The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (26 page)

Dr. Messer seems to be stating a peculiarly baffling paradox. The type of man most likely to grow very, very rich is the type of man least likely to enjoy it.

Conversely, those of us who might enjoy it may not make it.

Work worship.
On the other hand, perhaps the rich enjoy their lives after all. It makes no sense for one man to say what another man is supposed to enjoy. It might be that the very, very rich derive as much pleasure from their work as most ordinary men derive from their marriages, children, sports, hobbies and TV sets.

For a worship of work, an absolute love of it, is notable among the shared traits of the great self-made rich. It is a commonly accepted item of public dogma that the rich spend lives of idle and sometimes deliciously sinful luxury, but this is an illusion arising from the fact that stories of the rich at play make better copy than stories of the rich at work. A tycoon might work 30 straight 14-hour days, but no newspaper would consider the fact worth mentioning. But let the poor fellow seek a day of rest, let him be discovered crocked at a party, let him be seen chasing bird and bunny, and the garishly embellished story will appear in the next day’s society columns.

The rich work – either because they enjoy it or because they feel driven to do it. Many of them (Joe Hirshhorn, for instance) admit quite frankly that their compulsion to work has destroyed their marriages and hurt their relationships with their children and perhaps damaged other components of their personal lives. They sometimes talk about this in a sad and apologetic way, but they always end with a shrug. There’s nothing they can do about it. Work is part of their being. They can no more easily change their work habits than they can change the color of their eyes.

The
Chicago Tribune
once asked reporter Richard Gosswiller to roam around the city, talk to a lot of rich men and ask what advice they’d give to a man seeking wealth today. Gosswiller’s report appears in chapter 23, but there was an odd little fact that he didn’t include in the report, an apt demonstration of the compulsion to work that exists among the rich.

“One of the things I still find hardest to believe,” says Gosswiller, “is that almost all these men were in their offices when I called. You’d think, with all that money, they’d be off somewhere relaxing and enjoying it. But, no, they were all hard at work. It occurred to me that maybe this was the real secret of getting rich, even though none of them mentioned it: Be compulsive.”

We’ve contemplated the career of Clement Stone, salesman. Now let’s look at two men who are Stone-plus-something. Not only salesmen – promoters.

What is a promoter?
Webster’s New International Dictionary
defines him as somebody who “. . . sets on foot and takes the preliminary steps in a scheme or undertaking. . .” Well, yes, that’s true as far as it goes. An initiator, in other words.

But that definition could be applied with perfect accuracy to almost everybody you’ll meet in this book. Something must be lacking from the dictionary definition, for the word fits only a few, even stretched as far as it will stretch.

The truth is, the word
promoter
, as Americans use it, has a strong emotional element, an element of attitude and approach that is very hard to define with an acceptable degree of precision. A promoter is something like a salesman only more so. He sells, yes. As
Webster’s
tells us, he also initiates. But he does more. He follows through. He tends and nurtures. He inseminates, he raises to maturity, he harvests. And he does all this in a brash, aggressive, unembarrassed, brassy, pushy way that is believed around the world to be, in some obscure way, peculiarly American. (The accuracy of this belief would be an intriguing subject of inquiry for some other book, not for this one. My personal observation is that the average healthy Swiss or Frenchman, with a good head of steam behind him and a large magnetic pile of money in front of him, can outbrass the average American without even trying. But no matter. What’s important is that the belief exists: All promoters are Americans. As a matter of fact there is no word in either French or German that has precisely the same meaning, with the same connotations and emotional overtones, as
promoter
in English.)

A promoter tends to shock people by his way of doing things. Sometimes – as in the first case you’ll read below – he is accused of behaving dishonestly, of breaking or bending the law. In fact, the word carries with it a faint aroma of shady dealings. Yet it often appears, when his deals are examined closely, that they are neither unlawful nor even shady. They are only clever. This, plus the cheerful brassiness with which they are carried out, can startle and irritate those who are watching from the sidelines. “Why, the gall of the man!” the sideliners gasp. And, deep inside, each sideliner asks himself, “Why don’t I ever have the guts to do something like that?” The promoter’s reputation for trickiness springs from the observers’ jealousy more often than from any moral failing in the promoter himself.

Perhaps it could be said, in the end, that the promoter’s key character trait is impatience. He wants to make things happen
fast
. Driven by this urge, he hustles twice as fast as other men. He refuses to be stopped by things that other men would meekly accept as barriers. If he can’t go around a barrier, he kicks it down. He makes a lot of noise and doesn’t seem to care. And people keep saying, “Why, the
gall
. . .”

