FRIDAY
Here I am, downtown, at the new Ritz Carlton Hotel near the
Staples Center.
I am at the annual meeting of the Beavers. Now, you may never
have heard of the Beavers, but that is your loss. The Beavers are
the biggest civil engineering construction firms in America. These
are rough, tough, smart men who build immense bridges, huge
tunnels, highways, subways.
When I walked into the VIP reception before the dinner, I felt
as if I were a pygmy in a land of giants. These were impressively
powerful men and you could just feel it in the room. I would not
want to tangle with any of them.
I spent a long time talking to John Shea and his son Peter Shea.
They are the owners, or some of the owners, of Shea Construction.
This amazing firm was founded by Peter Shea’s grandfather, who came
from Ireland to America. He started out doing plumbing for bars
that needed piping from beer kegs to taps. Within a few years, he
was one of the key builders of the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge in
San Francisco. The company were major builders of the Metro in D.C.
In the present moment, they are building a new subway line in New
York, under the streets of Manhattan.
Their crews use 8,000 pounds of dynamite every day
blasting rock under Gotham to build the tunnel for the citizens and
visitors. Every day, more than a thousand of their sandhogs go down
300 feet below the sidewalks of New York to build the tunnels. It’s
amazing, even if I say it over and over again.
There were other stories there like this one: very strong,
determined, smart grandfathers who started companies and
descendants who made the dream bigger and bigger.
The event went on late and by the time it ended, my head was
spinning. These are amazing guys. Just incredible. Women
construction people too. All strong and enviable. We men who live
by scribbling feel small by comparison.
WEDNESDAY
“Bad news on the doorstep,/ I couldn’t take one more
step….”
We are down in the desert. It should be a time of rest, but it
isn’t. Even though Win Ben Stein’s Money was canceled more
than a decade ago, some people think it’s still on air. A woman
whom my wife and I considered a close family friend is seeking to
play the game and use fantasies and fiction to Win Ben Stein’s
Money.
It’s a legal matter and it takes a lot of time to work on
getting through it. It came out of the clear blue sky, although I
guess you could also say it comes out of one of the bedrocks of
human nature…greed. It’s providing well-paid work for lawyers and
using up a lot of my peace of mind. I hope when it’s over, I can
get some rest. It might not be over for a long time, though. I have
to be prepared. But it does organize my day and gives me lots of
food for thought. It also brings back some of my training in law
that I got at Yale. Nowadays we have computers to help and the
Internet, but some of the old concepts like Laches and Voluntary
Estoppel still come to mind.
I worked on the matter this morning. Then, I had a good 12-step
meeting. Surrender always works. But that means surrender to God,
not to man.
I came home and had a small lunch of leftovers with my wifey,
who really is not feeling well. Hormel makes an incredibly good
meatloaf. It takes six minutes to microwave it and let it cool and
it’s good for days afterward. I cannot stop eating it. I put a thin
slice of butter on the leftover meat and heat it in the microwave
and it is magnificent. Good work, Hormel.
Then I went out to the driving range to hit golf balls. The
weather was perfect. But by an ill fate, the only other golfer out
there was making horrible coughing and choking sounds as if he were
trying to bring up phlegm. Disturbing. I could not concentrate. I
hit many poor shots.
Luckily, he left soon and my drives improved dramatically.
Then a woman golfer appeared with all kinds of electronic
gadgets to tell her how to choose which club to use. They hissed
and clicked. Disturbing. Hard to drive straight. Finally, she put
away her gadgets and I had a few minutes of peace. Again, my drives
improved. Peace and quiet make a big difference. I was soon tired
anyway. I sat in a chair and breathed in the desert air, watched
the airplanes fly over—why is that such a great sight? But I was
tired, so I went home.
Bad news. There was an e-mail from the Nixon Foundation telling
me that Roy Ash had died. I knew he had been ill but I did not know
he was that ill. It is a big loss.
I knew Roy from the Nixon days. He was head of the Office of
Management and Budget. By all accounts, he was great at it. He and
his wife, Lila, were pals of my parents and I met them many times.
Roy always impressed me. He had grown up in modest circumstances in
Southern California and had not gone to college. He worked at a
branch of the Bank of America and told me once his ambition was to
some day be a branch manager.
Instead, he had been a statistical whiz in the Army Air Force, a
whiz kid at Harvard Business, and then, with fellow genius Tex
Thornton, had founded Litton Industries, one of the first major
conglomerates.
