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One Way to Skin a Rabbit. Almost alone among the chiefs of billion-dollar corporations, most of whom come from middle-class backgrounds, the man who has inherited this tradition was born to great wealth. Mother Copeland was a millionairess, father was a high officer of Du Pont for 40 years, and Lammot Copeland's playmates were mostly his moneyed cousins. From the start, he showed a flair for discovering short cuts. At ten, he entered a family contest in biology in which the little Du Ponts competed to be the first to find and assemble from the Delaware countryside the bones to form the complete skeleton of an animal. Young Copeland did it the easy way: he quietly caught a rabbit and cooked it in a pot of lye.
Fighting down a temporary temptation to become a doctor, Copeland took a degree in industrial chemistry at Harvard ('28), then made a modest debut in the family company. He started as an expediter for small orders, but was laid off when the Depression struck. Back in the company after only four months, he began to rise with predictable speed: board member at the age of 37, then corporate secretary, chairman of the finance committee, vice president. In 1962 Crawford Greenewalt—whose wife is a Du Pont and a first cousin of Copeland's—moved to the chairmanship after 14 years as president. He advised the board that the best man to succeed him would be Copeland. Somewhat like Britain's Conservative Party, Du Pont's 30 directors seek instinctively to pick the man who can best unify them. They place a greater premium on group management than most companies do, and were impressed by Copeland's ability to lead top managers to a group decision. They took Greenewalt's advice.
In a fine distinction, Copeland is known to old family friends as "Motsy" and to top business aides as "Mots." He is far from being as aggressive, outgoing and articulate as most modern executives—but, then, his role as steward of the family company does not require those qualities of him. An inside man, Copeland seldom deals with anyone below general manager, rarely meets customers or suppliers, has little contact with the chiefs of other big companies, has never spoken with President Johnson or any Administration officials. He spends full time on top policy, helping to decide which men to promote to high jobs, figuring how much to spend on each of Du Pont's major products and keeping a hard watch on the finances.
Pistols in the Basement. Like many an ancient riche, Copeland works at underplaying his wealth in public. He leaves his Cadillac at home and each morning drives himself eight miles to work in a Corvair. But his private pleasures are elegantly expensive: salmon fishing in Scotland, cattle breeding on his 3,000-acre farm in Maryland, duck-shooting parties on the Chesapeake (he keeps his eye sharp on a pistol range in his basement). Copeland is also a gourmet and oenological expert who belongs to Le Tastevin, an exclusive society devoted to fine wines, and he employs a French chef who came to him from Lord Astor. He and his wife Pamela—their three children are grown—live in a 20-room, antique-filled Georgian mansion whose 300 acres are tended by 14 gardeners and protected, naturally, by Du Pont fungicide.