CHAPTER 3

The Pride That Always Comes First

The dip of the light meant that the island itself was always left in darkness. A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.

—M. L. STEADMAN

Within six months of the layoffs, the company stock price didn’t just rebound; it soared. By 1996, all memories of the setback of 1995 were gone. The replication machine at Charcot was humming, the honeycomb quietly pumping out the honey, and profits grew and grew. Memories are short, and the bitter taste of the impending disaster that nearly was had already faded into the remote past. Black Monday had come and gone. The belt tightening had allowed Media Arts to make their loan payments and save face with Wall Street. And within one year, with the explosive success of the canvas transfer system, the profits doubled, then tripled.

Ken’s focus shifted toward the day-to-day nuts and bolts work of running a public company. Every three months he held an investor call, during which he had to disclose the company’s reports, talk about the previous three months’ business, and project the next three months’ performance. The pressure was always on to grow, and Ken’s job was to manage the company’s relationship with Wall Street.

Ken, along with his publishing team, also managed the production of limited editions, overseeing the process of determining the edition size of each release to meet the ever-growing demands of the public, without violating the foundational tenets of the limited edition art business. By 1995, the company was printing editions of 50,000 prints, which quickly grew to 100,000 in 1996.

These increases posed interesting challenges pertinent to the standards of the limited editions art industry. How did you create a certificate of authenticity and still call it a “limited” edition, when the print runs were so high? The executive team in charge of publishing at Media Arts ultimately had to decide how many editions to print of any one size: perhaps 50,000 of a 12 × 18 inch size print, another 50,000 of an 18 × 27, and 50,000 more in 24 × 36. Increasing the edition sizes and numbers was one way to increase profits, and a good part of the boom after 1996 was the increase in printing of lithographs and canvas transfers alone. Within that year, the company’s sales grew from $25 million a year to $50 million a year.

I shook my head, hearing the numbers. On some level it just seemed unreal. It didn’t make sense, the way nothing adds up when it’s too good to be true. But it paid the bills, and it wasn’t my department. I had no jurisdiction in this area myself, and I had to believe that the other side of the office knew what it was doing.

I concentrated on my side, which was bringing in licensing agreements at the brisk rate of about one a month. In licensing, which is not restricted by any rules of the limited editions business, the higher the number, the better; the greater the volume, the more licenses, the better. In the first two years I spent at Media Arts as their senior vice president of licensing, I secured over seventy-five licensing agreements. After finalizing the strategic relationship with Hallmark, I went on to sign multiple calendar agreements, most notably with Day Dream, the biggest calendar company in the world at that time, coincidentally run by Chip and Chris Conk, friends of mine from college. And Thomas Kinkade soon became the number one–selling calendar at Wal-Mart.

After calendars, I went on to construct licensing contracts for music boxes, Christmas ornaments, miniature lighthouses, barns, and cottages. These pieces were all sculpted and detailed to resemble the images from Thom’s paintings with great accuracy, and some were manufactured in limited editions with their own certificates of authenticity. It became a huge business.

Licensing is an entirely different animal from the limited edition prints business. Limited edition prints, which was the business of the canvas transfers, is based on the premise of supply and demand; it is necessary to limit the edition numbers to control the supply and thereby create the demand, and also to create the market value. Licensed products are essentially the opposite. It is the goal of licensing to sell as many given products as possible. Calendars, cards, Christmas tree ornaments—the highest volume of sales is the goal. Some licensed products, such as the collector plates, were also released in limited numbered editions, and they also did very well. But for the most part, licensing means taking an image and selling the use of that image to a producer that manufactures the actual licensed product and pays a royalty fee for the privilege.

I advocated to Thom that licensed products act as introductory products. Not everyone could afford a Thomas Kinkade print or canvas transfer painting. But they could buy a $10 set of cards, or a $15 ornament, or a $20 book. I hoped that having the images around in their homes would make people aspire to owning a painting one day. He understood the concept immediately and supported it fully. And the conversion rate later proved to be gigantic. Seeing that calendar every day reminded the person of Thom’s imagery, and indeed eventually inspired them to own one. In that sense my division, though separate, fully supported the limited editions art business the rest of the company was occupied with.

In that year, Thom continued to develop his recurring themes in paintings. He painted Winsor Manor in honor of his third daughter’s birth: a stately Tudor-style home glowing lavishly from the inside with towering old-growth trees surrounding it, suggesting age and history. Once again a lamppost stood to the side, illuminating the path to the home, which was dappled with sunlight filtering through the trees. He also painted Rose Gate in honor of Winsor, depicting what was a frequently recurring image in his paintings of a gate; in this case, a set of the two pillars of a stone wall, covered in rose vines that led the eye toward a hidden home tucked away among blooming bushes and trees, and a soft hazy distant sky. Always the light played the biggest role, creating hot spots that attracted the gaze and pulled it into the image. Lilac Gazebo was also painted in Winsor’s honor; it was one of many of what would become his romantic gazebo series, showing a Victorian-style gazebo in delicate framing, covered in a cascade of blossoms, set along a meandering path leading to a stone stairway into the woods.

While Ken spent half of his available time at the company managing executive affairs, he now spent the other half hanging out with me, busy with the business of licensing, and the excitement of its fast success. We were together constantly, traveling to Japan, China, Taiwan, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, and England. We grew very close in that time, and my wife and I and our three kids were occasional guests at the Raasch home in Los Gatos.

The potential for licensing products was seemingly endless. We even created an Avon catalog cover, which featured an electric waterfall, for which the opening order was 600,000 units. Avon catalogs are the focus of the Avon business. They act as the meeting place and the ordering center for Avon customers and sales reps, much like a store does. Avon sold beauty products, but also jewelry and gifts. Subscribers would wait eagerly to receive the catalog in the mail every year. And with an illuminated Thomas Kinkade waterfall on its cover, sales from the catalog reached over a million units. To be on the cover of the Avon catalog, normally reserved for superstar beauty brands, was a huge coup for us, and even newsworthy at the time.

Licensing didn’t just mean decorative trinkets and calendars. It also meant books. I forged an entire strategy for book licensing, creating products that ranged from gift books to message books to art books. Art books were published through Abbeville Press, a prestigious publishing house for art, architecture, and design, and were meant to be objects of beauty to be displayed on a coffee table.

Thomas Kinkade gift books were generally inexpensive, smaller-format books you could give as gifts to your grandmother or aunt for Christmas. Message-based books like Simpler Times, which was published in 1996, contained Thom’s personal messages about life and faith and family, such as “Choose your color—decide that joy is the hue you want your heart to be” and “My life shines with God’s radiant blessings when my heart is the color of joy.”

I was intimately involved in establishing both the ideas and the content of those books, acting as the central point of coordination between Thom, the writer, and the publishing company. I worked out licenses with publishers, I hired writers and sent them out to Thom for interviews. One writer in particular, Ann Christian Buchanan, was especially good at distilling Thom’s long stream-of-consciousness interviews in which he spoke about his vision of life, which I liked to say was a little bit like catching butterflies: so many of them get away, but you might be lucky enough to catch a few.

In the summer of 1996, my wife and kids decided that, after one year in San Jose, they were tired of the Northern California rain and wanted to return to Santa Barbara. They missed their old home, and their schools, and their grandparents. Besides, my wife thought certain people at the company were simply not to be trusted. We agreed that going back would be best for everyone. So I stayed in San Jose during the week and went home on weekends.

I was spending a lot of time with Thom in his studio in those days. I came over for a full day about every few weeks, and we went through all the events and products and books we were licensing, and cooked up many more. He enjoyed those sessions with me, because with me he could dream. He could talk about what he wanted to do, and brainstorm new ideas. I never came to him with problems. More and more, he opened up to me and talked about his life as well. It made us grow closer as friends. By that point we were more than colleagues. And the more we ended those sessions with a few beers, the more Thom opened up to me. He always had a whiskey by his side, and always offered one. We always went for a drink after a day of brainstorming, often to continue our talking. Drinking was just part of being with Thom. I didn’t question it; he was a man of the world. He enjoyed a good cigar, too; it came with the package. He had an outsized personality and he liked to live large. I felt like there was nothing holding him back, in anything he wanted to do.

This lack of limits was one thing I loved about Thom. He saw no boundaries; no rules to the game. He was free from the usual “I can’t” and “I couldn’t” that restrict the ordinary person’s mind. He saw it all in his inner vision, and then I saw it come true. It made him creative, and it made him successful. Greatness comes from thinking out of the box; highly successful people all share this quality of accepting no boundaries. And I loved sharing in Thom’s creative vision. It also made him fun to be around; he was the rebel with a good heart. The world was his game, and he played it just how he liked it.

One day when I was watching Thom paint, he began to tell me about how the light entered his life when he was saved at an old-fashioned tent revival in 1980, at the age of twenty-two. He told me he was acting out as a college boy back then, being rebellious. He was just into having fun, and I knew that with his personality there wasn’t any other way. But I also knew that he worked very hard at his art. He told me about those college days, laughing about coining the term blowawaymanship, and talking about his friendship with James Gurney. He mused at how they had both become so successful, when they had started out as pranksters. Perhaps it was their very freedom, their rebellion, that gave them the courage to defy the limits that hold back most people, and excel in the way they both did. College was a time for him to be young and silly, and he wasn’t going to church then.

“Were you raised in the church, Eric?” he asked me.

I told him I was raised Catholic.

“Ah yes, Catholic. So you believe in the pope and all that stuff.”

“All that stuff, yeah,” I said.

It was always amusing to me how the mention of being Catholic drew an instant pause. But Thom forgot about my being Catholic and went on with his story. He told me his mother was a strong Christian in the Church of the Nazarene, and how she had raised him very strictly in the church. Even though he had strayed, the values were still deep inside of him. Then one day while he was still in college, Thom walked into a tent where a preacher was talking to a crowd. He listened to him for a while, and suddenly felt the Holy Spirit moving inside of him, telling him to go forward and be saved. And he did. With all of his heart, and on his knees, he gave his life over to Jesus Christ. Thom got saved that day, and he said his art got saved along with him. That was when the light had entered his life, and that was when his paintings became devotions to God and Jesus. From that day on, he had a mission and a purpose for his life and for his art. I was touched by his story.

