Executive Suite

by Cameron Hawley

  He had little chance to get to know the industrial executives who most incited his admiration. They seldom survived the prospect stage. They were too smart to fall for the pretentious antics of Karl Eric Kassel. One of those men was Avery Bullard.

  Karl Eric Kassel had secured a commission to design a house to be exhibited at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, and a second commission to create a new line of furniture to furnish the house. It turned out to be a one-man job for Don Walling. Kassel kept promising him assistants but, although there were unemployed draftsmen in every bread line, he somehow managed to avoid finding them. Don worked twenty hours a day for weeks on end. The final construction and furnishing, which he went to Chicago to supervise, was a nightmare seen through glazed and bloodshot eyes. On the night before the opening, completely exhausted, he had collapsed on a pile of furniture pads.

  Sometime during the night the lights flashed on. Don awakened enough to be conscious that Karl Eric Kassel was giving some prospective client a preview showing as bait for his trap. Don heard the man’s voice and there was something about its timbre that instantly completed his awakening. He listened and what he heard gave him a vindictive satisfaction. The man’s words were slashing through the armor of Karl Eric Kassel’s pretense. Finally there was a pause and then the heart thrust. “Kassel, who actually designed this furniture?”

  Afterwards, over the years, when Don Walling was tempted to charge Karl Eric Kassel with all the bitterness and anger that he had felt during those two long years, there was always the book-balancing memory of the way the red-bearded charlatan had redeemed himself that night in the World’s Fair house. Kassel had said, directly and simply, “This house and everything in it was designed by a very talented young man named Don Walling.”

  “I want to see him,” the voice had demanded—and Don, more awakened than he had ever been in his life, unconscious of his grimy hands and his rumpled work clothes, unconscious of Karl Eric Kassel, unconscious of everything in the world except the necessity of obeying that command, walked out through the door to meet Avery Bullard.

  Somehow, unnoticed, Karl Eric Kassel disappeared and left them alone. They wandered down to the lakefront, Bullard talking, questioning, gently probing. There was no sword edge in his voice now, but it had lost none of its exciting quality. It was the voice of strength and power, of integrity and purpose, of fearless imagination that leaped skyward with the same magic that the rising sun streaked the sky over Lake Michigan, setting even the water aflame.

  Karl Eric Kassel was not surprised when Don told him that he was going to work for Avery Bullard. “I know,” he said simply. “Good luck. He’s a great man.”

  During those next two years, the years before the merger that created the Tredway Corporation, Don Walling worked closely with Avery Bullard. All his life he had been searching for a total challenge. Now he had found it. No matter how much energy and thought he poured into whatever they were working on, Avery Bullard could outwork him and outthink him. The range of the older man’s ability was a constant goad. He would come rushing in, take one quick look at a design that Don had been working on for days and instantly put his finger on something which, the moment Don saw it, he recognized as a flaw that he should have caught and corrected himself. Even more exasperating was the way Avery Bullard could snatch up a pencil and redraw a line that Don, no matter how long he struggled, could seldom improve. Competence is a whip in the hands of a taskmaster, and the lash cuts all the deeper when the whip is held by a perfectionist. Avery Bullard was unrelenting. Once he made Don turn out twenty-six sketches for a little brass toe on a Duncan Phyfe table. When a sketch was finally selected and the first trial casting made, Avery Bullard took one look and literally threw it out of the window of his twenty-fourth floor office. Then they started all over again. Don agreed that the end result was worth all that it had cost in money and time. It was closer to perfection.

