Now certain that marrying Lewis was the right thing to do, Loida could relax and see a bit of the world before settling down. She and Imelda left California for the Philippines, by way of Taiwan and Korea. They had decided to take the long way home to give their parents time to digest the news about the marriage. Loida had written to her parents about her plans but she still was not sure that they would agree to the wedding.
Loida wrote to Lewis every day, but in the course of her whirlwind journey, she had forgotten about the two-week marriage deadline she and her fiance had set. Lewis was furious when Loida finally called from the Philippines.
“We were supposed to get married in two weeks!” he said icily, informing her that he had gone through the trouble of arranging to have their wedding held at NYU’s chapel. Loida waited for the storm to blow over, apologized, and told Lewis she needed to spend some time with her family. And since she would be the one giving up her homeland, what did he think about a wedding in the Philippines? Her family had made this suggestion and she agreed, wanting Lewis to see her in her milieu.
Lewis was caught off guard by this request, “Let me think about it.” One day, he happened to casually mention his situation to another Paul, Weiss attorney, Ed Korman.
“Look Reg, isn’t it really kind of romantic?” Korman suggested. “You’re flying 10,000 miles to claim your bride.” Lewis called Loida and told her they would have a Philippine marriage.
Loida’s father, Francisco J. Nicolas, was cut from the same cloth as Lewis. Having lost his father at 11, Nicolas had to fend for himself. At 21, he had to abandon his dream of becoming a lawyer because his fledgling lumber business was becoming very profitable. Nicolas’s lumber company eventually became one of the Philippines’s largest and best-known furniture manufacturers, NICFUR.
Francisco had great plans for his daughter, Loida. He saw her becoming a congresswoman, governor, or even senator. Those plans would be derailed however by her marriage. Naturally, he was quite curious about this African-American who was stealing his oldest daughter. Could Loida at least show him a picture?
She pulled out a picture of Lewis standing on the beach in St. Thomas, gazing intensely at the camera. Francisco Nicolas studied the man in the photograph for a few moments and smiled. He understood why his strong-willed, independent daughter had finally been swept off her feet.
Lewis flew into Manila a few days before the wedding. He was alone because none of his family members or friends could make the trip.
An archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, the Philippines was ruled by Spain for 400 years before becoming an American possession from 1900 to 1946, the year the country gained its independence. American influence was still very strong in the country in 1968, and today English is still widely spoken.
Loida came from a tightly-knit family of three brothers and one sister. The night before Lewis’s wedding, Loida’s male relatives, including her three brothers, threw a stag party for him at the house of an uncle, Pedro Manalac. Loida’s kinfolk tried mightily to get Lewis drunk, but getting blitzed was not his style. Moreover, Lewis didn’t want his future in-laws to see him three sheets to the wind. After all, he was representing the United States of America. He made it through the night with his sobriety—and dignity—intact.
Lewis and Loida were married on August 16, 1969, in a lavish ceremony that made the society pages of Philippine newspapers, including many of the country’s top business and social elite. The country’s then Vice President, Fernando Lopez, acted as one of the godfathers of the couple.
Lewis and Loida exchanged vows at the Paco Roman Catholic church, a romantic, Spanish-era structure in the heart of Manila that was surrounded by a beautiful garden. The most memorable gift was from Clinton Lewis, who paid to have a photographer film his son’s wedding for the folks in the United States.
The Lewises began their weeklong honeymoon in Japan, where they enjoyed exploring Tokyo and Kyoto. But their next destination, Hawaii, left a sour taste in their mouths.
Loida Lewis, who had a tourist visa, was detained for 45 minutes by U.S. Customs officials after she told them she planned to live permanently in the United States with her husband. Producing her marriage certificate didn’t expedite things either.
Ironically, if she had shown them her tourist visa and said she planned to go sightseeing, Loida Lewis would have breezed through. The absurdity of that situation made her decide on the spot to specialize in U.S. immigration law once she became eligible to practice law in New York.