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“You probably don’t have that in your religion,” he replied.

“It’s the same religion, Thom. We’re all saved by grace.” I smiled.

He winked at me. “Yeah. But you have to go ask the pope first.”

At that moment his six-year-old, Chandler, came into the studio and asked him what he was doing. His girls often strayed into the studio to watch him paint. He always took a moment to explain his painting to them, taking them on his lap and showing them the light.

“See the light, Chandler? That’s God’s light. Right?”

Chandler looked at the painting and nodded. Light was a common subject of discussion among Thom and his girls, who now ranged from ages ten to one. Thom pointed out the light wherever he saw it—in the clouds, on the horizon, in his paintings—the way some fathers might point out a cute puppy or an airplane.

“Look, kids, there’s God’s light!” he’d say, and they would all crane their necks to see where their father was pointing this time. It was sweet to see their wide-open eyes, taking in the miracle their father pointed out to them, like a constant reminder and affirmation of God’s presence in their lives.

If the kids strayed into the studio, Nanette came and rounded them up again, in her usual chipper manner. And Thom always remarked how beautiful she was, or how he would be nothing without her. It always struck me how sweetly Thom and Nanette treated each other when they were together. He always complimented her, and she expressed her support of him at every turn. As they appeared in public, so they were in private. Nanette also made me feel very welcome, with a greeting and a smile every time I saw her. She asked about my wife and the kids, and sent her regards. She knew how important the licensing business was to Thom and treated me very well.

Thom and Nanette’s youngest daughter, Everett, was born in that year, 1998. Both of our families had four kids by then. “Kids” was always the big subject among us all, even though our families hardly saw each other anymore, since my wife and children were back on our ranch. I was making the five-hour commute every week, which after a time became a monthly plane ride, between San Jose and Santa Barbara, and that kept everyone happy. I found it just as easy to work from home using the phone, and traveled to San Jose to see Thom for the occasional meeting.

When we published Lightposts for Living in 1999, letters began pouring in to our publisher, Warner Faith, a division of Warner Books and Time Life, Inc. Thom’s adoring fans wrote how much he had changed their lives, how they had been healed looking at his paintings, how they had regained hope and renewed their faith. Thom would spend hours reading their letters, and often read them out loud to me, proud of his message and his impact on the world.

He also read articles in the business section of the major national newspapers and magazines, and saw the company’s success validated over and over again. Even if the art establishment was dismissive, it couldn’t dismiss millions of dollars in royalties, and going from being ranked in the top one hundred to the top fifty new companies. The more the accolades poured in, the more Thom felt gratified and grateful. And I was helping to put him in the game with our licensing business. He received his validation not from art critics, but from his licensees and collectors. When the books first became a success, he told me we were making history; that we were changing the way the art market worked. And, most of all, that we were changing lives.

Lightposts for Living went on to become an international bestseller. It was the first time he had ever published a book without pictures. It furthered his brand and his message, and it also forever cemented Thomas Kinkade as not just an artist, but as an icon who had a message the world was very interested in hearing. Thom was thrilled to be on the New York Times bestseller list. Given that he was such a voracious reader, it was a special accomplishment for him. And it was one of the highlights of his career to become known in the world as an author. Together we created over thirty books, but Lightposts for Living was his greatest success.

He pulled out the New York Times, which he always read from cover to cover, and said, “Look Eric! We made it to number twenty on the New York Times bestseller list! God does work in miraculous ways.”

Lightposts for Living was so successful that we came out with a sequel, Lightposts for Living II. The yearly desk and wall calendars are still being printed.

Global licenses expanded our business into Japan and England, where Thomas Kinkade was also beginning to be well known. But it wasn’t until I came up with a line of home furnishings that Thom became really excited. Thomas Kinkade throws, rugs, wallpaper, and furniture were the penultimate translation of his brand at the time. For Thom, a furniture line meant he had arrived at the pinnacle of an artist’s success. His paintings had become an image-based brand by being replicated on mugs and calendars. His paintings were also a message-based brand, following the publication of his many books. Now he had transcended image by becoming a lifestyle brand.

The name, the brand—Thomas Kinkade—stood for a lifestyle that could be bought and experienced and owned with furniture and accessories. The furniture didn’t contain any of his images; it merely bore his name. That’s why he was particularly excited. In 1998, we signed a deal with Kincaid Furniture Company and Steve Kincaid (with his ironically similar last name) to create a full line of furniture and accessories products to be produced together with La-Z-Boy. He would release the furniture line and distribute it to furniture dealers around the country. The appeal for Steve Kincaid was that we also agreed to make art that would be exclusively available to the furniture dealers across America, to carry with the furniture line as their own edition of prints. In April of that year, the release of the Thomas Kinkade line of furniture signified the pinnacle of Thom’s success as an artist. He had transcended his own images and had become a legend himself. In a sense, it would always be his highest moment of achievement.

After the rebound of the company, with the money pouring in, I witnessed an extraordinary explosion of wealth. Thom, Rick, and Ken went on a spending spree that seemingly went on for years. There always seemed to be more vacations, more houses, more cars, and more boats to buy. Since the first founding of Lightpost Publishing, the three nobodies who had made it big beyond their wildest dreams had to maintain their position on the rocket ship of success. And at times, the spending spree took on a decidedly competitive turn.

Ken’s initial investment garnered him a top position that he firmly held on to. He was the largest shareholder, and felt he had a proprietary right over the decisions being made in the company. His vision dictated much of MAGI’s formative business strategy. Part of that strategy, diversification, had left him with somewhat of a black eye.

Rick had much influence and power within the company, and in his own quiet way, he was a master at influencing decisions behind the scenes. He asserted his position by never having an office at the company. When the company was at Ten Almaden or at Charcot, Rick always maintained his office in Monterey. It was his subtle way of separating himself from the day-to-day operations, and perhaps from Ken. Everyone had their own fiefdoms and defended their positions protectively. Rick’s way of challenging Ken’s authority was to keep his own offices in Monterey, and rarely show up for meetings. When we had important meetings at the company, Rick was often sixty miles away in Monterey. It was the oddest thing at the time, but made sense in hindsight as the ongoing power struggle among the three company founders quietly escalated.

Rick also carefully maintained his position of trust with Thom. He was Thom’s first partner; the first to believe in him, the first to make him a success. Rick seemed elusive and mysterious, but he was always very nice and charming to me. He was a disarming person; highly intelligent, handsome, suave, dashing even. He was superpolite whenever you met him, soft spoken, but with an impressive air. He was also a strong Christian.

Rick was a brilliant strategist. Everything he did had calculation behind it. Rick attended meetings, four or five a year, but he never said much when he came. Thom was also almost never there, but would often join by phone, staying at his studio to paint. But I would see Rick, sitting in his chair and tapping on his wristwatch—he wore a Casio watch with a calculator—a watch he never changed in all the years I knew him. He would tap and tap away on his calculator, while others were doing the talking; always calculating, always figuring the numbers. At the end of many meetings, where important decisions were made and agreed upon by the various executives in the room, Rick would get up, smile, shake everyone’s hands, and be on his way back to Monterey. However, it was widely thought Rick would meet with Thom privately after the meetings and advise him as to what he thought Thom should do. Oftentimes, decisions made in executive meetings on Monday would change on Tuesday, when Thom would call Ken or Dan Byrne and tell him he had reconsidered and now wanted to do things differently. We all suspected it had been Rick who had convinced Thom to change his mind.

The two men vying for control, with Thom caught in the middle, created a triangle. Ken had more control of the company on paper, but Rick had Thom’s trust. And it was my impression that Ken had to work harder to hang on to his place in Thom’s esteem.

A game of one-upmanship began that was at times comical to watch. New boats, new cars, new homes; there seemed to be no end to the three men’s quest for owning the best, the most beautiful, and the most expensive things money could buy. If Ken bought a new Mercedes, then Thom bought a new Mercedes and an immaculate vintage Mercedes, and a pristinely restored 1960s vintage Chris Craft boat. Then Rick bought himself a luxury yacht. Thom and Ken owned a house together on Scenic Drive in Carmel-by-the-Sea, until Thom bought Ken’s share to own it outright. After selling out of Carmel, Ken bought a property in the prestigious Incline Village on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, with neighbors like Mike Milken and David Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft, who is steadily on the Forbes world’s richest people list. Meanwhile, Rick bought a rambling hacienda estate in Carmel Valley. Then Thom bought a gorgeous restored classic home on the south shore of Lake Tahoe where the older money lived. And whereas Ken’s property was across the street from the water, Thom’s property was on the water.

I never discussed these things with Thom or Ken or Rick. I don’t think they were ever aware of it. I suspect it all went back to the first days when they became involved with each other in business. Rick was considered the one who had essentially discovered Thom on the sidewalk when he became his private art dealer and manager. On the other hand, Ken had made the initial investment that created Lightpost Publishing, which later became Media Arts, and Ken felt a foundational ownership as a result. And Thom, of course, was painting the pictures that actually fueled it all. Vying for position, recognition, and control was surely an unconscious but ongoing competition among the three.

This subtle but fierce rivalry was most intense between Thom and Ken, who were always very close friends, but seemed to need to position themselves in terms of the other all the time. The struggle reached an apex when Ken and his wife, Linda, decided to look for a bigger house than their property in Los Gatos on Redberry Drive. Their house was a beautiful home, well appointed and spacious, with a white stucco exterior and a sprawling garden and grounds. But Ken wanted to be in Monte Sereno, which is just a notch above Los Gatos in prestige. And one day, Ken and Linda found a large estate on Ridgecrest Avenue; a penultimate Monte Sereno classic.

It was immediately clear to them that this was their dream house. They called Thom and Nanette, wanting their friends to see the property before they bought it. Thom and Nanette toured the house with Ken and Linda, and approved of their choice. While Ken went back to work, Thom went home and got on the phone and called his realtor. He said he had found a house he wanted to buy. A house on Ridgecrest Avenue. He gave instructions to the realtor to make a significant offer on the house, and proceeded to buy Ken’s dream house right out from under him.

