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By Root 665 0

was to single them out one at a time to be “roasted” with fierce humor. It was, in fact, an amazing sight: thirty or so middle-aged men in blue suits (there were almost no women present), nervous smiles fixed on their faces, waiting to see who Bluhdorn would pounce on next. They didn’t even know what to pray for—the natural thing was to pray that he would skip over you, but then again, being skipped over might mean that he didn’t care about you because he’d already decided to fire you. Michael Burke sat through this remarkable performance with stony indifference—Bluhdorn apparently knew better than to give Burke the treatment—then, clearly bored with the proceedings, he took the ribbon off his gift package and peeked inside. A smile came over his face, as he pulled out of the box a pair of one-size-fits-all stretch black gloves—Bluhdorn had bought a clothing company that manufactured them. Burke pulled them on, then held up one black-gloved hand. A deadly silence fell over the room, and Bluhdorn, momentarily silenced, stared at Michael Burke suspiciously. “Yes?” he asked. “You have a question?” Burke nodded cheerfully. “I just wanted to know which one of these guys I’m supposed to strangle,” he said.

Nobody laughed harder than Bluhdorn, but although the big teeth were clenched in a grin, there was nothing humorous about the way he looked at Burke. Right then and there I decided that Charles G. Bluhdorn was not a man to cross.

BLUHDORN’S LIFE was not exactly an open book, and the few facts tended to contradict each other, even in his “official” biographies, but it seems certain that he was born in Vienna, in 1926, of middle-class Czech parents. Whether or not he was Jewish was a question that was often asked, but never answered. The fact that his family moved from Austria to England in 1936, and that Bluhdorn was relocated to the United States as a refugee in 1942 certainly makes it seem likely that he was—not to speak of the fact that his speech, rapid, staccato, and sputtering as it was, was laden with colloquial Yiddish insults like putz, schmuck, and nebbish. Still, a lot of New Yorkers affect a familiarity with Yiddish, if only to make themselves sound like tough guys. All one can say is that Bluhdorn seemed to tread a careful line on the subject, allowing some people to believe he was Jewish, and others not.

His business career was in the Horatio Alger tradition. Having arrived in New York as a refugee, he went to work for a cotton broker at a salary of fifteen dollars a week, then switched to the commodities import/export business—a lifelong preoccupation with Bluhdorn, who bought and sold sugar futures the way other men play golf. By the time he was twenty-one, Bluhdorn had cornered the market in malt—his trading in that substance was, in fact, so hyperactive that it attracted the attention of the U.S. government, and brought about his first brush with Washington, though by no means the last. At twenty-three he was in business for himself, already a millionaire and something of a legend, but while he traded in almost everything from lard to pasta, he dreamed of something more stable, of an empire.

Bluhdorn’s epiphany—his equivalent of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus—came in 1957, when he bought Michigan Bumper, a decrepit manufacturer of stamped replacement bumpers. It was not just that he saw his future in a more solid business than commodities, with their notorious fluctuations, nor even that he believed (wrongly) that the automobile spare parts business was the wave of the future and would survive every vicissitude of the economy—it was that with the purchase of Michigan Bumper he worked out the simple formula that would take him far beyond malt, lard, sugar, and bumpers into the financial stratosphere.

Michigan Bumper was an unglamorous, low-rent, rust-belt corporation, whose stock (and industrial expertise) was at the bottom of the barrel, but once Bluhdorn owned it, it did not take him long to discover that bankers were happy to lend him money to acquire another corporation. However decrepit Michigan