The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (17 page)

He pulled out his wallet and looked inside. It was empty. His wife had emptied it that day to go shopping and had forgotten to tell him.

Luck of that kind cannot easily be explained by reference to character. Nor can the kind of luck that produces winning lottery tickets. “It comes at you from the blue, like being struck by lightning,” says 62-year-old Sol Levin of Jersey City, New Jersey. Levin, a dental-supply man who had never before won anything in a lottery, pessimistically bought five tickets in the New York State Lottery one day. The chances that any one of his tickets would be picked in a prize drawing were roughly one in a thousand, and the chances that two would be picked were too microscopic to think about. But the nearly impossible happened: Two of Levin’s tickets were picked, winning him a total of $400. “It wasn’t much money,” says Levin, “but it shows that this thing called luck does exist. Every now and then it zeros in on somebody. I don’t know why, but I do know – I mean,
now
I know – it happens.”

Many people think they know why. Numerologists, for instance, believed Levin won twice because his tickets had lucky numbers. His two winning tickets bore the consecutive numbers 10,522,453 and 10,522,454. If you add all the individual digits in those numbers, numerologists point out, you get the total of 45 – which is considered by some adherents of this mystical pseudoscience to be an overwhelmingly lucky number. (It is the “king number,” the total of all the digits from 0 to 9.)

Many other people have many other explanations of luck. “With anything as unexplainable and uncontrollable as luck, it’s only human to try to explain it and control it,” says Penn Mutual Life Insurance executive Robert S. Johnson. As a fighter pilot over England and Germany in World War Two, Johnson had more luck than anybody could explain rationally. “It’s silly, but you do it – you latch on to funny little superstitions.”

Johnson shot down 28 German aircraft without ever sustaining more than superficial damage to his plane and a minor wound in his leg. This was a fantastic record in the European theater of the war. Out in the Pacific, where the Japanese often fought with inferior aircraft and hastily trained pilots, it wasn’t uncommon for American fliers to chalk up high scores. But German planes and pilots were superior. If an American scored as high as ten and lived to tell the tale, it was considered remarkable. How did Johnson survive?

Character must have had something to do with it. Johnson had obviously learned his deadly business conscientiously, and he obviously handled his plane with great skill and impeccable judgment. He didn’t expose himself to unnecessary danger, never sacrificed safety in some wild quest for glory. “I didn’t go out of my way looking for victories.”

But at least some German pilots must have been equally excellent. How did Johnson elude their bullets? He grows almost apologetic as he talks about it. “Damned silly . . . I carried two lucky pieces all the time, a British farthing and a little steel knife. I knew it was silly, but I wouldn’t have felt safe without them. And I called my plane ‘Lucky.’ I was trying to explain and control my luck, you see.”

Today, a short, taut, graying man in his mid-40s, Johnson still worries about luck. “This tie I’m wearing today brings me luck. The thirteenth of the month is generally lucky for me. . .” Silly, perhaps, as he says. Yet luck – whatever it is – once saved his life. It is understandable that he is mildly obsessed by thoughts about luck. In fact, it would be strange if he weren’t.

Other students of luck have attempted more scientific examinations of the phenomenon. Probably the most famed is psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, executive director of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. First at Duke University and now at his foundation, Dr. Rhine has spent most of his professional life seeking the answer to one question:

“Is there an element of direct mental action operating at times to influence results in games of skill and chance?”

Rhine believes the answer is yes, but he has yet to convince a clear majority of fellow scientists.

In Rhine’s view, luck may result partly from precognition, psychokinesis and other weird manifestations generally catalogued under the general heading of extrasensory perception, or ESP. Rhine, his wife and a few dozen other respected researchers scattered across the country have performed literally thousands of experiments to find out if ESP exists and, if so, what it is and how it operates. Generally these experiments have involved attempts to influence the roll of dice or guess what cards somebody else was holding. If such an ability actually exists, it would, of course, be useful not only at the gambling table but also on the stock market and in the game of life itself. It would help explain why Kirk Douglas failed to board Mike Todd’s airplane (precognition) or why no enemy bullet ever found a vital spot in Robert Johnson’s plane or body (psychokinesis) or why Sol Levin’s two consecutive lottery tickets came up in a drawing.

If it exists. Some of Rhine’s experiments seemed to show that it does. The most bizarre experiment took place in September 1933. Divinity student Hubert E. Pearce sat in a cubicle in the Duke University library and tried to guess what cards were being turned up in another building 100 yards away. The cards bore five different designs. Thus, in an average series of 300 tries, Hubert Pearce would have been expected to get 60 right answers by chance alone – one in five. But in one amazing series Pearce scored 119. The odds against this happening by chance were something like a quadrillion to one. Hence, said Rhine, it probably didn’t happen by chance. Therefore, it must have happened because some other force was operating – ESP, controlled luck.

