Word: banana
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Booth steps into one of the hottest spots in U.S. business. United Brands lost $47 million in 1974 (on sales of more than $2 billion), as both of its main businesses-John Morrell & Co., a meatpacking firm, and Chiquita bananas -turned down. The losses were caused chiefly by Hurricane Fifi, which destroyed 70% of United Brands' banana crops in Honduras, and a sharp rise in the cost of cattle feed...
Anticipating the investigations that would inevitably follow Black's suicide, United Brands, a conglomerate with 1974 sales of $2 billion, admitted three weeks ago that it had bribed a top Honduran official last year in order to gain lower banana-export taxes (TIME, April 21); suspicion immediately focused on President Lopez. The Honduran commission has not yet unearthed any hard evidence that pinpoints Lopez, but the fact that he was the only official under investigation who refused to allow a review of his foreign bank accounts was considered sufficient grounds for his dismissal. The force behind the coup...
...Latin America, the scandal had a decidedly déjà vu quality. Under its former name of United Fruit Co., United Brands' banana operations had been synonymous with Yanqui imperialism; United Fruit was widely known as el pulpo, or the octopus. More than one Latin government that got in its way fell. Since merging United Fruit with his own AMK Corp. in 1970 to form United Brands, however, Black had been trying to bury the el pulpo image. By paying high wages, providing workers with low-cost housing, building schools and operating well-equipped hospitals, he had earned...
...Second Banana. His success onstage coincided with failure off. He was drinking heavily. In 1965 he and his first wife were divorced. Recalls Carney: "I was at the point where I needed a shot of Scotch the minute I opened my eyes in the morning." It took Alcoholics Anonymous, treatment with Antabuse and his happy second marriage a few years later to pull him out. He has been on the wagon for a year with only occasional backsliding. "You don't lick all your problems," says Art, "but I've got most of mine under control...
...brink of making big money and having new options. In his Beverly Hills hotel, his phone never stops ringing. He takes a call from Gleason. "What did you do last night?" "I went to see Chinatown," jokes Art. Then he smiles. His days of being anyone's second banana are over. Art Carney is a bankable actor...