The Billionaire Who Wasn't (22 page)

The anonymous Atlantic checks, even for Cornell, did not arrive until due diligence had been done by the “service company.” “These guys really kick the tires,” said Chuck Supple, president of Public Allies, which provided internships for young people in nonprofit organizations. It wasn't a case of Ed McMahon knocking on his door, he said, referring to the entertainer who arrived unannounced with a large check for winners of American Family Publishers sweepstakes. Atlantic followed up to see how effective the gift was, while taking care not to tell people what to do with the money.

Often, Handlan relied on his instincts. “I heard Howard Gardner speak at an educational conference, rode back with him on the plane, and talked to
him about what his needs were.” Gardner, a Harvard professor whose empirical work on multiple intelligences in the 1980s changed the way people thought and worked in education, the arts, cognitive psychology, and medicine, recalled that he had no idea who Handlan was, but that they spoke on the plane and that he drove Handlan from the airport to his hotel. “Shortly thereafter, he was offering me support at a level that I could only have dreamed about,” he said. “Our research group at Harvard Project Zero received generous funding without needless conditions. This funding was absolutely essential for our continuing work . . . because funding for nonquantitative social science and for broader, progressively oriented educational inquiries was disappearing.”

Gardner honored the anonymity requirements to the letter. He referred in conversation to Ray Handlan as Rex Harrison, to program director Angela Covert as Agatha Christie, and to the foundation as AF, as in Anonymous Funder. When his children later met Joel Fleishman, who succeeded Handlan as president of the Atlantic Foundation Service Company, they asked, “Is he the AF?” Gardner said, “I just smiled.”

Handlan had sufficient respectability to reassure most people that the money was from an impeccable source. Beneficiaries might fear it was “tainted” money, he said, adding with a laugh, “although in fund-raising what you worry about is “'tain't enough!” He found some potential donees hesitant at first, “but I hope because of my background and my curriculum vitae they accepted the fact that it was not drug money or gambling money.” A serious consideration for beneficiaries was that if the money had been fraudulently obtained, the courts would demand that it be returned to pay the donor's creditors.

An embarrassing situation arose when Columbia University in New York turned down a proposed anonymous gift amounting to several hundred thousand dollars because of objections from a board member. Handlan could not reveal the source of the money, but the gift was accepted after Frank Rhodes was recruited to contact the president of Columbia and vouch for the secret foundation's legitimacy. “There were one or two universities that thought that the anonymous offer was a very shady proposition,” recalled Rhodes. “More than once I had to speak to people and say, ‘This is perfectly legitimate, but there are good reasons for the anonymity.'”

“People probed at it in different ways,” said Harvey Dale. “We had a standard answer that was intended to close the door, not to open up a conversation.
We said sternly, and it was written into the commitment letter, ‘You can't ask that question. We act for anonymous donors. And the condition under which we can give you the money—their money, not our money—is you don't inquire, you don't talk about it.'” Only about one in twenty-five beneficiaries expressed concern, said Dale. “The rest said, ‘Oh! Great! Thanks! You must be very respected!'”

In one instance, Dale resorted to a ruse to give money to a not-for-profit body in New York where a board member vetoed taking anything from an anonymous source. Dale suggested to its president that he apply for the grant to another named charitable body. The Atlantic Foundation regularly gave funds to this body to make grants on their recommendation. The Atlantic money arrived at its destination without anyone being the wiser. “We also got credit for a lot of stuff that we didn't do,” said Dale. “When we became somewhat known, someone would come up and say, ‘I always knew it was you!' And sometimes it wasn't.”

Like Pip in Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations,
who assumed his anonymous patron was Miss Havisham, when all along it was the convict Magwitch, some recipients guessed wrongly who their benefactor was. But they were never told. Harvey Dale imposed the same conditions as Jaggers, the lawyer for Pip's real benefactor, who said, “Not only is it a profound secret, but more importantly it is a binding condition that you do not inquire.”

Dale could appreciate the caution of beneficiaries, as he had been an active member when in college of the National Students' Organization, which he only learned later was secretly funded by the CIA to keep track of left-leaning future potential leaders.

