CHAPTER 9 
He put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with infected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked, there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, in August of 2006 the FBI opened an investigation into allegations of fraud perpetrated by Thomas Kinkade and his company. The Painter of Light, whom the country knew for his religious themes and sentimental romantic images of cottages, gates, bridges, and lighthouses, had suddenly come under the scrutiny of the feds. Norman Yatooma’s allegations in the chambers of the arbitration hearings had begun to resonate in the outside world. Had fraud been perpetrated by Thomas Kinkade, the artist admired for his wholesomeness? Executives at the company, and friends who had known Thom well for ten years or more, wondered how it had all happened; how someone who started from such a sincere beginning could come to this.
The management decisions that had proliferated galleries, and sold too many paintings at too large a discount, were continuing to have a detrimental effect. Thom’s simpler times were only getting more and more complicated.
Federal agents were scouring for a case, and the unhappy dealers were certainly willing to speak to the investigators. After all, they felt Thomas Kinkade and his company had exploited their Christian faith to entice them into investing in their signature gallery franchise. They had been subjected to unfair competition by their own company, and undersold in discount stores. After a dealer was awarded $3 million, dozens more came out of the woodwork to lodge complaints. Investigators sought anything they could find that might amount to a federal case, perusing documents detailing the business relationship of the galleries with the Thomas Kinkade Company. The FBI agents, whose investigation was being coordinated out of the San Jose FBI office, were combing through endless stacks of dealer agreements, retail sales policies, training materials from Thomas Kinkade University, and all correspondence, including email. Everything the company and Thomas Kinkade had been involved in with the signature galleries came under scrutiny.
All Thom had ever wanted was to turn his poverty into prosperity. But the dream had turned into a nightmare. And even though nothing ultimately came of the FBI investigation, things still were only getting worse.
Norman Yatooma announced he was going to file a class action suit on behalf of the collectors who had bought the canvas transfer paintings by Thomas Kinkade, believing they were a good investment. He also planned a class action suit by the shareholders of the company, who had once held shares of great value that they had been forced to sell at a significant loss in 2004.
Yatooma alleged Thomas Kinkade had driven the stock price down from $30 to $4, so he could buy the company back cheaply and take it private again for merely $33 million of his own money. Nothing ever came of these allegations, but to Thom, and to those of us witnessing the legal battles, it seemed Norman Yatooma would not stop until he had vindicated everyone the Thomas Kinkade Company had affected by the unfortunate over-proliferation of signature galleries.
Yatooma was effective, speaking the same Christian language associated with Thomas Kinkade. “I am a person of faith myself, and I’m really disturbed by Kinkade’s use of God to perpetrate a scam,” he said.
At the onset of the lawsuits, the company had made a key decision, as the galleries began failing and many galleries hadn’t made their payments for up to a year and a half. Executive management decided they needed to stay firm. Instead of forgiving and forgetting along Christian tenets, they would give no quarter. There would be zero leeway. They could not appear weak, lest they open the door to an impossible situation where everyone who wasn’t doing so well, or had a bad spell, would come and ask for a handout; for lenience. They calculated that by putting a tough defense team—including the well-known defense attorney Howard Weitzman, best known for his participation on the O. J. Simpson dream team—on the case, they could keep battling until they exhausted the resources of the signature gallery owners who were suing, and who were bound to have far fewer resources than the company. Eventually, they not only beat every signature gallery owner who filed a lawsuit against them, but also prevailed in their own lawsuits against those dealers, forcing many of them into corporate and personal bankruptcy.
This strategy became the key factor in how things would turn out. It forced them into a hard-line position from which there was no return. Instead of working out a settlement, or trying to find a solution with the ailing galleries, they were now forced to take the most aggressive and damaging course of action toward their own gallery owners. The litigious strategy set the stage for a long and hard battle.
In the wake of the conflicts, Thom retreated more and more. He was increasingly absent, increasingly unpredictable. He withdrew into himself, most likely as a means of spiritual survival. Just like the promise his paintings held, he sought a place where he could feel safe. He yearned to retreat to a place better than the one he was in.
