Another Life (59 page)

Bluhdorn finished his call and asked for the time—watches, apparently, had a way of going dead on his wrist, perhaps because of the waves of energy emanating from him, or perhaps it had to do with his mechanical ineptitude, whatever the cause he preferred to ask the time rather than glance at a watch. Of course the simple answer may be that since he was always surrounded by people who were paid, among other things, to do his bidding, he simply saw no point in wearing a watch, or making a phone call, or carrying money for tips. Other people could do all those things for him, leaving him free to talk and worry about the price of sugar.

I told him that it was eight o’clock. “Jezus Ker-RIST!” he howled. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”

Bluhdorn was in motion again, sending the Paramount executive to search his luggage for a resupply of cigars, briefing us about our host, ordering me to place one last call to New York. We descended to the lobby in a flying wedge, led by Bluhdorn. Collins and Lapierre were waiting for us in the lobby. Bluhdorn hugged them, pulled their ear-lobes, pinched their cheeks. They were his boys, he told them, the goddamn movie was going to get made if it was the last goddamn thing he did. People had told him that
The Godfather
was a mistake, but he hadn’t listened, he had kept his faith in the book, in the young director, in the whole goddamn thing, and look what had happened. A huge fucking hit, one of the biggest ever! You had to believe, that was all, and he believed, he just wanted them to know that. This was said, I guessed, for the benefit of Barry Diller, who had made it very plain that he did not believe, but Diller was beyond arguing, putting one Gucci-clad foot in front of the other on the gleaming marble floor like a man who has just gotten out of bed for the first time since surgery.

Bluhdorn seated us in the limousine like a tour director, and we set off. We were having dinner at the home of Dino Fabbri, he explained, an Italian industrialist and printing magnate, who was both a close friend and a business partner of Bluhdorn’s. Fabbri’s house, when we arrived there, overlooked the sea, and was built in the style and on much the same scale as that of the Emperor Tiberius’s on Capri. The approach was hilly and winding, past small guest houses and garages hidden among small, fragrant pine trees. Bluhdorn charged up a broad flight of marble steps to embrace his host, while we straggled behind.

Fabbri was tall, slender, elegant. He didn’t seem to mind Bluhdorn’s bear hug, but he didn’t look as if he enjoyed it much either. He managed to extricate himself, shake hands with each of us, then led us through room after magnificent room, all of them in the somewhat cold and formal style of the lobby of a very expensive, but modern, grand hotel
de luxe
—the Baur Grünwald in Venice came to my mind. The floors were gleaming marble, and the furniture heavily gilded. Bluhdorn was on edge, trying to move as fast as he could, but Fabbri held him back, determined to show him the grandeurs of his
palazzo
, with a certain amount of pride. Clearly, he had gone to a great deal of trouble to put on this dinner. Spread out gracefully in the rooms were any number of very beautiful women in
couture
dresses, most of them showing a lot of deeply tanned skin, and a certain number of very sleek men wearing the kind of summer suits that can be had only from a Roman tailor, which never seem to crease or wrinkle. Under the subdued lighting, there was a sparkle and glare of gold and gemstones. Fabbri, in short, had produced a party of beautiful people for Bluhdorn, all of them attractive, wealthy, or both. Bluhdorn, however, despite his eye for a good-looking woman, walked right past them all without a word, until we were on the terrace, which was lit with blazing torchères. At the far end a huge buffet had been set up. There were piles of lobsters, displays of every imaginable kind of seafood, hot dishes, cold dishes, all presented with the kind of old-fashioned opulence and elegance that only the French can achieve when money is not a concern. Fabbri held out both arms in a gesture of hostly pride. “What do you think of that?” he asked.

Bluhdorn wasn’t impressed. “Are we here to eat or to talk business?” he growled, and before we could even put a few
crevettes roses
with
ail
on a plate, we were whisked off to a small library, a few of the beautiful young women were pushed out, and we sat down to discuss all
over again, at interminable length, the problems of making
The Fifth Horseman
into a movie. Tired Barry Diller may have been (when we finally did sit down to dinner, he instantly went to sleep at the table), but he was not so tired that he had forgotten how to say no.

