The estranged romantic partners of the estranged Chrysler takeover partners lived together for about nine months, became close friends, and shared many personal insights. Lisa told Darrien her dream was to be the “‘last Mrs. Kerkorian’ so that one day ‘it’ would all be hers.”
“It”—Kirk’s fortune—happened to be growing by tens of millions of dollars a month as Chrysler stock values steadily climbed.
By the end of 1995 it was clear that while Kirk’s campaign to boost share value had been a reasonable success, his takeover attempt was doomed. The gambler knew it was time to fold ’em. Walking away, however, required a bit of delicate choreography.
Kirk and Eaton agreed to meet secretly and alone—against the advice of advisers from both sides—to explore a final compromise. Eaton took a suite at the elegant old Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a short walk from Kirk’s Beverly Hills office.
Chrysler would agree to more stock buybacks. It would raise the dividend again. Kerkorian could have a seat on the Chrysler board, just so long as it wasn’t Jerry York, who was considered a menace to current management. Kirk had to think about that. York was his top choice.
“You know, Bob, we might be able to do that,” Kirk finally agreed. “But it’s going to be very expensive.”
Eaton agreed to add another billion shares to the buybacks. And so it went. But Kirk’s request that Chrysler restore to Iacocca the $42 million in stock options it had rescinded was adamantly opposed. How about half of it? Eaton shrugged. Maybe.
Formal negotiations moved to Michigan in February 1996. Kirk left York in charge and flew to Florida where he would wait out the final terms aboard his yacht. Key elements of the deal were in place—the expanded stock buybacks, the dividend increases, a five-year moratorium on Kirk buying any more Chrysler stock or attempting a proxy fight, and Tracinda executive Jim Aljian would get a seat on the Chrysler board. Iacocca would get half of the rescinded stock options, but he would have to sign a nondisparagement agreement—essentially a five-year gag order on criticism.
That’s when the whole deal suddenly went wobbly. A furious Iacocca wanted $53 million, reflecting the full current value of those contested stock options, and he would refuse to sign any agreement requiring that he shut up.
In a phone call from the October Rose with the entire deal hanging on Iacocca’s ego, Kirk tried to calm and reassure his partner. Finally, through gritted teeth, Kirk said he would personally make up the $32 million difference himself. You’ll get your money, he said. It sounded like the end of a friendship. It wasn’t.
One of Kirk’s most enduring—and friends found most endearing—traits was his limited capacity for grudges. He didn’t collect them. “It’s business,” he would say, and move on.8 Kirk and Iacocca were double-dating in the months that followed. And the expletives disappeared from Eaton’s name. They dined together as Kirk and Bob on several occasions thereafter.
And Kirk walked away from another failed takeover attempt with an almost unimaginable profit. When all the Chrysler dealing was done, he was up about $2.7 billion over his initial investments.
34
She Persisted
Summer 1996
Beverly Hills, California
When Kirk’s lucrative but failed run at Chrysler ended earlier in the year, it left him at the age of seventy-nine a billionaire bereft of meaningful challenges. He had no pending conquests, no looming takeovers, no underperforming corporations to rescue. He wandered through an uncertain spring. But by summer he was back in the arms of an old flame—his very needy and financially forlorn ex-company—MGM/UA.
The film studio’s 1990 merger with Giancarlo Parretti’s Pathé Communications had been a disaster for everyone—except Kirk, who had walked away with a majority share of the $1.4 billion sale. Parretti, it turned out, had bribed bankers to finance the deal and then looted the company to support his lavish lifestyle. French banking giant Credit Lyonnais was left with a dysfunctional film company and a bill for well over $2.5 billion. When the bank put MGM/UA back on the market, Kirk was first in line for his third turn at the movie business.
That July Kirk was restless romantically, as well. He kept trying to break off his five-year relationship with former women’s tennis professional Lisa Bonder, but she refused to accept “good-bye” as the last word in their affair. They still spent occasional weekends together until she said she was ready to move across the country. She just needed some cash to “start over” in New York City.
