The Billionaire Who Wasn't (52 page)

“What worries him now is that we are not giving it away quickly enough,” said Frank Rhodes. He doubted that Feeney or the board would “bet the whole store” on any one project. There was scope, however, for major initiatives. Said Feeney, “There is nothing wrong with a big bet, if a big bet is a good bet.”

The new strategy did not exclude Feeney from finding more of his own projects. But the spend-down decision required budgets fixed in advance, rather than just adding up all the gifts pledged at the end of the year. Healy felt his task was balancing Feeney's enthusiasm for new projects with the orderly winding down of the foundation. He added a fifth program, the Founding Chairman's Program, in the form of a “pot of money” available to Feeney to pursue entrepreneurial philanthropy outside the four programs. In 2004, the amount set aside for the founding chairman's pot was some $35 million. If he needed more, there would be more, within reason. In fact, in 2004 Feeney personally recommended, and the board approved, five grants totaling $41 million.

The directors never lost sight of the fact that it was “Feeney's money,” even though he had given it irrevocably to the foundation. At a board meeting in Bermuda early in 2005, Harvey Dale, who remained as a director, said, “As far as I'm concerned, and I'm sure I'm speaking for the board, if Chuck wants to spend more or commit more than $35 million, we should be accepting of that and consider the proposal.” There was a response of “Hear! Hear!”

The problem confronting them, Dale reflected, however, was not just finding enough good opportunities to give away money, but managing a predictable portfolio. “If the return on the portfolio is really stunning, much more than 10 percent, you come to the end, and all of a sudden you have got $10 billion and you have got to give it all away that year, which is absurd, or the portfolio underperforms, you hit a bad patch, and you run out of money before you hit the date. In the meantime, the program staff don't know what their budget is because it fluctuates too much.”

Paradoxically, during this period of internal debate on spending down, the endowment kept rising at a faster rate than spending. By early 2007,
when Atlantic Philanthropies appointed a new chief executive, fifty-two-year-old Gara LaMarche, the endowment stood at $4 billion—despite the fact that total giving had risen since 2002 from $2.5 billion to $4 billion. LaMarche, a human rights advocate and director of U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute, was given precisely nine years to complete Atlantic Philanthropies' active grant making by 2016. His task was complicated by the fact that half a billion dollars was still tied up in hotels, resorts, health clubs, and retailers across the world.

Like a big ship, the philanthropy slowed as it changed direction. Giving declined from a high point of $595 million in 2000 to $289 million in 2005. Feeney's entrepreneurial instincts were frustrated. He reckoned that annual giving would have to be ramped up to something around $350 million a year if his goal of giving while living was to be fulfilled in the allotted span. By the end of 2006, things began to fall into place and grant commitments that year exceeded $450 million.

In order to facilitate an orderly spend-down and to avoid its investments hitting “some extraordinary pay dirt and generating a huger amount of cash,” as Healy put it, about half of Atlantic Philanthropies' liquid assets were moved in 2005 into absolute return strategies, a diversified portfolio with a low correlation to the public markets and the ability to perform well in any economic environment. It was a pioneering move for a major philanthropy.

The disposal of the “state” side of the assets of Atlantic Philanthropies, held by General Atlantic Group Ltd., and its subsidiary, InterPacific, had gotten under way in the mid-1990s. This was sometimes a painful process for Feeney. The constituent parts were never impersonal assets. They were “people” businesses in which he was personally involved, to which he had given some of himself. He ran them like a welfare state, said a colleague. The hardest wrench was selling off Castletroy Park Hotel in Limerick, Ireland. Feeney had personally overseen its design and construction and nursed it through its teething stages. He used it as a gathering place for family and friends and here, more than anywhere, he let his hair down and had fun in his later years. Once, he brought about 100 GAGL staff and families for a weekend, and when the band struck up, Feeney and fellow executives appeared in boxer shorts and did a dance routine. In 1998, he organized a trip by 154 former students from St. Mary's High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the hotel for a fiftieth reunion of the Classes of '46, '47, and '48.
Many of the alumni, living all across the United States, had to get passports for the first time. Each paid $1,000 inclusive for the flight from JFK airport in New York to Shannon in Ireland and a week in Castletroy. Feeney provided everything else, including three buses to collect them from the airport. They were led into the foyer by a piper in traditional Irish costume. They were overwhelmingly of Irish descent, and many were in tears. “It was the best week of our lives,” said his childhood pal Bob Cogan, a retired federal government representative. “Charlie never left his roots. These were his real, true friends.” Feeney organized the reunion trip again in June 2003, though with fewer people, as time had taken its toll. On July 16, 2004, the last weekend before the hotel went on the market, he brought staff from Atlantic Philanthropies and General Atlantic and family members from around the world to commemorate the break with the hotel he built and loved. Typical of this most frugal of philanthropists, he laid on champagne for his guests, who included many of the friends he had acquired in Limerick such as Ed Walsh, Brendan O'Regan, and the Benedictine monk Mark Patrick Hederman.

