by Macy, Beth
The other thing that rubbed Mr. Doug wrong—and his wife and daughters too—was the photo JBIII brought back of his busty, blond German girlfriend. People whispered that he intended to marry the woman. At a time of lingering anti-German sentiment, that was a positively un-American idea in Bassett, Virginia. When JBIII was in Germany, though, patriotism had proved to be no match for hormones. “He had a really good time with the girls in Germany,” Teague, a fraternity brother, told me. “He liked that they were a little freer over there.” (“Freer?” JBIII roared, when I told him what Nelson said. “How about just free?”)
But a fräulein would never do for a Bassett man. Several years before, the family had helped arrange Jane’s marriage. From a North Carolina textile family, Bob Spilman had gone to North Carolina State University with Jane’s cousin, John Vaughan, of the Galax family branch. Bob was in John Vaughan’s wedding, which Jane missed because she was vacationing in Europe. By the time the family threw a party for him, Jane was dating a young lawyer in Richmond and working for a bank. She didn’t want to attend, but her father called and said it would be rude not to, she recalled.
That party would forever change the fate of Bassett Furniture and John Bassett III. Not to mention the Richmond lawyer, who would soon be toast. Bernard “Bunny” Wampler, Spilman’s fraternity brother at North Carolina State, remembers the party well. “Spilman walks in and says, ‘Damn, look at all these rich women! What do you say I go and marry one of ’em?’ ”
By the time Jane and Bob married, in 1954, Doug Bassett was suitably impressed with his son-in-law, a hard-charging veteran of the Korean conflict and a former West Point instructor who read the Wall Street Journal and traveled regularly to California by plane as a New York–based sales manager for Cannon Mills. “He’s on a plane out to California, and Bill and I haven’t even been out there yet,” he marveled.
JBIII may have started out with the coveted office space, but down the road, in the sales offices of the Bassett Chair plant, Bob Spilman was the one to watch. “When Robert got here, believe me, he was a go-getting somebody,” Jane Bassett Spilman said. “And he was a trader like you can’t believe. He’d rather save ten dollars in a trade than make a hundred dollars just in a yawn. He liked the challenge of talking people into things. If I were God and I could have put him in the best position he could be in, it would be mergers and acquisitions.”
The acquisitions would come later, in spades. For now, Spilman had to prove himself as more than a favored son-in-law. And John Bassett III had to prove himself as more than a Porsche-driving skirt-chaser. His dad put him in charge of quality control, which meant he roamed from plant to plant suggesting improvements and taking notes, just as his father had done. He got to know the different plant managers and was able to study every aspect of furniture-making.
But some perceived him as a tattletale, Little Lord Fauntleroy with a legal pad. When a new plant opened or an employee received a service award, JBIII was happy to get his picture in the Martinsville Bulletin or the Bassett Pioneer, which didn’t earn him points with Mr. Ed in the office next door. Several former managers told me JBIII thought nothing of skipping the chain of command and going directly to his father instead of Ed, whose memory, he would soon learn, was as long and roiling as the Smith River.
JBIII’s demeanor was as cocky as it was charismatic. According to Reuben Scott, who reported to him for several years, JBIII’s initial factory-man tenure was fraught, fueled by insecurity and a misguided sense of what a Bassett heir was supposed to know and do. Scott recalled him making a costly mistake on an entire order of dressers—a mistake his father berated him for publicly, then insisted he stay late to correct.
“At first you couldn’t tell him anything,” Scott, now ninety-two, told me from his nursing-home bed in Stanleytown. (Childless and widowed, he was on oxygen the two times I visited him, but he was mentally sharp and thrilled to talk about his factory days.) “He wouldn’t ask for help, I guess because he thought he was already supposed to know everything. But he got better.”