And there was no better place to escape than into the bottle.
“It’s in my blood—I’m Scottish,” he would explain about his love of whiskey. “It’s mother’s milk for us. This is what we drink.”
Thom threw up a protective shield around himself. Now he seemed to increasingly take on the persona of a man’s man, perhaps to steel himself against all the darkness bearing down on him. Thom became the rugged man, the hunter, the biker, the outlaw. He assumed the persona of the biker artist; started to grow his hair long and wear leather jackets. He was the big burly biker sitting astride his Harley-Davidson.
He cultivated a Hemingwayesque vision of himself as a kind of bulwark against his own sensitivity and pain. He had always admired Ernest Hemingway, not only for his writing, but also for his drinking abilities and manliness. He transformed himself into the image of a bohemian artist, an outsider and rebel; a man running from darkness. It was as if he was trying to act like what was happening didn’t faze him, although I knew it had to affect him deeply. Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, now also had “fraud” and “hack” attached to his name.
On July 1, 2006, CNN aired a Larry King interview with Thomas Kinkade and Robert Goodwin, the president and CEO of the Points of Light Foundation, to discuss their new book, Points of Light: A Celebration of the American Spirit of Giving, and to promote the foundation’s mandate to encourage the spirit of volunteerism in America. In the interview, Thom talked about his nonprofit work with the Salvation Army and the series of auctions at which he drew an original sketch on the back of a canvas transfer painting and auctioned it off for the Points of Light charity. Nanette had been involved in his charity work for the Make-A-Wish Foundation as well as his Salvation Army work, all along.
During this period in 2006, I was spending less time in San Jose and more time at home with my wife and kids in Santa Barbara. For the family’s sake, I preferred running the Creative Brands Group licensing business I handled with Ken out of my home office, rather than from the offices Ken and I had established for CBG in San Jose. I made many trips up to San Jose during that time, where I planned a week of meetings with Thom and executives at the company, to lay out our latest licensing plans. The company often put me up at the upscale Hotel Valencia.
The neo-Spanish hotel was perched over the bustling street life of Santana Row, a premier shopping boutique area of San Jose, just across the street from the Valley Fair Mall. On one of those many business trips, I rented a suite with one bedroom, two bathrooms, and a large living area. I had a meeting the next day at the Thomas Kinkade Company, but had let Thom know I was in town. He told me he wanted to see me.
“Eric. My brother Pat’s in town. Let’s get the guys together for a game of poker. Do you have a nice room?”
I stood on the balcony of my spacious suite and looked down at the bustling shoppers below. As the bellboy placed my bags in the closet, I looked around at the well-appointed, brand new hotel and said, “Yeah, I have a nice room.”
“Great. We’ll have a night at your hotel. That way I can get out of the house.”
Poker games were an annual tradition. A core group of men from the company—Dan Byrne, James Lambert and myself, and once upon a time, Terry Sheppard—were a staple at any party Thom held. Ordinarily we would meet at Thom’s Ivy Gate Cottage, where we would play poker into the night. Thom always kept his studio well stocked, and there’d be plenty of drinking and playing until someone won the table. We’d play Texas hold ’em, seven card stud, five card draw, high low eight; whatever the player whose turn it was to call the next game decided he wanted to play. We’d always have a lot of fun, sitting around the table, joking constantly, and talking football, baseball, and girls. We’d all be drinking, but where the rest of the guys would have one beer, Thom would have three. By ten o’clock Thom was well lit and full of liquor. He would then get up, open the French doors of his cottage, and relieve himself in the bushes. He’d always draw a lot of laughter and disbelief when he did it. And he’d always say the same thing.
“The Good Lord gave us the great outdoors to relieve ourselves. If he had intended for us to use bathrooms, Adam and Eve would have had facilities.”
