His shoes were off, his suit jacket folded neatly on the aisle seat beside him. The sunset streaked the sky in pastels, as the sprawl of Los Angeles twinkled into view outside David’s window in the first-class cabin of USAir Flight 1493. It was February 1, 1991, less than two months after his mother’s death. He had just completed two days of business meetings in Ohio and caught a 4:15 p.m. flight from Columbus to LAX.
Over the weekend, he planned to attend the fiftieth birthday party of a friend, as well as a board of directors meeting for the libertarian Reason Foundation, publisher of Reason magazine, scheduled for Saturday afternoon in Santa Monica. That evening, a Friday, David had a date with an on-again-off-again girlfriend, one of the revolving cast of lithe, leggy model types that he always seemed to have on his arm. Blond, green-eyed, and twenty years younger than David, Julie Hayek had been crowned Miss USA in 1983 and had nearly won the Miss Universe title later that year. An aspiring actress, her credits included bit roles on Matlock, Dallas, and Days of Our Lives.
The flight, two-thirds full, was scheduled to touch down at LAX at 6:11 p.m. Pacific time. That would leave him just enough time to check into his room at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, freshen up, and meet his date for dinner—and whatever came afterward.
Flight 1493 descended from the east, touching down gently on runway 24L with a faint squeal of the tires. Seconds later, the plane reverberated with the teeth-gnashing crunch of metal on metal. A shower of sparks cascaded past David’s window. Then a ball of fire. Terrified shrieks rose from the back of the plane.
“Stay down, stay down, stay down!” a stewardess shouted over the intercom.
The Boeing 737 had collided with a small, SkyWest commuter plane headed to Palmdale, California. A frazzled air traffic controller had mistakenly held the SkyWest plane for takeoff on the same runway on which she had cleared the USAir flight to land. The twelve people aboard the smaller aircraft died on impact, and the out-of-control 737, engulfed in flames, careened wildly across an active taxiway and toward a stand of maintenance buildings, dragging what remained of the mangled propeller plane.
Flight 1493 skidded into an abandoned firehouse at 60 miles per hour. The impact hurled David, who had unbuckled his seatbelt after the initial collision to make a dash for an exit, over a row of seats and into the bulkhead. The cabin lights flickered and went out. Thick, caustic smoke poured into the cabin. As panicked passengers trampled over him, David, on his hands and knees, scoured the floor for his loafers. They were gone. He felt for his jacket, hoping to use it to cover his face, but couldn’t locate it.
David crawled toward the exit at the rear of the plane, his fellow passengers barely discernible through the smoke. He made it only a few rows; a frenzied mob of passengers clogged the aisle. David was at the back of the panicked scrum. He would never make it. He stood up and turned back.
As David gagged on toxic fumes from the burning jet fuel, an odd sensation overcame him. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t desperation.
He felt… curious.
“My God,” he thought to himself, “I’m going to die! What an interesting experience!”
It was as if he had momentarily taken leave of his body and was now a mere spectator to his ordeal. Overcome by an odd calm, he wondered about the experience of death, and standing in the aisle, his consciousness slipping away, he prepared himself to greet it.
Then his survival instinct kicked in. The smoke must be entering the plane through some opening, he reasoned. A crack in the fuselage? Other passengers had massed at the rear of the plane, but David felt his way toward the front. An inferno blazed outside the main cabin door. To David’s right, though, he glimpsed a sliver of light around the galley exit. It was open several inches. Jolted with adrenaline, he pried the door open a few more inches and stuck his head out, gulping the murky air. He yanked on the door again. It moved a couple feet.
David stood in the doorway. Flames licked up from below. He could barely make out the ground through the billowing smoke. “Oh, what the hell!” he thought. He leapt to the tarmac. He picked himself up and hurried away from the burning plane in his socks. When he finally looked back, he saw a nightmare of wreckage strewn across the runway leading to the blackened, burning carcass of USAir 1493. Passengers spilled out of the plane’s right rear exit and dazed survivors wandered, zombie-like, around the tarmac.
