8

Navigating the New Landscape

We used to wonder why she spent so much time at the college picking out bathroom fixtures.

—ANNA LOGAN LAWSON ON JANE BASSETT SPILMAN

While Mr. Ed managed the town’s affairs via the company and the Kiwanis Club, which he ruled with an iron fist, Bob Spilman stuck to business and rarely mixed with the townspeople. He frequently asked barber Coy Young to cut his hair early in the morning, before the shop opened, so he wouldn’t be seen. He joined neither the church started by C.C. Bassett (Methodist) nor the one started by J.D. (Baptist). Though he was originally from North Carolina, the nephew of a prominent textile manufacturer, Spilman had arrived in Bassett by way of the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. He thought that, socially, Bassett was Death Valley—and he said so, loudly, more than once.

Though Jane may have secured his future as company president, Spilman thought it would look wimpy to have his wife conspicuously involved in company affairs. In the corporate world of the 1960s, that just wasn’t done. Company officers suggested he appoint Jane to the Bassett board, but “I knew it would be a cold day in hell before that happened,” Jane said.

I knew Jane had relished talking about the factories with her father so I asked whether her husband at least shared what was happening at the Taj Mahal with her over dinner. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that question,” she said, and she seemed genuinely stung. “But the answer is no. And it used to break… my… heart.”

Jane exerted her power in other ways. She had a new clubhouse built for the Bassett Country Club and appointed herself head of town beautification, concerning herself with such details as the color of paint on the company homes and store facades and how frequently the streets were cleaned and the grass along the highways mowed. She became the first woman to chair the board of her alma mater, Hollins College, where she’s remembered as a driven, but cheerful, powerhouse.

A diminutive blonde with stick-straight posture, she wore navy blue suits with brass buttons to board meetings and ran roughshod over fund-raising protocols, faculty input, and presidential search committees. Her phone conversations were purposeful and direct, always ending with a breezy “Do be of good cheer!”

The gorgeous new Wyndham Robertson Library on campus? She nailed the ask for that one, charming Wyndham’s billionaire brother, Julian Robertson, and securing three million dollars toward the fourteen-million-dollar project in a single visit. She even chose the architect for the project, all the better to ensure it matched the other traditional brick squares on campus and suited her vision to a tee.

Bill Young, Bassett’s retired corporate communications director, recalled Jane sealing the deal on a two-million-dollar donation to Hollins from a Bassett board member—during a single fifteen-minute car ride. She was efficient, if imperious, in her role, once discarding a lesbian board-member nominee for the Hollins board because “she’s not our kind,” according to fellow board member Anna Logan Lawson, and concerning herself with every detail of an alumni-quarters renovation, down to picking out the faucets.

“But when the students met with her, she really spoke to them as a powerful woman who could get stuff done,” added Lawson, an anthropologist and Roanoke-area civic leader. “She was strong and she looked good, and she was in their corner. I admired her and everything she did for Hollins, but I would not want to be her.”

Jane had already proven—to the world—that she was not afraid to ruffle feathers. An otolaryngologist friend had recognized Jane’s firebrand qualities after she’d founded a residential facility for juvenile offenders as an alternative to jail in Martinsville, a feat that garnered statewide press in the 1970s. The doctor encouraged her to join the board of Gallaudet University, and within four years, she had risen to chair. But at the federally funded liberal arts college for the deaf in Washington, DC, her leadership style was viewed as “unenlightened” and autocratic. Some professors criticized her “plantation mentality” and described the entire board as a bastion of paternalism toward the hearing-impaired. Asked why she had not bothered to learn sign language in her six years of serving on the board, Jane explained that “my efforts and my time would be best directed in areas where others couldn’t perform, like the budget.”

In 1988, when the board hired a hearing president over two deaf finalists, the students shut down the college, took to the streets, and marched with signs that said SPILMAN, LEARN TO SIGN: “I RESIGN!” They burned Jane and the president she’d hired in effigy and called for their immediate resignations.

