Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (18 page)

Howard convinced her to leave the will as it was—the antilitigation provision would serve the same purpose if Bill and Frederick refused to cease their legal campaign. They retreated through the formal dining room to the sun porch at the rear of the house, taking seats at a glass-topped patio table with the three people the lawyer had brought to witness the signing. The air was sticky with humidity, and the low, gathering clouds foretold a storm.

The fighting, Mary said heavily as they reviewed her final bequests, was “killing Charles.”

She looked down and signed.

Mary’s health deteriorated. She showed signs of dementia, possibly exhibiting the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. She stared blankly, before snapping back to reality. And she experienced spells of confusion, sometimes trying to eat using two knives. She also began night walking, climbing up and down the stairs of her home as if in a trance. To keep her from injuring herself, Oliver began sleeping near her bed, snapping awake when he heard her stir.

“She started failing,” he recalled. “And I think it was due to a lot of the stress, especially after the instigation of the war.”

Since college, Mary had remained close with her Wellesley roommate Betty Bowersock, whose twin daughters were Mary’s godchildren. Bowersock and her husband belonged to the Hemlock Society, the national right-to-die organization, and they planned to kill themselves before they grew infirm. In 1990, as Mary’s medical condition worsened and she grew increasingly despondent over the quarrel between her sons, the Bowersocks invited Mary to join them in a suicide pact. According to Oliver,
Mary considered ending her life with a pharmaceutical cocktail rather than watch helplessly as a civil war destroyed her family. Alarmed, Oliver, together with Charles’s wife, Liz, dissuaded Mary from further entertaining the proposition. Bowersock and her eighty-two-year-old husband ultimately followed through in April 1990, downing Darvocet and Seconal in their Middleburg, Virginia, home.

Sensing her time was drawing near, Mary issued a final request. “All I want to do is see my children one more time,” she told Oliver. “I’d just like to see them and talk with them and see Wyatt”—Bill’s three-year-old son.

This was no simple matter. “I was told by Liz that Mary was not to see them anymore because of the lawsuits,” Oliver said. While Charles ran Koch Industries, Liz handled domestic affairs on the large compound, including making sure that Mary was looked after. Both were strong-minded women, and they occasionally butted heads. “They were not the best of the best friends,” Oliver said. “Mary had her way of doing things, and Liz had her way of doing things. They were both Libras.”

At the risk of angering Liz and Charles, Oliver quietly arranged for Mary to visit with her estranged sons, on separate occasions in the winter and summer of 1990.

“Mary was enamored with the child,” Oliver remembered of Mary’s dinner with Bill, Joan, and Wyatt, when her toddler grandson had scampered around the house in plaid coveralls and a clip-on bow tie. “He had red hair and Fred had reddish hair, and curly. Mary had an excellent night that night.”

In the final months of Mary’s life, Oliver said he had to seek Liz’s permission before taking Mary off the premises. (“You certainly wouldn’t want to embarrass the Koch family.”) If Mary required medical attention, he had standing orders not to call 911. “My instructions were to call Liz before the police,” Oliver
remembered. “I wasn’t to call the ambulance or anything. They wanted to be in control of the ambulance, the press, et cetera.”

On Wednesday, December 19, 1990, Mary’s fragile health declined drastically. The previous weekend, Michael Oliver, with the Kochs’ permission, had escorted Mary to a Christmas party at the home of her friend Lucy Deck. It had been like old times. “She moved around the cocktail party with grace and elegance,” Oliver said, “and had her vodka and tonic with lemon and talked to everybody and remembered everybody’s name.” By Wednesday night, she struggled to breathe and clung to consciousness. Liz summoned an ambulance. Oliver, holding Mary’s hand, walked alongside the gurney as EMTs carefully wheeled her out of her home. As Oliver stepped into the back of the ambulance to accompany Mary to the hospital, Liz grabbed his shoulder.

“Michael, Mary doesn’t need you now, but I do,” she said, according to Oliver.

For the first time in his five-year relationship with Mary, he almost felt like a member of the family. The ambulance, its siren blaring, pulled out the front gate; together, he and Liz drove out the back to meet Mary at the hospital.

On Friday morning, Liz called Oliver at home. “Michael,” she said, “Mary’s gone.” It was December 21, Oliver’s forty-fifth birthday.

Liz called back the following day, an edge in her voice. She couldn’t find one of Mary’s diamond rings.
Where was it?
The unspoken implication was that Oliver had stolen it. “Go through her bedroom, go to her makeup table, and to your left, the third ring down is the ring you want,” he told her testily. They were changing the locks on Mary’s home, she told him, and asked him to return his set of keys and the remote control for the security gate. “You understand that this is just common procedure,” she said, Oliver recalled. His time in the Koch family had come to an end.

