He shook himself, pulling out of the memory. The orange screen still hummed in front of him. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d wasted twenty minutes. He had to get down to work.
There was, first, the business side. In 1953, Owen had borrowed $1,500 from a G.I. loan program and put a down payment on a near-bankrupt television repair shop in South San Francisco. He began tinkering with used parts, and within two years had perfected and patented an improved insulation technique for the hot tubes of early TV. General Electric picked it up, and Owen was on his way. He diddled with vacuum tubes, invested in copper wiring, got into simple components before the microchip came along. By the time Silicon Valley exploded, he was ready for it.
Shares of Owen Industries, Inc., were trading on the New York Exchange for $17 a share, and Nash himself had controlled eight hundred thousand shares when he took the corporation public in 1974. Figuring three or four stock splits minimum, Nash’s personal worth on stocks alone, at the time of the Business Week cover story, was close to $70 million.
His other assets were also substantial. Besides the $250,000 Eloise and his Seacliff mansion, he owned a house and more than a thousand acres of land in New Mexico, pied-a-terres in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a condominium in New York. According to Business Week he also held part or controlling interest in three hotels, ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Utah, a restaurant on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. His one failure, as of five years ago, had been an airline, the Waikiki Express, which had made two round trips daily between Oahu and Los Angeles for sixteen months before it went bankrupt.
But the man hadn’t spent all his time in boardrooms. The first mention of Owen Nash in any publication had nothing to do with business. In 1955 he was the first non-Oriental to break more than six one-inch pine boards on top of one another in a sanctioned karate exhibition. Jeff was tempted to get up from his chair and see if Archives had the picture referenced in the display, but decided against it. Time was getting short.
In 1958 Nash’s house in Burlingame had burned to the ground. He managed to rescue his six-year-old daughter, Celine, but had nearly died himself trying to get back inside to pull his wife, Eloise, to safety.
After his wife’s death, he bought his first sailboat and took it around the world, accompanied only by Celine. The papers picked up on the rugged outdoorsman life now – for a year in the 1960s he held the all-tackle world record for a black marlin he’d taken off the Australian Barrier Reef. As recently as last year he and Celine and a crew of three college kids had sailed a rented ketch to runner-up in the Newport-Cabo San Lucas race.
His forays into big-game hunting stirred more and more controversy over the years. Jeff Elliot thought the change of tone of the articles was interesting: when Nash bagged a polar bear in 1963 he was a man’s man featured in Field & Stream; by 1978, taking a zebra in the Congo got him onto the Sierra Club’s public-enemy list.
He didn’t ‘give a good goddamn’ (Forbes, Ten CEOs Comment on Image,‘ Sept. ’86) about the public. He was one of the only western industrialists to attend the coronation of Bokassa; the Shah of Iran reportedly stayed aboard the Eloise in the Caribbean while the U.S. government was deciding how to handle him after he was deposed; Nash appalled the Chronicle reporter covering his trip to China in ‘83 by feasting, with his hosts, on the brains of monkeys who were brought live to the table.
He made Who’s Who for the first time in 1975. He never remarried.
13
‘I wish I made more money,’ Pico Morales said. ‘I wish I had more money. Anybody else, they would have more money.’
His wife, Angela, put her hand over his. ‘English isn’t even his first language,’ she said, ‘but he sure can conjugate the dickens out of “to have money.” ’
They were in the Hardys’ dining room, sitting around the cherry table. After the spaghetti and a jug of red wine, Frannie had brought out an apple pie, and Pico had put away half of it.
‘He is a man of many talents,’ Hardy said.
‘Is there anything special about today and money?’ Frannie asked.
‘See? That’s what I mean.’ Pico had a knife in his hand and was reaching again for the pie. ‘We don’t think – I don’t think – like a rich person. I think it’s genetic.’
‘He thought sharks dying was genetic, too,’ Hardy said.
‘No, that was lack of family structure.’
‘What would you do if you had money,’ Angela asked, ‘besides maybe eat more?’
Pico had no guilt about his size. He patted his stomach and smiled at his wife. ‘What I would do, given this news tonight about Owen Nash that the rest of the world doesn’t know yet, is go out and invest everything I owned in stock in his company.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘That stock is going to dive, Peek.’
‘I know. So you sell short, make a short-term bundle, buy back in.’
‘How do you know when it’s going to turn around so you buy back at the right time?’ Frannie asked.
‘You don’t for sure,’ Pico said, ‘but that’s the nature of stocks.’
‘Either that, hon, or they go the other way tomorrow and take off because Nash was mismanaging his company and now they can fly. Then you lose everything.’ Angela patted his hand again. ‘Like every other time we have had hot tips on the stock market. Have another piece of pie.’
‘I’m interested in what you meant when you said anybody else would have had more money. When?’ Hardy had pushed his chair onto its back legs and was leaning into them, thumbs hooked in his front pockets.
‘Today. The last few days. We should already have an agent, be cooking up a book deal, movie rights, something. We’re the ones who found the hand. We should be famous by now.’
‘Fame’s an elusive thing,’ Hardy admitted.
‘Okay, laugh at me.’ Pico consoled himself with a mouthful of pie. ‘But you wait – somebody’s going to make a fortune off this somehow and then where will we be?’
‘We’ll be right here,’ Frannie said. ‘I’m kind of immobilized for a while anyway.’
‘Don’t you like where you are, Peek? I mean, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium is not exactly an entry-level position.’
‘I just feel like we’re all missing an opportunity here.’
‘Probably,’ Hardy said. Angela agreed. So did Frannie.
Pico ate some more pie.
May Shinn’s apartment was on Hyde, directly across the street from a boutique French deli. The cable-car tracks passed under the window, but this time of night, the cars weren’t running.
There was hardwood in the foyer, an immediate sense of almost ascetic order – a hint of sandalwood? The streetlights outside threw into gauzy relief the one room where she sat in front of her corner shrine, across the room from a low couch with a modern end table and a coffee table. Hardwood glistened around the sides of the throw rug. Along one wall was a high cabinet – thin and elegant lines, glass fronted. Another wall held Japanese prints above a low chair and a futon.
The entranceway itself was an eight-foot circle. Older San Francisco apartments often had turrets, alcoves, arches and moldings that no modern unit could afford. Another rug, two feet wide, was in the center of the circle. A hand-carved cherry bench, the wood warm, highly polished but not over-lacquered, hugged the side. Close to ten feet long, it was built to the curve of the wall, apparently and impossibly seamless. It would cost a fortune, and that’s if you knew the artist, if he could get the matched cherry, if there was the time.