For eight days, Jane refused to bow to their demands and was quoted as saying, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.” That quote became the spark that mobilized the international deaf community, which called the protest the “Selma of the deaf.”

Though she said later she’d been misunderstood by an interpreter and, consequently, misquoted, Jane did resign the following week, conceding that her presence on the board had become “an obstacle to healing.”

Back in Bassett, she told a Roanoke Times reporter that just a few weeks earlier, she had been fund-raising for Gallaudet in New York, where a potential donor told her the university suffered from not being well-known.

“Lord knows, there’s nobody who hasn’t heard of Gallaudet University” now, she said. Wistfully, she swore that she had not uttered the offending quote—though “it probably will be on my gravestone.” She held her head high and kept her cheerfulness in check.

Had Jane been born a decade later, Lawson said, “I think she would have had a much different, probably much happier, life. She would have run Bassett Industries. There’s no question in my mind.”

Though she never said it directly, Jane described herself in a way that implied she was a victim of the Southern patriarchy. But behind the scenes, according to dozens of people I interviewed, an entirely different narrative emerged. She had claimed that there were no discussions of the factory at the dinner table, but most people I talked to insisted that Jane maintained a firm grip on the company tiller throughout her husband’s tenure. “Jane was Bob’s personal board of directors,” a former Bassett vice president, Howard Altizer, said.

Observers could tell they were fond of each other. “But you could also tell there was an ongoing tension about who’s the final word here,” Warner Dalhouse, the banker, recalled. “Jane wasn’t gonna let Bob totally use up her authority as a Bassett.

“All the Bassetts were tough, but Bob Spilman was more Bassett than the Bassetts,” he added. Perhaps even more Bassett than Jane.

Although barber Coy Young has his doubts about that. “Kiss my foot that she was wounded!” he said when I told him how she described being cut out of business discussions. “Listen, when she went into the barbershop or the bank, you knew she was there. She’d go into a beauty parlor and order lobster on the phone in front of everybody, showing you she had the capability.”

Young remembered counseling a distraught Bassett shipping supervisor named Cosmo after watching Bob Spilman cuss him out publicly in the barbershop one morning. Cosmo had been put in the middle of an argument between Bob and Jane having to do with furniture they’d collected to give to their children. It was a disagreement about which kid got which piece, and Cosmo had sided with Jane.

Coy tried not to react as Bob cursed Cosmo, but he felt the display was childish and inappropriate. Then Cosmo dragged Coy into the dispute, asking him, in front of Spilman, to weigh in.

“Cosmo, when Bob gets through cussing you out, it’s over,” Coy told him. “But if you had crossed Jane, it would never be over. You did what you had to do.”

After which Spilman grumped, “Coy, cut my goddamn hair.”

Spilman was the one who hung a sign behind his desk proclaiming himself THE MEANEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY. When he needed a ride to High Point for Market business, he called up the Henry County sheriff and told him to send over a deputy to drive him there.

Spilman was also the one who stood by the elevators of the Taj Mahal and said “Good afternoon” to people who dared to show up for work at 8:02 a.m., just two minutes late. And Spilman was the one who sent the company jet to fetch plant manager Joe Philpott from his family vacation at the beach when personnel issues arose that called for a deft, diplomatic touch Spilman wasn’t capable of providing. Twice.

But behind the scenes, according to most people I spoke to, Jane was the mover of the family chess pieces, knighting her husband and later her son, Rob, and relegating her brother, Little John, to pawn. “John was on the board, but from the very beginning after their father’s death, he was cut out of all decision-making,” said Altizer, who worked for the company from 1965 to 1980. When John suggested ideas for improving plant efficiency, he was openly brushed off by Spilman, who didn’t believe in spending money on expensive new machinery. “Do the best with what you have,” he was fond of telling plant managers—and if you could cut costs by 5 percent, even better.