From his room at the Martinsville hospital, where he spent the last five years of his life, Mr. J.D. kept an eye on his namesake. A chauffeur picked the old man up daily for drives around Henry County so he could check on the bank and the plants, and every year on Mr. J.D.’s birthday, the local newspaper ran a feature on him with a picture. In one, his uniformed chauffeur stands next to the Cadillac while Mr. J.D. and his nurse pose next to the Smith holding a fish he had just caught (well, someone caught it). In another, chauffeur James Thompson is handing him a copy of the Henry County Journal. The cigar is in Mr. J.D.’s mouth, and the nurse is in the backseat forcing a half smile.
One afternoon, between plant visits, JBIII stopped by the hospital to see his grandfather.
“What time do the factories close, son?” Mr. J.D. wanted to know.
“They close at four,” JBIII said.
“And what time is it now?” he asked, pointing to the grandfather clock he’d had hauled up to his hospital room.
It was not even close to four o’clock.
“You go back and go to work, and, when the factories close, then you come see your grandfather.”
The message was clear: there was no leaving early, even if you were the boss’s son, and there was definitely no acting like you were better than the workers on the line, the people who were busy making you rich. Mr. J.D. had hammered that into his moody son, Doug, as a child, chiding him during a carriage ride through the town of Bassett. “What is wrong with you today, boy?” the old man boomed. “We have passed a lot of people on the streets, and you’ve just sat there like a cigar-store Indian while I have doffed my hat and waved and smiled and nodded on both sides of the street. And you have not even acknowledged anybody.”
It wasn’t so easy to be the company heir in a small company town. People talked incessantly about your family. And there was always pressure to be the world’s largest as well as the world’s best. At Spilman’s urging, Mr. Ed had recently gotten the company into the upholstery business, buying a plant called Prestige in Newton, North Carolina, which, according to a press release in 1963, made Bassett the “largest manufacturer of wood furniture in the world.” A year earlier, the company celebrated its sixtieth anniversary by hanging banners across the town that read $60 THOUSAND TO $60 MILLION IN 60 YEARS. It also laid claim to the world’s largest chair, a Duncan Phyfe model that Jiranek designed as a publicity stunt for Curtis Brothers Furniture Company in Washington, DC. It was nineteen feet tall and weighed 4,600 pounds; state patrolmen had to shut down a portion of the highway just to get it trucked to Washington. But that was no problem for Bassett, a company that had friends—as well as relatives, like Uncle Bonce—in high places.
“Discover Bassett…” whispered a short-skirted model in a Look magazine ad featuring a bright yellow canopy bed and an avocado-colored upholstered couch made in the company’s newly acquired Prestige Furniture. “Bassett Lets You Show Your Style Now,” announced an ad in Reader’s Digest in which a wife crocheted in an avocado-colored chair while her husband and dog slept on dueling plaid couches, his smoking pipe at rest atop a brass-handled coffee table.
The company was advertising in Life and Look magazines and buying up smaller companies, a strategy that helped it nearly double sales in four years. Thanks to the baby boom, the entire furniture industry was now a four-billion-dollar concern, with furniture receiving the third-largest share of consumer dollars, behind only houses and cars. The rebels had long since won the Furniture War between the States: of the thirty largest manufacturers, twenty-three were now in the 150-mile furniture belt stretching from Bassett to Lenoir.
Mr. J.D. had carved a multimillion-dollar empire out of cornfields and foothills, and the pressure was on his heirs to keep up the exponential growth. No one gave a thought to the Bretton Woods Agreements that had been negotiated among Allied nations in 1944, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that followed in 1947, establish
ing the international trading system and setting up a sequence of global trade negotiations designed to lower trade barriers on a “mutually advantageous basis” between the countries involved.
Doug and Bill hadn’t yet landed in California, after all, much less in China, where Mao Tse-tung spent much of the 1960s building state-owned factories, after banning private enterprise and foreign investments, and initiating the Cultural Revolution to keep the naysayers grindingly in check, starving and executing millions in the process. “We took the furniture, pots, and pans we had in our house, and all our neighbors did likewise,” said a teacher in rural Shanghai, speaking of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. “We put everything in a big fire and melted down all the metal” for use in government-directed infrastructure projects.
China would modernize using the principles of diligence and frugality, Mao wrote in his Little Red Book manifesto, first published in 1964. “Nor will it be legitimate to relax if, fifty years later, modernization is realized on a mass scale,” Mao proclaimed.
