Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar Read Free Book Online

American Express as well as other big names, such as the fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Johnson did it with generosity. “You had to be careful never to say you liked his sweater, because he’d take it off his back and give it to you,” recalled one Standard Brands executive. He did it with a carefully cultivated sense of style, including the grand entrance. Johnson arrived twenty minutes late, punctually, to everything. “If you’re on time, no one notices you,” he would say. “If you’re late, they pay attention.” And he did it with his usual good humor, telling the best dirty jokes in the club car each morning and being the most convivial partner on the golf course.
    Johnson’s immediate business challenge was to keep Standard Brands from collapsing. No sooner had he taken the helm in 1976 than sugar prices fell, hammering Standard Brands’s key corn sweetener market and leaving the company with operating profit declines for two straight years. Johnson had his young controller, Ed Robinson, put together what he called a “bad things” report, highlighting all the company’s rotten corners. One was the liquor division, which held huge inventories of wine. Johnson met with the “bottle kissers,” as he called the vintner-managersthere. “Oh, Meester Johnson, this eez too good to sell,” they said of the wine, as Johnson later related the story. His response: “Cut the price in half and move it.”
    A former accountant, Johnson camouflaged the company’s poor results with an occasional bit of financial sleight of hand, sometimes stretching generally accepted accounting principles to their generally accepted limits. Even when Standard Brands was posting profit declines, however, Johnson couldn’t muster any interest in cutting costs. “Give me the guy who can spend creatively,” Johnson would say, “not the one who’s trying to squeeze the last nickel out of the budget.” (The public relations department, which took care of entertainment and extravaganzas, was headed by a man Johnson liked to call, among other things, “Numero Uno.” Mike Masterpool, he said admiringly, is “the only man who can take an unlimited budget and exceed it.”) But line managers had to scramble from quarter to quarter to make their numbers. The unofficial motto of the day was “Get through the night.”
    Johnson tried to compensate for the company’s poor showing by devising jazzy new products, an effort that led to what one analyst called “some of the most celebrated failures in the food industry.” The first was Smooth ’N Easy, an instant gravy mix sold in the form of a margarine bar, which could be melted in a skillet and whipped into chicken gravy, white sauce, and brown gravy flavors. The result of Johnson’s all-night brainstorming sessions, it bombed in the supermarket. Johnson’s move into Mexican foods flopped, too, crushed by the marketing muscle of a competitor, Frito-Lay.
    In 1978 Johnson’s love for sports and knack for marketing disasters combined in the ill-fated Reggie! bar. Named for one of Johnson’s new friends, baseball star Reggie Jackson, the candy was handed to each fan entering Yankee Stadium on opening day that year, and when Jackson swatted a home run, Reggie! bars came raining onto the field. The Reggie! itself was a chocolate-and-peanut-cluster concoction made for years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and called the Wayne Bun; Johnson had simply renamed it and taken it national. (Its namesake didn’t help any. In promotional appearances Jackson seemed less interested in talking baseball than talking up pretty women.) Sales flagged, and by 1980, Reggie! was sent to the showers. (Jackson, however, was not: For years Johnson kept him ensconced in a company apartment, complete with a company car and a personal-services fee of $400,000 a year.)
    If this all seemed a tad chaotic, Johnson didn’t mind. In fact, he encouraged it. Ever the Pesketteer, he reorganized Standard Brands twice a year,