The Billionaire Who Wasn't (49 page)

Feeney had a different explanation. “I am never daunted by the depth of a problem because if you are signing up to help you have to assume there are problems,” he said. “I didn't go before because I only go to places on the track where I am going.” South Africa was a major physical as well as psychological diversion. His travels took him around the world, but it was a fixed elliptical route that he traversed over and over, from New York to San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and back to New York, or else the other way around, the itinerary always
recorded in ballpoint pen in a school exercise book that Feeney, who disdains computers, likes to call his “Jesuit's lap-top” and takes with him everywhere.

Feeney changed his mind, however, and went to South Africa some days in advance of the board meeting, giving Healy an opportunity to set up meetings with people who might influence his opinions. One of these was ex-African National Congress general secretary Cyril Ramaphosa, the powerful union leader who helped negotiate a peaceful end to apartheid. They met for lunch in Johannesburg's Sandton district in the private room of a restaurant that was once a famous brothel. They found a common interest in the Northern Ireland peace process. Ramaphosa and former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari had been invited by the IRA to verify the decommissioning of its secret stores of weapons. He regaled Feeney with cloak-and-dagger stories of how the IRA made contact with him. “I was told to go to a pub in Paris and read the
Financial Times
and to be inconspicuous,” he said. “Me? A black man?” An IRA man in dark glasses sidled up, and he was spirited to Ireland, where he ended up standing in Irish bogs, still trying to look inconspicuous, as caches of weapons were opened up and counted. Feeney had his own stories of adventures on the back streets of Belfast when making contact with Gerry Adams.

“The point of meeting Cyril Ramaphosa was to try and demonstrate to Chuck Feeney that this is not a ‘basket-case' country, that there are terrific people here who are going to secure its future, and that it is a place where philanthropy can invest its money and be reasonably sure of getting a return,” said Healy. It succeeded. As they parted, Feeney grasped Ramaphosa by both hands and told him, “Our work in South Africa has only just begun.”

Feeney also sat riveted while Alistair Sparks, South Africa's best-known journalist, gave the Atlantic directors an overview of the country's history in the eleven years since it moved from pariah status to a fast-growing stable democracy, and again when retired chief justice of South Africa, Arthur Chaskalson, one of the heroes of modern South Africa, spoke about the shift into constitutionalism in South Africa at a dinner for grantees held at the Howard Hotel. The evening ended with a group of students from the Music School of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, singing arias by Puccini and Verdi.

Atlantic Philanthropies directed the bulk of its funding in South Africa toward higher education, donating substantial sums to major universities such as Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal in Natal province. Operating
with a staff of five in Johannesburg under the direction of Gerald Kraak, a writer whose novel
Ice in the Lungs
won the European Union Literary Award in 2006, it has also given funding to organizations ranging from the Pietermaritzburg Gay and Lesbian Network to the museum at Robbens Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and it has paid for activists in Northern Ireland to come to South Africa to discuss conflict resolution.

Always on the lookout for university heads with vision and energy, Feeney told Brian O'Connell, the rector (president) of the University of the Western Cape, “We have come to the right place,” after O'Connell explained over lunch, with considerable passion, what the mission of the university was. At a dinner at the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town the next night, Mamphela Ramphele, who along with the murdered student leader Steve Biko was one of the founders of South Africa's Black Consciousness movement in 1969, spoke about why people should invest in South Africa. Urged on by John Healy's wife, Yvonne, Feeney made a short speech, the bottom line of which was that there was more work for Atlantic Philanthropies to do in South Africa.

“As the board visit proper progressed, you could see almost on a daily basis his mind changing because he kept encountering the most wonderful people, who are heroic in what they have done or are doing and have enormous obstacles to overcome, and he realized that this is a special country not just because of what it had shown to the world in the last few years in terms of moving from tyranny to democracy but because of the potential to lead Africa out of its present mess into a better future,” said Healy.

Feeney duly recruited South African academics into his worldwide network of university leaders. At his suggestion, Brian O'Connell brought a delegation from the University of the Western Cape to Australia to start building links with universities there. John Hay, president of the University of Queensland, began a collaboration with O'Connell on public health, AIDS research, and language acquisition. Students from South Africa were given the means to study in Brisbane and upgrade their qualifications.

