John Kluge, telecom billionaire
Evan Hulka
John Kluge: Business titan, UVA donor dies peacefully at 95
by Hawes Spencer
published 10:00am Wednesday Sep 8, 2010
John Kluge, the billionaire whose TV stations became the Fox network
and whose money helped shape UVA and Albemarle County, a place he
frequently called home, has died peacefully two weeks shy of his 96th
birthday, sources indicate.
“He was a wonderful man,” says brother-in-law Ludwig Kuttner. “He had
a great career. He was very charitable. He was great to the community
and to education.”
At the time of his death, Forbes listed Kluge as the 35th-richest
American with a total fortune— even after hundreds of millions in
donations— of $6.5 billion.
Former UVA President John Casteen says recalls being powerfully
affected by a conversation when Kluge, nearly 20 years ago, expressed
interest in creating scholarships to help minority students from every
nation— Kluge, after all was a German immigrant from modest means—
gain a university education.
Casteen says that Kluge and his wife— who felt passionately about
access to holistic medicine— brought a rare vision to their donations.
“After more than a quarter-century of work with philanthropists of
almost every kind and of all sorts of means,” Casteen says in an
email, “I have come to see the Kluges as the most purposeful
philanthropists I have known.”
Kluge amassed much of his fortune in the late 1980s by selling off
pieces of a company he bought in 1984 in a leveraged buy-out. Kluge
bought a then public company called Metromedia, for which he had
already served as CEO, and then sold off Metromedia’s television
stations to Rupert Murdoch and its cell phone licenses to a variety of
entities.
One of the legends surrounding the self-made entrepreneur includes his
allegedly paying his way through Columbia University via savvy card-
playing. Whatever the truth of such legend, the German-born Kluge
would repay Columbia— which now calls him a “Horatio Alger for the
Twentieth Century”— many times over by pledging $400 million to be
paid after his death.
Some of Kluge’s Charlottesville philanthropic efforts include the UVA
children’s rehabilitation center and its aboriginal art collection,
both bearing his name, as well as the 7,379 acres of manicured estates
in the southern part of the county he gave to UVA for resale.
This past November, Kluge and his wife, Tussi, donated another $3
million to the University to foster compassion in end-of-life care.
In 1989, Forbes measured Kluge’s wealth at over $7 billion and called
him the richest man in America. At the time, he was married to
Patricia Rose Kluge, an Iraqi-born socialite who had overseen
construction of what was then the largest house in the county, the
appropriately named Albemarle House. The Kluges divorced in 1991, and
Patricia kept the 48-room house and its Arnold Palmer-designed golf
course and went on to a new career in wine and philanthropy with her
new husband, William Moses.
Kluge’s business interests were varied. At Metromedia, he controlled
subsidiaries selling everything from lawn tractors to steak dinners to
Academy Award-winning films. In 1997, though, he sold off most of his
film library— about 2,000 titles including such Orion Studios hits as
Dances with Wolves, Platoon, and The Silence of the Lambs— to Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer for $573 million.
Another interest of Kluge’s has been restaurants. While his firm
continues to operate and franchise over 800 restaurants bearing such
names as Ponderosa and Bonanza (both inspired by America’s top-rated
1960s television show), Kluge shut down all 150 or so of his
Bennigan’s steakhouses and his 58 remaining Steak & Ale restaurants in
2008— as he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy for the Metromedia
subsidiary that operated the two latter chains.
Something that remained a passion for the nonagenarian was supporting
a local group called Hiromi T’ai Chi. As recently as April, the Kluges
hosted an afternoon fundraiser for the group at their Albemarle home,
Featheridge. Thanks to Kluge’s donations, Hiromi teaches T’ai Chi, a
Chinese martial art known for uniting mind and body, to
underprivileged area children.
One of the oft-told tales of Kluge’s business success is that shortly
after buying D.C. radio station WGAY (now WIHT), he ran into a friend
on a D.C. street who mentioned that Dumont Broadcasting needed a
buyer. The Dumont stations helped Kluge launch Metromedia— and Kluge’s
fortune.
The man whom one magazine would call the “cheapskate billionaire” had
a penchant for wringing profits out of formerly struggling businesses.
A biography posted at the Museum of Broadcasting notes that Kluge
saved money by headquartering Metromedia not in Manhattan but across
the Hudson River in cheaper office space in Secaucus, New Jersey.
The Museum goes on to note that one of Metromedia’s success secrets
was simply re-running old TV shows and keeping costs low— a strategy
that reached its pinnacle of success when Kluge secured syndication
rights to M*A*S*H, the black comedy set in a Korean Conflict mobile
combat hospital.
