Word: bendix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...America knows generally what Sloan, a writer for the Time Inc. monthly magazine MONEY, and Lampert, a reporter for Newsweek, are writing about. Beginning last August, Bill Agee, the $900,000-a-year chairman of Bendix, tried to take over Martin Marietta. At his side as a powerful consultant was his new wife Mary Cunningham. At the time, Cunningham was not employed by Bendix, but two years earlier, as Agee's protégé, she had briefly served as vice president for strategic planning at Bendix. Agee grossly underestimated Martin Marietta's defenses. The company retaliated...
Mary Cunningham, 31, does not come off well either. In Sloan's account, she first appears as "the Queen of Bendix" and, after her marriage to Agee in June 1982, as "the First Lady of Bendix." Sloan begins by asking a sympathetic question: "Is corporate America ready for a high-powered, brilliant young person who happens to be female?" His answer is yes, probably, but it was not ready for Mary...
...ideas of others as her own. This had resulted in her being shunned by her first study group at Harvard. "By the end of the first year," writes Sloan, "people who had come to know her would no longer speak to her." People who worked with her at Bendix claim she took the expertise of colleagues and seems to have presented it to Agee as hers. As vice president of corporate and public relations, she would assign several writers to do a speech for Agee, choose the best version and, if he liked it, claim that she wrote it. Aside...
What about all that speculation about the relationship between Bill and Mary? Both parties denied that they were romantically involved while Cunningham was at Bendix, and whether they were or not, says Sloan, is "their own very private, personal business. The only reason it is an issue is that they have made it one." Sloan reports that Cunningham, intentionally or not, gave people at Bendix the idea that she was on familiar terms with Agee...
Lampert's book is excellently reported and loaded with lively reconstructed dialogue, although sometimes the drumfire of detail hangs out like clothespins on a line. Lampert discloses that Donald Trump, the New York City real estate tycoon, considered tendering an offer for about 7% of Bendix during the takeover battle in exchange for RCA stock owned by Bendix. The author describes how Agee and Cunningham did not feel they had to play by the same rules as everyone else. At one point, Bruce Wasserstein, a First Boston investment banker who was advising Bendix, tells a flustered Agee: "Before...