Barbarians at the Gate Read Online Free Page A

owed an early knack for numbers and the gift of gab to her; an early entrepreneurial bent he owed to the times. The Johnsons weren’t poverty-stricken, but neither did they own their own bungalow until Johnson was eight years old.
    Around that period young Ross began working at a variety of after-school jobs. He used the money he earned for serious things, like buying clothes. He started with standard kid tasks, such as delivering magazines around the neighborhood and selling candy at the circus, then branched into more innovative ventures, such as renting out comic books from his collection. When he grew older, he sold certificates for baby pictures door-to-door. It was an enterprise he would turn to whenever he needed a buck during his years in college.
    Johnson wasn’t the best student in his high school, ceding that honor to his friend Neil Wood, who would go on to head the huge Cadillac Fairview real estate firm. Johnson was the kind of teenager who could rank in the upper quarter of his class, as he did, without appearing to try very hard, which he didn’t. Nor was he the best athlete in school, although he was a rangy six feet three inches by the time he graduated. He was far better at memorizing baseball statistics in The Sporting News than hitting a fastball.
    Unlike his father, who hadn’t completed high school, Ross Johnson wanted to be a college man, and he took the crosstown bus each day to Winnipeg’s University of Manitoba. He was average inside the classroom but excellent out of it: president of his fraternity, varsity basketball, and honors as outstanding cadet in the Canadian version of ROTC. (This despite a propensity for pranks: One night Johnson and some chums ambushed a superior officer, whom they considered a superior jerk, tied him to a diving board, and left him to contemplate his sins as the sun rose.) If there was anything that marked the playful young Ross Johnson, it was an ability to hold sway over his fellow students, even those who were far older. His college class was largely made up of returning World War II veterans, but it was Johnson, a teenager, who did the organizing and leading.
    Upon graduation, Johnson plunged into the middle levels of a string of Canadian companies, where he would muddle along for nearly twentyyears with little distinction. His first job, as an accountant at Canadian General Electric in Montreal, lasted six years. Bored, he moved to the marketing side in Toronto to try his hand as a salesman. “It’s where the good parties are,” Johnson explained to friends. There, as a low-level manager given the pedestrian task of marketing light bulbs, Johnson first displayed a zest for salesmanship. He dreamed up an idea for a premium-priced bulb, painted on the inside, and researched a name: Shadow Ban. The product did well. Johnson also did wonders for the division’s Christmas-tree bulb sales.
    As good as he was with light bulbs, it was in his expense accounts that Johnson’s real creativity shone. He cut back the expense budgets of his salesmen, marshaling much of the money for himself. He used the additional funds to entertain customers royally, taking particular delight in plotting and executing what he called “the hundred-dollar golf game,” which involved a day on one of the city’s finer courses, followed by drinks and dinner at one of the city’s finer restaurants. It took a prodigious effort to drop $100 in the early 1960s, but Johnson was up to it. By combining his flair for spending with his gift for flattering older men, Johnson moved steadily up the corporate ladder. “Spending money was always a joyful, joyous thing to Ross,” recalled William Blundell, a Canadian friend. “He was convinced that all of the decisions got made by the senior people in the accounts. He thought he could leverage that money pretty well.”
    From the start Johnson was a party animal. He loved nothing better than sipping Scotch and schmoozing into the wee hours. The next