“John Kluge represents the TV entrepreneur in the true sense of the
word,” writes Douglas Gomer, the author of the Museum’s biography.
“Because his efforts have been directed toward a less glamorous side
of the television industry,” Gomer notes that conventional broadcast
biographies have focused on figures such as David Sarnoff and William
Paley. “But as a pioneer in independent television station ownership
and operation,” Gomer writes, Kluge “deserves the same degree of
attention.“
However, Kluge’s leveraged buyout of Metromedia came with some
controversy.
Kluge and his longtime right-hand-man and chief financial officer,
Stuart Subotnick, had “dumbfounded their critics,” according to Jim
Murray, in his book Wireless Nation. “In a matter of weeks they lined
up all they needed with a complex combination of private investors,
venture capital, and a massive pile of fresh bank debt. The deal
structure, laden with interest deductions, cost the U.S. Treasury more
than it did any of the participants.”
But that wasn’t the end of the controversy. Although Kluge bought the
company for the then jaw-dropping sum of $1.1 billion, he sold its
pieces for at least five times that amount, prompting a 1987
discussion about insider information in a Fortune article entitled,
“Are shareholders cheated by LBO’s?”
At one point, Kluge and Subotnick owned the professional soccer team
now known as the New York Red Bulls. Earlier, Kluge’s Metromedia was
America’s largest billboard company and owned Snapper lawn tractors,
the Harlem Globetrotters, and Ice Capades.
In 1995, Kluge and Subotnick formed Metromedia International Group, a
publicly held company aiming to tap the burgeoning markets of China
and Eastern Europe with cellular phone systems. At some point, the
company went private, and last year the now North Carolina-based firm
declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In January, a trust bearing
Kluge’s name filed a claim for $10.8 million as part of the
bankruptcy.
Also in the mid-1990s but closer to home, Kluge constructed a 26,000-
square-foot museum for his collection of 72 restored and historic
horse-drawn carriages. County zoning officials, however, declined to
allow the Keene-area facility to open to the public, situated as it
was in a rural area, and he later sold off the carriages.
As detailed in lengthy story by Avery Chenoweth in Spy magazine, the
pinnacle of local controversy came in 1988, when the Kluges ran afoul
of their neighbors and the law over their British-styled exotic bird
hunts. They’d lend historic guns to the period-costumed guests and
begin shooting pheasant, grouse, and other game birds.
The problem was that to keep the game alive for such pig-in-poke
slaughtering, some of the neighborhood dogs were also slaughtered—
along with hawks, which are legally protected species. Albemarle and
state officials pressed criminal charges, and the gamekeeper was
deported back to the mother country.
Many of Kluge’s Albemarle projects— particularly the notorious exotic
bird hunts— were blamed on then wife Patricia. High points, however,
included fund-raising parties for Douglas Wilder, who became
Virginia’s first black governor in 1990. It was once reported by the
Richmond Times-Dispatch that Bill Clinton first laid eyes on eventual
grope-alleger Kathleen Willey at a party at Albemarle House.
After the divorce, Kluge let his ex-wife keep the mansion while he
opted to live at the humbler Morven estate, a three-story Federal
house built of red brick with white columns.
In the early 1990s, he bought four adjacent Palm Beach properties for
the sum of $16.5 million and began demolishing unwanted houses on the
site of what became one of his primary residences. Vacation homes
included a restored castle bought in the 1990s for about $6.5 million
near Queen Elizabeth’s Scottish country farm, Balmoral.
Kluge is survived by three children, Samantha and Joey by his second
wife, Yolanda Zucco, and John W. Kluge II, whom he and third wife
Patricia adopted and raised in Albemarle. His first wife was named
Theodora Thomson.
–DEVELOPING– last updated 3:39pm
Louis Epstein
: http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2010/09/08/john-kluge-business-titan-uva-donor-dies-peacefully-at-95/
:
: John Kluge: Business titan, UVA donor dies peacefully at 95
: by Hawes Spencer
: published 10:00am Wednesday Sep 8, 2010
:
: John Kluge, the billionaire whose TV stations became the Fox network
: and whose money helped shape UVA and Albemarle County, a place he
: frequently called home, has died peacefully two weeks shy of his 96th
: birthday, sources indicate.
: ?He was a wonderful man,? says brother-in-law Ludwig Kuttner. ?He had
: a great career. He was very charitable. He was great to the community
:
: At the time of his death, Forbes listed Kluge as the 35th-richest
: American with a total fortune? even after hundreds of millions in
: donations? of $6.5 billion.
