Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (17 page)

Once again, the Koch brothers were at war. The rift was so total that representatives of Charles and David approached
Forbes
that year to request that their entry in the magazine’s annual roundup of America’s richest citizens “be severed from Fred and William, their deeply alienated brothers,” the magazine noted. “Now, that’s sibling rivalry.”

Mary’s family was imploding. She found respite from her despair in the company of a younger man whose marriage was unraveling.

In the early 1980s, Mary met Michael Oliver at the Wichita Art Association, where she was a long-serving board member and major benefactor. A young, free-spirited assistant art professor at Friends University, a Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, Oliver specialized in pewter smithing. He had grown up poor in Mary’s hometown of Kansas City, working his way through
junior college and eventually earning an MFA from the University of Kansas. As she reached out her delicate hand to take his, Oliver was awed to be in the presence of a member of Wichita royalty. “The way she stood, the way her eyes sparkled, her kindness, her inner-self was so genuine and pleasant,” he recalled. “She could remember names like you wouldn’t believe. My lord. I’m sure it was cultural, that cultural idea that you need to remember everyone’s names.”

Following their first meeting, Mary grew close with Oliver and his then-wife, inviting them to spend the weekend at Spring Creek, the Koch family’s ranch in the Flint Hills. Oliver’s marriage was on the rocks, and by 1984, the couple had filed for divorce. As the news spread through the city’s close-knit arts scene, Oliver bumped into Mary at a gala at the Wichita Art Museum. She teared up when she spotted him. He began crying, too.

“Oh, you were such a lovely couple, why is this happening?” she asked. “Don’t worry about it, Michael, I’ll take care of you.”

Soon she invited him to dinner at her home. Oliver was petrified as he pulled his beat-up Honda through the security gate and up the circle drive. That night they sipped vodka tonics with a twist of lemon, Mary’s favorite cocktail, and in amusing contrast to her aristocratic image, she served Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. (“David said these are nourishing,” she told Oliver matter-of-factly.)

“I knew there was an attraction between both of us, and I just enjoyed being with her,” Oliver remembered. Their friendship soon evolved into something more. “It was a natural progression, because she was lonely and I was lonely. She was very lonely.”

Mary had sought companionship with a handful of (often much younger) men after Fred’s death. Though her courtship with Fred and their honeymoon were the stuff of storybooks, their marriage had not always been a happy one. She had loved Fred but also feared him, according to Bill. “My father was fairly tough with my
mother,” Bill once told
Vanity Fair
. “When she would irritate him, he wouldn’t speak to her for two weeks.… My mother was afraid of my father.”

One member of the extended Koch family described Mary as “a beautiful bird in a cage.” This relative noted, “She lived, by modern female standards, the life of a princess in a tower. She was kind of held captive by history and by the men in her life.… She was Fred’s trophy. So what was she going to do? Maybe that’s why she chose to live her final days the way she did, in this kind of I’ll-be-damned-what-you-think-of-me, I’m-going-to-do-what-I-want-and-have-Michael-in-[my]-life” way.

Oliver was half Mary’s age, and five years younger than her youngest sons, David and Bill. Their relationship became grist for the local gossip mill, as members of her social circle speculated about the gold-digging motives of Mary’s handsome consort.

“I got a lot of criticism,” Oliver recalled. “I was everything from a gigolo to whatever you want. But she didn’t care, and I didn’t care. And I said, ‘You know, it takes a younger man to keep up with you.’ It was just exciting. It was like you dream when you are a little child, and you always wanted to be the prince living in the castle. Well, I got that. That happened.”

David and Charles were initially suspicious. But as Oliver chauffeured Mary around Wichita, prepared meals with her at night, and escorted her on long walks around the Koch compound, the family—and particularly David, with whom Oliver occasionally played tennis—gradually warmed to him. Charles was always polite, but Oliver felt intimidated by him and he noticed that Mary occasionally seemed apprehensive around her son. “Charles has a lot of his dad in him,” Oliver said. “So she was a little afraid of him.”

Mary had two sides. One was the elegant, patrician
grand dame
of Wichita high society, who draped herself in fur and jewels and affected a mild air of
noblesse oblige
—a “woman from a different era,” the member of the extended family put it. But she was also
an avid outdoorswoman, as comfortable in waders as she was in couture, and as at home in a hunting blind as in an opera box.

