The Billionaire Who Loved Bluegrass
Financier and philanthropist spread around his millions so "good things will grow"
By: Jane Ganahl
F. Warren Hellman, a banjo-picking billionaire whose life followed such an extraordinary and eccentric arc it perhaps could only have taken place in San Francisco, died Sunday evening at UCSF Medical Center. He was 77.
The cause was complications from treatment he had been receiving for leukemia. Doctors had told Hellman that the illness could be neutralized, and he postponed chemotherapy treatments this fall to appear with his band The Wronglers at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, his lavish annual gift to the city, and to tour with one of his idols, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. With typical humor, Hellman joked in recent weeks that he had changed his name to Luke Emia. He referred to his dreaded chemo medication as Retuxif-ck.
A rugged iconoclast whose views on life rarely failed to surprise, Hellman was a lifelong Republican who supported labor unions, an investment banker whose greatest joy was playing songs of the working class in a bluegrass band, and a billionaire who wanted to pay more taxes and preferred the company of crooners and horsemen who shared his love of music and cross-country “ride and tie” racing.
Lanky and angular, an endurance runner and skier, Hellman had a penchant for politically incorrect humor and little tolerance for phonies. He was a ragged dresser, an apologetic capitalist and one of the most beloved figures in San Francisco history.
Hellman acquired the nickname “Hurricane Hellman” early in his business career. At 26, he became the youngest-ever partner at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct financial services firm; in 1973, at 39, he was named president and head of investment banking. In 1977, he co-founded the venture capital firm Matrix Partners, an early investor in Apple, Continental Cable (now Comcast) and Stratus Computer. In 1984, Hellman launched Hellman & Friedman LLC, a private equity firm that has raised over $25 billion in capital.
Hellman spent as much energy distributing his wealth as he did acquiring it.
His causes were endless — pension reform, the UC Berkeley aquatics program, the Mills College cross-country team, the Jewish Community Endowment Fund — and he frequently wrote songs about them. His passion for journalism led him in 2010 to found The Bay Citizen, where he served as chairman.
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“Jesus Christ, I'm a frenetic busybody,” Hellman joked in a 2001 interview.
Phil Bronstein, the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and a friend of Hellman’s for more than a decade, said: “Warren was San Francisco, and his passion for the city ran deep. His philanthropy and quiet leadership were unparalleled.”
Jonathan Nelson, the founder of Organic, Inc. and a longtime Hellman friend who, while riding on a ski lift one day, encouraged Hellman’s fantasy to stage a free bluegrass festival, said Hellman left his mark on the world in numerous ways.
There is a “crazy Zelig thing” about Warren, Nelson said. “Not only did he have three full careers in finance but he founded a newspaper and he went to Burning Man with me.” Nelson said he took Hellman to the desert art festival for his 70th birthday. “It was so amazing that he went back the next year.”
Born in New York City in 1934, Hellman was the son of investment banker Marco “Mick” Hellman and the great-grandson of Isaias W. Hellman, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who launched one of California’s first banks out of a Los Angeles dry goods store and went on to earn millions in banking, transportation, real estate and oil.
Hellman never met Isaias, but had been enthralled with him since childhood. “I was asked once, ‘If you could meet someone who went before...’ I didn’t hesitate: It would be I.W.,” he said in February during an interview at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. “He was a remarkable human being, with a fantastic ability to see over the horizon.”
To the audience's delight, Hellman then sang two verses of a song had written for his great-grandfather:
I.W. Hellman, he was a pioneer / came to California in his 16th year / he crossed the isthmus to come here / and become California’s greatest financier.
He went to work in a dry goods store / and said this is not what I came here for / so I’ll put me a safe right here by the door / because I am probably a banker at my core!
In this video, Hellman sings about his great-grandfather with The Wronglers:
Embed:http://youtu.be/h62ayM3RYKA
During World War II, when his father was sent overseas, Hellman moved to the Central Valley, near Vacaville, with his mother, Ruth Koshland Hellman, and his sister Nancy — now Nancy Bechtle, herself a San Francisco philanthropist and community activist.
Even as a child, Hellman showed evidence of having a profound disrespect for rules. Chris Hellman, his wife of 56 years, once said she traced his drive to an incident when one of his arms was severely burned at age 9 in a kerosene lamp fire. It seems he was sneaking into his mother’s bedroom with plans of making off with a toy that didn’t belong to him. “I never really liked authority,” Hellman later acknowledged in an interview.
An avid horseman, Hellman would escape for long rides — a practice that so unnerved his mother that she enrolled him in the San Rafael Military Academy to give him discipline. When his father returned at the end of the war, the family relocated to San Francisco, where Hellman enrolled in Lowell High School. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he triple-majored in economics, political science and history, graduating in 1955.
Hellman served two years in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, before enrolling at Harvard Business School. He then spent 15 years at Lehman Brothers in New York. Often described as “deal-driven and aggressive,” Hellman achieved extraordinary financial success independent of his wealthy family legacy.
Hellman met Chris, a former ballet dancer, on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth, in what his daughter, Dr. Tricia Hellman Gibbs, described as “the most romantic story ever.”
