Manhattan Monologues (19 page)

I hate Beverly Bogardus! But I am still not going to show this memorandum to my doctor.

I
N
1970, still in his early fifties and looking forward to at least a decade, if not considerably more, of his brilliantly successful career as president, CEO and board chairman (the triple title settled any question of who was boss) of New Hampshire Wire and Cable, Gary Kimball faced the first serious attack on his leadership. And it was not from an outside raider or from one of the frustrated labor unions with which he had once been in battle. No, the onslaught came from the bosom of his own family.

It was time for him, sitting in his lofty office in the Empire State Building, the center of his worldwide operations, to review his life and determine where he had gone wrong—if indeed he had gone wrong. He had obviously first to face his lifelong preoccupation with the family business, founded and controlled by his late father, whose favorite and favored son he had been, a preoccupation that had made the role in his life of the other family members, particularly after his father's demise and the division of his stock among them, quite as much that of shareholders as of blood kin. But had he not moved mountains to keep them rich and happy?

His father, Alonso Kimball, had been a gentle kindly man of the highest moral integrity, with the strict old-fashioned principles that required a gentleman to pay his father's debts as though they were his own, regardless of the cost to himself or his family, and who indeed had done so, delaying by several years the making of his fortune. He had responded enthusiastically to Gary's early fascination with the source of the family wealth and had made a practice, waving aside his wife's protests, of taking Gary along with him, no matter what school schedule had to be interrupted, on his frequent inspections of the company's plants in different states. Away from the rather hothouse atmosphere of the Fifth Avenue apartment where Gary's mother, to his youthful mind, "lolled" amid a profusion of flowers and French eighteenth-century furnishings, or the well-mowed lawns and cultivated gardens of the Westchester estate, the boy found what he called a more "real" reality in the hard shining objects that the great whirring machinery of his father's factories produced: blades, knives, tools of every kind that bit or pinched or shoveled or squeezed, huge hoists of cable or wire, scissors, scalpels, vises, hammers, saws, bolts and keys, down to the very simplicity of button hooks and paper clips. Bright luminous things, things that lasted, not flabby things, not things that grew fat and soft and decayed, like human flesh. Ugh!

The intimate and lasting relationship that Gary developed with his father set them somewhat apart from the rest of the family, from his tall, pale, gracious, art-loving and salon-presiding mother, his merry, pretty, flirtatious sister, May, and his charming but epicurean kid brother, Gilbert. It was not that any of these three was jealous of Gary's taking over the head of the household. Papa, of course, was an "old darling"; Papa was always buying them the most wonderful things; but Papa was more absorbed in his business than anything else. Papa, if they faced it squarely, was something of a bore, and if Gary amused him and kept his sharp eye from too close an inspection of their romps at home, well, that was all to the good.

Gary grew into a serious lad of a slight but well-formed build and a pale and impassive countenance, with small regular features and thick dark hair he wore in a crewcut. What people noticed particularly about him were his eyes, which tended to stare, taking in the onlooker without betraying any hint of the judgment formed. And at Chelton, the Massachusetts Episcopal boarding school, of which his father was a trustee and where he spent his four pre-Harvard years, he was essentially a solitary student.

It was not that he was unpopular or deficient in athletics or grades. He got on well enough with the other boys, largely because of his habit of quietly conforming to the school routine, which he saw no reason to oppose. He performed adequately if unremarkably in his classes and sports, and he hardly received a black mark or demerit in conduct throughout his four years at the school. But as one master remarked to his father, "Gary has an air of not being quite here." By "here," of course, he meant at Chelton. Alonso Kimball had smiled to himself. He knew where the boy's mind was. It was where his own was: in the terrible struggle the family company was having to survive the dark years of the Depression that had followed the stock market collapse of 1929.

