Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (46 page)

The family devised its own version of Trivial Pursuit, with Lewis asking each person at the dining table a math, history, or literature question.

Initially, Christina’s piano playing filled the Lewises’ Paris apartment with discordant, stacatto notes, leading her father to close the door to his study.

But as her playing became more and more fluid and melodic, the door to Lewis’s study stayed open more and more often. He even arranged for her recital to be held at the Hotel Meurice in Paris and often asked her to play her concert pieces for visiting friends.

It was terribly important to Lewis and his wife that their children grow up as normally as possible, given their sheltered and privileged lifestyles. When
Forbes
placed Lewis on its list of 400 wealthiest
Americans in 1991 and 1992, he made no mention of it to Leslie or Christina.

Lewis also taught them the value of a dollar, and how to hold on to one despite their affluence. It was one lesson the girls learned well at the master’s knee. “Christina and Leslie are just as tight with a dollar,” laughs their grandmother, Carolyn Fugett. “They do not spend to be spending, believe me. And don’t owe them anything!”

During the period he was living in Paris, Lewis seemed to take more time to enjoy the fun and relaxing things that his enormous wealth made possible. During several Christmas holiday seasons, he and Tony Fugett jetted into Jamaica to decompress for a week while Loida and the girls went to the Philippines. As the brothers passed through Jamaican customs, they were asked if they had any firearms to check.

“Do we have firearms?” a bemused Lewis responded. “No. Why, do we need them?” His trademark belly laugh was soon booming through the customs section of the airport. The brothers chuckled about the exchange throughout their stay. After leaving the airport they traveled to a resort in Jamaica known as Tryall, where they’d rented a villa named Randolins.

“I saw a change in the man,” Fugett says. “We did not have a phone and he did not read a paper. He read books and we swam together in a sea pool and we played tennis two times a day. It was unbelievable. There was a dog at the villa and he actually walked with the dog—this from a man who hated dogs!”

“He said he never relaxed as much as he relaxed at the Randolins. He was going to buy the place.”

While in Paris the Lewis family had a peculiar immigration arrangement: Because they had tourist visas, the clan had to leave France every 90 days. That was no problem given the geography of Europe, where countries are in close proximity to one another. The Lewises were well traveled on the continent and tallied Rome, Madrid, Berlin, and Prague among the cities that they toured.

When living in Europe, the ability to glide effortlessly between cultures and languages comes in handy. After a time, the Lewises were all fluent in French, with Loida Lewis and Leslie going a step better by adding Spanish to their repertoire, and Christina topping everyone by taking on Spanish and Japanese.

For Leslie’s eighteenth birthday, Reginald Lewis arranged for a black-tie dinner at the family’s Paris apartment that was attended by 60 of Leslie’s classmates. Her graduation present from dad was a snazzy Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible. When
Time
magazine asked why Leslie didn’t receive a more expensive vehicle like a Porsche or Mercedes, Lewis replied, “So she’ll have something to look forward to!”

One of Lewis’s proudest moments in life was when Leslie was accepted to Harvard College in 1991. Lewis and his family flew from East Hampton to Boston aboard TLC Beatrice’s corporate jet to accompany Leslie to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin her studies at Harvard. When it was time for the Lewises to leave and return to Paris, Leslie started to cry. Loida Lewis also got moist-eyed after the limousine began to pull away from the dormitory, affecting her husband.

With the Lewis household shrinking from four people to three, Reginald Lewis bought Christina two Labrador retrievers, named Gaston and Gilbert, so she wouldn’t feel too lonely in her sister’s absence.

With TLC Beatrice having its best year ever in 1991 despite a looming recession in Europe, and a home life that brought him endless joy, it was with eagerness that Reginald Lewis looked forward to the approach of 1992.

       
Connoisseur, Philanthropist, Citizen of the World

Reginald Lewis gave millions of dollars to charities and causes where he thought his energies and wealth could make a difference. He was involved with philanthropy long before he became rich and long before he knew about his brain cancer in late 1992.