One longtime family friend, Constance Witterman, described her as “a woman of all seasons. She was cultured, refined, intellectual, athletic… she was everything all rolled up into one.” Charles’s friends nicknamed her “Mighty Mary” for her indomitable style.

“She loved to party, loved to dance, loved to fish, loved to shoot, loved to hunt,” Oliver said. Together, they cruised the Flint Hills by four-wheeler, fly-fishing in the creeks and lakes around the Koch family ranch. Mary, whose deadly marksmanship was the stuff of local legend, taught Oliver how to shoot skeet. They traveled a couple times a year to hunt and fish at the Rolling Rock Club, the exclusive sportsman’s retreat in western Pennsylvania owned by the Mellon family.

One of Mary’s favorite summer pastimes was hunting bullfrogs. She was part of what Oliver half-jokingly described as a “secret society” of frog hunters among the local elite (“we’re talking about some of the richest people in all of Wichita”) who on summer evenings, after a few libations, waded into nearby ponds and streams scanning the shore with flashlights and scooping the amphibians—temporarily immobilized by the light—into canvas sacks. This group contributed their bounty to the chef at the Wichita Country Club, across the street from the Koch compound, getting dressed up in tuxes and dinner gowns to feast on frog’s legs and champagne in one of the club’s private dining rooms.

Oliver accompanied Mary on a hunt one night, sneaking onto the golf course to scour for bullfrogs in the water hazards. After an hour, they had harvested fifteen and Oliver followed Mary, both of them splattered with mud, up to the house with a noisy, pulsating gunnysack slung over his shoulder. When they reached the house and set the sack in the double stainless steel sink in the kitchen, it was no longer moving. There wasn’t a sound.

“Mary, do you think they’re dead?” Oliver asked.

Together they opened the bag and cautiously peered in. Petrified bullfrogs exploded out of the sack. Covered in mud and slipping on the floor, the pair chased after the escapees. “They were all over the house!” remembered Oliver. “All over the damn house. You’d catch one and then the next day she’d catch another one. It was a couple of days that they were around!”

For all the happy memories Oliver shared with Mary, there were morose ones as well. He spent many days lifting her out of the doldrums, as she wallowed in despair over the battle playing out between her sons. “Mary was in a turmoil,” Oliver said. “She was extremely upset most of the time.” He noted, “She tried to be the peacemaker that she was, but Bill and Charles were having nothing of it.”

After Bill and Frederick sued in 1985, it seemed every family dispute was now destined for the courts. In 1988, Charles and David successfully sued Bill to compel him to follow through on an agreement for Bill to trade his share of their childhood home for their interest in their father’s gold coin collection. Bill and Frederick, meanwhile, had launched another legal campaign against their brothers over control of the charitable foundation their father had created.

The contours of the foundation dispute were similar to those that had caused Bill to launch a proxy fight against Charles. By the late 1970s, Bill and Frederick had grown upset with how the foundation distributed its contributions. Administered by Charles’s philanthropic and political lieutenant, George Pearson, it channeled a large portion of its annual disbursements to libertarian causes, particularly the Institute for Humane Studies, instead of the primarily arts-related charities the rest of the family favored. “Charles was running the Foundation for his own benefit and not for the benefit of the shareholders,” Bill claimed in a deposition.

As Frederick noted in his own deposition, “I was dissatisfied by
the large amounts of money that were going from the Foundation to the Institute for Humane Studies, which I didn’t feel represented all of the shareholders’ wishes.” Frederick was getting deluged with donation requests from the various cultural organizations he supported—including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Caramoor (a center for music and the arts in Katonah, New York), and many others—but was increasingly unable to fulfill them at the level he desired.

In March 1979, before a meeting of the foundation’s directors, Bill told Charles that there had been a “palace revolt”; he and his brothers had decided that, going forward, each family member should allocate funds to the causes of their choice based on the percentage of shares they held in the foundation. (Charles, David, and Bill owned a little more than 22 percent apiece; Mary and Frederick each possessed 16 percent.) Charles went along with the proposal until the mid-1980s, when he and David decided that they wanted to rename the foundation to include their mother and place her in control of it. Bill and Frederick refused.