At about the same time that Kirk wrote a check for $870 million to buy back MGM, he also withdrew some cash for Lisa—a little something in order to “start over” in New York—$1 million in bank-wrapped stacks of $100 bills.1
Kirk always kept plenty of cash on hand for his own use. He hated credit cards. “They leave paper trails wherever you go,” he complained. But the first time Kirk ever applied for a credit card, he did so along with financial advisers George Mason and Anthony Mandekic. They were approved. Kirk was rejected. His reliance on cash left him without a consumer credit record.2
He was undeterred. Kirk remained a big believer in using his petty cash for daily personal expenses such as lunch or dinner, a cocktail at the Polo Lounge, tips for the parking lot valets, whatever. And $100 tips were common.
He kept rolls of $100 bills in his pants pocket wherever he went. Around town, that meant a wad of $5,000 to $10,000. On foreign trips, he preferred to have at least $50,000 in his pockets. His home safe, whether he was living in Beverly Hills or Las Vegas, was usually stocked with currency, mostly U.S. hundred-dollar bills, that routinely amounted to between $150,000 and $200,000.3
Lisa didn’t have a home safe. She didn’t even have a permanent home. She was still living with Darrien Iacocca. Under the circumstances, $1 million posed an immediate security burden. She asked Wendy Falahi—the twenty-eight-year-old wife of Kirk’s valet and fitness guru—for a ride over to Lisa’s bank on Sunset Boulevard. The women were friends, both of them outgoing, good-natured, and similar in age. And Wendy often took care of Lisa’s seven-year-old son, Taylor.
At the bank, an overly attentive manager escorted the two women into a private room with a table. An armed security guard stood outside. There, alone with a million dollars, the women discovered that a hundred bricks of currency did not fit easily into the space available in her safe deposit box. They had to rearrange, restack, stuff, and jam the last of the wrapped packs, an exercise that left them almost giddy by the time they left the guarded room.
That million-dollar stash never did finance Lisa’s new life in New York. She didn’t move east, and Kirk didn’t seem to mind. In August, about three weeks later, he invited Lisa to join him on the yacht cruising the French Riviera. In October when she turned thirty-one, Kirk took her out for a birthday dinner at Matteo’s, one of his favorite restaurants in Westwood. And in November they flew to Maui on his private jet to spend Thanksgiving in a $5,000-a-night luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
Their Hawaiian reconciliation ended abruptly. The bickering had resumed. Lisa was especially persistent about her wish to be married. Kirk didn’t even want to talk about it. He walked out, summoned his flight crew, and flew home, leaving Lisa to make her own way back to California.4
It was tennis that brought Kirk and Lisa together in 1991—tennis and Lornie Kuhle, a former MGM Grand Hotel and Las Vegas Country Club pro and that year a coach for tennis star Jimmy Connors. Years earlier, Kuhle had managed Bobby Riggs when he lost to women’s tennis star Billie Jean King in the nationally televised “Battle of the Sexes” produced by Jerry Perenchio.
Kuhle brought Lisa Bonder along to one of the weekend tennis marathons at Kirk’s hilltop house on Wanda Park Drive. The five-foot-ten blonde with a quick wit and a devastating forehand was an instant hit among Kirk’s circle of weekend tennis partners.
“She was fun, gracious, charming and she could play tennis like out of this world,” recalled Ron Falahi, Kirk’s right-hand man and valet who also served as t
he regular chef for those weekend games. And in March of 1991 she started dating Kirk. He was seventy-three; she was twenty-five. At the time she had been married for three years to Thomas Kreiss, the heir to a furniture fortune. Their baby, Taylor, had just turned two.
Before marriage and pregnancy, Lisa had been ranked in the Top Ten of women’s professional tennis. As a teenager she had defeated the legendary Chris Evert in a Tokyo tournament. And in 1984, her best year, Lisa reached the French Open quarterfinals in Paris and later that year in New York made it to the fourth round at the U.S. Open.
Kirk’s tennis buddies were impressed with her tennis and camaraderie. Kirk’s affection for her was obvious. But his blunt-spoken sister, Rose, was never a fan. Lisa wasn’t Armenian, she was still married, and she was so young.
“What do you see in this bimbo?” Rose once scoffed in disapproval.
