The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (19 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“What did this place used to be?” I asked Brad.
“The old movie theater,” he replied. “I remember when it opened. We were all real excited. We were going to have a movie theater! We were going to have something to do! They showed one movie and that was it. They shut it down.”
“What was the movie?” I asked.
“
Night of the Living Dead,
” said Brad.
There was a silence.
“Appropriate,” I said.
Brad scanned the remnants of Main Street. “Al Dunlap doesn’t understand how many people he hurt when he closed down the plant,” he said. “To a small town like this? It hurt.” His face flushed with anger. “I mean,
look
at this place,” he said.
 
 
The old Sunbeam plant was a mile out of town. It was big—the size of five football fields. In one room three hundred people used to make the toasters. In another room three hundred other people used to package them. I assumed the place would be abandoned now, but in fact a new business had moved in. They didn’t have six hundred employees. They had five: five people huddled together in a vast expanse of nothingness, manufacturing lamp shades.
Their boss was Stewart. He had worked at the plant until Al Dunlap became Sunbeam’s CEO and shut the place down.
“It’s good to see productivity still happening in this room,” I said.
“Mm,” said Stewart, looking slightly concerned that maybe productivity wouldn’t carry on happening in here for long.
 
 
Stewart and his friend Bill and Brad’s friend Libby gave me the tour of the plant’s emptiness. They wanted to show an outsider what happens when “madmen take the helm of a once great company.”
“Are you talking about Al Dunlap?” I asked.
“At Sunbeam there was madman after madman,” said Stewart. “It wasn’t just Dunlap. Who was the first madman? Buckley?”
“Yeah, Buckley,” said Bill.
“Buckley had a little security guy with a machine gun following him around,” said Stewart. “He had a fleet of jets and Rolls-Royces and $10,000 ice sculptures. They were spending money freely and the company wasn’t making much money.”
(I later read that Robert J. Buckley was fired as Sunbeam CEO in 1986 after shareholders had complained that even though the company was flailing, he kept a fleet of five jets for himself and his family, installed his son in a $1 million apartment at company expense, and put $100,000 on the company tab for wine.)
“Who came after Buckley?” I asked.
“Paul Kazarian,” said Bill. “I believe he was a brilliant man. Smart. A hard worker. But . . .” Bill fell silent. “I have a story I could tell you about him, but it isn’t for mixed company.”
We all looked at Libby.
“Oh, sure,” she said.
She took a long walk away from us across the barren factory floor, past cobwebs and broken windowpanes and dumpsters that were empty except for dust. When she was far out of earshot, Bill said, “One time I was failing to get some sale and he screamed at me, ‘You should suck this bastard’s DICK to get the sale!’ Right in front of a room full of people. Why would he act that way? He was a foul-mouthed . . .”
Bill’s face was red. He was shaking at the memory.
According to the John Byrne book
Chainsaw
, which details the history of the Sunbeam Corporation, Paul Kazarian would—during his tenure as CEO—throw pints of orange juice over the company’s controller and fire a BB gun at executives’ empty chairs during board meetings. But he was also known to care about job security and workers’ rights. He wanted the company to succeed without having to close down plants. He brought production jobs back from Asia and started an employees’ university.
We indicated to Libby that it was okay for her to return. She did.
“And after Paul Kazarian?” I asked.
“
Then
it was Al Dunlap,” said Stewart.
“I’m seeing him tomorrow,” I said. “I’m driving down to Ocala, Florida, to meet him.”
“What?” Stewart said, startled, his face darkening. “He’s not in jail?”
“He’s in the
opposite
of jail,” I said. “He’s in a vast mansion.”
For a second I saw the veins in Stewart’s neck rise up.
 
 
We headed back to Stewart’s office.
“Oh,” I said. “I was recently with a psychologist called Bob Hare. He said you could tell a lot about a business leader if you ask him a particular question.”
“Okay,” he said.
“If you saw a crime-scene photograph,” I asked, “something really horrifying, like a close-up picture of a blown-apart face, what would your response be?”
“I would back away,” Stewart replied. “It would scare me. I would not like it. I would feel sorry for that person and I would fear for myself.” He paused. “So what does that say about me?”
I glanced out of Stewart’s window at the plant floor beyond. It was a strange sight—a tiny huddle of five lamp shade manufacturers inside this great, bleak expanse. I had told Stewart how gratifying it was to see a business flourishing in here, but the truth was obvious: Things weren’t great.
“So what does that say about me?” Stewart said again.
“Good things!” I reassured him.
 
