In addition to rubbing shoulders with the heads of Fortune 500 companies and politicians like David Dinkins and Jesse Jackson, Lewis was on friendly terms with Bill Cosby and was a visitor to Cosby’s townhouse in Manhattan. Lewis was also an admirer and friend of opera singer Kathleen Battle. Lewis got a kick out of putting on a black tie and taking his brother Tony Fugett with him to hear Battle sing in Manhattan. Battle later sang at his memorial service.
“Today” host Bryant Gumbel was also an acquaintance. They met, of all places, in an airport and wound up sitting next to each other on the same flight. That encounter led to a relationship where they would pick up the phone from time to time just to say hello.
“I think more often than not we wound up talking about society’s perception of black men who are successful, more than anything else,” Gumbel says. “And we would kind of commiserate with each other and share stories about how we were perceived, or different standards that we were held to.”
“It was part and parcel of the whole deal of talking about being black and successful in this society and some of the things you have to do that most people don’t think about.”
Black men who are prepared or confident or willing to act aggressively are viewed as undesirables who are arrogant, uppity, and too big for their britches, Lewis would tell Gumbel.
In addition to being able to pick up the phone and call other celebrities, Lewis found that fame brought with it people who routinely suck up to the rich and powerful. On occasions when Lewis and his wife were besieged by sycophants, he would turn to Loida and utter quietly, “It’s the car,” causing both of them to burst into laughter. The remark was made famous in the Lewis household one afternoon when Lewis was driving his convertible 550 SL Mercedes with his oldest daughter, Leslie, seated beside him. Two beautiful women walking along the street as Lewis was approaching made a big show of giving him flirtatious looks.
Leslie, who has a dry sense of humor like her father, turned to him and said, “Daddy, it’s the car.” Her comment tickled Lewis to no end and gradually became a shorthand for people who seem friendly but are really motivated by ulterior motives.
THE JOYS OF FAMILY AND RELAXATION
Family and business were the dominant passions in Lewis’s life. When business wasn’t the topic of discussion with Lewis, his family was. Family members, friends, and business associates all remark that Lewis had a deep love for his wife and his daughters.
Tom Lamia and Lewis talked about their families all the time. “Gee, Tom, you’re really lucky to have six children,” Lewis told his colleague once. “I’d love to have six children.”
However, the birth of Lewis’s second daughter, Christina, had been a difficult one and Lewis feared that having additional children might put Loida Lewis’s health—and possibly her life—in jeopardy. By all accounts, Reginald Lewis was a different man at home than in the business arena. He could still be demanding and a taskmaster, but he was also very nurturing and supportive. Home life brought out a side rarely displayed in the workplace.
“He was sort of a lion in business, but to me he had a completely different personality at home,” says Alan Schwartz, the Bear, Stearns executive who befriended Lewis during the McCall days. “Reg clearly was the focal point of his house, but there was a very soft side to it. He clearly was very proud of his family and there was a softness to him that you wouldn’t have seen in a business deal. I think Leslie just wanted to be a female Reg.”
Of his two children, Leslie, 21, is most like Lewis in that she tends to be intense and analytical, can be eloquent or blunt depending on the situation, and tends to approach matters in a no-nonsense, focused way.
Christina, 14, who is attuned to things creative and artistic, is already an accomplished pianist and also displays a talent for creative writing. She seems to be more like her mother in that she has a spirituality about her and a quiet, inner strength.
Lewis spent as much time with them and with his wife on weekends and holidays as he could. But the week was devoted to business pursuits. It’s not that he held business or his personal ambition above his family—realizing his dreams just took a lot of his time. It was that simple.
“He knew the tremendous sacrifice he had to make by being away so much, which always bothered him,” says one of Lewis’s brothers, Jean Fugett, Jr. who’s also a lawyer and briefly worked with Lewis at 99 Wall Street. “That was something that he really hated about his job. But if he had to do it all over again, he would do exactly what he had done.”
That meant that maximum enjoyment and gratification had to be extracted from time spent with his family. Easter was a time of year the family trekked to the Virgin Islands. Thanksgivings were spent on Long Island and later in Paris. Christmases were celebrated in Baltimore, and the New Year was traditionally ushered in while in the Caribbean. There were also weekends in the family home on Long Island and generally at least one week-long trip a year to some vacation spot.
Lewis was particularly close to his girls because he felt the love they had for him was unalloyed, totally pure and unconditional. At one point, like many young men, Lewis was hoping to have a boy, whom he would have named Reginald Scott Lewis. That dream vanished without a trace of remorse once his daughters were on the scene. Their self-worth, solid personalities, well-adjusted outlooks on life and even physical attractiveness were all sources of immense pride for Lewis. “I knew I was going to have daughters who were going to be lookers,” Lewis was fond of saying.
“All I saw was the twinkle in his eye when he was talking about them,” Michael Milken says. “And how proud he was of them and how different their life was going to be from his life.”
Lewis was protective of his daughters; he shielded them from prying media eyes wanting to know more about the private Reginald Lewis. Although his relationship with his family was a love affair of the first order, business is a jealous mistress and Lewis found her siren song irresistible.