Everyone would laugh and shake their heads when Thom was making his jokes. But it became a natural fact of life that, every poker night, Thom refused to use the excellent and well-appointed bathrooms in his cottage, and instead enriched the great outdoors with his bodily fluids.
On our poker night at the Hotel Valencia, we played long into the night. Room service came up three times and brought whiskey, red wine, and chilled bottles of white wine in silver ice buckets, and popped the wine corks as we swirled our glasses and nodded approval for another bottle. There were also cases of beer on ice, and they were dwindling fast. Room service also brought treats from the in-house restaurant.
It was a nonsmoking room, but every one of us had a cigar wedged in our teeth, dealing out cards and raking in the chips. As I tapped the ashes into the overflowing ashtray, I worried whether I would get into trouble with the hotel the next day.
It was a boisterous affair. We ate and drank and smoked and gambled the $400 each of us had on hand, so that by the end of the night, in a game of acey-deucey, one of us was sure to walk away with close to $3,000.
By ten o’clock, as though set on a timer, Thom got up to relieve himself. And he could barely stand. True to form and tradition, he forsook the use of the bathroom and walked to the balcony just like he did at Ivy Gate Cottage, threw open the doors and walked to the edge of the deck, unzipped, and started relieving himself over the railing. Suddenly we heard voices and cries from below. Shouts of outrage came from the busy street, where unsuspecting pedestrians were clearly being showered.
Dan Byrne called out that there were people walking down there.
Thom swayed and looked down at the street and saw the scattering pedestrians beneath his stream of urine and started laughing hysterically. He zipped up and staggered back to the table, where everyone else was in hysterics.
I tried to get a word in. “Thom. Please, use the bathroom. People walk by on the street. I could get in trouble here.”
My mind flashed back to the time in San Francisco when the police had Thom spread out on the hood of a squad car for drunken and disorderly behavior. I had talked the officer out of an arrest that night. I didn’t want to press my luck a second time.
Not much later the restaurant had closed, room service was done for the night, and the stash of liquor was depleted. Even the minibar had been raided and emptied down to the last bottle. Dan Byrne had just won the table and was collecting his cash, as the rest of the men started getting up, groaning, stretching, and lamenting having to get up early the next day for their various jobs and meetings. Only Thom leapt out of his seat and exclaimed, “No! Don’t go! We’re just getting started!”
But the guys grumbled, shook their heads, and grabbed their car keys.
One by one, they waved off Thom’s protests, grabbed their jackets, extinguished their cigars, and got ready to go.
“You guys are no fun.”
Thom looked around the table. There were half-empty glasses, poker chips, and empty plates spread out in a mess. Suddenly Thom grabbed a 16-ounce empty glass from the table and started filling it with liquor from every glass the guys had used. He poured it all into his pint glass: whiskey, beer, champagne, wine, vodka tonic. He filled the glass to the brim until it became one horrible-looking brown mixture of every last drop of alcohol left in the place.
Thom stood and looked at the concoction in his hand. Then he tilted his head back and started pouring it down, gulp after gulp. He managed to drink about half the glass before coming up for air. He stood and recoiled, looking around the group with a shocked expression. Everyone was staring, suspended. His eyes seemed glazed and crossed. I thought, “Dear God, don’t let him throw up right now. Don’t let him throw up in my executive suite at the Hotel Valencia.”
Thom’s eyes rolled into the back of his head for a second, and I feared the worst. It was like watching the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde right there in front of all of us. It was frightening to see. Then he cleared his throat, tilted his head back, and downed the rest of the glass.
The men were stunned. Thom put the glass down, exhaled, and wiped his mouth. I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on, Thom. I’ll call your driver. I’ll tell him you’re ready to go home.”
He looked at me and nodded; docile, teetering.
“Sure. Time to go home.”
I walked him down to the street and made sure he got into the limousine in which his faithful driver, Bo, was waiting for him. After he drove off down Santana Row, I scurried back to my room and started cleaning up, already dreading the possibility of a hangover the next day.
