The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery

Author:Conor O'Clery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781610393355
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2013-08-26T14:00:00+00:00

23

CHAPTER

Musical Chairs

On July 3, 1996, a week after Bob Miller and Tony Pilaro presented Chuck Feeney and Alan Parker with an offer to buy them out of DFS, the four came together in Cannes on the French Riviera for the wedding of Jean Gentzbourger’s son Marco. All the families were invited. Chuck’s former wife, Danielle, and their children were among the wedding guests. Miller was accompanied by his wife, Chantal, and his daughters and his bodyguard. It was a rare social get-together of the DFS owners, and it came at the height of the biggest crisis in their thirty-year relationship. Typically, Chuck lodged in a small downtown hotel, the three-star L’Olivier on Rue des Tambourinaires, while the others checked into Les Muscadin, a four-star town-house hotel with sweeping views of the Bay of Cannes once favored by Picasso.

Feeney and Parker had already decided to reject the offer made by their partners unless Miller and Pilaro raised their price and produced the money by September 1, after which they would proceed with a sale of their shareholdings to LVMH. They expressed their concern that the Hawaii bid was coming up again in the autumn, and if DFS lost it, the value of the company would fall, and they wanted to move before that.

However, the wedding gave Feeney and Parker an opportunity to pull Miller aside on his own and persuade him to go along with the sale to LVMH, or at least not try to block it. They met him discreetly in a large waterfront hotel on the Croisette. They went over everything again, pointing out that they had protected Miller in the agreement with Arnault as it included a sixty-day window for him to sell on the same terms. Parker thought they had Bob convinced.

But not for long. The next morning, recalled Parker, “I got a call from Tony—would I go to the wedding in the car with Linda, his wife at the time. I thought it odd but I said, no problem. I guess Tony had got some whiff of what was going on, and he needed to occupy me. He then shot off to see Bob. The next car was Bob and Tony. By the time Bob got to the wedding, he said, ‘I’m not going to do the deal, it’s not going to work.’”

Pilaro dismissed the suggestion that he connived to get in the car with Bob. “I’m not that devious, believe me, I certainly wasn’t playing musical chairs,” he said. He protested that he could influence Miller on how to do something but not whether to do it. “To think otherwise is an overstatement of the power of Pilaro’s logic!”

Miller would later conclude that “Tony was probably more of a hindrance to me than anything else, because he was pushing for me to buy out Chuck. Tony had a certain way of hyping things up.”

The colloquy continued at a reception under the lemon trees in the garden of Gentzbourger’s elegant villa on the Avenue de la Croix des Gardes overlooking Cannes.

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