It was a tempting conclusion, but many other scientists didn’t accept it. One of the more rigid rules of science is that an experimental result must be repeatable, and Hubert Pearce was never able to do the trick again (though he did have a number of other runs in which he scored significantly higher than the expectable pure-chance score). His life since then has been normally but not spectacularly lucky. He is now a Methodist minister in Kansas City, a quiet man who lays no claim to any future-foretelling or mind-reading abilities.

A somewhat more pragmatic approach to the causes of luck is that of economist A. H. Z. Carr. Carr, who was economic advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, became intrigued by questions about luck when he tried to sort out all the reason why nations win or lose wars. He developed some theories about personal luck and expressed them in a 1952 book,
How to Attract Good Luck
. The book quickly sank into oblivion, but it made one sensible point.

You can’t win a game without entering it, said Carr. This is obvious if you are talking about poker or the stock market, but less obvious if you are talking about life in general. To attract lucky chances, you must put yourself in a position to receive them – “expose yourself as fully as possible to the fluid circumstances of life.” To boil this down to its essentials, this means simply to get into contact with as many people as possible.

Kirk Douglas hit Hollywood because he was in contact with Lauren Bacall. She was one of several hundred people whom the amiable young actor had taken the trouble to befriend. He had no way of knowing in advance which of these several hundred might bring him a stroke of luck or what that luck might be – but, by being in contact with that many people, he made the odds favourable. By contrast, one of Banana Nose Wilson’s main problems was that he never made many friendly contacts. Knowing few people, he had relatively few chances of hearing about a good job or lucking into some pot-of-gold opportunity through a friend of a friend.

“Yes, that book is right,” Wilson told me one day as we strolled down a crowded New York sidewalk. “Luck comes mostly from other people. If I could live my life over, I’d get to know a lot more people. That’s the secret! That must be it!”

“Why not start today?” I asked. “You talk as though you’re already dead, for God’s sake.”

“You’re right!” Wilson’s voice rose with enthusiasm. “I’ll try it! People, that’s what it’s all about! There’s no such thing as bad luck!”

But a little while later a pigeon emptied its bowels from a ledge high about the sidewalk. The dropping could have fallen on any of several hundred strollers. It landed on Banana Nose Wilson’s sleeve.

“Oh, the hell with it,” said Wilson.

3 Originally published in
True
magazine under the title “Who Is the Dame Called Lady Luck?”. Copyright © 1969 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., and Max Gunther. Reprinted with permission.
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It is obvious that a lot of money can be made from advances in technology. The trick is to arrive on the scene with the right idea at the right time – to turn up just a split second before your competitors do with a new device or material or process that the world wants to buy.

There seem to be two basic ways of pulling off this trick. One way is to concentrate fairly narrowly on one specialized field of science, to dig in that one field, probe it to its depths, progressively uncovering one treasure below another below another. If you succeed, you become known as the master of that field and virtually its sole owner. You become its owner not only intellectually but also – if you have a good patent lawyer and a sound financial instinct – in terms of money as well. A man who performed this feat in a peculiarly brilliant way is Edwin Land, and we’ll look at his star-dusted career in the next chapter.

The second approach to technology is that of the non-specialist. This kind of man isn’t wedded to any particular science. Instead, he is in love with technology itself – all of it. He is typically a tinkerer. He loves to take devices apart and see what makes them go, then play around with them to see whether he can make them go better. He doesn’t particularly care what kinds of devices they are, just as long as they offer him the opportunity to apply his own ingenuity. Unlike the specialist, who usually needs a fairly thorough education in his science, the non-specialist doesn’t seem to require much in the way of normal education. He may even have dropped out of school because books and abstract thought bored him: He was impatient to go out somewhere and get his hands on actual, working non-abstract devices.

Such a man is William P. Lear, Sr. He is probably best known as the producer of the Lear Jet, the small, inexpensive airplane used mainly by companies wishing to reduce travel time for high-salaried executives. But he has had his hands on dozens of other technological advances, from early radio innovations to new kinds of pollution-free car engines. Consider his story, told here by the perceptive reporter C.P. Gilmore – who visited the restless, ebullient Lear for a few days and came back giddy and out of breath.

In the early 1960s, market surveys by leading aircraft companies showed that 300 business jets would be sold by 1970. Lear predicted 3000. “They don’t ask the right questions when they make surveys,” he says. “The trick is to discern a market – before there is any proof that one exists. If you had said in 1925 that we would build nine million automobiles a year by 1965, some statistician would have pointed out that they would fill up every road in the United States and, lined up end to end, would go across the country 11 times. Surveys are no good. I make my surveys in my mind.”

On the basis of his mental surveys or some other undisclosed source, Lear predicted that his jet would be a runaway best seller. “We’ll sell ‘em like bananas – in bunches,” he said. Today the quip is turning into fact. One company recently ordered ten, another four; still others bought two and three each. “I think those qualify as bunches,” says Lear. One of the company’s recent sales was to Frank Sinatra, who hasn’t bought a bunch as yet but is seriously considering buying another.

Lear’s habitual success doesn’t just happen. He’s a doer, not a theoretician. He has absolute faith that he will succeed at anything he does. He doesn’t rely on faith to do the job, however. Lear works seven days a week (“Even Christmas,” says Mrs. Lear plaintively).

