The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (27 page)

Shortly thereafter we passed a chamber of humming computers and Turner tossed out a remark that seemed to illuminate itself in red lights and a warning siren. “I have the name of every registered voter in Florida on that computer,” he said, “and four years from now maybe I’ll have every voter in America on there.”

“Why would you want that?” I asked.

“You never can tell,” Turner said. “Might come in handy someday.”

Glenn Turner is, of course, that American classic – super-huckster. He looks like the man you bought your last used car from or the fellow who knocked at your door with that fantastic encyclopedia offer. He is part carnival barker, part fundamentalist faith healer with all the raw sexual force of an Elmer Gantry, part snake-oil salesman. But more than that he is a box of paradoxes packed inside a crate of enigmas and delivered to the center of a sideshow hall of mirrors. Every time I was tempted to yell “flimflam man” and zip up my wallet pocket, I would discover something disarming, like the fact that Turner is one of the largest employers of handicapped and mentally retarded people in the state of Florida. He has taken on sponsorship and distribution for Flame of Hope perfume, that fragrance manufactured by the retarded and chairmaned by Mrs. Rose Kennedy. He has donated one million dollars to build an opportunity center for the handicapped and retarded in his native South Carolina.

On his personal staff are many people to whom fate seemed to have dealt losing hands. A pair of 19-year-old twin dwarfs, orphans, only 33 inches high, joined Turner’s company as cosmetics distributors and quickly were promoted to goodwill ambassadors. Now they ride on the Lear Jet, occupying only one seat, and they stand before large audiences and tell how Turner treated them as human beings and changed their lives. A 31-year-old blind man from Maine whose college history degree earned him a job pitting olives in a pizza parlor for $48 a week is now making $30,000 a year for Turner. “Glenn Turner was the spark that set my life on fire,” he says.

One recent afternoon a mother brought her mongoloid daughter who painted sunflowers into Turner’s building, and though they had no appointment, both were quickly admitted to his private office. “You keep those kinds of people away from Turner and that’s the quickest way to get fired,” said a secretary. Turner interrupted his crowded schedule and spent half an hour talking to the child, buying three of her primitive works for $100 each and sending her home with tears and dignity.

Turner keeps his pockets filled with wads of $100 bills, which he scatters like grass seed on a dying lawn. When he travelled to Mexico City and walked through a peasant slum, he stopped every person he met and bent down and talked in his curious harelipped southern English to people who had no idea what he was saying. But his words seem to light up their faces even more than the $100 bills he pressed in their hands. He used up all the money he had and ordered his aides to empty their pockets as well.

After his speech at the Harvard convocation, he was invited to Sunday-night supper with a group of students. As he was passing through the cafeteria line, he was abruptly solicited by an SDS member for contributions to a welfare power march on Washington. Turner lectured the hirsute student for several minutes. “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day,” he said, standing there in a full-length mink coat, “but if you teach him
how
to fish, you feed him for the rest of his life.” Then he dropped a $100 bill into the astonished radical’s Granger pipe-tobacco can.

While driving down an Orlando boulevard looking for the Florida Citrus Open Invitational golf tournament, of which he was a sponsor, Turner saw a bedraggled-looking man leaning against a bus stop. “See that feller there?” he suddenly cried, thrusting out a gold-clothed arm. “I could make that feller a millionaire in two years!” The man never looked up, unaware that destiny in a blue Cadillac was speeding by. Turner drove on, rattled on. “My teeth may be false,” he said, “but my tongue is true. I failed 27 times as a door-to-door sewing-machine salesman. . . Sometimes I think I’m the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln ’cause we think exactly alike. He failed
18
times before he became president!”

At first one assumes that Turner must be a conservative somewhere to the right of Alexander the Great. He is, after all, deeply southern, and he wears on his lapel at all times an American flag – not just any American flag but a bejeweled one cast into ripples that seems almost to furl and unfurl as he speaks of patriotism and respect for the office of the U.S. president. But he turns out to be a moderate Democrat, dovish and disenchanted on Vietnam, outraged when an Orlando landlord refused this spring to lease an apartment to one of his black employees. Eight members of his staff who lived there threatened to move out immediately unless the man was admitted, and Turner threatened to buy the complex himself if all else failed. The black man was accepted.

