Barbarians at the Gate

by Bryan Burrough

  Emmett’s elevation to the presidency was announced, but not a subsequent internal probe by the company’s longtime law firm. As the months wore on and the investigation continued, there was rampant speculation inside the company that both Johnson and Emmett would lose their jobs. In September, the final verdict was reached: bad judgment, perhaps, but no bad deed. Emmett got off with a slap on the wrist. Instead it was his three accusers—Schaedler, Pines, and an executive named Ed Downs—that Johnson fired. Applegate was banished to being a consultant.

  “I’m sending you people out on the boat,” Johnson told the trio, “and you’re not coming back.” The episode was to be forever known among Johnson’s entourage as the “boat people incident.” For Johnson, it provided one of the few moments of jeopardy and strain he would ever know with a board.

  Afterward, he seemed restless. After four years Standard Brands was still an erratic performer. Its profits were growing again, but no faster than the rate of inflation. Its rate of return was well below the industry norm. Carbonell was working on all sorts of projects out at the R&D center—a fat-free peanut and improved fermentation for corn syrup, yeast, and vinegar. But new products took time, and Johnson was growing fidgety. For a while he kept busy by selling the yeast business and buying some liquor companies. But it was as if Standard Brands was a toy he had gotten for Christmas, and Johnson, having played with it for five years, was getting bored.

  Part of his disaffection was due to the fact that Johnson, now moving into his late forties, was no longer the boy wonder of the mid-seventies. The idea of becoming a sedate corporate elder made him shiver. He wasn’t interested in growing older; he longed to be the enfant terrible, the eternal shit-stirring youth. Everything about him, from the still-shaggy hair to his twenty-six-year-old second wife, suggested a corporate Peter Pan. What was needed, it was clear, was a new adventure.

  The opportunity came in a curious phone call from a fellow chief executive in March 1981. Bob Schaeberle, chairman of the food giant Nabisco, told Johnson his people had gotten a call from that fellow in Connecticut working for Standard Brands. Johnson didn’t know what Schaeberle was talking about. You know, the Nabisco chief said, the fellow who had the idea of merging Standard Brands and Nabisco. Johnson didn’t know. “Maybe there’s something there, and maybe there isn’t,” Schaeberle said, “but I think we should talk about it,” Um, sure, Johnson replied.

  But first Johnson wanted to discover the identity of the agent provocateur putting his company in play. “Who the fuck is this guy?” he exploded at a Monday morning meeting of his top lieutenants. Jake Powell, the chief financial officer, and Dean Posvar, the top planner, fessed up. The man was a Greenwich-based business broker they sometimes used to come up with minor acquisition ideas. Apparently he had gone overboard. “Well, if there is anything to this idea, Bob will sure as shit never want to do it now,” Johnson said. “Shit, he’ll think I don’t know what the hell is going on in my own company. And you know what? He’s right. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

  Nevertheless, Johnson was intrigued. He got together with Schaeberle and liked the man. In a matter of weeks the two executives agreed to merge their companies. Nabisco Brands, as the new company would be called, was formed in a $1.9 billion stock swap in 1981, at the time one of the larger mergers of consumer-product companies. Technically, it was a marriage of equals. But that was considered so much chin music. Everyone knew Nabisco, with dominant brands such as Ritz and Oreo, was the more powerful company. Everyone knew who would be in charge.

  Nabisco had been born a juggernaut. The National Biscuit Co., as it was originally called, was formed in 1898, the result of a transaction that merged one company that owned most of the nation’s major eastern bakers with another that owned most of the major western ones—and ended the cutthroat competition between the two. A product of the turn-of-the-century trust era, Nabisco was often called “the biscuit trust.” Yet it was also the biscuit pioneer, taking the cracker out of the cracker barrel and for the first time making it a packaged, standardized commodity. It was the first company to bring national marketing and distribution to a hitherto regional product.

  The man who created Nabisco was a Chicago lawyer, Adolphus Green. Green, the company’s first chairman, took a personal hand in inventing the octagonal soda cracker that was the company’s first national product. Uneeda Biscuit, he called it. He selected a company trademark still used today, a medieval Italian printers’ symbol consisting of a cross with two bars and an oval, representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the evil and the material. He designed the packaging and drafted the wording on the box: “Uneeda Biscuit. Served with every meal; take a box with you on your travels; splendid for sandwiches; perfect for picnics; unequalled for general use; do not contain sugar. This is a perfect food for everybody, and the price places them within the reach of all.”

