Bob Crandall Flies Off the Handle
In the eighties, his toughness and intensity made American Airlines the best in the business. Today, his rivals are undercutting him, Washington is ignoring him, and answers to his company’s woes are eluding him. No wonder he’s so angry.
(Page 3 of 4)
Bob: “A plenum, a space, where the cool air moves.”
Jan: “Twenty-six-inch.”
The Crandalls bought the house in 1990, long after their three children had grown up and moved away. (Mark is a commodities trader in London, daughter Marty is a partner in the Dallas law firm of Strasburger and Price, and Stephen is a financial analyst in Dallas.) When Bob Crandall first saw the house, he admired the mechanics, the construction, the monumentality of it. Then he discovered the plumbing and fell in love. Instead of a handle on the side of each commode, rubber buttons were inset into the floors. To flush the toilets, you simply step on the buttons. He rushed to the phone to call Jan at their weekend home in Massachusetts. She flew in, and two days later the house was theirs. It is currently valued at $1.2 million.
Now the plumbing has become the centerpiece of the grand tour. We are standing in an upstairs bathroom off the master bedroom. “See that?” Bob says, depressing the button with his toe. Whoosh! It sounds as if Niagra Falls is cascading behind the wall. Whoosh! He steps on it again. Whoosh! He is all grins, a kid in a toy store. Meanwhile, Jan Crandall is standing to the side, pointing out the gargantuan walk-in closet, the heated marble floors, and the pink bidet.
Bob and Jan Crandall are fervently, obsessively united in a mission to restore their house to perfection. They tracked down and purchased most of the original modernist furniture. They found the old landscaping plans, and Jan has been digging up the Burford and yaupon hollies by hand and replanting them in their original locations. They have restored all the plumbing, the electricity, the heat, the air conditioning, even the doorknobs. But there is one problem that the Crandalls have yet to address: the dark granite countertops in the kitchen. They are hard to keep clean.
“Come look right down here,” Jan says, drawing her visitors down to countertop level. “You can see all sorts of stuff that I missed. See?” Standing off to the side, Bob Crandall mutters, “White counters. You gotta have white counters.”
“Crumbs, dust, cornmeal …” Jan lists all the particulates easily obscured by the granite. Does she mean Kenyon’s cornmeal, I ask?
“Kenyon’s cornmeal? Do you know about Kenyon’s cornmeal?” She dives toward the freezer and begins pawing through frozen packages, yanking open drawers, searching for the sack of cornmeal that she orders from a mill in Usequepaugh, Rhode Island, where Bob worked almost forty years ago as a part-time bagger. Bob, meanwhile, is off on another pedagogical tangent, explaining the mechanics of a corn mill. “You’ve got two stones grinding in different directions, and the corn comes down and drops between the stones and, through gravity, is forced out the side . . .”
Bob and Jan Crandall are a compendium of facts: that the concrete foundation of their house can hold up six more stories; that Rhode Island johnnycakes must be cooked six minutes on one side, six on the other; that fruitcake needs to be wrapped in cheesecloth and soaked in brandy. This vast white palace is their refuge in Dallas, a city that is much too showy for a couple of New Englanders who are, at heart, unshowy people. But for Bob Crandall, especially, the house seems to be a statement of defiance. If he can’t prevent the decline of his airline, he can at least create the ideal house, one that is seamless, indestructible, and perfect.
Take the absorption with detail that Bob Crandall brings to his house, put it in the corporate environment, and you have a sense of what it must be like to work for this man. He likes to hold marathon meetings that go on all day and frequently into the night. People prepare all week and then quake in his presence. His sense of perfectionism is so powerful he can barely stand it when he doesn’t find the same quality in others; he can be maddeningly demanding. Crandall has a way of creating a crisis about everything, whether it is something tiny, worth 57 cents, or something huge, worth $57 million. “To say that he had an idea a minute is really true,” says Jim O’Neill, head of Sky Chefs, an airline-catering company in Dallas. “That mind of his kept clicking on everything I said, and he was able to take it one step further than I had. He always had another question.” When Crandall became chairman of the AMR Corporation, he began holding board meetings at seven in the morning, and nobody complained.
