Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (45 page)

He asked if any sports franchises were available and I said, “Yeah, quite a number.” At the time the Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, and Seattle Mariners could be had. There was also a possibility the Baltimore Orioles might be for sale.

We also talked about his company, which he is very pleased with. I asked him how things had been going since the NCR acquisition. Bob said he planned to let the other culture survive, to let them do their thing. I think he’s a good corporate leader, a very good one.

And Richard Nixon is a classic example of how real men of power with intestinal fortitude operate. I think he’s shown an incredible ability to look forward and not back—cut your losses and keep your chin up regardless of what happens. And he never admitted guilt; he only said he made mistakes. I don’t think he’s ever
actually apologized to the American people. Over the long haul, I think people will perceive him to be an honest gentleman.

Nixon has also been very good at seeking out writers and columnists and people who felt Watergate was probably blown out of proportion by the left-leaning press, and he just kind of hung in there. He’s also shown himself to be incredibly well informed on matters affecting the national interest. And by force of intellect and personality, he’s managed to portray himself as a man of power and good will.

I came away not focusing on his improper conduct—the tapes and all that stuff—but on what he had to say. The man had a valuable perspective on how our country should be looking at certain issues. He had an interesting assessment of other presidents. He thought that Reagan had been a very good president and felt that Bush had been generally good. He felt Clinton wouldn’t make a bad president and thought Eisenhower was probably superb.

He did not think Ross Perot would make a good president. As he put it, Ike was a good soldier and also a great politician. Reagan was a good actor and a great politician. Ross Perot is a great businessman and a very poor politician.

On the subject of Perot, I had an occasion to meet him once. I was down at
The Wall Street Journal
talking to the editors and after about two hours the publisher, Peter Kann, got up and went out of the room and came back with Ross Perot. I deferred to him and let him hold court to some extent for the next 45 minutes or so. I had doubts about whether I should do that or not because it was arguably my show. I mean, I took the time to go down there and hadn’t quite made all the points that I’d wanted to, but Perot was interesting. He was a little leery around me, but not that much.

I am trying to figure out why people are a little leery around me. I guess it’s a lack of knowledge or maybe hearing about how tough I can be and all that sort of thing.

The Business Roundtable is not truly my peer group in a sense. For one thing, some of the members have more traditional backgrounds in that they’ve started businesses from scratch. Then there’s also the matter of personal wealth. And unfortunately, I think the ethnicity factor, so to speak, is there. And it’s a reality. There remains sort of a preoccupation with race during any initial
encounter in this country, but it fades quickly. In my career, I found the most important thing is not to be self-conscious about it and not to let it interfere with the way you think or the manner in which you operate.

In addition to rubbing shoulders with the heads of Fortune 500 companies and politicians like David Dinkins and Jesse Jackson, Lewis was on friendly terms with Bill Cosby and was a visitor to Cosby’s townhouse in Manhattan. Lewis was also an admirer and friend of opera singer Kathleen Battle. Lewis got a kick out of putting on a black tie and taking his brother Tony Fugett with him to hear Battle sing in Manhattan. Battle later sang at his memorial service.

“Today” host Bryant Gumbel was also an acquaintance. They met, of all places, in an airport and wound up sitting next to each other on the same flight. That encounter led to a relationship where they would pick up the phone from time to time just to say hello.

“I think more often than not we wound up talking about society’s perception of black men who are successful, more than anything else,” Gumbel says. “And we would kind of commiserate with each other and share stories about how we were perceived, or different standards that we were held to.”

“It was part and parcel of the whole deal of talking about being black and successful in this society and some of the things you have to do that most people don’t think about.”

Black men who are prepared or confident or willing to act aggressively are viewed as undesirables who are arrogant, uppity, and too big for their britches, Lewis would tell Gumbel.

In addition to being able to pick up the phone and call other celebrities, Lewis found that fame brought with it people who routinely suck up to the rich and powerful. On occasions when Lewis and his wife were besieged by sycophants, he would turn to Loida and utter quietly, “It’s the car,” causing both of them to burst into laughter. The remark was made famous in the Lewis household one afternoon when Lewis was driving his convertible 550 SL Mercedes with his oldest daughter, Leslie, seated beside him. Two beautiful women walking along the street as Lewis was approaching made a big show of giving him flirtatious looks.

Leslie, who has a dry sense of humor like her father, turned to him and said, “Daddy, it’s the car.” Her comment tickled Lewis to no end
and gradually became a shorthand for people who seem friendly but are really motivated by ulterior motives.

Family and business were the dominant passions in Lewis’s life. When business wasn’t the topic of discussion with Lewis, his family was. Family members, friends, and business associates all remark that Lewis had a deep love for his wife and his daughters.

Tom Lamia and Lewis talked about their families all the time. “Gee, Tom, you’re really lucky to have six children,” Lewis told his colleague once. “I’d love to have six children.”

However, the birth of Lewis’s second daughter, Christina, had been a difficult one and Lewis feared that having additional children might put Loida Lewis’s health—and possibly her life—in jeopardy. By all accounts, Reginald Lewis was a different man at home than in the business arena. He could still be demanding and a taskmaster, but he was also very nurturing and supportive. Home life brought out a side rarely displayed in the workplace.

“He was sort of a lion in business, but to me he had a completely different personality at home,” says Alan Schwartz, the Bear, Stearns executive who befriended Lewis during the McCall days. “Reg clearly was the focal point of his house, but there was a very soft side to it. He clearly was very proud of his family and there was a softness to him that you wouldn’t have seen in a business deal. I think Leslie just wanted to be a female Reg.”

