I have confidence that these policies will be continued.
In the future I have decided to devote the bulk of my personal time to my family and philanthropic activities, particularly in the area of social justice and civil rights.
Later, Lewis dictated the following public statement to his wife, Loida, as part of his expression of support for Reverend Chavis:
When I think about how I want to spend the rest of my life, the decision to devote it to the cause of social justice, to the area of civil rights, and to American cultural affairs is to me a stimulating and challenging assignment.
Even in my own career, a person of very modest means has been able—by dint of his own efforts—to achieve great wealth and financial independence, which therefore suggests that some progress clearly has been made. But in my view, it is all too little when we consider the day-to-day drama being inflicted upon many of our children who are of African or Hispanic descent and who are not yet fully included in the American Dream.
By working in this field in the future, I believe that I am working for all Americans, because I truly believe that our society is highly vulnerable unless we join together in seeing this not as a particular problem of any one ethnic group, but as something that the nation must address as part of its own spirit of renewal.
At no point in the memo or statement was the underlying reason for Lewis’s abrupt retirement given.
On January 14, 1993, a Thursday, Loida Lewis called down to the front doorman of the family’s apartment to have a wheelchair ready. The time had arrived to fly to Toronto. Flanked by his wife and Tony and Jean Fugett, Lewis walked haltingly to the elevator portico of his magnificent apartment.
The elevator door opened and Lewis entered slowly, grabbing Tony’s arm for support. After descending a few floors, the elevator opened on an impressive foyer with a view of a central courtyard. Something else came into view—the wheelchair that his wife had requested for her husband. The doorman stood beside it attentively.
“No, please,” Lewis said. “I will walk.” With his brothers on either side of him, Lewis walked proudly—if somewhat unsteadily—past the wheelchair and out the front door of the building.
The Lewises chauffeur and bodyguard, Ed Gregg, sprang out of their Bentley to open the rear door to the vehicle. Lewis and his family members got into the car and Gregg immediately took off without first asking for a destination, which he customarily did when the constantly rushing Lewis was his passenger.
Gregg was instructed to head for Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Teterboro serves as something of a corporate jetport for New York City, freeing heavily congested LaGuardia and Kennedy airports for commercial traffic. “That was the last time I saw him,” Gregg says. “He was very weak.”
The Chairman of Beatrice was assisted up the ladder of his plane. The pilots and flight attendant were stunned by Lewis’s appearance. “They didn’t know that the tumor had advanced to the state that the left side of his body was affected,” Tony Fugett says. “I remember the crew trying to be cool and calm. They were professional throughout.”
After their arrival in Toronto, Lewis, his wife, and two brothers booked themselves into a hotel. His cancer treatments were to be administered there, rather than at the out-patient oncology center. Lewis pretty much stayed in his hotel suite during the brief time he was in Toronto, taking his meals via room service and allowing health care workers to administer his anti-cancer medication.
He initially believed the treatment would help him whip his illness. But after about two days, Lewis sensed the drug wasn’t the answer.
“Tony, it’s not working,” Lewis said matter-of-factly when the two of them were alone in his room.
Perhaps sensing the inevitable, Lewis—who believed in God, but was not a devout Catholic—had begun telling his wife, “Death does not frighten me—I’m not afraid of death. I surrender myself to Christ.”
During a moment when just Lewis and his wife were in their hotel suite, he pondered the irony that of all the places to be afflicted with a fatal malady, it had to be his mind. “I know I have cancer of the brain,” he told his wife, “I used my brain as a weapon to go forward and to disprove a lie about people of color, and I had no protection.”
Jean Fugett, Jr., by that point the de facto CEO of TLC Beatrice, left Toronto for New York in order to run the business.