After they’d cleared Customs and were traveling around Honolulu, Lewis felt that some of the white American tourists he encountered were looking at him in a manner that conveyed condescension and disapproval. Having just visited the Philippines and Japan where he could relax and just be a man—not a black man—Lewis was less tolerant than usual of American bigotry. Couldn’t he simply enjoy his honeymoon without being subjected to racism? Furious, Lewis cut short their stay in Hawaii, with the couple leaving after only one day.
The Lewises stopped in San Francisco for a day before heading back to New York, to Lewis’s tiny one-bedroom apartment at 333 W. 21st Street, in a section of Manhattan known as Chelsea.
Lewis loved Loida for her personality, spirituality, and intellect, plus her family’s social status served to further stoke his ambition. He was determined to show his new wife an opulent, affluent lifestyle of his own making, even though the unassuming Loida never coveted material possessions or social status. In later press interviews and speeches, Lewis would often pay tribute to Loida, calling her “one of the least materialistic persons I know.”
Loida Lewis believed in her husband and in marriage for better or for worse. In the early 1970s, when finances were tight and even her butcher wouldn’t accept her checks, Lewis would grumble to his wife that she needed to do a better job of balancing the budget. But there wasn’t too much Loida Lewis could do. After all, the family had to eat.
Not one to sit idly around the house, Loida Lewis got a job working with Manhattan Legal Services, a Johnson-era, publicly-funded law firm catering to low-income clients. When contrasting his job with Loida’s, Lewis would joke, “Reg works for the rich and Loida works for the poor.” She worked with Manhattan Legal Services from 1970 to 1973.
In 1972, Lewis earned a particularly large fee from one of his clients. The Lewises were expecting their first child and the fee enabled them to make a downpayment on a brownstone at 351 W. 22nd Street, also in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
The following year, their first daughter, Leslie, was born. In preparation for the birth, the couple spent seven weeks learning the Lamaze method of natural childbirth. Lewis was in the delivery room when Leslie came into the world. A very proud father, he had also seen how difficult and potentially life-threatening the process of childbirth had been for his wife. Consequently, he was reluctant to put her through it again. It would be seven years before the Lewises had their second child, Christina, in 1980.
Lewis always firmly believed that his wife should be free to develop a separate career with her own interests and goals. “Some men believe in keeping their wives barefoot and pregnant; I’m not one of them,” he often told her. From 1971 to 1979, she published a monthly magazine for the Filipino-American community that was financed by her husband.
Lewis was proud of his wife’s achievements. After Loida passed the 1974 New York Bar examinations making her one of the first Asians to do so without attending a law school in the United States, she applied for a lawyer’s position at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and was turned down. With Lewis’s backing and his firm as her counsel, she sued INS alleging discriminatory hiring practices and won three years in back wages. During the three-years’ hiatus, Lewis supported Loida’s decision to practice law with Antonio Martinez, who ran a law office specializing in Hispanic immigration. In 1979, she was sworn in as a general attorney with the INS and, for eleven years, stayed on the job even after Lewis’s success in the
business world. She finally said goodbye to the service in 1990 in order to relocate to Paris with her husband and children.
Loida sums up her 24-year marriage as exhilarating. “I knew I would not meet another man like him again,” Loida Lewis says of her late husband. “He was masterful.”
7
* * *
“I Was Not Ready”
When he was the subject of glowing news stories after acquiring Beatrice International in 1987, Reginald Lewis would complain about how some of the media made it look as if he’d achieved his success quickly and effortlessly. “That’s not true. I was no overnight success. It took 25 years of hard work to get to where I am. That’s what everyone has missed,” he would tell people.
His success had been achieved at great personal expense. His metamorphosis from unknown, struggling lawyer to celebrated, international financier was a lengthy, at times painful, affair. His initial attempts to purchase companies uniformly failed, not for lack of effort, but for a host of reasons that Lewis later crystallized into one.
“I was not ready,” he concluded, characteristically coming down hard on himself.