From Beijing to Bassett, no one was relaxing, especially not JBIII, who’d been smart to take the postcollege time-out from the business. His father was strict and, occasionally, erratic. Managers recalled Mr. Doug entering the boardroom and barking to his cousin Mr. Ed, “Get the hell out of my seat!”
Barber Coy Young remembered Mr. Doug chewing John out on the sidewalk in front of Bassett headquarters for the whole town to see. W.M. Bassett had paid for the stress with ulcers and high blood pressure, while Doug was known to have his first cocktail not long after his postlunch nap. “Doug maybe expected too much of his own abilities, and that took him to drink,” Spencer Morten said.
To encourage the young men in his family to get along better, Doug suggested they join forces to form a new subsidiary of Bassett Furniture, a plastics supplier called Dominion Ornamental that made frames for Bassett Mirror. Morten ran the company, which was jointly owned by several of the third-generation heirs, including Spilman and John. The venture made the men a bundle, but it was not the family healer it was intended to be.
For one thing, Spilman would not defer to anyone, repeatedly going over Morten’s and the other directors’ heads, even negotiating the final details of the company’s sale to Libby Owens Ford three years later. Each director walked away with $800,000 from an initial investment of $35,000. “And no one’s thanked me yet,” said Spencer Morten, still happy with the windfall but sore that his power was usurped.
Spilman’s moneymaking instincts were right on, as usual. But “he was a real asshole about it,” Morten said.
During our third interview, Spencer Morten invited me to touch the bump on the crown of his head. He got it the first time he knocked heads with a Bassett. He was a World War II medic, a Midwesterner by birth. And when the army weapons carrier he was riding in crashed, he hit his head on the carrier’s Bassett Furniture–made frame.
Morten was not born into the family fortune he now shares with his wife, Mary Elizabeth Bassett Morten, whom he dotes on, with assistance from the help, at their homes in Bassett and Hobe Sound.
When he showed up in Martinsville to work for the newspaper, he carried a single suitcase. He met his wife at a bridge game arranged by the sister of Mr. Doug’s wife. Mary Elizabeth and Spencer married at Eltham, after which Mr. W.M. installed Spencer in management at Bassett Mirror, where he worked for fifty years. For twenty-seven of those years, he represented his wife’s family’s considerable Bassett stock holdings as a member of the Bassett Furniture Industries board, and, believe me, he knows where the bodies are buried—even the ones along the edge of the family cemetery. During several interviews, he spoke animatedly and with surprising candor, as if he’d been waiting sixty years for someone to come along and ask him how it all felt. A former reporter, he even helped me track down long-gone employees and household servants.
It was Spencer, in fact, who first told me how Mr. Doug finally disposed of his son’s fräulein, in a scene that must have broken the young heir’s heart. Mr. Doug had heard she was flying in with her mother to visit John, much to the Bassett family’s chagrin. To head them off, Doug dispatched Leo Jiranek, the company’s signature designer, to meet them when their plane landed in New York. Jiranek dutifully treated them to lunch at his favorite place, the Princeton Club, then put them on the next plane to Germany, explaining that JBIII had changed his mind about the woman.
“But that’s a chapter John does not want to talk about,” Spencer warned me. Jiranek’s son Bob said the same thing.
Sure enough, when I broached the subject with JBIII, he snapped, “Girlfriend in Germany? I’m not gonna tell you about that.”
There are very few topics that John Bassett III won’t discuss, but after spending the better part of two years interviewing him, I’d apparently landed on one. He changed the subject, talking about the first apartment he shared with Pat, his wife of fifty years, a run-down duplex that was spitting distance from the train tracks in Bassett. “This wasn’t about being affluent. It was about settling down, and going to work, and being successful. I mean, don’t make it complicated.
“You knew what was expected of you, and [the workers] knew what was expected of them. Got it?”
Got it. Subject dismissed. According to the Bassetts, it was the simplest story in the world.
7
Lineage and Love
There is nobody in the world that can take care of a woman like another woman.
