The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (18 page)

When the dogs had been fed after our homecoming, Lear went into the den, poured himself a nightcap and indulged in what may be his only hobby, organ playing. He decided to take up organ about a year ago. He bought an organ and an instruction book. Today, despite the fact that he’s never taken a lesson, he plays as though he’s been at it for years.

Lear’s day started the next morning at 7:30, when he took his place at the head of the breakfast table. Within a minute or two his bacon and poached eggs were in front of him – Lear is served first in his household, other men next, women last – and he had glanced through the paper. As he dug into an egg, he reached for the phone beside his plate. The first of several calls was a 20-minute chat with the manager of a factory he recently opened in Detroit to build stereo-tape playback units for automobiles.

After breakfast we climbed into his Cadillac, and Lear started the engine. Lear always drives, I found later. Even when we were met at the airport in other cities, he always drove, no matter who owned the car.

At the plant Lear strode directly from his car to the electronics department to see how work was progressing on the direction finder he had tested the night before, then headed for his office. As he took off his jacket, he yelled to his secretary to get the president of the electronics company that made the direction finder on the phone. “Put it on my private line,” he said and walked into the executive washroom. “I don’t waste a minute,” he grinned as he closed the booth door and began his conversation.

When Lear returned from the washroom, two executives had spread a flock of proposed ads out on a large conference table for his approval. An official of one of the country’s largest brokerage firms was on the phone waiting to talk. He glanced at the ads for 30 seconds. “Don’t we have some more pictures?” he growled and picked up the phone as an adman scurried out to get more photographs. Lear stood simultaneously talking on the phone, scratching out lines of copy on one of the ads and writing in new copy. By the time he cradled the phone, he had rewritten the copy, shortening it severely, and picked a new picture. “An ad isn’t a brochure,” he lectured his ad people. “Anybody who’s got time to read all those words has got too much time. I’m not interested in the bastard.

“I’m no artist,” he told me as his assistants left with the approved ad, “but I can see what stinks. What it amounts to is that I write the ads and work on the layout, too.”

Lear similarly handles details of sales, finance, purchasing, production, electronics, engines, interiors and a dozen other areas involved in making and selling airplanes. Throughout the next hour a steady stream of employees crowded through the office to talk with the boss about details in these areas and others. He held a dozen phone conversations, one haggling with a San Francisco surplus dealer over the price of some electric motors. He sounded as though he had taken his training in a Cairo bazaar.

Lear runs a one-man show and seldom lets anyone else make a decision. “I tell them,” he snaps, “that if they put up half the money, they can make half the decisions.” Despite his tendency to dominate his surroundings, however, Lear exudes charm. He’s totally guileless and straightforward. When pleased, he shows it. But he can be completely intolerant, too, and doesn’t mind, as one put it, “bloodying his employees in front of witnesses.” An engineer came by Lear’s office one day to discuss a problem for which he had no solution. Normally Lear likes nothing better than solving problems that have stumped his engineers. But this day he didn’t want to be bothered. “If I’ve got to go up there and solve it myself,” Lear shouted, “then what the hell do I need you for?”

An executive sitting in the office attempted to ease the situation. “Don’t get excited, Bill,” he said.

“Who’s excited?” Lear yelled in a voice that could be heard in neighboring states and brought secretaries out of their chairs throughout the plant.

“What’s the problem, Bill?” asked a passing employee attracted by the noise.

“The problem,” answered Lear in his window-rattling tones, “is that there is an overabundance of idiocy around here.”

Engineers unable to put up with Lear’s temper and his insistence on approving every detail have left in droves. “When you work for Bill Lear,” snapped one, “you work for fifty cents a day and all you can take.”

“All he’s got around him now,” growls another, “is a bunch of yes-men.”

Whether that judgment is correct or not, there’s no arguing with the fact that Lear isn’t the easiest man in the world to get along with. Blunt as a battering ram and roughly as insistent, he has made his share of enemies. Most of his business rivals refuse to comment on him, even privately. “Well, the son of a bitch is unique,” growled one, who refused to be quoted by name or comment further.