“My mother was in the London Festival Ballet; she was traveling to New York from Southampton, England by ocean liner,” she said. “And my dad was returning home to New York from England. My father saw this group of beautiful young dancers at a table and asked to be introduced. So they met on the Queen Elizabeth, and were together from that day on. I feel extremely fortunate to have had that in my life: parents whose love story I look up to.”
In recent years, as Chris became stricken with Alzheimer’s disease, and Hellman cared for her, “that love has continued,” Tricia said. “He still sees her as the beautiful dancer he met on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth.”
Tricia, a former member of the U.S. ski team and the founder, along with her husband Richard Gibbs, of the San Francisco Free Clinic, said she spent much of her childhood doubled over at her father’s jokes. In a statement, Hellman's four children said their father possessed "the deepest repertoire of mildly inappropriate jokes of anyone we ever met, wrote some truly humorous bluegrass songs, and once made (his daughter) Frances laugh until milk came out her nose. You could always crack him up with a Monty Python line (“NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition”)."
“We laughed so much; he was the funniest father,” Tricia said.
Hellman in his early years at Lehman was hard-charging and, by his own accounts, occasionally out of control. One evening, while vacationing on Cape Cod, he and a friend were arrested when their partying got out of hand and they drove across neighbors’ lawns.
“We got to Bill’s house, and Bill decided to go up on his roof while I got sick under a bush,” Hellman recalled. “And this police car pulls in and the cop said, ‘Boys, have you been out driving?’ And I said ‘Oh no, officer.’ But he put his hand on my hood and felt it was warm and took us down to the Falmouth jail.”
Chris called the station — to make sure police intended to keep her husband over night. The officers drove him home the next morning, where he had to face Chris and his two small children.
Hellman never drank again.
It was also around that time that Hellman discovered the banjo. He bought an instruction book, “How to Play the 5-String Banjo,” by folk legend Pete Seeger. Frustrated at how slowly he was learning, Hellman decided he wanted to take lessons from Seeger himself and called up the singer’s manager. Hellman took it in stride when he was rejected.
“Why would he give banjo lessons to some capitalist from Lehman Brothers?” he joked.
Years later, Hellman would derive some of his greatest pleasure plucking his Whyte Laydie banjo, surrounded by the musicians he revered. Hellman celebrated his bar mitzvah two years ago, at 75. He sometimes wore the Star of David onstage, referring to himself as “The Rhinestone Jewboy.”
In this video, Hellman tells a story about his banjo and gives his "life is like a roll of toilet paper" philosophy before singing "The Toilet Roll Blues":
Embed:http://youtu.be/gvHuQEGHI9I
Frances Dinkelspiel, a Berkeley writer who wrote an acclaimed 2008 book, "Towers of Gold," on Isaias — Hellman's great-grandfather and Dinkelspiel's own great-great-grandfather — said one of the proudest moments of Hellman’s life was appearing on "A Prairie Home Companion" this summer with The Wronglers and Gilmore.
The band also appeared at South by Southwest, the annual music, film and technology festival. “Someone came up to him and said, ‘Are you from The Wronglers?’” Dinkelspiel said. “Warren was so thrilled because it wasn't, ‘Are you this rich billionaire philanthropist?’ It was, ‘Are you a musician?’”
Hellman left Lehman in 1977. Working at Lehman, he later said, turned out to be prescriptive: it showed him how he did not want to run a company. “Lehman was one of the toughest, most competitive companies in the business — and one of the least pleasant,” he said. “One of the founding principles of Hellman & Friedman was really simple: think about what would we have done at Lehman and then do the exact opposite.”
He founded Hellman & Friedman LLC in 1984 with Tully Friedman, who went on to found his own company in 1997. Hellman & Friedman expanded to include offices in London and New York and a staff of 50 investment professionals, and has invested in more than 75 companies worldwide. In recent years, Hellman was less involved in the day-to-day operations of the company but remained as chairman. He prided himself on the egalitarian culture he created there.
“One of my titles is chief cultural officer,” he chuckled during the Throckmorton conversation. “That’s because of the culture I’ve tried to create. The ownership is spread broadly. You treat each other with respect. You listen to what others have to say. What I can’t understand is why these things seem weird — they should be obvious. This could all change tomorrow, and, of course, when anyone leaves, I hate them. But we’ve lost very few people to other firms. I think we’re supposed to be a genuinely good place to work — and there is not a huge gulf between the assistants and the accounting people and management.”
Hellman had the same right-hand people for years. “They have had four career stages,” he quipped. “They were secretaries, then they were assistants, then governesses, and finally nannies. Now they say things like, ‘Why the hell don’t you get a new pair of shoes? I’m taking you to the Walk Shop at lunchtime.’”
While at Hellman & Friedman, he helped take Levi Strauss & Co. private for $1.8 billion in 1985, invested $224 million into the advertising company Young & Rubicam in 1996, bought into Formula One Racing for $312 million in early 2000, and became the first outside investor in the Nasdaq Stock Market in 2001.
