The Making of Barney

By the time he was twelve, Barney Ebsworth had a number in his head. It was $12,000. The year was 1946, the Second World War had been over for fourteen months, his family still lived in the Kingshighway flat, and two of his mother's relatives — his uncle Cliff, an advertising executive, and his uncle Ed, the general manager of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company — each earned that amount annually. Each owned a house. Each owned a car. To a boy whose father Alec made about five thousand dollars in clerical work and had, as far as Barney could tell, never held more than a hundred dollars in a savings account at one time, twelve thousand dollars was the salary that marked the border between precariousness and permanence.

The $12,000 benchmark is the title Barney gave to Chapter Two of his 2012 autobiography. It is the framing metric of his adolescence — the figure that gave shape to every decision, every summer job, every hour of homework done at a kitchen table, every bedtime moved up to nine o'clock in pursuit of a competitive edge. He did not yet know what business he wanted to be in. He knew only that whatever it was, it had to eventually produce the number his uncles had. Forty-five years later, after he had founded two cruise lines and assembled a collection of American art that would eventually sell for three hundred and seventeen million dollars, an interviewer asked him what his net worth had ever been at its peak. Barney's answer, to the interviewer's obvious surprise, was instant: he didn't know, and he didn't care. What he remembered, with real precision, was the year he exceeded twelve thousand dollars for the first time. It was 1962. He was twenty-eight. It felt, he said, exactly like he had imagined it would feel sixteen years earlier on a Kingshighway sidewalk.

Lee Jeans, and the Boy Who Solved the Branding Problem

The story of Barney's twelve-year-old marketing consultation is one of those family-history set pieces that sounds too tidy to be real. It is nonetheless recorded, in detail, in his own account. Uncle Cliff came home one evening with news: he had landed the account of Lee, the Kansas City workwear company best known for its fruit jelly but also a manufacturer of blue jeans. The trouble, Cliff told his nephew, was that Lee made a great pair of jeans but nobody was buying them. Levi Strauss & Co. was running away with the teenage market. Why?

Barney, twelve, a seventh-grader at the time, answered without having to think about it. What kids loved about Levi's, he said, was the rivets — the little copper hardware at the stress points — and the red label stitched into the right hip pocket, and the leather patch at the waistband. Levi's had visual furniture. Lee had none. Put rivets on the Lee jeans. Put a leather patch on the back. Put a logo on it. Make it a brand a twelve-year-old can recognize from across the room.

Uncle Cliff did exactly that. The logo was blue and yellow. The leather patch went on. Lee jeans began to sell. They have been selling ever since. Sixty years later, Barney still claimed — with the specific pleasure of a man who had never seen a penny of credit for the work — that he had built Lee with his advice at age twelve. It is not impossible that he was right.

Eagle Scout, and the Father Who Stood Beside Him

In the spring of 1948, at fourteen years and a few months, Barney was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout. It is the Boy Scouts' highest honor. It required the accumulation of at least twenty-one merit badges, a minimum of six months of leadership service, and the completion of a service project planned and executed by the scout. Most boys earn it around seventeen. Barney earned it as fast as a boy can earn it, which at that era was age fourteen. He was, as far as the St. Louis council could determine, the youngest Eagle Scout in the city's history to that point.

Alec attended every meeting and every campout. He had, when he earned it, been King's Scout — the British equivalent, named for George V, and now (since 1953) called Queen's Scout. Alec had received his King's Scout badge personally from Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout movement, at a Jamboree in England. As far as the Scouts' historical records can tell us, Alec W. Ebsworth remains the only person in the twentieth century known to hold both King's Scout and Eagle Scout. Barney's own Eagle ceremony made Alec, for one evening in St. Louis in 1948, a father watching his son earn the same honor he himself had earned under the gaze of the founder.

Alec's joking reaction to his son's speed is one of those lines that sounded harder in 1948 than it reads now, and that Barney preserved in the book with affection intact:

He was, Barney later wrote, about right. Barney's first date was at fifteen, a girl named Barbara from Sunday school whose family owned a bakery in town. Alec had to drive them. Barney had his Eagle badge, five more merit badges piling up, and a father in the driver's seat on the way to a bakery-family dinner.

Cleveland High School and the Quarter-Mile

By the time Barney was sixteen, he had settled into the sport he would define himself by for the next five years. He was a quarter-miler — a 440-yard sprinter, the most punishing distance in American track at the time, an event that demanded a sprinter's speed and a half-miler's endurance. He ran for Cleveland High School on the near-south side of St. Louis. He ran at a bedtime of nine o'clock, self-imposed, on the theory that if eight hours of sleep were good, ten hours would give him the competitive edge over boys who slept fewer.

