by Tom Blair
I have to hand it to British Airways; the entire supersonic experience was a level above superb. Caviars and fine wines in the passenger lounge were a perfect prelude to the journey. While the aircraft itself was rather confining—small seats and windows no more than seven inches wide—the service was orchestrated to perfection. Between cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, three courses, and a final curtain call of robust cognacs and an expansive cheese selection, the three-hour flight across the Atlantic quickly disappeared into my stomach.
PATRICK, 1859: Depending on the winds the Captain bragged the journey would be a quick four to six weeks. It was eight weeks before we saw America. ’Course the Hannah was stocked only with enough stale and rotting food for six weeks. The hunger the last two weeks didn’t matter, it was an old acquaintance to all of us.
Two things told you that you were moving fast. One was a digital readout in the front of the cabin. For the better part of the flight it consisted of four digits with no decimal point. Twelve hundred miles an hour was the cruising speed. The second confirmation of almost incomprehensible speed was the airframe. If you walked forward to the front galley, stopped by the cabin entry door, and placed your hand near the metal frame, it was too hot to touch: serious air friction at the front of the plane.
Of course there was another indisputable indicator that one was flying fast. On occasion you arrived before you took off. The scheduled departure time out of London’s Heathrow was 11:00 a.m. A short three and a half hours later the graceful Concorde landed in Dulles at 10:00 a.m., an hour before it had taken off. I could have a leisurely Saturday morning breakfast at the Ritz, with extra heavy cream on my blueberries, and be on my awning-covered patio in Potomac the same day, grilling burgers for the kids’ lunch.
For my first few London excursions the Four Seasons was my home away from home. The hotel was right on Hyde Park. It was my choice because it was familiar—familiar in that I had been staying at a lot of Four Seasons in the United States. In fact, I considered the Four Seasons bar in Manhattan to be my personal rec room. My business associates in London recommended the Ritz. I tried it and unemotionally abandoned the Four Seasons … well, Reagan did divorce Jane Wyman.
Even though the Ritz was seventy-five years old—the same as Bankers Life—everything was fresh and polished to a sheen. The public rooms were magnificent. The dining room looked as if it would be appropriate for a coronation, while the hallway from the reception area down the center of the hotel reflected—okay, give me this one—the opulence of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. But what was really special were the people and the location. Not to take anything away from Nigel, the concierge at the Four Seasons, but observing the staff at the Ritz was like watching a ballet. Everything was efficient, precise, and beautiful. And the Ritz’s location was superb. Walk out the front, turn right down Piccadilly, up through the Burlington Arcade, and a quick turn onto Bond Street. Drop into Beale & Inman for a Brioni suit; they had my measurements on file. Perhaps a couple of scarves for Alice at Hermes, then dash into Asprey for a new set of cuff links.
For a great lunch I could just walk out of the Ritz, take a quick right and then a quick left, and I was at Wilton’s, the place to go for Dover sole. Took me a while to catch on; the maître d’ had to explain it to me. If you walked in at one in the afternoon they greeted you with a “Good morning.” If you arrived at two in the afternoon you received exactly the same greeting. I finally asked, “Why ‘Good morning’ in the afternoon?” The response was “Sir, it is not afternoon until you enjoy lunch at Wilton’s.”
After lunch at Wilton’s, I could dart across the street and visit Chester, Chester being my salesperson at Turnbull and Asser. There I would consider their newest selections of fabrics—“We particularly like the Egyptian cotton blues”—and perhaps order a few custom-made shirts. Of course they had my measurements in their records … as well as Winston Churchill’s.
The house that Pat was building for my family was in the enclave of Round Hill. A dozen or so homes, all on well-attended grounds, each owned by nouveau riche. Alice and I would be the nouveau-nouveau riche. Having committed to the house, I was like the drunk at the bar, ordering one more round for everyone before closing. “Pat, don’t you agree a tennis court would be perfect over here, and is there any way we could have a pool house, with a kitchen and bath, connected by a trellis to the loggia on the back of the main house?” No going back; I had to make those numbers for Hank.
