Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Now, in early ’92, Norman is determined to prove them all wrong. He is bitter about Philadelphia’s fans. How they had loved him, briefly, when he rode in on his white horse to save the franchise in ’85, buying it, so the story went, to prevent the sale to investors in Phoenix. But the honeymoon lasted only a few months. WIPed up by the endless carping of call-in radio, which amplifies the opinions of cranks, Norman has become one of the city’s biggest bogeymen. So much so, that Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell’s pollsters used Norman as a standard for citywide unpopularity when they test-marketed new ideas (Norman was insulted). Part of his original motivation for buying the team had been romantic; he loves his old hometown and has fond memories of growing up watching the Phillies and Eagles. Now Norman couldn’t care less. If the club weren’t such a good investment (it has more than doubled in value since ’85), he’d happily ship the whole enterprise, helmets, pads, cleats, and prima-donna athletes together, to Tokyo for the right offer. That’s how he feels some days, anyway. But Norman is also stubborn. Even more than losing, even more than being despised, Norman hates being underestimated.

  This year Philadelphia is going to learn. For years he has taken a backseat to that blowhard Buddy; now it’s time for people to see what the owner can do.

  HE MADE HIS FIRST million in the cut-rate drugstore business. Apprenticing himself to his father-in-law, a gruff Lebanon, Pennsylvania, merchant named Harry Miller, Norman helped develop a chain of discount department stores called Bargaintown USA and then expanded the business into a larger chain of retail drug outlets.

  He is the son of a freethinking, self-educated father who had a barbershop on Arch Street in Center City, Philadelphia, and a semiliterate mother who had worked in sweatshops through her teens in order to save the money to bring her relatives to America. Both had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe, his father from Poland and his mother from Romania. Norman had come up through Philadelphia’s public schools and had taken a degree in business from Temple University. He had earned his tuition working two jobs, at a discount store on Market Street and at Food Fair.

  Norman at age twenty-two was ambitious beyond the scale of most college men in the fifties. America after World War II had spawned a corporate culture modeled after the military, the great shared experience of the war generation. It was strictly male, hierarchical, and overimpressed with size. Most ambitious young men coming out of college at that time had career goals defined by the corporate ladder. You got your degree, signed on at the lowest rung, and began a steady climb toward middle age and a uniform upper-middle-class dream.

  Not Norman. Like most Jewish young men, he regarded corporate America as a largely goyish concern. Besides, he had his sights set a lot higher than a station wagon and a home in the suburbs for the wife and kids. His parents, and the remarkable success stories he saw growing up in Philadelphia’s Jewish community, had left Norman the core immigrant belief that anything was possible in America. Big corporations? They were other men’s empires.

  After Temple, Norman took a job in a new marketing research arm of Seagram Distillers, an appropriately Jewish-owned company. It was an opportunity he would later call the most formative experience in his business life. “It taught me how to think,” he says. Under the direction of a former University of Pennsylvania professor, Frank Hypps, Norman learned how to do real-world market analysis, traveling all over the country as part of a Seagram’s sales-and-marketing team. They would visit bars and liquor outlets and conduct in-depth interviews, note shelf placement of Seagram’s products, how and why stores and restaurants decided on a product as their house whiskey. Then they’d write a detailed report to guide company sales tactics. He learned how to rigorously assess and define a market, how to target sales and streamline distribution. Norman would carry Hypps’s manuals through nearly four decades of mounting business success.

  He met Irma Miller, a slender, blond high-school girl, at Camp Kweebac, a summer retreat for Jewish teens outside Reading, where Norman had worked as a counselor and driver during his last years in college. They were married September 30, 1956. When Norman announced he was leaving his solid corporate job at Seagram’s to work for his father-in-law, Irma and her mother were horrified.

  Harry was a town character, a burly peddler in an oversized cowboy hat. He was loud, aggressive, and everywhere. In his youth, he had combed Lebanon for surplus merchandise, which he would buy and then sell from the back end of his truck. You never knew what Harry would be selling; you just knew it would be cheap. He seemed born with a knack for knowing, not just what something was worth, but what other people would pay for it. Even when Harry became one of the town’s most successful merchants, forsaking the truck for the farmer’s market he purchased out at Seventh and Sunset Streets, he remained the gruff hustler. In the town’s small and largely affluent Jewish community, Harry was respected, but at arm’s length. To Irma, her new husband’s prospects, his college degree and urbane manner, were a step up from Harry the Hustler. So Norman’s decision to work for his father-in-law came as an unpleasant shock.