Senior year, he was the St. Louis city sprint champion in the 100, the 220, and the 440 — a triple-sprint sweep that is rare at any level and was rare in St. Louis high-school track in 1951. He was also captain of the cross-country team, a role he accepted despite hating every step of distance running. He lost count, he wrote later, of the two-mile stretches he ran while hating them.

The University of Missouri offered him a track scholarship. Over the course of his college years he would receive, in succession, all four categories of financial aid that Mizzou offered its undergraduates — freshman, academic, athletic, and need-based. Even combined, it was not a full ride. Barney worked through every semester.

The summer after his freshman year, he worked three jobs at once. On Fridays, he reported to a munitions factory at seven in the morning and left at four in the afternoon, took a bus to the Kroger bakery, loaded bakery trucks from five p.m. to two a.m., went home, slept briefly, and opened the floor at a department-store menswear counter at nine a.m. the next morning. He made straight A's that semester and nearly drove himself, by his own later admission, into a nervous breakdown.

Pikes Peak, White Bucks, and the Outhouse

The Pikes Peak episode, recounted with peculiar affection in the book, is a small masterpiece of Barney's adolescent humor. The premise was Richard Halliburton's, the travel writer whose 1925 memoir The Royal Road to Romance Barney had read half a dozen times and whose chapter on climbing Mt. Fuji at night to catch the sunrise from the summit had lodged in his twelve-year-old imagination. In the summer of 1952, Barney talked two college friends — Larry, a future physician, and a second classmate who would go on to a career with the Social Security Administration — into attempting the American equivalent: Pikes Peak, by night, arriving at the 14,115-foot summit in time for dawn.

They arrived at the base of the mountain wearing shorts, short-sleeved shirts, and, in Barney's case, a pair of white buck oxfords — the dressy leather-soled shoes that had no business on a Colorado mountainside. Three hours in, they were hopelessly lost between the switchback trail and a dry creek bed. At two in the morning, they stumbled onto the cog-railway tracks that run from Manitou Springs to the summit. A sign was posted prominently: Keep off the tracks. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

The three-sentence exchange that followed tells you everything about the relative risk tolerances of the men in the group. Larry, Barney's future-physician friend, said they couldn't go up the tracks: It wouldn't be sporting. The future Social Security clerk said they couldn't go up the tracks because they'd be arrested. Barney, the entrepreneur, said: I don't know about you, but I'm going up those railroad tracks. They go to the top.

They followed the tracks up. At the summit, forty-mile-per-hour winds cut directly through their shorts-and-shirts ensemble and the temperature dropped below freezing. The caretaker's hut was locked; their knocks were inaudible. Then Barney spotted an eight-hole outhouse a few yards from the railway's summit platform. It had a heater.

The three young men descended the tracks in daylight and drove back to Missouri without, as far as is recorded, ever being prosecuted. It is the first clearly visible instance in Barney's life of a trait that would define his business decisions for the next six decades: a quiet willingness to step over the rope that other people stopped at.

Nine-Point-Six Seconds, Eighth Place

Barney's Olympic ambitions came to their hardest landing at the NCAA 100-yard-dash final. He had qualified through the conference meets and arrived at the national final in the best shape of his sprinting life. The race was run at night, the way NCAA sprint finals were run in that era to give the newsreel cameras better shadow relief. He ran 9.6 seconds. The world record, set by Mel Patton in 1948, was 9.3. Barney's 9.6 would have won most college 100-yard races in the country in any given weekend of the 1951 or 1952 season. In an NCAA final, it was the time of a boy who saw the backs of seven other men pulling away from him.

He finished eighth. There were eight men in the race.

He finished his sophomore year, took stock, and transferred. Washington University in St. Louis offered him an academic scholarship, which unlike the Mizzou track scholarship did not come with the psychological weight of a varsity-level sprint career; he moved back home with his parents on Kingshighway, enrolled in the business school, and ran varsity track for the Bears at a competitive level that felt enjoyable again. By senior year he was treasurer of the business school, captain of the Wash U track team, and had been admitted to a combined undergraduate-and-first-year-law-school program. At the end of his senior year the dean sent him a note: straight A's, class rank number one.

