The feud never got out of hand because the Company was an enormous success, and the profits it produced were a balm to hurt feelings. Annual sales hit the billion-dollar mark for the first time in 1972, and had reached five billion a decade later. This volume had most recently produced earnings of over $175 million a year, enabling AFC to pay very comfortably an annual dividend of ninety cents on each of its 80 million outstanding shares.
For the Andersen family itself, and the Andersen Foundation, begun by Laurance Andersen, this meant annual dividend income in excess of $33 million—not huge by the megabuck figures of the 1980s, but more than enough to make one and all very comfortably off.
As he neared retirement, Flemming Andersen was especially pleased at the highly profitable outcome of two developments he had encouraged. One was branching out into pet foods, a new departure for the Company. Through shrewd advertising, AFC had been able to capture a modest but profitable share of the pet market; enough of the country’s 56.2 million cats and 51 million dogs were being fed the AFC products to make HEART O’ GOLD pet food a thoroughgoing success.
Andersen’s other innovation had given him even more satisfaction. He was a competitive person by nature, and it pleased him that AFC had taken on a tough rival—Campbell Soups—and managed to more than hold its own. Many other food processors had tried over the years to compete with Campbell’s in soup selling, but their efforts had usually ended in costly failure, or at least without capturing a profitable share of the market.
Those around Flemming Andersen—not least Billy O’Neal—had tried to discourage his move into soups, citing this bleak history. But he would not be deterred. Correctly, he sensed that the country was ready for a line of soups containing only natural ingredients—no monosodium glutamate, no artificial coloring, no mysterious junk. And he also sensed that AFC’s reputation for quality would enhance its ability to emphasize the all-natural character of its new SUPERBOWL varieties.
The results had been sensational beyond even the Chairman’s expectations, and Joe Faxton, the AFC Treasurer, would be able to report, at the family meeting at Mohawk Inn, that the Company was headed for another year of record earnings.
It was slightly after noon on the last Friday in August when Flemming Andersen left the AFC Building on Park Avenue, climbed into a waiting Company limousine and departed for the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport. He was accompanied by Casper Robbins, the President of AFC and an obligatory (if not necessarily willing) participant in the Mohawk weekend. The two men would meet their wives, Sally Andersen and Ditsy (née Elizabeth) Robbins, at the airport. Andersen would also meet his son, Laurance (named after his distinguished grandfather), a forty-five-year-old bachelor at the moment (after shedding three successive wives in disastrous and costly divorce proceedings, the most recent within the past year).
Flemming’s relatives would be coming in from what the family jokingly called the “compound” in Connecticut. (While the Andersens vigorously denied that this estate bore any resemblance to the cluster of Kennedy homes in Hyannis, the fact was that Flemming, Laurance and Flemming’s daughter Sorella all had adjoining properties in back-country Greenwich.) At the Marine Terminal, they would take an AFC corporate plane to the Adirondacks.
As the car moved up the F.D.R. Drive, Casper Robbins sensed that his colleague did not want to talk (part of his success as a nonfamily survivor at AFC could be attributed to his instinctive, and correct, impulses as to what the wishes of members of the Andersen family were). Flemming, for his part, wondered how many more years the August reunions would go on. They had been started in the 1920s by his father. The first Laurance had been a willing immigrant from Minnesota—decamping from Duluth within months of his own father’s death, moving his family and the AFC corporate headquarters to New York City. He nonetheless had a nostalgia for woods, mountains and bracing weather that the Adirondacks satisfied.
As originally conceived, the outings had been for the Andersen family, ranking management of AFC and outside advisers like Reuben Frost, and their spouses. (Old Laurance, with only one son and one daughter, could hardly have had very festive weekends had they been confined to blood relatives.) Flemming, who somehow became aware that the Company’s managers might have other things to do on the last weekend in August, had several years earlier made it clear that management personnel, other than essential figures like Robbins and Faxton, need not attend. The result had been an indecently swift attrition in the number of those coming to the Mohawk Inn. Now, in the mid-1980s, attendance was limited to Flemming and his children; Billy O’Neal; Casper Robbins; Reuben Frost; Randolph Hedley, legal counsel to the Andersen Foundation; and several members of the AFC headquarters staff who arranged the weekend’s events and logistics. And, of course, spouses and (very occasionally) spouse substitutes, and a bevy of Andersen grandchildren.