  N. W. Ayer, Nabisco’s advertising agency, took it from there. In early 1899, it placed a one-word ad in newspapers and on billboards: “Uneeda.” Then the next step: “Uneeda Biscuit.” Then, “Do you know Uneeda Biscuit?” After that: “Of course Uneeda Biscuit!” Ayer went on to present an ad campaign that showed a little boy in a slicker with a box of Uneeda Biscuits, a simple, powerful image in an age before Madison Avenue had come to full flower. At the time it was the biggest ad campaign ever, and the first to feature a packaged ready-to-eat food.

  Uneeda Biscuit was a smashing success, and set the stage for a torrent of new Nabisco products: the Fig Newton, made by a Boston baker, named in honor of that city’s suburb of Newton; the Saltine cracker, from a St. Joseph, Missouri, baker; Animal Crackers, by two of the company’s New York City bakers. Nabisco was the first company to figure a way to mass-produce shortbread, and the result was Lorna Doone, an immediate hit. It concocted a combination of marshmallow and jelly, covered with chocolate icing, and named it Mallomar. Even its flops had a silver lining. In 1913, Green came out with a package of three new products known collectively as “Trio.” He had high hopes for two of them in particular: the Mother Goose Biscuit, which would depict scenes from nursery rhymes, and the Veronese Biscuit, an upscale hard cookie. But it was the third cookie in the trio, which featured vanilla frosting between two round chocolate wafers, that caught on. It would become the bestselling cookie in the world: the Oreo.

  Green pioneered the idea of using a direct sales force in the food business rather than a middleman, dispatching salesmen to push Nabisco products across the country. Beginning with the Uneeda Cadets, Nabisco mustered a huge, hardworking army of salesmen who made their appointed rounds in horse-drawn wagons with freshly painted Nabisco logos six days a week, twelve hours a day.

  A man who referred to his workers as “a great family,” Green made Nabisco a benevolent employer. Within three years of its founding, he installed a system for the company’s employees to buy stock on cut-rate terms, making them what he called “associate proprietors.” He refused to employ child labor in an era when it was common. And although he expected his workers to churn out America’s snacks from dawn to dusk, in brutally hot and often hazardous bakeries, he also felt responsible for providing them nutritious meals. “In our New York plant,” he wrote in a report to shareholders, “an employee can obtain a dinner consisting of hot meat, potatoes, bread and butter, and coffee or tea for 11 cents.”

  Green died in 1917, and with him went much of Nabisco’s innovative spirit. His successor, a lawyer named Roy Tomlinson, was less interested in biscuits than the bottom line. Profits quadrupled through the 1920s, but Nabisco was coasting on the enormous success of its early products and on its sales force. When it needed new products, it bought them, including Shredded Wheat in 1928 and Milk Bone dog biscuits in 1931.

  Then, in the midst of the Depression, Nabisco’s bakers came up with something novel. For years they had been trying to develop buttery crackers like those of some of their competitors. The result, covered with a thin coating of coconut oil and sprin
kled with salt, was a completely new kind of cracker. They called it Ritz, and it became America’s most popular cracker almost overnight. Within a year, Nabisco had baked 5 million of them. Within three years, it was baking 29 million of them a day, and Ritz became the bestselling cracker in the world.

  But again the company rested on its laurels. For the next decade Nabisco drifted, paying its dividends, keeping out of debt, and baking the same cookies and crackers it had for years. Eventually profits dropped, its bakeries aged, and so did its management. By the mid-1940s, the average age of Nabisco’s top executives was sixty-three; they were known as “the nine old men.” Only when Tomlinson retired, after twenty-eight years, did the company stir again.