And he dies in the year without estate tax.
Will the billionaire death rate spike in December?
: Former UVA President John Casteen says recalls being powerfully
: affected by a conversation when Kluge, nearly 20 years ago, expressed
: interest in creating scholarships to help minority students from every
: nation? Kluge, after all was a German immigrant from modest means?
: gain a university education.
:
: Casteen says that Kluge and his wife? who felt passionately about
: access to holistic medicine? brought a rare vision to their donations.
:
: ?After more than a quarter-century of work with philanthropists of
: almost every kind and of all sorts of means,? Casteen says in an
: email, ?I have come to see the Kluges as the most purposeful
: philanthropists I have known.?
:
: Kluge amassed much of his fortune in the late 1980s by selling off
: pieces of a company he bought in 1984 in a leveraged buy-out. Kluge
: bought a then public company called Metromedia, for which he had
: already served as CEO, and then sold off Metromedia?s television
: stations to Rupert Murdoch and its cell phone licenses to a variety of
: entities.
Metromedia had been the Dumont Network's owned-and-operated stations,
and became the later Fox Network's.
: One of the legends surrounding the self-made entrepreneur includes his
: allegedly paying his way through Columbia University via savvy card-
: playing. Whatever the truth of such legend, the German-born Kluge
: would repay Columbia? which now calls him a ?Horatio Alger for the
: Twentieth Century?? many times over by pledging $400 million to be
: paid after his death.
:
: Some of Kluge?s Charlottesville philanthropic efforts include the UVA
: children?s rehabilitation center and its aboriginal art collection,
: both bearing his name, as well as the 7,379 acres of manicured estates
: in the southern part of the county he gave to UVA for resale.
:
: This past November, Kluge and his wife, Tussi, donated another $3
: million to the University to foster compassion in end-of-life care.
Timing for his own end of life?
: In 1989, Forbes measured Kluge?s wealth at over $7 billion and called
: him the richest man in America. At the time, he was married to
: Patricia Rose Kluge, an Iraqi-born socialite who had overseen
: construction of what was then the largest house in the county, the
: appropriately named Albemarle House. The Kluges divorced in 1991, and
: Patricia kept the 48-room house and its Arnold Palmer-designed golf
: course and went on to a new career in wine and philanthropy with her
: new husband, William Moses.
Surely Biltmore House is bigger than that?
: Kluge?s business interests were varied. At Metromedia, he controlled
: subsidiaries selling everything from lawn tractors to steak dinners to
: Academy Award-winning films. In 1997, though, he sold off most of his
: film library? about 2,000 titles including such Orion Studios hits as
: Dances with Wolves, Platoon, and The Silence of the Lambs? to Metro-
: Goldwyn-Mayer for $573 million.
:
: Another interest of Kluge?s has been restaurants. While his firm
: continues to operate and franchise over 800 restaurants bearing such
: names as Ponderosa and Bonanza (both inspired by America?s top-rated
: 1960s television show), Kluge shut down all 150 or so of his
: Bennigan?s steakhouses and his 58 remaining Steak & Ale restaurants in
: 2008? as he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy for the Metromedia
: subsidiary that operated the two latter chains.
:
: Something that remained a passion for the nonagenarian was supporting
: a local group called Hiromi T?ai Chi. As recently as April, the Kluges
: hosted an afternoon fundraiser for the group at their Albemarle home,
: Featheridge. Thanks to Kluge?s donations, Hiromi teaches T?ai Chi, a
: Chinese martial art known for uniting mind and body, to
: underprivileged area children.
:
: One of the oft-told tales of Kluge?s business success is that shortly
: after buying D.C. radio station WGAY (now WIHT), he ran into a friend
: on a D.C. street who mentioned that Dumont Broadcasting needed a
: buyer. The Dumont stations helped Kluge launch Metromedia? and Kluge?s
: fortune.
:
: The man whom one magazine would call the ?cheapskate billionaire? had
: a penchant for wringing profits out of formerly struggling businesses.
: A biography posted at the Museum of Broadcasting notes that Kluge
: saved money by headquartering Metromedia not in Manhattan but across
: the Hudson River in cheaper office space in Secaucus, New Jersey.
:
: The Museum goes on to note that one of Metromedia?s success secrets
: was simply re-running old TV shows and keeping costs low? a strategy
: that reached its pinnacle of success when Kluge secured syndication
: rights to M*A*S*H, the black comedy set in a Korean Conflict mobile
: combat hospital.
