The Billionaire Who Wasn't (42 page)

“The university asked me to get involved and I said, with people like Chuck Feeney backing it, this is very safe,” he remarked, walking among the palm trees planted on the lawns around the main four-level edifice. “Without him we would not have this university in Vietnam, without him these buildings would not be here,” he said, gesturing toward the Norman Day-designed campus structures. Because of the equity provided by Atlantic in June 2002, RMIT was able to secure loans totaling $14.5 million from the International Finance Corporation and the Asian Development Bank to build the university and provide it with banks of Compaq workstations. The university in 2006 had a student population of 1,400 and provided young Vietnamese with an internationally recognized Australian
degree at less than half the cost in Melbourne. Vietnam's prime minister, Phan Van Khai, told Mann that he wanted the university to be a model for other universities in Vietnam. Mann also planned to make it the number one “tennis university” in Asia. “Getting to know Chuck Feeney has been one of the highlights of my life,” said Mann. “He is so low key, but he is dynamic; his mind races at 100 miles an hour.”

Mark Conroy, too, came to regard Feeney as one of “the best and most thoughtful people” he had ever encountered in his life. “We are all going to be put in a box at the end of the day,” he said. “You can't really wrap yourself in money. A lot of people think they can. They seek to accumulate wealth. They are pretty aimless. When you come into this kind of work, you don't think of money except to help people. People say, ‘I have only $200; I'd like to help, but I can't give like rich people.' I say to them, ‘You know what, that person with the burned face who benefited from the $200 doesn't think that way.' It's about helping people so that they can help themselves, hoping someday people can get educated and see big enough opportunities to share the planet with each other.”

CHAPTER 28

Bowerbird

Chuck Feeney likes to tell an anecdote about his first encounter with an Australian immigration official in the 1970s, when on a DFS business trip. “I was asked if I had a police record. I said, ‘I didn't know that was still a requirement!' The guy went ballistic.”

He started visiting Australia regularly after 1993 when his friend Ken Fletcher, the former Australian tennis player, complained one day in London, “I've had it, I want to go back to Australia,” and Feeney had replied, “Fine, I'll go along with you.” They flew to Sydney and from there north to Fletcher's hometown of Brisbane, the capital of the State of Queensland, a fast-growing city with street cafés, riverside paths, water taxis, and a pleasant semitropical climate on the Pacific coast.

As in Ireland and Vietnam, Feeney relied on a personal connection to introduce him to the country. In Australia it was Ken Fletcher, one of the heroes of Australia's golden tennis era, who won ten major doubles titles in the 1960s, including a mixed doubles grand slam at Wimbledon with champion Margaret Smith Court. Fletcher moved to Hong Kong when at his prime to play professional tennis and gained a reputation as something of a
larrikin
—someone who disdained authority and enjoyed life. He became friends with the Feeneys there and occasionally gave them tennis lessons at the Ladies' Recreation Club. Years later they met again in London, where Fletcher had ended up in a dead-end job running a suburban tennis center, and Feeney, who admired sporting legends, took him on as a consultant on sports and real-estate investments.

In Brisbane, Feeney set up Fletcher in a riverside apartment with a brief to be his eyes and ears, and provided him with a car. “We gave him a job as a kind of a spotter to look for opportunities and bring them to our attention,” he said. An old buddy of Fletcher's, retired journalist Hugh Lunn, who lived in Brisbane, arranged to buy a “perch” in Dockside Apartments Hotel and rent it to InterPacific so that Chuck and Helga would have somewhere to stay when visiting.

The two Aussies soon learned about Chuck's close attention to expenditure. “One time when Chuck came out, Hughie presented him with a telephone bill—minor stuff—and Chuck went through it, and I said, ‘Hughie, take note of this, here is a multi-billionaire arguing over a two-bob telephone call,'” recalled Fletcher. “I think his frugality comes from the fact that he is a born and bred retailer. Walking down the street, he would be pushing me into the shop windows, a billionaire checking the price of Casio watches. He would say, ‘If we could buy those at $1 and sell them for $10, that's my sort of profit.' He never ordered a limo to get around. I drove him. And he hated anybody to think that the big yacht parked outside his apartment block might be his! But he could be generous, too. He once took me to buy a pair of Mephisto shoes, and they're bloody expensive.”

