Remember When

  “That’s very colorful, Miss Quigley,” he replied with scathing mockery.

  “It’s fact,” she argued, smarting from his snide tone.

  “No,” he countered, “this is fact: Cushman Electronics was founded by a genius six decades ago, but his heirs grew more lazy and more stupid with each successive generation. Those heirs—who happen to make up the board of directors—were born to great wealth, educated in the best schools, and despite the fact that they were letting Cushman, and its shareholders’ investments, go down the toilet, they still remained so convinced of their own superiority that they couldn’t see what was coming. They couldn’t believe that some school chum from their ‘old-boy fraternity’ wasn’t going to step in and rescue them with an infusion of cash that they could squander either on themselves or on fighting off more takeover attempts.

  “Instead of that, they lost to me—to an upstart from the wrong side of the social tracks—and it’s humiliating to them; it offends all of their cultured sensibilities. That’s why they’re screaming ‘foul.’ We weren’t engaged in a tea party with polite rituals; we were engaged in a battle. In a battle, there are only winners, and losers, and bad losers.”

  Cole waited for her to admit defeat and retreat, but she sat there in stubborn silence, refusing to agree. “Well?” he demanded after a moment.

  “There are ways to fight the battle so that the winner doesn’t look like a barbarian, and public relations is the key to that.”

  She had a point and Cole knew it, but he didn’t particularly appreciate having to face it or admit it. Time and again, as Cole had built his company into a major conglomerate composed of profitable subsidiaries, he’d waged legal and economic battles with complacent aristocrats like the ones on Cushman’s board, and each time he’d emerged victorious, he had the feeling that they hated him as virulently for successfully invading their ranks as for taking whatever prize he had wrested from them. It was as if the damage Cole did to their sense of invulnerable superiority was as loathsome to them as the financial damage he did to their bank accounts and stock portfolios.

  Personally, Cole found their attitude funny rather than insulting, and he was amused that, when it came down to a corporate battle over the takeover of another company, he was always portrayed as a ruthless marauder swinging a mace, while his targets were innocent victims and his competitors were chivalrous white knights. The real truth was that those courteous knights hired mercenaries in the form of lawyers and accountants and stock analysts to do their “dirty” fighting and maneuvering behind the scenes; then when their opponent was too weak to put up more than token resistance, they strolled gracefully onto the corporate battlefield wielding a gentlemanly saber. After a brief, symbolic duel, they lifted the blade to their forehead for a courteous salute to their victim, plunged the blade into him, and then strolled off the field, leaving more hired mercenaries to clean up the legal mess and bury the victim.

  In contrast to these corporate duelists, Cole was a brawler, a street fighter who was interested only in victory, not in his reputation or in making friends or in showing off his grace and prowess on the battlefield. As a result, he’d acquired many enemies and few friends over the years, along with a reputation for ruthlessness that he partially deserved and one for unscrupulousness that he didn’t deserve at all.

  None of that bothered him. Lifelong enemies, unjust public accusations, and hard feelings were the dues that one paid for success. Cole paid his without complaint, as did those other determined visionaries who, like him, had managed in the last two decades to harvest vast personal fortunes from soil that was no longer fertile, in an economic climate that was considered unhealthy.

  “They said the same thing about Matt Farrell and Intercorp in the late eighties,” Cole reminded her pointedly. “Now he’s the Prince Charming of Wall Street.”

  “Yes, he is. And part of that is due to some very good publicity that resulted from his tumultuous marriage to a well-loved heiress and from a more open, public profile.”

  Cole glanced toward the doorway and nodded a greeting to the corporation’s head counsel, John Nederly, who was being ushered into the office by Cole’s secretary. Gloria assumed her time with Cole Harrison was at an end, and she stood up, defeated.

  “When do you want to have the press conference?”

  For a split second, Gloria couldn’t believe her ears. “I—As soon as possible. How about tomorrow? That’s enough time to set it up.”