On January 16th, a Saturday, it was sunny in Toronto with a typically frigid, mid-winter Arctic air mass straddling the city. Lewis awoke that morning on a mission: He planned to “play” a particularly wicked game of tennis, and Tony Fugett was going to do it for him. Fugett, who hadn’t brought any tennis gear sent the flight attendant out to fetch some. He was somewhat baffled by his brother’s insistence that Fugett play tennis. Leisure activity was the furthest thing from his mind right now, but he dutifully carried out Reginald Lewis’s request.
“Tony, I want you to go out and play a tennis game. I’m going to be your coach—you really need to get some exercise because you’ve been caught up in doing a lot of things,” Lewis told his brother. “Now, what I want you to do is I want you to get 60 percent of your first serves in. I know you can hit that overhead, I want you to take that hitch out of your forehand and come to the net behind that powerful serve of yours.”
Fugett promised Lewis he would go out and try to play a memorable tennis match. He left Lewis’s hotel room and closed the door gently behind him. He called his brother, Jean Fugett, in New York.
“Jean, Reg wants me to go out and play tennis,” Tony Fugett said. “And not only does he want me to play tennis, but to do what he wants, I have to play the best tennis of my life!”
Tony Fugett set out for a nearby indoor tennis club. He found a tennis pro willing to play and waged battle as though the Wimbledon championship were at stake.
Not long after Fugett departed, Loida Lewis entered her husband’s room.
“Loida, it’s like there’s a shade falling over my eyes,” Lewis told his wife. She went over to see what the matter was and finding her husband to be okay for the moment, went into another room of their hotel suite. Feeling totally helpless and frustrated, Loida sobbed quietly.
Lewis summoned a male nurse to come to his room and shave him. Lewis asked the nurse to dress him well, not in pajamas, but in a manner appropriate for a fancy dinner.
Over a meal of veal scalopini, Lewis reminisced with his wife about their life together and what a fantastic, improbable journey it had been. They did this not out of a sense of foreboding, but because it was something they normally did from time to time.
Tony knocked on the door and Loida let him into the hotel room.
“Did you do the best you could do?” Lewis asked.
“Yeah,” Tony said.
“Did you have fun?” Lewis asked. “Yes,” Tony Fugett replied.
“That’s all that matters,” Lewis said, catching Tony Fugett by surprise. “Here’s a man who kept track of the score in everything,” Fugett says, thinking back to their post-game conversation.
On Sunday, January 17th, at about 3 A.M., Tony Fugett was awakened by a frantic call: “Come down to our room right away!”
Lewis was lying in his bed with rivulets of sweat pouring down his face when Fugett arrived. The first thing Fugett did was sit Lewis up in the bed and prop some pillows behind his back. He then took off his big brother’s nightshirt and undershirt, which were soaked with perspiration, and then put a fresh Brooks Brothers nightshirt on Lewis.
Fugett then gently lowered Lewis back down on the bed.
“Tony, help me, I need you,” Lewis said, then he began to convulse from a seizure before lapsing into unconsciousness.
“A coldness came over me,” Fugett says. “I had frantic people around. It was take charge time—get him to the hospital. He was always a master of execution and I had to become one.”
After getting his brother to a hospital, Fugett left to rustle up the crew of Lewis’s plane and alert them that they
needed to be ready to return to the United States at a moment’s notice.
Back at the hospital, the family was informed that Reginald Lewis had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage brought on by his brain tumor. The Chairman of Beatrice was in a coma and had suffered irreversible brain damage, the doctors said. They added that there was practically no hope of recovery and that Lewis could pass away at any time.
A woman pastor from the hospital asked Loida Lewis if she wanted a Catholic priest to administer extreme unction—the ceremony where the priest prays for and anoints with oil a person who is dying or in danger of dying. She said she would like to have the sacrament performed.
“Lo and behold, the Catholic priest was an African,” Loida Lewis recalls. “Because my husband is so fierce about race, God sends him an African in Canada to give the last rites.”
She now faced a perilous decision: Should they remain in a Toronto hospital, or transport Lewis to a medical facility in Manhattan, a trip he might not survive?