When Florida’s business community rallied massively this year to oppose a corporate tax, Turner went on record as being
for
such a tax, pointing out in speeches that it was only just and proper for business to return part of its good fortune to the state that housed it. And, by his count, Turner has taken several hundred long-haired hippies into his sales organization. “They don’t cut their hair for me,” he says, “but at least they wash and put on clean clothes. One of them’s head of my entire Eye-talian operation.”

Morally, Turner says, he conducts himself like Caesar’s wife. “I don’t drink, smoke or play around,” he confided in a speech before the Chicago White Sox, who were interested in signing up for “Dare to Be Great.” “In fact, I’m just about perfect.”

Turner built his empire on the controversial principle of “multilevel” selling. In essence, he sold distributorships in his cosmetics company that entitled a person not only to sell the Koscot line of beauty aids but to sell subfranchises to others and get a large finder’s fee as well. Example: A man purchases a Koscot distributorship for $5000, which theoretically sets him up in business as a cosmetics salesman. But he also earns the right to sign up subdistributors for $2000, and he gets $700 commission on each. When various attorneys general began looking into the fast-growing Koscot operation, it was discovered that a great many distributors were not as interested in selling cosmetics as they were in getting finder’s fees.

One attorney general quickly branded it a “pyramid” scheme, another likened it to chain letters, still others cried “lottery” or “fraud” or “sale of unregistered securities.” The New York attorney general’s office took special note of the fact that Turner’s representatives were painting pie-in-the-sky pictures at sales meetings, waving fat checks around and suggesting that Koscot distributors could make $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The New York attorney general calculated that at the end of 1970 there were 1600 distributors in his state alone, and were they all to make the $100,000 by bringing other people into the program, they would have to lure 150,000 more distributors into Koscot within one year, and these would then have to add another 150 million by the end of the second year.

In Pennsylvania, the attorney general noted that each Koscot distributor was encouraged to bring 12 new people into the program a year – only one per month. Surely you can sign up one man a month, the pitch went, perhaps your brother-in-law or your neighbor. But were each of these 12 new people then able to bring another 12 in, making a total of 144, and were each of these 144 able to bring another 12 in, and so on down the line through 12 tiers, at the bottom of the pyramid would theoretically be 8,916,100,448,256 people – or more than 2000 times the population of the planet earth.

Sales pitches to join Koscot as distributors and subdistributors were made at high-pressure meetings chairmaned by men in silk suits and honeyed voices who spun dreams of Golden Eagles (top salesmen) who made $180,000 a year, Silver Eagles (average salesmen) who made $160,000 and lowly Buzzards (goof-offs, presumably) who managed $120,000. If a prospect was interested but not interested enough to part with his $2000 or $5000 then and there, he would be invited for a free one-day trip to Orlando, flying on a Turner airplane, in the company of ebullient men who cried out during the journey, “How do you feel?” and roared back to one another, “Grrr-eat!” At Koscot headquarters the prospect would heap his plate with barbecue, watch a color film detailing the history of Glenn Turner’s success story, intercut and heavily embroidered with shots of idyllic sunsets on tropical beaches, expensive cars, jet airplanes, spectacular women, of a future on that soft cloud above the dust of everyday life. If the prospect was at last willing but had not sufficient cash, Koscot pitchmen had been known to escort him directly to the bank or loan office, murmuring in his ear all the way.

“The scope of the fraud and misrepresentations and the amounts of money being exacted from unsuspecting citizens . . . is enormous,” said the Pennsylvania attorney general in his court proceeding against Koscot. “The social implications are equally enormous when one considers that most of these people who invest in this program will be innocent lambs being led to slaughter by a dream of ‘heaven on earth.’ Most of these people will go into debt or will convert their life savings, and at least three out of four will be doomed to failure.”

When the lawsuits began to mount, Turner announced, “I must be getting successful; I’m told GM is sued 18 times a day.” He sought out famed attorney F. Lee Bailey and said, in introduction, “I have a small problem – me versus the United States.” “I always did like a fair fight,” answered Bailey.