After the DFS sale, encouraged by the success of his model for giving in Ireland and Vietnam, Feeney began to look for similar philanthropic opportunities in Australia. In March 1998, he and Fletcher went to see Brisbane mayor Jim Soorley to ask his help in setting up a meeting with university heads. Soorley, a former priest in the Marist order who had been running the city since 1991, organized a dinner in the city's Irish Club with two leading academics, Professor John Hay, the vice chancellor (president) of the University of Queensland, and Professor Laurie Powell, director of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. He tipped them off to be on their toes, as Feeney might be able to help them with any projects they had in hand.

At the dinner in the President's Room of the Irish Club, beneath a framed copy of a letter written by Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence, Hay and Powell told Feeney that their plans for development were constantly thwarted by lack of money and their institutions were seriously underperforming. It was the same story as in Ireland. Australia's higher-education institutions relied on fees and government grants to keep going, and there was no tradition of philanthropic funding by businesses or wealthy alumni.

Feeney wasted little time. The next day he called to see Hay, a young, high-achieving administrator, on his Queensland University campus. Hay had an ambitious plan to create an institute of molecular bioscience. Within weeks Feeney arranged for Atlantic to put up AU$10 million (US$7.5 million) seed money for the project. The State of Queensland government agreed to put up AU$15 million, the federal government in Canberra another AU$15 million, and the university a further AU$15 million from the university budget. Hay now had AU$55 million for the institute. “So all of a sudden it was a big project,” he recalled. As it got under way, Harvey Dale arrived from the United States and made clear to Hay that the source of the Atlantic funds was to be a strict secret.

A Labor Party premier, Peter Beattie, was elected in Queensland shortly afterward, and he approved of the idea so much he subsequently put in another AU$80 million. “We've since added a lot of money through competitive research grants, so the whole thing is several hundred million dollars,” said Hay. “It's one of the most exciting scientific university-based research institutes in Australia.”

The project—a model of Feeney's policy of using matching grants to multiply an investment—led to a series of other initiatives. Hay was able to create the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology when Atlantic put in one-third of the AU$70 million cost and Queensland and the university another one-third each. By 2006, Feeney had directed a total of AU$125 million to the university. “Because of our visibility we are now getting grants from other American organizations and are joint recipients with Harvard of a major grant from the Gates Foundation,” said Hay. “Without Chuck Feeney this would not have happened. Without a shadow of doubt Chuck Feeney is the reason I have stayed in Brisbane.”

Feeney learned with some amusement the story of the only other major donor in the history of the University of Queensland, who was also of Irish origin. In 1926, James O'Neill Mayne donated the 270 acres of land on which the university was built. He had bought it with money inherited from his father, Patrick Mayne, a young immigrant from County Tyrone who became mysteriously wealthy after a drunken out-of-town stranger was robbed and killed. Patrick Mayne confessed on his deathbed to the murder. The University of Queensland senate was unhappy about the origin of the Mayne fortune and agreed to accept the gift by only one vote. The biggest hall at the university was named Mayne Hall, and Feeney provided AU$7.5
million to transform it into an art museum with a gallery of self-portraits provided free by Australian artists, an idea Ed Walsh had pioneered at Limerick. “It was a no-brainer,” said Feeney, explaining that by getting artists to contribute self-portraits and then letting people buy them and keep them on the walls, the university made money. “There are a lot of high-quality artists who like the prestige of having one of their paintings in the collection.” “Getting pictures for nothing appealed to Chuck,” said Hugh Lunn.

At the opening of the gallery, a photographer came up and asked the philanthropist, “Are you Chuck Feeney?” Feeney said, “No, that's him over there.” The photographer came over and said to Hugh Lunn, “I'd like to shake your hand for what you have done for science in Brisbane.” “I shook hands, embarrassed,” said Lunn. “The photographer left and didn't even take a picture.”