Of the 89 passengers and crew members aboard David’s plane, 22 people perished and 30 were injured. A bus ferried the survivors to a nearby terminal. David was a bit banged up, his knees skinned and his right heel bruised, but he otherwise felt okay. If he hurried, maybe he could still make his date with Hayek. When David tried to leave the terminal, a guard brusquely turned him back. It was a good thing. Though he felt fine, his lungs were badly damaged. Later, after a doctor examined him, he was sent by ambulance with another injured passenger to a hospital in Marina del Rey to be treated for smoke inhalation. As David walked to the entrance, a CNN reporter, who had staked out the hospital, approached him. His voice hoarse and clothes charred, the executive gamely recounted the crash. Many of David’s friends learned of his brush with death from seeing this interview, which was replayed dozens of times over the next couple days. So many well-wishers called David’s Manhattan apartment that the answering machine ran out of tape after recording 58 messages.
David spent the next two days in the intensive care unit, where he was fed intravenously and intubated with a tube that delivered pure oxygen to his lungs. He could only communicate by writing notes. Morphine dulled the physical pain, but not the emotional aftershocks of David’s near-death experience. The calm façade he had managed the day of the crash crumbled by the following morning. He could still picture the faces of people who had died on his flight, including Deanna Bethea, the sweet, twenty-two-year-old stewardess who had waited on him in first class. Also dead was the older couple seated directly across the aisle from him, George and Rosemary Weth.
In the days after the tragedy, David had flashbacks of the crash and relived it in his dreams. He felt a crushing sense of guilt. After opening the galley door, why hadn’t he helped other passengers—perhaps the Weths—to safety? Why had he merely saved himself while others had slowly suffocated? Close to passing out when he jumped to the tarmac, David might have perished himself had he tried to be a hero. This, at least, was what he told himself.
David left the hospital that Sunday, assisted by Charles and Liz, who’d flown to L.A. to look after him. The David Koch who had jetted to L.A. for a tryst with a beauty queen was a different man from the one who hobbled out of the hospital that Sunday, short of breath; still coughing black, bloody mucus; and aware more than ever of his own fragile mortality.
“This may sound odd,” he said years later, “but I felt this experience was very spiritual. That I was saved when all those others died. I felt that the good Lord spared my life for a purpose. And since then, I’ve been busy doing all the good works I can think of.”
At the time of the crash, David, then fifty, was one of New York City’s most eligible bachelors. And he had been enjoying every second of it.
The Ferrari-driving business titan, more than a few female admirers had noticed, bore a resemblance to the actor Michael Caine. Fun loving and gregarious, David had a trademark laugh—loud and honking, it easily rose above the din of cocktail parties. He was an endearing figure on the New York society scene: Though a member of the elite, he somehow managed to project the aura of a guileless Kansas farm boy—albeit one who had grown up in a home decorated with Renoirs and Thomas Hart Bentons. (“He doesn’t have a mean streak in him,” one New York friend remarked.)
David lived at 870 U.N. Plaza—once home to Truman Capote, Walter Cronkite, and many other New York notables—in a penthouse duplex with leather couches, a 1970s vibe, and a wall of windows overlooking the East River and Roosevelt Island. He spent summer weekends at his 15,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion in Southampton, and jetted off during the winter months to his ski lodge in Aspen. He enjoyed cruising the Mediterranean by chartered yacht and had a taste for exotic travel, journeying to places such as the Galapagos Islands and Olduvai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti, a mecca for paleoanthropologists studying the origins of man—a subject of particular fascination to David and an early focus of his philanthropy.
It didn’t hurt his appeal among Manhattan’s eligible women that his name regularly turned up on Forbes’s annual list of America’s wealthiest people. But he was a catch who didn’t want to get caught. “He was having a good time not being married,” said John Damgard, who met David on the basketball court at Deerfield and remains one of his closest friends. “He had no difficulty attracting incredibly attractive women. If you’re tall, handsome, and rich, lots of fun, a good athlete, you can go skiing, play tennis, you can do all these things anywhere in the world—it’s not surprising. And when he went places, he didn’t have to stay at a youth hostel, let’s just put it that way.”