  He was signing more papers handed to him by his secretary, but he glanced up at her and shook his head. “I’m leaving for Los Angeles tonight, and I’ll be there until Wednesday.”

  “What about Thursday?”

  He shook his head again. “I’ll be in Jeffersonville, Thursday and Friday, handling a family matter.”

  “Saturday then?” Gloria said hopefully.

  “That’s fine.”

  Gloria’s mental cheer was strangled by the secretary, who turned over the page in his desk calendar, pointed to something written on it, and said, “I’m afraid Saturday’s out of the question. You’re to be in Houston that night.”

  “Houston?” he demanded, sounding disgusted and irate at the prospect. “For what?”

  “For the White Orchid Ball. You donated a Klineman sculpture to the charity auction that precedes the ball, and you’re to be honored for your generosity.”

  “Send someone else.”

  They all looked up in surprise as Gloria negated that suggestion. “I put the Orchid thing together. The Klineman will be the most valuable item to be auctioned off—”

  “It will also be the ugliest,” Cole interjected in such a mild, factual tone that Gloria choked back an inappropriate giggle. “Why did you buy it?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “I was told it would be a good investment, and it’s gone up substantially in value over the last five years. Unfortunately, I don’t like it any better now than I did when I bought it. Let someone else go to Houston in the corporation’s name and take the bow.”

  “It has to be you,” Gloria stubbornly persisted. “When public relations suggested you make a donation, you made a very generous one. The proceeds go to the American Cancer Society, and the ball is a major national media event. The timing is perfect for a little publicity there, followed by a press conference here next week.”

  Cole stopped writing and stared hard at her, but he couldn’t find an argument to outweigh her logic, and in a small way, he approved of her resolute determination to do the job the company was paying her to do, despite his personal opposition and lack of cooperation. “Fine,” he said curtly.

  Dismissed, she got up and started to leave. A few steps away, she turned around and found the two men watching her. “The networks are going to play up the Cushman deal,” she said to Cole. “If you have a chance to catch any of that on the news, I’d like to go over it with you and make some plans for countermeasures at your press conference.”

  When he replied, he sounded as if she was in danger of exhausting his patience. “I’ll put the news on while I pack for Los Angeles.” Gloria began to retreat.

  As she left, Cole leaned back in his chair and looked at the corporation’s chief counsel, who, with an appreciative gleam in his eyes, was watching Gloria exit. “Tenacious, isn’t she,” John remarked when she was out of earshot.

  “Very.”

  “Great legs, too.” The door closed behind her, and John switched his attention to the matters at hand. “These are the proxies your uncle needs to sign for the board meeting,” he said, sliding some papers across the clear glass desktop which rested on a random pattern of free-form chrome tubes that always reminded John of twisted chrome Tinkertoys. “Cole, I hate to sound like a purveyor of gloom and doom, but your uncle really needs to sign over his shares in the corporation to you, instead of giving you his proxy each time. I know his will stipulates that you’re the sole heir to his shares, but I lie awake at night in a cold sweat, thinking of the dis
aster we would have on our hands if he should get senile or something and decide to withhold his proxy.”

  Cole flicked a wry glance in the attorney’s direction as he slid the proxy forms into his briefcase. “You’ve been losing sleep over nothing,” he said. He swiveled his chair around and began removing files from the credenza behind his desk. “Cal’s mind is as sharp as a razor blade.”

  “Even so,” John persevered, addressing Cole’s back, “he’s in his seventies, and elderly people can be tricked into doing some very peculiar and damaging things. Last year, for example, a group of small shareholders of an Indiana chemical company decided to oppose a merger its board was trying to push through. The shareholders located an elderly woman in California who owned a major block of shares she’d inherited from her husband, then convinced the old lady that the board’s action would cause massive layoffs and vastly decrease the value of her shares. They then escorted her back to Indiana, where she personally voted her shares against the merger and got the damned thing blocked. A few weeks later, she wrote a letter to the board claiming she was forced to do what she did!”

