In-N-Out Burger (24 page)

 

It was during one of Guy's better stretches in 1995, while separated from Lynda, that he reconnected with Kathy Touché (
née
Nissen). Kathy was the girl whom he had had a crush on when he was in high school and she was just thirteen. A divorced mother of three, the petite blonde was working at her father's restaurant, Norm's Hangar, on the tarmac at Brackett Field in La Verne. A local institution, Norm's was known as a great spot to watch planes take off and climb up over the San Gabriel Mountains and for its all-day breakfasts and chatty waitresses. Although many years had passed, the two still shared many interests. As it turned out, they had both experienced profound grief as well. About two weeks after Rich Snyder had died, Kathy's older brother Johnny Nissen was killed while racing his all-terrain vehicle in the California desert.

The pair began talking on the phone and dating in earnest. According to Kathy, Guy would fly down to Brackett Field and meet her at Norm's. This time around, Guy seemed to display none of his high school shyness. On their first date, Guy picked Kathy up in a restored 1936 panel delivery truck for a romantic dinner at El Encanto, a rambling estate tucked into the middle of the Angeles National Forest in nearby Azusa Canyon. In her voice, which sounds a lot like a Lucinda Williams song—molasses over gravel, she explained, “We had a lot in common. We liked street racing and concerts, and we had a lot of fun together.” At the time, however, Kathy insisted that she had no idea of the depths of his problem with drugs.

By the time the couple reconnected, Guy had already begun his long, dark descent. But like many addicts, Guy was also something of a magician. According to Kathy, most of the time Guy went into his office and closed the door. For a surprising period of time, he was able to hide his abuse even as it escalated to other substances—in
time he was shooting up heroin. Unlike many addicts, Guy also had the means to infinitely enable his use. Surrounded by an entourage of helpmates and aids, Guy had only to snap his fingers to procure a never-ending supply of drugs.

According to some, he was surrounded by sycophants and hangers-on; others say that his closest friends were simply at a loss, unable to do much for Guy except pick up the pieces—or baby-sit a grown man bent on self-destruction, a man to whom a great number of them owed their livelihoods. A small cadre saw to it that he went into rehab and escorted him to hospital emergency rehabs following multiple accidental overdoses. But like all addicts, Guy couldn't hide from the effects of his addiction forever. In January 1996, about a month after his Claremont arrest, Guy had a drug-related heart attack.

During this time, according to friends, his estranged wife, Lynda Snyder, and her children (now grown) took a tough love approach to Guy. They rarely saw him. He was said to be deeply hurt by the rupture; he had helped raise Lynda's daughters, Traci and Terri, and loved them deeply. But nothing seemed to pain him more than the separation from his daughter, Lynsi, who was just starting her teenage years and was living with her mother up in Shingletown. According to intimates, Lynda made a decision to keep Guy away from his daughter because of his drug use. “She was his whole world,” said one person close to the family. Dale Wright recalled that the family simply cut their contact with him. “Lynda didn't allow Guy to see Lynsi much. She limited her time. He didn't get to see her very often. I don't know how often, but he wanted to see her more often than he got to see her.”

On January 23, 1997, Guy and Lynda Snyder's divorce became final. She retained the Flying Dutchman ranch that (according to the
Orange County Register
) was valued at $1.4 million as well as child and spousal support, the paper reported, of $500,000 a year.

Eight months later, on September 28, Guy married Kathy Touché; he was forty-six and she was forty-two. Just two days before the couple's wedding, Guy gave her a prenuptial agreement to sign. “I told him we should have one,” she recalled sharply. “But I said that
he better not show up with it the week of the wedding. And that's exactly what he did.” As Kathy described it, In-N-Out's lawyers drew up a lengthy agreement that would give her very little in the event of a divorce. “I took it to a lawyer in Newport Beach to read,” she said. “He looked up at me and said, ‘Does this guy even like you?'” In the end, she signed it. “I wasn't after the Snyders' money, and I thought by signing it I'd be demonstrating my love and loyalty,” she explained. “I had a private conversation with Guy, and I said to him, ‘You said that you would help to take care of me.' And he knew that I wasn't going to take him for a ride.”

Guy and Kathy married in a small ceremony in front of one hundred guests—mostly family and some of the couple's old high school friends—at a church in Newport Beach. Fifteen-year-old Lynsi did not attend the nuptials. The reception was held aboard
The Wild Goose
, a 1942 World War II minesweeper that the actor John Wayne had converted into his private 136-foot luxury yacht. The wedding party cruised off of Lido Isle in Newport Harbor. In a photograph taken at their reception, Kathy, who is wearing a simple white shift and pearls, is seen dancing cheek to cheek with Guy, who is pressed tightly against his new wife, a Champagne flute in each of their hands.

