Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?

by Reginald Lewis

  “Cleve, we’ve got this problem over in France with S.E.S.,” Lewis said. It seemed that one of the managers had sold some Beatrice property that he was not authorized to sell. “This is a mess and I’m concerned about the banks,” Lewis said affably. “You’re good at this stuff—would you go over to France and see if you can get to the bottom of it? You and Tom Lamia?”

  “When do you want me to go?” Christophe asked noncommittally.

  “I’ve already got you booked on a flight three hours from now,” Lewis answered.

  Christophe was gone for two weeks. After he returned, another week went by without Lewis making any mention of Christophe’s desire to quit. Christophe decided to make another visit to Lewis’s office.

  “Reg, what I told you back in January is still valid,” he told Lewis. “And more than two weeks have passed.”

  “Oh, I thought you had forgotten about that,” Lewis said.

  “No.”

  Lewis walked over to the door of his office, closed it and then took a seat on his couch, rather than behind his desk.

  “Cleve, I really wish you would reconsider,” he said. “You mean the world to me. I know what we can do, but I guess at the end of the day you’ve got to make your own mind up. If you are that intent, then what’s the timing?”

  Christophe repeated his desire to allow for an orderly transition. The two men agreed that Christophe would leave at the end of April.

  Prior to that deadline, Lewis took Christophe on a number of lunches and dinners where they had engaging conversations and even managed to share a few laughs. But things just weren’t the same—the old magic, the level of comfort and camaraderie that made their relationship so special in the past was missing.

  Each time they would meet, Lewis would get around to asking Christophe whether he had changed his mind, and each time the answer was no. At one dinner, Lewis even said, “You’re right about the screaming and stuff. I shouldn’t be doing that with anyone.”

  In November 1987, Lewis bought a mind-boggling mansion known as Broadview on Long Island. On Christophe’s penultimate day at TLC Beatrice, Lewis invited Christophe to Broadview.

  “Hey Cleve, tomorrow I’m going to be taking a helicopter out to the island to meet with a tennis contractor to have a tennis court put in. You’ve never seen Broadview, why don’t you fly out with me?”

  “Reg, I’d love to, but I can’t,” Christophe said. “I’m going to be packing, because tomorrow is going to be my last day.”

  “Are you serious?” Lewis said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, are you going uptown to take the train to Connecticut,” Lewis wanted to know. “Why don’t you ride up with me? My chauffeur is downstairs—I’ll give you a ride to the train station, because I probably won’t see you tomorrow.”

  Christophe took Lewis up on his offer and they took the elevator together to the ground floor and walked to the front of 99 Wall Street, where Lewis’s limo awaited. After his passengers were aboard, the driver headed toward Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, which runs alongside the East River in Manhattan. On the opposite bank of the river the drab shoreline of Queens started coming into view. Lewis’s chauffeur took an entrance ramp for the FDR north.

  In the few minutes it took to get to the station for Christophe’s commuter train, Lewis was going to try to wear his friend down one more time.

  “Would you please, please reconsider?” Lewis asked plaintively.

  “No,” said Christophe, who was probably secretly enjoying the test of wills. When he glanced over at Lewis, he saw a familiar flash of fire in Lewis’s eyes.

  “You know, this is the most juvenile, irrational set of economic analysis I’ve ever seen,” Lewis said in a booming voice. “You are committing economic suicide. I’m embarrassed for you in the way in which you’re allowing your emotions to push you into these amateurish judgments. Do you really know what I think?”

  “Reg, I know what I think—I don’t give a fuck what you think!”

  The anger drifted from Lewis’s eyes when he heard Christophe’s words. “You don’t give a fuck what I think,” he said, repeating the words slowly.

  With that, Lewis started smiling broadly and thrust his hand across the seat and grabbed Christophe’s. “I love it,” he said. “You have the makings of an entrepreneur yet.”

  Lewis’s limo pulled into the train station and Christophe got out and caught his train to Connecticut. The two men wouldn’t speak to each other for another two years and when they did, it was by telephone and after a call initiated by Lewis. Although Christophe took a job with a MESBIC just five blocks from 99 Wall Street, Lewis and Christophe never spoke face-to-face again after that encounter in Lewis’s limo.