The placid red-bricked and white-columned school buildings encircling a shimmering green, elm-studded lawn might have seemed remote from unemployment and poverty, but Gary was acutely aware of formerly rich boys who were suddenly put on scholarships and others who had to leave school altogether, and he pored over the long letters in which his father explained, in the same detail he would have to a business partner, his tireless and ultimately successful battle to bring his company through the tangled thicket of a prolonged economic crisis that, in Alonso's fixed opinion, had been aggravated and not abated by the advent of the New Deal. The paternal triumph, of which Gary had never seriously doubted, served to convince the boy of the Tightness of his father's lifelong creed: that capitalism, free and unregulated, was the answer to all the ills of mankind. Alonso's remedy for the Depression would have been to allow the stock market to hit bottom, if that was its natural tendency, at which point the recuperative powers innate in the system would have begun to operate and revive it. Any interference could come only from the devil, who began to take on a likeness in Alonso's imagination to the Hudson River squire who so jauntily sought to steer the rocking and heaving ship of state.

One spring there was a bad forest fire in the neighborhood of the school, and several hundred young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps were called in to help the local firefighters. Chelton's headmaster volunteered to send in his older students to lend what aid they could, and Gary found himself assigned to an unburning but threatened area to await the onslaught of the flames, which in fact never came, as the fire was brought under control. But Gary, sitting around in the company of these young men and listening to their casually obscene chatter, had his first experience with lower-class American adult males, and they did not impress him. What could you do with such people? A fascist state would arm them, and they would become killers; a socialist or communist one would give them everything, and they would bankrupt the land. Only a capitalist state could cope with them; they would all go to work and be told how to do it. Perish by guns or starve under bureaucrats; those were the alternatives to an economy run by free enterprise.

There was a great deal of religion dished up for the boys at Chelton, but Gary had no personal use for it. It might be a handy thing to keep the lower orders quiet—pie in the sky if none on earth—and it was manifestly unwise and unproductive to air agnostic views on the subject. And wasn't the truth, the real truth, manifest enough even under the looming presence of the great Gothic tower of the school chapel? Who had built the chapel but a wealthy graduate? Who made up the board of trustees but successful lawyers and businessmen? Was the great God-fearing and God-imploring headmaster himself not a member of a famous banking family? And were not most of Gary's classmates headed for careers on Wall or State Street?

Every now and then a clever master would sense the implied dissent behind the silence of this grave but preoccupied student and seek to entice the boy into an exchange of ideas.

"I sometimes wonder," one of them said to Gary in the fall of his final year at school, "if Chelton doesn't have too many campus activities for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Shouldn't there be more time for those on the threshold of manhood to contemplate the mystery of the universe and find their own souls?"

Gary agreed politely, but the master, baffled by his continued taciturnity, turned away and did not try again. He couldn't have known that Gary believed that he had long since found his soul.

In his college years Gary spent his vacations in his father's office or touring the factories, learning every aspect of the business. And when the war came in 1941, it wasn't difficult for Alonso, heavily engaged in supplying the armed forces with metalwork, to arrange for the assignment of his elder son, as an ensign, to the Navy Department in Washington to check munitions contracts with an eye as expert as many a trained lawyer's. So even the world crusade against Hitler and Hirohito was converted, in Gary's case, to the final chapter of his indoctrination into the world of industrial management.

The ensuing quarter-century marked the rise of the Kimball company into the first rank of metal suppliers. It was Gary, always at his father's right hand, who devised the solution to the constantly recurring clashes with labor: move the plants south in search of poorer and more submissive workers, or out of the country altogether, to Korea, to Guatemala, to South Africa, to Bolivia. Alonso showed some reluctance at first, but the immediate benefits, so easing to his old habits of worry, his increasing age, with its attendant ailments, and his pride in his brilliant son, soon quelled his patriotic doubts about hiring so few Americans to do the work of an American business. And after his death, following a long illness, Gary reigned supreme, with no one in management to criticize or question his policies.

But the year 1970 brought a horrid surprise: a long, well-researched and vividly illustrated
New York Times
article on "slave labor" in a Kimball plant in Guatemala. It was followed by a brief flap of public indignation and a mild effort to boycott some of the products of New Hampshire Wire and Cable. Gary chose to ignore the whole matter and refused to give interviews or to answer press telephone calls, but he could not avoid a meeting at his mother's apartment with her and Nicholas Gilder, husband of his sister, May.