The next morning, I dragged myself out of bed and pulled myself together with a couple of Advil. I barely made it in time for the 8:00 a.m. meeting at Ivy Gate Cottage at Thom’s house. When I arrived, I expected to find him sleeping. Or certainly, if awake at all, hurting very badly.
As I walked around the cottage along the path of roses to the back patio, I found Thom sitting at his easel, painting the blooming trees and flowers in the garden. He saw me and perked up, his rosy cheeks glowing. I was always stunned at his constitution. He beamed at me.
“Hey, Eric! Beautiful morning! The birds. The sun. What a great day to be alive.”
No matter how many challenges Thom faced—no matter how many lawsuits came bearing down on him, or how many drinks he’d had the night before—he could always paint. It was the one most consistent thing in his life, and sitting before his easel was probably the only place he always felt safe.
In September 2006, Thom painted the Elvis Presley estate Graceland for its upcoming fiftieth anniversary. He traveled to the estate in Memphis, Tennessee, set up his easel, and painted the mansion from the grounds near the street, with its gate open, two pillars inviting the viewer inside, where Graceland perches atop a knoll. In March 2007, he returned to Graceland for the festivities and presented the painting to Priscilla Presley. Thom was a fan, and he identified with Elvis.
The similarities were sometimes unnervingly ironic. When Thom went on auction tours for the Points of Light Foundation, at which he would give a talk and auction off a handmade sketch that he drew onstage, he’d quip that the drawing would be valuable long after he was gone, and that the lucky collector would someday proudly show his grandkids his own original Thomas Kinkade. Then he would joke that the grandchildren would exclaim, “Thomas Kinkade? He isn’t a real person. I thought he was just a myth!” Then he’d add with perfect comic timing, “And soon there will be Thomas Kinkade sightings all over the place.”
Thom became the American painter. Every iconic image came under his brush. Baseball parks, from Fenway to Yankee Stadium. Nascar and Indy races. Cities, from Chicago to Charleston, Kansas City, Seattle, Philadelphia. All were commemorated in his paintings. In 2008 he signed a deal with Disney and painted his first in a series of Disney images. It was called Winnie the Pooh I. Cinderella, Snow White, Pinocchio, and Tinker Bell soon followed.
Despite his growing personal troubles at this time, Thom made another dream come true: the making of a TV movie based on his life, with Lionsgate Studios. Called Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, it was to star Peter O’Toole as Glenn Wessels, the painter who mentored him as a young boy. I remember Dan Byrne was amazed at the fact that here he was, as CEO, jetting back and forth to Hollywood for script meetings. He chuckled that they were even asking him his opinion about the lighting.
I laughed with him. “Well, as CEO of the Thomas Kinkade Company, you better know something about the light.”
I even sat in on one Lionsgate meeting, watching Dan Byrne speak as the credibility consultant. Dan would comment on whether or not Thom would have said a particular line.
To me, the executives at the studio seemed openly disparaging of the movie. It seemed like a cynical exercise for them, as they simply wanted to make a sickly sweet tearjerker for a certain movie-of-the-week audience of mostly women, and any of the Christian Thomas Kinkade fans. I didn’t feel it had much of a chance of being a great movie, but it meant a lot to Thom.
For Thom, making a movie was perhaps his last big dream come true. It brought him full circle to his days in Hollywood as a background painter on Fire and Ice. He was back where everything had started, and this time he was a central character in the script of his life. It was a chance to hold on to the myth of his wholesomeness that was slipping through his hands. He was drinking pretty heavily those days, and when he went on set, I was told he sat in his director’s chair with a drink in hand.
Later that year, Dan Byrne quit the company. The pressures bearing down from the lawsuits, the changes in Thom and his increasing absence, and the chaos and instability in management finally made him take leave for good. John Hastings, who had worked with the company in the past, was installed as the new CEO. Hastings had been the director of a premier printing company out of Atlanta, a division of Hallmark. He was well qualified, since he was actually intimately familiar with the replication process of the Thomas Kinkade art by that time, and understood the market well. And so the sixth CEO in seven years took the helm at the Thomas Kinkade Company.
