Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (49 page)
Read Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? Online
Authors: Reginald Lewis
“Yes, Tony, I’m paying him. Why am I paying him? Because there was a promise of hope,” Lewis responded philosophically. “Is this amount of money worth the promise of hope? Yes—give it to him.”
Another promise of hope materialized in Canada. An experimental drug was being offered there that might have the ability to dissolve Lewis’s tumor. However, the drug was not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, so Lewis would have to go to Canada for treatment.
Arrangements were made for Lewis to be seen in an oncology out-patient facility in Toronto. The day before he flew to Toronto, Lewis’s secretary, Deidra Wilson, came to his co-op to take some dictation from her boss.
The following draft memo, which was dictated January 13, indicates that Beatrice’s Chairman was still remarkably focused and lucid less than a week before his death:
To all shareholders:
In the next few days we will issue a press release announcing my retirement from day-to-day operations and the formation of an office of the chairman to assume many of my former duties.
Since the Lewis family will continue to own 51% of the company’s common stock, I will, of course, stay involved to some extent. However, I shall relinquish all responsibilities for day-to-day management and turn these over to a group of young, but highly seasoned executives in whom I have great confidence.
The goal will continue to be to produce superior returns for all stockholders, while maintaining a solid balance sheet, stability and continuity in all of our operations. As you know, our principal holdings are in Western Europe, whose economies are feeling the effects of recession and high unemployment. I am confident, however, that the long-term future of Europe is strong, particularly in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland, and the other markets where we do business.
I am also confident that we have made the necessary investments over recent years to ensure that our independent subsidiary companies can continue to compete effectively. I want to thank our many employees—5,000 worldwide—who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me since December of 1987 to produce what can only be described as fine results for all involved. I am particularly grateful to many of our senior executives in the field, Señor Delfin Suarez, Messrs. Jean and Jacques Baud and the Baud family, Vincent O’Sullivan, and to our organizations in Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and in other operating theaters around Europe.
They have given me their cooperation on an unfailing basis and have accepted my vision and leadership for this company from the very beginning.
To my board of directors, which has been a great source of moral support to me, I extend my thanks and appreciation.
The new team will be led by Jean S. Fugett, Jr., who is no stranger to this company or TLC’s affiliates. Jean, who as many of you know is my brother, has been with me since the inception of TLC in February of 1984. He has worked very closely with me through the McCall acquisition, its revitalization and subsequent sale and was also an integral part in the acquisition and ongoing affairs of TLC Beatrice, with our emphasis on investments and rigorous review of operations. He has worked very closely with me over the past five years and I believe is in a unique position as a family member to understand the needs of the 51% majority shareholders. He also appreciates the manner and culture that I have tried to instill in the company, so that we can work
for the benefit of all shareholders, applying the most rigorous standards of integrity and professionalism.
I have confidence that these policies will be continued.
In the future I have decided to devote the bulk of my personal time to my family and philanthropic activities, particularly in the area of social justice and civil rights.
Later, Lewis dictated the following public statement to his wife, Loida, as part of his expression of support for Reverend Chavis:
When I think about how I want to spend the rest of my life, the decision to devote it to the cause of social justice, to the area of civil rights, and to American cultural affairs is to me a stimulating and challenging assignment.
Even in my own career, a person of very modest means has been able—by dint of his own efforts—to achieve great wealth and financial independence, which therefore suggests that some progress clearly has been made. But in my view, it is all too little when we consider the day-to-day drama being inflicted upon many of our children who are of African or Hispanic descent and who are not yet fully included in the American Dream.
By working in this field in the future, I believe that I am working for all Americans, because I truly believe that our society is highly vulnerable unless we join together in seeing this not as a particular problem of any one ethnic group, but as something that the nation must address as part of its own spirit of renewal.
At no point in the memo or statement was the underlying reason for Lewis’s abrupt retirement given.
On January 14, 1993, a Thursday, Loida Lewis called down to the front doorman of the family’s apartment to have a wheelchair ready. The time had arrived to fly to Toronto. Flanked by his wife and Tony and Jean Fugett, Lewis walked haltingly to the elevator portico of his magnificent apartment.
The elevator door opened and Lewis entered slowly, grabbing Tony’s arm for support. After descending a few floors, the elevator opened on an impressive foyer with a view of a central courtyard. Something else came into view—the wheelchair that his wife had requested for her husband. The doorman stood beside it attentively.
“No, please,” Lewis said. “I will walk.” With his brothers on either side of him, Lewis walked proudly—if somewhat unsteadily—past the wheelchair and out the front door of the building.
The Lewises chauffeur and bodyguard, Ed Gregg, sprang out of their Bentley to open the rear door to the vehicle. Lewis and his family members got into the car and Gregg immediately took off without first asking for a destination, which he customarily did when the constantly rushing Lewis was his passenger.
Gregg was instructed to head for Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Teterboro serves as something of a corporate jetport for New York City, freeing heavily congested LaGuardia and Kennedy airports for commercial traffic. “That was the last time I saw him,” Gregg says. “He was very weak.”
The Chairman of Beatrice was assisted up the ladder of his plane. The pilots and flight attendant were stunned by Lewis’s appearance. “They didn’t know that the tumor had advanced to the state that the left side of his body was affected,” Tony Fugett says. “I remember the crew trying to be cool and calm. They were professional throughout.”
After their arrival in Toronto, Lewis, his wife, and two brothers booked themselves into a hotel. His cancer treatments were to be administered there, rather than at the out-patient oncology center. Lewis pretty much stayed in his hotel suite during the brief time he was in Toronto, taking his meals via room service and allowing health care workers to administer his anti-cancer medication.
