by Josh Ozersky
In the course of researching this book, I hoped to come to a decisive conclusion about the Original Recipe debate, and while I can’t claim to have irrefutable proof, I am convinced that the Original Recipe, while still distinctive and delicious, is not in fact the same recipe as served by the Colonel. I base this assertion on two separate evidentiary streams. One centers on samples of the former recipe obtained through friends of Colonel Sanders, compared subjectively to samples obtained from current KFC franchises. More persuasive, though, is the well-attested story of how Colonel Sanders commissioned Marion-Kay Spices of Brownstown, Indiana, to create his spice mixture. This spice mixture, which is still for sale under the name 99X, is indistinguishable in taste to the samples I obtained of KFC’s former seasoning. That is, the flavor profile is the same when mixed in the same proportion to unseasoned flour. When not “stepped on” with an overwhelming flour-to-spice ratio, the seasoning is much stronger and more fragrant and reminiscent of what many old-timers insist is the original taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a blast from the company’s precorporate past. The story behind 99X is that the Colonel, unhappy with the taste of the spice mix then being supplied by McCormick, approached Marion-Kay Spices founder Bill Summers, who is said to have “cracked the code” of the eleven herbs and spices and possibly to have improved it. That was the Colonel’s view, in any case, and he is said by numerous parties to have recommended it to franchisees, resulting in the aforementioned suit. What is not in question is that Kentucky Fried Chicken sued Marion-Kay for infringement on its franchising monopoly rights, which led to the discontinuation of the arrangement. Happily for fried-chicken lovers everywhere, however, 99X is still available online. The origin of the name comes from Summers’ having tweaked the mix very slightly; it refers to the mix being 99 percent identical to the original with the “X” representing the tweak.6
The perceived degeneration of the spice mix was only one part of the general malaise that infected Kentucky Fried Chicken in the ’70s. The company, even under Brown and Massey, was only once removed from the Colonel. Though its senior managers didn’t come from restaurant backgrounds, they were, in the larger scale of things, middling entrepreneurs who had hit it lucky; they were also southerners and deeply connected to the chicken-eating public in the states where it was strongest. The new owner, Heublein, was an immense and indifferent corporate entity that picked up the chain in passing, dropping it into a portfolio of holdings so deep it made barely a splash.
The first hints of a sale by Brown came in 1970. Brown and company had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but the result was not that different from what the Colonel had encountered when his nickel-a-chicken business started to get out of hand. They couldn’t keep track of what was going on. At one point the company’s managers didn’t know how much money was coming through the system or even how many stores it had.7 A big executive shake-up the previous year resulted in four vice presidents being shown the door and a bean-counting CFO coming on board, followed the next year by repeated heroic defenses of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s financial stability by Brown, who used all his oratorical power to underscore what was actually a very robust business despite its absurd overvaluing (and subsequent undervaluing) by stockbrokers. But Kentucky Fried Chicken was no longer a booming regional company; it was about to be acquired by a corporate giant, and there was one man for whom that step was one too many. Harland Sanders, the chain’s founder and goodwill ambassador, announced his retirement from the board of directors in August 1970. When asked why, he told the New York Times, “I realized that I was someplace I had no place being. Everything that a board of a big corporation does is over my head, and I’m confused by the talk and high finance discussed at these meetings.”8
There was much to be confused about. The entire system was in disarray, and it wasn’t because of insufficient leadership on the part of senior management. No, the fact was that the entity called Kentucky Fried Chicken by the outside world really consisted of two very different bodies whose backgrounds, motivations, and experiences were totally different. The employees of the company were, almost to a man (and they were almost all men), educated professionals—lawyers, salesmen, businessmen, entrepreneurs of one kind or another. They thought in broad terms and planned for future millions. Their experience with drunken customers, rusted frying machines, and grease fires was limited to what they read about in field reports—if they read those at all. As with almost all large restaurant companies, operations was the least interesting department and one that was generally seen only as a means to driving customer satisfaction or some such end. To the franchisee, in contrast, operations were everything. He or she was likely someone who had spent a long time in the restaurant business, who took fifteen-hour work days for granted, whose whole day was spent in a haze of grease fumes and muttered curses, of empty threats against indifferent teenage workers and servile promises to enraged biddies whose mashed potatoes didn’t have enough gravy. The franchisees made money from the system and even to some extent identified with it; but they also knew that the system was built on their backs, their labor, and their risk, and they often regarded franchise owners as useless do-nothings or worse.
