Then, suddenly, all four of them were holding each other, emotionally, as if they never wanted to be separate again.
Soon after it was Lisa, aged ten, who broke away and, going to a bathroom, brought back wet towels with which, competently, she wiped her father’s face and washed away the blood.
Much later, when the children were again in bed and sleeping, Andrew and Celia came together, making love with a passionate, wild abandon, greater by far than they had experienced for a long time. Near the peak of their frantic coupling, Celia cried out, “Deeper! Deeper! Hurt me!” And Andrew, relinquishing all gentleness, seized her, crushed her, and thrust himself into her, roughly, crudely, deeply, again and again.
It was as if their earlier fierceness had released passions other than anger, passions which suddenly coalesced.
Afterward, though exhausted, they talked far into the night and again next day. “It was the kind of talk,” Andrew said later, “which we’ve needed to have, yet both of us put off.”
What each conceded was that, for the most part, there had been unpleasant truths in the other’s accusations.
“Yes,” Celia admitted, “I have relaxed some standards I once had. Not all, or even most, but some. And there have been times I’ve put my conscience in my pocket. I’m not proud of it, and I’d like to say I’ll go back to the way things were before, but I have to be honest—at least in this—and say I’m not certain if I can.”
“I guess,” Andrew said, “all of it goes with growing older. You think you’re wiser, more seasoned, and you are. But you’ve also learned along the way that there are obstacles and practicalities which idealism won’t ever conquer, so you ease up on ideals.”
“I intend to try to do better,” Celia said. “I really do. To make sure that what happened to us here will not be wasted.”
“I guess that goes for us both,” Andrew said.
Earlier he had told Celia, “You touched a nerve when you asked if I lie awake sometimes, wondering about Wyrazik’s death and perhaps some others. Could I have saved Wyrazik by acting sooner about Noah? Yes, I could, and it’s no good saying otherwise and living with delusions. The only thing I can say is that there isn’t anyone who’s been years in medicine who doesn’t have something in the past to look back on and know he could have done better, and perhaps saved somebody who died. Of course, it shouldn’t happen often, but if it does, the best you can do is hope that what you learned you’ll use later on for the benefit of someone else.”
A postscript to what happened was that next day Andrew had three stitches in his face, put there by a local médico who observed with a smile as his patient left, “Probably a scar stays, Doctor. It will serve as a reminder to your wife.” Since Andrew had earlier described the cut as the result of a fall while climbing, it merely showed that Quito was a small place where gossip traveled fast.
“I feel terrible about that,” Celia said. It was a few hours later and they were having lunch with the children.
“No need to,” Andrew reassured her. “There was a moment when I felt like doing the same thing. But you were the one who happened to have a shoe handy. Besides, my aim isn’t nearly as good as yours.”
Celia shook her head. “Don’t joke about it.”
It was then that Bruce, who had been silent through the meal, spoke up and asked, “Will you get a divorce now?” His small, serious face was tightly set, reflecting worry, making it clear the question had been weighing on him for some time.
Andrew was about to answer flippantly when Celia stopped him with a gesture. “Brucie,” she said gently, “I promise and swear to you that as long as your father and I live, that will never happen.”
“That goes for me too,” Andrew added, and their son’s face lighted up in a radiant smile, as did Lisa’s beside him.
“I’m glad,” Bruce said simply, and it seemed a fitting end to a nightmare which was past.
There were other, happier journeys the family shared during the lustrum spent by Celia with International Sales. As to Celia’s career, the period proved overall successful, enhancing her reputation at Felding-Roth headquarters. She even, despite opposition within the company, managed to achieve some headway in having the labeling of Felding-Roth drugs sold in Latin America come closer to the precise standards required by law in the United States. However, as she admitted frankly to Andrew, the progress was “not much.”
“The day will come,” Celia predicted, “when someone will bring this whole subject out into the open. Then, either new laws or public opinion will compel us to do what we should have been doing all along. But that time isn’t yet.”
An idea whose time had come was encountered by Celia in Peru. There, a large part of the Felding-Roth sales force was composed of women. The reason, Celia learned, was not liberation; it was sales. In Peru it is considered rude to keep a woman waiting; therefore in doctors’ offices detail women were ushered into a doctor’s presence quickly, ahead of male competitors who might have to wait for hours.
The discovery prompted a long memorandum from Celia to Sam Hawthorne urging recruitment of more detail women on Felding-Roth’s U.S. sales force for the same reason. “I remember from my own time as a detail woman,” Celia wrote, “that while sometimes I had to wait to see doctors, at other times they saw me quickly, and I think it was because I was a woman, so why not use that to our advantage?”
In a subsequent discussion Sam put the question: “Isn’t what you’re suggesting a way of advancing women for the wrong reason? That’s not women’s lib. That’s just using women’s femininity.”
“And why not?” Celia shot back. “Men have used their masculinity for centuries, often to women’s disadvantage, so it’s our turn now. Anyway, man or woman, we’re all entitled to make the most of what we have.”
In the end, Celia’s memo was taken seriously and began a process in Felding-Roth which, during the years that followed, was copied enthusiastically by other drug houses.