The Army, not one day more

Barney walked into the dean's office in the spring of 1956. The dean assumed he had come to say thank you for the congratulations letter. Barney had not. He had come to say he was dropping out with nine credit hours still uncompleted to enlist in the United States Army. He had been turning the decision over for a semester. The Korean War had ended three years earlier and the draft was still running; he knew that whatever he did next — law, business, marriage — the Army would eventually pull him out of it for two years against his will. He preferred to go on his own schedule.

At the enlistment office in downtown St. Louis, the sergeant made him the standard offer: sign up for three years and you can go to the Finance Corps at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, clean desk work, good quarters. Barney's response is, again, one of those adolescent lines that carries an adult spine inside it:

Fort Lost in the Woods of Misery

Barney was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training. The post had been established on December 3, 1940 — a year and four days before Pearl Harbor — on twenty-four thousand acres of Ozark hill country near the town of Waynesville. Its original purpose had been to train engineer battalions for the war everyone knew was coming. By 1956 it had become the Army's principal basic-training facility for the midwestern draft and was referred to, by the men who passed through it, with an affectionate and largely accurate nickname: Fort Lost in the Woods of Misery.

The winter of 1956–57 at Fort Leonard Wood was, by contemporary weather-bureau records, one of the coldest in the fort's history. Temperatures in the Ozarks dropped into the single digits through January. The barracks heating was erratic. A drill sergeant, making a disciplinary point on Barney's first night of basic training, ordered a recruit to kick the door of their barracks off its hinges. The recruit complied. Barney's company slept the remainder of basic training in an unheated concrete-floored barracks with a permanently missing front door, in zero-degree weather.

Barney had arrived with one small, crucial stroke of luck. A private at the enlistment office — whom Barney, sixty years later, said he would pay a hundred thousand dollars to locate — had noticed Barney's two years of mandatory ROTC at Mizzou on the enlistment form and told him that with a letter from his ROTC officer he could enter basic training as a Private First Class. A single stripe. Normally given to soldiers with a year's service. Nothing, from the outside. Everything, from inside basic training.

The stripe put Barney on Charge of Quarters duty rather than Kitchen Patrol. It made him a squad leader. The drill sergeants treated him, to the extent drill sergeants treated any recruit with anything other than functional contempt, as an adjacent. It was the hinge on which the rest of his Army career turned.

The M-1 Round That Took His Helmet

One of the things basic training at Fort Leonard Wood taught recruits in 1957 was how to fire the M-1 Garand, the semi-automatic rifle standard-issued to American infantry from 1936 through the Korean War. The M-1 had a failure mode — fouled chamber, worn extractor, improper cleaning — that caused it to misfire in roughly one of every ten discharges. During a live-fire range exercise, the Army's solution was to line ten recruits firing at the targets with a second line of ten recruits standing behind them, each holding the ammunition belt of the firer in front and each tasked with keeping the firer stable if his rifle jammed. Barney was in the second line. The recruit in front of him stopped mid-volley, rifle cocked sideways. The rifle discharged.

The round passed through Barney's helmet. It took the helmet off his head. In that particular language that people who have been shot at use, the blow felt like someone had hit me in the head with a sledgehammer. The lieutenant ran to him, asked if he was all right. Barney touched the shrapnel on the side of his scalp and understood, several seconds later, what had just happened. He had no injuries requiring hospitalization. Two inches lower and he would have been a 1957 Army training-accident statistic.

Willing Himself to France

When basic training ended in the late spring of 1957, Barney's company was shipped in different directions. Most went to Korea, still heavily garrisoned four years after the armistice. Some went to West Germany, still under quadripartite occupation. Barney went to France. He did not get sent there. He willed himself there. And the reason was Marcel Proust.

On the troop-ship crossing to Europe — a bottom-bunk spot in a stacked berth of six — Barney stood at the rail at sunrise while the five men bunked above him were uniformly seasick. Two young soldiers from Arkansas stood next to him, arms folded, complaining that they'd been stuck in uniform for the next eighteen months. A gull flew over. It did what gulls do. The deposit landed squarely on their heads. Barney, who had stayed up all night watching the horizon, turned to his neighbors and offered the one piece of life wisdom he ever set to print in the book:

The Ammo Depot, the Three French Women, and the Unholy Three

Barney's posting in France was at the largest U.S. Army ammunition depot in Europe, in the Lorraine region. His colonel, who collected high-IQ recruits for the prestige of having a bright company, appointed him Forms and Reports Control Officer — a job that involved keeping track of how many hand grenades, rifle rounds, artillery shells, and Corporal missiles the depot was storing, and filing the periodic reports up the chain. Three French civilian women worked under him as clerks. The job had approximately enough work for one.