Tragedies bring some families closer. But Mary’s death did not cause even a momentary thaw between her sons. At their mother’s funeral, Bill tried to greet Charles, offering a handshake, but Charles once again rebuffed the gesture, behaving as if Bill weren’t even in the room.

After the funeral, the brothers held a wake at Mary’s home. (Frederick was unable to attend, after an ice storm kept his plane grounded in Chicago.) Needing a moment to himself to mourn, Oliver descended a back staircase to the downstairs trophy room. He passed a pair of upright elephant tusks—from a bull Fred had bagged on safari—that framed the brass bell from the supertanker Charles had named for Mary. As he stood alone among polar bear and lion pelts, and the heads of water buffalo, dik-dik, and ibex, Bill entered the room from another staircase carrying an armload of files and papers. He looked surprised to see Oliver. “These are my personal papers that I wanted to make sure I get back, because I know I won’t ever see them again,” he hastily explained, according to Oliver.

Oliver thought little of it as Bill hurried past, but he said Charles and David’s lawyers later told him that the stack of documents Bill carried off contained Mary’s calendars and other personal papers. Bill had learned that he and Frederick would be disinherited from Mary’s estate if they refused to drop their suit against Charles, David, and Koch Industries—something Bill had no intention of doing. He was presumably gathering ammunition for another fight. Far from ending the legal hostilities, Mary’s will sparked another round of litigation.

His shoes were off, his suit jacket folded neatly on the aisle seat beside him. The sunset streaked the sky in pastels, as the sprawl of Los Angeles twinkled into view outside David’s window in the first-class cabin of USAir Flight 1493. It was February 1, 1991, less than two months after his mother’s death. He had just completed two days of business meetings in Ohio and caught a 4:15 p.m. flight from Columbus to LAX.

Over the weekend, he planned to attend the fiftieth birthday party of a friend, as well as a board of directors meeting for the libertarian Reason Foundation, publisher of
Reason
magazine, scheduled for Saturday afternoon in Santa Monica. That evening, a Friday, David had a date with an on-again-off-again girlfriend, one of the revolving cast of lithe, leggy model types that he always seemed to have on his arm. Blond, green-eyed, and twenty years younger than David, Julie Hayek had been crowned Miss USA in 1983 and had nearly won the Miss Universe title later that year. An aspiring actress, her credits included bit roles on
Matlock
,
Dallas
, and
Days of Our Lives
.

The flight, two-thirds full, was scheduled to touch down at LAX at 6:11 p.m. Pacific time. That would leave him just enough time to check into his room at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, freshen up, and meet his date for dinner—and whatever came afterward.

Flight 1493 descended from the east, touching down gently
on runway 24L with a faint squeal of the tires. Seconds later, the plane reverberated with the teeth-gnashing crunch of metal on metal. A shower of sparks cascaded past David’s window. Then a ball of fire. Terrified shrieks rose from the back of the plane.

“Stay down, stay down, stay down!” a stewardess shouted over the intercom.

The Boeing 737 had collided with a small, SkyWest commuter plane headed to Palmdale, California. A frazzled air traffic controller had mistakenly held the SkyWest plane for takeoff on the same runway on which she had cleared the USAir flight to land. The twelve people aboard the smaller aircraft died on impact, and the out-of-control 737, engulfed in flames, careened wildly across an active taxiway and toward a stand of maintenance buildings, dragging what remained of the mangled propeller plane.

Flight 1493 skidded into an abandoned firehouse at 60 miles per hour. The impact hurled David, who had unbuckled his seatbelt after the initial collision to make a dash for an exit, over a row of seats and into the bulkhead. The cabin lights flickered and went out. Thick, caustic smoke poured into the cabin. As panicked passengers trampled over him, David, on his hands and knees, scoured the floor for his loafers. They were gone. He felt for his jacket, hoping to use it to cover his face, but couldn’t locate it.

David crawled toward the exit at the rear of the plane, his fellow passengers barely discernible through the smoke. He made it only a few rows; a frenzied mob of passengers clogged the aisle. David was at the back of the panicked scrum. He would never make it. He stood up and turned back.

As David gagged on toxic fumes from the burning jet fuel, an odd sensation overcame him. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t desperation.

He felt… curious.

“My God,” he thought to himself, “I’m going to die! What an interesting experience!”

It was as if he had momentarily taken leave of his body and was now a mere spectator to his ordeal. Overcome by an odd calm, he wondered about the experience of death, and standing in the aisle, his consciousness slipping away, he prepared himself to greet it.