And during all this time, beyond the pharmaceutical business, outside events marched on. The tragedy of Vietnam was taking shape and worsening, with young Americans—the cream of a generation—being slain by tiny people in black pajamas, and no one really knowing why. A rock-music cult called “Woodstock Nation” flared briefly, then burned out. In Czechoslovakia the Soviet Union brutally extinguished freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were savagely assassinated. Nixon became President, Golda Meir prime minister of Israel. Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis. Eisenhower died. Kissinger went to China, Armstrong to the moon, Edward Kennedy to Chappaquiddick.
Then, in February 1972, Sam Hawthorne, at age fifty-one, became president and chief executive officer of Felding-Roth. His accession to power was sudden, and occurred at a difficult, critical period in the company’s history.
7
Sam Hawthorne, in the jargon of the times, was a Renaissance man. He had a multiplicity of interests, indoors and out, intellectual and athletic.
He was at heart a scholar who, despite heavy involvement in business, managed to keep alive a lifelong, well-informed love of literature, art and music. In foreign cities, no matter how great the pressures of work Sam would somehow find time to visit bookstores, galleries and concerts. In painting he favored the Impressionists, inclining to Monet and Pissarro. In sculpture his great love was Rodin. Lilian Hawthorne once told a friend that in Paris, in the garden of the Rodin Museum, she had seen her husband stand silent for fifteen minutes contemplating “The Burghers of Calais,” much of the time with tears in his eyes.
In music, Sam’s passion was Mozart. A proficient pianist himself, though not a brilliant one, he liked to have a piano in his hotel suite while on trips and play something from Mozart, perhaps the Sonata No. 11 in A—the grave and clear Andante, the quickening Menuetto, and finally the joyous Turkish Rondo, sending his spirits soaring after a tiring day.
The fact that he had a piano in what was usually a luxury suite was because he paid for
such things himself. He could afford to. Sam was independently wealthy and owned a substantial amount of Felding-Roth stock, having inherited it from his mother who died when he was young.
His mother had been a Roth, and Sam was the last member of either the Felding or Roth clan to be involved in company management. Not that his family connections had made much, if any, difference to his career; they hadn’t, particularly as he neared the top. What Sam had achieved was through ability and integrity, and the fact was widely recognized.
At home, Sam and Lilian Hawthorne’s marriage was solid and both adored Juliet, now fifteen and apparently unspoiled despite the adoration.
In athletics Sam had been a long-distance runner in college and still enjoyed an early morning run several times a week. He was an enthusiastic and fairly successful tennis player, though the enthusiasm was stronger than his style. Sam’s greatest asset on the court was a vicious volley at the net, making him a popular doubles partner.
But dominating all outside interests, sporting or cerebral, was the fact that Sam Hawthorne was an Anglophile.
For as long as he could remember he had loved visiting England, and felt an admiration and affinity for most things English—traditions, language, education, humor, style, the monarchy, London, the countryside, classic cars. In line with the last preference, he owned and drove to work each day a superb silver-gray Rolls-Bentley.
Something else that held Sam’s high opinion was British—not just English—science, and it was this conviction that prompted an original, daring proposal during the opening months of his Felding-Roth presidency.
In a confidential, written submission to the board of directors he set out some stark, unpleasant facts.
“In drug research and production—our raison d’être—our company is in a barren, dispiriting period which has extended far beyond the ‘flat spell’ experienced by this industry generally. Our last major breakthrough was with Lotromycin, nearly fifteen years ago. Since then, while competitors have introduced major, successful new drugs, we have had only minor ones. Nor do we have anything startling in sight.
“All this has had a depressing effect on our company’s reputation and morale. Equally depressing has been the effect on finances. It is the reason we reduced our dividend last year, an action which caused the value of our stock to plummet, and it is still out of favor with investors.
“We have begun internal belt tightening, but this is not enough. In two to three years, if we fail to produce a strong, positive program for the future we will face a financial crisis of the gravest kind.”
What Sam did not say was that his predecessor as president and CEO, who had been dismissed after a confrontation with the board, had followed a top-level policy of “drift” which, in large part, had reduced Felding-Roth Pharmaceuticals to its present sorry state.
Instead, and having set the stage, Sam moved on to his proposal.
“I strongly and urgently recommend,” he wrote, “that we create a Felding-Roth Research Institute in Britain. The institute would be headed by a topflight British scientist. It would be independent of our research activities in the United States.”
After more details he added, “I profoundly believe the new suggested research arm would strengthen our most critical resource area and hasten discovery of the important new drugs our company so desperately needs.”
Why Britain?
Anticipating the question, Sam proceeded to answer it.
“Traditionally, through centuries, Britain has been a world leader in basic scientific research. Within this century alone, consider some of the great discoveries which were British in origin and which changed our way of life dramatically—penicillin, television, modern radar, the airplane jet engine, to name just four.
“Of course,” Sam pointed out, “it was American companies which developed those inventions and reaped commercial benefits—this because of the unique ability of Americans to develop and market, an ability the British so often lack. But the original discoveries, in those and other instances, were British.