Following the reception, the pair drove off in a classic 1940s Kaiser Steel Willys that Guy had spent five years restoring. He got a one-day road pass from the city to drive the car on the streets of Newport Beach, and the hulking, vintage U.S. military jeep was so loud that it set off all the alarms of the parked cars as they drove away.

After a Hawaiian honeymoon, Guy, Kathy, and her three children moved into a $1 million house in Claremont. An affluent city at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in the Pomona Valley, Claremont was filled with tree-lined streets, historic buildings, and the group of seven Claremont Colleges. In fact, the city's outsized proportion of trees and residents with advanced degrees had earned it the moniker as the “the city of trees and PhDs.” The Snyders' sprawling new house had six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and a huge yard with a pool, Jacuzzi, and sauna. It was the biggest house that Kathy had ever lived
in, and she called it “overwhelming.” Actually, she said later, “It was too big. It didn't feel like a home.”

During this time, Guy seemed to function well. He was engaged with the business of In-N-Out. One of his goals was to buy back as many of the leased stores as possible. In fact, he converted a section of the Claremont house into an office. When he went to the company's headquarters, Guy commuted by Lear Jet. Often he flew back into Brackett Field and met Kathy, who was still working at Norm's Hangar (which she eventually took over from her father). It wasn't uncommon for Guy to arrive, put on Kathy's apron, and help clean up. “People would've died if they knew the CEO of In-N-Out was bussing tables,” she laughed at the memory. “He loved nothing more than to eat a patty melt on the patio and bus tables.” At one point, Kathy said, he made an offer to buy Norm's—but she refused. “I said no. You leave my family business alone and I'll leave you yours.”

With Lynsi up in Shingletown and Guy in only sporadic contact with his daughter, he focused on life with his new family. Guy bought a junior dragster for Kathy's thirteen-year-old son, Aaron, and flew the boy and Guy's In-N-Out racing team to a track in Phoenix. “That was really neat because their father wasn't too involved in their lives at the time,” she recalled. And Guy took his new father-in-law and brother-in-law on Alaskan fishing trips. “They had a ball. He really admired my father,” she said. “He was just a big kid. He liked to drive tractors and get stuck in the mud. He'd spend all day getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes I think he'd do that just so he could get pulled out.” The family took frequent trips to the cattle ranch in Arroyo Grande. (It was something of a consolation prize, since he had lost the Flying Dutchman in his divorce settlement with Lynda.)

Accompanied by his new wife, Guy Snyder traveled overseas with the managers (and their spouses) who were rewarded each year as part of In-N-Out Burger's 100 Percent Club. Europe—Amsterdam in particular—was a favorite destination. Harry Snyder's family was originally from Holland. In addition to the family connection, Guy was fascinated by the city's cafés, where one could buy marijuana.

One 100 Percent Club trip to Amsterdam was particularly memorable for Guy. Guy and Kathy flew the Concorde to Europe, stopping in New York en route where they stayed at the storied Plaza Hotel's two-level, seven-room presidential suite overlooking Central Park. After New York, the couple flew to London for three days before arriving in Amsterdam for a four-day trip. On the itinerary was a performance of
The Phantom of the Opera
in New York, dinner at a sixteenth-century castle in London, and trips to the tulip farms of Holland.

Prior to this particular trip, Guy had hired a genealogist and a private detective to track down his father's relatives in Amsterdam. Once there, they met for the first time, and the reunited families took a boat cruise and had lunch together. It was during this visit that Guy looked into buying a Sherman tank and a vintage windmill to be sent back home. Once Guy discovered that shipping charges would run in excess of $1 million, however, he changed his mind.

 

Now that Guy was chairman of In-N-Out, he no longer had his brother looking over his shoulder. One of the first things that he did after Rich died was to step up In-N-Out's involvement in racing. He purchased a suite at the Pomona Fairgrounds, where the Winternationals were held, and liberally passed out tickets to friends and In-N-Out associates.

In 1996, Guy approached Jerry Darien, whom Guy had known since he was kid running elapsed time slips at the Irwindale Raceway in the 1960s. A former teacher, Darien had worked as an announcer at the Dale when Harry Snyder was part owner in the track. The two met at a Mexican restaurant in Pomona. In addition to the Funny Car, Guy was interested in putting an Alcohol Car team together, and he wanted Darien to head up the effort. Guy agreed to sponsor a team. “There was a handshake,” recalled Darien, who hadn't lost his sonorous announcer's voice in the intervening years, “and away we went.” The team won its first race in Boise, Idaho, a divisional contest, in April 1997. Six months later, at the end of the season, Guy decided to end In-N-Out's association with the Over the Hill Gang.

