Norton Simon, Businessman and Collector, Dies at 86

(New York Times, June 4, 1993)

Norton Simon, the restless California industrialist who parlayed a bankrupt orange-juice bottling plant into a billion-dollar conglomerate and spent more than $100 million putting together one of the country's greatest private art collections, died Wednesday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The immediate cause of his death was respiratory failure, said his daughter-in-law, Judy Simon. She said he had suffered for some years from Guillain- Barre syndrome, which is a paralyzing neurological disorder.

Mr. Simon, a brooding, driving man who could multiply long figures in his head, was something of a Renaissance man among the self-made business titans of his generation.

He earned international respect as an art connoisseur and patron, and he was outspoken about public affairs in California, where he made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Senate nomination in 1970. As a regent of the University of California, he repeatedly opposed Gov. Ronald Reagan's attacks on administrators and students.

Despite his successes, he was perennially dissatisfied. "I believe in a paradoxical way of life," he once told an interviewer. "I don't believe anything is wholly right, but both right and wrong. There is a thin line between. There is a Chinese proverb that 'Life is a search for truth and there is no truth.' "

Losing Interest, He Quits Business

And so Mr. Simon gave up his seat on the board of Norton Simon Inc. in 1969, only months after he had painstakingly put the company together by merging Hunt Food and Industries, long the cornerstone of his business empire, with two other prominent concerns he controlled, the McCall Corporation and the Canada Dry Corporation. The new conglomerate produced a staggering variety of products, ranging from matches to magazines to ketchup.

Asked why he had left the business at the relatively young age of 62, Mr. Simon said he wanted to concentrate on collecting art and his other interests. "When it got to the point that the business was more operations than creating, it was less intriguing to me," he said. For years he occupied himself intensely with his art collection, which came to contain thousands of objects with a total value that grew to be at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Simon and his first wife, the former Lucille Ellis, were divorced in 1970 after 37 years of marriage. In 1971, he married Jennifer Jones, the film star, on a yacht off the British coast, and she helped him with his art collecting.

Mr. Simon housed vast art holdings in the former Pasadena Art Museum, which he renovated at a reported cost of more than $3 million. In 1975 it was renamed the Norton Simon Museum of Art.

The gallery contained various art treasures for which Mr. Simon had paid $1 million or more, including a 10th-century Indian idol, the Shivapuram Nataraja. Buying the 44-inch bronze figure led to a dispute with the Indian Government; the idol was said to have been stolen and smuggled out of India.

"Yes, it was smuggled," Mr. Simon said in an interview in 1973, before the controversy was settled. "I spent between $15 million and $16 million over the last two years on Asian art, and most of it was smuggled. I don't know whether it was stolen."

Tough Approach To Business and Art

Mr. Simon's tough, pragmatic approach was one reason for his success as an entrepreneur and art collector. He displayed that approach in 1965 at another London art auction where he acquired Rembrandt's portrait of his son Titus after an unusual auction-room dispute.

The top bid for the painting was thought to have been made by a London dealer, but Mr. Simon rose and demanded that the bidding be resumed, arguing that the auctioneer had failed to act on a secret signal he had given.

Several minutes of argument ensued, with dealers and collectors in the audience taking part. Then the bidding was resumed, and Mr. Simon got the canvas for $2.2 million.

Another of his strengths as a businessman and collector was his analytical skill. In his later years he would size up the strengths and weaknesses of a Maillol sculpture or a Van Gogh canvas with the same flair, gusto and insight he had applied to deciding which companies to invest in and how to infuse them with new life.

Despite his toughness, he retained a soft demeanor and had a way of disarming visitors by speaking frankly about his emotions. He was a longtime champion of sensitivity training and encounter groups in business and employed three psychologists on his corporate staff.

"My hostilities are usually showing," he once observed. "But I do get rid of anger very rapidly. Some people are born with a peace of mind. I was not. I don't like to be rough; it has been difficult being firm with people."

Mr. Simon was perennially on the outlook for promising investments, and over the years he bought interests in dozens of companies. He would look for companies whose profits were being held down by stodgy executives and whose stock was undervalued and widely held. When he spotted a likely target, he would buy stock, generally quietly, sometimes on his own, sometimes through the Hunt company.