“If you asked me for a reason,” he continued, “I would say there are fundamental, inherent differences between British and American higher education. Each system has its strengths. But in Britain the differences produce an academic and scientific curiosity unmatched elsewhere. It is that same curiosity we can, and should, harness to our advantage.”
Sam dealt at length with costs, then concluded, “It can be argued that embarking on a major costly project at this critical time in our company’s existence is reckless and ill-advised. And, yes, a new research institute will be a heavy financial burden. But I believe it would be even more reckless, even more ill-advised, to continue to drift and not take strong, positive, daring action for the future—action which is needed now!”
Opposition to Sam Hawthorne’s plan surfaced with astounding speed and strength.
The proposal was, as someone put it, “scarcely out of the Xerox machine” and beginning to circulate among company directors and a few senior officers when Sam’s telephone began ringing, the callers forceful with objections. “Sure the Brits have had their scientific glories,” one director argued, “but nowadays American achievements far exceed them, so your whole contention, Sam, is laughable.” Others focused on—as one board member expressed it heatedly—“the absurd and backward-looking notion of locating a research center in an effete, run-down, has-been country.”
“You’d have thought,” Sam confided to Lilian a few evenings later over dinner, “that I’d suggested canceling the Declaration of Independence and taking us back to colonial status.”
Something Sam was learning quickly was that holding the company’s top job neither gave him carte blanche to do as he wished nor freed him from the shifting sands of corporate politics.
A practicing expert in company politics was the director of research, Vincent Lord, also an immediate objector to Sam’s proposal. While agreeing that more money should be spent on research, Dr. Lord described the idea of doing so in Britain as “naïve” and Sam Hawthorne’s view of British science as “kindergarten thinking, founded on a propaganda myth.”
The unusually strong, even insulting words were in a memo addressed to Sam, with a copy to a friend and ally of Vince Lord’s on the board of directors. On first reading the memo, Sam burned with anger and, leaving his office, sought out Vincent Lord on the research director’s own ground.
Walking on impeccable polished floors through the research division’s glass-lined, air-filtered corridors, Sam was reminded of the many millions of dollars, virtually limitless sums, expended by Felding-Roth on research equipment—modern, computerized, gleaming, occasionally mysterious—housed in pleasant, spacious laboratories and served by an army of white-coated scientists and technicians. What was here represented an academic scientist’s dream, but was a norm for any major pharmaceutical company. The money poured into drug research was seldom, if ever, stinted. It was only the specifics of expenditure which occasionally, as now, became a subject for argument.
Vincent Lord was in his paneled, book-lined, brightly lighted office. The door was open and Sam Hawthorne walked in, nodding casually to a secretary outside who had been about to stop him—then, seeing who it was, changed her mind. Dr. Lord, in a white coat over shirtsleeves, was at his desk, frowning as he so often did, at this moment over a paper he was reading. He looked up in surprise, his dark eyes peering through rimless glasses, his ascetic face showing annoyance at the unannounced intrusion.
Sam had been carrying Lord’s memo. Putting it on the desk, he announced, “I came to talk about this.”
The research director made a halfhearted gesture of rising, but Sam waved him down. “Informal, Vince,” Sam said. “Informal, and some face-to-face, blunt talking.”
Lord glanced at the memo on his desk, leaning forward shortsightedly to confirm its subject matter. “What don’t you like about it?”
“The content and the tone.”
“What els
e is there?”
Sam reached for the paper and turned it around. “It’s quite well typed.”
“I suppose,” Lord said with a sardonic smile, “now that you’re head honcho, Sam, you’d like to be surrounded by ‘yes men.’”
Sam Hawthorne sighed. He had known Vince Lord for fifteen years, had grown accustomed to the research director’s difficult ways, and was prepared to make allowances for them. He answered mildly, “You know that isn’t true. What I want is a reasoned discussion and better causes for disagreeing with me than you’ve given already.”
“Speaking of reasoning,” Lord said, opening a drawer of his desk and removing a file, “I strongly object to a statement of yours.”
“Which one?”
“About our own research.” Consulting the file, Lord quoted from Sam’s proposal about the British institute. “‘While our competitors have introduced major, successful new drugs, we have had only minor ones. Nor do we have anything startling in sight.’”
“So prove me wrong.”
“We have a number of promising developments in sight,” Lord insisted. “Several of the new, young scientists I’ve brought in are working—”
“Vince,” Sam said, “I know about those things. I read your reports, remember? Also, I applaud the talent you’ve recruited.”
It was true, Sam thought. One of Vincent Lord’s strengths across the years had been his ability to attract some of the cream of scientific newcomers. A reason was that Lord’s own reputation was still high, despite his failure to achieve the major discovery that had been expected of him for so long. Nor was there any real dissatisfaction with Lord’s role as research director; the dry spell was one of those misfortunes that happened to drug companies, even with the best people heading their scientific sides.
“The progress reports I send to you,” Lord said, “are always weighted with caution. That’s because I have to be wary about letting you and the merchandising gang become excited about something which is still experimental.”
Strong Medicine Page 18