  Yet another lawyer, general counsel George Coppers, was installed by the board as chief executive in 1945. Coppers had taken weekend management courses at the Harvard Business School and set about reshaping Nabisco with what he had learned. He cleared out the nine old men and brought in a wave of new young ones. Over a twelve-year period he spent $200 million to modernize the bakeries, real money in those days. All the funds came from profits: Perish the thought of debt at good, conservative Nabisco. Coppers allotted huge budgets to research and advertising, dragging down profits but creating a foundation for the future. By the time it built its last new cookie and cracker plant, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, in 1958, Nabisco had cut its costs, improved its quality, and heaved its way into the latter part of the twentieth century. By 1960, the year Coppers died, Dun’s Review recognized Nabisco as one of the twenty best-managed companies in the country.

  One of Coppers’s bright young men, an Idaho Mormon named Lee Bickmore, now took the helm. Bickmore began his Nabisco career as a shipping clerk in Pocatello and went on to become a salesman, pushing Ritz and Oreos in obscure corners of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. It was only when he wrote an earnest letter to New York headquarters, full of suggestions about training and techniques for salesmen, that he gained notice.

  As president, Bickmore expanded Nabisco into foreign markets: Australia in 1960, England and New Zealand in 1962, Germany in 1964, and Italy, Spain, and Central America in 1965. He spent so much time on overseas travel he became known as “The Flying President.” Bickmore also diversified, moving into frozen foods and making Nabisco the largest shower-curtain maker in the world. He took on a carpeting business and a toy business. He bought a company called J. B. Williams, which made personal-care products such as Aqua Velva shaving lotion and Geritol.

  It all bombed—the foreign operations, the shower curtains, the toys, everything. To make up for the losses, Bickmore squeezed Nabisco’s cookie and cracker divisions for every penny of profit. He squeezed so hard, in fact, that they began to crumble. The Coppers-era bakeries were deteriorating, and Nabisco no longer had the profits to modernize or replace them. Even after Bickmore retired in 1973, little changed. In the seventies Nabisco was run by decent, slow-moving executives who fostered a culture that venerated past glories. Good men all, but change agents they weren’t. As one of its ad agency executives put it, “How could somebody who makes Oreos be mean?”

  Nabisco stagnated. No one was fired. No one worked past five. No one raised a voice. No one, not even the new chief executive, Bob Schaeberle, had doors on his office. No one, not even Schaeberle, had a company car or a corporate country club membership.

  Then along came Ross Johnson. It was, one wag noted, as if Hell’s Angels had merged with the Rotary Club.

  Bob Schaeberle became chairman and chief executive of Nabisco Brands, Ross Johnson president and chief operating officer. Below him, as the two companies combined their managements, Johnson’s Merry Men were positively grouchy.

  For one thing, Nabisco’s morning meetings began around eight-thirty, in the midst of their hangovers. In contrast to Standard Brands’s free-for-all bull sessions, Nabisco’s deliberations were carefully choreographed. Executives sat around a table, each making a fifteen-minute presentation on a particular cookie or cracker. At the end of each, questions were invited. Rarely were there any; it seemed bad form. It would drone on like this into midafternoon, with a break for lunch. Johnson often arranged to be summoned from the room by a phone call, never to return, leaving Rogers and Carbonell and the others to silently squirm.

  Then one day, John Murray, the Standard Brands vice president for sales, could stand no more. It came during an especially tiresome discourse on procedures for closing company offices during snowstorms. In the event of a bad storm, a Nabisco executive said, workers would be given notice that offices would close in a matter of hours. That enabled those who needed rides a chance to line them up, and gave the company a chance to organize van pools and bring the day to an orderly conclusion. Obviously pleased with himself, the executive invited questions.

  “I can’t fucking believe this!” Murray exploded. “If it’s dangerous out there, don’t wait two hours; close the place down. Nobody’s going to do shit for those two hours, anyway. That’s fucking ridiculous.” A stunned silence ensued. Finally Jim Welch, a senior Nabisco executive chairing the meeting, broke it. “I agree with John one hundred percent,” he said.

  It was one of the first shots of the cultural revolution that would transform Nabisco. Meetings began to loosen up. Murray would be detailing the performance of Fleischmann’s Margarine, only to be interrupted by a shout from Peter Rogers: “Tell ’em about Blue Bonnet Baking Margarine.” That brand, of course, was faring poorly. Nabisco executives prided themselves on the company’s elaborate planning procedures, compiled in thick, multiyear projections and operations outlooks. Johnson chucked them all. “Planning, gentlemen, is ‘What are you going to do next year that’s different from what you did this year?’” he told them. “All I want is five items.”

