Truth Be Told Read online

  When you can master the win-win, you inspire loyalty. Few are better at it than Ted Turner and Kirk Kerkorian. People who work for Kirk love him. Kirk knows everything that’s going on, but he doesn’t smother his employees. He gives them room to grow and moves them up. A lot of his managers used to be clerks.

  I’ve never felt a greater loyalty to anyone I’ve ever worked with than Ted. Once, in the late eighties, when my contract was coming up, rival companies offered deals that doubled my salary. Ted was expanding at the time and couldn’t counter with that kind of money. So my agent went to his office to tell him I was leaving. Ted picked up the phone, called me in the early morning at my hotel in California and said, “Here’s what I want you to do. It’s simple. Just say: ‘Goodbye, Ted.’ You say, ‘Goodbye, Ted,’ and we’re friends. You start your new job and nobody’s angry. I want to hear you say goodbye.”

  I stood in the suite in my underwear with the telephone at my ear. I just couldn’t say “Goodbye, Ted.”

  “You can’t say it!” Ted said. “You can’t say it!” Then he promised me that within a year I’d have a contract for the same money I’d been offered—and he delivered.

  Even when it looks like these guys are going to lose they find a way to win. Like when Ted and Kirk dealt with each other. Ted loved the movie Gone with the Wind. It led him to buy the studio that owned it—MGM—from Kirk for $1.5 billion. Just driving into the studio made Ted happy. But after a short time he found out that he really didn’t like a business where you invest $42 million in a project and then at two o’clock on Monday morning find out whether you’ve made money or not. So he called Kirk and told him he’d like to sell it back at a loss. Who wouldn’t want that deal? Sure, Kirk said, I’ll buy it back at a profit.

  Just one thing, Ted said. He wanted to keep the library. This was back in the mid-eighties. At the time, there was little to be done with the library. Plus, Kirk wasn’t in television or cable. But Ted was. He knew exactly what to do with the library: Turner Classic Movies. So it was a win-win all around. Ted buys it, sells it back to Kirk at a loss, but keeps the movies and makes an enormous profit.

  On the surface, the one quality these men have that I don’t is the passion to acquire. I don’t amass companies or properties. But in a way, I guess you could say I do acquire. I acquire people. The joy of my life is meeting somebody interesting every day.

  And at seventy-seven, I was getting to interview the richest guy in the world.

  I had first met Carlos only a few months before. Carlos gives twelve thousand scholarships to Mexican kids every year and he invited me to speak to them at an annual event in Mexico City. Bill Clinton had spoken at the event, as had Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright. The director of Avatar, James Cameron, and I were invited in 2010. So was the former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan.

  A few days before the event, once again I felt I should be spending more time with my kids and I sent word that I was sorry but it was best for me to cancel. It was almost like fate called back and said, You don’t understand.

  I’m so glad I reconsidered. Saying no would have been the second biggest mistake of my life. The biggest will always be starting to smoke cigarettes when I was seventeen. It took me thirty-seven years to stop.

  The night before the event, I had dinner with Carlos’s assistant and learned that Carlos and I shared the same passion. As soon as we met, before we even said hello, we were talking baseball.

  He’s a crazy Yankee fan. He’s seventy years old, and he knew about all the black major leaguers who’d come to play in the Mexican Leagues during the days of segregation. It wasn’t long before we were arguing about the five greatest pitchers of all time.

  How can you leave out Koufax?

  But you had to take everything he said seriously. He knew his stats. He later showed me a two-page letter he’d handwritten to Alex Rodriguez. He listed all the things A-Rod needed to do, and the time he needed to do them in, in order to top numerous records. It was an amazing array of statistics.

  I couldn’t help but wonder: How could a guy with that kind of passion and those kinds of means not own a team? Divorce had recently left the Dodgers ownership in disarray, and so I just came out and asked, “Why don’t you buy the Dodgers?”