The gall of Glenn W. Turner, the first of this breed we’ll visit, cannot be doubted. Turner began life as the son of a dirt-poor farmer in South Carolina. He tried being a salesman of other people’s products but didn’t make a go of it – indicating that a salesman and a promoter are not quite the same thing. Then he borrowed $5000 and, by sheer promotion, multiplied it in three short years to a fortune of more than $100 million. In the process he made many people very angry – including a number of law-enforcement officials.

As reporter Thomas Thompson tells us below in his witty and somewhat startled way, Glenn Turner is essentially a promoter of ideas, not things. It’s true that his original small company was formed to sell cosmetics, and it’s true that cosmetics are things. But it was the
idea
of beauty rather than the
thing
of cosmetics that Turner really set out to promote, and from that base he branched out into a bewildering variety of other ventures, pyramiding one idea on top of another.

One of Turner’s newest ideas is a success course similar to those of Clement Stone and Paul Meyer, the Waco fortune teacher. You’ll note that some of Turner’s success formulas resemble Stone’s and Meyer’s quite closely, and some of Turner’s self-needling phrases and course titles (“Do it now”; “Positive mental attitude”) are pure Stone. But the main title of Turner’s course is pure Turner: “Dare to Be Great!”

The word
dare
and exclamation mark, these are pure promoter.

The office itself takes
some
getting used to. It has eggshell carpet deep enough to hide in, a massive desk on which rests an open Bible and a silver Rolls-Royce toy (when one twists the spare tire, it becomes a music box and tinkles
The Impossible Dream
), furniture of snowy vinyl and suede appropriate to a high roller’s suite in any good Las Vegas hotel, a wide-screen picture window of bulletproof glass whose view is of an interior business corridor, and two dominant oil paintings. One painting is directly behind Turner’s chair and represents a sharecropper trudging behind a mule. “This is Mr. Turner’s yesterday,” explains an aide, referring to her employer’s birth and childhood on a South Carolina farm. The second painting, which Turner faces as he does business, shows a rocket ship streaking through the cosmos, onward and upward through a shower of comets and exploding stars. “This,” says the assistant with an almost reverent prophecy in her voice, “is Mr. Turner’s tomorrow.”

It is today, the here and now, that makes Turner, who is only 36, of interest, an only-in-America phenomenon. A little more than three years back he was broke and bankrupt – a familiar condition for the eighth-grade dropout whose lack of education is matched by the fact that he was born with a harelip and still speaks with the unfortunate handicap. But, as he tells the story, he borrowed $5000 in 1967 to start a cosmetics company, “the field with the highest profit potential in business – they powder ’em when they come into the world and paint ’em when they go out” – and set up shop in a one-room office in Orlando, Florida, so chosen because the city was near both Cape Kennedy and the then-just-announced Disney World. He named it Koscot Interplanetary, Inc.

Using unorthodox business techniques, so unorthodox that at least 20 state attorneys general have investigated him and several were moved to file various court actions against him, Turner claims nonetheless to have built an empire that has swept the country from sea to sea, moved into at least nine foreign countries on four continents, branched out into helicopter manufacturing and sales, a wig company, a mink house that markets everything from fur-covered golf tees to $5000 maxicoats, a music-recording firm and several other enterprises that at last count consisted of 37 corporations employing some 200,000 people (mostly salesmen) and valued – by Turner’s own estimate, since he owns 100% of the stock – at somewhere between $100 million and $200 million.

His latest endeavor, a self-motivation course called “Dare to Be Great,” will someday become, predicts Turner, “the international language of the world.” Turner dreamed up the course as a way to spread his personal philosophy, i.e., that within every human being lies a great pool of resources largely untapped, doomed to grow stagnant. He originally planned to call his course “Dare to Be Big,” but he feared that women, particularly plump women, would not want to be any bigger. Now he has grandiose plans to install it as a course in every high school in America (“If we could start each day with ‘Dare to Be Great,’ then there’d be no more student protest”), to build colleges around its philosophy, to translate it into the languages of the world. Already linguists are converting the lessons into German and Italian.

“Dare to Be Great” comes in a large, fat black briefcase that, when opened, contains 20 tape cassettes, a tape recorder and a white plastic notebook that repeats – in print – the same material on the tapes. There are 20 chapters, called “orbits” in deference to Turner’s enchantment with outer space. The introduction page offers advice to the student who wishes to become great:

“Congratulations! You have just decided to change your life. You are now in the process of becoming a new man. William James, the father of American philosophy, said, ‘The greatest discovery of my generation is that we have learned we can alter our lives by altering our attitudes of mind.’