In late 2006, asked if he would consider another geography, Feeney, then seventy-five, replied, “I wish I was younger.”

CHAPTER 32

The Old Turks

The four founding shareholders of DFS, who started with nothing and became fabulously wealthy, were by the turn of the century leading very different lives. Today they have little or no contact with each other, though Bob Miller, Alan Parker, and Tony Pilaro own chalets on the same wooded hill-side at the tony ski resort of Gstaad in Switzerland. Feeney and Miller have not spoken since their last meeting before the sale. Nor have Miller and Pilaro. Feeney and Pilaro have met just once. Only Alan Parker continues to have cordial relations with the other three, though he himself did not see Miller or Pilaro for five years after the split.

On one thing Feeney's partners agree. They were extremely fortunate that the Irish American entrepreneur came into their lives, and they are happy to acknowledge his role in making them rich. Chuck Feeney “is a very special human being, there is no question about it,” said Bob Miller. “There is absolutely no doubt Chuck was the visionary and the driving force in DFS,” stated Alan Parker. “Feeney is a peripatetic, brilliant, goal-driven, visionary ... he had success written all over him,” reflected Tony Pilaro.

Bob Miller treats his wealth in conventional ways. He and his wife, Chantal, have become members of global high society. The
South China Morning Post,
Hong Kong's English-language daily, once described his and Feeney's opposite lives as “the story of the billionaire prince and the billionaire pauper.” Miller resides most of the year in a magnificent house on the Peak in Hong Kong, where he is the richest Western resident. From early August to
the end of January—the grouse-shooting season—he can be found in England at Gunnerside, a shooting lodge on his private estate in Upper Swaledale, Yorkshire, which includes the largest grouse moor in England.

The elegant stone-walled lodge is set in an amphitheater of meadows, blanket bog, and heathlands. An adjacent enclosure contains free-range pheasants. Fit and tanned, and with a full head of silver hair, the seventy-two-year-old billionaire was wearing a zip-up jacket bearing the logo of his yacht, Mari-Cha IV when he reminisced one November evening in 2005 about his relationship with Feeney and his own attitude toward great wealth. Over dinner, in a room hung with large oil paintings of dogs and hunting scenes, Miller talked with some regret about the breakdown in his relationship with the partner who helped propel him to billionaire status. They were never really close, he said, but in the early days they were the “Young Turks,” and those were the best days.

As his butler, Andrew, formerly first footman to the Queen Mother and dressed in regulation black waistcoat and striped trousers, poured Chateau Gruaud Larose 1998, Miller reflected on how his attitudes to wealth were shaped by his childhood experiences, which were not dissimilar to those of Chuck Feeney but had very different effect. “I was born in 1933 and grew up in the Depression,” he said. “I can remember my father wouldn't get paid until Saturday morning, and the Friday night dinner was always rather meager because my mother would have run out of her house money by then. It would be baked beans and brown bread. My father was very good at managing what little money he had, and I guess I learned all that from him. I could always make money. As a kid I was always delivering newspapers and usually had cash in my pocket. I worked as a short-order cook at nights while a student at Cornell. I waited on tables in the fraternity house and got my food free. I went right from high school into college and got a small scholarship that helped. My parents had to pay about half, and I could make the other half.”

His Scots-Irish mother used to tell him, he said, “Money is like manure, spread it around and fertilize things and make things grow and happen—in other words you should enjoy it.” That was her philosophy, and “I think a very good one.” As DFS dividends grew, he noticed Feeney being more troubled about whether they really deserved that kind of success, but “making more money never did seem to bother me; you take where it comes and enjoy it, you know.”

The Millers' lifestyle changed when they became wealthy. They spent on a grand scale, throwing multi-million-dollar parties and mixing with the crowned heads of Europe. In New York, they bought Bill Cosby's town-house on the Upper East Side for $18 million in the mid-1980s and filled it with expensive art and antiques. In addition to elegant homes in Hong Kong, Paris, and London, they acquired a chalet in Gstaad and a holiday home on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, a hideaway for celebrities like Keith Richards and Julia Roberts.