  But Harry and Norman were soul brothers. The older man respected Norman’s education and business insights. Norman respected Harry’s up-from-the-back-of-the-truck success and his capital. Money was a means for making more money. And if Harry knew how to hustle, Norman knew how to speed.

  One of the first things Harry did with Norman was to send him on a scouting expedition to Providence, Rhode Island. An old factory there had been converted into an unusual kind of department store. Instead of customers approaching a counter and asking a clerk to bring them merchandise, the way nearly all general stores then operated, the owner spread goods out on long wooden tables and let customers wander around the store with a cart.

  When Norman liked what he saw, Harry took him down to the bank, cosigned a note so that his son-in-law could borrow ten thousand dollars, and then took the money as contribution to their new partnership—Bargaintown USA.

  The first store was in Lebanon, at Harry’s old farmer’s market. It wasn’t fancy—low overhead was key—and the merchandise, true to Harry’s reputation, was plentiful and cheap. They ran garish fullpage ads in the Lebanon Daily News and kept the store open long hours, seven days a week. Harry retained Norman’s brother, Leonard, a lawyer, to help battle Pennsylvania’s blue laws. Those who knew Norman then remember a gaunt man with dark rings under his eyes, disheveled in appearance, smoking constantly, barking orders, and seemingly camped full time in the cramped offices behind the store. Bargaintown was a hit.

  Of course, what worked in one town would work in another. The second Bargaintown opened in Manheim, the third in Hummelstown, the fourth in Lewistown—all places that drew in customers from a wide rural area, but were too small to attract a Korvettes or Alexanders, the giant department-store chains. As the stores thrived, credit came easier and easier, and neither Norman nor Harry was inclined to sit still. Between ’57 and ’62, they opened six Bargaintown stores.

  Branching into discount drugs was Harry’s idea. The new stores operated on the same principle—low overhead, high volume, low prices—but they were smaller and less expensive to open, stock, and maintain. Norman especially liked them because he could get them up and running fast. They recruited a successful cut-rate drugstore operator from New York named Mort Klein in ’64 and really picked up the pace, opening a new store every two weeks.

  Mort traveled the back roads of Pennsylvania, scouting out locations for new stores. He took long coal-country drives, ranging out from Lebanon in ever-widening circuits, stopping in every jerk town they came across with a population of seven thousand or better, places like Sunbury, Uniontown, Shamokin, Kulpmont, Mt. Carmel, Pottsville, Frackville, Shenandoah, Danboro, Bloomsburg, Lewisburg, ranging as far east as Pottstown, as far south as Hanover, north to Shickshinny, and as far west as Monongahela and Aliquippa. He would scout out storefronts with fifteen hundred to two thousand square feet of floor space that could be ren
ted within Norman’s parsimonious budget, generally under eighty-five dollars per month. When he found a likely spot, Norman would visit.

  Negotiating was Norman’s special gift. He had a way of seeming to look right through you, of instinctively sorting out bottom line from bluff. When a landlord in Donora stubbornly refused to accept less than a one-hundred-dollar monthly rent, Norman first balked, then seemingly capitulated. But when the papers were drawn up, the contract called for a ten-year lock on that rate, renewable annually—and here Mort had to admire the audacity—at Norman’s discretion! Of course, all the landlord saw was the one hundred dollars per month. Norman saw a successful store with a fixed basement-level lease for a full decade.

  And just because papers were drawn up and signed, that didn’t mean (for Norm) the deal was done. If there was an ounce of advantage down the road, he was patient … and ready. Saddled with a rent in Johnstown that he felt was too high, Norman had surprised Mort by pressing ahead. The new store prospered, more than justifying the higher lease, but several months into operation, Norman issued a surprise order.

  “Paper it up,” he told Mort.

  They laid off the employees, locked the doors, and taped brown paper over the windows.

  A few days later, the store reopened—with a significantly lower rent.