Conglomerates never made much economic sense but they made
fantastic entrepreneurial sense. The founders started with a high
growth electronics company, then used its highly valued stock to
buy low growth but high earnings companies. The stock market
generously allowed a high growth stock multiple to the combined
enterprise, and immense fortunes were made.
Roy was extremely modest and self-deprecating, though. I once
asked him about difficult moments when Litton was new. He
remembered a time when he went to see the head of some old line
company who asked Roy to come home with him and fix his TV set, if
Roy knew so much about technology.
He was a genius entrepreneur and civil servant but also a poet.
He often mused about how Litton, a name that sounded as light as a
rose petal, was valued so much more highly in the world than a
Conrock, a company that supplied crushed rock or civil engineering,
and whose name—Consolidated Rock—sounded so formidable. That’s a
poet’s question.
I got to know Roy well in 1978 and 1979 after I had moved to
L.A. I had an idea for a financing company that would buy the
income streams from long-running TV shows and buy stars’ profit
participations for cash and then own the stream of income.
Presumably we would buy these things at a huge discount because the
sellers needed liquidity and we would have (as Roy put it) a tax
funnel that sheltered much of our income stream.
We would be in effect a large pawn shop for Hollywood.
Roy made me work hard on preparing this proposal—I well remember
trying to figure out how to compute Internal Rate of Return on my
HP-12C and reading about tax. But then he loyally went with me to
New York to scare up investors.
Through my old pal Peter Flanigan at Dillon, Read, we came close
but it never quite happened. I am just as glad it didn’t. I would
not have enjoyed being in that business. I am not really a
businessman. Not at all. I am a braino writer type.
But Roy was a great guy. Here he had founded and run one of the
most successful corporations on earth. I just had a pitiful idea
and no money, yet he treated me as an equal. He was never
condescending, never abrupt, always humble. He never lorded it over
me. Really an amazingly down to earth, wonderful man.
He had grown phenomenally rich beyond his Litton money because
gold had been found latterly on his ranch in Nevada—in immense
quantities. He never made much of his wealth. “It’s just a small
number followed by a lot of zeroes,” he once said. He was written
about in his obituary as if he were a calculator, but he was a
poet.
Long, long ago, in the summer of 1974, he threw the last party
for Richard Nixon as Chief Executive at his estate in Bel-Air.
Nixon said that he had asked Roy to have the party because Roy was
the only man he knew who had a tent. Good sense of humor for them
both.
Once Roy and I were having dinner at Mr Chow and he told me
about his aggravation over someone owing him a few million dollars.
“What can that possibly matter to a man with wealth like yours?” I
asked him.
“It’s liquidity at the margin,” he said.
I guess I looked puzzled.
“It’s nice to have cash,” he said.
For the last thirty years or so, he has been restoring
Pre-Revolutionary War estates in the Hunt Country outside
Washington, D.C. I have never seen any of them but I imagine they
are magnificent. Roy was a poet and had an eye for poetry.
Lila Ash and Roy’s children must be devastated. He was a
prince.
THURSDAY
My wife saw the doctor about her months of feeling ill. He told
her to eat oatmeal with flaxseed oil. What on earth are we going to
do? What can that even mean?
I am getting extremely worried.
I had many calls today from broke friends asking for money. It
is amazing how many people hit me up for money, amazing how many
people I know do not work—amazing how miserable they all are. And
they do not know, not one of them, that there is no self-esteem
without work. You just cannot be happy if you are idle. It’s that
simple. But so few people get it. Scary. Read Day of the
Locust about cunning people in L.A. preying on normal working
people. That’s my story. Nathanael West, real name something like
Weinstein, wrote it. He got it totally right.
I spent an hour sitting in on a class at Palm Desert Charter
Middle School. It was on the Constitution. It was a fine class with
a fine teacher. But I kept going back to my eighth grade Civics
class. I guess it’s just old age, but I recall we did the subject
at a much more intense level than the class today. Probably it’s
just an old man’s memory tricks. The class today was fine. (I keep
using that word because John Coyne uses it. We talk a lot.)
I recall an eighth grade class where we were assigned to be
Tories or Patriots debating the Revolu-tion. I was a Tory. I was
saying that the Revolutionists were just “rabble rousers.”
An incredibly, unbelievably smart fellow in my class named Arne
Steinberg replied, “John Adams, Samuel Adams, George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson. Were they rabble?”
I have never encountered such a powerful comeback ever again in
my life. That guy was a genius. He was also a fine pianist.
Probably still is.
Anyway, I enjoyed the class but the windows do not open and I
could not smell the new mown grass as I did in 1958 through immense
open windows.
Autres temps, autres moeurs.
