A Harvard-schooled entrepreneur of impressive means was not the sort of beau Dorothy Zauhar thought herself fated to find. The daughter of impoverished heavy-drinking parents, Zauhar, 59, recalls sleeping nights in a car in a junkyard. She was removed (along with her four brothers and sisters) from her parents' custody when she was five. Zauhar spent the next five years in a Duluth, Minn., orphanage until a loving foster family was found for her. At 20 she married a TV repairman. They were divorced in 1982 after the couple had had three children.
Then, at an age when even the world's...