by Jon Ronson
“So what does that say about me?” Stewart said again.
“Good things!” I reassured him.
Sunbeam was, in the mid-1990s, a mess. Profligate CEOs like Robert Buckley had left the company flailing. The board of directors needed a merciless cost-cutter and so they offered the job to someone quite unique—a man who seemed to actually, unlike most humans, enjoy firing people. His name was Al Dunlap and he’d made his reputation closing down plants on behalf of Scott, America’s oldest toilet-paper manufacturer. There were countless stories of him going from Scott plant to Scott plant firing people in amusing, sometimes eerie ways. At a plant in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, he asked a man how long he’d worked there.
“Thirty years!” the man proudly replied.
“Why would you want to stay with a company for thirty years?” Dunlap said, looking genuinely perplexed. A few weeks later he closed the Mobile plant down, firing everyone.
Dunlap’s autobiography, Mean Business, was replete with anecdotes about firing people, such as this:The corporate morale officer at Scott [was] a pleasant enough person being paid an obscene amount of money, her primary job was to ensure harmony in the executive suite. The hell with harmony. These people should have been tearing each other’s hair out. I told [Scott’s CFO Basil] Anderson to get rid of her. . . . Later that week one of the in-house lawyers fell asleep during an executive meeting. That was his last doze on our payroll. A few days later he was a memory.
And so on. He fired people with such apparent glee that the business magazine Fast Company included him in an article about potentially psychopathic CEOs. All the other CEOs cited were dead or in prison, and therefore unlikely to sue, but they took the plunge with Dunlap anyway, referring to his poor behavioral controls (his first wife charged in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and muttered that he always wondered what human flesh tasted like) and his lack of empathy (even though he was always telling journalists about his wise and supportive parents, he didn’t turn up at either of their funerals).
On the July 1996 day that Sunbeam’s board of directors revealed the name of their new CEO, the share price skyrocketed from $12.50 to $18.63. It was—according to Dunlap’s unofficial biographer John Byrne—the largest jump in New York Stock Exchange history. On the day a few months later that Dunlap announced that half of Sunbeam’s 12,000 employees would be fired (according to The New York Times, this was in percentage terms the largest work-force reduction of its kind ever), the share price shot up again, to $28. In fact the only time the price wavered during those heady months was on December 2, 1996, when BusinessWeek revealed that Dunlap had failed to show up at his parents’ funerals and had threatened his first wife with a knife. On that day, the share price went down 1.5 percent.
It reminded me of that scene in the movie Badlands when fifteen-year-old Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, suddenly realizes with a jolt that her tough, handsome boyfriend, Kit, has actually crossed the line from rugged to lunatic. She takes an anxious step backward, but then says in her vacant monotone of a voice-over, “I could have snuck out the back or hid in the boiler room, I suppose, but I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit for better or for worse.”
Much as in Badlands, Al Dunlap’s relationship with his shareholders bounced back fast after December 2, and together they went on a year-long rampage across rural America, closing plants in Shubuta and Bay Springs and Laurel, Mississippi, and Cookeville, Tennessee, and Paragould, Arkansas, and Coushatta, Louisiana, and on and on, turning communities across the American South into ghost towns. With each plant closure, the Sunbeam share price soared, reaching an incredible $51 by the spring of 1998.
Coincidentally, Bob Hare writes about Badlands in his seminal book on psychopathy, Without Conscience: If Kit is the moviemaker’s conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a talking mask simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. Her narration is delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. If there was ever an example of “knowing the words but not the music,” Spacek’s character is it.
It all ended for Dunlap in the spring of 1998 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating allegations that he had engineered a massive accounting fraud at Sunbeam. Sixty million dollars of their apparently record $189 million earnings for 1997 were, the SEC said, the result of fraudulent accounting. Dunlap denied the charges. He demanded from Sunbeam, and was given, a massive severance pay to add to the $100 million he earned in his twenty months at Scott.
Back then, in the pre-Enron days, there wasn’t quite the appetite for pursuing criminal charges when the cases were as complicated as that one was, and in 2002 Dunlap’s legal troubles ended when he agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle various lawsuits. Part of his deal with the SEC was that he would never again serve as an officer or a director of a public company.
“What about his childhood?” I asked John Byrne before I set off for Shubuta. “Are there unusual stories about odd behavior? Getting into trouble with the police? Or torturing animals?”
“I went back to his high school but I don’t believe I interviewed any of his old classmates,” he replied. “I have no recall.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I know he was a keen boxer as a child,” he said.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes, he made some comments about how much he enjoyed beating people up.”