  On paper Schaeberle remained the top executive of Nabisco Brands, but Johnson found it easy to get his way. Their offices were adjacent, and Johnson wasted no time ingratiating himself with the boss. He deferred to Schaeberle in every regard, obsequiously addressing him in meetings as “Mr. Chairman.” Johnson’s many country club memberships were paid for by the company; he insisted that Schaeberle’s dues be picked up, too. They were. Johnson and his executives drove flashy company cars; he insisted Schaeberle and his aides do so, too. They did. Johnson donated $250,000 to Pace University to endow a Robert M. Schaeberle Chair in accounting. Surprised by the announcement at a Pace dinner, an honored but stunned Schaeberle said, “Who’s going to pay for this?”

  The company was, of course. The company also had to vastly upgrade its pay scale, since thirty-six Standard Brands executives made more than $100,000 compared to fifteen Nabisco ones. Johnson’s base pay was more than double Schaeberle’s, requiring a vast raise for the chairman. He accepted it reluctantly, but later balked when told his 1983 salary and bonus would total more than $1 million. What would the shareholders say? Schaeberle ordered that his bonus be cut enough to get him back into six figures. Johnson talked him out of it, saying he had it coming to him. If Schaeberle made a million, Johnson had it coming to him as well, of course.

  Johnson continued to upgrade his own life-style, buying a huge French chateau-style house with a forty-acre estate in Sparta, New Jersey. He attempted to commute via helicopter to Nabisco’s headquarters in East Hanover, New Jersey, but was thwarted when town fathers repeatedly refused to allow helicopters to land there.

  Slowly but surely, Johnson closed his grip around Schaeberle’s company. One by one, veteran Nabisco executives began to vanish, replaced by Johnson men. The fall of Nabisco’s powerful chief financial officer, Dick Owens, was a prime example of the way Johnson worked. At the time of the merger, Owens appeared to be at the height of his powers. He was made an executive vice president and sat on the combined companies’ board. Whatever Owens wanted, Johnson got him. He approved a steady stream of Owens’s requests for new aides: a senior vice president here, a vice president there, a veritable raft of assistant vice presidents. In Johnson’s warm embrace, Owens’s financial fi
efdom grew steadily.

  Then one day Johnson walked into Schaeberle’s office with his brow furrowed. “Dick is building up a huge financial organization,” Johnson fretted. With unassailable logic, he laid out the dangers of substituting the analysis and judgments of people at headquarters for those of line managers. “We shouldn’t be doing the numbers for the business managers,” Johnson suggested.

  “Well,” Schaeberle asked, “what should we do?”

  “I think Dick is congenitally incapable of decentralizing,” replied Johnson. “I think we need to make a change.”

  And so Owens was shunted aside, replaced, for a time, by Johnson himself. Johnson immediately installed Standard Brands people beneath him, and replaced Nabisco’s financial controls with a system devised at Standard Brands. Only Standard Brands people seemed to understand the new system, which suited Johnson fine. Having changed the playbook, Johnson’s troops now emerged victorious in a string of minor bureaucratic battles. “At any meeting,” recalled a former Johnson lieutenant, “you could embarrass the Nabisco guys.”

  Johnson had Standard Brands’s Dean Posvar named planning director, a job that put Posvar—and thus Johnson—in charge of board presentations and enabled the Johnson troops to define and thus control board discussion. Johnson’s crony Mike Masterpool took over public relations, giving him control of the outward dissemination of information as surely as Posvar’s planning group and the financial apparatus regulated the inner flow.

  It was the same story all the way down the line, thanks to another Johnson move. Schaeberle had originally planned to keep Nabisco and Standard Brands operations separate within the combined company. But on Johnson’s suggestion, they were integrated. As departments were combined, the timid Nabisco executives were forced to swim with the Standard Brands sharks. When choices for a top position had to be made, Johnson walked into Schaeberle’s office and, while insisting he wasn’t playing favorites, laid out a compelling case for the Standard Brands man. “You’re right,” Schaeberle would say. “This guy is better.”