The small attendance made the weekends very expensive, even by bargain Adirondack prices; not only did Flemming Andersen have to pay for those who attended—he was far too scrupulous to attempt to saddle AFC with the bill—but for the Mohawk Inn’s weekend expectancy as well. He felt the privacy he purchased was worth it; his only doubts were about the value of the underlying event itself. But tradition was tradition, and he intended to carry this one on at least until protests from the younger generation grew too loud.
(It was also one of Flemming’s ways of dealing with his grandchildren. The weekends gave him a chance to get to know them—at least this had been true until the grandchildren had grown into sullen and antisocial teenagers—and he saw it as a means of impressing upon them the existence of a special family, and corporate, ethic that they would be expected to uphold.)
Given AFC’s rosy condition, Flemming Andersen should have been in a contented mood as he started the weekend. But he was not. Two recent events intruded into his consciousness as he looked out at the East River from the back seat of his car.
The first had been a scare three weeks earlier when he had had pains in his chest for the first time ever. The pains, which occurred in early afternoon in his office, startled him and sent him scurrying to Michael Odell, his doctor for many years. Odell tried to calm his patient’s anxiety, insisting—quite truthfully—that Andersen’s cardiogram showed nothing amiss and that he almost certainly was suffering from something no more severe than a slight case of indigestion.
Andersen was reassured—almost. He realized that, at seventy-five, pains or aches—or worse—were inevitable; and, while he had almost literally never been sick a day in his life, he could not deny the existence of occasional but brief spells when he felt weak and below par. This self-knowledge, and the recent heart scare, had made him focus reluctant attention on the question of his succession at AFC. Since the beginning, the Company had always been run by a member of the Andersen family. But now succession by a family member did not seem realistic.
Years before, he had thought that Laurance would be his heir-apparent. After a volatile college career at Yale, during which he was elected editor of the campus humor magazine on one day and threatened with expulsion for gambling the next, Laurance had joined AFC. Despite a collegiate reputation as a playboy that did not diminish as he got older, he took his work at AFC seriously and got a broad experience in every aspect of the Company’s business. He was a handsome, athletic man and mostly well liked by those he worked with at AFC.
But Laurance always seemed to be at odds with his father about Company matters, often of the most minor sort. Flemming had been dismissive of his son’s ideas, and Laurance had gradually seemed to lose interest in AFC. He was a member of the Board of Directors, but had resigned in the early eighties as one of the Company’s two Executive Vice Presidents, a title he had shared with his cousin Billy O’Neal. After his resignation, he had invested heavily in a Colorado ski resort, which in short order had brought him to the brink of personal bankruptcy, from which his father had grudgingly rescued him.
His latest enthusiasm was involvement with a group
of young wheeler-dealers in a venture capital partnership based in California—a partnership that Flemming dearly hoped would prove both solvent and successful.
As for his nephew Billy O’Neal, there was no doubt about his desire to take over AFC’s management. With justification, he demanded some of the credit for AFC’s recent prosperity. As Executive Vice President, he had engineered the Maxwell beer acquisition and his hands-on management had rejuvenated the declining Maxwell brand. One in four Americans still said “Give me a Bud,” but now almost one in ten said “Make it Max.”
O’Neal’s problem, aside from his antipathy to Flemming’s branch of the family, was that he was a more than occasional user of his own product—or at least other alcoholic beverages. He was an odd sort of drinker. Most of the time he was fully capable of functioning in his job with both intelligence and genuine Irish charm and wit. But every so often he would disappear on a monumental bender that might last a few days, or a week, or (as had happened at least three times) a month. All of which did not matter too much as long as his responsibilities were limited and he had good assistants. But it was conduct that was simply not suitable, in Flemming’s view, for the Chairman of the Board of Andersen Foods.