By August 2004, Feeney had divested himself of his interests in Ireland, including Heritage House in Dublin, the Kilternan Hotel south of the city, the Trade Management Institute building in Blackrock, and Castletroy Park Hotel. All the properties made sizable profits: the Celtic Tiger economy, which Feeney had helped fuel, had sent property prices soaring. Winding down InterPacific was more complex. By the end of the 1990s, it was employing more than 2,000 people, generating annual sales in excess of $350 million, and holding investments valued at $650 million. The stores in the Hawaiian Retail Group that had caused the bitter split between Feeney and his DFS partners were closed or sold off by January 2003. Feeney came to Honolulu and took a function room at the Sheraton to throw a party for the staff. By early 2007, the Pacific Island Club Hotel in Saipan was still on the books, as was Couran Cove Island Resort and the Runaway Bay Sports Super Centre in Australia, and Western Athletic Clubs in the United States. “There will be no distress selling,” said Feeney, dismissing prospects of a fire sale. “We will sell when the market is rising.” InterPacific also continued to hold a half share in the Laguna Beach Resort in Phuket, where he and Helga would sometimes take short breaks from their travel. They were there when the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004. “Helga and I were having a his-and-hers massage,” he said. “We heard screams and saw fear in the eyes
of the staff, who shouted, ‘Get out!'” The hotel escaped with minor damage. Feeney ensured that there were no layoffs, despite the fall in tourism.

In January 2005, Feeney stepped down as chairman of GAGL and handed over to Mike Windsor, with Jim Downey as deputy chairman and Chris Oechsli, Harvey Dale, and Cummings Zuill making up the board. By then the businesses had dwindled to just over 10 percent of Atlantic Philanthropies' total assets, a reversal of the situation two decades earlier when the ratio of “church” to “state” was one to ten.

“Chuck walked out of the meeting in San Francisco with his plastic carrier bag and said, ‘Well, I'm off!'” said Windsor, describing Feeney's last day as chairman. “But all this is Chuck's, and I never lose sight of that. Anything we do strategically, he will still make the final call.”

CHAPTER 34

Not a Moment to Lose

It is hard to establish where Chuck Feeney is going to be at any given time, more than a few weeks into the future. He is constantly on the move. In January 2006, in his tiny apartment in San Francisco, he remarked, “I just did a count: This is the first time in our lifetime we are spending three months anywhere.” But he and Helga were soon off again on another odyssey, to New York, Dublin, London, Brisbane—where he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday—Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Paris, and back to San Francisco. Asked once where his home was, he replied, “Home is where the heart is,” adding more revealingly, “And where my books are; everywhere I go, I have my books.” On another occasion he explained, “I've got the best of all worlds. Each place has an attraction. I think now about convenience, and access to a good newspaper.”

If home is where one pays one's personal taxes, then Chuck Feeney lives in the United States. The truth is, he doesn't really live anywhere. He and Helga do not have a permanent home—just small apartments in different cities rented by his foundations, with none of the trophies on the sideboard to commemorate the life of a successful man—though there
are
piles of books and papers. He certainly doesn't aspire to live in a mansion. “I wouldn't be comfortable in an 8,000-square-foot home,” he said. “You couldn't find anybody in it.”

He is permanently restless. Chuck and Helga practically live at 30,000 feet. And they travel economy class, often sitting at the back of the plane for
journeys of more than ten hours. He claims it is a money-saving measure. “It would be different if it got me there quicker,” he says, adding that while he has thought about traveling business class, he doesn't feel he can justify the extra cost. “A lot of bad-mouths say about me that I want to stretch out on two economy seats,” he jokes.