  Most landlords would rather keep a steady tenant at a lower rent than go off looking for a new one. It was a principle with other applications, as Mort discovered. Before he was hired, he had held out for a salary higher than Norman wanted to pay. Harry intervened to secure the better salary, but nine months after Mort moved his family to Lebanon, Norman fired him, then offered the job back later the same day, at a lower salary. Mort took it. It’s harder to give something up than to turn something down.

  As Norman’s expansion plans accelerated, Harry grew anxious. The whole empire rested on his financial clout, so he had a lot more to lose than his son-in-law. And, as the complexity of the enterprise grew, Harry felt its weight shifting from his shoulders. Norman never rested. Store nineteen opened in Bloomsburg. Store twenty opened in Danville. Store twenty-one was getting ready to come on line in Shamokin. There were plans in the works for fifteen more stores before the end of ’67—when Harry’s foot hit the brake.

  Gamble-Skogmo, a retail empire based in Minneapolis, offered to buy Bargaintown. For Harry, the deal would cap a lifetime of success. His son-in-law would go on to further corporate heights; Gamble-Skogmo offered to make Norman a top exec and move him and Irma to Minneapolis. Harry figured it was too good to pass up. But Norman said no. Irma didn’t want to move to Minneapolis, he explained, and, besides, if a retail powerhouse like Gamble-Skogmo was interested, didn’t that just prove they were onto something big?

  It became more than a professional disagreement. Harry was livid. Who did this kid think he was? Had he forgotten who had loaned him the ten grand to join the partnership in the first place?

  The two men stopped speaking to each other. Norman and Irma stopped coming by for family dinners. They split up the partnership; Norman took the discount drug stores, renaming the chain Keystone, and Harry kept the department stores. For several sad years, the family endured a cold and bitter split.

  NORMAN WAS JUST GETTING STARTED.

  It was 1967. To further expand, Norman turned to the brokerage house of Butcher and Sherrard (later Butcher and Singer), a bedrock Philadelphia financial institution devoted to the shelter, care, and feeding of money, old and new. Norman was simply dazzled by these men.

  And over the next six months, B&S built Norman a conglomerate called Philadelphia Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics (PP&C). They merged Norman’s thriving and still expanding Keystone chain with a troubled venture in northeast Philadelphia called Philadelphia Laboratories; then with U.S. Cocoa Corporation in Camden; with Vitamix, a vitamin manufacturer in Connecticut; and a licorice-extract manufacturing firm in Virginia called F. A. Martin Company. The logic behind the acquisitions was sometimes lost on Norman, but the suits at B&S were delighted. They were predicting annual sales in excess of ten million dollars. Norman was excited. He’d hit the big time.

  But his faith in this ungainly contraption lapsed quickly. Despite the impressive array of PP&C holdings, the only one of its divisions making money was Keystone, and the bedrock was starting to crumble. Instead of doubling Keystone’s sales in ’68, as the wizards predicted, the chain’s six-month sales slipped from $4.6 million to $3.6 million. When Norman complained, he was assured that what really mattered was the mounting value of PP&C’s stocks, which went up with each new acquisition.

  But Norman wasn’t impressed by such an abstract measure of success; what he saw was a cumbersome agglomeration of losing ventures. By the end of ’68, when B&S proposed adding a concrete company in western Pennsylvania to the mix, he asked out. The suits obliged. They wrote him a check for $1.2 million.

  He was thirty-six years old. He drove back to Lebanon that night, and the next day stopped by the Keystone offices waving the check triumphantly. It was a scene no one in Keystone’s offices that day would forget.

  “I did it! I did it!” Mort remembers him saying. “I never thought I could do it, but I did!”

  Norman Braman was a millionaire.

  Now he could start making some real money.

  A PATTERN WAS BEGINNING to emerge in Norman’s career. Twice now, he had formed a partnership with someone older and better established, profited by the association, and then moved on, leaving hard feelings and accusations of betrayal in his wake. Harry Miller was still not speaking to his son-in-law; and the suits at B&S, whom Norman successfully sued after the buyout (he was awarded an additional $838,000), were still smarting two decades later, when W. W. Keen Butcher III, patriarch of the money house, grumped to a reporter, “Mr. Braman cannot be relied upon for informational purposes. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  It’s partly a consequence of Norman’s restlessness. Every five to ten years he sheds his skin and emerges as a new man. Norman the college kid became Norman the chain-store owner, then Norman the corporate CEO, then Norman the urbane young millionaire ready to sample early retirement.

