Suddenly Susan
Not so long ago, Austin women in need of couture clothes had to go to Dallas or Houston. Now Susan Dell (the wife of Michael) is selling her own high-dollar designs in a tony boutique. It's your classic riches-to-rags story.
(Page 2 of 3)
High-spirited and outgoing, with a Farrah Fawcett mane and a dazzling smile, she became one of the most popular members of the class of 1982. The house was perpetually filled with flowers, her brothers say, and one suitor regularly brought Tyler roses by the bucketful. "Susan always went out with the star athletes—the quarterback, the pitcher for the baseball team," remembers Steve of her days as a cheerleader. "She didn't get serious with them, but they were serious about her." After high school, she vowed to apply herself to her studies at Arizona State University, though majoring in fashion merchandising and design proved to be disappointing. She candidly admits that she had an eye for design but not the skills for clothing construction. "Anything I sewed, you wouldn't have caught me dead in," she says, laughing at the memory. "I couldn't take an idea from the page to the garment." At the end of her senior year, unsure which direction her life would take, she confided in Zeck Lieberman on the long drive home from Tempe to Dallas. She wanted to meet someone she could get serious with, she told her father, and though she had never cared much about marrying within her faith before, she also wanted him to be Jewish. There was only one problem, she said, "Jewish guys don't like to sweat."
"Well," her father suggested, "why don't you teach a Jewish guy how to sweat?"
Enter Michael Dell, a pudgy, bespectacled 22-year-old wunderkind who had launched his career selling PCs out of his UT dorm room. Susan met him in February 1988 after she had followed her brother's lead and ventured into real estate, moving to Austin to work for Trammell Crow. One of her clients insisted that she meet Dell, then a rising star in the business world but by no means a household name. His fledgling company was still called PC's Limited, and as Susan tells it, she had not the slightest idea who he was or even any certainty about his last name. They met at a North Austin bistro for lunch, and shortly thereafter Susan told her brother Steve that she was smitten. "Most men I dated talked about themselves a lot and tried to impress me," she recalls. But Michael, whose father is also a doctor, seemed unassuming. "He was the nicest guy I'd ever met." The young entrepreneur also looked good on paper; when he took his company public later that year, his stock holdings reportedly soared to nearly $100 million. The following spring they were engaged, and in October 1989 they were married. He was 24, she 25.
At first glance, they seemed an odd match: A family photo from the time shows Michael, plainly ill at ease in front of the camera, his tie slightly askew; beside him stands Susan, resplendent in a crimson dress she had designed and matching pumps, smiling brilliantly. "From a superficial standpoint, we were naturally sort of surprised," says Randy, choosing his words carefully. "Michael was very cerebral, very philosophical. He had been so serious, with so many serious people, for a long time." Susan took it upon herself to give his life, which had largely consisted of eighteen-hour workdays, more balance. She hosted the first party held at his Northwest Hills home. She took him jogging or biking around Town Lake most mornings. She persuaded him, on business trips abroad, to duck out of work long enough to take in the sights. Bolstering his confidence, she persuaded him to wear Armani suits for executive polish and to try warming to the limelight rather than shunning it. What her husband thinks of her efforts—or of her, for that matter—is anyone's guess. "I'll only answer questions pertaining to Susan's business," Michael Dell told me during a recent interview, living up to his billing as a famously tight-lipped CEO.
By 1991 Forbes was including Dell on its list of the four hundred richest Americans. Such wealth came at a price: Two years later, soon after the birth of the Dells' first child, a burglar broke into their home when the baby and the nanny were alone. No one was hurt, but the incident left Susan deeply shaken. "I believe he should be put in jail where he can't emotionally scar anyone else," she testified at one of the burglar's trials. "I'm fearful all the time." Soon afterward, the Dells commissioned Charles Gwathmey to design a solitary estate on Thompson Mountain, a limestone-and-stainless-steel Shangri-la surrounded by 120 wooded acres and a tall game fence. Privacy at the mansion—which, from a distance, looks like a spaceship that has lost its way—is at a premium: Only intimate friends are allowed farther than a reception hall adjacent to the house, and hired help must sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from speaking about their employers. Security officers monitor the perimeter and discreetly keep watch over the Dells, even when Susan pedals into the Hill Country on her marathon 65-mile weekend bike rides.
Life inside the bubble is carefully stage-managed, and glimpses of Susan in unrehearsed moments are hard to come by. Friends and family are guarded in what they say about her, frequently retreating into banalities. "For Susan," they invariably say, "the glass is always half full." Even her husband prefers to stick to generalities, speaking of her "enthusiasm" and "energy" without providing any details. Indeed, those closest to her are relentlessly on-message, as if reading from the same stage directions: Reveal nothing. Always bring the conversation back to Susan's business. Use buzzwords like "dedicated" and "passionate." Questions that might provoke any other response often receive the same reply: "You'll have to check with Susan on that." Of course, there is a certain absurdity in trying to grasp the essence of a woman who is, by design, unknowable—though given those constraints, Susan talks about herself with little disingenuousness. Although she is keenly aware of shaping her own story line—"I always knew I would marry the greatest guy in the world," she says—she is the least circumspect of her circle, offering frank assessments of her life beneath the glass.
Effusive, occasionally self-deprecating, and informal in conversation—"Killer!" she had exclaimed when she saw a new design at her New York offices—she spoke in June about the peculiarities of her high-profile life. Standing in her Westlake office, she compared the gradual increase in her husband's fame with the way that Loop 360, the main thoroughfare running through Austin's high-tech hills, has changed from a scenic drive to a choked highway during the thirteen years she has lived in the city; as a newcomer, she biked along it with ease, and as traffic has increased each year, she has forged on. "You just get used to it," she said. First, people stared at her husband in public. Then they asked for autographs. The couple was recognized in an out-of-the-way restaurant in Paris, then in a toy store in Tokyo. Now, helicopters occasionally hover over their house. "Wherever you are, people know you, but you don't know them," Susan said. "They look at you and lean toward you and want to shake your hand." There have been moments when the enormity of it all has taken her by surprise, as when her husband delivered a speech in New York that drew a crowd of thousands. "He was like a rock star," she said.
This past year the media's interest in the Dells has reached a fever pitch. In March the New York Observer ran a story titled "Yee-haw! The Texas Dell Boys Lasso Manhattan," claiming—incorrectly—that the couple had purchased a $22 million Manhattan pied-à-terre. In June the Austin American-Statesman speculated that the Dells were the buyers of an $80 million spread west of town (land that Susan confirms will be the family's horse ranch, although she says the reported dollar amount is incorrect). Heightened fascination with the Dells is probably inevitable; however, if they have inspired jealousy or resentment in Austin, it is largely discussed behind closed doors. On and off the record, observers of the couple's ascendancy expressed little ill will toward them—perhaps in part because they have become the city's most generous patrons. Dedicated philanthropists, they have donated nearly $50 million to a variety of causes and ushered in an unprecedented era of giving among the city's so-called Dellionaires. In the same vein, Susan encourages her four children to give one third of their allowance to charity. "Their lives depend on us making sure they're grounded," she said with a sense of urgency.
My Library
