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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497672871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Series: | Power and Pleasure , #5 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 347 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Under her own name, Jessup has written three editions of the perennial favorite The Woman’s Guide to Starting a Business and has written and edited myriad nonfiction books and articles for major magazines.
A former Virginian and New Yorker, Jessup lives in Santa Fe with her husband, Jonathan Richards, a writer and political cartoonist. and is the mother of two daughters. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, PEN Center USA West, PEN Center New Mexico, and SCBWI.
Under the pseudonym Meredith Rich, Claudia Jessup is the author of five novels including Bare Essence, which was made into a CBS television miniseries and an NBC weekly series.
Under her own name, Jessup has written three editions of the perennial favorite The Woman’s Guide to Starting a Businessand has written and edited myriad nonfiction books and articles for major magazines.
A former Virginian and New Yorker, Jessup lives in Santa Fe with her husband, Jonathan Richards, a writer and political cartoonist. and is the mother of two daughters. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, PEN Center USA West, PEN Center New Mexico, and SCBWI.
Read an Excerpt
Tender Offerings
By Meredith Rich
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 Meredith RichAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7287-1
CHAPTER 1
The miniature leopard, actually a domestic Bengal cat named Shere Khan, vaulted from the patio tabletop and pounced gleefully onto an unsuspecting butterfly relaxing in a bed of dahlias. As the cat playfully mauled and chomped on its prey, Shere Khan's owner smiled approvingly. He did not seem concerned that the predatory feline had broken an antique hand-cut French crystal goblet during its spectacular leap.
"I love that damned cat," he commented to his luncheon guest, "almost as much as my wife." This was probably true: it was his first Bengal cat, and his fourth wife.
Richard Charles "R.C." Diamond, nicknamed the Dick by his adversaries and the Hope by his associates and hangers-on, fiddled with a tiny snag on his manicured thumbnail, then turned to gaze out across placid Diamond Bay. It was his bay, and this was his island, situated a few miles off the coast of South Carolina. The forty-room brick mansion, an impressive backdrop to the alfresco luncheon, had taken three years to complete. In that time, R.C. had broken four architects and caused dozens of contractors to wake up nights in icy sweats. Diamond, however, never missed a chance to point out that the project had provided employment to over a thousand workers imported from the mainland.
Originally conceived as a replica of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the finished product had mutated considerably from the initial blueprints. By the time of completion, the mansion bore little resemblance to the founding father's stately residence on a Virginia hilltop.
R.C. Diamond was a man whose mind worked overtime and changed often. No detail, however insignificant, had gone unchallenged during construction. Indeed, it had not been uncommon for whole sections of the house to be ripped apart and redone, either according to Diamond's latest impulse or his penchant for perfection.
Once, according to local scuttlebutt, R.C. illicitly imported close to a million dollars' worth of intricately carved wooden doors from Florence, true relics of the Renaissance. Upon inspection after their installation, he noticed that they were scarred and in certain disrepair, as five-hundred-year-old architectural antiques are apt to be. In a rage, he had them all removed. Then, rather than selling them, donating them to a museum, or returning them to their homeland, he had them incinerated in a huge bonfire. This was rumor, however. R.C. never admitted nor denied the story.
Fortunately, Charlotte Hunt Gwaltney—the former Charleston debutante and fourth Mrs. Diamond—had obtained control over the interiors of Diamond Bay Plantation. Charlotte had majored in art history at Hollins and hailed from a reasonably affluent old-guard family. The taste for finer things was in her genes. She had an impeccable eye for treasures, well suited to her unlimited budget.
The exterior of the house may have evolved into a sprawling hodge-podge, but inside there was total harmony of elegance and perfection. The art collection was composed of the important works of old masters. The antiques were one-of-a-kind treasures, imported from all over Europe and Asia. The carpets were exceptional specimens from wealthy oriental dynasties, still in impeccable shape. Shere Khan, the beloved cat, ate his specially prepared morsels out of an aged Limoges bowl. Dinner guests raised bites of roasted homegrown pheasant to their lips with the same vermeil forks that had once fed the Emperor Napoleon and his empress, Josephine.