  Cole locked the credenza, turned back around in his chair, and regarded the worried attorney with unconcealed amusement while he put the files into his briefcase. Calvin Downing was his mother’s uncle, and Cole was not only closer to him than he’d ever been to his real father, he also understood him well enough to know that the attorney’s fears were ludicrous in Cal’s case. “To the best of my knowledge, no one, including me, has ever been able to convince, coerce, or force Calvin to do anything he didn’t want to do—or prevent him from doing something he did.”

  When the attorney continued to look dubious, Cole cited the first example that came to mind. “For five years, I campaigned for him to leave the ranch and move to Dallas, but he wouldn’t. I spent the next five years trying to convince him to build a nicer house at the ranch, but he argued that he didn’t want a new house and it was a waste of money. By then he was worth at least fifty million dollars, and he was still living in the same two-bedroom, drafty old place he was born in. Finally, two years ago, he decided to take his first—and last—real vacation. While he was gone for six weeks, I hired a contractor who brought in an army of carpenters, and they built him a beautiful place on the west side of the ranch.” Cole closed the briefcase and stood up. “Do you know where he lives today?”

  John heard the ironic note in Cole’s voice and made an accurate guess: “In the same old house?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What does he do out there, all by himself in an old house?”

  “He’s not entirely alone. He’s had the same housekeeper for decades, and he has a few ranch hands to help out on the place. He spends his time either interfering with them or else reading, which has always been his favorite pastime. He’s a voracious reader.”

  That last piece of information didn’t fit at all into John’s preconceived Yankee notion of an elderly, weathered Texas rancher. “What does he read?”

  “He reads everything he can get his hands on that pertains to whatever happens to fascinate him at a particular stage in his life. His ‘stages’ usually last three or four years, during which he devours dozens of tomes on his current subject. He went through a period where all he read were biographies about war heroes from the beginning of recorded history; then he switched to mythology for a while. After that came psychology, philosophy, history, and finally westerns and murder mysteries.” Cole paused to make an entry in his desk calendar before he added, “A year ago, he developed an acute interest in popular magazines, and he’s been reading everything from GQ to Playboy to Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. He says popular magazines are the truest reflection of the state of a modern society’s collective mind.”

  “Really?” John said, carefully hiding his instinctive unease with the eccentricities and obsessions of a stubborn, elderly millionaire who happened to hold an enormous block of shares in Unified Industries—and who could, if he chose, wreak havoc on Unified’s complex corporate structure of subsidiaries, divisions, joint ventures, and limited partnerships. “Has he drawn any conclusions from his reading?”

  “Yes.” Cole shot him an ironic smile, glanced at his watch, and stood up to leave. “According to Cal, our generation has flagrantly violated the rules of morality, decency, ethics, and personal responsibility, and we are further guilty of breeding a new generation of children who don’t even understand those concepts. In short, Cal has surmised from his reading that America is going down the toilet in the same way as ancient Greece and Rome and for the same reasons that caused their decline and collapse when they were world powers. That impossible metaphor, by the way, is Cal’s not mine.”

  John got up and walked toward the office door with him, but Cole paused with his hand on the knob and said, “You’re right about the need for Cal to transfer his shares over to me. That’s a loose end that I should have tied up years ago, but for a variety of reasons I’ve postponed it. I’ll work it out with Cal when I see him later this week.”

  “Work it out?” John repeated worriedly. “Is there some sort of problem?”

  “No,” Cole said, somewhat disingenuously. The truth was that he had no desire to try to explain to a stranger the role that Cal had played in his life, or the gratitude Cole felt for him . . . or the love. Even if he had wanted to try, Cole knew he could never explain or justify to a corporate attorney that sheer sentimentality alone had prevented Cole from asking his uncle to sign back to Cole the stock Cole had issued to him fourteen years ago.