“She makes me laugh,” Kirk replied.5
Good humor was a common trait of all Kirk’s women, those he dated and those he wed. Wife Jean was among the spunkiest. One evening at a stuffy Beverly Hills dinner party with Kirk, Cary Grant, and Cary’s girlfriend at the time, British photographer Maureen Donaldson, the also very British Jean tired of the small talk. The men had retired for scotch and cigars. One of the rich women was complaining about the inadequacies of her household cooks.
“You should have your cook make spotted dick,” Jean interrupted in the Cockney accent of her youth.
“What? What did you say?” responded the woman, not quite believing what she’d just heard.
“You. Should. Have. Your. Cook. Make. Spotted. Dick!” Jean repeated more slowly, one heavily accented word at a time.6
With a wink and a nudge Maureen chimed in, too. “But without raisins it’s not spotted dick,” she said, adding suggestively, “if you know what I mean.”
The table full of proper Beverly Hills society matrons fell into a moment of seemingly hostile silence—until Jean explained that spotted dick was an English pudding with raisins. Not everyone was amused. But it was precisely the sort of reaction to chitchat that Kirk would have relished. He put a high priority on confident, good-humored women.
Kirk’s previous companions, including Yvette Mimieux, Barbara Grant, and Priscilla Presley, were smart, stunning, and discreet. And none of those who came before Lisa Bonder had ever said a word that drew public attention to their ties with Kirk.
As Suzy the gossip columnist suggested early in the Bonder-Kerkorian affair, Lisa talked too much for Kirk’s comfort. Worse yet, in conversations with Darrien Iacocca and other friends, Lisa had grumbled that he should be sharing more of his wealth with her. It was a violation of Kirk’s jealously guarded privacy, and it cost Lisa his trust.
That Kirk was still lavishing Lisa with gifts and trips and a million dollars in bank-wrapped $100 bills months after their breakup seemed contradictory to friends and family. But Lisa would explain it simply, “He took care of me, and I took care of him.”
From the earliest days of their affair, Kirk promised he would provide financially for Lisa and Taylor if she wished to move quickly to divorce. And for his own sense of propriety, Kirk encouraged her to do just that. He did not, however, propose marriage himself. He was very happily unmarried. That never changed through his five years with Lisa. By early 1997, with their relationship chilling into estrangement, her opportunities to woo him into marriage were fast fading.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
Even as a young man, Kirk had been frustrated by difficulty conceiving children. A childless marriage was one of the great disappointments of his nine years with first wife Peggy. With Jean, they tried for about five years before Tracy was conceived. And after trying for another five years without success, they decided to adopt Linda.
Kirk at first assured Lisa that he long ago had a vasectomy. He later acknowledged that actually he was sterile.
Lisa confided to a friend that she had a solution, a way to get around Kirk’s sterility and still convince him to marry her. She told Bonnie Glusman that she had located a clinic in Los Angeles that performed in vitro fertilization. Lisa could get pregnant at the clinic but tell Kirk that the baby was his.
Bonnie, the wife of prominent Las Vegas restaurateur Fred Glusman of Piero’s—both of them mutual friends of Kirk—offered no support for that idea whatsoever. She said she called Lisa’s plan “deceitful and morally wrong,” ending the conversation.
By spring of 1997 it was becoming clear even to Lisa that reconciliation with Kirk was hopeless. She was spending hours a day on the phone fretting with friends and obsessing over how to win back Kirk’s affections. But he was adamant. She told friend and socialite Anne DuPont that she would not have much to live for without Kirk in her life. She made similar comments to Kirk that he found especially disturbing.
Lisa also stalked Kirk, keeping track of his travels through inquiries to the aircraft dispatch office at Van Nuys Airport where Kirk based his private jet. She was even familiar with the crew’s standard flight routes, and on the phone with friends she would sometimes calculate within a few minutes and a few miles where Kirk was and when he would get wherever he was going.
Kirk finally complained that Lisa seemed to be showing up at odd times and places, as if she were following him.
