(2 of 8)
I go to see the head of a California conglomerate. I expect a Western version of controlled optimism, with touches of anxiety around the edges. Company men out here are always mentioning "the rising tide of Pacific business," the giant market in Asia barely tapped—"1 out of 18 jobs in the state is linked to foreign trade," one executive says. And the domestic market promises even more. By 1975, personal income in California will have soared to $110 billion! But David Mahoney, young and relaxed at 46, turns out to be 180° from the kind of executives I know back East. He sits behind a modern oval desk in a palatial three-room suite of offices that he has taken over as board chairman of Norton Simon, Inc., a year-and-a-half-old concern formed from Canada Dry, Hunt Foods, McCall's and other companies. The place is plush—driftwood walls, deep-pile carpet. The whole bit. He smiles and says, "Let's go outside." I follow him into the Norton Simon garden, and he takes off his jacket and we walk among the sunlit ferns and flowers. "Why aren't you behaving like an executive?" I ask. "Haven't you heard of status?"
"Out here, the business executives think they're younger. They feel that all New York businesses are part of one big Establishment. And in a way, they are. In New York all different kinds of industries—Wall Street, Madison Avenue, all of it—are interlocking. They all depend on the big New York banks. Out here, the industries are mostly smaller, and they're independent of one another. It's less stifling."
I watch him saunter around, loose-limbed and relaxed, and I believe the sales talk. "You know, a lot of board chairmen are here not because of the job, but because they want to live in California. Some top executives live here but commute to New York for five days a week. In fact, the speed of travel and communications today has ended the inferiority complex the California businessman used to have. The California industrialist is liberated from that old provincial feeling. And he shows it. He is tanned, he swims a lot, he is healthy—people are interested in the body out here. The California businessman is a rounded guy." I watch Mahoney stroll through the ferns and I wonder . . . maybe his bottom drawer really is free of Gelusils and Miltown. But what about the executives on the lower level? Are they quite as ulcer-and-anxiety free? Where, after all, do California psychiatrists find their patients?
Cut to: South-Central Los Angeles