Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (48 page)

Lewis looked elsewhere for answers. Figuring he might be carrying a pound or two too many, Lewis went on a diet, hoping that would invigorate him. He shed the weight successfully, but still couldn’t shake the fatigue. In the summer and early fall of 1992, came other changes in Lewis’s health. He started to become allergic to ice cream. Eating it made him hyperventilate, so he cut it out of his diet completely.

Then he became allergic to his beloved champagne, which would bring on the same physical symptoms as the ice cream. Described by close friends as someone who was a latent hypochondriac most of his life, now Lewis’s maladies were all too real.

By the time summer rolled around, Jean Fugett, Jr. was concerned enough about his brother that he was making frequent calls to France from the United States.

Lewis visited TLC Beatrice’s Manhattan headquarters in August. Robert Davenport, who worked briefly as Lewis’s director of business development, dropped by briefly to see his old boss.

“He was sitting in his office and he didn’t get up when I walked into the office. So I walked over to him and shook hands and he never stood up.”

It was an uncharacteristically reflective Lewis that began talking to Davenport. “His death put into very sharp focus the conversation we had, which sounded a lot like a retirement speech,” Davenport says.

Lewis told his former employee, “I just wanted to take the company public, but that didn’t work out. I’m comfortable now and I don’t need to make any lifestyle adjustments,” Lewis said. “Things are on track and running well. I’m really sort of comfortable where I am and I’m really going to pull back a bit.”

When it was time for Davenport to leave, Lewis got up to escort him to the door.

“Reg, goodness you’ve dropped a lot of weight!” Davenport exclaimed.

“Oh, a diet—I’ve really cut out all the meat and alcohol,” Lewis responded.

In September an old schoolmate from Lewis’s Virginia State days, John “City” Green, came to visit the head of TLC Beatrice in Paris. Chairman of the board of regents of Morgan State University, a historically black school in Baltimore, Green wanted to talk to Lewis about increasing his philanthropic aid to Morgan. Lewis’s foundation had already given $50,000 to Morgan to establish the Reginald F. Lewis Scholarship.

“My god, City, I haven’t seen you in years,” Lewis said as he shook hands with, then hugged his Kappa Alpha Psi frat brother. “This is something I need to do more of.”

In addition to admiring Lewis’s classy charcoal brown suit, Green noticed something else about his old friend. “I came away with the feeling that he wasn’t feeling well or was tired or something,” Green recalls. “I just attributed it to the trans-Atlantic lifestyle. He didn’t seem as intense as I would have expected him to be after remembering him from school. But then I said to myself, ‘Maybe it’s because he wasn’t with people in business with him.’”

In October, Lewis flew out to California to visit Michael Milken in prison camp, where Milken was sent after being convicted of stock manipulation charges. As usual, Lewis was preoccupied with a potential business acquisition. “He was looking at Paramount independent of me,” Milken remembers. “Paramount stock at the time was $40 to $41 a share. That was our last extensive conversation. We walked around the visiting area and there was a gleam in his eye and he was energized.” Lewis also talked about his family. “He loved to talk about his girls,” Milken says.

Milken also noticed subtle changes in Lewis’s demeanor. “His voice didn’t have the same ring to it,” Milken remembers. “He then gave me a five-six-minute lecture on beauty. And art. The twinkle in his eye was there in late 1992 when I was with him. The twinkle in his voice was not there.”

By Thanksgiving, something was undeniably amiss with Lewis’s health. He was beginning to have vision problems in his left eye. He
told a concerned Loida Lewis that he planned to fly to the United States to undergo a thorough physical exam, which had been scheduled for his 50th birthday. A battery of tests was conducted on Lewis, including a CAT scan. It revealed an ominous looking growth inside Lewis’s brain.

As a doctor explained the test results to Lewis, he felt himself going numb with incredulity. And the somber expression on the physician’s face filled Lewis’s heart with trepidation. He sat for a minute in the examining room after the doctor had left, collecting himself. Then, he walked on leaden legs to a telephone and called his wife in Paris. “Something is wrong and they don’t know what,” Lewis said in a monotone. “A CAT scan showed something on my brain and they want to do a biopsy.” Loida and Christina Lewis were on the next plane from Paris to New York.

