Gulf + Western

"We went on our first trip to Santo Domingo, where Gulf + Western owned a huge sugar plantation and had developed a luxe golf resort on the southeast coast called Casa de Campo. We had our first fight there. Whatever hurt it was that stung me I no longer remember, but I had to get away. I fled on my motorbike up into the rocky hills of the Dominican mountains and slowly unfroze as I dodged potholes along the unpaved road. Why was I so emotionally unprepared for intimacy? When I was eight years old, I had given up believing my mother could protect me from my brother or from my emerging sexual confusion. I became a “walker in the city,” all on my own, not dependent upon anyone. Now my emotions were all over the place because an actual person was becoming important to me. I didn’t just *want* her, I *needed* her, and that banged hard into my built-up self-protections. But all that receded as I drove back to the house, and found Diane standing in the driveway, instantly stitching me back together with her huge earth-mother heart."

"Charlie started Gulf + Western as an auto-parts company, making the chrome bumpers on the front of cars. Before that, he’d been a coffee trader, and became a millionaire in his twenties. He could—and did—trade anything. He put the word “insatiable” into ambition, and he built his auto-parts business into one of the first conglomerates at a time when buying disparate businesses was popular, and before private equity took over the model. From auto parts to sugar to insurance in every corner of the world economy, he bought sound and cheap, using his stock to expand, each acquisition pushing the stock price higher and making the next acquisition easier. He was an industrial genius. An immigrant’s immigrant, he was more of an American patriot than Americans born generations earlier."

"“This is a sympathetic film about a communist, and while you may think it’s amusing for a capitalist company to do this, I work for a protocapitalist, Charles Bluhdorn. I don’t talk to Charlie about decisions to make a movie or not make a movie, but for this one I have to. I can’t put Gulf + Western in a position of being taken by surprise by the controversy this film will cause.” We were still very much in the Cold War with the Soviet Union (it would be ten more years before it would collapse). When the idea was put to Bluhdorn, he surprised us by saying that of course Gulf + Western would support the movie. He said the greatest thing about America is its tolerance, even encouragement, of open discussion on any subject."

"After Charlie had spent thirty-four years building up Gulf + Western, it owned dozens of companies with twenty-one separate business units and one hundred thousand employees. It was one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Charlie Bluhdorn had become one of the world’s greatest industrialists. He didn’t have his own country, but he came pretty damn close. Charlie had bought a company called South Puerto Rico Sugar in 1967 and had been adding millions of acres to its holdings, which now included 10 percent of the land in the Dominican Republic. It had become one of the largest sugar refineries in the world."

"It was just about our lowest point. The finance people at Gulf + Western had even made a presentation saying that we should get out of the movie business entirely. The return on capital was just too low for their liking and the risks were too high. They thought we’d never master a consistently profitable slate of movies."

"Meanwhile, the news had indeed upended the town. Not since the 1930s had anyone skipped so seamlessly from heading one studio to heading another, and no one had ever been given $3 million in salary (that figure also leaked out). The entire creative core of Paramount was now at risk of leaving, and while the studio had a decent backlog of movies, there was real concern that this mighty hitmaking machine would cease to function. It had been taken for granted that Paramount was the most stable and best-run studio; no one outside a very few knew how unstable the relationship had been between me and the head of Gulf + Western after Charles Bluhdorn died."

"On that call, Charlie spoke for the first time about the Gulf + Western corporation and his lack of anyone to rely on there. He said he needed someone to trust now more than ever and that he wanted to put me on the board. I was speechless. Nobody from any of the individual companies Gulf + Western owned was on the board, nor were any of the most senior corporate people. The board was entirely composed of outside directors. It was probably better that the hotel ceiling separated us. I didn’t want him to see that I had tears in my eyes. I didn’t know what it stemmed from, but I could hear the vulnerability in his voice when he quietly pleaded with me to keep our conversation secret until after the New Year, when he’d want me beside him at board meetings. It more than touched me that this business-busting titan wanted me to help him, to protect him as he felt more isolated and alone. We never spoke about it again."

"Bluhdorn insisted: “You’ve got to take all of them.” The kernel of an idea forming, I asked if he planned to make new movies at Paramount or if he was just going to strip-mine the assets. That got him all frothy again and he bellowed, “Do you think I’m some small-time player? I’m going to revive Paramount and make it the biggest studio in town!” (And, he did.) I pounced on this and said, “Great. We’ll agree to contract all those films if we have the right to swap the new movies for the old turkeys. In other words, I’ll guarantee the dollars, betting you’ll make better movies we can successfully run, which will partially offset the costs of making them, since these old movies are basically worthless.” While I didn’t fully understand it at the time, this was exactly the concept Bluhdorn had used to build up Gulf + Western: trading the made-up paper value of his stock and using it to buy better assets than the crummy ones he’d been able to buy at the beginning."