The next day I sat with Ken at lunch. He was stunned by the seeming betrayal. Ken had trusted Thom, his best friend and business partner, and Thom had bought his dream home out from under him. Ken couldn’t believe Thom would do that to him. I told him I was pretty shocked myself. Ken said he had only wanted to show Thom the house to get his opinion. That he had loved the house the moment he saw it, and Linda especially had loved it. They only wanted to bring their friends in to get their final approval; they had been ready to buy it right then and there. Ken thought Thom must have gone right home and called his realtor.

I told Ken that I really didn’t know what to say. I was pretty stunned, and couldn’t imagine that Thom knew what he was doing. It wasn’t like him to be duplicitous. He never hid anything. I asked Ken if he thought Thom had done it on purpose. Ken told me he knew Thom’s nature. That he got excited and let himself get swept away. He knew it was just the way Thom was. Ken added that his wife Linda might never forgive Thom.

Ken and Linda kicked into high gear and went on a rebound house hunt. They finally found a huge estate on Forrester Road in Los Gatos, a house that had recently been built by Ken Gimelli, a wealthy waste magnate from Hollister, California, who had run out of money in the process of construction.

At that time Thom began a massive renovation of his new Monte Sereno estate, buying up several more properties around it to increase the property size to four acres. He created a massive compound with the main house at the core, a classic California cottage-style home from the 1920s. The main house was spacious and airy and much like a Thomas Kinkade painting: charming, cozy, inviting, warm, full of fabrics and textures and details. There were large French doors leading out into a lush garden, and large white windows with shutters and white open-beam ceilings. The grounds outside were verdant and blooming, with a gorgeous pool below. The surroundings were heavily wooded, and gave that same sheltering feel to the house that his cottages evoked in his paintings. The house itself was filled with all the originals he’d kept. If you looked around the living room, you might see eight paintings valued at $500,000 or more each, which meant you were looking at over $4 million in art.

Meanwhile, Ken and Linda had bought a virtual Hearst Castle of Los Gatos. The opposite of charming and cozy, it was grand and opulent. They renovated their eleven-acre estate with 10,000 square feet of living space, six bedrooms, and five and a half baths. They added statues and carved friezes, doors, murals, pillars, and ornate fountains. It took stonemasons over a year to fit into place the flagstones of the driveway leading up to an eight-car garage. The entrance housed a grand stairway in heavy ornately carved wood, with a mural above it painted by Roberto Lupetti, an artist who had helped restore the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The ceiling had hand-carved plaster scrollwork and appointments such as an exquisite marble mantle imported from Italy. In the bathrooms were marble statues from Pietrasanta, Italy, and there was sixteenth-century French brick tile flooring in the kitchen. Outside there were a tennis court, a pool, and an Italian garden. In that sense, Ken got his revenge. It quickly became known as one of the nicest houses in Silicon Valley.

We were happy to visit Ken and his family at his new estate, to spend Saturday afternoon in the garden, play a game of tennis, and let our kids swim in the pool. Ken seemed content with his new abode. He ended up with the biggest house of them all. Of all my memories and times spent in this grand home, there’s one image indelibly etched in my mind: Linda standing in the kitchen with her checkbook, writing check after check to a literal army of landscapers, gardeners, pool guys, maintenance men, and housekeepers. The prize of one-upmanship, this stunning house, valued at one point at $30 million, became a full-time job for Linda while Ken toiled at the office.

I straddled the line between the two friends for years. I had been very close to Ken from the beginning. He had hired me; I felt loyal to him and valued him as a person. He was a kind man with a good heart, who had supported me from the beginning, something I never forgot. But I also grew very close to Thom. Thom was comfortable around me as his buddy and as a confidante, and we spent a lot of time together, both with our families and just hanging out alone.

I’d sit for hours and watch him paint as he talked about his childhood. He loved to remember the past. Whenever he did, he always twisted the negative into a positive. He told me that I didn’t know “poor” until I had been in his shoes. That many nights they didn’t have food, and he would wait longingly until his mother came home, praying she had groceries for them that night. That he had given his mother all of his paper route money to help support the family since he was twelve years old.

“We were poor, but we were happy. Those were the happiest times in my life,” he said.

I asked him if that was really true, given all that he had now.

“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t ever want to be poor again. I think about that a lot. Once you’ve been poor, a part of you always fears going back. I don’t ever want to go hungry again,” he said.

“I can understand that,” I replied.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m not nostalgic for those times. It’s not the hunger I remember; it’s the beauty of that time. We lived in those beautiful El Dorado Hills, and my brother and I would go out and explore the abandoned mines and creeks and the old mills. We’d go fishing in the ponds and catch tadpoles. We ran through the green fields, chasing each other. So many days I would spend just lying in the grass, looking up at the sky, watching the clouds roll by.”

It was his notion of simpler times. While he preached those messages to the people on his tours and visits, now he was speaking from the heart and from experience. He really believed and felt that the past was a simpler time, and that simpler times were happier times.

We also used to hang out in the local bars together, getting a drink after our work was done. We went to the Los Gatos Lodge Bar and Grill, or Thom’s favorite haunt, the bar at the Hacienda Hotel. There was a dive bar called the Black Watch that Thom also loved to hang out in, and another called Carrie Nations. After hours of looking through my box of samples and ideas, talking about furniture or lamps or wall coverings, he said yes to everything and we went to have that drink. It was always fun hanging around with him. He was always upbeat in that period; never depressed. He was fueled by a relentless energy and enthusiasm. Over drinks he talked life, art, baseball, and our next plans.

On one particular day, with two Bud Lights in front of us and a baseball game on the TV above us, Thom told me how his schooling in fine art at Berkeley and Art Center of Pasadena encouraged him not to care whether anyone understood his art or even liked it; only to see his art as a vehicle for the expression of self. But he said that painting was always more than self-expression for him. That beginning with his discovery of the Hudson River School at Berkeley, he was fascinated with the tradition of the American monumental landscape painters as an expression of idealism and spiritual revelry. Long before the official critical art world questioned his validity and place in art history, he had rejected the idea that art was there to serve the artist. He said he passionately felt that art had to serve the people, not the artist; and that art wasn’t about understanding, but about creating good feelings for the viewer.

Sitting at the bar that day, he told me he felt modern art had it all wrong. That artists had been fighting the wrong fight for a long time; fighting for self-expression while losing their cultural relevancy in the process. He felt the artist had forgotten his responsibility to have a positive impact on society. He believed in art’s constructive values and principles. He said that artists used to be cultural leaders, the visionaries of their society, like the nineteenth-century American landscape painters who tried to point to a better world by depicting the beauty of the American West. Artists at that time had led the way to the expansion into the West.

Thom’s feelings about the moral dimensions and inspirational importance of art coincided with his Christian beliefs, and his conviction that his art was a form of ministry and a responsibility to share his talent as a form of exaltation of Jesus Christ. He painted scripture in many of his images. For instance, he put John 3:16 next to his name: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” He called his paintings “beacons of hope” and “silent messengers.” He added other scripture into his paintings, such as Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

He often talked about letters people wrote to him from all over the country, telling him God touched them through his art; that people had physical healings, and experienced salvation in front of his paintings; that the despairing found hope, that the stressed found new purpose, that the grieving felt reunited with their loved ones. According to these accounts, some suicides were even averted by the power of his images.

He believed that art was so powerful because it existed outside the constraints of time.

“Art is forever,” he said, sitting in the bar that day.

Thom said he was fascinated by the way art transcended time, and he pointed out that music and books are limited by the way we take them in, in a temporal way. A piece of music ends. A book is read and put away. But paintings are permanent fixtures in your home and in your visual space. They imprint themselves on the viewer’s heart, since the eye is the window to the soul.

“That’s why I believe art should have a positive meaning. If an image conveys peace and serenity, then I am doing what God put me here on this earth to do.”

Whenever Thom talked about his art, his message was always consistent. It was about his responsibility and his calling. He passionately believed in the power of his art, and he believed in his mission to do good with it. I saw him speak to crowds of gathered fans, to adoring followers at his galleries, to people on the street who recognized him, and to autograph seekers and acolytes. His message was one of faith and family, and the salvation of the light. He was the beacon and the messenger. He shone his light on the path, for the lost and the seeking, toward the glory of God. Kinkade’s message, his ministry, and his passion were deeply felt. And the buying public responded.

He ordered another beer and looked up at the baseball game, thoughtfully.

He told me it had been miraculous for him to watch what God had done in his life. Using a kid from a broken home—his Dad was a World War II veteran who left the home to chase girlfriends, and disappeared. His mother raised two boys. She met the Lord Jesus at a Billy Graham crusade. If all this could happen to him, then he felt it just went to show that God could use any ordinary person.

“You’re more than an ordinary person,” I said.

“I’m as flawed as the next guy. Maybe more,” he replied.

I asked him how his mother was doing, and he told me Nanette and he were moving her into a house on their property. Since buying the original house, Thom had bought up three more adjoining properties to make it all one large compound. The little boy who gave up his pennies from his paper route to help support the family was now giving his mother a home. It brought tears to his eyes when he told me.

“It’s the least I could do, after all she’s done for me. Did I tell you my mother used to hang up all of my paintings in our house?” he asked.

He went on to describe how she had taken his sketches and paintings and hung them up on the wall of the trailer, next to dime-store reproductions of a Monet or a Rembrandt. Thom said she made a point to hang his work up on the wall next to the great masters in an act of encouragement and a validation of her belief in him. She also took Thom and Patrick to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco whenever they could go to the big city. Thom would linger in front of the paintings, enthralled, and see his future hanging on the wall.

“It’s so important to encourage our children, like my mother encouraged me.”

He asked me if any of my kids were into art, and I told him my youngest liked to draw.

“Make sure you encourage the gift. She could be the next Thomas Kinkade.”

I smiled, “There will never be another Thomas Kinkade.”