As president of Cornell, Frank Rhodes found it frustrating that he could not praise Feeney more in public, “but it was Chuck's wish that it should be anonymous, secretive almost, and that he shouldn't be publicly identified as the donor.” When Rhodes hosted an intimate dinner for Feeney in a private room overlooking Lake Cayuga at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, he made a little speech in which he said that though respectful of the desire for anonymity, those in the room knew where the money was coming from and they could recognize Chuck Feeney's generosity.

It seemed an innocuous gesture, but Harvey Dale was upset. “What agitated me most, there were waiters walking around, and the president of Cornell was saying, ‘Here's something nobody knows, the source of all this magnificent money is Chuck Feeney, I've got a great secret and I can only
share it in this room,' and so that blows it. One doesn't really challenge Frank Rhodes. But I said afterward, ‘Frank, you shouldn't have done that, that was a bad idea. Don't do that again.'” Rhodes recalled that Feeney would shrug off anonymity as an evil necessity, but Harvey Dale enforced confidentiality so severely that “you had almost to sign your life away” to receive a donation from the Atlantic Foundation.

In order to improve its own understanding of the issues surrounding secret giving, the Atlantic Foundation bankrolled a conference on anonymous giving at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy. Naturally, it gave the funding anonymously.

CHAPTER 15

The Luck of the Irish

The Feeneys left Bermuda after the creation of the Atlantic Foundation. Danielle disliked the country so much that she vowed never to set foot there again. In 1985, Chuck and Danielle moved the family home to London. Feeney wanted to use the English capital as his base for running the multinational company known as General Atlantic Group Ltd. on behalf of the philanthropy. He owned neither, but he still effectively controlled both. For the first years after he created the Atlantic Foundation, Chuck Feeney had been happy to see almost all of its giving focused on the United States, and on the university that had given him such a wonderful base for his business life. But he kept an open mind about other locations for his initiatives. He spent much of his time after the move to London reading, asking questions, and looking for fresh opportunities for both making money and giving it away.

When Feeney went to register his company in London, however, he came up against an unexpected bureaucratic complication. The use in a business title of two generic names together, such as “General” and “Atlantic” was not allowed under English company law. But there was nothing to stop him from using the initials “G.A.” if he had a name to match. “I went to the telephone book,” said Feeney, “and found an old trading company called Gerard Atkins and Co. and bought it, so we operated under that name and used the initials G.A.” The name Gerard Atkins on the letterhead was also a convenient way of maintaining discretion and anonymity.

With funds from General Atlantic, he bought 17 Savile Row, a rambling building in the heart of London's fashionable custom-tailoring district, to serve as world headquarters for GAGL and as a residence for himself and Danielle. He told Paul Hannon, “I like funky buildings.” Feeney renovated the building with the help of Broadway theater designer Fred Fox, whom he had befriended on a plane. “Chuck enjoyed the project enormously, knocking down walls and painting,” said Hannon. “He himself took the top floor, so we had to keep climbing up and down the stairs. It was good for all of us, but not very efficient. The building had five floors and no lift, and he was planning to live on the top floor with his family, but Danielle vetoed that.” Feeney moved his family instead to a triplex in Mayfair and enrolled Patrick, then fourteen, in the French lycée.

In London, Feeney had already acquired N. Peal, one of the world's most famous cashmere brands, with two outlets in the Burlington Arcade and a shop in the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, and a factory in Hawick on the Scottish border. He liked going into the cashmere shops and checking out the displays.

A chance invitation brought Chuck Feeney to Ireland. Shortly after he moved to London, a friend of Tony Pilaro's sent him a brochure that he had come across. It appealed to Irish and Irish American investors to join an eighty-member consortium with the intent of buying and upgrading Ashford Castle, a 700-year-old stately home converted into a luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Corrib in County Mayo. The brochure arrived with a tongue-in-cheek note saying, “This is something no self-respecting Italian American would get involved in, but might interest you.” Once the home of the Guinness family, the hotel was a favorite with American celebrity visitors. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara had stayed there during the shooting of John Ford's
The Quiet Man
in 1952, and President Ronald Reagan had spent a night during a presidential visit to Ireland in May 1984.

