to Goodwill of Orange County in its history. The couple’s gift of $1 million will go to the organization’s programs for veterans … Congratulations to Igor Olenicoff, the newly minted grandpa of a healthy girl born recently to his daughter Natalia and her husband, Derek Ostensen. The new arrival’s name is Skye Amara Ostensen, and her grandpa fairly bursts with pride when he reports that she was born with “eyes open and mouth moving,” showing off traits that make it plain “there’s some Olenicoff in there somewhere.”