In 1994, the Millers paid $13 million for Earl Peel's 32,000-acre Gunnerside estate—now expanded to 40,000 acres—and Chantal Miller spent several million more upgrading the hunting lodge, installing antique furniture and artwork and outfitting the guest bedrooms with fabric wallpaper and Fabergé alarm clocks. Miller employed a gamekeeper to organize the burning and draining of the moor every year to provide ideal conditions for the traditional sport of the aristocracy, breeding and shooting pheasants.

From the time he started accumulating money, Bob Miller indulged his passion for boats. He and Chantal spent much time sailing on Mari-Cha III, an oceangoing yacht replete with artwork, marble surfaces, and Honduran mahogany paneling. His $10-million, 140-foot, super yacht Mari-Cha IV, became the fastest yacht ever to cross the Atlantic. “This is what life's all about. The only reason you make money is that you can do something like this,” Miller told a
South China Morning Post
reporter, after first breaking the Atlantic record in 1998. He and his twenty-three-member crew shattered the west-to-east transatlantic speed record by more than two days in 2003 in the sailboat emblazoned with a red dragon logo. Like Feeney, Miller does not put his name on things. He once remarked dismissively that if Donald Trump owned Mari-Cha IV, “he'd have his name written all over it.”

Miller sent his three daughters—Pia, Marie-Chantal, and Alexandra—to the Institut Le Rosay finishing school in Switzerland, and as they emerged into society, they were feted in
Vanity Fair
as the “Three Graces.” “Not since the Gilded Age have three heiresses been so well betrothed,” proclaimed
W,
the American fashion magazine, which reported that for Alexandra's twenty-first birthday, Miller had the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Plaza, New York, transformed into a 1920s speakeasy for a white-tie dinner costing more than $500,000. The three sisters were regularly included by style writers among the fifty best-dressed women in the world.

They all had fabulous marriages. In 1992, Pia wed Christopher Getty, a grandson of oil billionaire J. P. Getty, at a lavish ceremony in Bali, where hundreds of Indonesian children showered them with rose petals.

Marie-Chantal married exiled Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece, prince of Denmark, in London in 1995, bringing a dowry of £130 million from her parents, according to
Majesty,
the British royal magazine. Miller paid for a vast reception and dinner at Hampton Court, home of King Henry VIII, which witnessed the biggest gathering of European royalty since the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

“We had the Queen of England and the Queen Mother, plus members of the royal families of Greece, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Italy, Holland, Bulgaria, and Jordan,” Miller recounted with a chuckle over the crème brûlée. “When I made my father-of-the-bride speech, I had to say, ‘Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Highnesses, Your Holiness, Your Excellency, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. . . .' Quite a mouthful!”

Three months later, his youngest daughter, Alexandra, married Prince Alexandre von Furstenburg, son of Prince Egon and fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg. Miller paid for a sumptuous black-tie ball for 650 guests, including singer Dolly Parton, socialite Bianca Jagger, and TV celebrity Barbara Walters, in a vast tent resembling a Chinese pavilion in New York's Battery Park.

Wealth and the marriages propelled the Millers into the exalted ranks of European high society. Bob Miller's shooting guests in August for the first drive of
Lagopus scoticus,
the red grouse that is indigenous to the British Isles, often included European royalty. He had so many friends in different royal families that when Cornell alumnus Fred Antil, after meeting Prince Egon, told Miller that he had met “the Prince,” Miller replied, “Which one?”

Bob Miller established his own investment vehicle, the Search Investment Group, in 1970 and based it in Hong Kong. Search manages third-party capital and has invested over the years in a home shopping network in China, casinos in Italy and Greece, and real estate in the United States. The Miller family also created two charitable foundations, concentrating on scholarships for the needy, health and welfare for underprivileged children, environmental conservation, youth, arts programs, and the Asia Society, said Miller. But he keeps his affairs very private. There is no public record of the
extent of his giving. He made it clear that most of his fortune will be passed on to his family.