Then his survival instinct kicked in. The smoke must be entering the plane through some opening, he reasoned. A crack in the fuselage? Other passengers had massed at the rear of the plane, but David felt his way toward the front. An inferno blazed outside the main cabin door. To David’s right, though, he glimpsed a sliver of light around the galley exit. It was open several inches. Jolted with adrenaline, he pried the door open a few more inches and stuck his head out, gulping the murky air. He yanked on the door again. It moved a couple feet.

David stood in the doorway. Flames licked up from below. He could barely make out the ground through the billowing smoke. “Oh, what the hell!” he thought. He leapt to the tarmac. He picked himself up and hurried away from the burning plane in his socks. When he finally looked back, he saw a nightmare of wreckage strewn across the runway leading to the blackened, burning carcass of USAir 1493. Passengers spilled out of the plane’s right rear exit and dazed survivors wandered, zombie-like, around the tarmac.

Of the 89 passengers and crew members aboard David’s plane, 22 people perished and 30 were injured. A bus ferried the survivors to a nearby terminal. David was a bit banged up, his knees skinned and his right heel bruised, but he otherwise felt okay. If he hurried, maybe he could still make his date with Hayek. When David tried to leave the terminal, a guard brusquely turned him back. It was a good thing. Though he felt fine, his lungs were badly damaged. Later, after a doctor examined him, he was sent by ambulance with another injured passenger to a hospital in Marina del Rey to be treated for smoke inhalation. As David walked to the entrance, a CNN reporter, who had staked out the hospital, approached him. His voice hoarse and clothes charred, the executive gamely
recounted the crash. Many of David’s friends learned of his brush with death from seeing this interview, which was replayed dozens of times over the next couple days. So many well-wishers called David’s Manhattan apartment that the answering machine ran out of tape after recording 58 messages.

David spent the next two days in the intensive care unit, where he was fed intravenously and intubated with a tube that delivered pure oxygen to his lungs. He could only communicate by writing notes. Morphine dulled the physical pain, but not the emotional aftershocks of David’s near-death experience. The calm façade he had managed the day of the crash crumbled by the following morning. He could still picture the faces of people who had died on his flight, including Deanna Bethea, the sweet, twenty-two-year-old stewardess who had waited on him in first class. Also dead was the older couple seated directly across the aisle from him, George and Rosemary Weth.

In the days after the tragedy, David had flashbacks of the crash and relived it in his dreams. He felt a crushing sense of guilt. After opening the galley door, why hadn’t he helped other passengers—perhaps the Weths—to safety? Why had he merely saved himself while others had slowly suffocated? Close to passing out when he jumped to the tarmac, David might have perished himself had he tried to be a hero. This, at least, was what he told himself.

David left the hospital that Sunday, assisted by Charles and Liz, who’d flown to L.A. to look after him. The David Koch who had jetted to L.A. for a tryst with a beauty queen was a different man from the one who hobbled out of the hospital that Sunday, short of breath; still coughing black, bloody mucus; and aware more than ever of his own fragile mortality.

“This may sound odd,” he said years later, “but I felt this experience was very spiritual. That I was saved when all those others died. I felt that the good Lord spared my life for a purpose. And since then, I’ve been busy doing all the good works I can think of.”

At the time of the crash, David, then fifty, was one of New York City’s most eligible bachelors. And he had been enjoying every second of it.

The Ferrari-driving business titan, more than a few female admirers had noticed, bore a resemblance to the actor Michael Caine. Fun loving and gregarious, David had a trademark laugh—loud and honking, it easily rose above the din of cocktail parties. He was an endearing figure on the New York society scene: Though a member of the elite, he somehow managed to project the aura of a guileless Kansas farm boy—albeit one who had grown up in a home decorated with Renoirs and Thomas Hart Bentons. (“He doesn’t have a mean streak in him,” one New York friend remarked.)

David lived at 870 U.N. Plaza—once home to Truman Capote, Walter Cronkite, and many other New York notables—in a penthouse duplex with leather couches, a 1970s vibe, and a wall of windows overlooking the East River and Roosevelt Island. He spent summer weekends at his 15,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion in Southampton, and jetted off during the winter months to his ski lodge in Aspen. He enjoyed cruising the Mediterranean by chartered yacht and had a taste for exotic travel, journeying to places such as the Galapagos Islands and Olduvai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti, a mecca for paleoanthropologists studying the origins of man—a subject of particular fascination to David and an early focus of his philanthropy.

