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Geneen draws together his top executives once a month in both New York and Brussels for marathon meetings that can last for four days—and nights. Presiding over an agenda filled with such items as the need to supply ITT's telephone company in Chile with equipment to handle an anticipated spurt in tourist calls, Geneen will listen attentively, then announce briskly: "All right, let's move on to the next problem." When he himself speaks, the words come out in torrents, with results that are often scrambled; he says "verse visa" instead of "vice versa," calls for "spontanuity" rather than "spontaneity," constantly refers to ITT Business Planning Director Hanford Willard as "Willard Hanford." Sometimes the metaphors are marvelously mixed. "I believe," Geneen said recently, "in pushing and pulling and kneading and whittling until you finally get those two purple drops."
At times Geneen will pepper aides with questions for hours, at other times announce: "I'm not asking questions. I'm waiting for answers." Exploding at a meeting once, he demanded to know why none of those present seemed to be cooperating, received a bold reply from a top lieutenant: "It's because you scare them." Not surprisingly, many ITT executives have dropped off the team, including some of the bright young men Geneen brought with him from Raytheon. But most of his colleagues—past or present—have an affection for him, some of which found its way into a recently published in-side-the-company publication spoofing the boss. "If you're an eager, ambitious guy," says one ex-ITT official, "you'll find Geneen highly exciting."
What respite Geneen gets from his job comes at his weekend home at Centerville, Mass. There he works in the darkroom attached to the garage or hams around on any number of musical instruments (piano, accordion, banjo) in what his mother, who makes the cottage her summer home, calls "Harold's sulking house"—a cozy, one-room building he put up in the yard. Aside from the luxury of Genie IV, Geneen and his second wife, the former June Elizabeth Hjelm (an earlier marriage ended in divorce in 1946, and Geneen is childless), lead a life belying his wealth: a $243,000 salary, a bonus last year of $225,000 plus ITT common stock worth $5,500,000.
Scanty at Best. Geneen's biggest setback at ITT has been the breakdown in his plans to merge with ABC into a $2.6 billion colossus. The merger is bogged down in an intragovernmental squabble between the Federal Communications Commission, which has twice approved it, and the Justice Department, which last July went to court to block it. Much of the blame for the clash falls on Justice's ploddingly cautious antitrust division, which took no firm stand during the FCC's protracted deliberations, raised its objections to the merger only after the commission gave its first go-ahead.