Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [199]
I didn’t care. I had complete confidence in Dick’s ability to kill the deal, and it was not misplaced. He made it evident to Jovanovich that he risked buying a publishing company without its major executives and evident to Shimkin that Jovanovich was unlikely to listen to a word he had to say. The deal fell through, and the only significant consequence of it was that Dick now decided that the sooner he found for Shimkin a deal we could all live with, the better for all concerned. Until now, Dick had been trying to prevent Shimkin from selling; now, he was determined to get Shimkin to sell as soon as possible to someone who took the same view of the future as Dick did.
It was against this background that, on a business trip to Los Angeles, Snyder met Robert Evans, the boy-wonder producer of The Godfather. He mentioned to Evans that S&S might be for sale, and Evans told his boss, Charles G. Bluhdorn, the conglomerateur owner of the Gulf + Western Corporation, whose purchase of Paramount Pictures had made him a power in Hollywood.
By reputation, Bluhdorn was the most ruthless conglomerateur of them all, the so-called “Mad Austrian.” His violent temper, his many eccentricities (not all of them endearing), and his amazing volatility had made him a celebrity among a class of people rarely seen outside boardrooms. But while his fellow conglomerateurs preferred to remain invisible, Bluhdorn sought the limelight and apparently never shut up.
THE FASCINATION that certain artifacts of the sixties and seventies once had is hard to explain: white go-go boots, for example, or platform shoes for men, or Petula Clark singing “Downtown”—these things bring back not so much nostalgia as a certain wonder that they ever held our attention. The “conglomerate” is just as much a part of that increasingly remote past as bell-bottom trousers and Nehru jackets. Indeed, it is hard to conjure up a time when the word itself seemed to suggest to most people something new and threatening, a business corporation the only purpose of which was to maintain a dizzying rate of growth and which did so by the constant acquisition of other companies.
Not only did the companies acquired usually have little or nothing in common with the core business of the acquirer, very often the acquirer had in fact no core business to begin with—it existed merely for the purpose of growth, like certain parasitic amoebas. People feared that the companies they worked for would be acquired by a conglomerate—more often than not in an “unfriendly” takeover that resembled, to those who were acquired, the rape of the Sabine women—which would then proceed to fire employees wholesale, without regard to the years they had spent with the company or the importance of their work. Conglomerates were seen by most people outside Wall Street as bad things, manifestations of greed and long-distance management by strangers who didn’t know a thing about your business. The word most often associated with them was ruthless.
What Gulf + Western knew of S&S they learned through Dick, and the first thing they understood was that Dick was their kind of guy, a tough, shrewd, practical man who could get things done and who thought big. What Gulf + Western was about, after all, was growth, expansion, a ballooning list of assets against which they could borrow more money to buy more assets, brand names that were—or appeared to be—gilt-edged, which made it even easier to borrow still more money and dazzle Wall Street. The only thing that was bad was standing still, since people might then begin to ask whether the company was really making any money at all.
For the first time since the Jovanovich deal had surfaced, Dick was relaxed, happy, smiling, though one saw him seldom, since he was in the middle of the bargaining. He poured me a drink one night in his office, and as we clicked glasses he said, “The good times are coming, trust me.”
In a very short time, the deal was done, and S&S changed hands, becoming a part of what was known as “The Gulf + Western Family,” to the horror of