Even Lear’s top executives have their troubles. Back when Lear was still chairman of the board of Lear, Inc., the $100-million-a-year electronics company he sold to start Lear Jet, he decided he needed some freedom from everyday managerial duties to work on projects that particularly interested him. So he installed as president an executive named Richard Mock. It wasn’t a totally happy situation. “He was always bursting out of his lab with some new idea he wanted to get into production right away,” complained a frustrated Mock. “No sooner would we get some new item into the works then he’d want to improve it. Or else he’d start pulling engineers from their jobs to help him work out something else. I spent lots of my time trying to keep him from sidetracking the company.”

Lear seems to have a talent for making people mad. Back in the late 1950s he took off for Europe to set up several new plants and to establish the Lear line of electronic equipment there. While he was away from home base, one division of his company developed a new aircraft instrument called the LTRA-7, a combination transmitter, receiver and navigation device. Lear got back, tried it out, decided it was no good and canceled the whole program. Since the production line was already set up, the company took a bad financial licking. “The only thing wrong with the LTRA-7,” said one bitter engineer, “was that Bill Lear didn’t invent it. He couldn’t stand the idea of us doing something successful without him.”

In earlier years Lear split his time between his plant, then on Long Island, and New York’s Stork Club. There, at his regular table (which he called his “night office”), he became known for the clutch of beautiful show girls who usually surrounded him. Lear has been married four times. His present wife is Moya Olsen, daughter of comedian Ole Olsen of Olsen and Johnson fame. He has three children by earlier marriages; he and Moya have four. In his younger days Lear enjoyed the reputation of a roué and still likes to play the part. “This guy’s writing the story of my love life,” he told people while I was with him. “Only trouble is that they can’t find any asbestos paper to print it on.”

Despite such statements, Lear seems to have simmered down into a moderately doting family man. He frequently takes his wife and children still living at home (most are grown now) along on his many trips. He is obviously proud of his children and likes to work into the conversation that Bill, Jr., is a test pilot.

Lear’s offbeat, flamboyant style isn’t new; in fact, it’s his lifelong trademark. A half century ago he played hooky from school in Chicago to ride around on his bike and search for stalled motorists. Lear would offer to help. “Most troubles were in the electrical system in those days,” he recalls. “Usually the carbons in the distributor would break down. I would carry a piece of battery carbon in my pocket. When I found a stalled car, I’d take it out, saw off a piece to fit and get them going.” Lear learned an important lesson from these encounters. “Invariably they’d pat me on the head and say, ‘Thank you,’ and away they’d go. Then I got smart. When the engine was running, I’d say, ‘Just a minute, I want to adjust that a little more.’ Then I’d take the carbon out and start to walk away. I’d insist on getting paid before I put it back in.” From that point on, Lear put a price on every job.

His first full-time employment came at the age of 13. He got a job as an auto mechanic at six dollars a week but soon became fascinated with flying and radio, the two fields that were to remain lifelong interests. Eventually he quit his paid job to take an unpaid one as a mechanic at Chicago’s Grant Park Airport.

Lear’s flying career didn’t begin auspiciously. On his first hop the antiquated biplane he was flying flipped when landing and pitched Lear out on his head.

Lear, however, was also becoming something of an expert in the fledgling field of radio. “I worked as a radio engineer,” he says. “In those days that was a radio repairman fifty miles from home.” He soon found himself hired by a company that built battery eliminators, rectifying circuits that would allow radios to operate on house current. The dynamic loudspeaker, essentially the same device found in radios today, was just coming into use, replacing the gooseneck horn speakers then common. Lear suggested to the company that it should build a new kind of radio using the dynamic speaker. The company followed his suggestion and came out with the Majestic. Millions were sold, and radio became common in American homes.

A short time later Lear figured out a way to build radio coils a fraction of the size they had been before and formed the Radio Coil and Wire Company to turn them out. As a by-product, he built a compact, for its day, radio to run on an automobile battery and installed it in a car. He took the idea to Paul Galvin, president of a small Chicago firm. After expressing doubt as to whether radios in cars would ever be practical, Galvin decided to manufacture a trial batch of the units. A short time later the company’s name was changed to Motorola.