When he visited New York on business, Damgard, then the head of the Futures Industry Association, was David’s wingman. They hit the town together, dining at Le Cirque and other Manhattan hotspots, where, to impress their dates, David invariably ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. Afterward, they would keep the party going at one of New York’s exclusive, velvet-rope-lined nightclubs. “We ran hard together as bachelors,” Damgard recalled.
David “liked having a lot of women around,” according to one of his 1980s-era girlfriends. He at one point had his eye on Marla Maples, whom Donald Trump left his first wife to marry. (“Marla’s a babe,” David told New York magazine in 1990. “I wish Donald hadn’t gotten there first.”)
His incessant dating—sometimes he juggled multiple love interests over the course of a day—earned him a reputation as an incorrigible playboy. The Hugh Hefner–esque bacchanals he threw at his sprawling seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom Southampton beach house were legend. He “plays harder than anyone I know,” one of David’s close friends noted during his bachelor days, adding that the executive was also the “hardest working guy I know.”
With the roster of invitees running to a thousand or more—“a third of which were beautiful, wild, single women,” David once boasted—the parties featured six different types of champagne. Scantily clad women danced poolside and gyrated on the tennis court. Some of David’s parties went so late that he served guests two meals, dinner and breakfast. “Those were the best parties I’ve ever been to,” one friend, and frequent party guest, said. His annual New Year’s Eve blowouts in Aspen—which on occasion featured strippers—were similarly grandiose. “People really got in the mood,” the friend said. “A lot of the crowd were these L.A. chicks who had just bought a new pair of tits and wanted to make sure that they did not go unnoticed—those parties got pretty wild. There were bands and hot tubs and it was fun.”
As David entered his fifties, the idea of having a family increasingly appealed to him, but he remained “gun-shy ” about the prospect of marriage, referring to past relationships that could have ended in matrimony as “close calls.” The ongoing battle with Bill and Frederick worsened his fear of commitment. If such a bitter, bare-knuckled legal brawl could break out among brothers, imagine the kind of ugliness that could erupt between a married couple in the midst of a divorce.
Then David met Julia Flesher, a statuesque twenty-seven-year-old who hailed from humble Midwestern origins. Born in Indianola, Iowa, and raised outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, she had worked her way into the exalted world of Upper East Side society by way of her job as a $200-a-week assistant to the fashion designer Adolfo. (During the 1980s, she occasionally accompanied her boss to the White House to fit Nancy Reagan.) Mutual friends set the pair up, and on their first date, in early 1991, David escorted Julia to Le Club, an exclusive, members-only haunt on East 55th Street frequented by business tycoons. (“It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden,” Donald Trump, a member, once put it.)
The evening did not go well.
“I was a little too, how should I say it, forward with my humor,” David recalled of their evening together. “Julia was smiling, but weakly.” She remembered the date this way: “Afterward we shook hands and I said, ‘I’m glad I met that man because now I know I never want to go out with him.’ ”
Three days after their date, David lay prone in a hospital bed, his body a pin cushion of tubes and wires, after barely escaping the burning carnage of Flight 1493.
Six months after surviving the crash, David bumped into Julia at a party. Their second encounter started out about as smoothly as their first. He introduced himself to the willowy, six-foot blonde as if the pair had never met. “She said, ‘David, we went out together,’ ” he recalled. “And I pulled out my trusty black book and said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
Despite this rocky start, he managed to persuade Julia to go out with him again. This time, instead of a club frequented by lecherous bigwigs, he took her to the U.S. Open. “Julia was the ideal,” Damgard said. “That was it. He knew that was the woman he was going to marry.” She had come into his life at just the right time. The plane crash had awoken him to the capriciousness of life—how it could be taken from you in an instant, leaving so much unfulfilled. He was ready to put his days of empty pleasure seeking behind him; Julia, for her part, preferred to ignore David’s playboy past.
As Julia and David began dating, members of his social circle remained unconvinced that she could tame him. Indeed, David required some firm prodding in order to make the ultimate commitment. “After four and a half years, Julia gave me two choices,” he remembered. “I would be a live husband or a dead bachelor.”
