The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (25 page)

The question has fascinated psychologists for at least a century: Why do only certain men grow rich?

The question has irritated the rich for almost as long. Why do psychologists come around asking such nutty questions?

The fact is that nobody, including the rich themselves, knows for sure what internal aches and itches operate in a man to lift him above the great sea of the unrich. Clement Stone and other fortune teachers believe they know some of the answers, but most observers feel these can’t be all the answers and probably aren’t even the main ones. Not only are the psychological causes of wealth unknown; there is a strong suspicion that all attempts to elucidate them have been a solemn and scholarly waste of time.

Some highly respected observers say flatly that the rich, as a group, have no special personality traits that mark them as different from anybody else. One such observer is Dr. Frederick Herzberg, a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University who acts as a consultant to corporations and government agencies. His specialty is “work motivation.” He is, in a sense, a fortune teacher. But he candidly admits he doesn’t know what drives and hang-ups make one man rise to wealth while another man, starting at the same gate, shambles down to oblivion. “There is no communality among highly successful men,” says Dr. Herzberg. “Their personality types are as varied as all other people’s.”

Another observer is Dr. Eugene Emerson Jennings, psychologist at Michigan State’s Graduate School of Business Administration and also a consultant to several corporations – among them IBM. “I did a fantastic amount of testing back in the 1950s,” he says, “trying to isolate personality traits by which we could predict how far a man might rise in or out of the company. But we’ve stopped testing at IBM. We found we couldn’t predict anything reliably.”

Dr. Jennings remarks sourly that the business world teems with psychological-test peddlers who claim they can predict employees’ future success – can spot one young man as a future entrepreneur and another as doomed to failure. “A fellow from Kansas called me up a while back and said he had a foolproof test. I told him OK, fine, we’ll give the test to the next thousand candidates who turn up at IBM. And I told him that just to make things interesting, he was to put a thousand-dollar performance bond to show his faith. If the majority of candidates did what he predicted over the next ten years, he was to get his thousand bucks back. Fair enough? Well, he hung up, and I never heard from him again.”

The very, very rich tend to share this view that it is futile to probe for wealth-making personality traits. One man with strong opinions on the subject was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the noted political clan. He was worth something like a third of a billion dollars (main route: the stock market) when he died a few years ago. A Princeton University psychology student once sent him a questionnaire purporting to probe his psyche to its darkest depths. Kennedy shot the questionnaire back unanswered, along with a curt note: “Dear Mr. ––––: I am rich because I have a lot of money.”

Old Joe Kennedy’s answer may be the only reliable one there is. All the same, let’s see what other answers have been proposed. If you and I hope to grow rich, it might be interesting – it might even be useful – to see whether our personalities resemble those of the wealthy. We may discover ourselves to be totally unlike these unusual men in emotional makeup. If that turns out to be so, perhaps we can then save ourselves a lot of time and needless misery. We may decide we aren’t of the capital-gathering breed after all. Our indicated course will then be simply to relax and enjoy what paltry income we’ve got.

***

The psychoanalytic theories of moneymaking are so weird that, although they presumably make sense to psychoanalysts, they sound like utter gibberish to nearly everybody else. To attempt an analysis of these theories here would be to step into a quicksand of verbiage from which we might never reach firm land again. So let’s steer clear. A quick look from a safe distance ought to satisfy us.

Sigmund Freud addressed himself to the subject of money in a 1908 paper called
Character and Anal Eroticism
. By a bewilderingly circuitous route, he arrived at the notion that money is to an adult what feces are to a child. Evidently (so goes the Freudian reasoning), a child conceives feces to be part of his body and fears to lose them. If he becomes obsessed with this fear for one reason or another, later in life he may be obsessed with a thundering drive to collect material possessions.

Well, all right. To each his own theory. It must be remembered that Freud had a huge love of language, and one can suspect that he sometimes invented emotional hang-ups for the sheer joy of making up phrases about them.

Later generations of psychoanalysts have arrived at other theories, also by long and winding routes. Writing in the
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
years ago, Dr. Otto Fenichel of Prague and Los Angeles said that “the drive to amass wealth seems to be a special form of the instinct of possession.” Clear enough so far. This instinct, however, is “a special form of bodily narcissism and an expression of the fear of bodily injury.” The most important form of this fear is “the fear of genital injury.” Therefore, says Dr. Fenichel, obsessive wealth gatherers are that way because they suffer from “castration anxiety.”

The wealthy men we’ve visited in this gallery would no doubt be interested to learn these odd things about themselves. Some might feel inclined to argue. The problem with psychoanalytic theory is that it can be argued about all night long and no firm conclusions can ever be reached. So let’s now step onto firmer ground. Let’s look at some traits of the rich that various researchers believe can be demonstrated – and that show up in a tangible way among the men in our gallery.

Sex: male.
It is not a statistical accident that all the very, very rich individuals in this gallery are men. The fact is, there are no women now living in the United States – at least none known to
Fortune
, to Ferdinand (
Super-Rich
) Lundberg or to me – who have started from scratch and amassed as much as $100 million on their own.

There are some women who have almost made it. The late cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein was very rich. Actress-entrepreneur Lucille Ball may be the richest self-made woman now living. Her net worth is in the $50 million range. She could conceivably reach the level of $100 million some day, but she hasn’t done it yet. There are no women among the great self-made rich.

Why not?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The women’s liberation movement would, of course, argue that women don’t become very, very rich because our cultural and economic setup denies them the opportunity to do so. Some psychologists (mostly male) think, on the other hand, that women simply don’t have the great capital-accumulating drives – that few or none would become immoderately rich even if all the sex barriers were removed.