It was Ben Franklin who gave me a heads-up as to the problem with AIG. Yes, I’m referring to the Mr. Franklin who did the thing with the kite. Ben made the observation, I believe in one of his annual Poor Richard’s Almanacks, that the eighth wonder of the world is the power of compounding—compounding being the notion that while a number that increases by a fixed percentage each year becomes a larger number each year, the incremental growth is not linear; it moves toward exponential.
An example, by your leave. If I ask you to save a penny today and two cents the next day and four cents the next day and eight cents the following day, and keep doubling this rate of growth for thirty days, do you think you could have the financial ability to accomplish this? The vast majority of people answer with a quick yes. But if you do the math you’ll find that by the thirty-first day, you’ll need to have saved over $10 million.
When AIG was a $5 billion revenue company, a 15% growth required us to pull a three-quarter-billion-dollar-sized rabbit out of a hat for the year. At $10 billion, we needed a one-and-a-half-billion-sized rabbit, with really big ears. Could we grow at a 15% rate for the next ten years? If you extrapolated, the answer was a resounding no. Soon some president of an AIG subsidiary might glue really big ears onto some skunks and call them rabbits to hit his numbers for Hank.
It was right after I started to worry about AIG’s long-term growth that I saw “The Movie.” Probably several tens of thousands of words of dialogue. One line from the script seared my brain. The movie was Wall Street. Great movie if you’re a guy: tough, macho business talk, a couple of great-looking women, a motorcycle, limos, a beach house, and the requisite corporate jet with a sexy attendant. The plotline was pretty simple. A young Manhattan stockbroker stalks a big account—this big account being in the form of the exceedingly well-coiffed Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. He is your basic Wall Street predator who buys a company for $100 million, quickly sells off half the assets for $50 million, coldly breaks the union, robs the retirement fund, then liquidates the squeezed-to-the-bone, efficient company for a $50 million dollar gain. Greed is everything for Gordon. As the plot thickens, to curry Gordon’s favor the young broker helps him make a run at purchasing a second-tier airline that employs the broker’s father as a unionized mechanic. After a lot of plot development and conflict, the father chastises his son for his lifestyle. The son shoots back that his father is just jealous because he hadn’t made any big Wall Street money. The father’s response was the line that branded my mind: “I don’t measure a man by the size of his wallet.” This declaration, combined with a line from a British play I would see the following year, changed my life.
The powers to be at AIG gave me another assignment. They asked me to go to a G7 conference. When I first heard G7, I wasn’t sure what part I could play—perhaps carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the heads of state. It turns out that AIG had been wining and dining the British government to curry favor and a favorable nod. AIG had an absolute lock on China, but they were was thinking ahead. In 1997 the Red Chinese were going to execute their sovereign right to direct traffic in Hong Kong, this metropolis having been a British-leased property for the past hundred years or so. Hank was trying to establish AIG handholds in Hong Kong with the Brits before the flag of the Red Star was raised over the Peninsula Hotel. My assignment was to intersect with Francis Pym, who was Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, so that I could hand-deliver a letter to him. When I asked why hand-deliver versus hitting up the AIG petty cash to pu
rchase a few stamps, I was told it was the gesture that counted, not the letter.
Hank likely asked me to play postman because Washington, DC is only a hundred miles or so from Williamsburg, Virginia, the site of the scheduled G7 conference. Plus, I had been mingling for months with the senior BUPA staff in England, so Hank figured I probably knew my way around the niceties of the British gentry. I wouldn’t slap Pym on the back and laughingly ask him what he did for fun every July 4th.
Williamsburg, described in the most cynical manner, is like Disneyland; it looks great, but it’s not real. Original Williamsburg was the kettle in which much of the stew of American democracy simmered. The town fell into disrepair during the 1800s. The Rockefellers showed up in the early 1900s, and with immense energy and even more money rebuilt it to appear as it did in the 1700s. The town is really quite charming, if you’re into colonial houses with their handmade bricks, Flemish bond, and twelve-piece crown moldings, all surrounded by gardens and more gardens.