Only the modern conveniences—the private airfield, helicopter port, racquetball court, state-of-the-art gymnasium, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, eighteen-hole golf course, and purified-without-chlorine swimming pools—served to remind visitors that Diamond Bay Plantation had been bought and paid for by rapacious twentieth-century means. The infamous entrepreneur-cum-corporate-raider was known to cut rough deals.
Across the patio luncheon table, Diamond's robust investment banker (actually, one of many), Frederick "Fig" Bolton, was sweating extravagantly from the high Carolina humidity. His bald head was covered by a jaunty but ill-fitting khaki sports hat that had been lent him by Diamond, as protection from the strong late-June sun. Bolton looked as miserable as he did ridiculous. It was obvious that he preferred air-conditioned corporate dining rooms to these open-air meetings with his wealthiest client.
He had been transported to the island by helicopter an hour earlier. Since his arrival, he had picked his broiled lobster clean and downed close to five glasses of iced tea. Diamond had barely touched his own lunch, save a few cherry tomatoes and a couple of bites of the grilled-radicchio-and-goat-cheese salad.
From the nearby business wing of the house, Bolton could hear dozens of phones ringing and being answered by Diamond's live-in office staff. They provided a constant reminder that R.C. never strayed far from his main obsession, making money. Bolton knew exactly why he had been summoned to Diamond Bay Plantation. He also knew better than to broach the subject himself. So, while he hungrily gobbled the lunch prepared by Diamond's three-star Lyons chef and wondered what dazzling concoction would appear for dessert, Fig passed the time by making small talk. It was something at which he was very good, and he spiced up the meal considerably with succulent gossip from Charleston and Atlanta and Wall Street.
Diamond relished knowing what was going on in his enemies' lives. The billionaire listened, without comment, as Bolton rattled on, much accustomed to R.C.'s erratic social behavior. Newcomers, Fig knew, were sometimes slack-jawed after an encounter with the mercurial Diamond. The man did not always cater to customary verbal graces. Sometimes he would lapse into deep, brooding silences, leaving his guests to ramble on nervously. When he felt the urge to speak, Diamond would burst forth, spitting out statements and questions, sometimes in unconnected, stream-of-consciousness thoughts.
The man was unsettling, no doubt about it. However, if one wanted a slice of whatever pie R.C. Diamond was preparing to dissect, one put up with the man's idiosyncracies without complaining.
Diamond's peculiar nature did exhibit a positive side, evidenced by the fact that none of his four wives had married him only for his money. It was said by one of his enemies that R.C. Diamond could "charm the pants off a spinster," when he wanted. This was true. Diamond's unpredictable magnetism lured not only women, but business associates. Diamond could dazzle, if the scenario called for it. And, once dazzled by the man, one was apt to make excuses and allowances for him. Thus, aside from his vast wealth, this unexpected ability to disarm a colleague or opponent was R.C. Diamond's greatest strength.
His greatest weakness was his restlessness, and a basic distrust of human beings. He was a man who never looked back; he held no sentiment for those who had served him well if he ultimately found them to be expendable—his current enemies and former wives, for example. Although Diamond's charisma could be matched by his cruelty, there was a short list of trusted longtime associates who seemed to satisfy him on some unfathomable level. Fig was one of these: they had met in the early days of R.C.'s success, back in Chicago when Diamond was young and hungry. These few associates, though none considered themselves friends of Diamond's, seemed permanently exempt from Diamond's hate list.
R.C. Diamond was a brilliant capitalist. He had an instinct for deals that had made him a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five, and a billionaire shortly after his fortieth birthday. People pointed out in awe that Diamond had not come from money. He had made it all on his own, with his particular brand of ingenuity.