“We worked at things pretty much the same way, which meant that by definition our families were deprived of a lot of our time,” Cleve Christophe says. “That just was kind of the way it was. So we would talk about it in terms of our destiny, what we’re seeking to achieve, why it’s right for us to do this. We recognized at the same time there were certain of life’s experiences, particularly on the family side, that in a way were compromised in the process.”
Lewis’s happiest, closest times with his family were spent in Paris when he moved there after the acquisition of Beatrice. His focus shifted more toward family and he and his wife were probably closer than at any other juncture in their marriage.
On Friday nights, Reginald and Loida Lewis would usually go to the opera and have black-tie dinners at Maxim’s, one of Paris’s best known restaurants.
Lewis got a kick out of giving his wife unexpected surprises with a romantic twist. One time he materialized with tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and whisked her off to Austria in his private jet. They took in the concert, spent the night in splendor at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, and flew back to Paris the next afternoon.
The Lewises savored their time in Paris and looked forward to growing old together, with Lewis spending his golden years as the dean of a major U.S. university.
Dinnertime in the Lewis household saw the dining room turn into a courtroom as soon as dinner was finished. The Lewises would hold mock trials with one family member filling the role of prosecuting attorney, while another was a defense attorney, a judge, and a defendant.
Reginald and Loida Lewis had serious objectives in mind when these mock trial sessions, ostensibly a game, were held. They wanted their girls to be capable of thinking quickly on their feet and able to make defensible arguments based on sound analysis. Not surprisingly, Leslie and Christina possess a better than average grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates. Leslie, in fact, has given some thought to attending law school, which would put her on the same path as her father and mother.
�
�It was always interesting to hear the legal conversations when you walked into the dining room,” says Lucien Stoutt, the Lewis’s butler in New York. “Sometimes you’d walk in and you’d hear the kids prosecuting Mommy and Daddy. And nobody would be getting angry, they’d just be doing what they had to do based on the legal process.”
In Paris, Leslie began to exhibit the rebelliousness that has marked many a child’s passage into the teenage years. A typical disagreement between Leslie and her father would be over what time she was supposed to return home from an outing in the Lewis’s chauffeur-driven limousine. When differences between them would reach a head, Lewis resorted to an old-fashioned remedy and grounded his daughter for a week at a time. Lewis was tremendously relieved when at 18 Leslie outgrew the rebelliousness that caused them to butt heads on so many occasions.
It was terribly important to Lewis that his children not grow up to be sheltered and pampered and oblivious to the fact that few people enjoyed the life of privilege and wealth they were accustomed to. There were occasions in Paris when Lewis had Christina or Leslie personally deliver checks to an orphanage he made contributions to. As with his other goals, Lewis was successful; his daughters appear to be unpretentious and socially enlightened.
One accomplishment of which Lewis was tremendously proud was the fact that he never missed a parent-teacher association meeting or a play or recital at the international, multilingual school his girls attended in Paris. The same was true when they were living in New York.
Lewis was getting Leslie more and more acquainted with Beatrice and its operations. And he took Christina with him to visit TLC Beatrice’s potato chip operation in Ireland and the soft drink bottling plant in Brussels. But there was no grand design to groom either Leslie or Christina. Lewis saw no pressing need to have a capable successor waiting in the wings.
Evenings at the Lewis household were marked by laughter. Leslie and Christina loved to tell their father jokes, and he often reciprocated with one of his own. Lewis and Leslie were both partial to lengthy, intricate jokes that had to be meticulously retold to reach the punch line.
The family devised its own version of Trivial Pursuit, with Lewis asking each person at the dining table a math, history, or literature question.
Initially, Christina’s piano playing filled the Lewises’ Paris apartment with discordant, stacatto notes, leading her father to close the door to his study.
But as her playing became more and more fluid and melodic, the door to Lewis’s study stayed open more and more often. He even arranged for her recital to be held at the Hotel Meurice in Paris and often asked her to play her concert pieces for visiting friends.
It was terribly important to Lewis and his wife that their children grow up as normally as possible, given their sheltered and privileged lifestyles. When Forbes placed Lewis on its list of 400 wealthiest Americans in 1991 and 1992, he made no mention of it to Leslie or Christina.
Lewis also taught them the value of a dollar, and how to hold on to one despite their affluence. It was one lesson the girls learned well at the master’s knee. “Christina and Leslie are just as tight with a dollar,” laughs their grandmother, Carolyn Fugett. “They do not spend to be spending, believe me. And don’t owe them anything!”
During the period he was living in Paris, Lewis seemed to take more time to enjoy the fun and relaxing things that his enormous wealth made possible. During several Christmas holiday seasons, he and Tony Fugett jetted into Jamaica to decompress for a week while Loida and the girls went to the Philippines. As the brothers passed through Jamaican customs, they were asked if they had any firearms to check.
