Nice to Know?
THE hero is always the man of action. Typical man of action of our day is the big businessman —his battlefield the office and board-room, his weapons the bank balance and the telephone.
Among such champions of the swivel-chair, Calouste Gulbenkian, dapper, bright-eyed little Armenian, stood out like Hector or Achilles. Though he died only two years ago at the age of eighty-six, his doughty deeds already fill one book; later in the year they are to be celebrated by a well-known Rovelist.
Mr. Five Per Cent has the virtues one would expect of its journalist author. Mr. Hewins has made sure of his ground; the book is advertised as 'the only biography written with the aid of the Gulbenkian family.' He has approached numbers of people who worked with Gulbenkian in one or other of his many capacities, or who knew and can remember his associates. Clearly he has studied the complicated history of the great oil companies in the Middle East with care.
Unfortunately for both author and reader, the excitement of great business deals is extremely difficult to convey in print. It depends upon too many factors. Tension is lost in the laborious effort to understand just what both sides are really up to.
Readers of the Financial Times may be able to lose sleep over a battle in which directors and shareholders of Anglo-Utopian hold out for years for a 5 per cent, cut in the concession secured by US Leviathan—of which they already own one- third of the stock; but the ordinary man wants even his financial crises in human terms. A power of condensation and a dramatist's gift are needed for sorting out and lighting up what is at stake in terms of national drives, moral issues or con- flicts of personality.
To such dramatisation Gulbenkian does not easily lend himself. He was a complex, in some ways an intriguing, figure, with the power to charm and impress those who could be of service to .him. Sir Kenneth Clark, who advised him in art purchases, says: 'He had the most marvellous. mind I have ever met : the most powerful I have ever encountered. I grew genuinely fond of him.' His own family were less enthusiastic. 'Not very nice to know . . . even by Oriental standards' was the comment of Gulbenkian's brother-in-law.
Power-loving, but addicted to compromise; fond of luxury, but fasting one day in every month; controlling his family and associates— even his doctors—by spying systems; checking every penny, but never worrying over the mil- lions he occasionally failed to make; he inches his way through life and through the book. At times both mean and narrow, he yet competed on equal terms with Governments and financial empires, and—in a life devoted to self-interest—was con- stantly ready to promote the interests of Bri,tain, France or the countries of the Middle East, in what seems positively a benevolent or patronising way.
Though so much of the book consists of financial manoeuvring, it has many lively touches, such as Mr. Five Per Cent's favourite saying : The hand you dare not bite, kiss it'; and the dry comment in his memoirs: 'Oil friendships are slippery.'
. Of his associates two stand out : Mantachoff and Deterding. Mantachoff, a grea,t bull of a man who struck oil in his garden, became a Baku multi-millionaire and lived like an Oriental potentate—even distilling his kerosene in platinum cisterns. Deterding was . Gulbenkian's partner, rival and enemy in many enterprises, and Gulben- kian was delighted when he learned that Deterding had 'ordered £300,000 of emeralds from Cartier for Lydia (Lydia Bagratumi whom he was pur- suing) and couldn't pay for them because his annual director's fees had not yet come in.' Notable exponent of private enterprise though he was, Gulbenkian never allowed doctrines to stand in the way of common sense. When the war ended in 1945, he made repeated attempts to bring the Russians into the oilfields of the Middle East. with British and American agreement and nn reasonable terms, believing that this was essential to prevent a Third World War. TOM HOPIONSON
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