No matter how you looked at it, there was always a surprise in Thom. His actions spoke louder than words. He wanted to do right in his life, and he very often did, no matter how many times he fell into temptation. At his core, he deeply believed in the power of goodness, and he wanted to spread that good faith around.

Around this time, in 1996, Thom’s father, Bill Kinkade, had also made an appearance. Absent from his life after he abandoned the family, he came back when Thom became famous and wealthy. Thom never talked about his father to me. I only learned through others that he had remarried and had two more children with his new wife, and that he was living in Medford, Oregon. Thom spent some time with his father and was able to reconcile with him. His father was eighty years old by then, and there was more joy at the reunion than resentment left over from the past. Thom perhaps shared some of the vices his father had, but unlike his father, Thom was a good provider, and a steadfast father and husband; and he was also wildly successful in his life. Perhaps that might have made him blind to the similarities to the ghost of his father inside himself. Thom also had his strong faith, no matter what was going on in his life. He forgave his father and he cared for his mother because they were the right things to do.

On that day, sitting at the lounge bar in the Hacienda Hotel, musing over life and art and his mother and father, we whiled away the afternoon, talking about it all. When he reached the end of his reverie, Thom ordered another drink and looked at me.

“So, Eric. How are we going to take over the world?”

We clicked our Bud Lights, back in the comfort zone. It was Thom’s favorite subject: world domination. The excitement of planning, of dreaming, of bringing vision to life. And it wasn’t because of the money. It was because he believed God had a special purpose for him, and that was to influence people through his paintings. He thought that with his paintings, he would change the world.

It often struck me just how different Thom and Ken were, and yet I was close to both of them. While I enjoyed my boisterous buddy time with Thom at the bars after a day of brainstorming, spending time with Ken was always very different. Thom was exciting and surprising in person, and Ken was calm and mild. Thom was open and jocular, and Ken was quiet and reserved. Ken liked things clean and new, and Thom liked things old and messy and lively. Thom was Bud Light and whiskey, and Ken was more of a crisp white wine guy. I enjoyed them both very much, and felt lucky to have such good relationships with the men I worked with. It was sometimes hard to imagine how these two polar opposites had become friends, but it might have been their very differences that attracted them to each other. They shared a sensitivity, and childhoods that were less than nurturing, both of them having been raised without a father in the home. Perhaps they shared a need to fill an emptiness stemming from that missing element in their early lives, which made them relate to each other. No matter how much they achieved, it seemed to me that they both craved validation. And the company and its success were major sources of validation.

On the surface, Thom and Ken were great friends and business partners. But there was always a sense of underlying competition between them; a hint of tension, and staking of claims over decisions and credit for what was happening with all the success. And I was the witness in the middle of a deep bond between the two men that was always straining at the edges.

One day we were invited for the first time to visit Thom at his house in Carmel-by-the-Sea (the one he had once shared with Ken and bought him out of). It was a beautiful, cliff-side home, perched along the meandering Scenic Road. Our children played together in the house, while Thom and I sat out on the porch looking over the sprawling white-sand beach of Carmel Bay, with its jagged limestone bluffs and arching, stalwart Monterey cypress trees, and the Carmel lighthouse in the distance—a view that Thom painted many times. Thom turned to me and said, “Come on, I want to show you my town.”

We went to his driveway and he pulled up the garage door by hand, revealing a red and black fully restored 1921 Model T. It had a canvas convertible roof, gleaming brass details, mounted headlamps, wooden-spoke wheels, and thin rubber tires. It had no doors and no windshield, and looked like a toy. We got in and drove into Carmel, Thom waving at everyone he saw. People waved back, aware of who he was. He pointed out different houses, and could name them all by his paintings.

“This is the Hollyhock house. You remember the painting I did?”

It was fascinating to see the real houses, familiar to me from his paintings. In comparison, one could see how he had turned up the volume on all the details: how a simple home became fanciful in his vision; how it went from being a place of ordinary appeal to becoming a place of magical beauty. He captured the spooky quality of the oak trees that hang over the town and give a feeling of being in another world when the fog rolls in. You might think you were in the Cotswold’s or the moors of England.

We ended up on Dolores Street, parked the Model T, and walked to the Carmel Pipe Shop. Thom had a favorite cigar, a Punch Double Maduro Robusto. It had an extrastrong wrapper, was very thick, and was only a medium-length cigar. He bought a bag and we walked across the street to Sade’s, a little dive bar, where we had a beer, chatting with the locals. Everyone in the bar knew him; everyone on the street knew him. We walked back out and poked our heads into a few galleries along Dolores Street, surprising the owners with his visit. As we walked, Thom talked about how much Carmel meant to him.

“Kuskey, Carmel is a special place. It’s my real home after Placerville. I may live in Monte Sereno, but my heart is here. I have a certain spiritual connection to Carmel. There’s probably no other place that inspires me more.”

We went back to his house, where our wives had dinner waiting. The kids were running through the house playing tag, while the women were chatting in the kitchen about schools and play dates and diapers. When Thom entered the house, loud and boisterous, everyone knew the fun was about to begin. At dinner, the subject of children dominated the conversation. As we were having dessert, Thom looked up and saw the sun lowering through a layer of clouds over the ocean. He leapt up and said, “Look kids, can you see the light of God?” His girls all ran and put their ice cream–sticky fingers on the windowpane, gazing out at the rays of sun over the glistening ocean, and exclaimed they all saw God’s light.

Later Thom and I sat out on the porch and watched the last of the spectacular sunset, drank scotch, and smoked cigars.

Thom then started talking about all the plans we had and things he was thinking about. He thrived on new ideas, and I was the one guy he could think out of the box with. I wasn’t part of the day-to-day pressure of the demands on his output in paintings, and I wasn’t part of the noise of the business of selling prints. Thom and I could dream up new and more exciting ways to put his image on anything that made sense, and Thom never ran out of ideas.

I also fed off of him. Sometimes his ideas seemed crazy, and sometimes they clearly worked.

“How about a garden lantern with a cottage on it? Mission style.” Thom asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“What about an alarm clock?”

“Absolutely.”

“A train set with landscaping,” he exclaimed.

“Definitely.”

“A wristwatch?”

“Why not?”

He wanted to put his images on nightlights, candles, umbrellas, cookie tins, storage jars, table runners, doggie blankets. From Thom’s point of view, nothing was off-limits. It was fascinating and inspiring to hear him spin the ideas in his mind.

One time I joked, “Maybe we could make Thomas Kinkade houses.”

His eyes lit up, “Kuskey, that’s a great idea!”

At the time I thought he was crazy. Only a few years later, I would attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

In 1997 Thom painted another classic, Bridge of Faith, which became an enduring image. It was another of his themes, a series of bridges, which for Thom symbolized his walk with God. The low stone bridge, with a rickety wooden fence, reaches over a meandering stream cascading over river rocks, with the light of the sun searing rays through the dense trees and illuminating the distant path out of the shadows and darkness. Opulent grasses and flowers decorate the dense wooded setting. For Thom, it signified moments of revelation and joyous acceptance, and it became a big seller with his avid collectors.

Valley Fair Mall is an upscale, premier shopping destination for residents of Santa Clara and San Jose, and all of Silicon Valley. With nearly two hundred stores, seventeen food court locations, and nine restaurants, it is one of the largest malls in Northern California. In 1997 Media Arts first opened the Thomas Kinkade Gallery in the mall, believing it was better to sell Thom’s artwork in a gallery dedicated wholly to his art, than trying to sell it in a multiartist gallery. This formula was such a success that they soon opened several more dedicated galleries in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey, Hawaii, San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, and even Kansas City. The success of the new galleries kept Ken busy. And while sales of canvas transfer paintings increased significantly through these new venues, the need for more volume and more profit was always looming.

By far one of the most significant aspects of Thom’s creative vision was when he came up with the idea to open licensed galleries to sell his replications. Until that time, it was the foundational business strategy to continue opening and managing company-owned dedicated Thomas Kinkade stores. But it was going to take too long and be far too expensive to build and operate them. Thom had taken quite an interesting tidbit away from our Hallmark visit to Kansas City. He had asked the executives how Hallmark could afford to open so many stores throughout the country, and they had explained that they didn’t own or operate these stores themselves; instead, they licensed stores under the Hallmark name. Proprietors could obtain these licenses and run the stores, with the agreement to buy and offer for sale a certain minimum amount of Hallmark products.

“Why don’t we license galleries for people to own and run, and let them sell the canvas transfers for us?”

The idea immediately took hold. They would be called Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries. It was a way to show Wall Street we could keep overhead down and increase profits. Rick suggested creating a training center in Monterey, where people could become familiarized with the galleries, learn how to run them, and sign on the dotted line. People could be preapproved and given a limited slot in a monthly training session, after which they had to commit to buying the license for a gallery. For Rick, whose sales techniques were formidable, it would be a natural.

While Thom was always the idea guy, the one to come up with the germ of a concept, he left it to the rest of us to put his visions into action. While he went back to his studio to paint, the rest of us had to do the actual legwork, develop the concepts, draw up contracts, and make the deals. The galleries became Rick Barnett’s personal project. He shaped the concept and the details himself. The contracts, the terms of the licensing, the requirements for qualification were all hammered out in Monterey at Thomas Kinkade University. Thom wasn’t involved in the details. He didn’t want to know, and he didn’t have the patience or the understanding for business and contracts. He trusted Rick implicitly and let him handle the business on his end. Rick hired a Harvard PhD financial whiz who helped shape the deals and draw up the contracts for him, and Rick had the final say in their execution.

Within two years, the signature galleries were a hit. Profits continued to climb and we all did very well. It was a great place to work then, and we felt like winners, although of course no one profited as much as Thom, Ken, and Rick. Between the three of them, they owned well over half the company stock, and on paper were probably worth over $100 million. While the rest of us at the company went from doing well to doing great, they went from being rich to being superrich.