It was to the franchisee class that the Colonel belonged, which is one reason he was so beloved by the operators (as opposed to the executives, who with some justification considered him a royal pain in the ass). His sentiments and loyalty all lay with his former “family,” as he made clear in his 1974 memoir: “My concern is not so much with the high financing that seems to be necessary to keep Kentucky Fried Chicken growin’ as it is with the kind of people who are out there in their Kentucky Fried Chicken stores a-sellin’ it, and then with the high quality of the product itself,” he wrote. “That’s what made it a success from the start.”9
The Colonel had no intention of keeping this sentiment to himself. No sooner had the 1971 sale of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Heublein (seven years after the Colonel sold it to Brown and Massey) been effected than the Colonel began a series of guerrilla attacks on his new employer. First, he announced plans to open The Colonel’s Lady’s Dinner House, an antebellum-theme restaurant featuring his wife, Claudia, as a stand-in. The Colonel’s Lady’s Dinner House would serve Original Recipe chicken, a boast to which Heublein, not unreasonably, took exception. When the company reminded the Colonel (who, it will be remembered, owned very little stock) that it had just paid almost a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of stock for the exclusive rights to that product and that it was paying him $70,000 a year to be its goodwill ambassador, Colonel Sanders responded by suing the company for $122 million. By some miracle of diplomacy and salesmanship, Brown was able to convince the company’s management to settle with the Colonel for $1 million—along with the promise that he wouldn’t openly attack or embarrass the company in the future.
He started to do so practically before the ink was dry on the agreement. The Colonel was still mad. He was very old by this time, still alert and still very much himself, but in his mid-eighties and, as everyone knew by now, never one to worry much about speaking his mind, even when young and penniless. Now that he was rich, world-famous, and in a fighting mood, there was approximately zero chance that he would abide by the settlement. But what could Heublein do? There was no Kentucky Fried Chicken without Colonel Sanders. Oh, to have a nice fictional cartoon mascot instead! Oh, to have an Uncle Ben or a Mr. Peanut rather than to be at the mercy of this old coot’s caprices! And they couldn’t fire him, no matter how much they wanted, because he embodied the brand, and it was the brand alone—as they believed—that was worth paying for. Could they? It wasn’t clear. Strong opinions were expressed on both sides of the issue.
So the war continued. In private, both to longtime franchisees and to friends, he openly said how little the company’s executives knew about chicken. That much was true: Heublein was a transnational beverage company with no experience in the restaurant business at all. Its attitude toward the chain seems, at least in the
early years, to have been to think of it as an ATM machine that would more or less run itself. Stores were allowed to deteriorate, and there was little policing of the way the weaker franchisees ran their stores—a disaster in any fast-food restaurant, where dirt and disorder are inexorable forces held at bay only by the most arduous exertions and constant vigilance. By every measure—sales, consumer-satisfaction ratings, market share—the product suffered.
More alarming still, from the Colonel’s perspective, was the candid disregard the new owners had for him. This attitude preceded his misbehavior and, there can be no doubt, helped precipitate the trouble.10 “The Heublein people didn’t really understand or appreciate the Colonel,” John Brown would later say. “They were corporate people. They didn’t respect what he had done. Didn’t know. They were going to cut him out of their ads. They told me they hadn’t made up their mind whether they were going to use the Colonel or not.”11 This attitude could not possibly have been wasted on the man himself, who had proved to be preternaturally sensitive, even to the point of paranoia, on that very point. Nothing could have struck closer to home than the threat of losing the fame, so long delayed, that vindicated his entire life and transformed him in a few brief years from failed motel owner into chicken divinity.
The combination of personal pugnacity, Heublein’s very real ambivalence about him, and the unmistakable decay in the chain of which he was the symbol brought out all of his rancor. “It’s my face that’s shown on that box of chicken and in the advertising. It’s me that people recognize, and they stop me everywhere I go to complain,” he thundered to Brown. “The damn SOBs don’t know anything but peddling booze, and they sure as hell don’t know a damn thing about good food!”12
The situation finally came to a head in 1976 when, during a visit to New York, he stopped into a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Greenwich Village with the New York Times restaurant critic, Mimi Sheraton. The Colonel unloaded on the chicken, calling it “the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen,” but he saved his worst scorn for the gravy, which he said was “nothing more than wallpaper paste.”13 In Bowling Green, Kentucky, a week later, he expanded on this theme:
My God! They buy tap water for fifteen or twenty cents a thousand gallons and then mix it with flour and starch and end up with wallpaper paste. That stuff is sludge. . . . there’s no way you could get me to eat some of those potatoes. . . . you’re just working for a company that doesn’t know what it’s doing. Too bad, because it gives you a bad reputation.14
The unenviable job of responding to this outburst fell to company spokesman Anthony Tortorici, who bungled the situation further by essentially agreeing with everything the Colonel said. “We’re very grateful to have the Colonel around to keep us on our toes,” Tortorici said, obviously meaning the opposite. “But he is a purist, and his standards were all right when he was operating just a few stores. But we have over 5,500 now, and that means more than 10,000 fry cooks of all ages and abilities.”15 The smart thing would have been to say that the particular franchise was being looked at very closely by a crack team of operational division managers or some such thing; instead, the Colonel’s offhand put-down ended up vindicated, confirmed by the very people one would have expected to deny it. Nor, even at this point, could anyone at Heublein summon the will to fire their own trademark. Not to mention the fallout that would surely follow: as John Cox, the new director of public relations, put it, “Do you really want him running around the country with no controls whatsoever?”16 Score one for the Colonel.