In April, after another “final” Kirk rejection to her overtures, Lisa was back to considering a sperm bank. She told Anne DuPont that Taylor needed a brother or sister. But Lisa was also ready to party. She started dating Hollywood playboy Steve Bing, the heir to a Southern California real estate fortune. During one double date with Anne at the exclusive Hotel Bel-Air, Lisa and Bing slipped away for a quick lovemaking session.
It was around that time that Lisa decided to try a deal-making ploy on one of the greatest deal makers in American business history. She would agree to move on with her life, but she would need a stake—a nest egg, so to speak. There was a house for sale on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. It needed work. If Kirk would give her $4 million, she would use $1.6 million to buy and renovate the place. The rest would be moving-on-with-my-life money.
Kirk agreed. He would give her the full $4 million, but she would have to sign a contract—a legally binding nondisclosure agreement prepared by attorney Terry Christensen—committing her to keep secret everything Lisa knew about Kirk, his business interests, or his personal affairs. She even had to keep secret the secrecy agreement itself. They did more than shake hands on the deal. They spent a week together, in what both of them called “a last fling.”
Kirk promptly moved on, inviting another smart, stunning, articulate blonde to join him for dinner at the MGM Grand Hotel’s Brown Derby in late June. Una Davis was from La Jolla, an affluent coastal village north of San Diego. She also played tennis, was divorced, financially independent, and very competitive.
Una and Kirk had met two summers earlier when she and some mutual friends of tennis pro Lornie Kuhle drove north to join Kirk’s weekend tennis marathon. After a day of tennis, laughs, and one of Ron Falahi’s poolside buffet luncheons, Kirk took everyone out for dinner at Mr. Chow. The host was wearing a butterscotch-colored soft corduroy jacket with patches. Una exclaimed, “I love your jacket!” He seemed to keep an eye on her the rest of the evening.7
Kirk was in his late seventies at that first meeting, but trim and athletic. He was naturally tanned and had a full head of gray-streaked black hair combed back in a wavy pompadour. In conversations he was humble and self-effacing and had an almost boyish enthusiasm for life. “He was so much fun, so endearing, kind and sweet. You’d never think he was some big deal in business,” Una said of those early encounters.
They found the same comfortable rhythm of easy conversation and easy laughs at the Brown Derby, on their first private date. After dinner Kirk escorted Una to the door of her room and bid her good night. “That was that,” she says. “He was such a gentleman.” One date led to a second—at Spago in Caesars Palace. This time Una noticed the swirl surrounding Kirk’s
arrival.
“When he walked in, the whole place seemed to shake.” She saw people rush from all corners of the restaurant to greet him, seat him, and solicit his every wish. “It was amazing . . . but Kirk, he was almost embarrassed by it. He wanted to be incognito all the time.”
To avoid creating such a stir, Kirk liked to park in back, near the MGM Grand service entrance so he could walk down an alley, go through the food court, and get to his favorite restaurant without having to deal with dozens of greetings. One night in an amorous mood, Kirk lingered in his white Taurus with Una making out like a couple of teenagers.
KNOCK. KNOCK. A hotel security officer was pounding on Kirk’s window.
“You can’t be doing that. You’ve got to get out of here,” ordered the officer. He didn’t know he was talking to his boss. And Kirk never told him. In fact, he said nothing at all. But he was furious. Una noticed as Kirk complied with orders to move along that his right fist was clenched and cocked.
“He was ready to clock him!”
Sometimes Kirk seemed almost goofy in love. Another evening he was driving to pick up Una for dinner at her hotel and found himself uncharacteristically running late and in traffic. Abruptly, he wheeled onto the median and roared past the traffic jam, blowing out tires and finally coming to a dead stop.
He peeled off several hundred-dollar bills and paid a bystander to take care of his car, then ran off to keep his date with Una.
Those first dates led to more. It looked like the beginning of another beautiful friendship. Even sister Rose was fond of her.
But suddenly the phone calls stopped. The dates ended. “I figured that was that,” Una shrugged. Later in the summer she heard from Lornie Kuhle. Kirk was in a terrible place, he said. He’s depressed. He’s sitting alone staring at the walls. Could Una please call to cheer him up?
The Gambler Page 27