R.C.'s father had been an accountant for a successful Ohio container-manufacturing company that had been founded by his visionary brother, Ernest Diamond. R.C.'s uncle Ernest was a lifelong bachelor. Although he did not much like children, he did notice, somewhere along the way, that the young R.C. possessed the same get-up-and-go as he himself. Ernest encouraged his nephew to reach out for greatness and cautioned R.C. never to settle for the convenient alternative.
After high school, Ernest hired R.C. to work at the plant, and loaned him money to take university business courses at night. R.C. worked hard during the day and applied himself to his studies at night. But not every night. When R.C. was nineteen, he was forced to marry his high school sweetheart because she was carrying his child.
After the marriage, R.C. worked even harder. Uncle Ernest was vastly impressed with his nephew and protégé. At twenty, R.C. suggested a plan for increasing profitability by identifying and cutting out some of the less popular models. Next, he invented and developed a line of containers to be used in the health-care industry, which proved to be enormously lucrative.
When R.C. was twenty-three and the father of two children—Rick and Gina—Uncle Ernest suffered a mild stroke. He put R.C. in charge of running the day-to-day operations. The company thrived. A year later, R.C. suggested to his uncle, whose health was declining rapidly, that they sell the business. It was at the height of its profitability, R.C. predicted; it was time to get out. Uncle Ernest objected. He wanted to leave the company in R.C.'s capable hands. R.C. told him that his future was not in containers; he had grander ideas. So Uncle Ernest caved in. He even offered R.C. a finder's fee to locate a company to buy him out.
R.C. made a quarter of a million dollars on the deal. The year was 1969, but R.C. was not a product of his generation. He did not protest the war in Vietnam, nor did he smoke marijuana or wear tie-dyed T-shirts or grow his hair long. He was interested only in making money.
After the sale of Diamond Containers, R.C. decided to moveto Chicago, where there was more opportunity. His wife did not want to quit small-town life, so R.C. simply left her and his two small children behind. In Chicago, he founded Diamond Enterprises, Inc., a professional business brokerage, where he matched sellers with buyers and took a finder's fee, a percentage of the sale. He worked seven days a week, and was hugely successful.
After he had made his first million, Diamond became intrigued by the burgeoning computer business. He computerized his own company, then inventoried businesses in different fields and geographic locations, making it easier to match buyers and sellers. One day, one of his employees, Joe Baker, a pioneer computer whiz, came to him. He had developed a new type of personal computer, a sixteen-bit processor with more memory than the competition, R.C. was ecstatic, and put forth the majority capital to bankroll a business, with Baker as minority partner.
In 1975, Diamond Computers was launched in Silicon Valley. Three years later, the company went public, making both Diamond and Baker very rich men. Baker, unfortunately, was a computer nerd who was monumentally unsavvy about business. Diamond bought him out—forced him out, was more like it—and sold the company for megabucks to one of the giants of the computer industry. By then, Diamond was worth 100 million. It was the dawn of the eighties, that fabulous Decade of Greed.
R.C. was a classic entrepreneur. The initial coming together of an idea or project was what turned him on. The day-to-day running of companies bored him after a while. So he moved to New York and Wall Street, where he was determined to become a big fish in the big pond.
Using his company in Chicago to do the research, Diamond started Diamond Holdings, Inc., and became a whiz in the field of mergers and acquisitions. He no longer put buyers and sellers together for a fee. Now he stormed into companies and forced them into play, whether they wanted it or not. By 1986, at forty, Diamond was not only a feared and powerful corporate raider, he had made his first billion. He was known on the Street as Diamond Dick, the guy with the hardest pecker of them all. He had also married and divorced twice more.
By the nineties, the exhilaration had ebbed from Wall Street. Boesky and Milken and all the insider trading—plus the faltering economy—had taken their toll on the once-exuberant street of dreams. That was when Diamond met his fourth wife, Charlotte, and decided that it was time to settle down to a quieter life. He purchased his island, and developed it into his own vision of Shangri-La.