It was not, as some of the Heublein executives thought, mere perversity or spite; it was the thing that had made him what he was, the superhuman grandiosity that had led him to start walking around in a white suit and string tie and calling himself “Colonel Sanders” as a small-town business owner. He, like his franchisees, was temperamentally unsuited to being a paid employee; he had enough chances at being one, enough for two lifetimes, and had failed again and again. It was impossible for him to let go, to be quiet, to relinquish his ownership of the product that defined him, even so late in life. What was he if not The Colonel? And if a reporter wanted to know what he thought of the product that bore his name and image, what was he supposed to say?
The franchisees found themselves in a similar position. Legally and morally speaking, they had no more grounds for complaint than the Colonel did; it was Kentucky Fried Chicken that had made them rich, the great red-and-white-striped collective whose Kentucky Kremlin directed their chicken production down to the last degree and whose premier gave them at least a borrowed and temporary authority.
On the other hand, what loyalty did they owe to Heublein? The Colonel and John Y. Brown were the ones with whom they had started out, and Brown was now off trying to start a restaurant chain with the unappealing name of Lums, while the Colonel—the Colonel himself!—was openly at war. Nor were their claims against the company to be dismissed lightly. Heublein, everyone seemed to feel, had been an absentee owner when it suited the corporation, standing by while the system fell into disrepair and subsequently attempting to take control of ailing franchises, imposing draconian and arbitrary directives on store managers who knew far more about the business than the corporate executives could have hoped to. Darlene Pfeiffer, a longtime franchisee, remembers:
They were out of Hartford, Connecticut, and a lot of them were very well educated, and they thought that we were just a bunch of dumb chicken cooks. They treated us like that; certain ways the Colonel had taught us to operate, they’d say, “Oh, that’s stupid. You’re going to do it our way or the highway,” so to speak. So that’s when it started, when our corporate leadership began to let us down.17
The stores owned and operated by the company, which had been some of the best performers in the system, now were the worst. Heublein sold off hundreds just to not have to deal with them. Most of the top store managers from the Brown era quit or were fired, and there was a general sense that the company had in a few short years, in the words of John R. Neal of the Franchise Advisory Council, done little but “milk the business, run the stores down, and damn near ruin the KFC brand.”18
The parties were soon reconciled to the new order. The Colonel was invited to a little sit-down in which it was explained to him that if he didn’t dummy up, he would lose his million-dollar settlement and his job. This had the desired effect, but only temporarily, and eventually it took the pleas of his devoted secretary Shirley Topmiller reminding him that she was a single mother with two children to support as well as Pete Harman telling him that he was hurting the franchisees who still depended on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s good name. These appeals to his better nature, combined with the very real threat of losing his colonelcy, caused him to capitulate and go back to smiling blandly on billboards.
The franchisees were easier to mollify. They had a handful of very specific requests relating to royalties, territorial exclusivity, and the like, and Heublein granted them all in exchange for the franchisees withdrawing their support of an onerous bill then in Congress that threatened to limit the control of franchisees by their granting bodies. Heublein’s stock price had taken a beating from its internal war, and the franchisees counted themselves lucky to be able to salvage something from the battle.19 The bill, predictably, never passed.
The general decay of the chain continued throughout the 1970s with sales artificially buoyed by the introduction of low-priced specials and such menu additions as barbecued spareribs. Plenty of money still was coming in from the stores, but these short-term fixes did nothing to address the general disaffection felt by the public as overall sales, especially of chicken, went down. Even with the special products, sales went down 3 percent each year from 1976 through 1978, and profits declined annually by 26 percent.20
The Colonel, for his part, had by this point bigger problems on his hands. His race was pretty much run, and yet there was so much yet to be done: so many hands to shake, so many microphones to speak to, so many new friends to make. He h
ad been the most vocal advocate of staying active late in life, even appearing before the Senate Special Committee on Aging to give his testimony in 1977. Now his health began to desert him. His diabetes, which had been held in check over a few years, began to act up. Cataracts, arthritis, and a general weariness came over him. He had a series of valedictions, elaborate ceremonial affirmations of his importance, on occasions ranging from Derby Day to a visit to the KFC Franchise Convention in Las Vegas. The most moving by far was the dedication of the Colonel Sanders Museum at KFC headquarters, where pictures of his mother, his little brother, and his sister were honored under archival-quality frames. His first pressure cooker, “Bertha,” was kept in a special glass case, a treasured relic. Various honorary degrees covered the walls. There was a movie visitors could watch that unspooled the remarkable life of Harland Sanders. A bust, carved by his daughter Margaret, adorned the room.
He continued to travel, to orate, to make appearances as often as possible. But the following year he was diagnosed with leukemia. As it became obvious that the end was not far off, the urge to see the Colonel with their own eyes one more time ran strong among friends and strangers. Even from his wheelchair he reveled in the attention. His last months were spent planning every detail of his legacy. He had a large tomb built at Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, with a suitably heroic bronze bust marking his likeness, and he visited it on several occasions, the better to contemplate his own posthumous fame. He contracted pneumonia in November and fought it gamely, lingering on through sheer force of will for another month. He died on December 16, 1980, at 7:30 in the morning.