In 1998 Thom painted another one of his classic paintings, Garden of Prayer, the first of his most famous series of gazebo paintings. In it a classical gazebo, with six alabaster Ionic columns and a copper decorative scrollwork dome, stands beside the shore of an ambling river, which pools near the gazebo. A meandering path leads the way into the distant woods through an open green metal scrollwork gate. Flowers and leaves sprinkle the entire image with cascades of colors. Thom said it symbolized man’s connection to the creator, by being in his creation, and that a visit to the gazebo would bring every viewer of the image closer to their God.

At this point, collectors were lining up to purchase the latest release in his series, which came out once a year. Thom painted about ten paintings a year; there would be a bridge painting, a gazebo painting, or a lighthouse painting. The seduction for the collector was that it became irresistible to have to have the latest incarnation in a series. Thom was hitting all the right notes with his audience, and the galleries and collectible shops were filled with patrons. When art professors asked their students to name a living artist, many times the only name that came to mind was Thomas Kinkade.

On November 2, 1998, Forbes’s cover story was “The 200 Best Small Companies,” and Media Arts was named one of them. Ken did the interview for the magazine, as he usually did. The article featured a picture of him facing the camera with two Thomas Kinkade paintings behind him. The photo distorted his face through a wide-angle lens so that his head looked much too big. It was an odd editorial choice, but perhaps, through its extreme perspective, it gave a sense of expansion and forward motion.

The article briefly described the success of Media Arts and pointed out the most pertinent details: that sales were expected to top $120 million in the upcoming year, and that Media Arts had been growing at the rate of 37 percent every year since 1995. It stated that the replicated artworks in the signature galleries sold for amounts ranging from $30 to $1,500, and that although Media Arts only owned 27 galleries outright, there were 140 galleries selling his work because of the increasing numbers of signature galleries. This unique cost structure meant that Media Arts kept its operating margins at 20 percent and its return equity at an impressive 57 percent. The article also mentioned that licensing revenue had jumped from $1.9 to $4.2 million that year.

Ken was quoted only twice in the article, but his brief statements were just enough to do some real damage, by touching on the subtle competition over who really ran Media Arts, and who really contributed to the success of the company. Ken summed up the nature of the company in one sentence: “We think of ourselves as an emerging consumer brand, a lifestyle company.” He didn’t directly refer to the massive appeal of the art or the popularity of the artist. In short, he didn’t refer to Thom as the leader or the visionary he clearly was. By implication, it could be construed that Thom’s contribution was certainly his significant skills as a trained artist, but that contribution might be perfunctory compared to the marketing genius exhibited by the company that supported his art. Ken framed the article and hung it in his office, and gave me a framed copy as a gift.

This was just another in a long line of articles that had built up frustration for Thom. He never felt he was given his due adequately when Ken gave interviews on behalf of the company. Thom always felt there was more to say about how the art was impacting people, and why they were responding the way they were. To Thom, it seemed like Ken was focusing more on the business model, which tended to weight the credit toward himself. When Thom confided in me, I could hear his palpable frustration.

“Where does everything in the company come from? It comes from me. From hundreds of hours I spend behind the canvas. I think people forget that sometimes. You know how I know that it all comes from me? Because I spend night and day painting. I’m tired sometimes, Eric, but I know I have to keep going. If I stopped, everything would stop.”

This was also the first time I became consciously aware of Nanette’s influence in Thom’s affairs. Nanette generally kept a dignified distance from the business, surely consulting with Thom privately, but never appearing to interfere in business meetings. But in this case, her displeasure became known. From their perspective, as newlyweds Nanette and Thom had spent what little money they had to start manufacturing and selling lithographs of Thom’s artwork, long before they met Ken. Thom acknowledged it was Ken’s initial investment of $30,000 that made it possible to execute their vision on a larger scale, and allowed that vision to grow into something. They also acknowledged Ken’s contribution. But for the article to imply that this company, begun by all of them, was merely a marketing machine, as opposed to the result of the toil and genius of the painter, was too much for them to bear.

Nanette was fiercely protective of Thom, and anything that hurt him or wasn’t beneficial to him, she just didn’t like. Thom was everything to her and the family. She knew how hard he worked and she was always supportive; stood by his side, smiled at him, was gentle with him. She touched his shoulder, and held his hand. She knew he needed the stable home environment she could provide, so he could work in peace. And she also wanted him to have the dignity of getting credit for all he did. It was her strength and her loving support behind the scenes that kept him going, while she never asked for any credit herself.

With the rumblings over the Forbes article and frequent contentious discussions in the executive meetings, it became clear to me that the cloud that had followed Ken since Black Monday had begun to darken. Although Ken was the largest shareholder, and had been CEO and was still chairman and president of Media Arts Group, some people thought there was a pattern that could be seen in retrospect. Some openly said his penchant for diversification had resulted in monumental financial losses for the company.

With the growing mistrust over his past performance, and the Forbes article brewing even more trouble for Ken, a power void began to emerge. As if to fill this void, Rick Barnett stepped up and seemed to take a bigger and more important management role in the company. To his credit, Rick was always openly against diversification. He didn’t care about other artists, and he said so. Anything having to do with new artists or new products, he was always vehemently opposed to. But outwardly he would only politely disagree.

Rick would concede that he could see people’s point of view; that they felt to diversify was necessary to take the pressure off Thom. And then he would say that in Monterey he was seeing the overwhelming response to Thom’s work and he just didn’t see how diversification was necessary, and would end on, “I’m going to agree to disagree.”

Then he sat in the rest of the meeting and tapped on his watch, always tapping, never telling anyone what he was calculating. If someone finally turned to him and said, “Rick, what do you think?” he would take a deep breath, very dramatically fold his hands, and lean back and say that he just didn’t agree with diversification. Then he would get up at the end of the meeting, get back into his BMW, and drive back to Monterey, not to be seen for another couple of months.

We would pick up the phone and call Thom and tell him about the decisions we had just made in the meeting. He’d be on speaker talking to the group.

“That’s fantastic! That’s great news. We’re just gonna conquer the world, aren’t we? Good job,” he would say and hang up the phone.

The next morning he would often call Ken and say, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think this is a good idea. Here’s what I want to do . . .”

We came to expect it. Thom was in a sense a weak person, easily influenced, especially by Rick. We all knew by the patterns that Rick would politely disagree in the meeting, get in his car, and stop by Thom’s cottage on the way home and tell him what to say to management the next day.

The first era of the company could be called the Ken Raasch era, in which diversification (which later became known as the D-word) had failed to serve and ultimately understand the art business Thomas Kinkade created, and had almost cost the company its existence. Now the Rick Barnett era was about to begin, and the name of that game began with a capital S. As in Sales, without much of a watchful eye toward the perception and emotion of the buyer, and the typical art market management of scarcity.

For most of 1999, tensions and conflicts rose steadily. Although Ken was no longer fighting for diversification, he still exerted his decision-making power. Previously he had sent Dan Byrne to England for months at a time to try to fix what could not be fixed with the David Winter Cottages division. David Winter had once been a leader in the miniatures market, but the market had long collapsed. Dan did his best, but there just wasn’t much to salvage. And the memory of the David Winter Cottages acquisition was etched in everyone’s mind.

Thom began to withdraw more and more. He was never seen at the offices; he came in maybe once a year. If you wanted to meet with him, you had to go to him. And only if you could get past his secretary. Thom only liked meetings in which he could think forward, plan, and dream. He didn’t like dealing with day-to-day business issues, and he didn’t like conflict. In fact, Thom avoided confrontation at all costs. He wanted everyone to be happy, especially himself.

I had some mock-ups I needed Thom to approve, and had tried to get through to him for weeks, but his secretary kept telling me he wasn’t available. I understood her job was to protect Thom; she guarded him like she was the Seventh Cavalry protecting the Black Hills. After she told me Thom would be out of his studio for the rest of the week, I decided to drop off the files I had for him at Ivy Gate Cottage so he could have a look at them over the weekend. When I got to the gate, Nanette answered the intercom.

“I’m just dropping something off for Thom,” I said.

She told me to come in and head for the studio. I pulled up to the cottage and walked up to the door and was surprised to see Thom sitting inside at his easel. He saw me through the window, smiled, and waved me in.

“I thought you were out of town,” I said.

“She says that so I can have some peace and quiet.”

I told him a lot of people at the company were waiting to talk to him. He said they would manage without him. After all, that was what a team was for.

“My job is to paint. The business will take care of itself.”

I walked over to look at the painting he was working on. It was a thatched-roof cottage nestled in a lush woodsy garden full of bloom. I told him it was beautiful.

“It’s Everett’s Cottage. I’m painting it for her first birthday that’s coming up,” he said.

“She’ll treasure it always,” I said.

“A family is like a garden. Every child is a delicate flower that will bloom with the right nurturing,” he said. Thom always talked in this way; the same way he wrote his books. It wasn’t just on paper; Thom could hold forth on how to live one’s life all day long.

The painting was truly stunning. A misty background connoted the mystery of a life still unfolding; the warm inviting light in the cottage, the germ of a young child’s destiny just beginning, growing and developing inside, nestled within the harboring beauty of nature and the garden. Thom’s images were always full of symbolism. I was most moved by his devotion to his four daughters, and his dedicating timeless cottage images in their name.

I placed the mock-ups on a nearby table and told him I would leave them for him to look at whenever he was ready.

“Stay. Keep me company,” he said.

I began to understand more clearly that Thom wasn’t busy; he was just hiding from the company. It wasn’t in his nature to deal with business matters anyway. He was at his easel where he belonged. But I could also see how lonely he was. Thom’s work required extraordinary attention to detail, which is why his paintings took him hundreds of hours to complete. He seemed happy for my company. I was the kind of company that wouldn’t pressure him or make demands he was uncomfortable with.

He finally turned to me and said, “Let me tell you something that might surprise you.”

I said I was all ears.

He told me that when he traveled to England, to the Cotswolds to see the cottages there, he just found them so interesting and charming. He stayed at the old historic Lygon Arms in the quintessential Cotswold town of Broadway and walked the streets, looking at these small cottages all over town, which were originally built in the 1300s, and which had been added on to for over eight hundred years.

“Imagine how they looked, cobbled together through time,” he said.