Collins and Lapierre told him all their ideas for turning the book into a script, while he listened politely, shaking his head. In the end, even Bluhdorn got tired of the whole thing, and we were eventually allowed to sit down and eat. About midnight, I was told that I should spend the night, since Bluhdorn wanted to talk to me over breakfast. Too tired to be apprehensive, I allowed myself to be led away to one of the guest houses. I could not help noticing that while the rich often spend lavishly on their houses, they tend to economize on guest rooms. This one could have been a bedroom on the ground floor of any budget-priced motel in America. Clearly, some young woman had been displaced from it on my behalf, since her things were all over the room. I moved her lingerie off the rumpled bed and fell instantly asleep.

In the morning, I walked up to the main house and found Bluhdorn seated on a terrace, at the breakfast table, surrounded by flowers and birds, reading the morning newspapers in several languages. He was wearing an open sports shirt in a vivid pattern, a pair of shorts, and sandals, but there was nothing relaxed about his manner. We talked about the previous night’s meeting as we ate breakfast. Did I think it had gone well? he asked.

I sipped my coffee. I saw nothing to be gained by avoiding the truth. No, I didn’t think so, I said. Whatever the story problems were, it didn’t seem to me that they had been solved. The truth of the matter was that it was all a waste of time and effort. The fact remained that either you wanted to make a movie about a Palestinian terrorist planting an atomic weapon in New York City or you didn’t. If you did, there was more than enough material to make it, whoever wrote the screenplay. If you didn’t, then no amount of ideas, however clever, would convince you.

Bluhdorn nodded. He was in a sunny mood—maybe it was the weather, maybe he was simply a man who enjoyed breakfast. He lit a cigar and looked out over the orange groves and pine trees to the sea. “What the hell,” he said. “We tried, right?” No answer seemed to be called for. “What else do you have to do here?” he asked.

Nothing, I told him.

He raised an eyebrow. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You mean you flew
over here just for this one goddamn meeting?” I nodded. He reflected on this and shook his head. “Then you’d better be getting back to New York.”

I was back in New York the same day. The journey had been so rapid that a lot of people didn’t even know I had been away, and, after a few days, I wasn’t even sure myself.

P
ERHAPS BECAUSE
the trip had been unsuccessful, I never came that close to Bluhdorn again. It is possible that he associated me in his mind with one of his rare failures, though I think it is more likely that his attention was already being drawn away by more pressing concerns.

The scene during which Bluhdorn had made confetti of the
Times
for our benefit was prophetic. Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting was the opening salvo in an attack on G+W, most of which was aimed personally at Bluhdorn—who took it personally, of course.

Hersh’s charges stemmed from a defection that Bluhdorn regarded, perhaps correctly, as a personal betrayal, comparable to that of Judas—Joel A. Dolkart, a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and G+W’s chief legal adviser, had been indicted on many counts of fraud, including the theft of $2,500,000, in the face of which, being disinclined to spend several years in prison, he agreed to cooperate, providing the feds (and
The New York Times
’s Seymour Hersh) with a rich harvest of allegations with which to torment Bluhdorn. It was, one of Bluhdorn’s advisers put it, “as if Henry Kissinger had defected to Moscow.”

Increasingly, Bluhdorn began to resemble a Spanish fighting bull—snorting, angry, bloody, and unbowed, reacting to pricks from the picador. It was not that any of the allegations were, in themselves, all that startling—they included “questionable tax practices,” “questionable corporate payments abroad,” “unreported use of company resources for the private gain of company officials,” the “mishandling” of the company’s annual financial statements, “a pattern of transactions … designed to conceal the true financial condition of the company,” and “inadequate public disclosures about the administration of [the company’s] employee pension fund,” but nevertheless the company’s innermost financial secrets had been exposed, in an invidious light, by a long-term insider, something that happens rarely in corporate America.

Many of the charges were spurious, or exaggerated by the press, or made more dramatic in the telling by Sy Hersh; others were pretty much the norm in high-flying conglomerates like G+W. After all, nobody had ever pretended that G+W was AT&T or IBM; it was a company in which executives were expected to think on their feet, to take risks, and to do everything they could to keep the stock price going up. Certainly, it wasn’t the kind of company in which people spent a lot of time worrying about whether X or Y was really entitled to use one of the corporate jets, or pause to ask whether the financial people should be spending their time working on Bluhdorn’s personal taxes. It was understood by everyone—certainly by the shareholders and the executives—that in a certain sense Bluhdorn
was
G+W. When you invested in the company, you were investing in Charlie Bluhdorn’s smarts, instincts, daring, and ambition. It was Bluhdorn who had collected this odd group of companies, Bluhdorn who bought and sold them, Bluhdorn who was not just the spokesman for the company, but its very reason for being. There simply was not, in his mind, a difference between himself and the company, they were one and the same thing.