Praying that she was making the right decision, Loida Lewis opted to move her husband to Manhattan. After she told the doctors of her decision, she noticed Reginald Lewis’s head move slightly, as though he were nodding in the affirmative.
Hooked to portable life-support machines, a stretcher-bound Reginald Lewis was carried aboard his private jet for a final international flight.
Now that Lewis’s condition was touch and go and his cancer could no longer be kept under wraps, his relatives were told his situation was bleak and that they should travel to the hospital Lewis was being transported to in Manhattan. On Monday, January 18th, the day before Lewis’s death, his family was told Lewis’s pulse was beginning to weaken.
“The day before Mr. Lewis died, I saw his mother look kind of sad,” Lucien Stoutt says. “I could see something was wrong from the expression on her face.”
Butch Meily was given permission to notify the press that Reginald Lewis had brain cancer, was in a coma, and the prior week had created an office of the chairman to be headed by Jean Fugett, Jr.
The next day, Tuesday, January 19th, a doctor checked Lewis, turned to the assembled family members and said, “His pulse is going.” Everyone present, including Lewis’s wife and mother gathered around his bed. Loida Lewis recited the Twenty-Third Psalm aloud, “The Lord is my shepherd,” she started and continued to the end of the psalm. Then she whispered, “You may go now, my darling. I love you.”
“Everybody was crying, including me,” James Cooper says. Just then, the fire alarm sounded. Carolyn Fugett said in a loud voice, “The angels are welcoming him in heaven.” Reginald Lewis was dead at the age of 50.
Cooper and Tony Fugett were responsible for getting Lewis’s remains from New York to Baltimore for burial. Lewis would have gotten a chuckle out of the stunt they pulled to get his body out of the hospital without being detected by the press. They’d bribed an elevator operator to allow Fugett to accompany Lewis’s temporary casket to the ground floor via the back elevator.
Acting as a decoy, Cooper went out the front door and hopped into a waiting limousine to draw away any reporters or photographers that might be lurking out front. As soon as the limo pulled away from the curb, Cooper ordered it to go to the rear of the hospital, where the casket was loaded into a hearse. Then Cooper and Fugett followed the hearse from Manhattan to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Cooper and Fugett were both impressed by what they saw next: The crew of Lewis’s aircraft had washed and waxed his plane to a mirror-like sheen. Even the landing gear and the tires were gleaming. “The plane was immaculate and the crew was impeccably dressed, like Reg would have wanted it,” Fugett recalls. Several seats had been removed to accommodate Lewis’s casket, which was placed gingerly, almost reverently, inside Lewis’s beloved private jet. Fugett and Cooper, who had never flown before, boarded after the casket was loaded and flew off in a southerly direction. Their destination was Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
When the plane landed, a hearse was already on the tarmac, waiting to take Lewis’s body to March Funeral Home in West Baltimore. Loida Lewis, who had never left her husband’s side since she arrived from Paris last December, had asked Tony Fugett to stay with her husband until she arrived in Baltimore. The funeral home was devastatingly cold at night because its automatic thermostat couldn’t be overridden. Cooper also stayed, because Fugett asked him to.
Lewis’s many uncles took turns standing at his side, keeping him company, from January 19 until January 23, the day of his funeral and burial.
* * *
Epilogue
Dressed warmly to fend off a biting winter wind, relatives, friends, and those merely wishing to pay homage to a remarkable man began trickling into St. Edward’s Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore around 9:50 A.M. on Saturday, January 23, 1993. The wake for Reginald Francis Lewis was scheduled for 10 A.M., with a Mass of Christian Burial to follow an hour later. St. Edward’s is on Poplar Grove Street in Northwest Baltimore, literally around the corner from Mosher Street and the house and community that Lewis called home.
As the limousine carrying Loida, Leslie, and Christina Lewis glided up to the front of St. Edward’s, Leslie Lewis felt compelled to remind her mother of something: “Okay, Mommy,” said Reginald Lewis’s oldest daughter, who had flown down from Harvard in the middle of taking exams. “We are the Lewis women.”