 
Sunbeam was, in the mid-1990s, a mess. Profligate CEOs like Robert Buckley had left the company flailing. The board of directors needed a merciless cost-cutter and so they offered the job to someone quite unique—a man who seemed to actually, unlike most humans,
enjoy
firing people. His name was Al Dunlap and he’d made his reputation closing down plants on behalf of Scott, America’s oldest toilet-paper manufacturer. There were countless stories of him going from Scott plant to Scott plant firing people in amusing, sometimes eerie ways. At a plant in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, he asked a man how long he’d worked there.
“Thirty years!” the man proudly replied.
“Why would you want to stay with a company for thirty years?” Dunlap said, looking genuinely perplexed. A few weeks later he closed the Mobile plant down, firing everyone.
Dunlap’s autobiography,
Mean Business
, was replete with anecdotes about firing people, such as this:
The corporate morale officer at Scott [was] a pleasant enough person being paid an obscene amount of money, her primary job was to ensure harmony in the executive suite. The hell with harmony. These people should have been tearing each other’s hair out. I told [Scott’s CFO Basil] Anderson to get rid of her. . . . Later that week one of the in-house lawyers fell asleep during an executive meeting. That was his last doze on our payroll. A few days later he was a memory.
 
And so on. He fired people with such apparent glee that the business magazine
Fast Company
included him in an article about potentially psychopathic CEOs. All the other CEOs cited were dead or in prison, and therefore unlikely to sue, but they took the plunge with Dunlap anyway, referring to his poor behavioral controls (his first wife charged in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and muttered that he always wondered what human flesh tasted like) and his lack of empathy (even though he was always telling journalists about his wise and supportive parents, he didn’t turn up at either of their funerals).
 
 
On the July 1996 day that Sunbeam’s board of directors revealed the name of their new CEO, the share price skyrocketed from $12.50 to $18.63. It was—according to Dunlap’s unofficial biographer John Byrne—the largest jump in New York Stock Exchange history. On the day a few months later that Dunlap announced that half of Sunbeam’s 12,000 employees would be fired (according to
The New York Times
, this was in percentage terms the largest work-force reduction of its kind ever), the share price shot up again, to $28. In fact the only time the price wavered during those heady months was on December 2, 1996, when
BusinessWeek
revealed that Dunlap had failed to show up at his parents’ funerals and had threatened his first wife with a knife. On that day, the share price went down 1.5 percent.
It reminded me of that scene in the movie
Badlands
when fifteen-year-old Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, suddenly realizes with a jolt that her tough, handsome boyfriend, Kit, has actually crossed the line from rugged to lunatic. She takes an anxious step backward, but then says in her vacant monotone of a voice-over, “I could have snuck out the back or hid in the boiler room, I suppose, but I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit for better or for worse.”
Much as in
Badlands
, Al Dunlap’s relationship with his shareholders bounced back fast after December 2, and together they went on a year-long rampage across rural America, closing plants in Shubuta and Bay Springs and Laurel, Mississippi, and Cookeville, Tennessee, and Paragould, Arkansas, and Coushatta, Louisiana, and on and on, turning communities across the American South into ghost towns. With each plant closure, the Sunbeam share price soared, reaching an incredible $51 by the spring of 1998.
 
 
Coincidentally, Bob Hare writes about
Badlands
in his seminal book on psychopathy,
Without Conscience
:
If Kit is the moviemaker’s conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a talking mask simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. Her narration is delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. If there was ever an example of “knowing the words but not the music,” Spacek’s character is it.
 
It all ended for Dunlap in the spring of 1998 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating allegations that he had engineered a massive accounting fraud at Sunbeam. Sixty million dollars of their apparently record $189 million earnings for 1997 were, the SEC said, the result of fraudulent accounting. Dunlap denied the charges. He demanded from Sunbeam, and was given, a massive severance pay to add to the $100 million he earned in his twenty months at Scott.
Back then, in the pre-Enron days, there wasn’t quite the appetite for pursuing criminal charges when the cases were as complicated as that one was, and in 2002 Dunlap’s legal troubles ended when he agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle various lawsuits. Part of his deal with the SEC was that he would never again serve as an officer or a director of a public company.
 
 
“What about his childhood?” I asked John Byrne before I set off for Shubuta. “Are there unusual stories about odd behavior? Getting into trouble with the police? Or torturing animals?”
“I went back to his high school but I don’t believe I interviewed any of his old classmates,” he replied. “I have no recall.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I know he was a keen boxer as a child,” he said.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes, he made some comments about how much he enjoyed beating people up.”
“Oh REALLY?” I said.
“And his sister once said he threw darts at her dolls.”
“Oh
REALLY?
” I said.
I wrote in my notepad:
Throws darts at sister’s dolls, enjoys beating people up
.
“What was he like when you met him?” I asked.
“I never did,” he said. “He wouldn’t see me.”
There was a short silence.
“
I’m
going to meet him,” I said.
“Are you?” he said, startled and, I think, a little jealous.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I
am
.”
 
 
The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns—he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta—was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.
Like Toto Constant’s army of plastic Burger King figurines but huge and vicious and expensive,
I wrote in my reporter’s notepad.
“Lions,” said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.”
Item 5: Conning/Manipulative
, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad.
His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey,” or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.

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