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Comic Wars

Marvel Comics

Chapter One

"Meet Dr. Doom!"

Ronald O. Perelman?America's richest short, bald, forty-six-year-old chain-cigar-chomper?seemed to have a delicious deal when he bought Marvel Entertainment Group in January 1989. This was not a hostile takeover. It was simply a matter of negotiating a fair price for a property that seemed to have untapped potential.

The owner dumping Marvel was New World Entertainment, a Hollywood production company that garnered very limited payoffs from made-for-television movies featuring the Incredible Hulk and other Marvel comics superheroes. New World had gone flat and wanted to pump itself up with new genres of TV and movies. So Marvel was on the auction block, and when Perelman saw that half a dozen companies were making bids he hardly needed to check his credit line. He simply outbid the others at $82.5 million.

The delicious part was what Wall Street calls leverage: He had to put up only a small percentage of the money. All the rest was somebody else's.

MacAndrews & Forbes, the shell company owned personally and wholly by Perelman, cut a check for just $10 million. More than $70 million was borrowed from a syndicate of banks, led?as was becoming standard for Perelman?by Chase Manhattan. Chase would handle all the paperwork and formally make the loan offer while recruiting other banks to take on portions of the risk.

But what could be so risky here? Chase and the others were happy to finance Perelman's Marvel acquisition. This was small change compared with the billions of dollars of business that this tycoon represented in his recent past and his likely future. So far he had displayed a terrific eye for spotting undervalued companies, taking them over, giving them new management, and often breaking them up so that the pieces could be sold for an easy profit. That is what corporate raiders do for a living.

Perelman told his bankers?the "secured lenders," in the parlance of mergers and acquisitions?that owning Marvel would be "fun." Chase Manhattan did not lend money for laughs, but his idea of a good time seemed sound enough. Some in the business community had seen the needlepoint message in the ground-floor conference room of the Townhouse. Beneath the huge, framed paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol was one pillow with stitching that read: "Love Me, Love My Cigar." Another had this motto: "Happiness Is a Positive Cash Flow." What banker could disagree?

Perelman said that he would take Marvel far beyond the sleepy and small business of publishing comic books. "It is a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property," he said. "Disney's got much more highly recognized characters and softer characters, whereas our characters are termed action heroes. But at Marvel we are now in the business of the creation and marketing of characters."

Perelman never claimed to have a clear blueprint for this kind of expansion. And the bankers had no earthly idea how much more they would be lending him in the six years to follow.

Chase Manhattan and the other banks treated Ron Perelman as the wizard he appeared to be, and they enjoyed a constant stream of fee-generating transactions with him. When they loaned money to Perelman's companies, the banks were "secured"?first in line to be repaid should the debtor go bankrupt.

Bankruptcy was not, however, a word even remotely in the lexicon when discussing Perelman's early years at Marvel. True, the comic book characters had not been fully exploited by New World. But the books were selling to a core of loyal fans, and the beginnings of a collectibles craze could be detected as the 1990s got under way.

Perelman also felt he had the perfect man to lead Marvel into a wider world of entertainment: the tall, blue-eyed, and articulate Bill Bevins, former chief financial officer of Ted Turner's broadcasting empire in Atlanta. One newspaper assigned Bevins the perfect characteristics for his job, calling him "an affable numbers cruncher accustomed to coddling mercurial tycoons."

In just a few years, Marvel's obligations mushroomed into a total debt of $700 million. No one, certainly not the banks, had planned it that way; but little by little and lot by lot, Marvel managed to get "yes" after "yes" in a system that often kept the right hand of a bank syndicate unaware of what the left hand did. And if a banker should ever lean toward saying "no," the Townhouse could step up the pressure by hinting that Perelman would take his business elsewhere.

He was never afraid of debt. Through large ups and small downs, various forms of borrowed money had fueled his rise to riches. As a boy, he learned about business?and takeovers?from his father, Raymond, who was quite an aggressive conqueror of companies and corporate boards on a Philadelphia, if not a New York, scale. The Perelmans had the fanciest house in an affluent, largely Jewish suburb?Elkins Park. Perelman the Younger studied business at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and showed signs of impatiently wanting to outdo his dad. With some paternal advice, he bought a brewery for $800,000 and sold it three years later for a million-dollar profit.

Ronald launched his own family in 1965 by marrying Faith Golding, a wealthy New Yorker whom he had met on a cruise to Israel. The bottom line: an infusion of capital from the well-to-do Golding clan; four children in eighteen years of marriage; and, in the end, a divorce that was court-contested and acrimonious. When Mrs. Perelman discovered that there was a mistress, she hired high-powered lawyers who loudly laid claim to much of Mr. Perelman's stock portfolio.

The key development in that marriage was the family's move to New York when the children were young. It was 1978, Perelman was thirty-five years old, and he had definite ideas of how best to make his mark. His father was angry over his departure, and Ronald and Raymond hardly spoke to each other for several years. Somewhat coldly, the younger Perelman explained: "I wanted to create an entity on my own, without the constraints of the familial relationship."

The younger Perelman quickly formed a pack of Wall Street wolves that included Michael Milken: carnivores who invented, tailored, and perfected a groundbreaking weapon?the junk bond.

Publicly, at least, Perelman and his crowd did not call these investment vehicles "junk." They were "high-yield securities." In the great balancing act between risk and reward, there was plenty on both sides of the fulcrum. The issuer of these bonds would never deny that they were risky, because the principal?the face value?might never be repaid, but the high interest being offered was sufficiently seductive to make up for the risk.

"These bonds are sold to the most sophisticated investors," said Howard Gittis, who had been a prominent lawyer in Philadelphia before Perelman brought him to New York as his right-hand man. "They're not widows and orphans. And we don't hold a gun to anybody's head."

Even before his takeover and expansion of Marvel, Perelman enjoyed and employed more than $2 billion raised for him by Milken's junk bonds. Sometimes Perelman would put a billion or so off to the side, in a reserve fund invested in other companies' bonds, so he could be ready to pounce at a moment's notice. When a financial-market scavenger bought bonds at low prices, he was betting that the companies issuing them would recover. Recovery meant that the bond price could soar and feather the vulture's nest quite...