Two years later, Guy called Darien again and asked him if he could put a Top Fuel team together. Darien was given three months to assemble a car and enlist a driver. Guy agreed to pay somewhere between $1 million and $2 million for the sponsorship, to be distributed on a quarterly basis. Darien tapped twenty-six-year-old Melanie Troxel, who earlier raced the Alcohol Car, to drive the Top Fuel car. She was one of the NHRA's fastest female dragsters (and the daughter of the 1988 NHRA Alcohol Dragster champion Mike Troxel). The team's first race was to be at the Winternationals in Pomona, in February 2000.

Guy's time at the top was short-lived. His troubles soon escalated, taking away from his ability to function—let alone fulfill his duties as the company's chairman. Simply put, the years of abuse had caught up with him. Guy rarely checked on the warehouse or meat departments anymore. He was spending less and less time at the company, and meetings that would once have been postponed to accommodate his absences now went on without him. The professional management team that Rich had put in place, those men whom Esther referred to as “my boys,” implemented the company's agenda with her guidance. In the final years of the 1990s, anyone could see that Guy was in bad shape.

On October 27, 1997, Tom Wright was stopped at the San Ysidro Port of entry near San Diego at the Mexican border. There, U.S. customs agents searched Wright's 1997 In-N-Out–owned Ford Explorer, where they found a cache of drugs that included fifty 120-milliliter bottles of a codeine/ephedrine mixture; four bottles of 21-milligram Rohypnol; approximately 1,000 tablets of muscle relaxants; and miscellaneous containers of inhalants and nasal spray.
^*
According to arrest documents, Wright told the agents that he had traveled to Tijuana
to purchase “medicine from a nearby pharmacy for his personal use,” paying roughly $1,500 for the supply.

Wright's wife, Dale, however, said that her husband had gone down to Tijuana at Guy's request in order to buy a number of sleeping pills, asthma inhalers, and other prescription drugs for his use. “It wasn't the first time,” she said. “But it was his last.”

Dale, who had accompanied her husband a few times on these trips to Mexico, said that in hindsight “I didn't care for [Tom] doing it, but it was part of his job, being Guy Snyder's assistant. It was something he had to do or take the results and hit the road. We couldn't help it, and it was better than trying to get them all the time through different doctors.”

Years later, Dale still shudders at the memory of what she called her husband's first brush with the wrong side of the law. “It was just horrible,” she said. “We were afraid that Tom would go to jail.” Guy told the couple not to worry; he assured them that he would pay for any of the financial fallout from the episode. For a time, they kept the entire affair under wraps. The Explorer was impounded, and, as Dale recalled, they explained its disappearance to company managers by telling them the engine blew up.

In December, two months after his arrest, Tom Wright went before the U.S. District Court in San Diego. He was charged with illegal importation of a controlled substance, pled guilty to misdemeanor possession of codeine, and was sentenced to one year's unsupervised probation and fined $1,000. According to his wife, Wright had to pay an additional $40,000 to retrieve the Explorer and about another $100,000 went toward legal fees. Guy kept his word, said Dale, and paid for the entire mess.

By then, Guy's continuing decline was hard to ignore. It was around this time that Guy was diagnosed with porphyria, a complex medical condition often triggered by alcohol and drug use and associated with a variety of ailments including nervous disorders, a severe skin condition, and blue urine. The disease, often cited as the source of King George III of England's mental illness, left Guy's hands covered with open sores that needed to be frequently cleaned and wrapped.

It appeared that even Guy could not overlook the fact that he was trapped in a downward spiral. Just four days before Wright's arrest, in one of his more cogent moments, Guy made arrangements to obtain a legal order appointing successor trustees to the Esther L. Snyder Trust in the event that he died, became incapacitated, or failed to serve as trustee before his daughter, Lynsi, turned thirty (when she was to receive the second installment of the trust, giving her a majority ownership of the company). Guy apparently realized that he needed to do something to protect his only child and the only living direct descendant of the Snyder family. A year earlier, the terms of the trust transferred the majority of In-N-Out's shares to Guy Snyder. His daughter was just a teenager, and she was the sole beneficiary of those trusts worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Lynsi alone stood to inherit In-N-Out Burger.