Bailey remembers listening to the man from Florida for half an hour. “I decided then and there that he was legit,” said Bailey. “His business structure was not well set up, but there was nothing wrong with
him
. We shook hands, and I took him on.” Bailey has since helped reorganize Turner’s domain and brought in more professional eastern accountants and business experts.

Since then Bailey and Turner have pacified most of the complaining states, largely by setting up a distributorship quota in each, one distributor per 7000 people. Specifically, Turner has vowed to deemphasize the “wholesale” aspects of his business, as the selling of subfranchises is called, and emphasize the “retail” end, the selling of cosmetics and allied products. No states have complained about the quality of his cosmetics, and indeed, some prosecutors have used them and even reordered.

When Turner is introduced at a meeting – he often makes 20 speeches a week, either to sell his products or his philosophies – he does not walk to the podium; he runs! Sometimes he stands up on two folding chairs and rocks back and forth, adding to his remarks the suspense that he could collapse at any moment. He rips off homilies and statistics so rapidly and with such seeming conviction that they begin to sound as gospel: “If you throw dirt, you’re bound to lose ground”; “The man who’s not running with the ball nobody tries to tackle”; “The only difficulty in climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom”; “Most people spend more time planning their two-week vacations then they do planning their lives”: Out of 500 new millionaires in 1966, 52.6% never had a high-school degree. I started making my first in 1967 because I knew I had the chance.”

Before one speech Turner turned to me and said, “Watch what I can do with these people.” The m.c. introduced him as “the establishment’s answer to marijuana – he can turn anybody on.” Turner was off, seizing the microphone, stalking the stage, stripping off his jacket, loosening his tie. His speech was in three courses – the first uproariously country-boy funny, the second so moving that women wept, the third so inspiring and promising that the audience rose to its feet in standing ovation.

“I hope to be remembered,” he told them “as the fellow who created more millionaires than any other man . . . and by making successes out of people nobody would fool with. In my organization you’ll find more losers, more dropouts, more has-beens than anywhere else. I
like
the welfares. I
like
the failures. But there don’t have to be any failures! The only failure I’d ever expect to meet is in hell, and I don’t plan to go there. I’m going up. . . The reason I’ve made it as far as I have is that I’m too dumb to know why it won’t work. I may be the biggest liar in the world . . . or the most sincere man you’ll ever meet.”

When he was finished, he walked down the hall. “What makes me happy is turning on people to their potential,” he said. “Life is brainwashing – nothing else! You’re brainwashed to think you can or you can’t. People can! I’m gonna change the world.”

On a gloomy Sunday morning in Boston, Turner was confined to his hotel room waiting for a car to take him to a meeting. He was speaking of some of his new ideas – an orange-flavored mouthwash to make breakfast taste good, the dog-cosmetic market, “Mostly untapped – and with five million-dollar potential each year,” and he mentioned the million-dollar castle he is building outside Orlando, with moats and turrets and a boathouse, to entertain 150 people, and suddenly I had had enough.

By making every man think he can drive a Cadillac and live in a castle and wear a gold suit, I wondered, aren’t you emphasizing somewhat obnoxious American values? Aren’t you negating the unquestionable good work you do with the handicapped and the poor?

Turner looked as if I had shot an arrow into his breast. “I use money as a tool!” he fired back. “People respect money and power. You have to hit money first. I stand up in front of them as an example. How you gonna help people who are poor and handicapped and retarded – if you’re the same? What I’m selling is attitude. If a man listens to me, does what I say, then his attitude will change and so will his life. He might go out and buy a Cadillac – or he might write a great poem.”

Now he made a fist and pounded his other hand with it.

The energies and juices seemed backed up in him, eager to erupt through his words. He leaped from his chair and swept about the room. “If they ever closed us down – and they won’t,” he said,
they
referring to state agencies, “that wouldn’t matter. I can sell anything.” His eyes cased the suite. They fell on the drapes. “I can sell these!” he cried, almost pulling the down, “I can sell those!” he said, snatching up an ashtray. “I can sell Sheraton water glasses! If they put me in jail someday, that won’t matter, either. I’d figure I was put there to reform the penal system. I’d start a course for the inmates, teach ’em how to break out.” He paused for inspiration, which quickly came: “I’d call it ‘Dare to Be Free!’ ”