“Do we have firearms?” a bemused Lewis responded. “No. Why, do we need them?” His trademark belly laugh was soon booming through the customs section of the airport. The brothers chuckled about the exchange throughout their stay. After leaving the airport they traveled to a resort in Jamaica known as Tryall, where they’d rented a villa named Randolins.
“I saw a change in the man,” Fugett says. “We did not have a phone and he did not read a paper. He read books and we swam together in a sea pool and we played tennis two times a day. It was unbelievable. There was a dog at the villa and he actually walked with the dog—this from a man who hated dogs!”
“He said he never relaxed as much as he relaxed at the Randolins. He was going to buy the place.”
While in Paris the Lewis family had a peculiar immigration arrangement: Because they had tourist visas, the clan had to leave France every 90 days. That was no problem given the geography of Europe, where countries are in close proximity to one another. The Lewises were well traveled on the continent and tallied Rome, Madrid, Berlin, and Prague among the cities that they toured.
When living in Europe, the ability to glide effortlessly between cultures and languages comes in handy. After a time, the Lewises were all fluent in French, with Loida Lewis and Leslie going a step better by adding Spanish to their repertoire, and Christina topping everyone by taking on Spanish and Japanese.
For Leslie’s eighteenth birthday, Reginald Lewis arranged for a black-tie dinner at the family’s Paris apartment that was attended by 60 of Leslie’s classmates. Her graduation present from dad was a snazzy Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible. When Time magazine asked why Leslie didn’t receive a more expensive vehicle like a Porsche or Mercedes, Lewis replied, “So she’ll have something to look forward to!”
One of Lewis’s proudest moments in life was when Leslie was accepted to Harvard College in 1991. Lewis and his family flew from East Hampton to Boston aboard TLC Beatrice’s corporate jet to accompany Leslie to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin her studies at Harvard. When it was time for the Lewises to leave and return to Paris, Leslie started to cry. Loida Lewis also got moist-eyed after the limousine began to pull away from the dormitory, affecting her husband.
With the Lewis household shrinking from four people to three, Reginald Lewis bought Christina two Labrador retrievers, named Gaston and Gilbert, so she wouldn’t feel too lonely in her sister’s absence.
With TLC Beatrice having its best year ever in 1991 despite a looming recession in Europe, and a home life that brought him endless joy, it was with eagerness that Reginald Lewis looked forward to the approach of 1992.
15
* * *
Connoisseur, Philanthropist, Citizen of the World
Reginald Lewis gave millions of dollars to charities and causes where he thought his energies and wealth could make a difference. He was involved with philanthropy long before he became rich and long before he knew about his brain cancer in late 1992.
If charity begins at home, young Lewis had a first-rate teacher in his grandmother, Savilla Cooper. She possessed one of the biggest hearts in East Baltimore and thought nothing of escorting a stranger to her dinner table if that person had hit a stretch of bad luck and was hungry.
The lessons of Savilla Cooper were further amplified by Lewis’s mother, Carolyn Fugett, who urged her son to always deal compassionately with those less fortunate, something she did in deed as well as with words. She frequently gave monetary gifts to people. Clinton Lewis was also generous—in fact his restaurant business fell on hard times in part because he simply couldn’t turn away anyone who was hungry and couldn’t afford to pay for a meal.
Lewis possessed a mixture of toughness and tenderness akin to that of his mother. He turned away many of the endless proposals and requests for funding he was inundated with after he became one of America’s wealthiest men. But he was sufficiently caring to funnel a constant stream of money to projects and institutions he thought could have a positive impact on things.
In 1987, Lewis created The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation to manage his philanthropic activities.
“The genesis of that was, he understood the law and he understood how the law and society interacted,” Jean Fugett, Jr. says. “And he understood the role of institutions and he understood how historically we’ve been denied access to these institutions—p
olitical institutions, economic institutions, and philanthropic institutions. If you look at all these institutions that have a great deal of impact, some would say even a disproportionate impact, on the lives of people today and you look at society today, you can see that a way to attack it or approach it is institutionally.”
An institutional approach allowed Lewis to have a continuing influence on causes he was interested in, he believed.
Lewis used the same mindset for philanthropy that he employed for business: What’s the best way to maximize my power and influence? Early childhood education and pediatric preventative medicine were two of his pet issues. Lewis initially personally screened all proposals coming into his foundation, but that responsibility proved to be too time consuming and Lewis delegated it to his staff. He even appointed his oldest daughter, Leslie, to the board of The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, on her eighteenth birthday to instill in her a sense of doing the right thing.
Within four years of its inception, the Lewis Foundation had donated roughly $10 million to a variety of educational, civil rights, medical, and artistic institutions in the United States and in France. The year after the foundation was created, Lewis gave a total of $2 million in grants, including $1 million earmarked for Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, DC.
Some people interviewed for this book have cynically suggested that Lewis’s interest in charity was directly proportional to his interest in shaping his legacy and in wanting to buy a kinder, gentler image. That view is off the mark, because Lewis did much of his charity work without publicity. Also, the passion with which he addressed certain societal issues through philanthropy—particularly those affecting African-Americans—clearly came from the heart.
Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? Page 34