  The next time that Christophe, who is also the godfather of Lewis’s oldest daughter, Leslie, saw his former partner was at Lewis’s funeral in Baltimore in January 1993. “I told Loida at the funeral, I love the man—there’s no question about that,” Christophe says. “I cherish the memories. There is nothing that transpired in the later stages of our relationship that will ever detract from the joy that I shared with him through most of our relationship.”

  “Reg tried hard to keep Cleve in the organization,” Beatrice spokesman Butch Meily says. “I think Reg was friends with him, but he also saw a little rivalry there. He would always ask me if I knew what Cleve was up to, or if I’d heard anything about Cleve. He was always curious. Sometimes he’d start to make a phone call to him, then he’d stop. He would always look back on that relationship with regret that it had broken off.”

  But in a 1992 Wall Street Journal article, Lewis was quoted as saying that Christophe overestimated “what the market was for what he brought to the table.”

  BROADVIEW

  To rejuvenate himself from the rigors of life in Manhattan, Lewis often traveled 100 miles east on the weekends, trading in the city that never sleeps for the idyllic ambiance of East Hampton, Long Island, located on Long Island Sound.

  Back in the days when Lewis was running McCall, he and his brother, Tony Fugett, used to get together in East Hampton from time to time. A playground for East Coast blue bloods and scions of old money, East Hampton is filled with summer homes that eclipse most people’s everyday homes. Lewis, an African-American with blue-collar Baltimore roots, felt perfectly at ease in such rarified company.

  Since 1978, he had owned a three-bedroom weekend home that was located in a section of East Hampton called Hampton Waters. The house had served its purpose well, but Lewis had grander plans in mind. He loved nothing more than to take a leisurely ride in his convertible Mercedes two-seater, accompanied by Fugett, as the two of them ogled the imposing mansions and sprawling estates of East Hampton.

  “I’m going to be in this neighborhood,” he would tell Fugett when they encountered a particularly lavish home. “One day, we’re going to be here.”

  In the fall of 1987, the same time he was working to close his acquisition of TLC Beatrice, Lewis began making good on his pledge to move to one of Long Island’s most exclusive addresses. He and his family had outgrown their East Hampton home, which was even more cramped when Lewis entertained. So the Lewises asked their real estate broker to show them some larger homes in the tonier sections of town.

  They did quite a bit of house hunting, but none of the dwellings they viewed possessed the right mix of style and uniqueness to satisfy the discerning Lewis. Then his real estate broker enthusiastically suggested that the Lewises look at a home that wasn’t in East Hampton per se, but was so spectacular that it merited a look.

  The broker took Lewis and his family to a section of the Hamptons called Amagansett and led them to a 25-room, Georgian-style mansion on 5.5 acres of land that went by the name of Broadview. Described in a realty prospectus as an estate that “would make even Gatsby envious,” to get to Broadview one had to turn off Old Stone Highway and drive along a private road that wound its way through about a mile and a half of pastoral meadows and woods. The man
sion itself was built near huge cliffs that offered a spectacular view of Gardiners Bay. Lewis and his wife were overwhelmed by the majesty of the place and Leslie and Christina fell in love with Broadview at first sight.

  “I didn’t want it because it was too huge for me—it was intimidating,” Loida Lewis recalls of that first encounter. “But Reg, I think, saw himself in it.”

  Lewis visited Broadview about 15 more times after that initial visit, wanting to make damn sure he didn’t experience $4 million worth of buyer’s remorse if he bought Broadview, then had second thoughts. During the last of his many return trips, Lewis began pointing to locations where different pieces of his art collection would look good inside the massive house. They closed on Broadview in November 1987.

  Lewis and his family extracted maximum enjoyment from the awe-inspiring abode. Lewis invited his boyhood friend from Baltimore, Ellis Goodman, to see Broadview and showed it off with obvious glee.

  “This is right out of the Great Gatsby,” Goodman said in awe.

  “Well, of course it is,” Lewis replied, chuckling.