:
: ?John Kluge represents the TV entrepreneur in the true sense of the
: word,? writes Douglas Gomer, the author of the Museum?s biography.
:
: ?Because his efforts have been directed toward a less glamorous side
: of the television industry,? Gomer notes that conventional broadcast
: biographies have focused on figures such as David Sarnoff and William
: Paley. ?But as a pioneer in independent television station ownership
: and operation,? Gomer writes, Kluge ?deserves the same degree of
: attention.?
:
: However, Kluge?s leveraged buyout of Metromedia came with some
: controversy.
:
: Kluge and his longtime right-hand-man and chief financial officer,
: Stuart Subotnick, had ?dumbfounded their critics,? according to Jim
: Murray, in his book Wireless Nation. ?In a matter of weeks they lined
: up all they needed with a complex combination of private investors,
: venture capital, and a massive pile of fresh bank debt. The deal
: structure, laden with interest deductions, cost the U.S. Treasury more
: than it did any of the participants.?
:
: But that wasn?t the end of the controversy. Although Kluge bought the
: company for the then jaw-dropping sum of $1.1 billion, he sold its
: pieces for at least five times that amount, prompting a 1987
: discussion about insider information in a Fortune article entitled,
: ?Are shareholders cheated by LBO?s??
:
: At one point, Kluge and Subotnick owned the professional soccer team
: now known as the New York Red Bulls. Earlier, Kluge?s Metromedia was
: America?s largest billboard company and owned Snapper lawn tractors,
: the Harlem Globetrotters, and Ice Capades.
:
: In 1995, Kluge and Subotnick formed Metromedia International Group, a
: publicly held company aiming to tap the burgeoning markets of China
: and Eastern Europe with cellular phone systems. At some point, the
: company went private, and last year the now North Carolina-based firm
: declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In January, a trust bearing
: Kluge?s name filed a claim for $10.8 million as part of the
: bankruptcy.
:
: Also in the mid-1990s but closer to home, Kluge constructed a 26,000-
: square-foot museum for his collection of 72 restored and historic
: horse-drawn carriages. County zoning officials, however, declined to
: allow the Keene-area facility to open to the public, situated as it
: was in a rural area, and he later sold off the carriages.
:
: As detailed in lengthy story by Avery Chenoweth in Spy magazine, the
: pinnacle of local controversy came in 1988, when the Kluges ran afoul
: of their neighbors and the law over their British-styled exotic bird
: hunts. They?d lend historic guns to the period-costumed guests and
: begin shooting pheasant, grouse, and other game birds.
:
: The problem was that to keep the game alive for such pig-in-poke
: slaughtering, some of the neighborhood dogs were also slaughtered?
: along with hawks, which are legally protected species. Albemarle and
: state officials pressed criminal charges, and the gamekeeper was
: deported back to the mother country.
:
: Many of Kluge?s Albemarle projects? particularly the notorious exotic
: bird hunts? were blamed on then wife Patricia. High points, however,
: included fund-raising parties for Douglas Wilder, who became
: Virginia?s first black governor in 1990. It was once reported by the
: Richmond Times-Dispatch that Bill Clinton first laid eyes on eventual
: grope-alleger Kathleen Willey at a party at Albemarle House.
:
: After the divorce, Kluge let his ex-wife keep the mansion while he
: opted to live at the humbler Morven estate, a three-story Federal
: house built of red brick with white columns.
:
: In the early 1990s, he bought four adjacent Palm Beach properties for
: the sum of $16.5 million and began demolishing unwanted houses on the
: site of what became one of his primary residences. Vacation homes
: included a restored castle bought in the 1990s for about $6.5 million
: near Queen Elizabeth?s Scottish country farm, Balmoral.
:
: Kluge is survived by three children, Samantha and Joey by his second
: wife, Yolanda Zucco, and John W. Kluge II, whom he and third wife
: Patricia adopted and raised in Albemarle. His first wife was named
: Theodora Thomson.
:
: ?DEVELOPING? last updated 3:39pm
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
Brad Ferguson
<fe799b8b-a36a-43a1...@s17g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
Evan Hulka <ehu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As detailed in lengthy story by Avery Chenoweth in Spy magazine, the
> pinnacle of local controversy came in 1988, when the Kluges ran afoul
> of their neighbors and the law over their British-styled exotic bird
> hunts. They’d lend historic guns to the period-costumed guests and
> begin shooting pheasant, grouse, and other game birds.
I remember the story. They also printed a picture of Patricia,
topless, from her hippie days.