It didn’t hurt his appeal among Manhattan’s eligible women that his name regularly turned up on
Forbes
’s annual list of America’s wealthiest people. But he was a catch who didn’t want to get caught. “He was having a good time
not
being married,” said John Damgard, who met David on the basketball court at Deerfield and remains one of his closest friends. “He had no difficulty attracting incredibly attractive women. If you’re tall, handsome, and rich, lots of fun, a good athlete, you can go skiing, play tennis, you can
do all these things anywhere in the world—it’s not surprising. And when he went places, he didn’t have to stay at a youth hostel, let’s just put it that way.”

When he visited New York on business, Damgard, then the head of the Futures Industry Association, was David’s wingman. They hit the town together, dining at Le Cirque and other Manhattan hotspots, where, to impress their dates, David invariably ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. Afterward, they would keep the party going at one of New York’s exclusive, velvet-rope-lined nightclubs. “We ran hard together as bachelors,” Damgard recalled.

David “liked having a lot of women around,” according to one of his 1980s-era girlfriends. He at one point had his eye on Marla Maples, whom Donald Trump left his first wife to marry. (“Marla’s a babe,” David told
New York
magazine in 1990. “I wish Donald hadn’t gotten there first.”)

His incessant dating—sometimes he juggled multiple love interests over the course of a day—earned him a reputation as an incorrigible playboy. The Hugh Hefner–esque bacchanals he threw at his sprawling seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom Southampton beach house were legend. He “plays harder than anyone I know,” one of David’s close friends noted during his bachelor days, adding that the executive was also the “hardest working guy I know.”

With the roster of invitees running to a thousand or more—“a third of which were beautiful, wild, single women,” David once boasted—the parties featured six different types of champagne. Scantily clad women danced poolside and gyrated on the tennis court. Some of David’s parties went so late that he served guests two meals, dinner and breakfast. “Those were the best parties I’ve ever been to,” one friend, and frequent party guest, said. His annual New Year’s Eve blowouts in Aspen—which on occasion featured strippers—were similarly grandiose. “People really got in the mood,” the friend said. “A lot of the crowd were these L.A.
chicks who had just bought a new pair of tits and wanted to make sure that they did not go unnoticed—those parties got pretty wild. There were bands and hot tubs and it was fun.”

As David entered his fifties, the idea of having a family increasingly appealed to him, but he remained “gun-shy ” about the prospect of marriage, referring to past relationships that could have ended in matrimony as “close calls.” The ongoing battle with Bill and Frederick worsened his fear of commitment. If such a bitter, bare-knuckled legal brawl could break out among brothers, imagine the kind of ugliness that could erupt between a married couple in the midst of a divorce.

Then David met Julia Flesher, a statuesque twenty-seven-year-old who hailed from humble Midwestern origins. Born in Indianola, Iowa, and raised outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, she had worked her way into the exalted world of Upper East Side society by way of her job as a $200-a-week assistant to the fashion designer Adolfo. (During the 1980s, she occasionally accompanied her boss to the White House to fit Nancy Reagan.) Mutual friends set the pair up, and on their first date, in early 1991, David escorted Julia to Le Club, an exclusive, members-only haunt on East 55th Street frequented by business tycoons. (“It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden,” Donald Trump, a member, once put it.)

The evening did not go well.

“I was a little too, how should I say it, forward with my humor,” David recalled of their evening together. “Julia was smiling, but weakly.” She remembered the date this way: “Afterward we shook hands and I said, ‘I’m glad I met that man because now I know I never want to go out with him.’ ”

Three days after their date, David lay prone in a hospital bed, his body a pin cushion of tubes and wires, after barely escaping the burning carnage of Flight 1493.

Six months after surviving the crash, David bumped into Julia at a party. Their second encounter started out about as smoothly as their first. He introduced himself to the willowy, six-foot blonde as if the pair had never met. “She said, ‘David, we went out together,’ ” he recalled. “And I pulled out my trusty black book and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

Despite this rocky start, he managed to persuade Julia to go out with him again. This time, instead of a club frequented by lecherous bigwigs, he took her to the U.S. Open. “Julia was the ideal,” Damgard said. “That was it. He knew that was the woman he was going to marry.” She had come into his life at just the right time. The plane crash had awoken him to the capriciousness of life—how it could be taken from you in an instant, leaving so much unfulfilled. He was ready to put his days of empty pleasure seeking behind him; Julia, for her part, preferred to ignore David’s playboy past.

As Julia and David began dating, members of his social circle remained unconvinced that she could tame him. Indeed, David required some firm prodding in order to make the ultimate commitment. “After four and a half years, Julia gave me two choices,” he remembered. “I would be a live husband or a dead bachelor.”