This was not, alas, a position with which Sy Hersh sympathized, or Stanley Sporkin, the crusading chief of the Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. What seemed to most people within the G+W “family” that revolved around Bluhdorn merely interesting management idiosyncrasies, perhaps even lovable eccentricities on the part of the company’s founder, appeared to Sporkin as gross illegalities. The truth, one suspects, is that Sporkin’s ambition and Bluhdorn’s clashed—for Sporkin was a deeply ambitious man, as ambitious as Bluhdorn himself, and in Bluhdorn he doubtless saw an opportunity for endless stories in the press for himself, as a crusader for corporate justice and responsibility. “This will be war!” ran one headline, quoting one of Bluhdorn’s lawyers, which more or less set the tone for the dispute.

The endless wrangle and the publicity that surrounded it—for Sporkin turned out to be a master at getting his side of the story told in the press—ended in 1981, in a kind of draw in which the company basically agreed to stop doing what it had denied doing, and the SEC agreed to leave it alone. One consequence of the long struggle, however, was that Bluhdorn stepped out of the spotlight for a time. He no longer gave long, garrulous, and alarmingly frank speeches to financial reporters, and he spent more time than before at his house in the Dominican Republic.

At company functions, he began to seem almost benign. He set out to portray himself as the elder business statesman now, rather than as the hard-driving conglomerateur. He wanted people to see Gulf + Western as a successfully completed organization, not as a conglomerate that was constantly changing, unfinished, and fluid, and this was achieved, on paper, at any rate, by splitting it up into eight divisions. Paramount and Simon and Schuster, for instance, were lumped together in “The Leisure Time Group”; the grandly named “Consumer Products Group” was principally engaged in the manufacture and sales of cigars, and so on, until a total of some 850 different types of products and services were divided into eight “groups”—a Procrustean way of proving the company had arrived or matured. “Synergy,” the magic word that was supposed to explain to shareholders and the other rubes outside the tent what the purpose of all this conglomeration was, now became a war cry within the company, as if there were really some link between auto parts, truck and auto leasing, mattresses, movies, resort hotels, sugar, zinc, and books.

Bluhdorn’s energy remained undiminished, as did his notorious inability to relax. Once, visiting the Dominican Republic for an S&S sales conference (for a while, it became mandatory to use the G+W resort for sales conferences, despite the many difficulties of getting down there), I was invited by Mrs. Bluhdorn and her daughter to look at their horses—my interest in them having apparently been passed on through the company. Elegant, beautiful, and gracious, Mrs. Bluhdorn showed me over the ranch, where there were, indeed, a lot of horses, some of them pretty nice. I should come back one day, she said, when I had more time. Charlie loved going on horseback picnics up in the mountains. It was a wonderful way to spend a day—a long ride up into the mountains, a swim in a clear mountain stream, surrounded by wildflowers and birds, then a delicious picnic, and the ride back.… I nodded appreciatively at the thought of this idyll, until a certain skepticism intruded into the picture. I found it hard to even imagine Charlie Bluhdorn on a horse, let alone giving up a whole day to a picnic. Perhaps there was a side to him I hadn’t seen? Did Mr. Bluhdorn, I asked, enjoy riding? Mrs. Bluhdorn laughed charmingly. “No, no,” she said, “Charlie joins us for lunch in the helicopter, then he flies back afterwards.”

As Bluhdorn became less visible, there were rumors of illness, even of cancer. In the end it should have come as no surprise when he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, in February 1983, on a
plane on his way to the Dominican Republic. He had lived his life at twice the pace of any normal man—even of the normal ambitious business executive. Forever in motion, talking, pleading, threatening, he was like a force of nature. Far from surrounding himself with “yes men,” he thrived on argument, the angrier and more furious, the better. In an era of increasing corporate blandness, with CEOs who seem determined to behave as if all business were a kind of public service, Bluhdorn was the last of the great business eccentrics, a one-man band who made capitalism seem not only profitable, but fun. Always a trader at heart, he treated the American business world like a supermarket, rushing about in it like a demented shopper, picking up bargains without a shopping list to guide him. The last time I saw him, for a few brief seconds, in the dim light of the Top of the Tower restaurant, he looked pale and gaunt. He paused only long enough to say, “Cheezus Ke-RIST! You tell those boys I’m still going to get that goddamned movie made.” The old, rasping self-confidence in his voice and the broad grin were still there, but the movie never did get made.