“Oh REALLY?” I said.
“And his sister once said he threw darts at her dolls.”
“Oh REALLY?” I said.
I wrote in my notepad: Throws darts at sister’s dolls, enjoys beating people up.
“What was he like when you met him?” I asked.
“I never did,” he said. “He wouldn’t see me.”
There was a short silence.
“I’m going to meet him,” I said.
“Are you?” he said, startled and, I think, a little jealous.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”
The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns—he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta—was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.
Like Toto Constant’s army of plastic Burger King figurines but huge and vicious and expensive, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad.
“Lions,” said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.”
Item 5: Conning/Manipulative, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey,” or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.
“Gold, too,” I said. “There’s a lot of gold here, too.”
I had been prepared for the gold, having recently seen a portrait of him sitting on a gold chair, wearing a gold tie, with a gold suit of armor by the door and a gold crucifix on the mantelpiece.
“Well,” said Al. “Gold is shiny. Sharks.”
He pointed at a sculpture of four sharks encircling the planet. “I believe in predators,” he said. “Their spirit will enable you to succeed. Over there you’ve got falcons. Alligators. Alligators. More alligators. Tigers.”
“It’s as if both Midas and also the Queen of Narnia were here,” I said, “and the Queen of Narnia flew above a particularly fierce zoo and turned everything there to stone and the
n transported everything here.”
“What?” said Al.
“Nothing,” I said.
“No,” he said, “what did you just say?”
He shot me a steely, blue-eyed stare, which I found quite debilitating.
“It was just a jumble of words,” I said. “I was trying to make a funny comment but it all became confused in my mouth.”
“Oh,” said Al. “I’ll show you outside. Would you like to walk or take the golf cart?”
“I think walk,” I said.
We wandered past several extravagant oil paintings of his German shepherd dogs. There was a famous seven-week period during the mid-1990s, when he was laying off the 11,200 Scott employees, that he demanded Scott pay for two suites at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia—one for himself and his wife, Judy, and another for his two German shepherds. He has a son, Troy, from his first marriage, but I noticed there were no pictures of him anywhere, just lots of portraits of the German shepherd dogs and grand, gold-framed, life-sized oil paintings of Al and Judy, both looking serious but magnanimous.
We took a walk across his lawns. I spotted Judy standing near a stone sculpture of a sweet, tousle-haired child that overlooked the lake. Judy was blond, like Al, and wearing a peach sweat suit. She was just gazing out across the lake, hardly moving.
“You visited a plant one time,” I said to Al. “You asked a man how long he’d been working there. He said, ‘Thirty years.’ You said, ‘Why would you want to work at a company for thirty years?’ He saw it as a badge of honor but you saw it as a negative.”
“A negative to me,” he replied. “And here’s why. If you’re just going to stay someplace, you become a caretaker, a custodian. Life should be a roller coaster, not a merry-go-round.”
I wrote in my notepad, Lack of empathy. Then I turned to a clean page.
“Shall we get some ice tea?” he said.
On our way to the kitchen, I noticed a framed poem on his desk, written in fancy calligraphy, a few lines of which read:It wasn’t easy to do
What he had to do
But if you want to
be liked
Get a dog or two.
“Sean had it done for my birthday,” he said.
Sean was Sean Thornton, Al’s longtime bodyguard. “If you want to get a friend, get a dog,” said Al. “We’ve always had two. I hedge my bets!”
I laughed but I knew this wasn’t the first time he’d used this line. It was on page xii of the preface of his autobiography, Mean Business: “If you want a friend, get a dog. I’m not taking any chances; I’ve got two dogs.”
And in the unofficial biography Chainsaw, John Byrne writes about an occasion back in 1997 when Al invited a hostile financial analyst, Andrew Shore, to his home:“I so love dogs,” Dunlap said, handing Shore photographs [of his German shepherds]. “You know, if you want a friend, you get a dog. I have two, to hedge my bets.”
Shore had heard the exact line before, in one of the many articles he had read about Dunlap. But he laughed.
I wrote in my notepad, Glibness/Superficial Charm.
He is always ready with a quick and clever comeback [but] may actually provide very little useful information.
Michael Douglas says something like it in the 1987 movie Wall Street: “If you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there.” I wondered if the screenwriters had taken the line from Al Dunlap, but later I discovered that he hadn’t been the only bigwig to say it.
“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog,” Harry Truman had apparently said during his presidency, according to the 1975 biographical play Give ’em Hell, Harry!