Like most Irish Americans, Feeney had a sentimental attraction to the land of his ancestors. St. Patrick's Day was always a big event in the Feeney household. He joked to his children that he was descended from a dethroned “high king of Ireland.” He did some research into his family history and established that his grandmother on his father's side came from a tiny rural district called Larganacarran in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. He carried in his wallet a “Thornsticks” card, stating he was an Irish
American, passionately proud of Irish culture and customs but “without publicity, fanfare, or personal reward.”

He first took Danielle and the children to Ireland back in 1971. They stayed at Dromoland Castle Hotel in County Clare. They remember tears trickling down his face as he listened to a harpist play melancholy Irish melodies. He considered buying film director John Huston's Georgian manor house near Craughwell in the west of Ireland as another family home, but the price was too high.

The more he reconnected with Ireland, the more Feeney became convinced that Irish Americans like himself should be doing more to help. In the 1980s, the economy of the Republic of Ireland was moribund. One in five adults was out of work. Three out of four graduates were leaving the country as soon as they qualified. A British newspaper columnist described Ireland as a Third World country but for the climate, and many Irish agreed and emigrated. In Northern Ireland the bloody conflict known as The Troubles was raging without any sign of a resolution.

The offer to buy into Ashford Castle Hotel seemed a useful entry point, if only because the other co-owners were moneyed people and might share his interest in doing something for Ireland. It was Feeney's way of familiarizing himself with a culture: Before he invested General Atlantic money, he would find a “perch” to get a feel for the place, and he understood the hotel business. The consortium bought Ashford Castle for $7 million in 1985, of which Feeney paid $70,000. He induced Paul Hannon, and Joe Lyons from DFS, also to buy a stake each. Chuck, Danielle, and the children flew to Shannon airport and crowded into a rented Volkswagen van to drive to the hotel for a short stay. Typically, Chuck found himself helping the manager of Ashford Castle to organize the hotel shop.

Most of the co-owners in the Ashford consortium seemed more interested in playing golf and salmon fishing than anything else. If he was to get involved, Feeney needed somebody with a knowledge of the country to survey the landscape for him and suggest investment ideas, and better still if there was a Cornell connection. He found such a person in Padraig Berry, a young, intense Irishman who had gone to Cornell Hotel School on a $20,000 scholarship—made possible by funds donated to a scholarship fund by Feeney—and had worked as assistant to the Hotel School dean, Bob Beck. Feeney had met him with Beck a couple of times, and they stayed in touch.

Berry was fascinated by Feeney. “I thought at first he was quite odd. It was almost as if he was embarrassed to be recognized for who he was. I met him subsequently and engaged him in conversation. He looked at me and I remember those steely blue eyes.” They began meeting for lunches and dinners in London, where Berry worked as an accountant. “Chuck would bring up ideas, without following any agenda, to see how things unfolded, to see if we would do great things together.” Eventually Feeney suggested to Berry that he go to Ireland and look around for investment opportunities. Berry quit his job, loaded up his Golf GTI, and in May 1987 took the ferry to Ireland with only the vaguest idea of what he was supposed to do. Feeney gave him a large advance payment. “I worked sixteen hours a day for seven days a week for years for that man for that check,” said Berry, who came to regard Feeney as a father figure. Feeney came to Ireland a number of times, and they drove around looking at potential investments. “In Dublin we'd eat out every night in Gallery 22. We would have a couple of bottles of Macon Lugny. It was always a ritual.”

For a while, recalled Feeney, “we were just trucking along and doing things on an ad hoc basis.” He acquired the Kilternan Golf and Country Club in the misty foothills of the Dublin Mountains that had Ireland's only—synthetic—ski slope, and Heritage House, one of the finest Georgian buildings in Dublin, which he got Fred Fox to renovate as a showpiece of period décor.