The Billionaire Who Wasn't

by Conor O'Clery

  He still desired to do everything anonymously. Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov had been trying to ferret out more information to update the rich list. If anything leaked about the foundation’s obsessive secrecy and low level of giving, it could raise suspicions that it was up to no good. A new set of instructions to staff on dealing with the media was circulated by Harvey Dale and Paul Hannon in March 1991. Headed “When the News Media Call,” it gave several recommended responses to reporters’ questions, starting with “Can I help you?” and ending with “Come on, we’re a private company, and we simply don’t give out that sort of information to the press. I’ve got to go. Good-bye!”

  In early July 1991, Harvey Dale became alarmed when an unidentified woman phoned his secretary and asked how to contact “Harvey Dale of Exeter.” Exeter was the name of an unlisted entity known only to Atlantic insiders that had been used to facilitate the purchase of the foundation’s assets from Danielle in 1984. Worried that an exposure was being planned by a media organization, Dale contacted Chuck, who was in London, and suggested that despite their reluctance they should speed up preparations for a controlled “unveiling” and start preparing a press release. Paul Hannon warned in a separate communication, “Our complicated, byzantine tax-efficient structure is a negative, and we should be prepared to answer questions in this regard when we go public.”

  Several copies of an announcement were drafted in July and August 1991, disclosing the existence of the foundation and the fact that Feeney didn’t own it but was planning to administer it full time. One version dated July 22 included a comment from Feeney that his goal was to stimulate the interest of wealthy people in “giving while living,” but “I couldn’t do that while continuing to be known as a reclusive billionaire with no philanthropic interests.” Most drafts included French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s observation that “noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed” and American financier Bernard Baruch’s remark that “there’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

  The following month, however, Chuck Feeney decided once again to do nothing. He would allow the misperception that he was “wealthy” to persist to preserve the anonymity of the charity. In any case, it was definitely not a good time for him to face a media firestorm.

  In October 1990, Chuck and Danielle had separated over his close relationship with his longtime German assistant Helga Flaiz, who often traveled with him. The separation was a shock to everyone, but not a huge surprise. It was evident that Chuck and Danielle had grown apart during the 1980s. Friends described them as a mismatch in their later years together. They had been leading increasingly separate and different lives, and Danielle had known for some time from her husband’s depressed and angry moods at home that her relationship with him was over. Feeney had been spending less and less time at the family houses, and he made a point of never going on board the yacht that Danielle bought. Nor did he set foot in the once run-down family home at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera after Danielle finally transformed it into an elegant mansion.

  The children were immensely saddened by the split. They were close to both parents. The contrast between their mother and father was nevertheless obvious to them. “He had become a frugal, self-flagellating philanthropist who craved anonymity, whereas Danielle had a big yacht and a big personality,” said a family intimate.

  Feeney told his children—now all young adults—that he would be changing his life, that he would be constantly on the road, living only a few weeks at most in any one place at any one time. He gave each a binder with articles explaining what motivated his giving. One was Carnegie’s essay on wealth. Another was about the excesses of the sultan of Brunei, who spent $1 million on a child’s birthday. They were his singular way of telling them about himself and his motivations.

  The legal aspects of the separation put the future of the foundation in question. Danielle’s lawyer, Milton Gould of Shea & Gould, challenged the finality of the 1984 settlement and sought an increase in the compensation for the assets that Danielle had signed over to the Atlantic Foundation and for which she had received $40 million. A new settlement was reached that gave Danielle an additional $60 million from the foundation—the total available in liquid form in the businesses it held at that time, and $40 million more was pledged over five years to a family charitable foundation. Feeney insisted that Danielle get all the family homes, in Paris, London, the south of France, Connecticut, Hawaii, and New York. He wanted them to stay in the family to avoid any bitterness, he said. He took nothing himself from the family property. “Chuck was aghast at the notion that he had a legal right to ask anything of Danielle,” said Harvey Dale. In 1995, after a divorce with Danielle was finalized on the basis of two years’ separation, Feeney married Helga Flaiz at a small private ceremony in Bermuda.

  While this was happening, Feeney was beset by a family tragedy. His sister Arlene’s son, James (Jimmy) Fitzpatrick, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Feeney used every contact in the medical field to get the best treatment for his nephew. But even the specialists from the Cornell medical faculty to whom Feeney appealed for help could offer little hope. The provost for medical affairs, G. Tom Shires, told Feeney to expect the worst. Years later, Feeney could recall his exact words: “Your nephew has got a tall mountain to climb. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  His nephew’s illness cast a pall over Feeney’s life and work. Jimmy was like a son to him, and he had a lot of his uncle’s qualities. A graduate of American University in Washington, he would often stay with Chuck and go jogging with him. One Christmas in San Francisco, Jimmy was hit by an out-of-control fire truck while standing at a bus stop and was seriously injured, and Feeney flew immediately from Honolulu to make sure he got the best hospital treatment in San Francisco. Afterward, he took him to Hawaii to recuperate and gave him a job overseeing the rebuilding of the hotel owned by InterPacific in Guam. Feeney even got involved in Jimmy’s personal life, once taking a flight to—successfully—talk him out of marrying a girlfriend he thought unsuitable.