  After the merger, which was the first major fulfillment of the dream picture that Avery Bullard had drawn in that predawn hour on the shores of Lake Michigan, he had sent Don Walling to Pittsburgh to work with the Coglan Metal Furniture Company. “There are things we can do with metal that the furniture industry hasn’t even thought about yet. Go out there and do them. Don’t let anything stand in your way. Old man Coglan will tell you it can’t be done, that they tried that before. Don’t bother to tell him to go to hell, just disregard him. He doesn’t count. I had to keep him for appearance’ sake. He’ll be out in a year. Work closely with the superintendent, a man named Jesse Grimm. I don’t know him too well yet but he looks good. I think he’s our kind. But don’t rely on Grimm. Don’t rely on anyone. Get out in that factory yourself. Learn how to work metal. Know what you can do with those machines and what you can’t do—and when you want to do something that a machine won’t do, design a machine that will do it. Get out in the trade. Talk to people. Go to the markets. Find out what they want—even when they don’t know yet that they want it—and then give it to them. One last thing, Walling. Don’t wear out the seat of your pants on the drawing board stool. Hire a draftsman to get your ideas on paper. If you get enough ideas, hire two draftsmen—or three or four or five. Draftsmen are cheap. Ideas are what count.”

  Don Walling went to Pittsburgh fired not only with the incentive of a flaring opportunity but also with the chance to escape from the constant domination of Avery Bullard. Before the end of the first week the second motivation had lost its validity. He needed Avery Bullard and the recognition of that need revealed a weakness in himself that he set out to remedy. In the attempt, he began unconsciously to model himself in the Avery Bullard pattern. Trouble developed. The morale in the factory, stemming from a natural resentment of the forced merger, was none too good at best. Don Walling’s aping of Bullard’s tactics made it worse. Finally, in a midnight session on the back porch of Jesse Grimm’s house, the superintendent said, “Somebody has to tell you off, Don, and I guess I’m elected. I don’t know too much about Avery Bullard because I’ve only had two short talks with him, but I know something about the men in our plant. They won’t swallow the idea that Avery Bullard sent you out here to be a twenty-six-year-old carbon copy—and I might as well tell you that it doesn’t go down with me either.”

  Don’s first reaction was one of angry resentment but, under the soft attrition of Grimm’s reasonableness, it gradually dissolved into the reluctant acceptance of just punishment. He felt like a spanked child and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. He promised himself that no one would ever again call him a carbon copy of Avery Bullard. In time he became as good a friend of Jesse Grimm’s as the older man’s carefully impersonal attitude would permit.

  Meetings with Avery Bullard were few and far between, much less frequent than Don would have liked. He said so once on one of his trips to Millburgh. Avery Bullard had grinned. “Hell’s bells, boy, don’t you know that leaving you alone is the best compliment I can pay you? When I don’t like what’s happening you’ll hear from me soon enough—more than you’ll want to hear! By the way, we’re boosting your salary to ten thousand.”

  It was then that he said, “I guess that ought to be enough to support a wife, Mr. Bullard.”

  “Who is she?”

  He had hesitated, asking himself again the very secret question that he had asked himself so many times during the last two weeks. Then, more defiant than he had ever dared be with Avery Bullard before, he had said, “Her name is Mary Kovales. Her father used to run a little restaurant where I worked when I went to school. He’s dead. She isn’t in the social register and the first time she’ll ever taste champagne will be at our wedding.”

  “How smart is she?” Avery Bullard had asked, and it was no idle question.

  “Well—” Don hesitated, searching for some way to tell him. “She’s a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and she has a job now as an assistant to an economist. She—”

  “Good,” Bullard broke in. “You’ll need a smart wife
. It’s a hell of a handicap when you don’t have one. Champagne? Well, that runs up the cost, doesn’t it? In that case we’d better raise you to twelve instead of ten. Now get out of here and get back to Pittsburgh before Alderson finds out that I’ve wasted another two thousand of his precious dollars.”

  That next year Jesse went back to Millburgh as Vice-President for Production and Don was made General Manager of the Coglan plant. Then the rearmament program started and the Pittsburgh plant was converted to the manufacture of parts for aircraft and naval ships. There were four years when Mary said that she might as well have stayed single for all she saw of her husband. Don didn’t agree and Avery Bullard didn’t either. “I don’t know whether you know it or not, Walling, but that girl’s doing you a lot of good. You’re beginning to get ripe.”