Mary tried to keep the peace. “Please don’t be angry with Charles over the Fred C. Koch Fdt.,” she wrote Frederick in May 1985. The annual income his trusts generated—some $20 million—should be more than sufficient to cover his philanthropic endeavors, she pointed out. “It upsets me very much for you to fight this.”

But fight it he did. And when, in 1988, Frederick and Bill filed suit over the foundation, they named Mary as a defendant along with Charles and David. As they pursued the case, Bill’s lawyer dredged up Murray Rothbard, the economist cofounder of the Cato Institute whom Charles had driven out of that think tank. Rothbard was more than happy to pontificate on Charles’s despotic rule over nonprofit entities. A memo summarizing Rothbard’s expected testimony stated that “Charles Koch involves
himself in the minutest details related to the non-profit foundations with which he is associated,” including matters as picayune as “stationery design and color of offices.”

Rothbard intended to testify that Charles “cannot tolerate dissent” and “will go to any end to acquire/retain control over the non-profit foundations with which he is associated.” The memo alleged that “Charles Koch wants absolute control of the non-profit foundations, but wants to be able to spend other people’s money.” And it charged that he used these foundations to “acquire access to, and respect from, influential people in government.”

In March 1989, a little more than a month before the case went to trial, Mary suffered a mild stroke, which affected her balance and caused bouts of dizziness. Her blood pressure had also been spiking, and her doctor prescribed medication for hypertension. Bill and Frederick, nevertheless, subpoenaed Mary to testify.

A surreal courtroom scene played out in Wichita district court that April, as Mary’s doctor took the stand to back David and Charles’s position that, owing to her condition, their ailing mother not be forced to endure the ordeal of providing courtroom testimony. The case had already been difficult enough on her. Mary had broken down while being questioned about her correspondence with Frederick during one deposition.

“I don’t think she is ready for this sort of thing,” her physician, Dr. Albert Michelbach, testified. The court proceedings, he added, had affected “her physical and mental health.” And “the stress is going to cause her blood pressure to get out of control.”

Attempting to make the case that Mary was healthy enough to provide testimony, the opposing counsel grilled her doctor about her tennis playing—(“So, to the best of your knowledge, she’s still playing tennis on occasion?”)—implying that if she could play tennis, she could testify in a courtroom.

“The callousness of counsel and of the plaintiffs,” marveled the Koch family’s longtime lawyer, Bob Howard, “is almost beyond my experience.”

Later that summer, Howard, a partner with Kansas’s largest law firm, Foulston Siefkin, strolled up to the heavy wooden door at Mary’s home and rang the bell. He had managed to keep her off the stand, and they had easily won the case.

“Have you seen this?” Mary asked as she opened the door. Her eyes were bloodshot and she was clutching a two-day-old copy of the
Wall Street Journal
, its front page splashed with a story titled “Blood Feud.”

“To hear William Koch tell it,” the August 9, 1989, article began, “his brother Charles is a liar, a cheater and a racketeer. Charles responds that William has ‘various psychiatric ailments’ and is dead set on ruining the family business.”

The article disclosed the humiliating news that Mary’s sons had tried to force her to testify. (“She was able to play tennis with her stroke,” Bill’s lawyer griped to the reporter.) Bill told the
Journal
, “When you go into battle, the only way to do it is to assume you are going to fight to the finish.”

The story was salt in an already painful wound. “In light of what they’re saying, I don’t think I want to leave anything to Bill and Fred,” Mary told Howard, the lawyer recalled. He was carrying with him the new version of the will she had asked his law firm to prepare.

“You know, Mary,” he counseled, “this is just more of the same thing that’s been going on, it’s just a current piece of publicity about the same litigation. Do you really want to cut Frederick and William out of your will?”

Mary, who would turn eighty-two in October, had come to the difficult realization that she might not live to see peace in her family. But perhaps her death could put an end to the war. At her
request, Howard had drafted up a new clause to her will stating that “in the event that any of my said sons is involved in litigation at the time of my death as a plaintiff against me or any of my other sons,” they would be disinherited if the litigation wasn’t dismissed within six weeks of her death.