Three cotrustees were named: Douglas K. Ammerman, an accountant with Peat Marwick; Richard Boyd, longtime Snyder family friend, In-N-Out board member, and the company's vice president of real estate and development; and Tom Wright. In the event that Ammerman, Boyd, or Wright should cease or fail to act as a cotrustee, Mark Taylor, Guy's former stepson-in-law and the chain's director of operations, was named to serve with the remaining trustees. On October 23, 1997, Esther Snyder, the trustor, signed the order before Judge George Olafson of Los Angeles Superior Court.

The new agreement was set up in such a way that no new successor trustees could be subsequently named. If any two of the trustees failed or ceased to act, then the remaining two would serve as cotrustees. Likewise, should the three named cease or fail to act as cotrustees, then the remaining cotrustee would become the sole trustee. It was a straightforward order intended to protect the entwined futures of In-N-Out Burger and its young heiress, Lynsi Snyder. It was this seemingly clear-cut order that later emerged as a factor in an ugly and protracted internal squabble that proved to be a major turning point in the private, family-owned company's history.

The point of contention hinged in part on the naming of Mark Taylor as a replacement successor. During this time, among intimates
(including his wife, Kathy), Guy questioned Taylor's abilities and seemed to grow uncomfortable with what he believed was Taylor's growing ambition. According to Kathy, “Guy had every intention of firing Mark.” Others concluded that it was Lynsi's mother, Lynda, pulling the strings up in Redding, who agitated to install Taylor, her son-in-law, as a successor cotrustee. Whatever the case, Guy was in no position to put up much of a fight. For Guy, time was running out.

 

In-N-Out provided a stark contrast to Guy's unspooling life. In February 1997, the chain unseated Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers after eight years at the top of
Restaurants & Institutions
magazine's annual survey of the nation's best burger chain. It also happened to be the first year that In-N-Out had qualified for inclusion. It was a feat all the more remarkable because at the time, Wendy's had about 4,757 stores across the United States, and In-N-Out, with 124 stores in just two states, was competing with all of the large national chains, edging out Burger King (third) and McDonald's (sixth).

The same year In-N-Out earned the
Restaurants & Institutions
recognition, Esther Snyder was singularly honored. At seventy-seven, she was inducted into the California Restaurant Association's Hall of Fame. A year later, the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation bestowed Esther with its Lone Sailor award. Given to those who have distinguished themselves following their navy careers, demonstrating honor, courage, and commitment, the Lone Sailor had been awarded previously to President John F. Kennedy, former
Washington Post
editor Benjamin Bradlee, author Herman Wouk, and Senator John McCain.

The company was moving forward with new plans of its own. After more than four decades spent alongside freeway off-ramps and suburban intersections, In-N-Out Burger's management team decided, as the turn of the millennium approached, to push further into select urban areas. In a radical break with tradition, In-N-Out unveiled its boldly designed store number 119 in Westwood on the edge of the UCLA campus. It looked nothing like any In-N-Out store that had come before. Stephen Kanner, a celebrated Los Angeles architect
known for his pop modern style, created a sculptural burst of bright red and yellow with soaring, sweeping boomerang angles. The neon In-N-Out sign appeared to jut through the cantilevered roof and the glass drive-through allowed motorists to see inside the kitchen from their cars. From the street, the whole building served as a kind of billboard. The store, which Kanner called “a dream commission,” quickly racked up a slew of architectural awards.

The chain was now looking to position itself into other high-density and heavily traveled locations. A far cry from the outlying areas where it had traditionally planted its crossed palm trees, In-N-Out was increasingly moving, at least as far as its locations were concerned, from the outside in.

Kanner hoped that the new store marked the beginning of a new visual brand for the chain. “I got really excited,” he recalled, and he came up with a series of computer prototypes that would allow the chain to adapt the Westwood design to other locations and still be cost competitive. However, it was not to be. Kanner was told that the Westwood restaurant was too visual. Back at In-N-Out headquarters, Kanner lamented, “They said the burgers should be the star.”

 

As Guy's tenuous hold on his professional activities slipped, his marriage to Kathy was quickly unraveling as well. According to Kathy, the main problem was Guy's louche activities. She had grown increasingly disenchanted with the marriage and felt betrayed by her husband's escalating drug use. Fingering the one-of-a-kind, solid gold Double-Double hamburger pendant around her neck that Guy had commissioned for her, she said, “I feel so stupid, I didn't see the signs,” clearly anguished. “I had no clue until after we were married—the severity of it. It was like Elvis. Nobody stopped him. Nobody said no to Guy.”