“Play the cassette tapes over and over again. The power of timed repetition is immeasurable. For example, tell a person something repeatedly and this is what happens: The first time he says, ‘I don’t believe it.’ The second time he says, ‘Well, maybe so.’ The third time he says, ‘Well, it kind of makes sense.’ The fourth time, ‘I believe I’ll try that.’ The fifth time, ‘That’s great, I used it today!’ ”

When one browses through the textbook and listens to the cassettes, the material seems innocuous, familiar, sometimes naive, hardly destined to wake up a sick and weary world. It is Dale Carnegie, Emile Coué and all the other self-improvement wheezes all over again. There are quotations from Disraeli, Goethe, Chesterfield, Seneca, Emerson, even Napoleon – “Imagination rules the world.” Mostly it is a potpourri of salesman patter and a coach’s pep talk: “Develop a Positive Mental Attitude! Remember Everybody’s Name! Do It Now! Don’t Put It Off Until Tomorrow! If you have the intelligence to lean down and tie your shoestrings, you can reach up and lace the stars!”

But when one learns that it can cost up to $5000 to take the complete course – four “adventures” that will eventually consist of some 40 tapes and a dozen seminars – one realizes that the amount of money Turner could make off his philosophy might someday approximate the budget of an emerging, if not developing, country.

Turner approaches each day as if he had just been shot out of the Zacchini Brother circus cannon. He comes on like a hurricane boring across central Florida. He shakes hands with a grip that could rip a telephone book in half. “I love to lift weights,” he explains. “It makes you feel you can pick up the side of a house. You can’t, of course: so instead you go out and do something
great
!”
Great
is the key word. It pops up in the man’s every fourth sentence paired with an equal number of
Fan-tas-tics
! He travels more than a presidential candidate does the week before elections. One day’s schedule might read, “Breakfast meeting, San Francisco; lunch address, Reno; dinner speech, Phoenix; 10:00 P.M. conference, El Paso.” The schedule could just as easily read Singapore or London or Sydney, because he has been to all of them in the past few months, spreading the word, selling “Dare to Be Great.”

“In London 300 people came to the airport in a rain and cried when I left. They begged me to stay there and help them,” said Turner, who seemed totally amazed at the reaction. Fifteen years earlier, in the U.S, Army, his sergeant had detailed him to scrubbing toilets to keep him and his harelip out of sight.

He travels four days out of five. There is scant time for his wife, Alice, a tall, gentle, blue-eyed Tennessee blonde who affects complicated hairdos and who could command the front line in any theatrical production where a certain remote sexiness was required. When he does find an off afternoon, Turner gathers up Alice, their three sons and baby daughter, and they set off on a houseboat, meandering up the St. Johns River, past cypress, past suspicious-looking logs that
might
be alligators, into the quiet and the stillness. Turner pulls his engine back to its most gentle speed when passing an old black fisherman asleep on a bank. “I commit myself so totally to my family on these days,” he says, “that there can be no doubt in their minds as to my love. They understand why I can’t be with them more.”

Nor is there time for a social or intellectual life. The last book Turner remembers reading and liking was
The Carpetbaggers
. “I’m gonna be bigger than Howard Hughes someday,” he said as he shut its cover. When he dines, he does not look at his food or, quite probably, even taste it. He went to see
Love Story
and four days later could not remember being there, because his mind had been racing throughout: his own dreams and schemes were more vivid than anything he could see on the screen.

On a very recent day, while scuttling across the country 40,000 feet up in his Lear Jet, one of 11 aircraft operated by his personal fleet, Glenn-Aire, Turner was engrossed in plans to (1) buy or start a newspaper, because he is upset with the existing publication in Orlando, which often attacks him or, worse, ignores him, (2) start a panty-hose company, (3) create a cash credit card wherein a customer would get a 10% discount at a vast network of stores around the country if he paid in hard money, (4) build a chain of motels called Commuter Inns whose mother house would be a 42-storey wonder in Orlando, erected in the shape of a rocket ship and whose guests would endure both countdown and blast-off to reach their rooms. And, while working his way through an enormous stack of mail, he suddenly looked up and announced, “I’m thinking about starting my own post office. I have the network already. I can deliver anything anywhere in one day.”

The fact that Turner was flying at the moment from Orlando to Boston, where he would address a mock United Nations Assembly sponsored by Harvard law students and where he would coincidentally attend a dinner for possible Democratic presidential candidate Senator Harold Hughes, was not lost on me, either. Particularly when a remark that Turner had made a day or two earlier was so fresh in mind. He had been showing me around his now-vast headquarters in Orlando, a blue metallic building that seems to stretch on longer than a Cape Kennedy hangar, and I had asked if he was interested in politics, in running for elective office. “I wouldn’t want to be a senator or a president,” he had said. “But I wouldn’t mind being a king maker.” He said that he would never be so presumptuous as to tell his huge number of employees how to vote – “but it certainly wouldn’t hurt some candidate if I announced how I
personally
was voting.”