Cards on the table: Adrien Brody in Succession, with Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox. Photo / Supplied
Cards on the table: Adrien Brody in Succession, with Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox. Photo / Supplied
Anything the Roys get away with is nothing compared to these real-life takeovers. By Oliver Shah.
Perhaps the most delicately excruciating scene in this third series of Succession comes when the ageing media mogul Logan Roy and his estranged son Kendall fly to see one of their biggest investors onhis private island near New York. The grizzled Logan, played by Brian Cox, and the neurotic Kendall (Jeremy Strong) are not speaking to each other since Kendall publicly pointed the finger at his old man for suppressing allegations of rapes and sexual assaults at the cruises division of their Waystar Royco conglomerate.
The company is now under siege from hostile forces trying to wrest control from its founding family, meaning that Logan and Kendall are temporarily united by their need to persuade the oleaginous shareholder Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody) to support them in a crunch vote.
Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, in a scene from Succession. Photo / Graeme Hunter
Logan leans towards Aaronson on the sofa and purrs hypnotically: "Let me tell you, hand on heart, whatever the turbulence in the short term, there is nothing that's a significant issue. The core business is the core business and the volatility is priced in now, so it's all upside from here. Safest option? Back me, sit tight counting your gold in your castle here, and I'll make you whole. Okay?"
"Love it," Aaronson grins, relishing his moment of leverage over the old autocrat. "F***ing King Kong, come out to dance for me. I'm honoured."
Bid for M&S: Stuart Rose and Sir Philip Green. Photo / Getty Images
One of Succession's myriad pleasures is the realism with which its corporate chicanery is rendered. From Kendall's failed attempt to mount a hostile takeover of his father's business to the AGM "proxy fight" with rebel shareholder Stewy Hosseini and rival media tycoon Sandy Furness, the show borrows liberally from dramatic City and Wall St clashes of the past three decades.
One that springs strongly to mind is the battle for control of RJR Nabisco. The giant American group that made Camel cigarettes, Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers was taken over for $25 billion by the private equity firm KKR at the height of the 1980s boom after an epic tussle immortalised by the Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in Barbarians at the Gate.
RJR Nabisco was run by Ross Johnson, a thrusting Canadian with a love of the good life. From the moment he took over as chief executive in 1986 and had to work from the company's headquarters in the sleepy North Carolina city of Winston-Salem, he was like "a Ferrari revving in a badly clogged parking lot", according to Burrough and Helyar. With his bodyguard and his liking for travelling by helicopter, Johnson stuck out like a sore thumb in the conservative community. The local matrons nicknamed his wife, a Californian blonde in her early 30s, Cupcake.
He relocated RJR Nabisco's HQ to Atlanta — a move that led a country music station to play a ballad excoriating him — and decorated it in style: this was the heyday of executives using big companies as their personal piggy banks. The reception area's backdrop was an 18th-century $100,000 lacquered Chinese screen, complemented by a $16,000 pair of blue Chinese vases. There was $30,000 worth of 18th-century porcelain in Johnson's office. At Atlanta's Charlie Brown airport he built a state-of-the art hangar for RJR Nabisco's 10 corporate jets, which he used freely.
When his dog, Rocco, bit a security guard at a golf tournament in Palm Springs, Johnson had him smuggled on to a plane under the passenger manifold "G. Shepherd" and flown back to Winston-Salem. In his greed and naivety Johnson resembled the younger Roys — or rather, they resemble him. In one episode of the new series, Hosseini and Furness try to humiliate the family by demanding they scrap their use of private jets. "The PJs?!" whines Logan's third son, Roman, incredulously.
In the buyout fever of 1988 Johnson decided he wanted to take RJR Nabisco private. But his terms were too rich for most backers; he declined to relinquish the PJs, or the fancy apartments, or the luxurious golf clubs. And Johnson's team wanted 20 per cent of the equity — potentially worth billions of dollars — for nothing. They tried to snatch the company on the cheap with the investment banks Shearson Lehman Hutton and Salomon Brothers, but were outbid by KKR in a savage example of capitalism red in tooth and claw.
Henry Kravis, KKR's mastermind, could have been the model for Logan. "There was a steely glint in his eyes that made one want to believe the stories of unbridled greed and ambition," Burrough and Helyar wrote. "And there was an air — maybe it was his cool, boarding-school reserve — that hinted at something tightly coiled beneath: a sense, however slight, of menace."
RJR Nabisco takeover: Henry Kravis of KKR with Carolyne Roehm. Photo / Getty Images
Even Succession's writers would have struggled to come up with some of the vignettes from the RJR Nabisco saga, which played out two years after the publication of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities — a case of life mirroring art. On his 30th birthday Kravis rode a Honda motorcycle around his Park Avenue apartment. And when a pushy investment banker called Jeffrey Beck — nickname Mad Dog — was trying to court Johnson for business, he devoured a whole box of Milk Bone dog biscuits (made by RJR Nabisco) for a joke as they talked.