The other thing people notice about Crandall is his unswerving pragmatism. He views absolutely everything from the perspective of American’s profit margin. Crandall has said many times that he doesn’t believe airlines should offer bereavement fares—discounted tickets for people whose relatives are sick or deceased. “Requesting a bereavement,” he says, “is like going into a department store and asking for a discount on a black dress because your relative has died.” He resolutely opposes government intervention, yet he has never let his free market principles get in the way of improving American’s competitive position. He has pushed for legislation that would establish minimum employee benefits and that supports federal restrictions on noisy airplanes. Both are to the disadvantage of his weaker rivals.
Crandall can be cold and unsentimental. If he decides an employee is no longer useful to the company, he will inform him without the faintest remorse or sympathy. “You can be one of Bob’s very best friends and he can call you in the next day and say, ‘You don’t fit into the plans anymore—it’s time to go,’” says one fired executive. “It has nothing to do with whether he likes you personally.” Yet strangely, many of Crandall’s castoffs still revere him. “He was the best boss I’ve ever had because he made me so much better than I’d ever be in life,” says another former American executive, who left when Crandall didn’t deliver a promised promotion. One day, Crandall called him in and frostily informed him that someone else was going to get the job. “He screwed me to the wall and drove me from the company that I love,” the departed executive says, “but I’m one of the biggest fans of the man.”
And then there are his legendary blowups. When angered, Crandall has hurled trash cans across the room, pounded on the table, thrown people out of meetings. Once, in New York City, he yanked on a window blind and brought the whole thing crashing down. “I have seen Bob so angry that I thought he was going to die on the spot,” says another former American executive. “The man was literally out of control.” At a cocktail party for officials of the pilots union in Phoenix, Crandall suddenly, and loudly, declared, “I hate all f—ing unions.”
In 1982 his temper almost got the best of him in an incident that was repeated gleefully throughout the industry for years by his enemies. In Dallas, Braniff was regarded as the hometown airline and American as the Yankee invader. Both were fighting hard for virtually the same market, and Braniff, which had grown too fast, was faltering. Crandall sensed the kill and moved in, loading American flights onto every route that Braniff flew. Braniff accused American of orchestrating a sabotage campaign by manipulating its reservations system to turn passengers away from Braniff. Desperate for cash, Braniff began slashing its prices, forcing American to match. Both carriers were losing money.
Then, three months before Braniff’s demise, Crandall had a fateful five-minute conversation with its chairman, Howard Putnam. What Crandall didn’t know was that while they were talking, Putnam’s tape recorder was running. The tape later found its way to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Crandall: “I think it’s dumb as hell, for Christ’s sake, all right, to sit here and pound the shit out of each other and neither one of us making a f—ing dime.”
Putnam: “Well—”
Crandall: “I mean, you know, goddam, what the f—is the point of it? . . .”
Crandall: “I have a suggestion for you. Raise your goddam fares twenty percent. I’ll raise mine the next morning.”
Putnam: “Robert, we—”
Crandall: “You’ll make more money, and I will too.”
Putnam: “We can’t talk about pricing.”
Crandall: “Oh, bullshit, Howard. We can talk about any goddam thing we want to talk about.”
But Crandall was wrong. Price-fixing is illegal. Crandall later insisted he was just making an offhand remark, not asking for an agreement. The lawyers at the Justice Department didn’t see it that way; they filed an anti-trust suit accusing him of trying to establish an illegal monopoly. Played out on the nightly news, the incident didn’t flatter Bob Crandall or American Airlines. Eventually, there was a settlement, but Crandall’s armor had been pierced. He had spent a lifetime creating an image of gleaming invulnerability. Now everyone could see the real thing: a coarser, profaner, more brutal personality. Those who really knew Crandall, of course, already understood that he was merely talking to Putnam the way he frequently talked to people he considered inferior. Outside the company, people began to call it Arrogant Airlines.
By 1988 Crandall had acquired a multitude of unflattering nicknames: Bob the Butcher, Attila the Hun, Fang (inspired by his snaggly teeth). But he didn’t seem to mind; that year American Airlines showed a operating profit of $806 million, the largest in industry history. The company had more than $10 billion in assets, the best hub system in the country, a bunch of new international routes, a quiet, modern fleet, and the industry’s best profit record.
My Library