These early failures resulted in numbing depression and stinging self-doubt the likes of which the supremely confident Lewis had never encountered.
As an attorney, Lewis participated in scores of deals where his legal expertise helped others acquire companies. Tired of operating based on the whims of MESBICs and borrowers, Lewis was ready to leave law practice behind and do corporate acquisitions himself.
One source of Lewis’s disappointment with his law practice came in 1979 when new Ford Foundation head Franklin Thomas, who happened to be African-American, decided to cut off all business to Lewis’s law firm. The Foundation had been one of the firm’s largest clients and to lose this revenue for no clear reason frustrated Lewis.
Another setback suffered by Lewis had to do with Aetna Life and Casualty. Lewis & Clarkson had been doing legal work for the mortgage financing division of Aetna since 1979. The division had made it a practice to use minority firms whenever possible. In 1984, Aetna’s legal division changed managers and the new regime demanded that Lewis & Clarkson go through the whole interview process from scratch, including submitting bios for all of Lewis’s attorneys, as well as an explanation of the type of work they did. The demand enraged Lewis. He and Clarkson drove over to Aetna’s offices with Lewis bellowing the entire time as a cringing Clarkson kept his mouth shut, silently wishing they would get to their destination quickly, so he could leave the car.
“Why the fuck do we have to prove ourselves over and over?” Lewis asked. “I’ve got to go to the other side of the table. This is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life.”
THE FIRST ACQUISITION TARGET: PARKS SAUSAGE
Lewis’s first opportunity to “go to the other side of the table” and become an acquirer and owner of a company came in 1975. The target was a black-owned firm in Baltimore named Parks Sausage. The company’s founder, Henry Parks, was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and ready to get out of the business.
An old friend once said that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet one prince. This sums up the search for deal opportunities. When Henry Parks was said to be ready to sell Parks Sausage, of “More Parks Sausage, Mom” fame, I joined the fray. I lined up some local Baltimore support and talked to Chemical Bank and even got a letter out of them saying they would support my proposal. Parks Sausage was then traded publicly, but it was controlled by Henry Parks and his longtime partner, Willie Adams, who was a legend in the Baltimore community.
Ellis Goodman, Lewis’s friend from his days at the Baltimore country club, had a connection to Parks: his father-in-law knew Henry Parks personally. Lewis asked Goodman to arrange a meeting.
I came down to Baltimore for the meetings and met Henry Parks privately first, then with Willy Adams at Ellis’s office. I might as well have been the man from the moon. They just were not having any of it. I persisted nonetheless, explaining how I knew how to put the deal together, inviting them to stay involved, and saying all the things from deal-making 101.
The total value I proposed was about $3 million, which was a good premium to the then stock price. After several more visits and the bank letter, as well as other letters from my sources of financing, Willy Adams said, “Look, you’re a sincere young man and I believe in helping our young people, so before I take another bid, I’ll give you a shot at topping the other offer.”
Well, I thought, that’s progress. Wrong. Within a week, Lehman Brothers brought in another buyer, signed and announced the deal the same day at a price roughly the same as mine. When something like that happens to you and when you are inexperienced and let your ego run wild, you are crushed. You second-guess every decision you made, when rarely does any of that matter.
It’s just a deal that got away. You move on. Easy to say now, but not then. I felt it for weeks. But I was later to learn it gets worse.
Lewis, who was 31 at the time, had made quite an impression on the Parks team.
“He was dapper,” recalls Parks Chairman and CEO Ray Haysbert, who was a company vice president at the time. “And he had an air of confidence. I guess that stemmed from his education and prior experiences as a lawyer. And he dressed like a New Yorker—as I recall it, dark blues, and very white shirts with very stiff collars and I guess what passed for power ties.”
But it wasn’t enough to carry Lewis over the top, Haysbert muses. “As usually happens to young black people—black men—there was a credibility gap. They didn’t believe he could back it up.”