“Women tend to be somewhat more sensible about this than men are,” says one psychiatrist, earnestly begging not to be identified. “A woman wants enough money to make herself and her family comfortable – enough, perhaps, to enable her to live in luxury. But once she reaches that level of wealth, she usually quits striving for more. Many men, on the other hand, go on furiously piling up wealth long after they’ve got more than they can possible spend. It’s hard to imagine a female Howard Hughes.”

This may be so. In the career of the typical American family, the wife starts out by helping her husband increase his income and maybe even goading him to try harder. But when they reach middle age and a comfortable degree of wealth, she performs an about-face. He goes on driving himself while she, worried about ulcers and heart attacks, faces in the opposite direction and tries to slow him down.

It’s hard to say for sure whether these differences are brought on by social and cultural forces or are part of the two sexes’ built-in equipment. You can get an argument on the subject at any cocktail party. But let’s not argue here. Let’s simply say that if you want to be very, very rich, your chances are best if you start out male.

Child-parent problems.
Looking over our gilded gallery, it’s remarkable how many of these stupendously successful men lost one or both parents early in life through death or divorce. More than half of them, in fact, went through that wounding experience. Is this a statistical accident, or does it mean something?

It is apparently no accident. Researchers working with far larger samples than ours have been struck by the high incidence of parental death or divorce in the lives of the self-made rich. One such sampling was made in the 1960s under a research grant from the Small Business Administration. Three college professors – David Moore of Cornell, Orvis Collins and Darab Unwalla of Michigan State – went out and interviewed the “founding entrepreneurs” of 110 companies. “The theme of parental death crops up repeatedly,” they reported in their book,
The Enterprising Man
. “The picture that comes through from the interviews is one of the lonely child, grubby fists in tear-filled eyes, accepting the loss and facing a dangerous future. . .”

Why does the death or going away of a parent make a youngster start out to become wealthy? The three researchers suggest a couple of possibilities. One is that the bereaved child from then on has a massive sense of insecurity. He sets out to get so much money that he can never be left stranded again. Another possibility is that the loss of a parent makes him more than usually self-reliant. In trying to heal his emotional wound, he convinces himself that he doesn’t really need the parent; he can hack it on his own. While most of us meekly bumble through life working for other people (the company becomes the parent), an orphaned or half-orphaned youngster may try instead to climb the economic ladder by himself, as head of his own business.

School problems.
Another remarkable fact about the men in the gallery is that fully half of them are high-school dropouts, and only a third bothered to finish college. This tendency of capital gatherers to scorn formal education, or to find it unpalatable for some reason or other, has baffled and fascinated researchers ever since the phenomenon of wealth first became a subject of academic study. In a classic statistical study of 600 millionaires in 1925, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin found to his surprise that only 11.7% had college degrees. Sorokin mused, “This means that perhaps Andrew Carnegie was right when he said, ‘College education is not necessary to business success.’ ” It wasn’t necessary in Carnegie’s day, and it wasn’t in Sorokin’s day, and it still doesn’t seem to be today.

The tendency of the great rich to be late bloomers – to be misfits in school, to seem earmarked for failure in their early years – is intriguing to those of us who haven’t yet made our first $100 million. We, too, must be late bloomers. The subject is interesting enough to deserve a chapter all to itself. We’ll probe it in more detail in chapter 22.

Marital problems.
Pitirim Sorokin was also struck by the fact that, among his 600 millionaires, divorce was statistically twice as common as in the general U.S. population. In Sorokin’s era as today, the divorces and other marital scrapes and scandals of the very rich made good reading and sold newspapers. The rich seemed to have more marriage and sex problems than other people, but most scholarly observers guessed this was simply because the rich were more visible. It was startling to have Sorokin come along and prove statistically what the public had long accepted as dogma: The richer you are, the more likely you are to be divorced.

The men in our gallery faithfully follow the trend. Half have been divorced at least once.

Why? Money is the obvious answer. Divorce is expensive. For the average middle-income salary earner it is so expensive as to be, in many cases, financially crippling. The very rich often find divorce expense acutely painful but never crippling. The simple fact is that is easier for a rich man to get divorced than a middle-income man.

But there seems to be more to it than that. One psychologist who has made a years-long study of the self-made rich is Dr. Alfred E. Messer, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta and chief of the Georgia Mental Health Institute’s Family Studies Laboratory. Dr. Messer, along with many other students of the American family, finds that self-made rich men often have a peculiar lack of warmth, an inability to form a close, lasting relationship with man, woman or child.

This lack stems from the same forces that make such a man into a capital gatherer in the first place. “The man’s childhood is likely to have been rough,” says Dr. Messer. “The typical story is that of a parent dying or going away or – what amounts to the same thing – rejecting the child, abandoning him emotionally. The child grows up with the understandable feeling that he can’t rely on other people, he must prove himself worthy
by himself
. He seeks to prove it with money. In one typical case I had a patient who habitually carried $4000 around in his pocket, his way of showing he’d made it on his own, he didn’t need anybody.”

An emotional setup such as this doesn’t make for a warm and loving marriage, Dr. Messer points out. “The typical self-made man often thinks of his wife the way he thinks of his money. She is a jewel, a bauble. He has married her to increase his apparent worth. He wants the world to judge him by the prettiness of this jewel.”

Two things can go wrong with such an arrangement, of course. The first possibility is that the jewel will fade, and the man must then go out to find a new one. The second possibility is that the jewel will prefer to be a woman. “She will make emotional demands on the man – demands that he isn’t prepared to meet. She wants him to confide in her; she wants to share his problems and his life. This is exactly what he doesn’t want.”

Dr. Messer finds all this rather sad. “This country needs the self-made man, the enterpriser,” he says. “Obviously, somebody has to start and run the businesses that produce the national income and provide the jobs. But our entrepreneurs often achieve these ends at great cost to themselves.”