Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (15 page)

He was staying abreast of the latest developments in this field and was also building his network of contacts. He made it a point to devour every piece of MESBICS literature he could get his hands on.

In Washington, Lewis frequently ran into childhood friend Dan Henson (to whom he had sold his first paper route). Henson worked for the SBA and later the Minority Business Development Agency. In “the mid- to late-70s, Reggie was getting pretty sophisticated in terms of his knowledge of how to do deals. He was learning the art of the deal,” Henson says.

With his overcoat draped over his shoulder and briefcase in hand, Lewis would stride into MESBIC meetings in Washington, make contacts, then dash out the door and head back to New York—sometimes after just an hour.

In 1970, the same year he left Paul, Weiss, Lewis encountered someone who became a major client, friend, and future business confidant rolled into one. Lee Archer had just retired from the Air Force and was put in charge of running General Food’s MESBIC, which was known as Vanguard. A no-nonsense former fighter pilot, Archer had been scouting around for a lawyer familiar with the MESBIC industry. Though Lewis had only two years of experience then, he came highly recommended to Archer.

The young lawyer dropped by Archer’s office, where the two men sized each other up. Lewis was impressive as usual.

“I decided he was just what I needed,” Archer recalls. “He knew a heck of a lot about venture capital and he seemed to have the personality to sit on the board. He was smart, he was straight-forward and honest. He liked the kinds of things I liked, like plays and concerts.”

Lewis was eventually named as legal adviser and member of the board of both Vanguard and a Specialized Small Business Investment Company formed by General Foods known as North Street Capital.

Lewis participated in an incredible 64 business deals funded by General Foods. Being on the board also meant Lewis got a piece of
the action in some of the transactions, including a movie by the name of “River Niger,” which was financed by $40 million in MESBIC money. Lewis and Archer both owned the rights to the music in that movie.

When black-owned Johnson Publishing and another company made individual bids to take over
Essence
magazine, Lewis and Archer possessed just enough stock to hold the crucial swing votes to approve or kill the deal. Lewis believed that
Essence
was already well managed and in excellent hands, so he and Archer nixed the takeover attempt, even though they would have profited handsomely if they had sold their stock.

By helping block the
Essence
takeover, Lewis had thwarted the ambitions of the then-wealthiest black man in America, John Johnson, who owns Johnson Publications and publishes
Jet
and
Ebony
magazines. (Lewis would later supplant Johnson at the top of the
Black Enterprise
list of the 100 largest black-owned companies with his acquisition of Beatrice International.)

Lewis and Archer worked well together in that they were somewhat similar: Both were formal, rather reserved, and not given to wasting time when there was business to be taken care of. Occasionally the two would disagree. Nevertheless, Lewis later named Archer to the board of directors of both McCall Pattern and TLC Beatrice International.

Word of mouth about the quality of his legal work was starting to bring dividends for Lewis. In 1973, Lewis managed to snare the largest MESBIC of them all—Equico Capital Corp., a subsidiary of Equitable Life. Then-Equico president Mackey felt Lewis’s work was head and shoulders better than that of Equico’s own in-house lawyers. Mackey wound up funneling Lewis all of Equico’s work.

“He was very thorough,” Mackey remembers. “He was always what I call a businessman’s lawyer. Some lawyers basically were so conservative they would spend most of their lives telling you what you could not do. Reg’s attitude and approach to doing work was to figure out how to get done what it was you wanted to get done. And the quality of documents, in terms of making sure you were well protected and that you had proper covenants in your loan agreements, was good.”

Lewis often went above and beyond the call when it came to helping his clients. Mackey had a car with Washington, D.C., license plates that New York City police loved to ticket for not having New York
tags. When Mackey’s citations reached a critical mass, Lewis agreed to accompany him to the city parking violations bureau, where Lewis successfully negotiated a 50 percent reduction in Mackey’s large fine.

