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Bouncing Back. However they make their money, the self-made millionaires have many traits in common. Almost all of them decided early in life to be their own bosses. Most of them started earning money while still children: by the time he was 13, Arthur Carlsberg had been a caddy, gardener, seed salesman and fruit trader. Many of them, like Merlyn Mickelson, never went to college; others, like Arthur Decio and Charles Bluhdorn, impatiently dropped out of college in order to study in the marketplace. At the beginning of their careers, they lived lean, often taking shoestring salaries in order to pump profits back into their enterprises. In his first plant, Mickelson doubled as a floor-sweeping janitor. Many of them suffered at least one jarring failure in business, but showed a capacity to bound back unfazed.
Now that they have climbed high, the newly rich are sensitive about the "millionaire" title and seldom brag about it. But they respect the power of money, like what it can buy. Great wealth seems to produce a security and mobility that usually enables the rich to grow richer. By putting $1,000,000 into municipal bonds, an investor can get an annual income of $35,000 tax free. Most of today's newly rich entrepreneurs use their money in a more venturesome way, but few of them live on as grand a scale as the ostentatious millionaires of the Gilded Age. In an affluent nation where almost every middle-class wage earner can own a house and a car, take a holiday abroad and educate his children well, the F. Scott Fitzgerald aphorism—"The very rich, they are different from you and me"—is not nearly as true as it once was.
Some of the millionaires, of course, like to indulge expensive tastes. Walter Davis, 42, of Odessa, Texas, saw a need for a trucking business to haul oil from out-of-the-way wells to central pipelines, borrowed $5,000 and built a business that has earned him at least $7,000,000; now he lives in a $700,000 house and enjoys gambling $100,000 a weekend on college football games. Even those who are less flamboyant like to live well: John Diebold has a 16th century living room that was transported stick by stick from Sussex, England; Pittsburgh Theater Magnate Ernest Stern, 45, owns two dozen antique cars and a 53-ft. yacht.
More than Just Money. The motivation of the millionaire is seldom purely materialism. To him, the accumulation of a million is usually just a milestone on the road to a greater goal. Charles Bluhdorn seeks "the joy of putting something together and seeing it grow." Says Arthur Carlsberg: "Accumulating money is a hobby, a game, a drive. I enjoy it." Perhaps the best explanation comes from Manhattan's Robert K. Lifton, 37, head of the widely .diversified Transcontinental Investing Corp., who has earned $4,750,000 through real estate and other ventures. Says he: "This is our form of creating. If artists give up the world's pleasures to pursue their calling, people understand it. What they don't understand is that many businessmen have the same creative drives and derive the same satisfactions as artists—but what they are doing is translated into dollars and cents. When I come up with a good deal, that's creative. Successfully merchandising a product is creative. Taking a business idea and making it work is creative."