(Flemming was a realist, not a moralist, in these matters of human failing. While he had grave reservations about his nephew’s drinking, he did not think of Billy’s tawdry and frequent adulteries as a disqualification. Billy’s wife thought otherwise and was now separated from him.)
The only other male that could be considered family was Nathaniel Perkins, the husband of Flemming’s daughter Sorella. A failed novelist who bitterly resented anyone else’s success, he had never shown any interest in becoming a part of AFC’s management, for which his father-in-law had always been grateful.
With the men ruled out, there were, of course, the family women. His wife had always been interested in Company affairs, but this interest had been confined to dinner conversation and pillow talk at home; she had never expressed any desire to participate directly in running AFC.
As for his daughters, Sorella and Diana, Flemming was ambiguous. He was (at least he told himself he was) certain that he was open-minded about the role of women in business. Indeed, he had insisted that Sorella be the head of the family Foundation. This was a not inconsiderable job, given the half-billion dollars in assets the Foundation possessed, and she had handled it both efficiently and graciously.
Diana was quite another matter. She was deeply committed to a highly militant feminist organization called Concerned Women. As a national officer of Concerned Women, she had demonstrated so-called “leadership qualities,” but Flemming was not certain that they were of a kind transferable from militant political action to a corporate boardroom. In any event, neither daughter had ever proposed taking an active part in AFC’s management—in view of their grandfather’s legacy, they had perhaps been afraid to ask—and Flemming had never pressed the issue, though now he thought perhaps he should have.
This brought Flemming Andersen’s thoughts to the man sitting beside him in the limousine. Casper Robbins had been recruited by Flemming over much family opposition. The idea of an outsider as President, and very possible heir-apparent, had been alien to the Andersens, either selfishly (in the case of Laurance and Billy O’Neal) or sentimentally (in the case of Sorella and Diana). Only Sally had supported his effort, five years earlier, to transfuse new, outside blood into the AFC body corporate. She actually had known Robbins—the two of them had met playing tennis and had become occasional tennis partners—and had encouraged her husband to hire him after he had been recommended to AFC by an executive search firm.
Robbins had been the second-in-command at a leading communications company, where he had been unexpectedly passed over for the top job just at the time when Andersen was looking for a President. But there was more than timing that drew Andersen and Robbins together. Smooth and articulate, Robbins had nonetheless begun life as a poor boy in the remoter reaches of New Jersey. He had advanced through Williams College waiting on tables. His charm and athletic skill—he was captain of the tennis team—had been sufficient to overcome his deficiencies of background, and he had both the social distinction of membership in St. Anthony’s and the academic distinction of graduating with high honors. The Harvard Business School had followed, then an upwardly mobile career at HAG Communications—upward, that is, until he was unceremoniously turned down for the chief executive officer’s job.
Flemming Andersen had instinctively liked Robbins. As the scion of inherited wealth, the poor-boy-makes-good image of the younger Robbins both intrigued and appealed to him. Besides, Robbins had talent: a rigorous, tough mind, yet a capacity to conceal the toughness with great charm; an extraordinary articulateness in conveying his thoughts without being cutting or condescending to those he was addressing; a razorlike efficiency, but unaccompanied by the impatience that efficiency often brings along with it.
Robbins had been a good President, carrying out Flemming’s orders without complaint, acting with executive authority in those areas in which Flemming was not interested (dealing with AFC’s labor relations, for example) and, in general, learning the considerable differences between a communications company, eager to dominate the nation’s newsstands, and one dealing in foodstuffs, eager to dominate its grocery shelves.
Flemming Andersen had no reservations about the prospect of turning over control to Robbins; his only regret was that his own family had been unable to serve up an eligible heir. Indeed, as insurance, Flemming (albeit at the insistence of Robbins) had been instrumental a year earlier in constructing a “golden parachute” for the AFC President—a lucrative bundle of payments and fringe benefits that would snap into Robbins’s possession if and when AFC were taken over by outsiders and Robbins were fired or demoted. The thought was to show the family’s confidence in Robbins, to insulate him from the distraction of any threatened takeover and to put him on an economic and psychological parity with his well-protected colleagues in other corporations.