—JBIII
The women in the family waited until they reached the Galax city limits to give Little John the news: he was about to meet the woman of his dreams. It was September 1962. The occasion was the funeral of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company founder Bunyan Vaughan, and the entire Bassett clan was paying its respects to a fellow industry leader. Bunyan Vaughan was related by marriage to the Bassetts, and his company was related to them, too, having been started with Bassett money.
The women had ample experience in matters of love and money. Mr. J.D. was a nonagenarian widower now, with steady companionship provided by his chauffeur and his full-time nurse, who was in her sixties. The daughters and granddaughters had had a lot to say about that, having called a family meeting to share the news that someone had found Grandpop very happily sleeping with his nurse. The women were aghast, worried she would lay claim to the family fortune, though there was scant evidence to suggest that the nurse had anything other than caretaking and companionship in mind.
The Bassett men, however, had an entirely different response than their wives. The two were fooling around. It was mutual, nobody was getting hurt.
“You women be quiet,” Mr. J.D.’s Galax grandson George Vaughan snapped. “What we need to do is find out how the hell he’s pulling it off!”
Ultimately, the women prevailed, moving Mr. J.D. to the hospital in Martinsville, where he spent his final years. With more eyes on him, the theory went, the hanky-panky would stop, and the fortune would be safe. “There is nobody in the world that can take care of a woman like another woman,” JBIII recalled, shaking his head. “Men who don’t understand that are stupid.”
The women were now immersed in finding Little John a mate. Every sister was in charge of picking somebody, and Pat Vaughan Exum had gotten letters from Jane about him. Pat was a student at Jane’s alma mater, Hollins College, an old liberal arts finishing school for the elite daughters of the South—the Hollie Collies, they were nicknamed. It was the kind of college to which young women were (and still are) encouraged to bring their horses. (Back in the antebellum era, they were even invited to bring their slaves.)
Pat was related to Miss Pokey—her great-grandmother was the matriarch’s sister, making her a fourth cousin to Little John. She was also the granddaughter of Bunyan Vaughan, a position that entwined her lineage as well as her stock holdings with the Bassett corporate/family tree.
“Put on your lipstick,” Pat’s mother told her at the start of the funeral reception, held at the Vaughan family estate. “They ha
ve brought John Bassett up here to meet you.”
John stood silent as Jane asked Pat all the questions, firing-line-style, without missing a beat. What year was she at Hollins? What was her phone number? What were the rules these days on leaving campus for a date? “She was all over it,” Pat recalled.
Mourners lined the room, and they all fell silent as people strained to listen in when the two finally spoke. JBIII told Pat he was sorry about her grandfather and got her number, and then everyone commenced talking again. Years later, he would recall of his future wife’s figure, “That girl could put some wrinkles in a blouse.”
Two weeks later, they went on their first date. He didn’t want to risk asking her for a weekend date, in case she was already busy, so he proposed a Wednesday-night dinner instead. They courted twice a week for nearly a year, dining regularly at an exclusive Roanoke club where his parents were members.
And though Wyatt Exum wished his daughter would stay and finish college, Pat said her mother could see how much they were in love, and she urged the couple on. Pat earned her “Mrs.” degree instead and never looked back, she insisted. A music major “with no discernible talent,” as she put it, chuckling, she saved herself the embarrassment of the dreaded senior piano recital by dropping out after her junior year.
The bride wore her mother’s satin wedding gown designed with an oval neckline of rose-point lace, an elongated basque, and a shirred skirt ending in a court train, according to the wedding announcement. Spencer Morten recalled Mr. Doug leaning toward him at the reception and saying: “Good for John. He’s got him a good American car and now a good American woman, a Baptist even!”
The kissing cousins have learned to ward off jokes by beating observers to the punch line. “We’re so inbred around here, our family tree is a palm,” their son J. Doug Bassett IV deadpanned. When my story about John Bassett ran in the Roanoke Times, their daughter, Fran, wrote to thank me for explaining, finally, exactly how her parents were related. She’d never before understood.