After an extended courtship, David proposed to her on Christmas Eve in 1995, giving Julia the triple emerald cut diamond ring that had belonged to his mother. They wed over Memorial Day weekend in 1996 at David’s Meadow Lane mansion in Southampton (which he dubbed “Aspen East”). Two years later she gave birth to David Jr., followed by Mary Julia (in 2001) and John Mark (in 2006).
Fatherhood suited David and it also changed his public persona as a cad. “That was the old David,” said one of his close friends. “David is now a great dad, loves going home and being with the kids, dotes on those children.” Yet as a first-time father at fifty-eight, “he’s not able to kind of get down on all fours and go ‘ga ga goo goo,’ so there’s help around there.” This friend added: “Julia is a great mother and a great wife.… David’s an older father to have little kids. And she’s figured it all out. It’s made his life 100 percent better.”
The New York society columnist David Patrick Columbia noted: “When he finally married Julia… many thought she’d be his trophy wife. She has taken on the role, however of Wife and Mother in an ideal form: she is his consort; his life changed and so did his image.”
While David’s marriage gave him a new aura of respectability among New York’s social elite, the transition to being Mrs. Koch—what Columbia called “the construction of Julia Koch”—did not go seamlessly for her. Along the Upper East Side–Southampton social axis, there were expectations of a billionaire’s wife that didn’t exist for a girlfriend, a Byzantine social code that neophytes were somehow supposed to deduce on their own. There were black-tie galas to chair, fund-raisers to organize, parties to hostess, not to mention decorators to audition for their new fifteen-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, which had once belonged to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. David had bought the apartment for $9.5 million in 1995, shortly after Onassis’s death, and the couple spent the next three years renovating it.
The doyennes of the Upper East Side carefully dissected every move she made as the new bride of New York’s second-richest man (Michael Bloomberg, at that point, was the richest). “She was averse to making mistakes and she didn’t want to do anything that might be interpreted as not winning the seal of approval,” said a family friend. “She is very private.” To Julia’s dismay, her awkward entrée into New York’s beau monde played out in the press. “She looked dazed, like a gazelle caught in the strobe lights,” The New York Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller riffed in a less-than-flattering assessment of Julia’s formal New York society debut in 1997, when she cochaired the Metropolitan Museum’s annual benefit for the Costume Institute.
The New York Post later ran a lengthy article called “How New York Rejected Its Leading Socialite,” which chronicled Julia’s supposed high-society faux pas. “Julia thought it was all about having a lot of money, but it isn’t,” one acquaintance sniped. “She didn’t have the sophistication to carry it off, and New York can be very cruel to people who set themselves up like that.” The story noted that Julia had run afoul of Pat Buckley, wife of the National Review’s William F. Buckley, a prodigious charity fund-raiser and den mother to aspiring socialites. Buckley felt Julia shirked the “hard, hard slogging” required for charity work; David’s wife irritated her further when, during one benefit, Julia had talked to a tablemate during Buckley’s speech.
It seemed like she could not do anything right in the eyes of her critics. She was even criticized for barring W magazine from photographing the recently renovated interior of their new apartment, on the grounds that she didn’t “want people judging our taste.” But didn’t she understand that, as a socialite, her raison d’être was taste making and trendsetting? Julia was also accused of toning down David’s once-raucous shindigs by aggrieved B-listers who no longer made the slimmed-down invite list. When one year the couple dared to throw a subdued version of David’s annual New Year’s Eve bash—inviting some 200 guests instead of the typical 800-plus—one miffed socialite fumed that “Julia’s fingerprints were all over it.”
Given the cattiness, it was no surprise when, in the late 1990s, Julia temporarily fled New York for the more welcoming social scene of Palm Beach, where in 1998 the Kochs purchased Villa el Sarmiento, designed by Addison Mizner, the architect responsible for numerous Gold Coast landmarks, including The Breakers Hotel. “She decided that she wasn’t going to put herself in a position where somebody could have the opportunity to criticize her for no particular reason,” said the family friend.