  His answer tells you a lot about him as a businessman. “You own a baseball team and you marry the team,” he said. “It emotionally affects you. Did they win today? Did they lose today? You never want to be married to something you own.”

  I knew I was at the scholarship event simply to speak. But I couldn’t help it. This is a guy, I thought, that I’d love to interview.

  I never know what I’m going to say before I start to speak. I’m always living in the moment. I was told to tell a few stories and then we’d do some questions and answers. But when I reached the stage, I thought, Jeez, what am I going to say to these kids? I didn’t know how many understood English. My stories are all built around humor, and they might not work so well if the timing got lost in translation. I took another look at the kids. It just felt right to tell the Moppo story. I figured they’d like it because it takes place in the last year of junior high school. I didn’t realize at the time that something deeper was at work.

  The Moppo story takes about fifteen minutes, start to finish. If you listened to my all-night radio show years ago you’ve probably heard it. And if you haven’t heard it, make sure you get a ticket when my comedy show goes on the road. It’s about a kid in our neighborhood named Gil Mermelstein, who got his nickname because he had a mop of hair. This is the setup: Moppo comes down with tuberculosis and to recover, moves to Arizona with his family on short notice. Nobody in the neighborhood knows. The only reason I found out was I was walking past his apartment with a couple of friends when we ran into one of Moppo’s cousins. The cousin had been sent to tell the school that Moppo would be gone for the year. My best friend, Herbie, tells the cousin not to bother. We’ll tell the school, he says. That’s because Herbie’s got a great idea, a surefire way for us to get up some money for hot dogs at Coney Island. Herbie wants to tell everyone at school that Moppo has died. That way, we can take up a collection for flowers for Moppo’s family—and use the money to get the hot dogs. It’s foolproof. Moppo’s family is in Arizona, and the phone line in their apartment has been disconnected. Nobody would discover what we’d done until Moppo returned the next year—and by then we’d have all moved on to high school.

  Our plan worked perfectly. Too perfectly. The principal found out about our flower collection and became so moved that he organized an end-of-the-year assembly in honor of the late Gil Mermelstein. At this assembly, an award was going to be presented to a high-achieving student. Not only that, but he asked me, Herbie, and Brazzi Abbate, our third conspirator, to be onstage when the award was presented. And! The principal invited the New York Times to cover the event.

  You can imagine what happened when Moppo made one of the great recoveries in medical history and returned to school on the very day and hour of the assembly.

  The translator was spontaneous and brilliant. The kids cracked up at all the right points. They had so many questions afterward. My part of the presentation started to go longer than the allotted time and someone put up a signal to stop, but Carlos Slim just waved his hand as if to say “Let it go.”

  His assistant had made plans to take me on a tour of Mexico City and show me some of the family’s artwork. I later found out that when Carlos heard, he said, “No, no. I’m taking Larry. Get me a car.”

  It’s not often that Carlos drives—for reasons of security. But you never would have known. He was weaving through the streets, showing me where he played when he was a kid. What a vibrant place. Such beautiful architecture—I had no idea. It made me realize how much time I’ve spent in the studio in front of a backdrop of the world, yet there is so much of that world I haven’t seen. But it’s never been about touring the pyramids for me. It’s always been about the people I meet. The great part
of the ride was the feeling. Carlos was showing me around the old neighborhood like a guy from Brooklyn.

  Garth Brooks says that there are people who you hear are extraordinary, and then you meet them and find out they’re ordinary—and that’s what makes them extraordinary. That’s the definition of Carlos Slim. I’d never met a guy quite like him—and yet meeting him felt like the first day I met my oldest pal, Herbie.

  My temporary cancellation never came up in our conversation. But if we’d talked about it, I think Carlos would have understood. I wanted to spend the time with my boys, and everything about Carlos revolves around family. He has three sons and three daughters. The sons all grew up in one room. The daughters grew up in another. Carlos obviously could afford to give them each their own room. The point was, he wanted them to be close. One brother gave another a kidney.