Years later, when Lewis tried to take Beatrice public in 1989, with Merrill Lynch as the primary underwriter, Lewis made the black investment firm Pryor, McClendon, Counts & Co. Inc. an underwriter as a favor to Mackey, who was employed there.

As had been the case since high school, Lewis still had an affinity for fine clothing, when he could afford it. One of his shopping excursions led him to a small, black-run clothing store in Manhattan named LeMans Haberdashers. Lewis was impressed by the cut of the clothing, which came primarily from Italy and France, and by the manner in which it was displayed.

The LeMans visit started an interesting business and personal relationship with the shop’s three proprietors, including Kermit Morgan, that generated more than its share of laughs and heated discussions.

Lewis felt comfortable around Morgan, a fellow black entrepreneur fighting to make a living in the rough and tumble of New York City. Morgan found Lewis to be very funny, ambitious, and committed to helping other black businesspeople.

Lewis would always exhort Morgan to give back to the community by helping other black entrepreneurs who had the potential to excel, but hadn’t been exposed to essential contacts or financing sources. Lewis envisioned a network of black entrepreneurs that would be able to prosper by sharing information and helping others avoid pitfalls.

Morgan recalls that as far back as the early 1970s, Lewis was setting aside time to share his business expertise with black businesspeople, free of charge. But he was doing it quietly and selectively. Nothing was more valuable to the discerning Lewis than his time: It couldn’t be wasted on someone lacking a total commitment to achieving success.

If Lewis harbored expansion-oriented dreams for himself during his days as a lawyer, he also had them for some of his clients. Lewis was impressed with LeMans, which had two stores in Manhattan. But Lewis envisioned it becoming even grander. He and Morgan butted heads constantly over whether the business should expand beyond its two locations and beyond targeting black consumers.

“We argued all the time,” Morgan laughs. “He wasn’t right all the time, although he thought he was.”

Using his contacts, Lewis enabled Morgan to open a third store in Columbia, Maryland, an affluent, largely white bedroom community between Baltimore and Washington. The store did poorly and eventually closed.

“I guess what we learned from Reggie was to think large, because he had more exposure than we to raising capital and he stressed thinking on an international level,” Morgan says.

More than a decade before Lewis purchased Beatrice, the seeds of doing business on an international scale had already taken root. In 1974, Lewis helped LeMans get $500,000 for business expansion purposes, a transaction Lewis “put together rather simply, based on his contacts,” according to Morgan.

Lewis was more than just another attorney who drafted contacts or reviewed leases. He was always prodding Morgan to accompany him to the Harvard Club, or to wine-tasting sessions, activities the down-to-earth Morgan hated. Lewis wanted to introduce Morgan to influential white businessmen who might prove valuable to both of them later on.

“But it just wasn’t my style,” Morgan says. “He meant well and he wanted to expose us to big money, he really did.”

Their business relationship ended on an unhappy note. Morgan’s version is that he and his two companions—while generally very impressed with Lewis’s work—felt he was just a tad too nice when negotiating with LeMans’s business opponents. More than once, Lewis was reminded that he was being paid to represent LeMans, not the other side.

Charles Clarkson questions Lewis being too “nice” while negotiating for a client. “That would have been out of character for Reg,” Clarkson says. “He was always very zealous when it came to representing a client.”

But it says something about Lewis that his friendship with Morgan survived even after their business relationship broke up.

Lewis’s prestige was burgeoning; his income was rapidly growing. However, despite all this and his Harvard law degree, the fact that he was black meant he could be “put in his place” within a matter of seconds.

Once a casually dressed Lewis came to 30 Broad Street on a Saturday to do some work. Lewis nonchalantly nodded to the security guard as he strolled past his desk. The guard ordered him to stop and state his reason for being in the building.

Lewis was justifiably outraged. Sensing the challenge was really about race as much as anything, Lewis felt the blood rushing to his face. Hassling a person on his skin color made as much sense to him as discrimination based on shoe size or the shape of one’s earlobes. Could anything be less germane to a person’s intrinsic worth?

