'Like a Black Gatsby with Nick Carraway at his side'
As far as memoir titles go, 1995’s Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?—the story of Reginald F. Lewis, the first Black business tycoon in America—has to rank among the best: It captures the personality, zeal, and ambition of the guy who orchestrated one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in history, purchasing Beatrice International for close to $1 billion and becoming the richest Black American in the process.
Right next to him through all of this was a Filipino public relations maverick named Rene “Butch” Meily, and his account—From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey with America’s First Black Tycoon—does something else: It gives us a front-row seat to the biggest deals in that era of junk bonds, Michael Milken, and Michael Douglas declaring “Greed is good” in the movie Wall Street.
It’s also an entertaining, well-paced read, taking us through Meily’s early days, being recruited by Lewis in his rising TLC (The Lewis Corporation) from New York PR firm Burson Marstellar in 1987, all the way through the businessman’s untimely death from brain cancer in 1993. Along the way, TLC acquired Beatrice International, harnessing scores of European food brands, selling off most of its pieces, and coming out way ahead. We meet some of the business names of the era, like Milken, who helped finance the Beatrice buyout, and later ended up in prison for insider trading (he was pardoned by US President Donald Trump during his first term).
Meily, who has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and also The Philippine STAR, crafts his book well, alternating chapters between his arrival in New York, cutting his teeth in public relations, then catching the eye of Lewis, who wants to amp up his company’s press coverage, and finds Meily to be a helpful PR conduit. Parallel narratives shift between Meily’s romance of Pam Ledesma and married life in NYC, to the increasing demands of his new boss, who sends him to Paris on the Concorde frequently to nail down details of the Beatrice buyout. Strains start to widen in their marriage. Along the way, a lesson emerges: career isn’t necessarily the most important thing in life. As Meily tells me, “I have found that ordinary people living ordinary lives who can come home at the end of the day at a reasonable time and kick back, have a beer and watch a ball game are far happier than many of the rich and famous.” That’s insider knowledge for you.
Reg Lewis swings for the fences here, every time. His frequent mantra—“Keep going, no matter what”—applies not only to the challenges Butch faced in the company (“We were like veterans who’d been to war together,” he tells me. “I was at the top of my game and we were dealing at breakneck speed with countries all around Europe and the business world and press in the US”), but also to the challenges that a Black man playing in the same leagues as white Wall Street had to face. Frequently, Meily saw Lewis ignored by New York cab drivers, or trying to overcome the gatekeepers of Manhattan co-op boards when buying a Fifth Avenue apartment, or trying (unsuccessfully) to get a Black-owned multimillion-dollar business listed on Wall Street as an IPO.
Race in America was an issue for Lewis in a way that even a Filipino man might not fully comprehend. “Neither of you understand,” he tells Butch and his wife Loida Nicolas at one point:
“When you’re Black in this country, they lead you to the water, but they won’t let you drink. What I have, I’ve had to fight for every inch of the way. As a Black man, I don’t just want a seat at the table. I want to sit at the head of the table. You Filipinos have this candy cane vision of America that doesn’t exist.”
He accused me of viewing the US through the lens of the Hollywood movies I’d grown up on. That I didn’t really understand how racist things were in the US.
“You don’t know. But every Black guy worth his salt grows up with a sense of anger. Every day, I’m out there on the field, throwing passes or rushing for a touchdown. And every time I score, I kick the shit out of the lie that ignorant people believe. That Blacks aren’t good enough. You can be as rich as anyone but anytime a cop pulls you over, you know that you’ve got to be extra careful.”
Meily describes his account as “a portrait of an outsized personality, like a Black Gatsby with Nick Carraway at his side.” There’s a fly-on-the-wall flavor, even as Meily is in the thick of tantrums from Lewis (frequent) to moments of triumph (the fist-pumping Beatrice buyout), to weekends in Lewis’ mansion in the Hamptons with tennis star Arthur Ashe and New York Mayor David Dinkins, to the purchase of a two-story apartment overlooking Central Park from car designer John DeLorean, who was then at the tail-end of federal investigations over cocaine deals. The business zeitgeist then was: all rules are off the table. Get away with whatever you can. At one point, Meily scoffs at a headline about upcoming developer Donald Trump. “He’s got a hell of an ego,” says Meily. “Using his name as a brand to sell his buildings.”
Reg gives him a look: “What are you getting on his case for? The guy’s just trying to earn a living.”
Game recognize game.
Celebrity names pop up here and there, but at the center is Lewis, married to a deeply religious Filipina, Loida, who stands by his side, an anchor to his mood swings, and who eventually heads TLC Beatrice after Lewis dies. (The company is eventually sold and Butch heads back to the Philippines.)
Unlike F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s favorite edict, there are second stories in lives—Filipino lives, anyway. Back in Manila, Meily finds a calling with another business tycoon, Manny Pangilinan, whose efforts to mobilize corporate funding to relieve natural calamities such as those brought by Yolanda morphed into the Philippine Disaster Relief Foundation (PDRF), which Meily now heads. At the same time, his marriage to Pam was ending in divorce. Like a good movie (say, Wall Street), there are moral lessons to learn from Meily’s account. The importance of family, integrity, a work-life balance. And above all, “Keep on going, no matter what.”
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Fully Booked BGC will hold a special book signing today for Butch Meily’s From Manila to Wall Street at 3 p.m., with guest performances and readings from actors Jeremy Domingo, Leo Rialp, Nelsito Gomez, Maritina Romulo, and Tarek El Tayech. It will be lively!
