by Josh Ozersky
At the same time, the franchisees understood the business better than did the chain’s executives in their big white headquarters in Louisville. The franchisees were closer to the ground. When the two groups disagreed, the company could be brought to a standstill, as happened in the 1990s when Kentucky Fried Chicken, under a series of indifferent corporate owners, milked the chain for profits while ignoring the views of the most experienced franchisees, including Pete Harman himself. Harman, unthinkably, even became a plaintiff in a suit filed by the franchisees against the company during those darkest days.
In the late 1950s, though, there was no Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation. There was a “family” of franchisees, very few of whom had dedicated Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. They were a loose confederation bound by a recipe and a handshake deal. There was Pete Harman with a handful of stores in distant Utah, the forerunners of all future Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. There was the Colonel, and there was Claudia. And that was it. The franchisees sent their checks in on the honor system, and the Colonel cashed them when he got around to it. By 1960 he had more than two hundred outlets for his chicken, extending all the way into the Great White North of Canada. He personally had a small staff including an accountant, and he had a gold Rolls Royce with “KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN” painted on both sides. A short time later Colonel’s Foods, a subsidiary company, came along to oversee production of various food-service items like sauces and breading, followed by the sad but inevitable end to the handshake era.
The Colonel wasn’t content to just cash the checks, though; he was still a berserker in his pursuit of quality control and “doing things the right way.” He demanded as a condition of application that all new franchisees grant him the right to inspect their restaurants with the understanding that he could withdraw their franchises if they departed from his decrees. This could, in theory, have been anything from using powdered eggs in the breading wash to swapping mashed potatoes for french fries in certain markets. The Colonel seems not to have exercised his excommunication prerogative often, happily. John Ed Pearce describes how overwhelmed the Colonel was in this era:
He was now having real trouble franchising, policing his franchisees, running the Shelbyville headquarters and distribution facility, teaching at the regional schools he was setting up [to teach operations], checking on the books, hiring new people, and grappling with taxes and corporate laws. He and Claudia began to wonder if they would ever get to relax, travel and enjoy what they had built.13
At the end of his rope, Sanders turned to an old friend, John Y. Brown, then one of the state’s most powerful lawyers. He needed help. Brown, enjoying a profitable practice after enduring years in Kentucky’s rough-and-tumble political scene, declined to come on board. But his son, John Jr., had just gone into practice, and, well, why didn’t the Colonel go on over and see him?
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KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN INC.
John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky, is invariably described as “Kennedyesque.” The appellation isn’t that far off, or at least it wasn’t in Brown’s youth. Handsome, charismatic, a famous playboy and bon vivant, and a natural in the game of politics, he also inherited a potent political legacy: Brown’s father, John Sr., had been a major force in Kentucky politics for two generations. John Jr. got around to taking the top position in the state, from 1979 to 1983, and even considered a run at the presidency—but not before creating Kentucky Fried Chicken Inc., marrying Miss America, owning three professional basketball teams, and creating a legendary reputation as a high-stakes poker player and ladies’ man. He liked to have a nip of Kentucky bourbon now and again. He was on easy terms with the most powerful people in every sector of society. He was cultivated and genteel and had led a smooth and sheltered life as one of the most privileged young people in a famously plutocratic state.1 No man could have been more alien to Harland Sanders.
It seems unlikely that the seventy-three-year-old Colonel, therefore, would have chosen so willingly to go into business with Brown, who had no prior experience in business or restaurants. “I knew that he felt I had led a different sort of life than he had, that I came from a different background,” Brown later said. “But he liked me.”2 There seems no doubt that the Colonel was attracted to, and even a little intimidated by, Brown’s social ease, assurance, and gentility, all qualities Sanders lacked to one degree or another. The two had been introduced before the Colonel came to him for legal counsel; appropriately enough, the two bluegrass titans first met at the Kentucky Derby in 1963, with the Colonel resplendent in his whites and Brown, sportsman and scion, as in his element as any man could ever hope to be.
When Brown did come to talk business with the Colonel, he paid court the right way, visiting him in the big white house in Shelbyville. Brown was a natural salesman, too. He had an effortless gift for getting people to buy things, from vacuum cleaners to encyclopedias, and it didn’t take him long to realize that he wanted to sell himself to the Colonel. “He showed me a big pile of checks that his franchisees had sent him—he had over six hundred by then—and they were made out for a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars. I had no idea there was that much money in his chicken business.”3 Brown’s first thought was about neither spice mixes nor pressure cookers. “What kind of a sales force do you have?” he asked.