Of his two children, Leslie, 21, is most like Lewis in that she tends to be intense and analytical, can be eloquent or blunt depending on the situation, and tends to approach matters in a no-nonsense, focused way.

Christina, 14, who is attuned to things creative and artistic, is already an accomplished pianist and also displays a talent for creative writing. She seems to be more like her mother in that she has a spirituality about her and a quiet, inner strength.

Lewis spent as much time with them and with his wife on weekends and holidays as he could. But the week was devoted to business pursuits. It’s not that he held business or his personal ambition above
his family—realizing his dreams just took a lot of his time. It was that simple.

“He knew the tremendous sacrifice he had to make by being away so much, which always bothered him,” says one of Lewis’s brothers, Jean Fugett, Jr. who’s also a lawyer and briefly worked with Lewis at 99 Wall Street. “That was something that he really hated about his job. But if he had to do it all over again, he would do exactly what he had done.”

That meant that maximum enjoyment and gratification had to be extracted from time spent with his family. Easter was a time of year the family trekked to the Virgin Islands. Thanksgivings were spent on Long Island and later in Paris. Christmases were celebrated in Baltimore, and the New Year was traditionally ushered in while in the Caribbean. There were also weekends in the family home on Long Island and generally at least one week-long trip a year to some vacation spot.

Lewis was particularly close to his girls because he felt the love they had for him was unalloyed, totally pure and unconditional. At one point, like many young men, Lewis was hoping to have a boy, whom he would have named Reginald Scott Lewis. That dream vanished without a trace of remorse once his daughters were on the scene. Their self-worth, solid personalities, well-adjusted outlooks on life and even physical attractiveness were all sources of immense pride for Lewis. “I knew I was going to have daughters who were going to be lookers,” Lewis was fond of saying.

“All I saw was the twinkle in his eye when he was talking about them,” Michael Milken says. “And how proud he was of them and how different their life was going to be from his life.”

Lewis was protective of his daughters; he shielded them from prying media eyes wanting to know more about the private Reginald Lewis. Although his relationship with his family was a love affair of the first order, business is a jealous mistress and Lewis found her siren song irresistible.

“We worked at things pretty much the same way, which meant that by definition our families were deprived of a lot of our time,” Cleve Christophe says. “That just was kind of the way it was. So we would talk about it in terms of our destiny, what we’re seeking to achieve, why it’s right for us to do this. We recognized at the same time there were certain of life’s experiences, particularly on the family side, that in a way were compromised in the process.”

Lewis’s happiest, closest times with his family were spent in Paris when he moved there after the acquisition of Beatrice. His focus shifted more toward family and he and his wife were probably closer than at any other juncture in their marriage.

On Friday nights, Reginald and Loida Lewis would usually go to the opera and have black-tie dinners at Maxim’s, one of Paris’s best known restaurants.

Lewis got a kick out of giving his wife unexpected surprises with a romantic twist. One time he materialized with tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and whisked her off to Austria in his private jet. They took in the concert, spent the night in splendor at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, and flew back to Paris the next afternoon.

The Lewises savored their time in Paris and looked forward to growing old together, with Lewis spending his golden years as the dean of a major U.S. university.

Dinnertime in the Lewis household saw the dining room turn into a courtroom as soon as dinner was finished. The Lewises would hold mock trials with one family member filling the role of prosecuting attorney, while another was a defense attorney, a judge, and a defendant.

Reginald and Loida Lewis had serious objectives in mind when these mock trial sessions, ostensibly a game, were held. They wanted their girls to be capable of thinking quickly on their feet and able to make defensible arguments based on sound analysis. Not surprisingly, Leslie and Christina possess a better than average grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates. Leslie, in fact, has given some thought to attending law school, which would put her on the same path as her father and mother.

“It was always interesting to hear the legal conversations when you walked into the dining room,” says Lucien Stoutt, the Lewis’s butler in New York. “Sometimes you’d walk in and you’d hear the kids prosecuting Mommy and Daddy. And nobody would be getting angry, they’d just be doing what they had to do based on the legal process.”

In Paris, Leslie began to exhibit the rebelliousness that has marked many a child’s passage into the teenage years. A typical disagreement between Leslie and her father would be over what time she was supposed to return home from an outing in the Lewis’s chauffeur-driven limousine. When differences between them would reach a head, Lewis resorted to an old-fashioned remedy and grounded his daughter for
a week at a time. Lewis was tremendously relieved when at 18 Leslie outgrew the rebelliousness that caused them to butt heads on so many occasions.

It was terribly important to Lewis that his children not grow up to be sheltered and pampered and oblivious to the fact that few people enjoyed the life of privilege and wealth they were accustomed to. There were occasions in Paris when Lewis had Christina or Leslie personally deliver checks to an orphanage he made contributions to. As with his other goals, Lewis was successful; his daughters appear to be unpretentious and socially enlightened.

One accomplishment of which Lewis was tremendously proud was the fact that he never missed a parent-teacher association meeting or a play or recital at the international, multilingual school his girls attended in Paris. The same was true when they were living in New York.

Lewis was getting Leslie more and more acquainted with Beatrice and its operations. And he took Christina with him to visit TLC Beatrice’s potato chip operation in Ireland and the soft drink bottling plant in Brussels. But there was no grand design to groom either Leslie or Christina. Lewis saw no pressing need to have a capable successor waiting in the wings.

Evenings at the Lewis household were marked by laughter. Leslie and Christina loved to tell their father jokes, and he often reciprocated with one of his own. Lewis and Leslie were both partial to lengthy, intricate jokes that had to be meticulously retold to reach the punch line.