The first rich man to say yes to Ramparts was Irving Laucks, a vivacious 81-year-old who had a nine-year-old son, a millionaire to the tenth power and also a nice guy who specialized, in his words, in investing in “peace and women,” with his rationale for the connection taking the clue from Lysistrata. Irving invented plywood. He told me about it one day. “I was just fooling around trying to figure a way to get this dingbatted wood to stick together, and then it stuck, and then I started a company, and then I sold the company and the patent to another company, and then some other company or other bought them, and then all of a sudden I was rich as Croesus.”
Irving oversaw his diverse efforts in the fields of women and peace from an office in Robert Hutchins’ fancy think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in sylvan Santa Barbara. The Center has doubtless made its contribution to the long uphill march of the Western intellect, but I found it estranged somewhat from reality. Housed in a magnificent villa in the rich Santa Barbara hills, the intellectual cat-and-mouse exercises at the Center (tape-recorded, lest a pearl drop) somehow reminded me of the Russian nobility having tea before the Revolution and discussing what must be done to improve the lot of the masses and reform the poultry-yard ethics of the Czar.
A cagey fellow, Irving kept his eye on the think-tankers: “They’re all hanging around expecting me to put a lot more money in this place,” he said, his eyes full of mischief. “But I tell them my specialty is ending the war, and I’m awaiting and awatching to see what they can do to help me in my specialty. That gets ‘em mighty nervous.”
Luncheon cocktails at the Center consisted entirely of dreadful Heublein premixed martinis, poured from the can, which the assembled intellectual lights made a gang rush for and sucked in at a furious pace until Hutchins tinkled his little bell and the men of the mind walked obediently into lunch. The 81-year-old millionaire would occasionally drive me down the hill to a Mexican restaurant in Monticello, “where we can get a real drink.”
Irving put $75,000 into the paper, a welcome dollop in a several-hundred-thousand-dollar investment package we scraped together by the fall of 1965, just in time to keep the sheriff from the door. The term “package” sends fund-raisers reaching for the Maalox. The idea is that if a certain sum is necessary for a deal, then the various investors putting up the dough will not actually kick into the kitty until the entire amount guaranteed is forthcoming; the rationale is partly that money loves company, and partly to counter the very real temptation to run like a bandit to the bank with the first check.
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