Word: bluhdorns
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Charles G. Bluhdorn, chairman of merger-minded Gulf & Western, explains the rationale behind that current corporate rage-the conglomerate company-in disarmingly simple terms. "If you have all your eggs in one basket, you're stuck with those eggs," says Bluhdorn. "But if you've also got apples and bananas, that's something else." Following that formula, Bluhdorn, James Ling of Ling-Temco-Vought, Harold Geneen of ITT and several others have traced the tracks of such conglomerate pioneers as Litton and Textron across industry lines into movies and machinery, aircraft and auto parts, cigars, cybernetics...
...pretty-boy roles that George Hamilton now gets, then went back to fashions. In 1959, Revlon purchased Evan-Picone in a deal that eventually made Evans rich enough to return to Hollywood as an independent producer for Dick Zanuck at Fox. Two years ago, when young Millionaire Charles Bluhdorn (TIME, Dec. 3, 1965) bought Paramount and began raiding other studios for talent, his first recruit was Evans. Unlike Zanuck and Hyman, who make the deals and handle the creative side of moviemaking, Evans is responsible only for the production schedule, which now includes some 70 projects. Twice-divorced, Evans works...
...conglomerate companies like Gulf & Western Industries, such mergers have had spectacular results. Under Chairman Charles Bluhdorn, Gulf & Western, which a decade ago was an ailing Houston auto-parts company, has gobbled up one company after another (among them: Paramount Pictures, New Jersey Zinc) to balloon into a $1 bil-lion-a-year operation. A pioneer in the conglomerate-building field, Los Angeles' Litton Industries, which was started almost from scratch by Chairman Charles B. ("Tex") Thornton (TIME cover, Oct. 4, 1963) and President Roy Ash in 1953, is still building. Last week, Litton (1966 sales: $1.2 billion) arranged...
...risking money on projects they might not undertake on their own. Diversification has obvious benefits for the conglomerates, buffering them against bad weather within a single industry. To Andrew Carnegie's dictum to "put all your eggs in one basket and watch them," Gulf & Western's Bluhdorn replies: "If you have all your eggs in one basket, then you're stuck with those eggs...
...year, moved into consumer products for the first time by reaching an agreement to buy out Consolidated Cigar, the nation's biggest cigar maker (Dutch Masters, El Producto, Muriel), in a $150 million stock swap. At the same time, Gulf & Western's young (40), acquisitive chairman, Charles Bluhdorn, sweetened his company's stock offer for E.W. Bliss Co., an Ohio-based tool-equipment manufacturer that, like Consolidated, had 1966 sales of about $158 million. If the Bliss deal goes through on the heels of the Consolidated takeover, Gulf & Western's annual sales level, currently $700 million...