Lewis’s mother, Carolyn Fugett, recalls that her son came to Baltimore with a check for $1 million in his briefcase when he was trying to close the Parks deal. It was all she could do to keep her composure upon seeing his immense disappointment over the failed transaction.
“It hurt him deeply,” Mrs. Fugett says. “He foresaw that he could take that company and make it a giant among all companies. I think it impugned his ability.”
Lewis managed a wan smile for the benefit of his mother, who wound up doing more talking than he did. She assured him that one day he would buy a business that would make Parks seem puny by comparison.
“I hope you’re right, Ma,” said Lewis, who had nothing else to say.
A NEW ACQUISITION PROSPECT: ALMET
Returning to New York, Lewis rededicated himself to the practice of law. But his desire to buy and run a company continued to burn unabated. Lewis was to take a second stab at the corporate takeover game, an experience that left the aspiring business mogul shattered and reeling.
The subsequent attempt took place in 1977, two years after Lewis’s unsuccessful run at Parks Sausage. The opportunity materialized one day during a tennis match in Los Angeles, where Lewis had travelled for a business conference. During the game, Ricardo Olivarez, a close friend whom Lewis had met during one of his MESBIC deals and would later nominate to the boards of both McCall Pattern and Beatrice International, introduced him to a businessman named Paul Christian.
Paul, Rick, and I loved tennis and we got in a game during a break in the conference. Paul had heard about my ability to raise capital and asked me about the kinds of situations I was interested in. I said, low-tech, high cash flow, and good management. Paul, who was a finder (broker) and had a lot of contacts, responded with the proverbial “Do I have a deal for you.” Ever eager, I said, “Let’s hear it.”
The company’s name was Almet. Well, it was a fine company. Superb record of growth in an interesting industry—leisure furniture. Sales about $12 million, profits about $1 million; $3 million in cash on the balance sheet at year end, two plants. It was 40 percent owned by an outside investor who was ready to exit after 17 years in the deal, and 40 percent by the president of the company, a 61-year-old man named Bill Cammer.
Paul arranged for a meeting between myself and Bill Cammer. Almet’s plant and offices were in Vernon, California, in an industrial park near downto
wn Los Angeles. What followed was a 1½-year courtship of Bill and his associates. To this day, I believe it was among my best work.
Detail-oriented Reginald Lewis left no stone unturned in his efforts to woo Cammer, marvels Charles Clarkson, who was also involved with the Almet deal. Not only did Lewis send birthday and wedding anniversary cards to Cammer, he even sent them to Cammer’s wife, along with gifts and roses, Clarkson says. Lewis even went to the trouble of helping Cammer’s daughter get a job.
Cammer was a chain-smoking, hard-working, driven man who has been described as “a lunatic.” He later said he was favorably impressed by Lewis, who had a Harvard Law School pedigree and shared his ambitious plans for Almet’s future with Cammer.
Almet was a medium-sized company with a profitable market niche. It made aluminum beach chairs and umbrellas. The key to buying Almet was Cammer, whom Lewis was counting on to manage the company as President and Chief Operating Officer.
Lewis painstakingly put the pieces of the puzzle together. As his acquisition vehicle, he set up a company called Republic Furniture and Leisure, Inc. whose initials just happened to be RFL. RFL, Inc. would purchase all the shares of Almet including those held by Cammer and other managers and Cammer would operate the company for RFL, Inc. with a fat employment agreement as his incentive.
Lewis convinced Chemical Bank to put up $5 million of the $7 million purchase price. He then went to several of his MESBIC clients, including Equico, and asked them to put up the rest of the money in subordinated debt. Six of them agreed. An actual contract of sale was signed by Cammer and the other shareholders. Chemical Bank transferred the $5 million to its branch in California where the closing would take place. Everything seemed to be going according to Lewis’s plan.
The day of the closing arrived. Clarkson had flown to California while Lewis stayed in New York and dealt with the bankers. The final signing of documents was scheduled to take place at the offices of Almet’s law firm.
Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? Page 14