  He would repeat the process again in five years, then again at the end of the decade, and then again five years later. Impatient to succeed, he quickly grows impatient with success. The one constant in this lurching progress has been money. Wherever Norman goes, he makes more.

  But dollars aren’t enough. Norman has deeper, more romantic yearnings that even he finds hard to define. “I don’t know what I want, and it worries me that I don’t,” a middle-aged Norman told a newspaper interviewer. “I have something inside of me that keeps prodding, that keeps moving, that keeps inquiring … a feeling that I’m not fully satisfied with Norman Braman, that I’m not really satisfied with what I’m doing…. But what the hell do I really want?”

  Politics opened up Norman’s next opportunity. As a young millionaire Jewish Republican, he found it easy to make friends in the new GOP power structure in Washington. He was a supporter of Philadelphia senator Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and became close friends with newly elected upstate New York representative Jack Kemp, the former quarterback. When Norman “retired” to Florida, he allied himself with Representative Bill Cramer and became one of a number of young, relatively moderate Miami Republicans who challenged the long-standing upstate-Florida GOP power structure. He became business partners with California representative Bob Wilson, with whom he opened a chain of discount drugstores in Ireland that failed to thrive.

  Norman used these connections to pry his way into the business of selling Cadillacs, the foundation for the next explosion in his personal wealth.

  It didn’t take a genius to see that the hordes of retirees still migrating south were a potentially lucrative market for luxury cars. After the gas crisis of ’74, virtually every segment of the car-buying public was looking for smaller, more gas-efficient, less expensive vehicles—every segment except elderly retirees,
that is. The folks seeking permanent rest and recreation in the sun were the very people who had made GM and Ford the mightiest car manufacturers in the world. These people liked big cars, cars with fins and chrome and leather interiors and air-conditioning and terrific sound systems. They lived large, craved status, and because they didn’t drive all that much, weren’t so panicked by escalating gas prices. To someone of Norman’s marketing acumen, the business was just idling by the side of the road, fully gassed, keys in the ignition. The problem was how to get behind the wheel.

  Norman’s reading of the situation was Caddy dealerships did not go to outsiders, and they did not go to Jews. To break down the walls, he needed patrons, powerful patrons.

  That’s where California Bob came in. Wilson sat down with Norman and some other investors that year and outlined a strategy for a political assault on GM’s walls. They recruited Virginian I. Lee Potter, a former Eisenhower administration official and Republican national committeeman, who threw in more than $100,000 of his own money. Wilson borrowed $180,000 from C. Arnholt Smith, a megabucks GOP financier with close connections to Richard Nixon (Smith would later go to jail and be described by one federal prosecutor as “one of the great swindlers of modern times”). Smith loaned Norman $300,000. California Bob recruited the help of his longtime congressional colleague Jerry Ford, who had represented Michigan’s fifth district for a quarter century. Norman went to see his old buddy Hugh Scott. Together, they put the squeeze on GM. Before the end of that year, “an opportunity developed,” Norman recalls, to buy a silent half of the Sharp-Taylor Cadillac dealership in downtown Tampa. He had his toe in the door.

  A year later, Norman purchased his own Caddy dealership in Miami, on Biscayne Boulevard, and old Bargaintown Braman started teaching GM the art of discount merchandising. He fired the sales staff and hired a workforce that reflected the cultural pastiche of a changing Miami. He ran outlandish promotions, utilizing a cartoon superhero named BramanMan, and turned the area’s formerly collegial Cadillac competitors into silly cartoon foils. When the ads started attracting folks who really couldn’t afford Cadillacs … no praaaablem! Norm offered generous installment plans. His marketing strategy stood GM’s on its head. Whereas the manufacturer used Cadillac’s luxury status to exclude, Norman used the car’s status to include: he told people You deserve to own a Cadillac! If you can’t afford one … hey, let’s talk!