The idea that anyone could take over AFC had never really occurred to its Chairman; it was a farfetched pipe dream as far as he was concerned. Or at least had been until ten days earlier when he had met Jeffrey Gruen, the most notorious and perhaps the most ruthless of the corporate raiders still at liberty. Like the pains in his chest, his chance encounter with Gruen had probably been without significance. But …
The meeting had taken place at a cocktail party for Dartmouth College fund-raisers that Andersen, as an active and loyal Dartmouth graduate, had attended. Gruen, the father of a Dartmouth underclasswoman, had become as enthusiastic a booster of the college as the most loyal alumnus. (Having gone to work on the floor of the American Stock Exchange after high school in Brooklyn, Gruen had never gone to college himself.) More Catholic than the Pope (or at least more green than any Hanoverian), he circulated at the party as if he were a direct descendant of Daniel Webster.
As Andersen now remembered the encounter, Gruen had come up and introduced himself.
“I’m a great admirer of yours,” Gruen had said. “And an even bigger admirer of AFC. It’s the greatest food company in the world.”
Flemming Andersen recalled thanking him for the compliment.
“Fact is, Mr. Andersen, if I ever want a food company, it would certainly be yours,” Gruen had added.
That was all there had been to the conversation. No threat of a raid, not even a veiled hint of one. But still and all, Gruen had certainly been deliberate in seeking out the AFC Chairman at that party. And possibly, just possibly, might have put a playing piece on the starting square of that popular Wall Street game called TAKEOVER.
Andersen kept telling himself that the twinge of worry he felt was utterly unfounded. At any rate, he was not going to discuss the matter with the tanned, athletic man sitting beside him reading the London Financial Times. For reasons the Chairman could not explain, AFC’s President had not been a good listener of late and had not paid his
customary deferential attention to the Chairman’s pronouncements. At the best of times Robbins probably would have found his worries silly, Andersen thought; in light of his recent attitude, he surely would have done so.
Andersen’s anxious thoughts—and almost any other kind, for that matter—were banished at the Marine Terminal, where a larger group than he had expected waited to board the AFC plane. Sally had come in from the country not only with Laurance but with Laurance’s teenaged daughter, Dorothy. Plus a frisky Rottweiler puppy that seemed attached to Dorothy. Ditsy Robbins and the Frosts also waited in the cheerfully restored central room of the terminal, with the artist James Brooks’s splendid History of Flight looking down on them.
Flemming greeted all except Reuben and his son with kisses. For Reuben he had a warm handshake.
“Remember when we used to take the old propeller planes from this terminal?” he asked Frost, as they waited to be shown through the gate.
“Of course I do,” Frost replied. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Endless trips to California with stops about every hundred miles. And on planes smaller than those private jets outside right now.”
“I think that’s our pilot over there,” Andersen said, pointing to a uniformed figure at the arrival desk. “Yes, he’s gesturing to us. Let’s scoot.”
Andersen gathered the group and its luggage together and they followed the pilot out the exit.
“Reuben, would you sit with me on the way up? There’s something I want to run by you,” he said, bringing up the rear behind the women, children and dog.
“Of course, Flemming. Something interesting I hope?”
“I hope not” Andersen replied.
Once they were airborne, an attendant served drinks aboard the Grumman G-IV, the brand-new and more luxurious of AFC’s two aircraft; lunch would wait until their arrival at the Mohawk Inn some fifty minutes later. All of the group except Flemming, Reuben and the dog (whose name turned out to be Winston) sat in facing seats in the middle of the plane. The two men were in adjoining armchairs at the front, far enough away so that they could talk discreetly without their conversation being heard by those behind them. (Winston sprawled benignly in the aisle. His conversation, or more precisely his breathing, could be heard throughout the cabin.)
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