Julia eventually settled more comfortably into the role of society wife, despite the cold shoulder from Pat Buckley, turning up at all the places where it was important to be seen, clinging gracefully to David’s arm at galas and benefits, and presiding over parties at their home, where guests such as Glenn Close, Princess Firyal of Jordan, and Barbara Walters mingled over Dom Perignon and caviar.
Barely had they settled into Jackie O’s old pad when, in 2004, David plunked down $17 million for a 9,000-square-foot duplex in 740 Park Avenue, the Upper East Side apartment building where, coincidentally, Jackie O grew up. The expanding family, David explained, couldn’t possibly squeeze another child (and another nanny) into their old apartment, which spanned the entire fifteenth floor of 1040 Fifth Avenue. In a nod to their Oz-like surroundings, a plaque in the marble entryway to their current digs reminds visitors: TOTO, I DON’T THINK WE’RE IN KANSAS ANYMORE.
Not long into his courtship with Julia, David faced a second brush with death. In 1992, at the age of fifty-two, a routine blood test showed elevated prostate antigens, and his doctor soon diagnosed him with an advanced form of prostate cancer. He believed that he was again staring down death. “That puts the fear of God in you!” he recalled. “I thought I was going to die, certainly in months, if not in weeks.”
Treated with radiation at Sloan-Kettering, David was handed a reprieve when his cancer went into remission. In his exuberant style, he celebrated twice-cheating death with an extravagant, champagne-fueled Southampton soiree on a clear August evening in 1993, with music by Michael Carney’s orchestra and a $100,000 fireworks display put on by Long Island’s Grucci family. But the cancer soon returned, requiring more radical treatment. In 1995, he underwent prostate surgery.
Once again, the cancer vanished only to reappear. Though each of his brothers was later successfully treated for prostate cancer, David’s cancer was incurable. He could only try to forestall the slow-moving disease as long as possible. He was treated with hormones to stop the production of testosterone that fuels prostate cancer, a therapy that kept his cancer in check but sapped his sex drive and enlarged his breasts. When eventually that treatment began to falter, he joined a clinical trial for an experimental drug called Zytiga. “The side effects,” he quipped to a reporter, “are minor compared to dying.”
After Flight 1493, David had become an outspoken airplane safety advocate, drafting up a detailed list of technical recommendations to prevent future tragedies, testifying before a congressional committee probing “aircraft cabin safety and fire survivability.” (“I’m a chemical engineer, and I’m trained to analyze things in a technical fashion,” he told the assembled members of the House Government Activities and Transportation Committee.) He attacked cancer with a similar analytical intensity. David took the approach, said his friend John Damgard, that “cancer was just something he had to outsmart.”
David had begun serving on hospital boards in the 1980s, but his experience with cancer inspired him to make medical research a main thrust of his philanthropy. “Discovering that I had cancer and the terrible fear that it generated in me turned me into a crusader,” he once said, “a crusader to provide financing to many different centers to develop cures—not only for prostate cancer but for other kinds of cancer as well.” He would eventually spend at least a half-billion dollars on projects like these, including underwriting the construction of the sleek, glass-walled David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where world-class biologists and engineers collaborate on innovative cancer treatments.
By pouring hundreds of millions into cancer research, David hoped to promote advances that would prolong, if not save, thousands of lives—including his. One by one, he knew, his treatments would fail, requiring him to have a new therapy at the ready. His life depended on financing breakthroughs that would keep him one step ahead of the disease that’s trying to kill him. He likened his philanthropic approach to the one time he attended the Kentucky Derby and managed to place a bet on the winner. His strategy entailed betting on every horse in the race.
Where David had once calmly prepared himself for death in the smoke-choked cabin of USAir 1493, he was now doing all he could to buy more time. For a man for whom money was no object, he recognized the harsh irony that his billions could not purchase the thing that he desired most after becoming a father—to live long enough to see his three children graduate from college. “I can’t have what you have and what no amount of money can buy,” he once lamented to Damgard, “the assurance that you’ll watch your children grow up and your grandchildren. But I’m going to make goddamn sure that I give it my very, very best shot.”