Of course, it was Nick who had talked Gary's nervous and ill-at-ease mother into this confrontation. Nick, large, handsome, outgoing, redheaded, popular everywhere, particularly in his native Boston, where he was a well-known Brahmin and vigorous yachtsman, was a notorious underachieves He had made an unsuccessful but highly publicized run for the state senate, after which he settled back to a life of pleasure, but Gary had always been aware that his sister's husband had a large store of unused brains and energy, which Gary knew should be diverted from company affairs.

Loud, emphatic, but not unreasonable, Nick now proceeded to summarize the
Time's
findings. He ended by demanding to know to what extent the late Alonso Kimball had been responsible for the overseas hiring policy.

"Daddy approved of everything I did," Gary replied. "From the very beginning."

"In principle, yes. But was he aware of the conditions of the workers? I can hardly believe it in a man of his humanitarian views."

"So unlike mine, you mean?" Gary, determined to control his temper, could take just so much from the man he referred to privately as "the hedonist baked bean."

"All right, Gary, so unlike you." Nick did not hesitate to take the offensive. Yet there was no anger in his tone. Indeed, there was no anger in his contempt. "I've always known your god was the dollar." He turned to his mother-in-law. "Wasn't Mr. Kimball's mind weakening in his later years?"

"Oh, yes, I'm afraid that's all too true. You know that yourself, don't you, Gary dear?"

Gary sighed with exasperation. Without Nick he could have handled his mother, but with him it was much harder. Adelaide Kimball was the kind of woman of her generation who tended in any serious discussion to favor the physically stronger and handsomer man, and he could hardly compare himself with the stalwart Nick.

"Mother, Daddy always knew everything I did!" he protested. "And his mind at the end, if it wasn't all it had been, was certainly capable of taking in the essentials of our policy. Daddy believed in free enterprise. He didn't believe in telling other nations how to run their economies. If a man in Indonesia or Burma was willing to work for less than one in Detroit or Sacramento, he would take the lower bid; that's all. I'm not breaking any law. Even any moral law. The lower wage may be the equivalent of the higher in spending power in the third world. Is it my job to lobby for a 'new deal' all over the globe?"

"Free enterprise!" exclaimed Nick scornfully. "Ask your peons in Central America how free they are!"

"Well, why haven't you looked into this before, Nick? Because you've been too busy touring the oceans in your big pleasure boat! Cruising in the South Sea islands and admiring the picturesque natives without worrying your red head about what they live on. At least I give them something. And in some cases more than they've ever had before."

"The reproach to me is not unjustified," Nick admitted, addressing his mother-in-law. "But I see now that Gary's policy is to drug us into passivity. Very clever, I must say. But hardly scrupulous."

"If you think that running a company night and day for a quarter of a century in order to bring wealth and ease to a bunch of idlers is unscrupulous, then you're welcome to the word!"

"It's just what I do think. And I'm embarrassed to hell that it's taken me so long to find it out!"

At which Gary walked out of the meeting.

At home in his penthouse aerie, hanging over the East River, in the gleaming white drawing room—all spotless, shimmering white, except for the brackets, and arms and legs of chairs and tables, gold-tinted—he submitted to a rare impulse to seek sympathy from the wife who presided so meticulously over the perfect maintenance of their abode. Katrina's slim, trim build and crisply waved black hair lent her a chic that almost but never quite compensated for the awkward slant of her nose, her small pinched lips and those sharp dark eyes that were so ready to disapprove.

She listened with a mild impatience as he expatiated on the scene at his mother's.

"Don't those things blow over?" she commented at last. "Isn't it pretty much like the strike in the Michigan plant where that man was killed? Who remembers that now? In a month's time Nick will have gone back to his boat and your mother will be dreaming of her next pet poet or painter. Tell them you'll send someone down to Guatemala to check on the report. You might even hike the wages a couple of pesetas. Or, better yet, fire one of the managers. It shouldn't be hard to find a crooked one. Or we might go ourselves, in March, instead of to Acapulco. I hear there's a divine new hotel on the beach at San José. Betty Crunch was there and adored it." And then she turned, as if to business. "Look, dear, it's time to dress. We're dining at the Hoopers'. I thought you'd never get home."