The biopsy was performed and it confirmed the Lewises’ worst fears: Reginald Lewis had brain cancer. Due to the size and location of the tumor it was inoperable. If left untreated, Lewis would have roughly six to eight weeks to live, the doctors estimated. Radiation treatment was the only treatment option, but the odds of eradicating the cancer were nominal, the Lewises were told.

His mind still sharp and his analytical approach to problem solving very much intact, Lewis wanted to know about the potential negative side effects associated with radiation treatment. He was told that his memory and powers of reasoning might be impaired, and there might be a loss of bodily function. Hair loss was pretty much a definite.

For a brief while Lewis toyed with the idea of undergoing radiation sessions. He even went through the motions of talking to a physician who would administer the radiation treatments. But in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Under his risk/benefit analysis, the chances of radiation being successful were practically nil, but without it, at least his faculties would remain intact. He couldn’t fathom the notion of having his mental faculties impaired and succumbing to cancer in a few months anyway.

On December 8, one day after Lewis’s birthday, he received an award in Manhattan from the New York Urban Coalition, in what would be his last public appearance. Later that day, Lewis’s butler received an unusual request from his boss. Lewis wanted Lucien Stoutt
to cut the meat on his plate, because Lewis was unable to hold the fork in his left hand.

“Lucien, it’s not like when we used to be at East Hampton, playing tennis,” Lewis told Stoutt as the butler quietly sliced Lewis’s meal into manageable pieces.

Four days after his diagnosis, an emotional, sobbing Reginald Lewis called his mother in Baltimore to break the horrible news. He simply told her that he’d had a CAT scan that showed a brain tumor.

“Well, let me come up and be with you,” Carolyn Fugett said calmly, fighting to keep her own surging emotions in check.

“I don’t want to take you away from the family,” Lewis said.

“Well, look at it this way: Loida can be with you and I’ll be with Leslie and Christina.”

“Okay, Mom, that would be nice.”

They got off the phone, ending one of the worst telephone calls any parent can get from an offspring.

“I felt that I had died inside, truthfully, when I heard him,” Carolyn Fugett says. “Before the CAT scan, you could tell something was wrong. I guess the mother in me knew that he wasn’t in the best of health.”

Only a select group of family members were told of Lewis’s malady. Tony and Jean Fugett knew, as did James Cooper, the uncle Lewis was particularly close to.

“He just said, ‘I have cancer,’” Cooper remembers. “The reason I knew he didn’t have long to live is because he said, ‘I don’t want you to see me, because you wear your feelings on your sleeve. I want you to pray for me, because it’s serious.’ When he said it that way, I knew it was serious.”

As the shock and disbelief gradually wore off, Lewis resolved to fight his cancer rather than surrender meekly to it. He was also determined not to let his illness derail his life.

“He was tired, but he’d talk in the car sometimes about future plans,” says Lewis’s chauffeur and bodyguard, Ed Gregg. “He’d talk about buying things—hotels, that sort of thing. I guess his mind was always going on a business cycle.”

Indeed, the beat never stopped in terms of Lewis presiding over Beatrice and conducting its affairs. His mother says Lewis would wheel and deal over the telephone at home.

“He was taking care of business,” Carolyn Fugett marvels. In the last few weeks before his death, Lewis initiated a currency swap that resulted in a tidy gain for the company.

Meanwhile, only two executives at TLC Beatrice were told that the chairman was seriously ill. Another person who figured it out after a phone call from Lewis was Charles Clarkson. On a leave of absence from TLC Beatrice at the time, Clarkson who suffered from a spinal tumor while under Lewis’s employ some years back, was compassionately given plenty of time to recuperate.

“I just wanted to talk to you because I know you had been ill,” Lewis said, prompting Clarkson to immediately suspect Lewis had cancer. Any remaining doubt Clarkson harbored was alleviated after Lewis said he might need to see Clarkson’s brother-in-law, who is a radiation oncologist in a Manhattan hospital.