“You learn in this business, if you want a friend, get a dog,” said the corporate raider and pharmaceutical chief Carl Icahn at some point during the mid-1980s.
“If you want to be liked, get a dog,” said the host of CBS’s Inside Edition, Deborah Norville, in the early 1990s. “The people you work with are not your friends.”
We gathered in the kitchen—Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard.
I cleared my throat.
“You know how I said in my e-mail that your amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a fascinating theory. It’s like Star Trek. You’re going where no man has gone before. Why are some people enormously successful and others not at all? The kids I went to school with had a lot more privileges than me but they’re not successful. Why? What’s different? Something’s different! It’s a question that’s been on people’s minds for generations! And that’s why, when you mentioned this amygdala thing, I thought, ‘Hmm. That’s very interesting. I’ll talk to this fellow.’ ”
“I have to tell you that some psychologists say that if this part of your brain doesn’t work properly, it can actually make you . . .”
“Mmm?” he said.
“Dangerous,” I mumbled inaudibly.
I suddenly felt incredibly nervous. It was true that I had already asked two people—Tony and Toto—if they were psychopaths, and so I ought to have been used to doing this. But this was different. I was inside a man’s mansion, not a maximum-security prison or a mental hospital.
“Sorry?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”
“Dangerous,” I said.
There was a short silence.
“In what respect?” he said thinly.
“It can make you”—I took a breath—“a psychopath.”
Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard stared at me. For a long time. I was in over my head. What did I think I was doing? I’m not a licensed medical professional or a scientist. Nor, if I’m being honest with myself, am I actually a detective. I blamed Bob Hare. He hadn’t told me to do this, but I never would have had I not met him. His checklist gave me false confidence that I could make my way in this land of psychopaths. I should have listened to Adam Perkins’s warnings. I’m not a detective, not a psychologist, and I didn’t even score that well when I self-diagnosed with the DSM-IV.
They looked at once deeply angry, befuddled, and disappointed. Al had let me into his home and I was being compelled by circumstance to ask him if he was a psychopath. It is not illegal to be a psychopath but, still, it’s probably very insulting to be asked if you are one.
“I’ve got a list of personality traits written down here that define psychopathy,” I said, pointing at my pocket.
“Who the hell are the people who make the list?” said Al. “What are their names? I bet I never heard of them!”
At this I realized I could turn the situation around to make Bob take the blame in absentia for the unpleasantness.
“Bob Hare,” I said. I pronounced his name quite clearly: “Bob Hare.”
“I never heard of him!” said Al, a triumphant glint in his eye.
“Never heard of him!” Judy agreed.
“He’s a psychologist,” I said. I exhaled to indicate that I felt the same way he presumably did about psychologists.
Al pointed toward a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeb Bush, as if to say, “Those are men I have heard of!”
“So, that list . . . ?” said Al. He looked suddenly intrigued. “Go ahead,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” I said. I pulled it out of my pocket. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
“Okay. Item one. Superficial charm.”
“I’m totally charming,” he replied. “I am totally charming!”
He, Judy, and Sean laughed, easing the tension.
“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I asked.
This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.
Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, I had written in my
notepad earlier. His inflated ego and exaggerated regard for his own abilities are remarkable, given the facts of his life.
In fact, on my way here I had made a detour to Florida State University in Tallahassee to see the Dunlap Student Success Center. It had been built with a $10 million donation from Al and Judy and was without doubt an ostentatious monument to them and their German shepherds. There was a huge painting of them and the dogs on the lobby wall in which Judy was wearing a leopard-print blouse and Al was wearing a gold tie. There was a bronze plaque into which Al’s and Judy’s faces had been carved above a button that, when pressed, played a recording of Al sermonizing on the subject of leadership. (There were no good leaders left, his oration basically said, and if America wanted to survive, they ought to develop some dynamic ones fast.)
I had asked Kelly, one of the building’s managers, to show me around the center.
“We are thrilled that the Dunlaps chose to give their money to an opportunity to develop citizenship and leadership and the career life story of Florida State students,” she told me.
“Al isn’t known for being the most charitable person,” I replied. “Have you reflected on why the change?”
“I can speak only to the opportunity to do good in this physical space that his gift has made possible,” she said.
“I’ve heard he collects sculptures of predatory animals,” I said. “Eagles and alligators and sharks and bears. Any animal that goes ‘ARGH!’ It strikes me as a strange hobby. Has he ever spoken to you about that hobby?”
“We have not had an opportunity to speak to that,” she said, looking like she wanted to kill me. “We have talked about the opportunity to be together in this space and for Florida State students to learn.”