From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant's Journey With America's First Black Tycoon

O'Dwyer's note: Butch Meily’s client Reginald Lewis had died. Now Butch’s job as his public relations strategist was to announce the news to the media. But he immediately faced an ethical dilemma about how to do so.

The following excerpt from Butch’s memoir, “From Manila To Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey With America’s First Black Tycoon,” recounts what happened next. The book, out this month, chronicles the life of swashbuckling lawyer, financier and CEO Reginald Lewis, the first Black entrepreneur to run a company that earned a billion dollars a year in sales.

Butch, an alumnus of Burson-Marsteller and Howard J. Rubenstein Associates, served as Lewis’s trusted public relations advisor as Lewis navigated daring corporate takeovers, an extravagant global lifestyle and the brain cancer that claimed his life at only age 50:

The day Reg died, his widow Loida invited a couple of us to the hospital and ushered us in to show us his body. The room itself was bare and tiny and looked like a morgue. Reg lay there on what appeared to be a concrete slab, wrapped in a white hospital robe, his head turned slightly sideways. All the anger, all the drive and all the dreams were gone. We just stood there staring at what was left of him, a shape, a form, a mere memory. So, this is how it ends.

After a few minutes to say privately whatever prayers we could muster, we moved to another room to talk about plans for his wake. The first was to be held in Baltimore and the second in New York City at the fashionable Riverside Church on the West Side.

“Reg once told me that if he ever went, he’d like a simple, classy service, like Lloyd Garrison’s,” I said. Garrison was a well-respected New York lawyer whose wake Reg and I had attended. It consisted of a few readings from the Bible and brief responses from the family and someone from his law firm.

I was so used to telling people what Reg wanted and having everyone fall into line without question that I was taken aback when Loida balked.

“Reg is dead,” she said, “I’m in charge now.”

“I’d like a service with Jesse Jackson, Mayor Dinkins, Arthur Ashe and others speaking,” she added. The few senior executives present from TLC Beatrice International, the company Reg ran, looked at her, shocked and silent. Who was this person? But just like that, I knew the answer. We had a new voice at the table, one from whom we had never heard.

At a later meeting, the company executives met with members of the Lewis family to discuss the communications plan. The family wanted to ease the shock of his death by first announcing that Reg was sick and then saying that he passed away. No one outside this tight group even knew that he was ill.

But this was a big story, impossible to hide. I believed we should have a press conference to tell everyone the news.

But the family was adamant. They wanted first his sickness and then subsequently his death declared with just a simple statement. For some reason, they wanted to keep everything under wraps. I knew this was a mistake. It went against everything I believed in about public relations. You’ve got to tell the truth, and if it’s bad news, it’s best to get it out quickly. But I was lost and in unchartered waters. Reg had just passed away.

In the end, I went along with it.

We agreed that I’d put out two press releases, the first saying Reg was ill and in a coma, and then a second, a few hours later, announcing he had passed away.

I sat down in my office and looked out at Central Park, covered in snow. Then I composed two of the strangest press releases of my life. After the first release went out, I started getting calls from Reg’s close friends. One lady insisted he’d recover and be just as good as before.

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

She burst into tears and accused me of being pessimistic and giving up prematurely. It seemed useless for me to explain. I felt bad about lying to people, pretending Reg was still alive when I knew he was dead. Here I was, managing the image of a dead man as if he were still alive.

As soon as the second release crossed the wires, all hell broke loose. The Larry King producer called five or six times. CBS and NBC reached out too. The message slips piled up on my desk. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. The media staked out various New York City hospitals to find out where his body was.

The front-page article that appeared in The Los Angeles Times read, “Reginald F. Lewis, the Harvard-educated lawyer who gained fame during the 1980s takeover craze and built the nation’s largest black-owned business, died of a cerebral hemorrhage Tuesday after a short battle with brain cancer. The quick decline of the chairman and chief executive of TLC Beatrice International Holdings, who turned 50 last month, came as a shock to Lewis’ friends and colleagues. Many learned of the extent of his illness Monday, when the multinational food company revealed that Lewis had been hospitalized in Manhattan and was in a coma.”

For one last time, Reginald Lewis was front page news.

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Butch Meily is author of the memoir “From Manila To Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey With America’s First Black Tycoon” and president of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, a private sector disaster management organization. He has contributed op-eds to The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun and The Dallas Morning News, among other publications.