“Hell, I got no sales force,” the Colonel snapped back. “If people want to sell my chicken, they can come to me now. I don’t have to go to them.” Brown remembers, “I said to myself, ‘Brown, you better pull up a chair and sit in.’ ” Given the obvious need each man had for the other, they ought to have joined forces then and there, the Colonel providing the product, the image, and the authenticity, and Brown incorporating the business into the matrix of modern business practice and cutting himself in for a hefty slice in the process. The two men were perfect partners, and there was deep warmth between them that persisted for many years, even in the Colonel’s irascible eighties. But Sanders wasn’t ready to part with his newfound business so painfully earned. Instead, they decided to open a barbecue restaurant together. “The Colonel was still pretty possessive about his chicken business, but he never stopped thinking about new projects,” Brown says, “and he had it in his head that he wanted to open a barbecue. So we opened a barbecue.”4
The barbecue business is incredibly challenging, requiring major capital investment in all kinds of specialty equipment, and Brown borrowed money from Jack Massey, a Louisville investor. The Porky Pig House, as it was called, went nowhere fast: as the Colonel had pointed out in colorful language, Brown knew nothing about restaurants and now was trying to run a complicated, capital-heavy business on a shoestring. But he had access to money; that was what he brought to the deal. So when the Colonel complained to Brown that he was having trouble keeping up with the costs of supplying pressure cookers, seasoned flour, paper products, and the like to all his franchisees spread around the continent, Brown took Massey up to Shelbyville to see the Colonel. It was now 1964, a year into the barbecue business. The idea was that Brown and Massey would buy into Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then the Colonel would have access to some serious operating capital, and they would be in on the ground floor of an aggressively expanding business.
The Colonel, having never been really successful as a businessman, having been in debt a good part of his life, and having a bone-deep distaste for people who had never done the kind of hard work that he had mastered at age twelve, was skeptical. He saw all “moneymen” as swindlers, usurers, and was notably gruff, even for him. He acted strangely uneasy. Brown remembers that he was “constantly muttering, pulling his moustache, stuff like that.” The young man couldn’t figure out what it was all about: “He said he needed money, and I was bringing a person to him who could help. It was very upsetting.” After much delay, the Colonel finally came out with it: “Let me tell you right now,” he said, “there ain’t no slick-talking sonofabitch going to come in here and buy my company out from under me. Nosir!”5
Both men were shocked. Neither had even considered the idea of buying Kentucky Fried Chicken. Brown had just borrowed a lot of money for the Porky Pig House; he was still thinking about getting the place profitable so as to pay it back. Massey had come along to Shelbyville as a favor to Brown, whom he considered something of a protégé. The idea of going into the fried chicken business was the furthest thing from their minds, or so they claimed afterward.
Harland Sanders, on the other hand, had a lot of good reasons for selling Kentucky Fried Chicken. Brown came around to the idea pretty quickly and made haste to suggest it to him over the next few weeks with varying degrees of gentleness. He was in his seventies now, an old man; shouldn’t he enjoy his golden years, hmm? Hadn’t he earned the right to relax a little? And then, what about the business? If he left it in the hands of the franchisees, as was his plan up until his odd outburst, the loose network of restaurants would inevitably fracture in discord. Neither of the Colonel’s daughters was interested in taking over the business, and of course Harland Jr. was many years in the grave now.
Beyond all this, there was a single reason above all the others, and it was this one that carried the day. He simply wasn’t able to run the business by himself. He could sell and promote anything under the sun, and he could make chicken like a champ. But he was no businessman, not at this age and not on this scale. “I’d been in business for myself for more than thirty-five years at one thing or another,” the Colonel later wrote, looking back at the fateful decision.
During that time I’d seen successes turn to failures for reasons that were out of my control. Now I had built up the most successful business I ever had singlehanded—startin’ from scratch when I was sixty-five. And that had taken only nine years.
Why the hell am I sellin’ out now? I asked myself.