His brush kept dancing over the canvas as he spoke, and once in a while he would glance over at me. I was riveted, waiting for the secret.

He said he studied these cottages, one after another, trying to figure out what made them so charming. And then he saw that the windows and the doors and the rooflines were quite chaotic. They didn’t make sense anymore from all of the additions over time. They all had crazy angles where one roofline would dive into another roofline or into a window. And there would be a door that led seemingly into nowhere. All of that chaos gave these cottages a mystery and charm.

I said that I could see what he meant.

He talked about the optic nerve, which we discussed a lot in our meetings, just as they do in advertising. The optic nerve takes in an image in a split second and tells the brain, before you can even think, if it likes what it’s seeing or not. He told me that’s how the Cotswold cottages were.

“They hit your eye and you just love them right away. That’s what I try to capture,” he said.

He looked at me and smiled. He could see I was amazed.

He then told me this was his pixie dust. It started with these Cotswold cottages and what he saw there. He decided to bring that charm of chaos and dissonance into his French country manors and his cottages. He just made everything even more impossible and dramatic. He started painting windows in interesting places, and made them too small for an ordinary person. He jumbled up the rooflines, and added light that made people want to know where it was coming from. Like in a fairy tale, it drew you in. It was his secret. The charm of chaos was in all his paintings.

I was blown away. To hear the secret of the appeal stated outright was amazing to me. I felt like a sorcerer’s apprentice gleaning the gift.

I stayed for a few hours listening to him tell more stories. And I showed him all my mock-ups. Before I left, I invited him to an upcoming event in San Francisco I had tickets to, and he gladly agreed to come. It was the annual Fine Wine and Cigar Expo, and as much as we both loved cigars, I figured he would be the perfect person to take along.

On the day of the expo, weeks later, I left work early and arrived at Monte Sereno by noon, where a black limousine stood waiting for us. Thom had a regular driver, a loyal and dependable man from the Philippines named Bo who took him everywhere, and was on call twenty-four hours a day.

As the limo pulled out of the estate, Thom showed me the stash of cold beers on ice and the bottle of Johnny Walker Black. He held up the bottle of whiskey.

“Eric, have a snort of whiskey with me.”

It was his favorite phrase: a “snort” of whiskey.

I looked at my watch. It was barely one in the afternoon.

“No, thanks, I’m fine.”

“No problem at all. I’m just gonna pour myself one.”

On the drive to San Francisco I nursed a Coors Light from the icebox, while Thom had several shots of whiskey. Thom could put down liquor, and he often started in the middle of the day.

He pulled out his treasured humidor, which I had often seen in his studio. He had brought it in the car, and offered me a cigar. I told him how much I admired the humidor’s burl walnut finish.

“They call it bird’s-eye walnut. I’ll get you one when we hit a million dollars in licensing.”

He later did, and the humidor is still sitting in my office with a plaque that reads: ERIC KUSKEY. WITH APPRECIATION THOMAS KINKADE 1998.

On the drive, Thom asked me about friends of mine I had mentioned to him in the past who ran the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island. He was very intrigued with the museum and its collection. Thom was a great fan of the American illustrators of the past; artists like Howard Chandler Christy, Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and Norman Rockwell. He talked about his dream to own a Norman Rockwell someday.

Thom loved Norman Rockwell more than any other painter. Rockwell personified the kind of images Thom believed in. Pictures that showed a quintessential American scene, with moments of connection and emotion, set within a deeply cultural context. His favorite painting was Freedom from Want, Norman Rockwell’s famous image of a family gathered around a Thanksgiving meal, which he painted as part of a series entitled “The Four Freedoms.” Freedom from Want must have touched Thom at his core. Here was the man who as a boy sat by his window, hoping for his mother to bring home food. He must have understood the need for that freedom most of all. He frequently talked to me about this series and how much it meant to him.

“Aren’t these beautiful notions, Eric? Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Worship. That’s my life right there, captured by Norman Rockwell. Everything I care about, everything I stand for, is in those paintings.”

As we neared San Francisco, he asked me if I knew about The Pied Piper. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said it was the famous piece by Maxfield Parrish painted in 1909, and asked if I knew it was hanging in San Francisco. I told him I didn’t know, and asked him to tell me more.

“We’re going there,” he said. “You won’t believe it when you see it. There is a masterpiece hanging in the Palace Hotel. We’ll go before the expo.”

“Great,” I said, nursing my warming beer.

I was not prepared for the turn-of-the-century grandeur of the art deco Palace Hotel in the financial district. We entered the Pied Piper Bar and Grill. I was stunned; Maxfield Parrish’s masterpiece The Pied Piper hung above the bar.

We grabbed two stools and sat in front of the 6 x 16 foot painting, marveling at the vibrant colors in the image of the pied piper leading the children astray.

Thom ordered another whiskey and I had another beer. By this time Thom had already had three drinks in the limo, but I hadn’t taken much note. We talked about the look on the face of the pied piper and the expression on the faces of the children, the exquisite detail, and how the painting transports you into another world. Thom told me that, in fact, the face of the Pied Piper was Maxfield Parrish himself, which had always fascinated him. We had a sense that the clock had stopped, just looking at it. We discussed the history of Maxfield Parrish and illustration in American art. I had been educated in the art that mattered to him, and he enjoyed talking to me about it.

Thom was in a reverie.

“Things mattered then. The human experience mattered then.” He looked at me. “Things don’t seem to matter as much anymore.”

“It was another time, that’s for sure,” I said.

“Sometimes I think I belong to that time. I should have been a painter then. I would have been one of them.”

“I think you are one of them.”

He smiled. He thought so, too.

“I’m going to show them all one day. I’m going to show the world. I may not live to see the day, but when the book is written, I’m going to be known as the modern-day Norman Rockwell or Maxfield Parrish.”

It made me feel a little sad, hearing him say it. There was something morbid, something foreboding about it that I couldn’t put my finger on. Looking back, I think he knew the art world wouldn’t accept him, and he already had a sense of his own mortality.

I told him there were plenty of people who respected him. That he was far more successful than Norman Rockwell was in his lifetime. He said he knew he had the heart of the people, and that was what mattered most. But he felt he would probably have to die before he got respect for what he did.

“It’s just how the world works. And that’s all right. It isn’t about me. But I do want to be remembered,” he said.

I told him nobody could forget him, and clapped him on the back and got up from the bar stool. I said I would go run to the bank across the street and be right back. Thom picked up his drink and gazed at the Maxfield Parrish painting.

“Take your time.”

I rushed across the street to get some cash. I wasn’t gone for more than ten minutes. As soon I got back, I walked into the bar expecting to see him at the counter, but Thom was gone. I went outside. I looked in the lobby and didn’t see him. I went out to the street. He was nowhere. Then I saw a dive bar across the street. I had a feeling he might be there, so I crossed over and stuck my head inside. There was Thom, sitting at the bar, knocking back another whiskey.

When we entered the expo, I had the sudden feeling that I was bringing a cat burglar into a diamond store. We started at the cigar section and stopped at booth after booth, where companies offer samples of their best cigars, and wine and port. Every booth you passed had a tray of plastic glasses filled with alcohol. I sampled a few here and there, but Thom was sampling the wine at every vendor. They were little glasses, but he would drink one or two and walk on to the next booth. After forty-five minutes he had probably consumed what seemed like twenty of those little glasses of wine. And he was beginning to swerve and sway.

I said, “Let’s get out of here and get a breath of fresh air.”

He said, “I gotta go take a leak,” and promptly walked off, mistakenly walking into the ladies’ room.

I was waiting nearby and hadn’t seen him go in. Suddenly I heard a scream and commotion. I turned just in time to see Thom quickly coming out of the women’s bathroom, drunk off his ass, his hand on his zipper, laughing hysterically.

“I was wondering why there was no urinal in sight! What kind of place is this?!”

We were both laughing hysterically by now. All I could think was, “Oh my God, the Painter of Light just went into the ladies’ room at the wine and cigar expo.”

Before I could stop him, he turned and went in again, on purpose. I was horrified.

“Thom!” I tried to call him back, but he disappeared inside.

I looked around and thought, “This cannot end well.” I decided to go back into the expo to wait for Thom. I waited for ten minutes, but there was no sign of him.

I went back to the booths and looked everywhere. Finally I headed to the front entrance and stepped outside. There I saw two police officers standing with Thom sprawled out on the hood of their car, one arm behind his back, starting to put his hands in handcuffs. He was grinning, oblivious to the seriousness of the situation.

I rushed over to the policemen and introduced myself.

“I’m terribly sorry, officer. I was supposed to be with him. He might have had a little bit too much to drink.”

“A little too much? This lady said he kept coming into the women’s bathroom. Somebody called hotel security.”

“I understand. But please, his car is right here,” I pointed to the limo. “If you could release him into my custody, I will see that he gets home safely.”

The officers looked at each other. They were smirking, too. They had no idea who he was. Here was this huge guy, clearly inebriated, laughing and slurring, sweat dripping down his face. They thought he was just another loopy drunk.

“Take him. Get him outta here.”

They released his cuffs and I guided Thom to his limo. Once inside he laughed, falling back into the seat.

“You really saved my ass, Kuskey.”

I closed the door as quickly as I could and told the driver to take us home. But Thom had another idea. He rapped on the driver’s window.

“Take us to the Gold Club.”

I didn’t know what the Gold Club was, but it sounded like a strip club to me. The driver nodded and drove ahead as I watched Thom slowly slide down in his seat, his eyes closing. Within a few blocks he was fast asleep, snoring.

I tapped the driver. “Take us back to Monte Sereno.”

I slept in the guest room of the cottage that night and woke up with a headache. I expected Thom to be out for the day, but when I dragged myself into the sunlight, I saw him sitting at his easel, his hair combed neatly, fresh as a daisy.

“Morning, Eric! How about some orange juice?” he asked, smiling as if nothing had ever happened.