In front of her husband’s open casket, Loida Lewis greeted mourners with a firm handshake and a smile, belying her profound sorrow and sense of loss. She chose to submerge her pain and console others, instead of the other way around.
I had written a lengthy piece about Reginald Lewis for USA Today following his death and really didn’t have to attend his funeral, because no coverage had been planned by my paper. Nor had I been tabbed to write this book. But I put on a tie and went anyway. I wasn’t present when Jackie Robinson or Frederick Douglass were laid to rest, but figured I could at least tell my grandchildren I was at Reginald Lewis’s funeral. Here was a fellow African-American from Baltimore who grew up in a neighborhood not far from mine and clawed his way to the summit of a billion-dollar business empire.
When I walked past Lewis’s casket, Loida Lewis greeted me warmly, even though we had never been introduced. I was disappointed that an opportunity to meet Reginald Lewis when he was alive had never materialized, and thus chose not to view his body.
Loida, Leslie, and Christina all spoke before the overflow crowd gathered inside St. Edward’s Catholic Church with dry eyes, conviction and strong, clear voices, as did all of Lewis’s family members, including his mother, Carolyn Fugett.
Christina Lewis began by reading a passage from the Bible, the Book of Wisdom, Chapter Four, Verses 7-14: “The just man, though he die early, shall be at rest. For the age that is honorable comes not with the passing of time, nor can it be measured in terms of years. Rather, understanding is the hoary crown for men, and an unsullied life the attainment of old age. . . . Having become perfect in a short while, he reached the fullness of a long career, for his soul was pleasing to the Lord. Therefore, he sped him out of the midst of wickedness, but the people saw and did not understand, nor did they take this into account.”
Leslie Lewis took a different tack: “My father never stopped moving forward, no matter what fate threw in his way. Whether racial stereo-types that would hamper him in his business, racial bias and prejudice, no matter what the world threw him, he didn’t let it stop him. . . . As we traveled to the church this morning, we had a police escort. In their urgency, they stopped traffic at intersections and they played sirens, and I thought, ‘Wow! They’re really making a lot of noise.’ Then I thought, ‘My God, yes! Let them make noise. Let there be a commotion. Let there be a loud noise because we are sending off a great man today.’”
Finally, Loida Lewis spoke of a love that death would never dimish: “The foundation on which Reginald F. Lewis grew up is a foundation based on love. Not the love we see on television or the lo
ve in which you say, ‘I love you,’ and then forget it the next day. No! It’s the love that St. Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. Love that is patient, hopeful, expecting. Not nagging. It is love that is kind, not hurting with your tongue. It is love that is not conceited, or self-centered, or ego-based. It is not selfish; nor does it keep a record of wrongs. . . . True love never gives up. Its faith, its hope, its patience endures. So my darling, you had it in your early life, and I tried to give it to you in our marriage. I have loved you without conditions, without reservations. My love for you will never end.”
Among those who sent messages of condolence was newly inaugurated president Bill Clinton. “Hillary and I are deeply saddened to learn of your husband’s death,” Clinton wrote. “Reginald Lewis’s commitment to excellence, his life of achievement and his deep concern for his fellow man were an inspiration to me and to all who knew him.”
“His generosity was boundless, enriching the lives of people around the world. We will miss him. You and your family are in our thoughts and in our prayers.”
Bill Cosby wrote: “Reggie Lewis is to me, not was, is to me what Joe Louis is to me. What Jackie Robinson is to me. Regardless of race, color, or creed, we are all dealt a hand to play in this game of life. And believe me, Reg Lewis played the hell out of his hand.”
Lewis was eulogized by his friend and soon-to-be head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Dr. Ben Chavis. Those in the church laughed heartily as Chavis recounted how he and Lewis had gone to North Carolina to fight school desegregation, and Lewis had had the moxie to ask a uniformed, white Southern sheriff to display identification.
Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? Page 37