Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (2 page)

More than 2,000 people attended Lewis’s funeral and memorial service, including Arthur Ashe, just before his own death. Opera diva Kathleen Battle sang “Amazing Grace” at the memorial service and
Lewis’s family received words of condolence from Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, and Bill Cosby, among others.

“Regardless of race, color, or creed, we are all dealt a hand to play in this game of life,” Cosby wrote. “And believe me, Reg Lewis played the hell out of his hand!”

With his deep-set, piercing eyes, bushy moustache, seemingly perpetual scowl, and megawatt intensity, Lewis wasn’t the most approachable of individuals. Either through expertise or influence, he commanded respect.

A romantic who once surprised his wife Loida by flying her on his private jet from Paris to Vienna just to hear a classical music concert, Lewis was a Francophile who spoke French fluently and maintained a Paris apartment in King Louis the XIV’s historic Place Du Palais Bourbon. In Manhattan, Lewisesque standards of luxury called for a 15-room, 7-½ bath co-op purchased for $11.5 million from John DeLlorean. Weekend getaways were enjoyed on Long Island in a $4 million Georgian-style mansion.

Charming, irascible, and prone to mood swings, Lewis was as quirky an amalgam of pride, ego, and towering ambition as ever sauntered into a boardroom. Quick to unsheathe his razor-sharp tongue and intellect against adversaries, quaking employees, and even relatives, Lewis achieved one of the more spectacular corporate buyouts in an era of such mega-deals.

But not before he first overcame daunting obstacles and setbacks with a single-mindedness that should inspire not just entrepreneurs but anyone fighting against prohibitive odds, as Lewis did.

Lewis was proud to note that he was the only person ever admitted to Harvard Law School without having so much as submitted an application. But it wasn’t a primrose path that Lewis walked—his acceptance into Harvard Law School came only after he had doggedly maneuvered himself into a position where charm and hard work enabled him to crash the gates.

So it was with most of the noteworthy accomplishments of Lewis’s life. Nothing came easily or without enormous preparation and dedication on his part. A harbinger that Lewis was not one to be cowed or intimidated by barriers of any kind appeared when he was still a small boy.

I remember being in the bathtub, and my grandmother and grandfather were talking about some incident that had been unfair and was racial in nature. They were talking about work and accomplishing things and how racism was getting in the way of that. And they looked at me and said, “Well, maybe it will be different for him.”

I couldn’t have been more than about six years old.

One of them, I can’t remember whether it was my grandfather or my grandmother, said to me, “Well, is it going to be any different for you?”

And as I was climbing out of the tub and they were putting a towel around me, I looked up and said, “Yeah, cause why should white guys have all the fun?”

This is Reginald Lewis’s story.

       
A Kid from East Baltimore

Reginald Francis Lewis was born on December 7, 1942, in a neighborhood of East Baltimore that he liked to characterize as “semi-tough.” The Baltimore of the 1940s and 1950s was a city of gentility, slow living, and racial segregation. No one had heard of Martin Luther King . . . or civil rights . . . or integration.

As in other Southern cities of the time, there were many things black people in Baltimore couldn’t do. They couldn’t try on clothes or shop at many downtown stores. They couldn’t eat in certain restaurants or go to certain movie theaters.

East Baltimore was a city within a city. It was mostly made up of black migrants from the South who had come North in search of jobs at area steel mills such as Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow’s Point. Lewis grew up in a world marked by block after block of red brick row houses, many of which had outhouses in their backyards. A city ordinance passed in the late 1940s finally outlawed outdoor toilets.

Tucked deep inside East Baltimore was Dallas Street, where Reginald Lewis spent his early years. More akin to an alley than a street because it was so narrow, Dallas Street was also unpaved. Each house had three or four white marble steps leading directly to the front door. The steps served as porches and outdoor chairs.

Although he didn’t move to Dallas Street until he was five, Lewis would look back on it years later as a special place.