  Carlos’s wife died of kidney disease. He moved to a much more modest home, but he kept the old house exactly the way it was. He won’t even reupholster a chair. He is as attached to that house as I am to the stories of my childhood. His wife had turned him on to art, and he had accumulated some incredible pieces. He’s got Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross. You know that Rodin sculpture, The Thinker? There were people who criticized it. They said that Rodin could only make big sculptures. So Rodin made a small Thinker. Carlos has it. At the time of the event he was in the process of constructing a museum in the name of his wife to house his collection so that he could share it with all of Mexico. When he spoke about it, there was something in his tone that was strangely familiar, so familiar that I almost didn’t recognize it at first. Then it hit me. He spoke about the art with the same pride that you’d hear in my voice if I were walking you through my trophy room. My trophies aren’t trophies. They’re all memories that tell me something about life.

  Dinner was scheduled for ten o’clock that night. When I told Carlos that I don’t stay up late, he moved it up to eight o’clock. I hadn’t brought a tie on the trip. I was the only one in a large group who showed up at dinner without a tie. Carlos took off his tie.

  I had so many questions to ask him.

  You own so many companies. How do you stay on top of them all?

  After you buy ten suits, how can you be just as curious about the eleventh? How do you maintain your interest?

  I was thrilled when he agreed to come on my show. The little kid in me has always pinched myself when I get to meet people like Carlos. And when I hear that Carlos Slim is pinching himself in order to believe he’s meeting me, it makes me pinch myself again. Is this reality?

  There was a movie made years ago about reality, perception, and money that I really love. It stars Gregory Peck and it’s called The Million Pound Note.

  Peck plays this down-and-out American sailor on a fourteen-foot cutter who gets lost in a gale and is picked up by a British steamer. He arrives in London penniless and shabby, in need of a job. He’s walking down the street when two rich men see him. They make a bet. One says that simply giving Peck a million-pound note will lead him to riches and fame. The idea is that Peck wouldn’t even have to cash it—the aura of the note would bring him wealth. The other man bets that there’s no way the note could make Peck what he wasn’t.

  So they call him in and give him this envelope. They tell him if he wants a job he must bring back what’s inside the envelope in thirty days. If he doesn’t bring it back, he’ll be out on the street again. They don’t give him anything else. All Gregory Peck has got as he goes out the door is this envelope.

  He hasn’t had a meal for a while and goes into a fancy London restaurant. Naturally, the staff doesn’t want such a shabby guy inside. But he gets a table and eats. When it’s time to pay the bill, he opens up the envelope and is shocked to find the million-pound note.

  He gives it to the waiter to pay his bill. Of course, the restaurant doesn’t have the cash on hand to break it. The staff assumes Peck is an eccentric millionaire and begins bowing to him. No charge at all, sir. They’re delighted merely to be in his presence. Please, come back anytime.

  The subplot is he meets a wonderful girl who doesn’t realize he’s wealthy and falls for him. Everyone else is mesmerized by the note. Peck goes to a swanky hotel and it’s Right this way, sir. He goes to a tailor shop, is measured and outfitted. The bills keep mounting, but nobody asks him to pay.

  When the girl hears that he’s rich, that he’s not who she thought, she leaves him. But word of his wealth attracts everyone else. He becomes a front man for a gold mine. People invest in the mine simply on the strength of his recommendation, which has merit only because of the note.

  Then the note is stolen, and people start getting suspicious. Just as an angry mob of investors converges on him, the guy who took the note returns, raises it for all to see and saves his reputation. There’s a happy twist: The girl comes back when she finds out that Peck is the regular guy she’d fallen for in the first place. In the end you’re back at the beginning. You’re left to wonder: What is wealth? The way you’re seen, or who you actually are?

  The movie came to mind when I was told about a funny situation Carlos got into when he arrived in L.A. to appear on my show. Carlos didn’t want the interview to be overly serious, so he thought he’d inject a little surprise by wearing colorful suspenders. He didn’t bring any with him from Mexico, so he decided to buy a pair. Easy enough. Carlos is the majority shareholder of Saks Inc., the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue. So he goes to visit the one in the heart of Beverly Hills.