Then, armed with a substantial block of shares, he would start telling the existing management what it should do to improve operations.

Mr. Simon's first acquisition, the orange juice company in Fullerton, Calif., was purchased at a bankruptcy court for $7,000 in 1931. He moved it into canning tomato products, kept its prices low and greatly expanded its operations before selling out for $3 million in the early 1940's.

Some Ventures Went Awry

But sometimes things did not go smoothly. In the 1960's he took control of the troubled Wheeling Steel Company of Wheeling, W. Va., after its management had resisted, and he jolted steel leaders around the country by criticizing their industry's practices.

"We achieved success in principle," he contended in an interview years later, "but ultimately my associates put pressure on me to get out." The Pittsburgh Steel Company took over Wheeling in 1967. Mr. Simon lost money on the venture but asserted that he made a "tremendous amount" by buying control of the Crucible Steel Company in Pittsburgh.

Mr. Simon's entrepreneurial flair may have been a family trait. His father, Myer Simon, owned a department store in Portland, Ore., where Norton Winfred Simon was born Feb. 5, 1907. After graduating from Lowell High School in San Francisco, where the family had moved, Mr. Simon spent a few weeks at the University of California at Berkeley, then dropped out and went into business, initially in the sheet-metal trade in Los Angeles.

After acquiring the juice company, he renamed it Val Vita Food Products Inc. and became its president. He held the post until he sold the concern to what was then the Hunt Brothers Packing Company. He bought stock in Hunt, achieved control in 1943 and in 1944 became board chairman of the newly named Hunt Food and Industries, a post he retained until 1960. He was also president for 18 years and held other offices in the company.

Mr. Simon's and his family's holdings of stock in Norton Simon Inc. were worth more than $50 million in December 1969 when he resigned as a director.

"One of the problems in American business management is the older group trying to hold on too long," he said in an interview at the time. "The company is in good shape. I really have a sense of trust in the management and the board."

After resigning, Mr. Simon reduced his investment in the conglomerate to roughly $1 million worth of stock. He continued to receive a retirement income of $113,200 a year, in addition to $60,000 a year as a consultant.

Hooked on Art After Shopping Trip

Over the years, collecting art and related activities came to be a consuming passion. He got his start as a collector in 1954 after he built his home in Los Angeles. He went shopping for paintings to put on the walls. "I bought a Gauguin, a Bonnard and a Pissarro," he recalled later, "and I was hooked."

Mr. Simon used to say that he got his real start as an art connoisseur under the tutelage of Richard Fargo Brown, a prominent museum administrator who died in 1979. "He was, frankly, my first teacher in the art world, and he had a pretty good eye," Mr. Simon once said.

Mr. Brown and Mr. Simon worked together to form the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which came into being in 1962 with Mr. Brown as its first director. Mr. Simon, a benefactor, was on its board.

His own collection retained an awesome assemblage of treasures, including a Raphael "Madonna" and an altarpiece panel by Giovanni di Paolo, the 15th-century Sienese painter. The Simon museum -- he was successively its director and the chairman of a fine arts committee made up of members of its board -- also had paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The museum put on display a copious collection of South Asian and Southeast Asian sculpture, in addition to the controversial Indian idol: The dispute with the Indian Government had been settled with an agreement that after 10 years in Pasadena the bronze was to be shipped back to India.

In October 1980 "Girls on a Bridge," an Edvard Munch painting from his collection, was auctioned at Christie's in Manhattan for $2.8 million, a record for the artist and the second highest price then on record for a 20th-century work of art. In the same auction, another painting from his collection, Picasso's "Woman with a Guitar," brought $2 million.

Before the sale Mr. Simon told an interviewer he was selling the canvases in part because he was focusing his attention largely on sculpture.

In 1989, he resigned as the president and a trustee of the Simon museum.

Mr. Simon is survived by his second wife, Jennifer, who is the chairman of the board and president of the Simon museum; and by a son from his first marriage, Donald; four grandchildren, and a sister, Evelyn Prell, all of whom live in the Los Angeles area.

Donald Simon, a private investor, is a trustee of the Norton Simon Foundaion. Two of the grandchildren, Douglas and Pamela Simon, are trustees of the Simon museum.