The street was more a collection of rough rocks and pebbles than anything else, unlike the smooth black asphalt of the streets in better neighborhoods. At 7, it didn’t matter that City Hall paved the block just north and just south. That just gave the grown-ups something to talk about all the time. . . . 1022 North Dallas Street, the heart of the ghetto of East Baltimore, is the street where all my dreams got started.

Lewis was born to Clinton and Carolyn Cooper Lewis. Reginald was their only child and not long after his birth, Lewis’s young mother took him to her parents’s home in East Baltimore. Samuel and Savilla “Sue” Cooper lived at 1022 Dallas Street, in one of the ubiquitous brick row houses.

Carolyn’s 6-year-old brother, James, gleefully awaited the arrival of his first nephew. “I can remember the day, the evening—it was starting to get dark—when they brought him home. My sister told me to go upstairs and sit down because I was real fidgety.”

James did as he was told and a moment later, Carolyn appeared holding Reginald. “She handed him to me that day and said, ‘This is your little brother.’ See, I was the little brother and I didn’t like being the little brother. That stood out in my mind, because I am no longer the little brother. I am now the big brother.”

Carolyn’s simple gesture earned Reginald the unwavering support of an uncle, cum older brother, who would fight for Reginald at the drop of a hat, support that would come in handy on the rough-and-tumble streets of East Baltimore. James was one of eight Cooper siblings, all older than Reginald, who played with, pampered, and nurtured the boy. He was also doted on by his grandparents and was the youngest child on his block, making young Reginald the unrivaled center of the universe not just at 1022 Dallas Street, but for the entire 1000 block. And of course, he was his parents’s only child.

Reginald Lewis developed a strong sense of self-worth early on, in addition to an expectation that he would be catered to and get his way.

Clinton Lee Lewis, then 25, was a diminutive man with a café au lait complexion, wavy black hair, and high cheekbones. He held several
jobs in succession, first as a civilian technician for the Army Signal Corps and later as the proprietor of a series of small businesses, including a radio repair shop and a restaurant. Shortly after the marriage, he left to join the Navy.

Lewis seldom mentioned his father, even to close friends. Business associates who made it their business to study Reginald Lewis drew blanks when it came to his father. No one knew for sure if he was dead or alive.

Lynwood Hart, a college roommate of Lewis’s, recalls that, “Reggie saw his father as somebody who didn’t have much of a dream. I don’t know that he had a lot of respect, though I think he had a certain caring for his father. It was clear to me in the conversations we had about his dad that he thought his dad was an underachiever. One day after stopping by his father’s restaurant in Baltimore, I said, ‘You never talk about your father.’ He said, ‘Naw man—I don’t know. He could do so much more with his life.’”

Clinton never remarried, and he passed away in 1983, living long enough to glimpse his son’s success as a Wall Street lawyer.

Carolyn Cooper Lewis was a light-skinned beauty with expressive brown eyes. Just 17 at the time of Reginald’s birth, she was to be a major influence in her son’s life. Both as a child and later as a successful businessman, Lewis always exhibited a fierce protectiveness toward her. His aunt, Elaine Cole, noted that, “He loved and adored his mother. In his eyes, she could do no wrong.”

Lewis was still a young boy when his mother left Clinton Lewis and moved into her parents’s home on Dallas Street. The move into the Cooper household was a seminal experience for Lewis.

My mother left my father when I was 5 and arrived at grandma’s house in the middle of the night with me under her arm. Everybody got out of bed. Grandmom and Grandpop, Aunts Charlotte, Beverly, Jean, and Elaine, Uncles James and Donald. Uncle Sam was away in college. Aunt Doris was married and Uncle Robert was in the Air Force. After my grandfather exploded about more mouths to feed, Grandmom asked one of my aunts to take me up to bed. As I went upstairs, I heard my mother say that we would not be a burden, we’d pay our way. That stuck.