He initially believed the treatment would help him whip his illness. But after about two days, Lewis sensed the drug wasn’t the answer.
“Tony, it’s not working,” Lewis said matter-of-factly when the two of them were alone in his room.
Perhaps sensing the inevitable, Lewis—who believed in God, but was not a devout Catholic—had begun telling his wife, “Death does not frighten me—I’m not afraid of death. I surrender myself to Christ.”
During a moment when just Lewis and his wife were in their hotel suite, he pondered the irony that of all the places to be afflicted with a fatal malady, it had to be his mind. “I know I have cancer of the brain,” he told his wife, “I used my brain as a weapon to go forward and to disprove a lie about people of color, and I had no protection.”
Jean Fugett, Jr., by that point the de facto CEO of TLC Beatrice, left Toronto for New York in order to run the business.
On January 16th, a Saturday, it was sunny in Toronto with a typically frigid, mid-winter Arctic air mass straddling the city. Lewis awoke that morning on a mission: He planned to “play” a particularly wicked game of tennis, and Tony Fugett was going to do it for him. Fugett, who hadn’t brought any tennis gear sent the flight attendant out to fetch some. He was somewhat baffled by his brother’s insistence that Fugett play tennis. Leisure activity was the furthest thing from his mind right now, but he dutifully carried out Reginald Lewis’s request.
“Tony, I want you to go out and play a tennis game. I’m going to be your coach—you really need to get some exercise because you’ve been caught up in doing a lot of things,” Lewis told his brother. “Now, what I want you to do is I want you to get 60 percent of your first serves in. I know you can hit that overhead, I want you to take that hitch out of your forehand and come to the net behind that powerful serve of yours.”
Fugett promised Lewis he would go out and try to play a memorable tennis match. He left Lewis’s hotel room and closed the door gently behind him. He called his brother, Jean Fugett, in New York.
“Jean, Reg wants me to go out and play tennis,” Tony Fugett said. “And not only does he want me to play tennis, but to do what he wants, I have to play the best tennis of my life!”
Tony Fugett set out for a nearby indoor tennis club. He found a tennis pro willing to play and waged battle as though the Wimbledon championship were at stake.
Not long after Fugett departed, Loida Lewis entered her husband’s room.
“Loida, it’s like there’s a shade falling over my eyes,” Lewis told his wife. She went over to see what the matter was and finding her husband to be okay for the moment, went into another room of their hotel suite. Feeling totally helpless and frustrated, Loida sobbed quietly.
Lewis summoned a male nurse to come to his room and shave him. Lewis asked the nurse to dress him well, not in pajamas, but in a manner appropriate for a fancy dinner.
Over a meal of veal scalopini, Lewis reminisced with his wife about their life together and what a fantastic, improbable journey it had been. They did this not out of a sense of foreboding, but because it was something they normally did from time to time.
Tony knocked on the door and Loida let him into the hotel room.
“Did you do the best you could do?” Lewis asked.
“Yeah,” Tony said.
“Did you have fun?” Lewis asked. “Yes,” Tony Fugett replied.
“That’s all that matters,” Lewis said, catching Tony Fugett by surprise. “Here’s a man who kept track of the score in everything,” Fugett says, thinking back to their post-game conversation.
On Sunday, January 17th, at about 3
A.M
., Tony Fugett was awakened by a frantic call: “Come down to our room right away!”
Lewis was lying in his bed with rivulets of sweat pouring down his face when Fugett arrived. The first thing Fugett did was sit Lewis up in the bed and prop some pillows behind his back. He then took off his big brother’s nightshirt and undershirt, which were soaked with perspiration, and then put a fresh Brooks Brothers nightshirt on Lewis.
Fugett then gently lowered Lewis back down on the bed.
“Tony, help me, I need you,” Lewis said, then he began to convulse from a seizure before lapsing into unconsciousness.
“A coldness came over me,” Fugett says. “I had frantic people around. It was take charge time—get him to the hospital. He was always a master of execution and I had to become one.”
After getting his brother to a hospital, Fugett left to rustle up the crew of Lewis’s plane and alert them that they needed to be ready to return to the United States at a moment’s notice.
Back at the hospital, the family was informed that Reginald Lewis had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage brought on by his brain tumor. The Chairman of Beatrice was in a coma and had suffered irreversible brain damage, the doctors said. They added that there was practically no hope of recovery and that Lewis could pass away at any time.
A woman pastor from the hospital asked Loida Lewis if she wanted a Catholic priest to administer extreme unction—the ceremony where the priest prays for and anoints with oil a person who is dying or in danger of dying. She said she would like to have the sacrament performed.
“Lo and behold, the Catholic priest was an African,” Loida Lewis recalls. “Because my husband is so fierce about race, God sends him an African in Canada to give the last rites.”
She now faced a perilous decision: Should they remain in a Toronto hospital, or transport Lewis to a medical facility in Manhattan, a trip he might not survive?
Praying that she was making the right decision, Loida Lewis opted to move her husband to Manhattan. After she told the doctors of her decision, she noticed Reginald Lewis’s head move slightly, as though he were nodding in the affirmative.
Hooked to portable life-support machines, a stretcher-bound Reginald Lewis was carried aboard his private jet for a final international flight.
Now that Lewis’s condition was touch and go and his cancer could no longer be kept under wraps, his relatives were told his situation was bleak and that they should travel to the hospital Lewis was being transported to in Manhattan. On Monday, January 18th, the day before Lewis’s death, his family was told Lewis’s pulse was beginning to weaken.