Pym was a very pleasant chap. Our conversation journeyed awkwardly through his World War II service and his days at Cambridge. For many senior British businessmen and bureaucrats, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, I attended Oxford, I attended Cambridge, are all considered to be greetings. The British should follow the lead of the military, display rank. Mint some gold Os and some gold Cs. If one attended Oxford, one could merely attach a gold O to each shoulder of one’s suit. Likewise a gold C for Cambridge. It would avoid the forced funneling of a conversation toward confirming which school one attended. Must say, I never felt obligated to mention my days at the University of Iowa … Go Hawkeyes!
The best part of my colonial excursion was an introduction to Margaret Thatcher. She had command presence; when she walked into a room everybody else became shorter. It was obvious why our cowboy president and she were pen pals. The other good news is that I got swept up in the official visit. The American government, plus Commonwealth of Virginia officials, were out to impress the Germans, Italians, Japanese, French, and a few also-ran countries. One of the more impressive events was a formal candlelight dinner at the mansion that once housed the first governor of the Virginia Colony. American history was put into perspective when my seatmate, a German minister, casually commented that he likely owned a pair of shoes that were older than the governor’s house.
One subject grated our Virginia hosts. For all who would listen, and even if you didn’t want to, Virginia State officials lectured that the first settlers in the United States weren’t the heralded travelers who arrived on the Mayflower and established Plymouth Colony. They wanted everyone to know that Virginia was the site of the first colony, and that the history books lied and Massachusetts was guilty of false advertising. Under the guise of a historical outing, but more like busing the jury to view evidence, everyone in attendance was shuffled off to Jamestown, about ten or fifteen miles from Williamsburg. Our little caravan of limos and buses stopped at a few other sites of pre-Plymouth settlers as well. A few of these sites were being excavated, with much excitement when half a button or a part of a musket was sifted from a large mound of earth.
At the original site of Jamestown, a museum housed artifacts that had been recently unearthed. I had to burn close to an hour while some overly enthusiastic woman with a PhD in digging in the dirt excitedly told of their most recent discoveries. A couple of her finds got my attention, one being a grouping of brass buttons, each the size of half a dollar; they would have shamed the buttons on my Brioni blazers. Also a hand-carved ivory comb with the name “Emilie” along one side caused me to pause. I couldn’t imagine having the time to carve twenty or more individual teeth in a piece of ivory. These settlers had time on their hands in the evenings; they weren’t busy billing clients so they could hit their earnings targets.
EMILIE, 1627: In the darkness of evening, a commotion. Father up, people yelling. Father from the cottage goes, Nathan and I peer through the window, much movement, much running, no direction. Then Father back. Events told quickly, Jamestown attacked by four boats of Indian warriors, muskets fire from the stockade and they retreat, no more danger. Slowly but often, news from other villages. Massacres. Women, children killed, but not quickly without pain. Homes burnt, crops burnt, supplies burnt. Our lives ashes.
My sister called Alice while I was in Williamsburg. I think she felt more comfortable talking to Alice than to me about my mother; told Alice that when she’d last visited Des Moines, Mom didn’t look well at all. Sis spoke to my father, who said Mom was fine, but my sister had her doubts. She asked if I could visit with Mom and Dad, and since I owned a health-care company, could I have Mom checked out. At the time I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. My health-care experience was along the lines of raising $100 million in convertible debt for an HMO, not assisting some internist in interpreting a blood workup.
We were scheduled to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately the Brits don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I had finally had the immovable object, the BUPA management team, rolling, and I didn’t want to risk losing momentum by pausing. I needed to keep my shoulder to the wheel. I twisted myself into an ugly pretzel that Thanksgiving. While holding my breath I told Alice that I was going to miss Thanksgiving, but if she would take the kids out to Des Moines, I would join them a couple of days later. She smiled, most likely not a genuine smile, and said she understood.
