THE WHITE SHARKS OF WALL STREET by DIANA B. HENRIQUES

Author:DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2001-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THERE ’LL BE

SOME CHANGES MADE

T om Evans had moved in from the edges of the proxy battlefields in 1954. His contested acquisitions had not involved large exchange-listed companies with publicly traded stock and he had waged his fights well to the west of the Wall Street-Washington axis, but he was nevertheless getting noticed. In January 1954, Newsweek magazine profiled the decidedly portly forty-three-year-old Evans—allegedly less driven than in the past, an entrepreneur who insisted, “I never work at night now, and rarely on Saturdays. What’s the use of owning your own company if you have to work all the time?” 1

He seemed to be playing the role of the wealthy businessman-squire. He and his second wife, Josephine, had settled into a 150-acre farm in Lingonier, near the Mellon family enclave at Rolling Rock. His three sons and her three daughters spent time at that peaceful spot, although Tom’s temper and his sons’ lingering resentment over the divorce kept the emotional climate in an unsettled state. In addition, Evans traveled abroad at least once a year and kept an apartment in New York’s Waldorf Towers so he and Josephine could enjoy the theater and shop for his growing art collection, which he had begun during his years with Betty Evans. He was not yet widely known as a prominent collector, but a few alert art dealers were beginning to cultivate his business. Occasionally, he went fishing at Fisher’s Island, off the Connecticut coast.

After the creative turbulence of his first marriage, he seemed to crave an atmosphere of dignified wealth and artistic pursuits in his life with Josephine. Soon, the only hint of the havoc that had gone before was the hostile gulf that divided him from his eldest son. Tom Evans Jr., an athletic young man whose face mirrored his father’s youthful beauty, had been kicked out of prep school during the divorce. At age fourteen, he had refused to submit to his father’s plans for him—a military academy. Instead, he had moved into a boarding house in the Buffalo area and enrolled on his own in a public high school. 2

Porter was humming along nicely. As Newsweek noted, in early January 1954 Evans had awarded the manager of one of his subsidiary companies a $100,000 bonus check, “several times the manager’s annual salary.” It reflected how well his decentralized style of operation was serving him. As he accumulated companies, he still relied on the aging Clarence Dobson and his executive staff to prune away dead wood and solve any structural or organizational problems. Then, he gave each manager his head, with the promise of substantial rewards if the executive met Evans’s ambitious financial goals. Those divisions that did not meet their goals were sold.

As Business Week noted, in another flattering profile published in 1955, the thirteen Porter divisions “boss themselves.” 3 In many cases, the magazine noted, Evans and Dobson had recruited the “new management” to run their acquisitions from among the same managers who had worked there when they bought it.

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