Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [211]
At company functions, he began to seem almost benign. He set out to portray himself as the elder business statesman now, rather than as the hard-driving conglomerateur. He wanted people to see Gulf + Western as a successfully completed organization, not as a conglomerate that was constantly changing, unfinished, and fluid, and this was achieved, on paper, at any rate, by splitting it up into eight divisions. Paramount and Simon and Schuster, for instance, were lumped together in “The Leisure Time Group”; the grandly named “Consumer Products Group” was principally engaged in the manufacture and sales of cigars, and so on, until a total of some 850 different types of products and services were divided into eight “groups”—a Procrustean way of proving the company had arrived or matured. “Synergy,” the magic word that was supposed to explain to shareholders and the other rubes outside the tent what the purpose of all this conglomeration was, now became a war cry within the company, as if there were really some link between auto parts, truck and auto leasing, mattresses, movies, resort hotels, sugar, zinc, and books.
Bluhdorn’s energy remained undiminished, as did his notorious inability to relax. Once, visiting the Dominican Republic for an S&S sales conference (for a while, it became mandatory to use the G+W resort for sales conferences, despite the many difficulties of getting down there), I was invited by Mrs. Bluhdorn and her daughter to look at their horses—my interest in them having apparently been passed on through the company. Elegant, beautiful, and gracious, Mrs. Bluhdorn showed me over the ranch, where there were, indeed, a lot of horses, some of them pretty nice. I should come back one day, she said, when I had more time. Charlie loved going on horseback picnics up in the mountains. It was a wonderful way to spend a day—a long ride up into the mountains, a swim in a clear mountain stream, surrounded by wildflowers and birds, then a delicious picnic, and the ride back.… I nodded appreciatively at the thought of this idyll, until a certain skepticism intruded into the picture. I found it hard to even imagine Charlie Bluhdorn on a horse, let alone giving up a whole day to a picnic. Perhaps there was a side to him I hadn’t seen? Did Mr. Bluhdorn, I asked, enjoy riding? Mrs. Bluhdorn laughed charmingly. “No, no,” she said, “Charlie joins us for lunch in the helicopter, then he flies back afterwards.”
As Bluhdorn became less visible, there were rumors of illness, even of cancer. In the end it should have come as no surprise when he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, in February 1983, on a plane on his way to the Dominican Republic. He had lived his life at twice the pace of any normal man—even of the normal ambitious business executive. Forever in motion, talking, pleading, threatening, he was like a force of nature. Far from surrounding himself with “yes men,” he thrived on argument, the angrier and more furious, the better. In an era of increasing corporate blandness, with CEOs who seem determined to behave as if all business were a kind of public service, Bluhdorn was the last of the great business eccentrics, a one-man band who made capitalism seem not only profitable, but fun. Always a trader at heart, he treated the American business world like a supermarket, rushing about in it like a demented shopper, picking up bargains without a shopping list to guide him. The last time I saw him, for a few brief seconds, in the dim light of the Top of the Tower restaurant, he looked pale and gaunt. He paused only long enough to say, “Cheezus Ke-RIST!