  Don wondered if there might be a hidden meaning in Avery Bullard’s use of the word “ripe.” The year after the war he found out. He was brought back to Millburgh to head the new Design and Development department, responsible for styling and product development work for all nine factories.

  Don Walling’s return to Millburgh had not turned out to be the triumphal ascent that he expected. There had been a difficult period of personal adjustment. As general manager of the Pittsburgh plant, he had been at the top of the heap, with almost total authority. In Millburgh, he was only the junior member of the executive staff, hemmed in by the carefully guarded lines that marked the delegation of responsibility to a dozen other department heads. Even after he was given his vice-presidency, he still sat at the foot of the directors’ table, outranked by all of the others. He had anticipated his return to designing with considerable pleasure, excited by the possibilities of centralized design control over nine factories, but Grimm and Dudley had thwarted most of his first efforts. Grimm had said that since the factories were all oversold as it was, there was no need to waste the money that putting out new models would entail, and Dudley had agreed that his sales department didn’t want to extend the length of the line. Product development work had continually faced handicaps that grew out of the same situation. There was no laboratory building and experimental tests had to be made in the factories. The only way that new processes could be worked out was to stop production on a factory line and, as Shaw pointed out, and the others agreed, that would mean a cut in output and higher costs.

  Until these last few months, Don Walling had felt no serious concern about the attitude of the other vice-presidents. It was Avery Bullard’s attitude that really mattered and the president had always backed him up, ordering at least a few new patterns into the line every season, and a continuation of development work on the molding process as well as the experimentation that was underway on a new finishing method and a new dry-kiln design. Of late, however, Walling had sensed that Bullard’s support was being given with greater and greater reluctance. It seemed that there had been a progressive weakening of the president’s driving urge for constant improvement.

  In the last month, Don Walling had been called to Avery Bullard’s office only twice and neither time had he felt the energizing stimulus that contact with the president had always given him before. The last conference had been the most unsatisfactory of all. He had gone up with a layout of the new finishing process and an armful of experimental samples showing what could be done with it. Avery Bullard had hardly looked at them. He had spent all of the time discussing a memorandum from Shaw which recommended that all development effort for the rest of the year be concentrated on projects that would have a direct effect on immediate profits. In the end, Don Walling won a partial victory—Bullard agreed that the work on the molding process should continue—but he had left the president’s office with the disquieting feeling that, more and more, Avery Bullard’s most admirable qualities were being destroyed by the comptroller’s unrelenting drive to squeeze out the last penny of net profit from current operations. That had never been Avery Bullard’s way of management. It was not the way he had built the Tredway Corporation.

  Now, riding up in the elevator, Don Walling’s thoughts were more of Shaw than of Avery Bullard, and the disappointment-born anger with which he had forced himself to leave the factory was transferred to the man who sat behind the closed door that he faced as he stepped off on the twenty-third floor.

  “Meeting six o’clock, Mr. Walling,” Luigi said importantly.

  “I know, Luigi. Thank you.”

  5.53 P.M. EDT

  During the minutes that had just passed, Loren P. Shaw had looked at his multi-dialed watch so frequently that an observer, if there had been one present, might easily have judged him to be afflicted with a severe nervous disorder. There was no observer. Shaw was alone in his office and acutely conscious of his solitude. The muffled sounds that came through the wall told him that the other vice-presidents were gathering in Alderson’s office, as they frequently did before an executive committee meeting, to compare speculations on what Avery Bullard’s next move might be.

  Shaw knew that any attempt to outguess the unpredictable Mr. Bullard was a futile waste of time, yet he always found it difficult to restrain himself from joining his fellow vice-presidents’ guessing circle. The fact that he had not once done so since Fitzgerald’s death represented a triumph of reason over emotion. An executive’s rank was measured by the offices he entered. If you went to another man’s office instead of forcing him to come to yours, you openly acknowledged his superior status.

