The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (20 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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“Gold, too,” I said. “There’s a lot of gold here, too.”
I had been prepared for the gold, having recently seen a portrait of him sitting on a gold chair, wearing a gold tie, with a gold suit of armor by the door and a gold crucifix on the mantelpiece.
“Well,” said Al. “Gold is shiny. Sharks.”
He pointed at a sculpture of four sharks encircling the planet. “I believe in predators,” he said. “Their spirit will enable you to succeed. Over there you’ve got falcons. Alligators. Alligators. More alligators. Tigers.”
“It’s as if both Midas and also the Queen of Narnia were here,” I said, “and the Queen of Narnia flew above a particularly fierce zoo and turned everything there to stone and then transported everything here.”
“What?” said Al.
“Nothing,” I said.
“No,” he said, “what did you just say?”
He shot me a steely, blue-eyed stare, which I found quite debilitating.
“It was just a jumble of words,” I said. “I was trying to make a funny comment but it all became confused in my mouth.”
“Oh,” said Al. “I’ll show you outside. Would you like to walk or take the golf cart?”
“I think walk,” I said.
 
 
We wandered past several extravagant oil paintings of his German shepherd dogs. There was a famous seven-week period during the mid-1990s, when he was laying off the 11,200 Scott employees, that he demanded Scott pay for two suites at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia—one for himself and his wife, Judy, and another for his two German shepherds. He has a son, Troy, from his first marriage, but I noticed there were no pictures of him anywhere, just lots of portraits of the German shepherd dogs and grand, gold-framed, life-sized oil paintings of Al and Judy, both looking serious but magnanimous.
We took a walk across his lawns. I spotted Judy standing near a stone sculpture of a sweet, tousle-haired child that overlooked the lake. Judy was blond, like Al, and wearing a peach sweat suit. She was just gazing out across the lake, hardly moving.
“You visited a plant one time,” I said to Al. “You asked a man how long he’d been working there. He said, ‘Thirty years.’ You said, ‘Why would you want to work at a company for thirty years?’ He saw it as a badge of honor but you saw it as a negative.”
“A negative to me,” he replied. “And here’s why. If you’re just going to stay someplace, you become a caretaker, a custodian. Life should be a roller coaster, not a merry-go-round.”
I wrote in my notepad,
Lack of empathy
. Then I turned to a clean page.
“Shall we get some ice tea?” he said.
 
On our way to the kitchen, I noticed a framed poem on his desk, written in fancy calligraphy, a few lines of which read:
It wasn’t easy to do
What he had to do
But if you want to
be liked
Get a dog or two.
 
“Sean had it done for my birthday,” he said.
Sean was Sean Thornton, Al’s longtime bodyguard. “If you want to get a friend, get a dog,” said Al. “We’ve always had two. I hedge my bets!”
I laughed but I knew this wasn’t the first time he’d used this line. It was on page xii of the preface of his autobiography,
Mean Business
: “If you want a friend, get a dog. I’m not taking any chances; I’ve got two dogs.”
And in the unofficial biography
Chainsaw
, John Byrne writes about an occasion back in 1997 when Al invited a hostile financial analyst, Andrew Shore, to his home:
“I so love dogs,” Dunlap said, handing Shore photographs [of his German shepherds]. “You know, if you want a friend, you get a dog. I have two, to hedge my bets.”
Shore had heard the exact line before, in one of the many articles he had read about Dunlap. But he laughed.
 
 
I wrote in my notepad,
Glibness/Superficial Charm.
He is always ready with a quick and clever comeback [but] may actually provide very little useful information.
Michael Douglas says something like it in the 1987 movie
Wall Street
: “If you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there.” I wondered if the screenwriters had taken the line from Al Dunlap, but later I discovered that he hadn’t been the only bigwig to say it.
“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog,” Harry Truman had apparently said during his presidency, according to the 1975 biographical play
Give ’em Hell, Harry!
“You learn in this business, if you want a friend, get a dog,” said the corporate raider and pharmaceutical chief Carl Icahn at some point during the mid-1980s.
“If you want to be liked, get a dog,” said the host of CBS’s
Inside Edition
, Deborah Norville, in the early 1990s. “The people you work with are not your friends.”
 