When I told Ken about the experience, he said he was sorry I had to be subjected to that. But I really didn’t mind. It was all part of the fun and boisterous and sometimes silly personality that Thom had. He was a guy with a bawdy sense of humor. He lit up a room, energizing everyone around him. And part of the fun was the drinking. Because of his jocular ways, it was hard to see it as a problem.

Thom lived like there was no tomorrow. Everything was big and large and loud. He had an appetite for life, for food, for drink, for beautiful things and beautiful women. He consumed life as if there wasn’t enough go around. I often had a sense there was urgency, and a sense of his mortality, in that appetite. He made frequent mentions of not expecting to live for long; of not being around to see this or that event. He often referred to things that would happen after he was gone. He would talk about the artists of the past, and would ask me why I thought so many great artists died young. I chalked it up to his romantic notion of the kind of painter he thought he was, and an overidentification with the likes of van Gogh or Toulouse-Lautrec. But looking back, these statements were consistently urgent.

When Thom ate a meal, he would sit, shoulders hunched, his upper body inclined over his plate, shoveling the food into his mouth as fast as he could. Watching Thom drink and eat was a bit like watching an Olympic sport in progress. It had the feel of a fierce competition against an unseen opponent. Perhaps it was an urgent need: the hard-to-quell childhood anxiety of not having enough. A whole beer was just a sip for Thom. If he drank iced tea, he would drink the whole glass in one gulp. When everyone ordered their dinner, Thom would sometimes order two entrées.

Thom was a great fan of the opposite sex. Like a child with no boundaries, he got carried away with everything that excited him. And to say that one particular thing really excited Thom would be a misstatement, because absolutely everything excited Thom. He was the proverbial kid in a candy store, every day of his life. The hunger, the appetite, the voraciousness with which he took it all in—the beauty of nature, the thrill of a ride on his Harley, an all-night gambling spree, the transporting experience of spiritual rapture—always made it seem as if he felt it might be his last time to enjoy whatever he was experiencing. Thom read not just one but four books at the same time: history books, pulp fiction, spy novels, newspapers. He would devour them in a matter of days and move on to the next. He fed his mind, his body, and his spirit with a passion for life, and sometimes with indiscretion.

His accidental foray into the ladies’ room at the Fine Wine and Cigar Expo was an accident that became a child’s prank. There’s no excusing it, but there might be some perspective to be gleaned that brings one closer to understanding what made Thom tick. He was unfiltered; he had no malice, no premeditation. You saw his thoughts in action as they were happening, and they came out unbridled and unexamined.

All the fun made it easy to overlook the deeper problems beneath. Ken had known Thom for a long time, and he was genuinely concerned that Thom was ill. And after seeing Thom nearly in handcuffs, for the first time I understood why Ken was worried.

As the tensions rose between Ken, Rick, Thom, and their respective teams, we began to hear rumors that Thom was going to bring his pastor into the company to help mediate and facilitate healthy communication.

And then one day he appeared: Pastor Mike Kiley, sporting a full white beard and glasses. He immediately went inside Ken’s office and closed the door. An hour later, he came out again. Then he walked into the office of our CFO, Bud Peterson, and closed the door. Another hour passed. And so it went; we all received visits from Pastor Kiley. He introduced himself and said he wanted to be a neutral party in all discussions. With a soft demeanor, he stated that he would do whatever he could to build bridges and encourage friendly communication.

In the weeks and months to come, Pastor Kiley would be seen walking the halls, his hands clasped behind his back, smiling at everyone. On his arrival, it appeared to me that Pastor Kiley didn’t know what a licensing agreement was, or how the canvas transfer system worked, but he sat in on all of our meetings. Within a year, Thom had given him the title of vice chairman of the board. Pastor Kiley began to be part of the decision making, and ultimately ended up making decisions himself. A period of chaos began that would never really abate.

We now sat in executive management meetings with Pastor Kiley praying over decisions, and listening to him sermonize on business practices. In board meetings, when tempers were running high and tension was thick, Pastor Kiley would raise his hands, looking around the room. He would ask us all to take a breath and remember who we were and what the company was.

Everyone would begrudgingly pause and breathe.

He asked us not to lose sight of who Thomas Kinkade was. He asked us all to remember the man we were talking about, and who we all supported with our hard work.

The executives would remain silent, as Pastor Kiley continued speaking in his measured pastoral voice, from his practiced spiritual counseling experience. He intoned that we were a mission-based company, and we all needed to remember that mission. Our mission was to change lives and to spread peace and love into the world. He would ask how we could do that if we didn’t even have peace inside our own four walls.

He would look at everyone at the table. He said we had a historic opportunity to change the world. And he asked who else could say that out there. Not Coca-Cola. Not Chevrolet. We were changing the world from inside people’s homes. We were entering into their lives and having a positive effect. And he reminded us it was Thom’s wish that we all get along.

There was silence in the room. Everyone knew to let him speak his peace before we could get back to business. Then Pastor Kiley bowed his head and said a prayer.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Wall Street would think if they knew about the churchman in the boardroom. Kiley was a trained counselor, but his training was in religious-based counseling and certainly not in business affairs. Kiley was also drawing a salary and now, as vice chairman of the board, the new title might have gone to his head. But he was a man with good intentions, and he kept Thom calm in the times when things were beginning to get heated between all factions. In that sense, I think he did his job.

But Pastor Mike Kiley wasn’t the problem; he was just the tip of the iceberg. A revolution had slowly been brewing, and it was about to come to a head.

The art business is run by people who know the business of art. In order to be effective, you need to know what the art business means from a historical and practical sense. It’s not merely about selling; it’s about the mediums used to make the art, the history of the art and its precedents, and having a perspective about the art market, from the masters to contemporary artists. You should know what a stone lithograph is, or a serigraph, or why some painters use oils and others acrylic. You should know how Andy Warhol used multimedia, and how he created his famous Campbell soup cans series. You have to understand art’s place in history.

Obviously, most vacuum cleaner salesmen are not trained in the business of art. Rick Barnett, however, had learned. A brilliant man, he had become an eloquent American art scholar. He knew the importance of being able to describe Thom’s place in history. He was also Thom’s biggest fan, perhaps only second to Ken. This struck me as right; that Ken and Rick were truly Thom’s biggest supporters and his most avid fans. But when it came to talking about Thom, no one could talk about the art better than Rick.

He would say that Thom was America’s most collected artist, and point out that Thom’s works hung on twenty million walls in American homes. There was no artist whose images could be seen on more walls than Thomas Kinkade’s. Not one artist in the history of the world came close. He said that probably not a day went by that the average person didn’t see an image by Thomas Kinkade. No artist had been accepted by the public, collected, and was as beloved as Thomas Kinkade. His work was spiritual without being programmatic. It was rich with symbolism and metaphor. We weren’t just talking about extraordinarily beautiful paintings of extraordinary craftsmanship, but meaning and message and purpose. Rick said that every one of Thom’s paintings had something to say about the meaning of our lives.

As conflict over executive decisions, ownership and control, and the direction of the company was at its height in 1999, it was my impression that Rick was spending more and more time with Thom. No one had the kind of access to Thom that Rick did. Thom would close Ken out, but when Rick called, Thom always answered. At times Rick seemed to be the only one Thom trusted. And Rick steadily pointed out that the company was about sales, not diversification. That we needed to learn from the past, and we couldn’t go back to what happened on Black Monday.

The power shift took its course. Rick’s influence seemed to grow as Ken’s diminished. Rick wanted sales, and with those sales, of course, came his commissions. To focus the agenda on selling, Rick suggested bringing in the best salesperson he knew: Greg Burgess, another former vacuum salesman and colleague of Rick’s from the Kirby days. Burgess didn’t cut the figure of a senior executive in an art business. He had the demeanor of a former vacuum salesman, with studied body movements and smooth verbal cues. You wouldn’t ever think of him as someone in a senior position at the biggest-selling art business in the world. Then Rick brought in Brad Walsh, another colleague from the Kirby days, to add to the executive sales team. Brad was a short and stocky character with a quick smile. Then Howard Walsh, Brad’s father, joined the board of directors; a rotund graying man who was the retired CEO and chairman of the board of the Kirby Vacuum Company. All three Kirby guys had fast smiles and hardy handshakes, and they were killer salesmen. Driven by numbers, these guys could have just as easily sold sunglasses or staplers. With the new Kirby vacuum team taking over the direction of the company, numbers truly took over. It was all about the bottom line.

Rick even brought in an operational executive named John Lackner, and an attorney, Tim Guster, who became the general counsel for Media Arts. Both were also former Kirby employees. Sometimes it seemed like a coup from the inside by stacking the deck. With Kirby colleagues in the company, Rick gained a significant amount of control over the overall agenda. It began what could be called the second phase of the company: the era of Rick Barnett. No one knew it was the beginning of the end.

Ken was a good person, but he was also a complex character; fiercely competitive, yet endearing to those who knew him. He was the kind of person who would beat you in a race and then come over and hug you. His life began modestly, similar to Thom’s; Ken was raised by a single mother and a grandmother. And he always had an intense desire to be rich. In some ways it could be said that Ken had made all his money from the chance meeting with Thom at a wedding. Some people said they felt Ken’s rapid success colored his perception of how hard or easy it was to make money. He never had the chance to learn the ropes, or learn from mistakes, before he was already making millions. But even though Ken had had the idea of diversification, everyone else had jumped on board with it. When it failed, Ken was left holding the bag. He was the one everyone doubted; the one everyone blamed. When Greg Burgess and Brad Walsh came on board, there was no more tolerance for doubt. Within months the revolution took hold.

In this period of upheaval, I tried to focus on my own business and stay out of the corporate politics playing out among Ken, five Kirby vacuum salesmen, and a pastor whose lack of business experience was increasingly pushing him toward what seemed like a meltdown.

I was busy building the Thomas Kinkade Furniture line we had licensed and were about to reveal at the International Furniture Expo in High Point, North Carolina. We had rented a beautiful historic home, the Tomlinson House, in the country club enclave of High Point, to stage and feature the new line of furnishings.