  According to Loren Shaw’s battle plan, the resistance of every such temptation was the winning of another skirmish that carried him one step closer to the executive vice-presidency. His eventual selection, of course, was inevitable—Bullard could not possibly pick anyone else as executive vice-president, it was obvious that none of the others were even remotely qualified—yet every day that it could be moved nearer meant the elimination of another twenty-four hours of tortured waiting.

  Deeper in Loren Shaw’s mind, too deep for completely conscious recognition, was the fear of what might happen in that moment after he opened the door of Alderson’s office, when all eyes would be upon him, when he might be forced to recognize that there was no warmth in their greeting, no invitation to share their fellowship.

  Even subconscious thought never passed that point because Loren Shaw had, as an instinctive measure of self-protection, solidly blocked his mind against the acknowledgment that he was not liked by other men. Since that day in high school when he had been defeated in an election for treasurer of the sophomore class, he had always avoided any situation where he might be demeaned by the worthless opinions of superficial fools.

  Fighting against the tugging forces that held Loren Shaw in his own office was the full strength of a personal characteristic that was the dominating force in his life. He was an extremely inquisitive man. Curiosity is a normal human trait but in Loren Shaw it had been developed to abnormal proportions. When anyone else knew something that he did not know, particularly when that knowledge might have even an indirect bearing on his own personal future, he was driven to an emotional pitch that frequently pressed the limits of his endurance. Back in his high school days there had been several occasions when he had become physically ill while waiting for the announcement of examination results, despite the fact that he was always absolutely certain that he had made a top grade.

  During this last hour and a half, Loren Shaw had endured the constantly mounting torture of not knowing why Avery Bullard had called a special meeting of the executive committee. Nervous perspiration had dampened the palms of his hands again and he opened his desk to take another fresh linen handkerchief from the supply that he kept in the carved teakwood box that fitted the bottom drawer. It was the tenth handkerchief that he had used that day, a necessary extravagance that he placed in the same category with his suits, all of which were made by the New York tailor who, according to Fortune magazine, confined his patronage to the nation’s top industrial executives.

  Loren Shaw closed the drawer on the slightly rump
led handkerchief, moving noiselessly to avoid the possibility of missing any sound that might come through the wall. There were no intelligible words but he could distinguish Walt Dudley’s muffled voice and the low rumble of Jesse Grimm’s answering laughter.

  Shaw’s thin lips curled in distaste. Dudley had told another of those moronic stories of his … still carrying on like a road salesman instead of a vice-president of the Tredway Corporation … blabbering fool! At least Jesse Grimm had the good sense to keep his mouth shut most of the time. But neither of them mattered … they were both out of the running … so was that old fuddy-duddy Alderson.

  Once again, as it had a thousand times since Fitzgerald’s death, the sharp needle of Shaw’s mind found the same groove in the same record and he heard the same answer … Loren P. Shaw, Executive Vice-President. There was no other answer. There couldn’t be! It was like a simple problem in mathematics. You could work it a dozen ways but the answer was always the same.

  But now, in the same groove of the same record, came the unavoidable question and the equally unavoidable fear that always trailed it … why was Bullard delaying?

  With every asking that question had squeezed out another drop of resentment, until now Loren Shaw’s mind was brimming with the acid of long-distilled anger. He hated Avery Bullard with the special hatred of the tortured for the torturer. He hated him for the calculated cruelty that he had inflicted with these months of waiting, for his damnable secrecy, for going to New York without saying a word about what he was doing, for calling an executive meeting with no one knowing why.

  No one? Shaw stiffened, apprehensively. Did they know in that office beyond the wall? Did Grimm know … or Alderson … or Dudley or Walling? Walling? No, he hadn’t heard Walling’s voice. He must not be there. Wasn’t this the night that Walling was running that factory test of the molding process? Yes, this was Friday. That meant Walling wouldn’t be at the executive committee meeting. Of course not … Bullard would never insist on his fair-haired favorite inconveniencing himself!