  As Jimmy’s condition worsened, Feeney gave up much of his world travel to spend time with him. His nephew died in March 1992. Over the years, the untimely death of people he loved made Feeney abnormally sad and depressed, and he found it particularly hard to accept the injustice of it, said a family member. “He was hit very hard by Jimmy’s death,” recalled Patrick. “My Dad loved his nieces and nephews almost as much as his own kids.” As always, unwilling to express his deepest-felt emotions directly, Feeney wrote a moving script that he and Caroleen read at the requiem mass on March 9, 1992, at St. Genevieve’s Roman Catholic Church in Elizabeth, in which he played the role of advocate for Jimmy to enter heaven.

  “No matter how much money you have, you can’t solve the health issues of those you love,” reflected Feeney years later. “Here was Jimmy, and I was giving everything I own to try to solve his problem but it wasn’t for solving.” The tragedy reinforced his determination to focus the Atlantic Foundation on medical and biomedical research in future years.

  For the first time in his meteoric business career, said a friend, Chuck “took his eye off the ball.” Feeney stood down as chief executive of General Atlantic Group and appointed Paul Slawson to take over. As head of InterPacific, Slawson had been involved in the purchase of Western Athletic Clubs and the development of the Pacific Islands Clubs, and had invested in such sidelines as the market for diapers in Taiwan and in Pizza Huts in Thailand and Beijing. Feeney believed he could bring similar intuition and skills to the management of General Atlantic Group as a whole.

  Paul Slawson moved to London to assume his new responsibilities in October 1991. When he called everyone together in Savile Row and asked them what they were interested in, Chris Oechsli, a brilliant young American lawyer hired as assistant counsel to General Atlantic by Paul Hannon, responded, “If there is an opportunity to do more operations I would be glad to do that.” Oechsli had extens
ive travel experience—he was born in Costa Rica and studied Mandarin in China—and had already been peripherally involved in some of Chuck’s East European operations.

  The next day Slawson called Oechsli into his office and said, “I noticed your interest in operations. I am going to put you in charge of an operation—moving our offices!” Slawson didn’t like “funky” buildings and set out to “modernize” General Atlantic. He moved company headquarters to a new office block at 25 Grosvenor Street. The building was contemporary in style, with curved walls and modern art. Slawson installed a £10,000 mock-medieval table in the conference room. “It had the perspective of an international corporate office, unlike the rabbit warren in Savile Row of familial types that kind of pottered about,” said Oechsli. “There was a new ethic—from the expenditure to the aesthetics to the gravitas of the people.” Feeney kept his own private office in Savile Row and stayed away from Grosvenor Street, where Slawson installed a team of three Americans from the financial world to help run the show.

  Slawson began employing highly paid consultants and getting involved in a round of black-tie dinners and receptions. An associate recalled that his team was “very top-heavy, with no expense spared in their offices, their furniture, their decoration or their staff numbers.” The Slawson operation became, Oechsli thought, “very un-Chuck-like” with too much bureaucracy.

  Slawson moved to repeat the success of Western Athletic Clubs by initiating the purchase of Cannon’s Health and Fitness club in London. Located under the viaduct at Cannon Street Railway Station with a swimming pool and squash courts, it was patronized by London’s smart set and city types. Its board chairman was an old Etonian, Sir James Harvie-Watt, who was also chairman of the exclusive Queen’s Tennis Club in London. Cannon’s had a second sports center in Covent Garden and a country club outside London.

  The sports club was run by the Australian sporting legend Ron Clarke, then fifty-three, who set nineteen world track records for running in the 1960s and lit the flame at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. Feeney called Clarke and told him he would come by at about 8:00 AM the next day for a look around before the purchase went through.

  “I thought I would have time to have my usual early morning workout before he arrived,” recalled Clarke. “Unfortunately he arrived about 7:00 AM and, as he wanted the meeting to be low key, I hadn’t told any staff to look out for him. We had a strict ruling that nobody, but nobody, got into the club past the turnstiles without a membership card. By the time I had my shower and was in the office, Chuck had already been waiting an hour. When the girls phoned up to say there was an American gentleman in the foyer who had been waiting for me for so long, I almost died. I thought he would be spitting chips. I was a fan for life when, instead of being angry for being kept waiting, he complimented the girls for being so vigilant, said they had done absolutely the right thing, and was not put out at all.” Clarke found Feeney to be “unlike any businessman I had ever met in that he seemed to have little interest in clothes or creating an impression. And when he asked a question, he listened to the answer.” Feeney liked what he saw that morning, and General Atlantic Group purchased Cannon’s.

  After a year, Chris Oechsli wrote a memo to Feeney saying that he didn’t feel the new people were acting in his best interest and he was planning to move on. Feeney asked him to stay put. “We’re looking into some of this. It doesn’t seem right,” he agreed. Oechsli stayed and was promoted to general counsel in place of Paul Hannon, who left General Atlantic to become an international industrial arbiter.