  Back then, Unified Industries had been only a vague, farfetched dream of Cole’s, but Cal had listened to his plans. With boundless faith in Cole’s ability to turn his grand scheme into a reality, Cal had lent him a half million dollars to get it started—an investment that, at the time, constituted all his profits from the oil and gas leases on his land as well as an additional two hundred thousand dollars he borrowed from a bank. Cole had then approached a Dallas banker for a loan of an additional $750,000, using the future income of Cal’s wells as collateral. Armed with more than a million dollars, a quick intellect, and a wealth of inside knowledge he’d obtained merely by listening to Charles Hayward and the other millionaires who gathered at the Haywards’ stable, Cole made his first gamble in the high-stakes world of business and finance. He placed his opening bet on one of the riskiest, and potentially most profitable, of all ventures—oil and gas leases.

  Having seen one large drilling company try twice and fail on Cal’s ranch, he decided to buy an interest in the second and smaller company, the one that had ultimately succeeded. Southfield Exploration was owned and badly managed by Alan South, a cocky thirty-three-year-old third-generation “prospector,” as he called himself, who loved nothing more than finding oil and gas where major drilling companies had failed.

  The challenge was what drove Alan; the adrenaline of success was what he sought, rather than making and maintaining profits. As a result, he was low on funds and anxious to acquire a partner when Cole approached him with a million dollars to invest. Alan was not nearly so anxious to turn over full financial control of the operation to Cole, but Cole was adamant and Alan had no choice.

  Cal had wanted Cole to consider his investment a loan, but Cole’s pride made him go one step further. He had insisted that Cal be a full partner, as well as insisting on paying back the loan, and he’d had the documents drawn up by a lawyer. In the three years that followed, Alan made strike after strike—and had fight after fight with Cole, who flatly refused to let him overextend again, no matter how promising various locales looked. At the end of that time, Cole allowed Alan to buy him out for five million dollars, and the two men parted friends.

  With Cal’s approval, Cole used his profits from the drilling company to buy three carefully selected, small manufacturing companies. He hired a new management team, shored up the companies with new equipment, emphasized customer service, and boosted the morale of the sales staff. As s
oon as each company’s balance sheet looked good, he sold the company. In what he considered his spare time, he studied the stock market and analyzed the philosophies of successful brokers and money managers. Based on the fact that most of the experts disagreed radically with each other on one or all of the important points, Cole concluded that luck and timing mattered as much or more than skill and knowledge. Since luck and timing had been on his side thus far, he tried his hand in some serious investing.

  At the end of three years, Cole had turned five million dollars into sixty-five million. During all that time, the only condition Cal put on Cole was that Cal’s other nephew, Travis Jerrold, be given a place in Cole’s next business venture. Travis was five years older than Cole and from a town on the other side of Texas, where he worked for a failing tool manufacturer. He had a college degree, a pretty wife named Elaine, whom Cole liked very much, and two spoiled children named Donna Jean and Ted, whom Cole did not like at all. Although Cole had only seen Travis once as a teenager, he liked the loyalty that Travis as “family” would bring to the business, and he was perfectly amenable to Cal’s request.

  Cole began looking around for a profitable company on which he could found his corporate dynasty—a company that provided a product or service for which there was likely to be an ever-increasing need. Predicting that need was the key to success, and it was there that Cole discovered he had a genuine gift. Although everyone else seemed to believe that IBM and Apple would soon own the entire computer hardware market, Cole was convinced that lower-priced, but high-quality, generic brands could seize a large share of the personal computer market.

  Against everyone else’s judgment and advice, he bought a small company called Hancock and invented his own new “name brand.” He tripled the size of the company’s sales force, beefed up quality control, and poured money into an ongoing advertising campaign. Within two years, Hancock computers were sold in retail markets all over the country and winning praise for their reliability and flexibility. When all that was in place, Cole named Travis as Hancock’s new president and put him in charge, which caused Travis’s ecstatic wife to burst into tears of gratitude and Travis to break out in a nervous rash.