“Reg was very sensitive about that,” Charles Clarkson says. “He had a sense that he was black all the time and people treated him a certain way and he was always on guard. It was a big part of his life.”

Still angry hours after the incident, Lewis mailed off a strongly worded letter to the building manager. Lewis knew nothing would come of his complaint, but failing to vent the rage eating away at him would be unhealthy and to stay passive in the face of bigotry would be untrue to himself.

One night, Lewis was changing a tire on his Mercedes outside of his Manhattan brownstone. Two city policemen pulled up behind Lewis’s car and ordered him to spread his legs and place both hands on the hood of his vehicle. Lewis protested that not only did he own the Mercedes, he owned the brownstone, too. After the cops were shown the registration for the car, they apologized and drove away. Lewis later told a friend that during the confrontation he couldn’t help but think, “I pay more in taxes than these guys make in salary.” Wisely, he did not articulate that observation.

When confronted with racism, Lewis’s response was to meet it head on. If he felt a maitre d’ placed him too close to the kitchen, or that a waiter delivered indifferent service, Lewis would buttonhole the manager and bring it to his or her attention. Once when a taxicab passed him by in Manhattan, Lewis set out on foot after the offending driver. Sprinting at top speed along a New York City sidewalk packed with people, Lewis edged close enough to the cab to write down its number on a scrap of paper. He folded it, put it in his wallet and dashed off an angry letter to the city taxicab commission the same day.

Lewis brought the same intolerance for bias to the workplace. “He never tolerated even a hint of condescension or bigotry in his personal or his business dealings,” TLC Beatrice General Counsel Kevin Wright says.

“I will not tolerate racism anywhere, from anybody on any joke or anything,” a deadly serious Lewis once told his brother, Tony Fugett. “I will stop the president of the United States if he makes an inappropriate statement and tell him that it is inappropriate right then, at that point in time. Period.”

Lewis didn’t care for discrimination in any of its ugly manifestations or guises, including homophobia. A month before he passed away, he and his family had scheduled a skiing trip in Vail, Colorado, and had put down a $16,000 deposit, when an antigay law was passed. Even though his youngest daughter, Christina, wanted to go skiing badly and Lewis had to forfeit $16,000, he canceled the vacation, rather than be a party to a discriminatory situation.

One sunny weekend morning in 1982, Lewis and a classmate from his Harvard days, Bill Slattery, were driving from Manhattan to a summer camp in Massachusetts. Lewis’s daughter Leslie was a camper there, as was a daughter of Slattery’s. Lewis was in the passenger seat of Slattery’s car, which was new, and Slattery’s son was in the back seat. As they rode along a heavily traveled Connecticut road at a 56 mph clip, they passed a state trooper parked under a tree. The trooper immediately pulled out and settled in directly behind Slattery’s car.

After a cat-and-mouse routine that went on for three miles, the trooper finally turned on his siren and flashing lights. The lawman left his cruiser, made an exaggerated display of adjusting his gun holster and started walking toward Slattery’s car. Lewis turned to Slattery and said, “See what it’s like?” There was no sarcasm or anger in his voice, just a trace of resignation. The trooper wrote Slattery a ticket for speeding, a citation he and Lewis felt was unjust, and got back in his patrol car.

“There was no question in my mind or my son’s mind or Reg’s mind that if Reg hadn’t been in that front seat, he wouldn’t have stopped us,” Slattery says.

Luckily neither of Lewis’s daughters were with him, because he didn’t want them exposed to racism, even though he knew it was inevitable. When Christina was still a little girl, he took her to see “The Nutcracker” at New York’s Lincoln Center one Christmas, and she asked an innocent question about something taking place on stage. An elderly white woman behind Lewis remarked that Christina needed to be quiet and Lewis turned around and leveled the woman with an acidic retort and a withering stare. He felt badly about it
afterward, but still believed the woman would have remained quiet had an inquisitive white child asked the question.