  Feeney went on a trip around the world and found that there was a lot of discontent throughout the ranks of the companies he had created, General Atlantic Group and its subsidiary, InterPacific. His faith in Slawson unraveled. On his return to London in early summer 1993, he had a list of names written on a legal pad of those people who had left the organization in the previous few months. “I could see the disruption he was causing,” recalled Feeney, who measured things in human terms. Harvey Dale concluded in an internal report that overheads had become excessive, major strategic errors had occurred, and morale of staff had suffered. In June, Feeney asked Slawson to stand down, after only two years in the job. He hated confrontation and found the episode upsetting—and expensive, as it involved large compensation payments. Feeney once more took over the running of General Atlantic Group and moved the headquarters back to Savile Row.

  After the changeover, Feeney found that one of Cannon’s English directors had been paid £12,500 a year for his services before the club was acquired by General Atlantic, but that after the purchase, this had been increased to £12,500 a month. It turned out that he had been told in a letter after Slawson took over Cannon’s that he would continue as director and be paid the sum of £12,500 “payable monthly,” said Chris Oechsli, whereas it should have been “annually, payable monthly.” Feeney called in the director after Slawson had gone and asked what he was thinking of when he got the letter. The director replied that American firms were known to pay a lot more and he assumed that was the new arrangement. “Chuck didn’t buy that, and that was the end of his role,” said Oechsli.

  Feeney admired people with athletic dedication, and he was impressed by Clarke and his sporting connections. The former runner invited him to a black-tie event in the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on May 6, 1994, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Roger Bannister’s beating the four-minute mile. Feeney, wearing a dark suit and blue tie, was seated next to Ireland’s 1956 gold-medal winner Ron Delaney, at Ron Clarke’s table. There was a stellar lineup of the world’s great runners, including Chris Chataway, Chris Brasher, John Landy, Herb Elliott, and Sebastian Coe. Roger Bannister, who had become Master of Pembroke College at Oxford, greeted Feeney warmly as the party was breaking up. They had lunched previously at the Athenaeum Club in London, and Chuck had arranged to make donations to Oxford University. Feeney had been to almost every Olympics since Tokyo in 1964 and had seen many of these runners in action. It was a big occasion for Feeney and marked an increasingly close association with Ron Clarke that would continue in Australia some years later.

  CHAPTER 20

  Show Me the Building

  As part of his long-term plan to devote himself more to his philanthropy, Chuck Feeney purchased a building on Molesworth Street in the center of Dublin in 1989, which he named Atlantic House. He recruited John Healy, the director general of the American Ireland Partnership, to set up and run the operation, to be called Tara Consultants. Healy recalled being invited to meet Feeney in London, where he had a “typically meandering, obscure conversation” with Chuck in the course of which he inferred he was being offered some sort of a job in a consulting company. Knowing by then that Feeney was no ordinary American businessman, he had accepted.

  Only when he said yes and traveled to New York for a briefing from his new boss, Harvey Dale, did the Irishman learn that he would be working for one of the world’s biggest and most secret philanthropic foundations. The lawyer told him that the Atlantic Foundation and the Atlantic Trust were set up so that the money flowed through different “spigots”—a word for “water taps” not used in Ireland—but Healy guessed the meaning. Dale told him that Feeney was about to step up his philanthropy in Ireland, and Chuck had singled him out for his knowledge and contacts. As managing director of Tara Consultants, he would also have responsibility for enforcing a set of rules: Feeney’s name should never appear on any press release or on any plaque; he should not be offered, nor would he accept, any honorary degree; and funding would cease if confidentiality was breached. Healy flew on to Ithaca and was briefed by Ray Handlan on how the Foundation Service Company worked. He learned the scale of the grant making and about Atlantic Foundation’s unique combination of convertible and nonconvertible assets, known as “church” and “state.”

  “At that stage we were deep into confidentiality,” explained Feeney. “We would say, ‘We want to do this thing but we don’t want any credits for it—just gi
ve the impression that you raised the money.’” If beneficiaries wanted his attention, he said, all they had to do was to show him the completed building.

  The success of his philanthropy at Limerick University inspired Feeney to look at the condition of the other half dozen universities in Ireland, which were all state-funded and lacking capital to expand and modernize. His ambitions for the then-struggling country were growing. Lifting one boat would make little difference to Ireland’s higher-education sector as a whole. Helping a number would make a national impact. He set about arranging seemingly accidental meetings with other university presidents across the country, hoping to find the same drive and vision as in Limerick. His opportunistic philanthropy would be most successful if he found the right people to use the funds well. It was not the philanthropist that deserved praise, he believed, but those who had the position, the ability, and the vision to do good things with the funds. He could use the talents that had made him wealthy to identify and help develop worthwhile projects. But so much depended on the personality and drive of those involved to put the money to good use. “When it came down to it, it’s always people,” he would often say.