If charity begins at home, young Lewis had a first-rate teacher in his grandmother, Savilla Cooper. She possessed one of the biggest hearts in East Baltimore and thought nothing of escorting a stranger to her dinner table if that person had hit a stretch of bad luck and was hungry.

The lessons of Savilla Cooper were further amplified by Lewis’s mother, Carolyn Fugett, who urged her son to always deal compassionately with those less fortunate, something she did in deed as well as with words. She frequently gave monetary gifts to people. Clinton Lewis was also generous—in fact his restaurant business fell on hard times in part because he simply couldn’t turn away anyone who was hungry and couldn’t afford to pay for a meal.

Lewis possessed a mixture of toughness and tenderness akin to that of his mother. He turned away many of the endless proposals and requests for funding he was inundated with after he became one of America’s wealthiest men. But he was sufficiently caring to funnel a constant stream of money to projects and institutions he thought could have a positive impact on things.

In 1987, Lewis created The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation to manage his philanthropic activities.

“The genesis of that was, he understood the law and he understood how the law and society interacted,” Jean Fugett, Jr. says. “And he understood the role of institutions and he understood how historically we’ve been denied access to these institutions—political institutions, economic institutions, and philanthropic institutions. If you look at all these institutions that have a great deal of impact, some would say even a disproportionate impact, on the lives of people today and you look at society today, you can see that a way to attack it or approach it is institutionally.”

An institutional approach allowed Lewis to have a continuing influence on causes he was interested in, he believed.

Lewis used the same mindset for philanthropy that he employed for business: What’s the best way to maximize my power and influence? Early childhood education and pediatric preventative medicine were two of his pet issues. Lewis initially personally screened all proposals coming into his foundation, but that responsibility proved to be too time consuming and Lewis delegated it to his staff. He even appointed his oldest daughter, Leslie, to the board of The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, on her eighteenth birthday to instill in her a sense of doing the right thing.

Within four years of its inception, the Lewis Foundation had donated roughly $10 million to a variety of educational, civil rights, medical, and artistic institutions in the United States and in France. The year after the foundation was created, Lewis gave a total of $2 million in grants, including $1 million earmarked for Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, DC.

Some people interviewed for this book have cynically suggested that Lewis’s interest in charity was directly proportional to his interest in shaping his legacy and in wanting to buy a kinder, gentler image. That view is off the mark, because Lewis did much of his charity work without publicity. Also, the passion with which he addressed certain societal issues through philanthropy—particularly those affecting African-Americans—clearly came from the heart.

“Reg was concerned about the world in which he lived,” says Cleve Christophe, longtime friend until their falling out during the Beatrice deal. “I knew him for too many years and we discussed it far too many
times for me to believe that that was just a facade—it was not. I remember in 1986 he said, ‘Cleve, I have a very deep concern about the direction of our society, particularly as it relates to black males.’ That was long before the theme that is so prevalent today of, ‘What’s happening to black youth, the males in particular?’ He felt we had important roles to play—by example as well as by dint of what our success might enable us to do, in terms of philanthropy and otherwise.”

“When he gave the $1 million to Howard, I wanted a big press conference and a lot of publicity on it,” says Butch Meily, the spokesman for Beatrice. “He absolutely refused.” Instead, Lewis went to Howard without fanfare, handed over a check and did an interview with Howard’s television station.

Many people were surprised to learn of the scope of Lewis’s activities, which weren’t fully disclosed until after his death. “As it turned out, I didn’t know half the things he was doing,” says Jill Slattery, a friend from Lewis’s Harvard days. “One thing I remember him saying was that one way he could give back and help was to get to a certain point in life. I learned a whole lot at the funeral of how much he had given back.”