Then I realized how the popularity of Kentucky Fried Chicken was growin’ right over me and mashin’ me flat.6
The Colonel took his time making up his mind. He was genuinely ambivalent, even with all the good reasons Brown had given him. There would be no going back or starting over after he made the sale. A lifelong believer in the gospel of work, he would have no real reason for being, or so he feared, if he sailed. (At the age of eighty-eight he testified before a congressional subcommittee, telling them that “retiring is the awfullest thing in the world.”7)He temporized, delayed, had momentary changes of heart and just as swift reversals, all while Brown and Massey, who had been persuaded by Brown that Kentucky Fried Chicken was a gold mine, twisted in the wind. “It was a stressful time, believe me,” Brown says now.8
In many ways it was a good deal for the Colonel. He would get $2 million in cash, more than he ever dreamed of, plus $40,000 a year to work as a goodwill ambassador, “the living symbol of Kentucky Fried Chicken.” (Later this would be upped to $75,000.) He didn’t take any stock, for tax reasons, but that didn’t bother him; he now had more money than he could ever spend. Cash was what he preferred anyway, cash on the barrel-head: $500,000 up front, payable within two months, and the rest paid over a five-year period. In other ways, the deal wasn’t that good. The Colonel, accustomed to a lifetime of handshake arrangements and leaving “the paperwork” for later, had agreed, he thought, to a sale in principal and had a few lawyer friends look at the contract. After he signed it, he found that the money wasn’t as amazing as he thought; in fact, given the payout schedule, it was less than he was making before the sale. His salary for a busy full-time job as the face of the brand was a relative pittance, and the company would even get to keep his residual royalties! But there was nothing he could do. “Father had only himself to blame,” his daughter Margaret would later say. “Father’s hands were tied, and his lousy salary was hardly enough to compensate for the exhaustion he experienced from flying around the world making commercials.”9 Worse still, he had signed away the right to use his own name and image on any other business for the rest of his life.
Harland P. Sanders, the Colonel. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The office of Colonel Sanders is kept to this day exactly as he left it. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Harland Sanders, circa 1920: a young businessman on the rise. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel’s original pressure cooker, which is kept by KFC as a sacred relic. It was in this vessel that the first batch of Kentucky Fried Chicken was cooked. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The kitchen at Sanders’ gas station: the genesis of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Sanders Court & Cafe—it might have been remembered as just another piece of roadside Americana, but for the Colonel’s subsequent career. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Sanders Cafe in the mid-1960s, halfway through its metamorphosis into KFC. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Sanders Cafe, in Corbin Kentucky, as it looks today. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Harland Sanders in middle age, before the suit and the white beard. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel in his pre–white suit period. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The first public appearance of Kentucky Fried Chicken—at Pete Harman’s Dew Drop Inn in Utah. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
An early Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Colonel Sanders, man and icon. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Part of the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe was breaking the chicken down into nine pieces. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel demonstrates how to fry in a pressure cooker. Note the Band-aids from grease splatters. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
An elderly Colonel demonstrates a fine point of pressure-cookery. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel and a typical Rube Goldberg–like fryer. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel as a guest on What’s My Line, prior to his apotheosis. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel and Jerry Lewis trade quips on the latter’s Labor Day telethon. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Always an admirer of beauty, the Colonel pays his respects to the one and only Zsa Zsa Gabor. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Painter Norman Rockwell was prevailed upon late in his life to paint the Colonel by the Colonel’s protégé, engineer Winston Shelton. It took some persistence; in the end, Rockwell complied with the condition that the Colonel remove his glasses. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
Harland Sanders lived long enough to enjoy the sight of his own memorial legacy. How many men can say the same? Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
A modern KFC, complete with an idealized icon of the chain’s founder. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The Colonel in his last years. Courtesy of KFC Corporation.
The problem was that the Colonel wasn’t just making decisions on behalf of himself but rather his “family” of franchisees—a term he actually took seriously. Certainly there could be no sale without speaking to Pete Harman and Kenny King of Cleveland, the two biggest and earliest franchisees. To his surprise and possible dismay, they were all in favor of it. The major franchisees were going to get big chunks of stock, and the Colonel let himself believe that they would watch out for the other franchisees and the quality of the product, having been chicken men themselves, unlike shady moneymen who never knew what it was to mop up a restaurant at six in the morning.
The deal finally got done on February 18, 1964. The Colonel, in one of his most expansive moments, made this written promise to Brown and Massey:
It is my intention to deliver to you the best and most conscientious service I can render, consistent with my health, as long as I remain on your payroll . . . the business is yours to operate as you please, and I will never be critical to anyone other than you two about how you operate it. Anything that I suggest to you would be merely a suggestion, and no hard feelings on my part if they are not taken.10
There’s no question that Sanders believed this at the time, but no one with even a passing knowledge of his
character could ever have believed that he could abide by it. This was a man who thought nothing of visiting strangers’ homes and running into the kitchen with a drill to bore holes in the gas range, a man who had made a lifelong habit of swearing at employees, his own and those of unlucky restaurant owners, and knocking any nearby surface with the end of his cane to indicate his displeasure at imperfectly cooked scrambled eggs. There was no way that the presence of this temperamental, stubborn, opinionated individual was going to be easy to control; the question was merely how volatile an asset the Colonel would be for the newly formed corporation.