Perhaps subconsciously he feels that by traveling business class he would be turning his back on the blue-collar culture from which he came. Perhaps he prefers to be in the company of the people who fly economy. Perhaps he feels he is not
entitled.
Whatever the reason, it is one of the rules by which he lives his life and no amount of pleading from friends and relatives ever made a difference. On an eleven-hour flight from Paris to Cuba in 2004, when his daughter Juliette and her husband, Jean Timsit, were bumped up to business class, she recalled how she pleaded with her father, who was with Helga in economy, “with the usual three plastic bags full of books and papers,” to please change places. He responded, “No, no, no. It's the luck of the draw.” Worried about the effect on the couple's health of sitting for long periods in a cramped position, the board of Atlantic Philanthropies has pleaded with Feeney to fly business class, but up to 2007, he was still insisting on the cheapest seats. He doesn't demand the same sacrifice from his executives, some of whom, like Dave Smith, have had the uncomfortable experience of being escorted to first class past Feeney standing in line for economy with his little wheeled Samsonite case and plastic bag of papers. Colin McCrea and Tom Mitchell were once flying business class to an Atlantic Philanthropies board meeting in Bermuda, when they found Chuck in the Paris airport and persuaded him to at least join them in the business lounge. The receptionist didn't want to let him in. Finally she said, “He can go in provided he doesn't eat anything.” By then Feeney was inside, drinking a complimentary glass of Chardonnay.

“Since my earliest days I have been frugal, but I am a frugal person in that I hate waste, at any level,” says Feeney, who always wears off-the-peg clothes, a cheap plastic watch, and reading glasses of the type sold in book-stores. “If I can get a watch for $15 that keeps perfect time, what am I doing messing around with a Rolex?” Helga shares his frugal nature, and the couple enjoy getting bargains when shopping. On the ground, Feeney always takes buses and taxis, rather than limousines. “I cannot rationalize someone driving me around in a six-door Cadillac,” he says. “The seats are the same in a cab. And you may live longer if you walk.” When visiting the family in
New Jersey over the years, Feeney would routinely take the train from New York. His nephew once told Jim Dwyer how he would pick him up at Elizabeth station “and there's Uncle Chuck, waiting on a train platform near the junkies and the hookers.” His brother-in-law Jim Fitzpatrick pleaded, to no avail, “Chuck, you've got to be careful. It's dangerous to be going back to New York at night in a bus.”

Feeney avoids black-tie functions at which donors are the recipients of mellifluous expressions of gratitude. “I'm just not the kind of guy who gets any kick out of attending these mutual admiration society dinners.” He has no tuxedo now. He once turned up for a formal dinner in Dublin wearing a sweater, and was only persuaded to borrow a bow tie and jacket from a waiter when told he would otherwise draw attention to himself.

He refuses to ask the staff in his business or foundation offices to do anything personal for him. “I've worked for people who would have me go to pick up their dry-cleaning, their lunch, things like that,” said Gail Vincenzi Bianchi at the San Francisco office of InterPacific. “He would never. He once mentioned to me that he had some dry-cleaning to pick up downtown, and it was a Friday afternoon and I said, ‘Chuck, give me the receipt and I will drive downtown and pick up the dry-cleaning.' And he said, ‘No, no, I would appreciate if you would give me a ride down there, and I'll go pick it up.'” He does not think it beneath him to pick up rubbish in the street and put it in a trash can. “If everybody picked up trash, there would be no trash on the streets,” he explains.

While frugal to the point of eccentricity, Feeney is not mean or cheap. He likes to give people thoughtful presents, often pictures he commissions from his friend Desmond Kinney, an Irish artist. Kinney and his partner, Esmeralda, occasionally join him and Helga on their travels. In restaurants, he insists on paying. And far from being reclusive, he has friends and acquaintances all over the world whom he and Helga meet for lunches and dinners, always with white wine, characterized by his wisecracks and his cackling laugh. He often gathers eclectic groups together, people from diverse backgrounds whose only common thread is that he has met them and befriended them. “Thus artists, politicians, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, university presidents, writers, lawyers, and sometimes his own family members mix freely,” said his friend Niall O'Dowd. The publisher recalled that when spending weekends at the Feeney house in Connecticut in the 1980s, he would come into contact with other visitors without knowing what role they
played in Feeney's life. “There were all these different layers being peeled away every time you heard something new about him.” He learned how parsimonious Feeney could be when his host one day took him for a long walk to the post office in Salisbury, where Feeney rummaged through a used magazine collection in a box in the corner. “Next thing, this multimillionaire comes up with ‘Great!'—an old issue of
Time
or something.” “If you see a magazine with pages torn out,” Feeney quips, “that means I've been reading it.” His habit serves a purpose. The pages provide a means of communication. As has been seen, he will often hand a friend a cutting that has caught his attention, to show what is on his mind.