Public Lives: A Latter-Day Warbucks, Helping Children

By JAN HOFFMAN

WHEN a 59-year-old bachelor who is also a Wall Street titan puts up $50 million of his own to help 40,000 poor children attend private school, it seems only reasonable to ask, Why is he doing this?

Sprawling on a couch recently in his 44th-floor office overlooking Central Park, Theodore J. Forstmann — silvery helmet hair, fresh tan — gleams. The financier, who was a co-chairman of George Bush’s Presidential re-election campaign, says he has no desire to run for office. But he is basking in the acclaim received for the program he founded a year ago with the philanthropist John Walton. Last week it awarded $160 million in partial scholarships for grade-school children, in what many see as thinly disguised school vouchers.

Mr. Forstmann, a long-time scholarship donor, is unapologetic. He holds forth about how public education is a monopoly that must be challenged by competition.

Enough. What’s in it for you, Teddy?

Mr. Forstmann, a founder of the multi-billion-dollar investment firm Forstmann Little & Company, is known as a blunt, forceful perfectionist. But unlike most financiers, he betrays an uncool streak of passionate earnestness.

“I know what a lonely child feels like,” he says. “It’s a desperate feeling. You have no self-esteem. You think you’ve been dealt this hand because it’s your fault. I experienced this as a child.”

It is not obvious how a man whose personal fortune Forbes magazine estimates at $525 million can empathize with poverty-stricken children, but in a two-hour conversation, Mr. Forstmann speaks haltingly about his own strife-torn childhood.

He was the second of six children in a family of great wealth, but he and his branch of a woolen-manufacturing dynasty were social outcasts. His relatives, German Lutherans, lived in adjoining mansions in Upper Montclair, N.J. His grandfather, a 300-pound patriarch, briefly disowned his father, Julius, for marrying Dorothy, an Italian Catholic. So Julius fled to Greenwich, Conn., where Teddy and his siblings grew up with amenities like a private baseball diamond.

The Forstmann clan disdained them, says Mr. Forstmann, as did old-line Greenwich. Even today, the man who persuaded leaders in Hollywood, the Senate and the corporate world to support his program, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, calls himself an outsider.

Mr. Forstmann remembers Julius as “an intellectual, generous, gentle guy who had no belief in himself.” But Julius, ordered to run the empire, was also a vicious alcoholic of the Jekyll-Hyde type who was in and out of sanitariums. “Definitely abusive, and then very apologetic,” Mr. Forstmann says.

“My mother is the competitor,” he adds. “She had some idea that one of us should win Wimbledon. She pushed me at tennis.” So he quit the game for 20 years.

In his father’s plan, Mr. Forstmann was to become the family lawyer. He says, “I grew up calm on the outside, but I wasn’t too calm on the inside.”

JULIUS died when Teddy Forstmann was 21. The family fortune was gone. He graduated from Columbia Law School and began playing high-stakes bridge, a penniless rich kid fumbling for an identity. Heading into his mid-30’s, he finally realized: “It was not my fault. That was my epiphany.”

He gained the confidence to inspire investors. During the last 20 years, his ruthless competitiveness, sanctimonious but prescient anti-junk-bond crusade and the 23 leveraged buyouts, which included Gulfstream Aerospace and Dr Pepper became the stuff of business school textbooks. The rewards include four homes, works by Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh (“it’s just a drawing, but it’s a famous drawing”), and rumors of a romance with Princess Diana, which he politely denied. This is the stuff of a self-esteem that became exceedingly robust. (Mr. Forstmann, alone among his oft-wedded siblings never to risk marriage, is emerging from a five-year relationship, but seems wanly hopeful.)

“It took me 35 years to visit my Dad’s grave,” Mr. Forstmann says, “and now I go once a year. I had an insight: it’s tough not to have a father, but if you’re a father and you don’t have a son, that’s tough, too.”

So for 25 years, he has been traveling and writing checks, hoping to rescue damaged childhoods. He has visited Bosnia and helped to finance a ranch for sick children in Colorado. There was even a near-incredulous Daddy Warbucks moment in Johannesburg when Mr. Forstmann met one youngster who yanked at his heart.

“This kid is for me, that’s it,” he remembers thinking. “So I called the guy who runs my tournament” — a tennis benefit for children — “and I told him to bring over the kid.” That is how a child named Everest traveled from a South African orphanage to a Southampton gala. Everest, 12, and his friend Siya, 15, spend vacations with Mr. Forstmann, who pays for boarding school back home.

The two boys have been playing computer games in the outer office. Everest cuffs Mr. Forstmann fondly and says: “We just came back from the Bahamas. We go water-skiing and play golf. We go to dinners with Teddy and meet famous people like Henry Kissinger.”

Mr. Forstmann seems abashed by the depth of his devotion to the boys, who are a reminder that he has bested Julius in every way but one. “I’d love to be a father,” Teddy Forstmann says.