In the community at large, the little people had to walk a tightrope, recalled industry veteran John McGhee. “You couldn’t show too much love and affection for Bob and Jane because that would piss off” the C.C. Bassett side. “And if you were like me, you probably felt like John Bassett would be the heir apparent when Bob relinquished the board chairman or the presidency.” And yet there seemed to be no love lost between Spilman and Little John, so who knew?

Not long after Spilman became president of Bassett, conglomerates such as Mead and Burlington Industries decided the furniture industry was ripe for diversification, and, seeing profits in furniture, they started buying up companies.

Bassett’s balance sheet was the envy of the industry, and the company was still the largest single-name-brand furniture company in the United States. It was averaging a 17 percent return on invested capital and more than 8 percent on sales, and by the mid-1980s, it had $65 million in cash and almost no debt, which gave Spilman the flexibility to make big acquisitions. The company was publicly held but tightly controlled by managers and relatives—that is, the appointees of Spilman and Jane.

Rather than modernize the Bassett factories, Spilman began acquiring others to beef up sales. As he told an interviewer in 2005, “We bought so many damn plants it takes a long time to remember them all.”

“Bob was a good pitchman behind the scenes,” said Colbert Micklem, a Bassett salesman of that era. “He loved to handle the money and look for ways to purchase things and grow his industry. But he did nothing to improve the efficiency of the plants.”

A reporter for Fortune had visited the town in 1967, and the resulting article chided Bassett and the other Southern furniture makers for their “Rube Goldberg assembly-line techniques,” calling their mass-produced furniture “uniformly uninspired and often downright ugly.”

But when Little John suggested a design change, it was usually dismissed outright. More than once, Spilman prohibited John from flying on the company airplane, even after John’s suitcase was packed and he was ready to board. Mr. Ed griped that “Little John is just plain smart”—and not in a good way. In fact, several people told me that Spilman, Jane, and Ed quietly promulgated the notion throughout the industry that John Bassett wasn’t smart or “sophisticated” enough to become CEO of a furniture company as large as Bassett. As Bunny Wampler put it, “John was always trying to tell Spilman what to do, but Spilman was a lot smarter and wouldn’t listen to him. So he just wanted to get John out of his hair.”

John was, after all, ten years younger than Spilman, who was already a vice president when John returned to Bassett. Just twenty-eight when his father died, John knew he didn’t have the management experience to run the company. But he believed that if he held tight and learned the ropes, playing the good soldier and biding his time, the presidency would one day be his.

When he returned home from Germany and repeatedly went over Mr. Ed’s head, he had no idea he was playing into the Spilmans’ hands. “John should’ve respected Ed more than he did,” Spencer Morten said. He alienated Morten, too, when he brought a furniture buyer from Norfolk into Dominion Ornamental, the plant Mr. Doug had set up to make the boys play nice. John was running the J.D. plants at the time and thought nothing of taking the furniture buyer to Dominion, run by Morten, and committing the ultimate sin: shutting it down (temporarily) to show the visitor how it worked. He was doing something worse than showing off; he was slowing the production line. JBIII disputes that account and says that shutting down an operating assembly line is anathema to him, then and now.

Several Spilman friends, relatives, and industry insiders who asked not to be named said Mr. Ed and Spilman cut a secret deal within minutes of Doug Bassett’s funeral. If Spilman promised never to fire Ed Bassett’s manager sons, Eddie and Charles, Ed would retain his spot as chairman of the board, but Spilman would run the daily operations—and do whatever he wanted with the brassy young heir. “Ed could not stand Little John Bassett,” one family friend said. “And Spilman sucked up to Ed because he had to.”

“It was all about survival,” one relative told me. “If John’s father had lived longer, Uncle Ed would have never had a shot at running the whole thing.” John surely would have been promoted over Spilman, the relative added. “But Ed mucked everything up.”

In the 1967 Fortune magazine photo spread, John is already on the periphery. CEO Ed stands in the middle of his management team, his foot perched casually on the railroad track that intersects the company town. He’s flanked by his son Charles and his confidant Bob Spilman—while John grins at the photo’s edge.