He spends his days moving from one department to another (frequently with his favorite dog, a small black poodle named Jet, trotting after him) checking every detail of the plane’s manufacture and design, ordering changes, making improvements. “This plane is going to be just like the Volkswagen,” he says. “Ten years from now it will look just the same. But it will fly faster, land slower, use less fuel and be more reliable.”

In an airplane, weight equals performance; a lighter plane (for a given power) can fly faster, carry more, go farther. Weight, consequently, is Lear’s passion. Automatically, as he passes an engineer’s desk, he grabs a part and hefts it to judge weight. “How much?” he asks.

“Three grandmothers.”

“Get rid of one,” he barks and moves on.

Grandmother
is Learest for pound. It started one day when an engineer was trying to get Lear to approve the design for a part and protested that it weighed only four pounds. “Don’t you know,” shouted Lear, “that I’d sell my grandmother to save just
one
pound?” The name stuck.

Lear has cut hundreds of pounds from his jet after the engineers had squeezed it down as far as they could. One afternoon he strode into the seat-manufacturing division of the plant and asked to see the aluminium shell around which the pilot’s seat is built. “Why couldn’t we cut a square foot right out of the back here?” he asked, drawing a square on the aluminium. “This part doesn’t support anything.” The engineer working on the seat grinned sheepishly. “Another grandmother and a half,” said Lear happily.

Lear hates paperwork and rarely writes memos or letters. He prefers more direct methods. Not long ago he thought of a better way to connect a rod in a control system to give better action. In most companies such an idea would go to engineering for evaluation, where the plan would be debated and finally approved. Specifications would be set and plans drawn. Eventually prototypes would be made for testing. Months after the original idea, the change might be ordered, new drawings would be made, and the altered part would go into production.

But not at Lear Jet. When Lear thought of the change, he walked across to the area making the control rod, grabbed the nearest production worker and the part he wanted to modify, drew several lines directly on the part with his pencil and explained how he wanted the new system put together. “Call me when you have it finished,” he said and walked off. An hour later Lear looked over the control mechanism, approved it and sent it to the engineering department with instructions that all drawings be changed to conform. The next day the new part was being installed in airplanes. “Patience,” says Lear, “was never one of my virtues. When I make a change, I want every drawing in the plant to be changed within an hour.”

He applies the same technique to almost any problem. When his first prototype jet was in its flight-test program, Lear and his engineers decided to change the shape of the wing’s leading edge to give better stall characteristics. In most aircraft plants such a major overhaul would be a six-month job starting with complete redesign and retooling. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Lear decided to make the change late one Friday afternoon and had templates made to indicate the new shape. He called one of Wichita’s best auto body-and-fender men, told him to get his tools and come on out. Lear had the body man spread hard-drying fender compound on the leading edge, then file and grind it to the proper shape. It was finished early the next morning and cost $48 in labor. The airplane flew with the new wing before noon on Saturday. It proved the point, and subsequent production wings were changed to conform.

The day I first met Lear was a holiday. One of Lear’s executives met me at Wichita airport and drove me to the plant on the other side of the field. We found Lear in the engineering department. Most lights were off; the scores of drawing boards, arranged in neat lines, were covered. Lear was alone in the vast room, hunched over a board, making changes on a drawing. He had flown a Lear Jet in from Los Angeles a few minutes earlier and during the flight had thought of an improvement in the locking device to hold the pilot’s seat in place. He explained the idea to me – it was a way to do the job with fewer, lighter parts – and finished the drawing. Then he scrawled, “See me about this. WPL,” and put the cover back on the board. We went downstairs, where he gathered several executives who were working despite the holiday. And got reports on what had happened while he was away. Lear stopped by the electronics department, personally checked out an automatic direction finder that had failed on his flight and that he had had removed from the airplane. Before the day was over, he went through a half-dozen other departments, gave an interview to a reporter from an aviation magazine and glanced through a stack of papers on his desk. It was eight o’clock when Mrs. Lear met us at the plant and we went out for dinner.

Later that night, as Lear’s car turned into the driveway of his home, we were surrounded by a pack of leaping, barking dogs. Lear jumped from the car with a bag of meat scraps he had brought home from the restaurant. Laughing and talking to his five dogs, he began throwing scraps of meat.

Lear lives in a well-to-do, tree-shaded suburb of Wichita. His home, large and pleasant but definitely not in the mansion category, could be owned by any moderately successful doctor or small businessman. There is one servant, a combination cook and housekeeper. Mrs. Lear serves dinner – even company meals – herself. A roomy patio graces the back of the house, but there is no olympic-sized swimming pool or other sign of unusual wealth.

Lear, in fact, definitely seems to prefer a relatively simple life. When he and his family were living in Europe a few years ago, he got fed up with the baronial splendor of the mansion outside of Geneva he had rented. He bought a piece of property and had a modest American-type house, which he named Le Ranch, built on it.