The boardroom stress had also gotten to Thom, who was keeping more to himself, sequestered in his studio spending long days and nights painting. A trip to North Carolina would be a welcome reprieve for us all, and an excuse to celebrate. After all, the furniture line was one of Thom’s most prized achievements. For Thom, furnishings were more substantial than collectibles; they were literal three-dimensional manifestations of his vision, turned into everyday objects of use.

We were staying at the Tomlinson House the night before the debut. The house was a creepy old Tudor-style historic home, built in the 1920s, and it was said to be haunted. It had a dark cellar and Thom had been taking people down there all night, turning lights on and off, having fun spooking them. Dan Byrne, Ken, Terry Sheppard, his videographer, and others from the company were there. Everyone was riding high on the success of the furniture line. Steve Kincaid’s company had thrown a big party for everyone in attendance earlier that night. After the party cleared, only those of us who were staying at the house were left. And Thom was just getting started.

“Come on guys, let’s have some fun. Let’s play a game. Famous names game. Anybody who loses has to take a drink.”

It was a little ironic. Thom advocated shutting off the television and playing a board game with your kids, to be together as a family. This was perhaps his way of interacting with the company family. And those who rarely got to see Thom outside of work situations were particularly tickled to observe him in rare form.

As we sat in a circle, someone began by naming a celebrity, and whatever letter that celebrity’s name ended in, the next person had to name a celebrity whose first name began with that letter. If you couldn’t think of a name, you lost and had to take a drink.

We threw out names from Kevin Bacon to Nat King Cole to Elle McPherson to Nick Nolte, after which Thom couldn’t think of anybody and had to take a drink. We all got a little tipsy along the way, everyone in stitches, mainly over Thom’s constant jokes and antics. Thom even tried to go to bed at one point and undressed down to his white skivvies, only to come down moments later and rally the troops again for another round of drinks and games. The evening ended up with him dancing around in his underwear; a 250-pound man running through the house half-naked. No one thought much of it or said much at the time. By three in the morning. he was charging around the house, half dressed, singing, playing the piano, and chugging vodka right out of the bottle. Everyone laughed hysterically until we heard that soft-spoken voice from upstairs. It was Nanette, asking Thom to come to bed.

We took it as our cue to exit. Only Thom remained in the living room, alone, drinking until six in the morning. He finally got about two hours of sleep before it was time to head out to the expo.

We took a stretch limousine to the High Point Market, and Thom made the driver stop at the famous, first-ever Krispy Kreme drive-through donut shop. He ordered a dozen glazed donuts and proceeded to eat them all during the ten-minute ride to the event.

As soon as we got to the Thomas Kinkade booth, where the furniture line was prominently displayed, Thom was met by a contingent of news reporters and cameras.

Thom stepped in front of the cameras, but couldn’t get more than two sentences out before he passed out and collapsed on the floor with the cameras rolling. He lay on the ground, out cold. Our staff quickly carried him into a back room, where EMTs were called to check his vitals. Bob Davis, Thom’s event manager, told the press to return a little later; that the Painter of Light wasn’t feeling well and needed rest. Thom slept in the back room for forty-five minutes and woke up raring to go, as if nothing ever happened. Then he set out to shake hands with the public, speaking his faith to those who had come to see him talk, signing autographs and taking pictures with his adoring fans.

Six months after Thom and I had launched the Thomas Kinkade furniture line, sales were going through the roof. Hundreds of dealers across the country had jumped on board for the chance at selling the line and the exclusive prints along with it. Thom was immensely proud of his furniture line, and doing business with Steve Kincaid went off without a hitch. Steve was genuinely nice and a big supporter of Thom’s. But as we were about to launch the second spring line, I got a call from Steve. He told me he was being inundated with calls from his dealers, receiving hundreds of complaints that no one was getting their art deliveries for the furniture lines.

I asked him if he had talked to anyone on the sales side, and he said he wasn’t getting any of his calls returned. I told him this was the first I had heard about the problem, and vowed to set up a meeting with Brad Walsh and Greg Burgess at the upcoming International Furniture Expo to find out what was going on.

We all sat down in Steve Kincaid’s office at the High Point Market, one year after our first successful launch of Thom’s furniture line. The furniture was a great success and Kincaid had set up an enormous display encompassing close to ten thousand square feet of showroom. Entire home interiors were built for the show. There were four living rooms, four dining rooms, and four bedrooms providing living environments that displayed the lifestyle furniture brand of Thomas Kinkade. In the back of this massive showroom, Steve kept his office, and this is where Brad Walsh, Greg Burgess, Ron Carpenter (Steve’s associate), and I met with him. When we sat down, Steve got right down to business. He asked why he wasn’t getting deliveries of the art for the furniture line.

Brad Walsh replied that he had decided to kill the program.

Steve looked incredulous. He asked what Brad meant, and reminded him that he had a contract.

Brad repeated that he had killed the art program and they weren’t doing that anymore. Steve Kincaid, who was a polite, soft-spoken Southern gentleman, was turning beet red at this point. Barely able to comprehend, Steve asked him to repeat himself. And Brad reiterated that he had killed the art program for the furniture dealers.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. I looked at Steve. He was livid. Steve asked Brad if he was reneging on the agreement with him. Brad said he was, and that it was his final decision.

Steve was incredulous. He said he couldn’t believe that a guy like Thomas Kinkade, with everything he stood for, would go back on his word.

I tried to run damage control. I assured Steve that Thom was not aware this decision had been made. I looked at Greg and asked what he had to say about it.

Brad Walsh glared at me, now turning two shades of red himself. Greg Burgess had been silent for the entire meeting, and he didn’t answer me now. Steve Kincaid looked around, threw his hands up and said we were done, we were finished. Then he stood and walked out of the room. I tried to call after Steve to stop him from leaving, but he was already down the hallway. As I watched Steve march off, Brad Walsh followed me and tapped me hard on the chest, getting in my face. He told me that if I ever went against him in a meeting again, there would be hell to pay.

I stood transfixed. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Had he just threatened me? My mind was racing with a jumble of thoughts: “What do I do? Do I punch him first before he can punch me? Is this the moment I get into a fistfight with the senior vice president of sales in the hallway at the furniture market? Can I let this guy destroy all my hard work of the last year? And what about Thom? He loved the furniture line. How could he do this to Thom?” I unclenched my fists and controlled myself. I told Brad that I didn’t have to listen to his idle threats, and he responded that he didn’t have to listen to me either, and he stormed away with Greg sheepishly scurrying after him.

Our contract with Steve Kincaid had been scuttled by Brad Walsh. It was shocking. They weren’t interested in furniture. Thom’s wishes and Thom’s dream of having his own furniture line didn’t seem to matter to them. Thom’s reputation as an honorable person didn’t seem to matter. Furniture didn’t net them a commission. They seemed to be interested only in the sales that brought profit into their own pockets.

I called Thom and told him what had happened, and he was truly horrified. His beloved furniture line was most dear to his heart, and he was a man of honor. He respected Steve Kincaid as much as I did, and he immediately made some calls to see what he could do. He called Greg. He called Ron Carpenter, Steve Kincaid’s right-hand man. But it was all too late. The damage was already done. Steve Kincaid had lost face with his dealers and there was no turning back.

I was a man of my word. I believed that your word was what made you who you were. But principles of loyalty and honor didn’t seem to mean much to Greg Burgess or Brad Walsh. I had made a deal with Steve Kincaid myself, and it broke my heart when Steve finally cancelled his contract. Understandably, Kincaid and La-Z-Boy wanted nothing more to do with the Media Arts Group or Thomas Kinkade.

In the spring of 1999, I had planned a trip to Taipei, Taiwan, to meet with Darwin Lim, who ran a huge distribution of myriad products imported from the United States. Ken, still desirous of finding a way out of the David Winter Cottages debacle, asked if he could tag along. He knew I was resourceful, and the trip to Taiwan seemed like an opportunity to engage with me over trying to find an international market for the remaining inventory of unsellable cottages.

We sent samples ahead to Taiwan and planned a trip that would also include Tokyo and Hong Kong. We flew first class, not uncommon for Ken, and I recall that the two first-class tickets for all our various destinations cost $20,000 each. We were met at the airport by a Rolls-Royce and taken to the Regent Hotel Taipei, where we stayed for several nights. We successfully set up a deal with Darwin Lim and continued our adventures, flying to Tokyo and then on to Hong Kong, traveling first class all the way. We stayed at the InterContinental Hong Kong and sat talking at the bar of the hotel, looking out at the stunning view of Kowloon Bay and the glittering bustle of the city beyond.

During the day we met with Art Collection House, a big art publishing company that specialized in famous painters of the day such as Christian Riesse Lassen, going out again at night to five-star restaurants, living high on the hog.

On the last night of our trip I was in my room, already packed for the next morning’s return home, when there was a knock at the door. It was Ken. He looked dismayed. I let him into the room, concerned. It was clear that something bad had happened.

“What’s wrong?”

Ken held up a paper in his hand.

“What is it? Was there an accident?”

I took the paper from Ken and read. It was a fax from Linda, his secretary. The fax read that he was to contact her immediately. It seemed to say there had been a coup d’etat back at home.

Ken had been removed by a majority vote from his remaining position as chairman of the board of Media Arts Group, the company he helped to found.

We ate dinner in the hotel that night and talked. Ken was alternately angry, afraid, and confused, trying to understand what had happened. I was shocked.

“They can’t do this, right, Ken? They can’t let you go from your own company,” I asked.

Ken said he wasn’t sure about anything right now.

I told him that he had founded the company with Thom; that he couldn’t go on a business trip and suddenly be let go from his own company. Ken responded that he wasn’t sure of anything until he could talk to his lawyer.

Ken felt deeply betrayed and embarrassed, although he wasn’t necessarily surprised. Tensions had been running high back at the mother ship, and Thom had increasingly allied himself with Nanette against Ken. I will never forget how Ken appeared that evening; he looked deflated, like the wind had been taken out of his sails.

I was also concerned about what it meant for me. I had aligned myself with Ken politically at the company, and I couldn’t help but think I would be next. Questions were swimming in my head. Was this the end of my ride with Thomas Kinkade?