Feeney's arrival on the scene coincided with a plan by Peter Beattie to upgrade the state, which up to then many Australians saw as a version of America's Deep South. The fifty-three-year-old Labor Party leader had an agenda to transform Queensland into a “Smart State,” promoting knowledge, creation, and innovation, partly to stop its brightest inhabitants from leaving. He wanted to change the image of Brisbane from “Brisvegas”—a gambling city at the center of a strip of casinos—into the capital of high tech. He had the words “Smart State” imprinted on car license plates. At the top of his agenda was restructuring the education system and encouraging research and development in information technology and biotechnology.

Feeney thoroughly approved of the idea. “The smarter you are, the smarter you get,” he said, adding that “it was evident that there was an availability of smart, bright young people in Queensland.” Feeney became a key partner in establishing the “Smart State,” said Beattie.

Professor Laurie Powell also found his institution transformed after the dinner at the Irish Club. Feeney provided initial funding for the AU$60-million Cancer Research Centre at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the first cancer research facility of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. When it was nearing completion and needed a further AU$5 million, Feeney advised Powell to sell the naming rights. Clive Berghofer, a wealthy Queensland property developer, stepped forward with a donation of AU$5 million—a major act of philanthropy by Australian standards. “I've got nothing leased, nothing on hire purchase, nothing rented, and nothing borrowed,” Berghofer said when presenting the check. “What's mine is mine,
and it is with great pleasure that I can give back to the community for what is now the Berghofer Cancer Research Centre.” Feeney was pleased. He didn't like it when subsequently Fletcher commented about “that fool's name up there” as they drove by a huge red neon sign for the Clive Berghofer Cancer Research Centre. “Chuck jumped down my throat. ‘He's no fool!' he said. I said, ‘I don't mean it like that; it is just that you are so good. You are the bloke who built the building.” Feeney said once he took the attitude on naming rights for buildings that “it doesn't matter whose name is on a library as long as there is a library there for people.”

“The effect of Chuck's giving in Queensland is enormous,” said Hugh Lunn. “One thousand people turned up for a lecture by Dr. Brent Reynolds of the Queensland Brain Institute, which received $20 million from Atlantic, on getting stem cells out of human brains. That is the sort of awareness Chuck has created in Brisbane—one thousand people turning up for a lecture on the brain!”

Almost every single grant in Australia “was just one-third of the amount of money needed,” Feeney said with some satisfaction. “One-third from us, one-third from the institution, and one-third from the government.” He leveraged more than half a billion Australian dollars on donations from Atlantic Philanthropies.

Feeney leveraged cooperation as well as money. His attitude, he said, was “we can help you, but you have to help someone else.” He incorporated Australia's universities into his growing world network, using what Frank Rhodes called the “classic example” of the original template of Cornell helping Limerick. American, Irish, Australian, and later South African and Vietnamese university heads, academics, and scientists found themselves urged on by Feeney and Atlantic Philanthropies to cooperate and help each other.

“Chuck used Australia as a platform of knowledge and technology for Vietnam,” said Le Nhan Phuong. Atlantic funded a program to bring Vietnamese students to the University in Queensland. Feeney met some of them on the Brisbane campus one day in November 2005. He arrived dressed in Hawaiian shirt, slacks, and a droopy fawn cardigan and looked anything but a munificent benefactor. The students sensed that Feeney was somehow responsible for them being there, and crowded around him to take photographs, something the university heads were not permitted to do. The group included some striking teenage girls. Feeney told them, “Study hard,
beauty won't be enough. We will be successful if you will be successful. Do what you can. Vietnam wants you to come back and help.”

As in every country where he spent time, Feeney endeared himself to his new friends with his mild manner and sociability, and his idiosyncrasies. “I think he is unique. He is a great man. He has almost no vanity at all,” said John Hay. “He kept bringing me heaps and heaps of papers and articles that I should read and these sometimes became quite mountainous. ‘The last time it was only two inches deep,' I said. ‘You're slacking off, Chuck!'” Peter Coaldrake, vice chancellor of Queensland University of Technology, found himself looking forward to Chuck's visits to discuss a common passion—American politics. “He would come with a plastic bag and give me cuttings and the latest books. He is an incredible bowerbird. Look at my desk, I'm a bowerbird,” he said, pointing to a desk littered with papers and explaining that a bowerbird is an Australian bird that collects all sorts of odds and ends to make its nest.