As Thom withdrew, Nanette became more and more important. She always had the future in front of her and the past in the rearview mirror. She was sensible, logical, and wise. She came to executive meetings. She became his voice. She stepped up when Thom couldn’t. In the years that followed the shaming depositions, the relentless lawsuits, the humiliation of the implosion of the signature galleries, the plummeting market value of the art, and the financial woes of the Thomas Kinkade Company, Nanette was more and more there as Thom was increasingly absent.
Nanette’s husband, the father of her four daughters, was slowly disappearing from their lives, drawn into an abyss by the bottle. It must have been difficult for her to watch, and lonely to experience. In 2009, she even staged an intervention with Ken in order to try and stem the rising tide of his alcohol consumption. Thom promised to cut back, but quickly fell back into his usual routine. He just couldn’t see that he had a problem.
In the years when the lawsuits began, Nanette emerged from the shadows for the sake of her husband, who couldn’t do it for himself anymore. She presented herself with dignity and stood up for Thom’s legacy and achievements, as I see her do to this day. And in the years I watched Thom’s decline, I admired her continuing strength.
Nanette knew that, underneath his joviality, Thom was a deeply insecure man. He was always trying to prove himself. He needed constant validation and acceptance from everyone around him. It must have been hard for her to watch his decline, and to slowly lose him in spirit although he was still present in person. The years of depositions and lawsuits had visibly eaten away at him. The loss of the love, from so many who had once admired him, was devastating to him. I know she saw him slipping away, as we all did; every day a little bit more.
That year, amid the chaos and net losses from the lawsuits, the Thomas Kinkade Company reached over $3 billion in total retail sales.
Norman Yatooma had attempted to collect payment on the judgments handed down by the arbitration panel against the Thomas Kinkade Company for years, but the company had stalled continuously and still hadn’t paid, leaving his clients in ongoing misery. Yatooma wanted what was right: that his clients be paid the sums ordered, to help them put their destroyed lives back together, or what was left of them.
The first installment of $500,000 due to Karen Hazlewood and Jeff Spinello had been owed for years. The company seemed to think that if they didn’t pay, they could always survive the ensuing legal battles and draw things out indefinitely. Two subsequent payments of $1 million and $1.5 million were due within a year’s time. Finally, Norman Yatooma resorted to his own style of taking care of business, intended to get results for his clients. He felt it was simply wrong for the Thomas Kinkade Company not to pay his clients after essentially ruining their lives. So he went after the money in the only way he knew would guarantee results: he hired several moving trucks, called all the media outlets in San Francisco, and with a court order in hand, drove to Morgan Hill to collect what rightfully belonged to his clients. If he couldn’t get the awarded judgments in money, he was ready to take merchandise equivalent in value.
Helicopters circled above the Morgan Hill company headquarters. Local news vans cluttered the street with their satellite dishes, broadcasting into the homes of America. Reporters stood with cameramen, reporting live from the scene. Local sheriff’s department deputies were on hand, monitoring the event and prepared to force the court-ordered release of artwork in lieu of payment. The media’s hounding approached the intensity of a high-speed car chase on the freeway.
Norman Yatooma instructed his moving vans, which had their gates rolled up like gaping mouths ready to swallow the company whole, to back up to the loading docks of the facility. He knew the public spectacle increased his leverage, and that forcing the issue would, after four years, get results. He called Thomas Kinkade a deadbeat, and said the company had breached their agreement, adding, “Kinkade’s word is as worthless as his artwork.”
Ken and Rick must have been watching the circus from their televisions at home, while Thom was more likely painting in his studio, avoiding the matter entirely.
Finally, with the cameras rolling and the morning news broadcasting the scene live, the front door of Morgan Hill opened just a crack and a hand held out an envelope. Norman Yatooma approached the door and took it. In it was a check for $500,000.