Of course, R.C. was not the sort of man who could actually retire. He continued to make deals, but most of the big deals had already been made. With less action, Diamond became despondent. Much of the excitement had drained from his life. He had accomplished what he had set out to do; midlife dissatisfaction set in.
R.C. Diamond wanted the second half of his life to be as exciting as the first. He was desperate to find a new company into which he could sink both his money and his energy.
Still sweltering in the midday sun, Fig Bolton continued his gossipy monologue and waited patiently for Diamond to get to the point. Fig swatted at a persistent fly, and took another gulp of iced tea. "You heard about old Todd Farley and his young lady friend, Miss Nina?" he asked in his soft Carolina drawl. His gray eyes squinted into a naughty grin. "Old Todd's fixing to shed Ruth andmarry Miss Nina, if you can believe it. All the harridans around town are fit to be tied. Poor Todd. Working all those years to make that shitload of money. Now he's going to have to shovel it all over to Ruth. Whatever s left, Miss Nina'll get, one way or another. She's even talked old Todd into moving to London. Jeez, it sure proves once again that there's no fool like you know what."
After drinking so much iced tea, Fig felt a powerful urge to relieve his bladder. He knew, however, that the protocol was for him to sit there and talk until R.C. divulged the purpose of the occasion. There was a legend on Wall Street that R.C. Diamond allowed himself to urinate only twice a day, upon waking and retiring. It was true that no one had ever seen R.C. take advantage of a men's room anywhere in the world. It was also known that the man slept only two or three hours a night. (Another annoying characteristic was his penchant for waking business associates in the wee hours of the morning, to discuss whatever deal was currently occupying his thoughts.)
"I need action," Diamond boomed suddenly. It was certainly as sweltering on his side of the table as on Fig's, but the billionaire, in his white linen suit, looked as cool as the coconut-sorbet palate-cleanser that was now being set in front of them. The enigmatic, forty-eight-year-old raider wore only white or black. The closets of his residences were full of identical suits, turned out each season by his London tailor. There were those who speculated that he was color-blind, but the truth was more mundane: Diamond was merely too preoccupied to bother with deciding what to put on his tanned, trim body every day.
"I feel like my life is constipated. Nothing is moving," the rich man continued. "Charlotte says I'm going through male menopause. Hell, maybe she's right. Damn. There's nothing to get my blood pressure up anymore. All the old players have lost their balls. There's no goddamned fun anymore. I want some fun, Figgy. I don't want it all to stop. Thrills. That's what I want again, like the old days. It's like I'm a star catapulting toward a black hole, knowing certain disaster waits for me, but not being able to reset my course." He paused, and lit a cigarillo. "Charlotte's been bugging me to take her to Africa on some fucking photographic safari. Look at the market these days. Look at the world. Why go to Africa when we have a fucking third-world world country right here? All those do-gooders running the government. I want the good old days. I want to shed blood. Blood. "He stopped and stared intently at Fig with piercing brown eyes.
"Now, now, R.C.," Fig said, unfazed, "you know there's some good action around. Not as much as before, I grant you. Times are certainly more sober, but that don't mean we have to run off and join a monastery," he said with a good-ol'-boy grin. "There's meat to be gnawed from a lot 'f healthy hogs. We only need to choose the right one. That's what the nineties are about. Choice ... careful choice. And dealing quietly. Hush." He put his swollen fingers to his thick lips. "That's how we're going to wind up this century. With power deals that are performed with the delicacy of laser surgery. Like those people you see in parks at dawn doing that tai chi stuff." Fig punched his short, flabby right arm into the air. "Quiet, powerful—"
"Yeah. I like that. You're right, Figgy. And since you're so optimistic, I want you to find me something," Diamond interrupted again in his accentless voice. "Something I can really get off on." He rose abruptly from the table and tossed his napkin directly into the sorbet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tender Offerings by Meredith Rich. Copyright © 1994 Meredith Rich. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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