My plan was to fly from London to Chicago, and then take a puddle jumper down to Des Moines and be with the family for a day or so. I had anticipated taking a Friday morning flight out, but ended up staying in London for the day. On Friday evening the BUPA senior staff wished me a cheerful weekend as they drove off in their Bentleys and Jaguars, leaving me five thousand miles away from my expectant family. I had promised Alice that I would pull in to Des Moines on Saturday evening and we could have dinner with the family, and I would be with her and the kids on the flight home on Sunday. Later that Friday evening I sat at the Ritz bar and pondered the wart-covered reality that made my promise to her no more than a wishful fantasy: I was obligated to be in California on Monday morning for an HPA Board Meeting. I couldn’t go from London to Des Moines, back to Washington, then to LA, so I just got a direct flight from London into LA. On Saturday night I was cruising forty thousand feet above Des Moines and my loving family, with three hours to go before I would reach LA.
Choosing between a right and wrong option usually lends itself to the simple application of logic and ethics. It is the wrong and wrong options that tear you apart. It is wrong to miss a family gathering; it is wrong not to meet your commitments to a client. How do you choose?
I stopped in Des Moines for half a day on my way back from California for a dinner with the folks. The kids and Alice were already nested in our freshly minted home in Round Hill. I studied my parents at the dining room table. They were old; their shoulders were rounded, their hair was grayer, they moved slower. Even their eating was slower. On my flight home that night I promised myself that I would visit Mom and Dad more often.
I felt worse than bad about missing Thanksgiving. At first I rationalized: I wasn’t in Vegas losing the family savings at the craps table, I was babysitting a mega-business prospect. It didn’t work, though; I’d missed Thanksgiving, the High Mass and Gold Standard of family holidays. I had shortchanged my family. I was an unworthy member of the class of husbands and fathers. So I did what most guys do, I tried to buy off my guilt. I planned a family trip dripping with extravagance. Clearly, the more I spent, the fainter any remembrance of my transgression.
Ferrari introduced a new model, a Ferrari Testarossa. Think spaceship. A big twelve-cylinder engine in the back, lower than low to the ground, and multi-finned gills that flowed from the front wheel-well back through the door and into the back fender. Every car magazine had one on their cover. Even People magazine and Popular Science showcased the car. Probably the most exotic auto ever produced. A serious waiting list. My friendly Ferrari dealer informed me it would be a
minimum of two, more likely three, years before I could purchase one. The waiting list was long, and the list price was high, just a few pennies under $90,000. However, one could be purchased. I bought a red Testarossa in Texas (sounds like a fragment of a limerick) by overpaying $120,000 to a speculator: instant gratification. In college my mantra had been, “What, me worry?” My new mantra was, “What, me wait?”
MORDECAI’S UNCLE, 1904: Each day you made money—maybe just pennies—but you wanted to spend it, because you could not walk down the street without seeing something you wanted, something new to eat, new to wear. In a shop window, on a wall, on a leaf of the New York Herald blowing jerkily downstreet, inducements uppermost; and it made it so hard to chink those few pennies back and put them under the brick (from which we both stole, I’m sorry, sorry when temptation hurt too much, for an apple, or an orange, or God help us, one stick of chocolate. But we put it back, and put the blows and outcries behind us, and went short to make up).
If someone exercises every day they will develop a robust cardiovascular system. If they then become sedentary, their heart will, in time, have less tolerance for physical stress. Money, or the lack of it, has similar effects on the human. Without excess money one goes through life experiencing the frustrations that most encounter on a day-to-day basis: waiting in a long line to pick up license plates, standing in rain while the parking attendant tries to find the keys he misplaced, being told by the dry cleaner that your suit is not ready as promised. We learn to simply accept the tedium and annoyances that punctuate life. Our frustration tolerance is well tuned. Money reduces the frustration factors. Someone else goes to pick up the car tags. Our limo is out in front of the office building; no need to wait in line in the parking lot. Our closet is resplendent with suits, one less is not noticed. When something does surface to frustrate individuals with significant net worth, their lack of frustration fitness shows. They can’t cope with inefficiency or delay.