The article called Ed a blunt advocate of paternalism, describing the $1.5 million the company had just spent to build two recreation centers, one for blacks and one for whites. “We have to keep the people happy, although I must say it was easier to do in the days before television and cheap transportation,” Ed told the magazine, which described the family’s style of living and management as belonging to a “bygone day.”

And Fortune didn’t know the half of it.

At Jane Spilman’s home in central Virginia, horse country, on the Charlottesville side of Richmond, photographs of children and grandchildren were arranged neatly on bureaus. Bob Spilman was present in a few of them, but most of the photos he was in featured his prize possession, a sport-fishing yacht he named Sawdust.

Sure, he had a woodworking shop in all three of his homes, and once he used his shop to construct a nineteen-foot dory (with the help of a company sample maker), which he launched at a party—in his swimming pool. But if you asked any of the thousands of people who worked the Bassett assembly lines, they would tell you: He did not have sawdust in his veins.

I visited eighty-two-year-old Howard Hodges at the Fork Mountain Rest Home to talk about the thirty-eight years he’d worked at Bassett, and Hodges said Spilman rarely toured the plants. But when employees had problems with their managers, they were encouraged to snitch on them by writing directly to Spilman via a form the company referred to as the hotline.

“Most people were scared of Mr. Spilman, but he was always good to me,” said Hodges, wearing a robe, undershirt tank, and sweatpants. He sat on the side of his twin bed, which dwarfed the tiny room, with its worn linoleum floors and cinder-block walls. His wife, Myrtle, died in 1973 in a car wreck; they were carpooling to work at the Bassett Chair plant with some other employees to save gas money, and the driver hit a pothole, lost control, and crashed into an embankment. “Lord, I have missed that woman,” he said.

His goal had been to work until he turned eighty, but his doctor made him retire in 2000 at age seventy. Twelve years earlier, he’d had a heart attack at work but refused to leave his planing machine until his foreman forced him to see the company nurse—twenty minutes into his attack.

He has fond memories of working for JBIII in the J.D. plants, John’s first plant-manager job. He stopped by Howard’s machine regularly to check on the planer, telling him to keep up the good work. Like his father and his uncle Bill before him, John knew most of his employees by name. His workplace philosophy was that direct communication was preferable to snitching: “If you want to find out how a machine is doing, don’t go to the foreman. Go to the man who’s running it,” Hodges recalled John telling him.

Decades later, John Bassett III will say very little about how his relatives treated him in the family business. More than once, he bit my head off for asking. After my three-hour interview with Jane, though, he wanted to find out everything she’d said. A newspaper article I had written about him a few months earlier prompted him to thank me because it led to the first honest discussion the two had had in decades. Now he was curious. “What else did Jane say? What did she say about me?”

I was surprised to be dragged into the family drama, with John pressing me to tell him exactly what his sister said, and Jane implying to me that they’d both been the victims of her husband’s domineering personality. “Robert was terrible to John. Terrible!” she said.

Their relationship seemed devoid of the affection I’d witnessed in Junior and Mary Thomas’s modest trailer, watching them interact with their grandson and hearing them tell departing visitors, “Have a blessed day!”

When I told JBIII that Jane claimed she’d stood up for him with Spilman—that “John was unaware of how far I went to bat for him”—he nodded and admitted, “That’s probably true.” He hadn’t known Spilman withheld details about the factories from Jane and refused to put her on the board. It was also news that Jane felt she’d had to choose her husband over her brother if she wanted her marriage to last.

“Bob was very pedantic,” John said in a rare unguarded moment. “He’d give you a job and then he’d try to micromanage how you did it. He’d tell you to go to New York, then call back to ask what plane you were taking, what airport you were leaving from. He wanted to control every little thing.”

And that’s all he would divulge at that point about the man who would dominate the narrative of his career and, ultimately, his family. Nearly three years after Spilman’s death, John Bassett told me I could interview anyone I wanted to. But if I was looking for more on his brother-in-law—and the humiliation John suffered at his hands—he was not going to be the one to give it to me.