On April 28, 1998, Guy Snyder filed for divorce. The two briefly reconciled—“I kept hoping things would get better,” Kathy said—but then on May 18, 1999, he once again filed for divorce. She moved out of the large Claremont house they shared and into a smaller house
nearby. “It was pretty mutual and amicable,” she said. “Guy really had drug issues and I did not want to be subjected to that life he chose.” During their brief marriage, Guy seesawed between rehab and overdoses. “You can't make a marriage like that,” she said, looking back. “I know he'd have given anything to come to terms with it.” Her tone softening she added, “He was wonderful when he was clean and sober. He was fun, and he was
sooo
handsome.”

The couple's divorce moved fairly quickly. The prenuptial that Kathy had signed gave her little leverage. All of the couple's property, according to Kathy, was in In-N-Out's name: “our house, the ranch up in Arroyo Grande, and all of our cars. In-N-Out had their hands on everything.” While at court in Orange County, Kathy said the judge displayed little sympathy for her. “He told me that I should consider myself lucky that I got to live the lifestyle of a millionaire's wife while I had the time,” she laughed. In the end, she said, “I left with more than I went in with and a lot of wonderful memories.”

 

In his last years, one would hardly guess that Guy was the scion of a multimillion-dollar company. Scruffy and unshaven, bloated and overweight, he resembled a vagrant. Guy no longer cut the dashing figure he once had as a young man in denim with a silver belt buckle and a purposeful stride. Disappearing behind sunglasses and under baseball caps, large T-shirts, and baggy shorts, he was lapsing into a state of dysfunction. In the spring of 1999, he came down with pneumonia, and before the year was up he had suffered and recovered from three drug overdoses. As his behavior grew increasingly erratic, Guy was prone to memory lapses and simply wandering off.

Largely estranged from his family, Guy was worn down and felt increasingly isolated. He moved out of the spacious home he had shared with Kathy in Claremont, and the millionaire who could check into any luxury hotel instead holed up in his motor trailer that was parked inside the old In-N-Out Burger warehouse in Baldwin Park.

At times, and briefly following his divorce, Guy would stay up at the Flying Dutchman Ranch, hoping to see his daughter. Ironically,
throughout 1999, Lynda was involved in Guy's hospitalizations after his bout with pneumonia as well as his overdoses.

Toward the tail end of the summer of 1999, Guy once again flew up to Shingletown in an attempt to see his daughter, installing himself in a guest house on the property at the Flying Dutchman Ranch where she was living. According to Dale Wright, Lynda was not happy about this and called her husband, Tom, in the middle of the night and asked him to fly up and take Guy away. “She told Tom that she didn't want him dying up there on her, and asked Tom to come and get him,” recalled Dale. Wright caught an early morning flight out of Fox Field in Lancaster and flew up to Redding.

In September, not long after Wright had extracted Guy from his ex-wife's house in Shingletown, Guy moved in with the Wrights. Guy had his mobile trailer transported from the Baldwin Park warehouse to the Wrights' property in Lancaster, located on the dry scrubs of the Mojave Desert on the outskirts of the Antelope Valley, north of Los Angeles.

At the Wrights', Guy had good days and bad ones—on some days, he could count on just a few good hours. As Dale remembered it, “You could tell he was going downhill.” Some nights he spent just wandering around their house. The Wrights installed a second telephone line in their house for Guy because, as Dale explained, “he loved to talk on the phone.” Sitting on their porch, Guy held forth about In-N-Out and drag racing and seemed excited about plans to launch his new Top Fuel team.

Then, on the morning of November 6, 1999, Guy disappeared. Dale remembered the day clearly because it was the wedding day of her eldest daughter, Janet. It wasn't the first time that Guy had gone missing—but this time they couldn't find him. At about 8:00 a.m., the Wrights called the police to report that Guy was gone. Sheriff's deputies found him wandering near a desert road and brought him to the hospital. When they located Guy, he was disheveled and wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt with the In-N-Out logo.

Not quite a month later, at around midnight on December 4, the Wrights were sitting in their living room watching the TV Land
channel with Guy when their eighteen-year-old daughter Darci noticed that Guy was slumped over in the chair where had been sitting. He had collapsed and was not breathing. “I remember thinking ‘oh my God,'” said Dale. Her husband put a blood pressure cuff on Guy, but he had no pulse, and they called the paramedics. The emergency medical team arrived at about 12:30 a.m., but they found Guy unresponsive. Exactly two minutes after arriving at the Antelope Valley Hospital at 1:10 a.m., Guy Snyder was declared dead; he was forty-eight years old. Sheriff's deputies, who had arrived on the scene unaware of who Guy was, took note of his simple clothing and unexceptional motor home and wrote “Unemployed” on their report.