  Goodman remembers that Lewis took tremendous pride in the art collection he’d assembled at Broadview. Someone whose love for art began in an art history appreciation class taken at Virginia State, Lewis became a familiar figure in Manhattan auction houses and art galleries, from which he purchased African-American, French Impressionist, and Surrealist paintings to display at Broadview.

  Despite buying the estate, Lewis opted to keep his smaller house in East Hampton because there were too many pleasant family memories associated with the dwelling to sell it.

  The tennis court that Lewis had built at Broadview was put to good use. The Lewises hired a butler, Lucien Stoutt, who knew exactly how his boss wanted things to be arranged prior to a match: Lewis’s routine called for his Prince tennis racquet to be resting against the backs of one of the courtside chairs. Two cans of Penn tennis balls had to be beside the racquet, with the seals on the cans unbroken. An opened can was an indication that the balls inside might not be fresh, an unacceptable condition for Lewis.

  The umbrella for the courtside table needed to be in place and opened. Underneath the table was always a cooler containing water, ginger ale, and Lewis’s beloved Diet Coke. Across the back of each chair would be one white towel for each of the combatants. Only then would Lewis be ready for war, which was often waged with Tony Fugett, one or two chosen friends, or a local tennis pro who was paid to come play for an hour.

  In all honesty, Lewis—who was 45 in early 1988—was almost as interested in fighting the battle of the bulge as in fighting his opponent. “He always used to complain that his stomach was a little too big and he liked to move around on the tennis court,” Stoutt remembers. Lewis hated to lose, but on those occasions when he was on the short end of the score, Lewis dealt with losing graciously.

  While Lewis never put on airs for anyone, Broadview was one place he could totally relax. “This is a man who can afford to go to any restaurant and for lunch sometimes he would have Wise lightly salted potato chips and champagne,” Stoutt recalls of Lewis’s eating habits. The bubbly stuff was fetched from an amply stocked Broadview wine cellar.

  Lewis’s tastes in food and drink were surprisingly proletarian when he wasn’t entertaining. At Broadview, the Lewises had a cook working for them, Dalma Walker, who made cheeseburgers and barbecue dishes to perfection. However, on occasion, Lewis would be just as happy munching on his potato chips, microwave popcorn, or fried chicken that he had Stoutt buy from a local deli.

  On those infrequent occasions when Walker was not working and Tony Fugett happened to be visiting, Fugett and Lewis would putter around the kitchen and whip up pork chops, baked beans, and vegetables. Then a grinning Lewis would get on the phone and place a long-distance call to his mother. “Guess what me and Tony just did,” he would chuckle. The tickled siblings would then have Stoutt serve them their meal.

  At dinnertime, Lewis would run the show, right down to determining who sat where at the table. He and Stoutt had a code worked out that made Stoutt appear to be clairvoyant.

  The reason Stoutt appeared magically to clear the table at the exact moment everyone was finished eating was because Lewis had an electronic switch placed under the carpet near the head of the table. When Lewis pushed the switch with his foot, it rang a bell in the kitchen that summoned Stoutt.

  When Lewis was alone and Stoutt appeared, a finger pointed at a wine glass meant bring more wine—a nod of the head meant take away all the dishes. “Not only in business, but when he was dining, he still had control,” Stoutt marvels.

  Lewis threw his first Broadview bash on May 30, 1988, when he rented a bus to transport members of the Fugett and Cooper family from Baltimore.

  Not long afterward, the Lewis family moved to Paris, where Lewis set up operations, since the bulk of TLC Beatrice’s business was done in France. Lewis leased an opulent 18th-century Left Bank apartment in King Louis the XIV’s historic Place du Palais Bourbon, a literal stone’s throw from the French parliament building.

  But Broadview retained a special place in Lewis’s heart and he visited it whenever he could during one of his trips to the United States.

  While the Lewises were in Paris, Stoutt had his run of Broadview. But what should have been a cushy, hassle-free assignment turned into a nightmare on the morning of November 6, 1991. Lewis had expressly instructed his butler to sleep in Broadview the night before, but Stoutt had helped his fiancee move to a new apartment on November 5 and stayed over at her place.