It was a lesson that Reginald Lewis would carry with him all his life. Carolyn Lewis looks back on her decision to leave her husband, saying, “My husband and I never had bad feelings. But there are some people you just can’t live with. He was into being the head of the entire Lewis clan and at that point, I could not see me fitting into that mold. It gave me no sense of my own identity.”

Lewis remembers that “My mom was about 22, and I rarely saw her in the mornings because she was working two jobs—a waitress, and at night a clerk at a department store.”

“I wanted for nothing,” he later wrote.

Lewis’s grandfather, Sam Cooper, held several jobs as well. At one point, he was a waiter at one of Baltimore’s fanciest hotels, the Belvedere. At the same time, he waited on tables at the Suburban Club, a Jewish country club in suburban Baltimore, while also working private parties at posh homes.

Sam Cooper was an orderly man who liked everything to be just so at home and at work, a trait he passed on to his grandson. When he came home, the Cooper household had to be neat and clean or there would be hell to pay because Sam had a terrible temper. He never had trouble finding work, which was a good thing because he quit several jobs in fits of pique. His hair-trigger temper apparently had an effect on his grandson, whose own outbursts became legendary.

Sam Cooper would often bring home all kinds of delicious leftovers from work, including frogs’ legs, which the children hated, lobster newburg, Smithfield ham, turkey, marvelous desserts, and even champagne, which the children were allowed to have in small portions. Reginald Lewis retained a fondness for quality champagne all his life.

Because of his work, Sam Cooper would not get home until long after the children had gone to bed. To make up for that, he would rise early to cook everyone a big breakfast of eggs, bacon, hot cakes, and hash-brown potatoes.

He would set the table with linen tablecloth and napkins, flatware, and glassware and then he would serve the children as though they were guests in a fine restaurant and he was their waiter.

Despite his initial grumbling, Sam Cooper adored his grandson. “The first time my mother and Carolyn walked in the house with that boy, tears came to daddy’s eyes and from that point on, Reggie was daddy’s baby,” says James, one of Cooper’s sons.

In fact, James remembers his father taking Lewis to the Belvedere Hotel, and, with a white towel draped over his left arm, escorting him to a dining room table and serving him lunch, which in Reginald’s case usually consisted of a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

Sue Cooper was a warm, loving, deeply spiritual individual who was also a no-nonsense taskmaster. In addition to raising eight children of her own and two of her sisters’s children, she cleaned other people’s houses.

She made sure that each child had a job to do, with the youngest children doing the dusting and the older ones washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and helping with the ironing.

Next door to the Cooper house was a vacant lot that over time became filled with trash and broken glass. Sue and the children cleaned it up and planted flowers of all kinds. She set aside an open space in the middle of the lot where she and the children could have picnics and play.

Neither Sam nor Sue Cooper had gone beyond the eighth grade in school but, as one of their daughters put it, “Both had PhDs in common sense.” Lewis learned a great deal from his grandparents—how to conduct himself with people from different backgrounds and races, including white people. He noticed that when his grandparents talked to whites, they did so with head erect and gaze unwavering. Sam Cooper emphasized that his children and grandson should always be courteous in their dealings with whites, but never servile.

“Be whatever the situation calls for and if you need to use them, use them. And after you’ve gotten what you want and where you want to go, then you proceed on,” one of Sam’s daughters, Lewis’s Aunt Charlotte, recalls her father saying.

I feel very good about my base values, which I think is so important that we instill in our young people and children. On this note I think of my grandparents, even more than my mother. My mother was active, having a lot of other children and dealing with all that entails. But my grandparents, I think, had a wonderful facility for programming young people. And being able to convince you that you were someone special, that you had something to bring or something to contribute, too.

I carried that with me a long way. It’s been extremely important to me.

Thanks to the Cooper family, I never had a fear of white people. And I think my grandmother always emphasized, “Don’t be afraid of them. Be afraid of situations or be concerned in certain situations, but never fear any person—be they black or white.” And she never showed any fear in terms of dealing with whites. And that was important, because that wasn’t true with a lot of other people that I’ve known.