My mother and Aristotle Onassis had something in common - notwithstanding that my mother was a single parent who had struggled to feed her two sons and Onassis was a multibillionaire with a fleet of oil tankers. They both knew the importance of what I'd later understand in the corporate world as "positioning," and they both knew how to use it to their advantage.
Pebble Beach & Horses
Although we were poor, my mother negotiated a brilliant arrangement. We became rent-free caretakers of the most palatial mansion in Pebble Beach. The absentee owners had put the house on the market, but at such a high price that, luckily for us, buyers were hard to find. I was told it was Byzantine architecture with all the stone and marble imported from Europe and reassembled on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Stone stairs led down to the ocean where a swimming pool and dressing rooms had been carved out of the rocks. There was a beach on the ocean side, protected by giant boulders and heated by hot water pipes underneath, so the sand was always warm, even on the foggiest days. The main bathroom had a giant black marble bathtub in the middle of the room under a mother of pearl skylight. There were real gold fixtures and the floor was made of gold tiles. Throughout the house were dozens of marble columns of every color. I started to count them once, but lost track. We were the poorest people in Pebble Beach living at the grandest address.
I remember, too, the exotic foods to be found in the walk-in pantry - all inedible to my young mind. Shelves of caviar, foie gras, and bottles of truffle oils. Surrounded by these questionable luxuries, there were times when, hard as my mother tried, she was unable to provide food for her boys' dinner, to say nothing about feeding herself. On these occasions, she searched the refrigerator to come up with a few olives, maybe an egg, a chopped onion, a pickle, and some crackers, but always served with a flourish under candlelight, saying, "This is how the rich people eat."
My mother knew instinctively the same advice I was given many years later by one of the world's wealthiest men. It was after a memorable New Year's Eve as the guest of Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis at the club, El Morocco in New York City. Mr. Onassis expressed interest in my profession and reaffirmed the importance of positioning. He offered his own rules: "Drink where the rich drink, even if it means sipping one drink. Live at an upscale address, even if it's the worst accommodation in the neighborhood. Exercise! Stay tan, even if you use a tanning lamp. To most people, a tan suggests success. Don't talk about your troubles, or eat too much in the middle of the day, or sleep too much. Don't request small loans, assume big ones, and a pay them off promptly." The takeaway from Onassis was to be successful, you must assume, and live the qualities and characteristics of the identity to which you aspire. My mother and Onassis both understood the importance of putting yourself in an advantaged environment, where good things were likely to occur.
During my days growing up in Pebble Beach, there was a horse stable nearby. I used to walk over and watch the kids riding their horses and taking lessons; watching was free but a membership to the golf club, tennis club, beach club, or yacht club was out of the question.
Dick Collins, a man who over time became my surrogate father and reappearing supporter, ran the stable. Unknown to me, he was a key figure in the United States Equestrian Team. He hated idle kids and put me to work doing miscellaneous tasks. Once, he told me to go close the door on a horse's stall. I did it and came running back puppy-like for my next task. Dick said, "Why didn't you pick up that rope?"
I said, "You didn't tell me to."
He shot back, "You mean you would walk right by a rope on the ground and not pick it up?"
It was then that I realized that I needed to think about what I was doing around this man.
After doing increasing tasks for a couple of months, without pay, Dick gave me my first riding lesson when I was ten years old. I was naturally pretty good at it. I had more lessons, got better, started exercising horses for the wealthy owners and eventually began teaching riding.
On a typical day, I'd get up at 6 a.m. to feed, water, un-blanket, and clean the stalls for about thirty-five horses. Then, I'd catch the bus to school. After school, I would practice with the football, basketball, or track teams and then repeat the morning by returning to the stable - cleaning the stalls, feeding, watering, and blanketing the horses. Horses and riding became my world; school and studying were far from my mind. On weekends, as I got older, I would take or teach riding lessons and lead celebrities on trail rides through the woods.
My friends became the young guys training for the Olympic Equestrian team and I also had hopes of making the team. In my future would be several trips with Dick Collins to Ireland for fox hunting, but more about such wonderful experiences later, as they are a recurring theme in my life.
Motion pictures are another motif that first appeared in my life around this time. My mother had a part-time job soliciting ads for the local Carmel newspaper, The Pinecone. As a "journalist", she was given two movie passes, which my brother and I took full advantage of, seeing every movie that came to town. At that time, they were all double features, and the play bill changed three times per week! We must have seen hundreds of movies. I could never have envisioned the role this early fascination with Hollywood and films would play later in my life.
Football & College
By the time I was seventeen years old, I was too big to compete in equestrian events - six foot three and 190 pounds. Because we were living by the grace of others, I felt pressure to be nice to everyone, and a quiet anger grew within me. Playing defensive tackle on the football team was a good fit. I liked hitting people hard. And, the harder I hit our opponents, the more praise I received. I was voted All-League in my junior and senior years, and I was captain of the team in my senior year. We were undefeated both years.
I'd never even given a thought to college. Generous teachers had given me charity Cs, but with no money for college, it wasn't happening. Yet once more, my mother negotiated a miracle. Three Stanford University benefactors arranged for me to receive a football scholarship to play for Menlo, the most expensive and elite junior college in California. The idea was that if I earned good enough grades during my freshman year, I could transfer to Stanford and play football there.
One Menlo classmate, a crown prince of Saudi Arabia, drove a custom-made Ferrari; another arrived at school driving a supercharged white 1957 Thunderbird, towing a white supercharged scarab racing boat. Two brothers from Texas, who were not doing well in their studies, were sent a train full of polo ponies, grooms, and a trainer. They did better from that point on. My mother had put me in an extraordinarily advantaged (if not skewed) environment.
At Menlo, we had to wear coats and ties to dinner. We sat at tables for six to eight guys, and a faculty member sat with us to encourage thoughtful discussion and good manners. The faculty member at our table one evening was Duvall Hecht, an English professor. When some of my classmates were involved in a prank that resulted in damage to the football field, he stood up, expressing his disappointment that the students would behave in such a manner, while acknowledging that young men often have excess energy to burn.
He offered to start and coach a rowing team that could race on the West Coast that year, and if we did well enough, could go to the Olympic trials the following year.
When he said "Olympics," my ears perked up! Here was an Olympic sport where, unlike with horses, my size and strength were assets. I threw myself into training under Coach Hecht, who, I later learned, had a master's degree from Stanford in literature, was a former Marine fighter pilot, and had won an Olympic gold medal in rowing. Later in life, Coach Hecht would create "Books on Tape" and sell it to a major publisher, becoming a multimillionaire. It was then that he started looking for another job. I think he must have been about seventy years old, but no one would hire someone that age. So, he learned to drive big diesel rigs, got hired as a trucker, and spent several years doing long hauls in the western states, getting paid for driving and for listening to all the books on tape which he'd never had time to hear. He was clearly an out-of-the-box thinker!
Back at Menlo, between early morning rowing practice, morning and afternoon classes at school, football practice, and trying to squeeze in homework, I had too much to do and too little time. Hesitantly, I went to my scholarship benefactors and told them I wanted to focus on rowing instead of football. They generously said, "Phil, if you have found something you are passionate about, go ahead, and you can keep your scholarship."
Rowing & 1960 Olympic Hopes
Our crew did very well in the first year, and in our second year, Coach Hecht decided that we should take the best four oarsmen from our eight-oared shell and travel to the East Coast to compete as a "four without coxswain" in the races leading to the Olympic trials for the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
We needed a new racing shell, which cost $1,600. Divided by four, it meant we each needed to contribute $400 plus more for all our travel expenses. As I didn't have the money, my teammates all generously chipped in...