“Reg, do you want me to call him for you?” Clarkson asked.

“Well, maybe if I go I’ll talk to you,” Lewis said.

Without telling Clarkson, Lewis quietly saw the physician. He scheduled a number of appointments for radiation treatments, but never followed through.

Lewis did try to reach out to Kevin Wright, but because of the nature of their relationship and because Lewis was too private to discuss his illness, they missed a chance to connect one last time. “On a couple of occasions the message came back to me, ‘Reg wants to see you.’ But with Reg, I never just showed up—I waited until I was summoned. If I had known he was that ill, I would have just gone over.”

Despite the hospital visits, it was becoming obvious to Lewis and those around that the malignant growth inside his head was starting to overtake him.

“In the space of about two weeks, you could see he was sick,” Lucien Stoutt says. “He slept more than usual.” Plus the bright smile and flashing eyes Stoutt had grown accustomed to were absent.

Ed Gregg says Lewis’s children were very quiet and obviously upset as their father was fighting for his life. Loida Lewis, who possesses vast reserves of quiet inner strength, maintained her equilibrium. “You could see it wearing on her,” Gregg remembers. “I guess he was
such a dominant figure in their lives that to see him get sick was probably a big shock to them.”

As if life weren’t topsy-turvy enough, in December the Lewises moved from their brownstone on 22nd Street to a spectacular two-level, 15-room East Side co-op that once belonged to former automaker John DeLorean. In some respects, the distraction was a welcome one.

Lewis spent New Year’s Eve hosting a black tie dinner party for close friends and the family. January 1, 1993—a Friday—was quiet. He stayed with his family. The brain cancer had now dramatically weakened his left side and he often needed assistance in order to move around. The vision in his left eye was also demolished. An independent and proud man, Lewis hated the vulnerability and dependence brought on by his illness.

“As he lost control of the left side of his body, I became his left side,” Tony Fugett says. “No one else could touch him or watch him or be around him. In the morning I was there when he was up, and I was there when he went to sleep at night. I almost became like an extension of him.”

However, Lewis resolutely refused to wallow in self pity, nor did his optimism wane. Shortly after New Year’s Day, Lewis called up Charles Clarkson. “I want to wish you a Happy New Year,” Lewis told his longtime colleague. “I’m still struggling, but I’m strong. I know I’ll beat this thing.” Lewis never did tell Clarkson what his malady was.

Because Lewis’s hospital treatments didn’t appear to be working, Loida Lewis suggested that he try something outside the realm of conventional medicine. A faith healer who was famous in the Philippines could be flown to New York to see if he could arrest Lewis’s illness. The healer claimed to have the ability to touch sick people and literally pull their maladies out of their bodies.

Lewis flatly rejected the proposal at first. But after some more thought, he figured it certainly couldn’t hurt. So the healer was flown to Manhattan and put up in a hotel not far from the Lewises’ new residence near Central Park. The mystic was supposed to conduct healing
sessions in Lewis’s home that were to take place over five days. The first session started during the first full week of January 1993.

“At the beginning, we thought it was for real, but it was fake,” Loida Lewis says. “When we looked closely, it was just sleight of hand.”

Tony Fugett, who was also present, told his brother that the healer was a fraud. “What!” exclaimed Lewis, who wanted to believe in the mystic’s abilities.

Fugett, who can be hot-tempered like his big brother, was furious, but he held it in. “He was palming and he wasn’t a fucking good palmer, either,” Fugett says of the faith healer. “But my focus was more on Reg than this phony bastard. I was angry at his decision to go forward, because Reg still made all the decisions.”

Yet, Fugett understands why his brother agreed to see the mystic. “He wasn’t desperate, but he felt that there had to be some cure somewhere and he would do whatever he could to find something.”

Even though Lewis, his wife, and his brother had seen through the faith healer, he was allowed to continue, though his sessions were cut from five days to three. Fugett asked his brother if he still intended to pay the man?