  The following day a woman taking an early morning stroll two miles from Broadview noticed an unusual orange glow flickering against the morning sky and called 911. East Hampton Town Fire Marshall David Disunno was the first official at the scene. Flames were visible in each of Broadview’s front windows as the grand old mansion burned furiously.

  Stoutt’s beeper went off at 6:30 A.M. It was the East Hampton Town Police wanting to make sure he was okay because Broadview was going up in flames! By the time Stoutt raced to his place of employment, the fire had destroyed the middle section of the splendid mansion and was methodically devouring the remaining ends. About 50 firefighters were spraying water on the conflagration, but little could be saved, with the exception of an attached three-car garage containing Lewis’s Mercedes convertible and a Mercedes sedan.

  Also, a small unburned section of the room where Lewis kept his pool table and library yielded an unexpected treasure: The family photo albums. The photographs were none the worse for wear, except they had to be treated to remove a sooty film.

  At roughly noon Paris time, Loida Lewis was advised by Estela Ilagan, the housekeeper, that Broadview and its multimillion dollar art collection were going up in smoke. “We started calling Lucien because we thought maybe Lucien had died in the fire,” Loida Lewis says of the horrifying moments after she and her husband learned of Broadview’s destruction. “We didn’t know what to say. Could it be that somebody evil wanted to destroy it because of racism?”

  Lewis flew back to New York immediately. It was a tortuous flight given that he knew for certain that a magical place in his life was no more. As he flew over the Atlantic, Lewis pondered whether some nefarious person or persons had caused his misfortune intentionally.

  Stoutt absolutely dreaded having to come face-to-face with his boss. Lewis exploded when he heard Stoutt had defied his directions and hadn’t stayed overnight in the house.

  “You fucked up,” Lewis told Stoutt, each clipped word a scathing indictment that cut Stoutt to the core.

  “Mr. Lewis, I know I did,” he answered contritely. After asking Stoutt where he had been, Lewis really didn’t have that much to say. No amount of talking in the world would restore his prized house or its artwork, or undo Stoutt’s actions.

  Stoutt was eventually forgiven and still works for the Lewis family today. But on that day in November 1991—when the embers of Broadview were still warm—Stoutt would have been well a
dvised to give his seething employer very wide berth.

  Not quite sure if the town officials in Amagansett could get to the bottom of why his glorious home had been destroyed, Lewis called a powerful government official he trusted implicitly—New York City Mayor David Dinkins. Could Dinkins arrange for someone to come to his Long Island mansion to sift through the embers of a fire that looked suspiciously like arson, Lewis wanted to know?

  Dinkins got on the phone to Police Commissioner Lee Brown who arranged for two city police arson investigators to drive 100 miles to the eastern tip of Long Island. But when they got to the fire scene, they held themselves out as a lawyer and an insurance adjuster working for Lewis.

  Long Island police ran a check of the license on the duo’s vehicle, which looked suspiciously like an undercover cop car. A check showed that the car was registered to the New York City Police Department. When the “lawyer and insurance man” were confronted a second time, they admitted that they worked for the city. One of them, Lt. Phil Pulaski, headed the city arson and explosion investigation squad.

  The New York media had a field day raking Dinkins over the coals for sending city personnel to probe a buddy’s misfortune all the way out on the eastern tip of Long Island.

  Loida Lewis was upset with the coverage of the fire by the media. “I feel that the whole thing was politically-inspired. The media were using the incident to get at the Mayor. Reg and I were and are New Yorkers. We had lived in the city for years. We voted there and Reg had paid millions in taxes. He asked the city to take a look at the fire and advise him as to who he should hire in terms of a top-notch arson expert. It’s just as if an American living in Timbuktu is mugged. The first thing you’d do would be to turn to the local American embassy and ask for their help,” she says.

  Lewis himself was outraged at a tasteless Fortune article on the fire that had a picture showing the destroyed mansion. From Paris, he personally called the writer of the article, the managing editor and the publisher of the magazine to complain.