 
We gathered in the kitchen—Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard.
I cleared my throat.
“You know how I said in my e-mail that your amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a fascinating theory. It’s like
Star Trek.
You’re going where no man has gone before. Why are some people enormously successful and others not at all? The kids I went to school with had a lot more privileges than me but they’re not successful. Why? What’s different? Something’s different! It’s a question that’s been on people’s minds for generations! And that’s why, when you mentioned this amygdala thing, I thought, ‘Hmm. That’s very interesting. I’ll talk to this fellow.’ ”
“I have to tell you that some psychologists say that if this part of your brain doesn’t work properly, it can actually make you . . .”
“Mmm?” he said.
“Dangerous,” I mumbled inaudibly.
I suddenly felt incredibly nervous. It was true that I had already asked two people—Tony and Toto—if they were psychopaths, and so I ought to have been used to doing this. But this was different. I was inside a man’s mansion, not a maximum-security prison or a mental hospital.
“Sorry?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”
“Dangerous,” I said.
There was a short silence.
“In what respect?” he said thinly.
“It can make you”—I took a breath—“a psychopath.”
Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard stared at me. For a long time. I was in over my head. What did I think I was doing? I’m not a licensed medical professional or a scientist. Nor, if I’m being honest with myself, am I actually a detective. I blamed Bob Hare. He hadn’t
told
me to do this, but I never would have had I not met him. His checklist gave me false confidence that I could make my way in this land of psychopaths. I should have listened to Adam Perkins’s warnings. I’m not a detective, not a psychologist, and I didn’t even score that well when I self-diagnosed with the
DSM-IV
.
They looked at once deeply angry, befuddled, and disappointed. Al had let me into his home and I was being compelled by circumstance to ask him if he was a psychopath. It is not illegal to be a psychopath but, still, it’s probably very insulting to be asked if you are one.
“I’ve got a list of personality traits written down here that define psychopathy,” I said, pointing at my pocket.
“Who the hell are the people who make the list?” said Al. “What are their
names
? I bet I never
heard
of them!”
At this I realized I could turn the situation around to make Bob take the blame in absentia for the unpleasantness.
“Bob Hare,” I said. I pronounced his name quite clearly: “Bob Hare.”
“I never
heard
of him!” said Al, a triumphant glint in his eye.
“Never heard of him!” Judy agreed.
“He’s a
psychologist
,” I said. I exhaled to indicate that I felt the same way he presumably did about psychologists.
Al pointed toward a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeb Bush, as if to say, “
Those
are men I have heard of!”
“So, that list . . . ?” said Al. He looked suddenly intrigued. “Go ahead,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” I said. I pulled it out of my pocket. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
“Okay. Item one. Superficial charm.”
“I’m totally charming,” he replied. “I am
totally
charming!”
He, Judy, and Sean laughed, easing the tension.
“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I asked.
This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.
 
 
Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth
, I had written in my notepad earlier.
His inflated ego and exaggerated regard for his own abilities are remarkable, given the facts of his life.
 
 
In fact, on my way here I had made a detour to Florida State University in Tallahassee to see the Dunlap Student Success Center. It had been built with a $10 million donation from Al and Judy and was without doubt an ostentatious monument to them and their German shepherds. There was a huge painting of them and the dogs on the lobby wall in which Judy was wearing a leopard-print blouse and Al was wearing a gold tie. There was a bronze plaque into which Al’s and Judy’s faces had been carved above a button that, when pressed, played a recording of Al sermonizing on the subject of leadership. (There were no good leaders left, his oration basically said, and if America wanted to survive, they ought to develop some dynamic ones fast.)
I had asked Kelly, one of the building’s managers, to show me around the center.
“We are thrilled that the Dunlaps chose to give their money to an opportunity to develop citizenship and leadership and the career life story of Florida State students,” she told me.
“Al isn’t known for being the most charitable person,” I replied. “Have you reflected on why the change?”
“I can speak only to the opportunity to do good in this physical space that his gift has made possible,” she said.
“I’ve heard he collects sculptures of predatory animals,” I said. “Eagles and alligators and sharks and bears. Any animal that goes ‘ARGH!’ It strikes me as a strange hobby. Has he ever spoken to you about that hobby?”
“We have not had an opportunity to speak to that,” she said, looking like she wanted to kill me. “We have talked about the opportunity to be together in this space and for Florida State students to learn.”
“Al says life is all about winning,” I said. “What do you think about that?”

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