Barney divided the work in thirds, gave each woman one piece of it, and turned the rest of the filing cabinets into a careful deception. A few drawers were kept in perfect, inspectable order. The rest were filled with waste paper. When inspectors came through, Barney would open a perfect drawer. The unit got top marks on every inspection. If they had ever opened a drawer and pulled out a file, Barney admitted later, we all would have been in trouble.

Because Barney's ammunition-depot work took him roughly six hours a week, the officers put him in charge of the three Non-Commissioned Officers' Clubs on the post. This made him, as a corporal, the highest-paid enlisted man on the base. With his Mizzou accounting training, the NCO clubs' ledger work was trivial. The clubs themselves were drinking-and-socializing halls for the sergeants; the rule was that the clubs could serve no food because several of the non-coms assigned to staff them had been grounded off food-service duty for venereal disease, and the Army, in its mid-century pragmatism, gave them to Barney as something administratively harmless to do.

Barney's two best friends at the depot were Dan Devine, a Catholic from Chicago who ran the officers' club, and Wally Sugar, a Jew from Chicago who ran the enlisted men's club. Barney — Protestant, from Missouri — ran the NCO clubs. The three of them dubbed themselves the Unholy Three. They spent every weekend they could get a pass in Paris.

Getting a pass was easy, because Barney's main bartender — the sergeant major of his company, who controlled all the weekend-pass approvals — signed Barney's paperwork in the clubs' ledgers and Barney signed the sergeant major's passes. No one ever spoke about the arrangement. It was never, for two years, broken. When Barney's commanding officer shook his hand at separation in the spring of 1958, the officer's parting question was the one hanging over the entire year and a half:

The officer never got his answer.

The Black-Market Francs Scheme

One week into his NCO-club command, Barney discovered that the previous club manager — a lieutenant — had been running an arbitrage scheme using the American and French currency accounts. The official exchange rate was 350 francs to the dollar. The black-market rate in neighboring Luxembourg was 440. The lieutenant had been writing large American-account checks to cash, driving the dollars to Luxembourg, exchanging them at 440, driving the francs back to France, depositing them in the club's French account at 350 — and pocketing the 90-franc-per-dollar spread. On a $100,000 transaction, that was nine million francs — roughly $25,000 skimmed by splitting rigged trips to Luxembourg.

The sergeants running the clubs under him had become accustomed to the money. On his first transaction, Barney wrote the check through the legitimate channel at the 350 rate. They were aghast.

Barney's rule, then and later, was that he would bend administrative regulations but not criminal laws. What the Army considered theft of government currency was, for him, a hard line. For the remaining seventeen months of his tour, the NCO clubs operated on their own legitimate funds. A few years after Barney left the Army, the man who became the first Top Enlisted Man in the Army's history — an NCO running a club in Frankfurt — was caught pocketing more than a million dollars a year running the same scheme Barney had shut down as a corporal.

What Paris Did to Him

The passes the sergeant major signed took Barney and the Unholy Three to Paris almost every weekend of the year and a half Barney was stationed in France. He arrived at the Gare de l'Est on Friday evenings, checked into the cheapest hotel he could find near the station, and walked. He rode the Métro thirty-eight times in his first three-day weekend. He taught himself Paris by walking every arrondissement and carrying a fold-out map in his pocket and watching faces in cafés. He saw the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur, the Panthéon, the Madeleine, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal. On every trip, he went back to the Louvre.

What the Louvre did to him is the subject of the next Part. But the first Saturday he walked into it, through what was then an inconsequential side-door entrance (the I. M. Pei glass pyramid was still thirty-two years away), and climbed the grand staircase, and came face-to-face at the top with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Hellenistic marble that had stood there for a century and a quarter — something in his twenty-two-year-old brain came unsettled in a way he did not entirely understand for decades.

He was, when he left the Army and came home to St. Louis in the spring of 1958, a decorated corporal with a letter of recommendation from his colonel and roughly eleven hundred dollars in savings. He was also, although nothing on the discharge paperwork recorded it, the most attentive self-taught student of European art history in the United States Army's personnel files.

The girl he had met at a USO party in Paris on New Year's Eve of 1956 and was about to marry — a nineteen-year-old French student named Martine de Visme — would come home with him.

The rest of the 4th edition tells the story of what they did next.