Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(45)
Whitney went upstairs to unpack. After his shower, the scent of Bay Rum aftershave floated in the hallway. My grandmother put extra wool blankets at the ends of our beds and turned up the heat.
Charlie, my mother informed us, had gone to Mexico for the holiday. “It’s for the best,” she said flatly, her eyes trained on the pot of Campbell’s soup she was warming at the stove.
My mother had arranged a meeting for us downtown for the following day with Bill Penner. “You need to get the facts,” she said. She meant about the financial implications of my father’s elopement. Her thirty-year settlement agreement with my father would not be disrupted, but my brothers and I had no such binding agreements. “You all have to face this.” One might have thought, from her tone, that we were headed for the guillotine.
We dressed for the occasion, I in a black-and-white checked double-breasted jacket with black pants and heeled boots; Bobby and Whitney, sporting blazers, ties, and gray flannels. We met in the trust department of our family bank in downtown Detroit, an entity designed to keep the family-trust management under our own roof. Nearly all the Stroh Brewery Company shares were held in multiple generation-skipping trusts for the protection of the company and the family—at least that’s how my grandfather, etc. planned it. These trusts kept the brewery assets intact so that subsequent generations of Strohs might continue to own and manage the business while also paying out quarterly distributions to the family shareholders and their spouses. Within our nuclear family, my father was the only shareholder.
Bill Penner, an attorney with the big Detroit firm Butzel Long, agonized over a pile of documents at the head of the boardroom table as we filed in, his skin stretched too tightly over his clearly exhausted face. He looked up with reddened eyes. “Thanks for coming down,” he said in a tone that could only be called funereal. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”
We all shook his hand and sat down. Bill had grown gaunt with age. Whitney had once remarked that he looked as if he “summered on Three Mile Island,” and I couldn’t help but laugh. Now I felt badly; this man seemed so genuinely concerned about the situation we found ourselves in, so determined to do whatever he could to help us.
“I’ve been reviewing the trusts that benefit your father,” he said soberly as he flipped through a thick document. “And, well . . . Afraid I don’t have very good news.”
The air left the room. Bobby wiped his brow and gave me a long-suffering look that said, Here we go . . . again.
“As you know,” Bill continued. “Your father and Elisa did not sign a prenuptial agreement before they wed. That in itself is troubling. The other piece of unfortunate news, though, is this: two of the four generation-skipping trusts that benefit your father give him a power of appointment over the income, meaning that he can—or even, from a legal standpoint, may have to—appoint that income to Elisa after his death.”
I felt the raw taste of fear at the back of my throat.
Whitney leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, his hands white-knuckling the edge of the mahogany table.
Bobby looked up from his notepad. “Let me get this straight, Bill. Our father may have to leave Elisa his trust assets? I don’t understand—that money was made by his father and grandfather.”
Bill nodded. “That’s correct. And just to be clear, he may leave only the income from the trusts’ assets, not the assets themselves. Those, of course, will pass to your children.”
We had no children. And even if we had, Elisa would receive the income for the entire span of her lifetime. My brothers and I would be passed over entirely, lending the term “generation-skipping trust” an unpalatable new twist. Until now, I had never given the trusts much thought. I was young, and artists, well, they were always just scraping by. And so I had learned to romanticize my bohemianism, if only to cope with a lifestyle that afforded few of the luxuries I’d enjoyed in the past. In fact, until very recently, I had been perfectly happy on my chosen path, self-abnegation included. But now I realized that the Stroh trusts—psychologically certainly—had always, in truth, served as something of a safety net for me. I’d never had to cope with serious uncertainty. All that had changed now. And not just because of my father’s impetuous behavior.
The vast majority of the Stroh Brewery’s value had virtually disintegrated while I’d been holed up in my art studio in London, wrestling with esoteric issues of point of view in my video-installation pieces. For several years, every major brewer in the United States had been undercutting its competition with price reductions, and Stroh had been forced to follow suit; with no margins and no cash, our business was tanking. In a desperate last attempt to stay afloat—and with the help of another massive loan—the Stroh Brewery acquired the G. Heileman Brewing Company, a brewery in even direr straits than our own. The marriage was a poor one, and our combined sales continued to drop. Yet the Stroh board went on paying the family shareholders the large income to which everyone was accustomed. Indeed, my father’s lifestyle seemed to grow more lavish by the minute, with grander houses, fancier boats, and showier cars. His denial was contagious; even Bobby, Whitney, and I assumed our businesses must be faring better than reported at the annual family business meetings. For years, we’d all flown cross-country to attend these meetings—a requirement of all shareholders, present and future—under the assumption that the trusts would be there and that we, as future shareholders, were ultimately responsible for our stake in the company. Now it was clear we’d never had any control over the company’s destiny, let alone the trusts.