Lear, now known as radio’s “boy wonder,” quickly tired of the automobile-radio business and sold out his interest in Motorola. “I wanted to be in some business that would justify my flying airplanes,” he recalls. “So I moved out to Curtis Reynolds Airport in Chicago and started making aircraft radios. Then, around Christmas 1933, I and my little crew of six or seven people left for New York. On January 1, 1934, we set up business there. And by Friday, April 13, I was busted.”

“The most amazing thing about Bill Lear,” says one of his old friends, veteran aviation writer Devon Francis, “is that he has absolute confidence that he will succeed in whatever he does. So, when he went broke, he didn’t sit around worrying about it. He just decided to get some money. He said to himself, ‘What does someone need?’ ” What he came up with was an idea for building a multiband radio in a simpler way than had been done before. He took the idea to RCA and sold it for $250,000. “It didn’t surprise him in the least when RCA bought it,” says Francis. “After all, that’s what he thought it up for.”

Perhaps Lear’s biggest triumph was the F-5 autopilot, which he designed and built in 1949 for U.S. jet fighters. Prior to the F-5, autopilots were too big for fighters, although they were widely used in bombers. Fighter pilots, consequently, frequently arrived at the target area exhausted from hours of precision flying and navigating. In addition, many planes and pilots were lost in World War Two when weather closed in and pilots were unable to find their way back home.

Lear’s device, hardly bigger than a bread box, not only could fly the plane to its destination, but could lock on to ground signals and land a returning plane in zero-zero weather. For his trouble he got a big government contract to produce the units and also won the 1950 Collier Trophy, an award held in previous years by such aviation greats as Orville Wright, Glenn Curtis and General Hap Arnold.

The FAA, incidentally, has never approved any blind-landing system, including Lear’s, for use on U.S. airliners. Military pilots have been using the Lear blind-landing system for 15 years. In the early 1960s Air France equipped its Caravelles with Lear autopilots and has made more than 1200 hands-off landings in zero-visibility weather with passengers aboard. “The FAA,” says Lear with characteristic bluntness, “is a scourge on the progress of aviation.”

By the late 1950s Lear, Inc., had grown to one of the major aircraft-electronics manufacturers in the country, and Lear moved to Europe to start production there and drum up business for Lear products. It was there that he first learned of the P-16, a Swiss-designed ground-support jet. Two of the prototypes had crashed, and the project was abandoned. Lear, however, was convinced that the plane was basically sound and the trouble had been in malfunctioning systems. He hired the same firm of engineers to do the basic aerodynamic work on a business jet and set about developing for this purpose a slight modification of the P-16.

Although Lear was anxious to swing into production the board of directors of Lear, Inc., was strongly against getting into what aircraft makers call “the tin-bending business.” Lear, with the blessing of the board, sold out his 23% ownership and charged into the jet business alone. (Lear’s stock was bought by the Siegler Company and the two companies shortly after merged into the Lear-Siegler Corporation, still a giant in the aircraft-electronics business.) He set up a plant in Switzerland but quickly became frustrated by Europe’s refusal to move at the Lear pace and by difficulties in getting American-made parts. In early 1963 he packed up the entire plant and shipped it to Wichita. “We didn’t know what to take,” he says, “so we took everything.” With the benefit of the Lear top-speed treatment, the first plane rolled off the assembly line in October.

Generally, aircraft companies handmake the first model of a new plane and don’t build the expensive jigs and tooling for mass production until tests have confirmed the adequacy of the design. Lear was so confident that he built the jigs first. Then he launched into production before FAA certification, another risky procedure. Had major changes been necessary, he could have been ruined. But changes weren’t necessary, and the gamble paid off. Lear was selling planes several years earlier than would have been possible with conventional construction techniques. “With this approach, you’re either very right or very wrong,” says Lear. “I was right.”