  Everybody at Saks, his assistant is thinking, is going to faint when they realize the owner is in the building.

  “Of course not,” Carlos tells her, “nobody’s going to even recognize me.”

  He walks in and, sure enough, nobody has any idea that the owner is on his way to the men’s department. He’s certainly not dressed as shabbily as Gregory Peck coming off the boat—but you get the irony. He owns the store and everybody he passes assumes he’s just an ordinary shopper.

  A salesman comes over to him in the men’s department. Carlos asks to see some colored suspenders.

  The sales guy says, “Well, we’ve got some nice white ones. But if you really want colorful suspenders, you should go to this store two blocks away. They’ve got a great selection there.”

  The assistant is standing behind Carlos—so Carlos can’t see her. Her eyes are squinched shut. She’s gritting her teeth. Her head is furiously shaking back and forth. Silently, she’s trying to save the salesman’s job: No, no, no!

  But the sales guy is adamant. “It’s a great shop. You’ll see, they offer everything you’d ever want to see in suspenders.”

  Carlos is very calm. “Yes,” he says. “But I’d like to find the suspenders here.”

  “I’m telling you,” the guy says. “You don’t want to buy suspenders here. Take my word for it, go to this other shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carlos says. “But do you work for Saks? Or do you work for this other store?”

  “Of course I work for Saks,” the salesman says. “But I don’t want to waste your time.”

  So Carlos convinces the salesman to sell him a pair of white suspenders. Never tells the guy who he is. Then he goes to the other store. Why? Because he’s a businessman and he wants to see what his own store is lacking and why his own salesman would send him elsewhere. Just as the salesman suggested, that’s where he ends up buying the colorful suspenders.

  You walk away from the story the way you walk away from the Gregory Peck movie: with questions. Was the sales guy working against his own company? Would the customer never again see Saks as his first option for shopping? Or did the sales guy help the store in the long run? Would the customer return to the men’s department at Saks to buy something else simply because he trusted the sales guy’s recommendations? In the end, both the movie and the story have little to do with money. They’re about something much deeper. Which is exactly what made me so proud of my interview with Carlos Slim. By the end of that h
our, anybody who tuned in could no longer see Carlos Slim as a number. They saw him for the man he truly is.

  He employs 250,000 people in Central America. He runs his businesses with austerity—no frills during the boom times. Until recently, there were no corporate headquarters. Management had their offices in individual factories. His goal is to distribute income so that it will lift the entire region. Owning thirty cars or forty watches has no meaning to him. He compares it to buying toy after toy for a child who’s too busy opening the wrapping paper to ever play with the first one. When we met he was financing 120,000 surgeries a year. I have an idea of what that means to him, because my cardiac foundation saves a life almost every day. Both Carlos and I have had open-heart surgery. It’s jokingly called the Zipper Club. It’s an exclusive group: people who’ve had a surgeon physically touch their heart understand each other—and their time—in a way that others never will.

  I didn’t tell Carlos about some of the guests I’d invited before he came for dinner. I’ll never forget the childlike look of astonishment on his face when he whispered, “Is that Ernie Banks?”

  The evening was surreal. The Chicago Cubs great was in my home. And there was Carlos Slim, in a catcher’s stance imitating Yogi Berra and receiving a pitch from the mayor of Los Angeles. My eleven-year-old, Chance, was casually talking to the all-time home-run record holder, Barry Bonds. As I looked on, I could imagine myself running down the street by Ebbets Field following the Dodgers after games. Not for autographs. I just wanted to ask them questions. Why did you bunt in the fifth inning? Chance has been in the Dodgers dugout many, many times. Tommy Lasorda once carried out his birthday cake at spring training. Now he was listening to Barry Bonds talk about hitting strategy as if it were simply an interesting conversation. Did he even understand the life that he was living? Or was that impossible? Because, to him, it was normal.