“No one really knew the true Reginald Lewis, because he was private,” his mother says. “He didn’t brag that he paid this for somebody, or he did that for somebody. His foundation was truly all his money—it did not come from some foundation or from the company, it came from him. A lot of people give a whole lot of money, but it comes through their corporations and they feed it from a profitable corporation into a nonprofit organization, but he didn’t do that. This is Reginald Lewis giving back, and the nicest thing about it is he did it while he was alive.”

In later years, Lewis made a one-time donation to his wife’s alma mater in the Philippines in memory of her late father. “The gift of $100,000 to the University of the Philippines, my university, was a complete shock,” Loida Lewis says. “He never gave me any inkling that he was going to do that and that he was going to do it in my father’s name and not his.”

But Lewis’s relatives, including his mother, knew better than to make charitable pledges under the assumption that he would subsidize them. “If you’re talking about saying to Reginald. ‘This is a charity I’d like you to support,’ I didn’t do that,” Carolyn Fugett says. There was one occasion where Fugett had forgotten she’d promised to donate
some money to a church group. As luck would have it, Lewis called shortly after she was reminded of her commitment.

“Mom, is there anything that you want to give something to?” he asked as though clairvoyant.

She told him about the pledge she’d made to St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Baltimore.

“Is your name on the line?” Lewis asked.

“You got it,” his mother replied.

“Well then, I’ll do it out of discretionary funds,” Lewis said, making $2,000 available to his mother. Lewis was a regular benefactor of St. Edward’s, including a $10,000 donation in 1989 for a new piano and an upgrade to the church’s sound system. St. Edward’s had been looking for $7,500. Carolyn Fugett was able to present the check in front of the congregation to enthusiastic applause.

After Lewis’s death in 1993, his uncle, James Cooper, insisted that Jean Fugett, Sr. go with Cooper to a Baltimore Lincoln-Mercury dealership. Sitting in the middle of the showroom floor was a new Lincoln Continental with a huge red ribbon wrapped around
it.
Loida Lewis, knowing that her late husband had wanted to surprise Jean Fugett, Sr. with a new car, carried out her husband’s unfulfilled wish.

When Lewis lived in Paris, he arranged for the Fugetts to fly to France on the Concorde, then go on an all-expense paid tour of Paris and the surrounding countryside.

At Christmas, Carolyn Fugett could usually expect a box full of jewelry from Tiffany’s from her son, while Jean Fugett, Sr. usually received Brooks Brothers suits, leather jackets, and the like. During one yuletide gathering, Jean Fugett, Sr. casually mentioned within earshot of Lewis that he’d like to operate a McDonald’s fast food franchise.

“Do you want one—seriously?” Lewis asked his stepfather. “I backed off, but evidently he was serious,” Jean Fugett, Sr. says. “He would have gotten me a franchise.”

Every Christmas Eve, Beatrice spokesman Butch Meily would take a check for $10,000 from his boss to the Rev. Calvin Butts, a high-profile civil rights activist and pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. From Lewis’s perspective, it undoubtedly didn’t hurt that Butts was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, the black fraternity Lewis joined at Virginia State.

The Kappa Alpha Psi New York Alumni Scholarship Foundation, Inc., is also a beneficiary of Lewis’s. His foundation gives at least $5,000 a year toward a $25,000 scholarship fund for New York City high school and college students. Lewis personally made the first contribution in 1989. After his death, the awards ceremony for handing out the 10 $2,500 individual scholarships was named the Reginald F. Lewis Memorial Scholarship Luncheon.

In January of 1990, Lewis gave $1 million in grants to predominantly African-American educational, artistic, and arts institutions. Among the institutions that received money from Lewis were the Mother Hale House in New York, which takes care of babies born to drug-addicted mothers. He also supported the Dance Theater of Harlem, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. “I am encouraged by the support of African-Americans to African-American endeavors, and want to be part of that,” Lewis said. “I share that African-American heritage and these institutions represent the kind of philanthropy I choose to support.”