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Hellman also had his share of financial miscues and near disasters. He played a leading role in the costly and ultimately unsuccessful merger of the medical centers of Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco, in 1997. He was key in the reorganization of Levi Strauss & Co., which then went into free fall.
In 1990, Hellman led the Board of Trustees of Mills College, an all-women liberal arts school in Oakland, in a decision to open the school to men to stem declining enrollment. During an ensuing 16-day strike, students presented Hellman with a 6-foot-wide banner that said “Warren, Go To Hell-Man.”
Phil Donahue dedicated a full episode of his television show to the controversy, as 300 students boycotted classes, blocked entrances to administrative buildings, and effectively closed down the campus to convince the board to reverse its decision. As the strike dragged on, faculty and staff reached an agreement to teach courses without pay, alumni raised pledges sufficient to keep the school open without admitting men, and students proposed volunteering to increase recruitment efforts.
On May 18, 1990, students, alumni and faculty gathered on the steps of the school’s tea shop for a scheduled announcement from Hellman. Rather than speaking, Hellman silently unrolled another banner: “Mills. For Women. Again.”
Not long afterward, Hellman presented the student body with the “Warren, Go To Hell-Man” banner, preserved in a frame behind glass. It’s currently stored at the Mills College museum.
Hellman’s son, Mick, also an investor at Hellman & Friedman, said his father reveled in his failures a little too much, often rattling off a list to potential investors. After he did this a few times, “we asked him not to spend an hour on the failures but to encapsulate them in a couple of points,” Mick said.
Transitioning from the business world to the music world proved revelatory for Hellman, who often said he’d much rather hang out with his musician friends than anyone else.
“I now get to do business with people that I don’t detest,” he said in an interview when asked about his work on Hardly Strictly.
Hellman said he came to view money “like manure. If you spread it around, good things will grow — and if you pile it up, it just smells bad,” he told Forbes.com. “I do believe that. I don't have any passion for or interest in collecting stuff. I don't have any interest in owning expensive art or Lamborghinis. It's just another thing to maintain. It's not a moral judgment; it just doesn't move me at all. What does move me is philanthropic stuff. Giving really does move me. Part of it is selfish: It's fun to be appreciated. But the other part of it is that good things really are growing.”
Hellman’s civic and philanthropic activities include serving as past chairman and current trustee emeritus of The San Francisco Foundation; advisory board member of the Walter A. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley; trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation; trustee emeritus of The Brookings Institution; board member of the Committee on JOBS; member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Jewish Community Federation; chairman of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund; board member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Bay Area Council; chairman of Voice of Dance; board member of the Salesforce.com Foundation; and founder and chairman of the board of The Bay Citizen. In 2005 Hellman was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hellman was a devoted Old Blue; he showered millions on his alma mater, UC Berkeley. In 2010, he was instrumental in bringing the Judah L. Magnes Museum — a world-renowned 10,000-piece collection of Jewish life, art and culture — to the campus. In 1994, Hellman and his family gave $5 million to create the Hellman Fellows Program, which has supported the research of hundreds of junior faculty members.
Twenty years ago, Hellman’s daughter, Tricia, a physician, and her husband, Richard, told Hellman they wanted to provide primary care services to people without health insurance. After dismissing the idea, Hellman later warmed up to it. The annual fundraising luncheon for the San Francisco Free Clinic, which has treated thousands, has become a who’s who of powerful Hellman friends.
Asked how he chose his charities, Hellman grinned. “I feel like the character from ‘Oklahoma!’ — I’m just a girl who can’t say no. Sometimes something intrigues me and then it becomes a huge sinkhole, but most of the time it works out.”
Hellman felt strongly about passing along a culture of philanthropy to his children and grandchildren. “Many years ago, we started giving an amount of money each year to our children, and each of them have gotten involved with various charities,” he said. “And now with the grandchildren, we’ve been giving them $200 for every year they’ve been alive, and they have a year to give it away, and if not, it expires. And they’ve really gotten into it. We let them know that there’s no such thing as being too philanthropic.”
Hellman’s politics were a source of intrigue in recent years. In 2008, the lifelong Republican stunned observers when he left the party. Unwilling to leap entirely over to the Democrats, Hellman became officially noncommittal.
“I thought about becoming an independent,” he said. “But I became a DTS — which I first thought was ‘driving while totally stoned,’ but it was in fact ‘decline to state.’ Today, with the whole advent of the tea party and the extreme shift to the right, I think the two parties are further divided than they ever have been in my life.”
Hellman gave generously to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, former Mayor Willie Brown and others. Last year, he donated $50,000 to Proposition B — the controversial pension reform measure backed by San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi — before withdrawing his support and aligning himself with labor unions to form a more moderate approach. The measure that resulted from those efforts passed resoundingly last month with Hellman’s support.
But Hellman may ultimately be remembered for his annual valentine to the city: Hardly Strictly.
The festival began as one of Hellman’s quixotic dreams in 2001: to invite some of his favorite artists to play at Golden Gate Park. “Why did I start it?” he reflected in February. “I guess I would say I am like the guy at the cocktail party who swallowed a goldfish — it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I’ve just always loved that kind of music. It was indulging a fantasy — to invite my favorite musicians to come and hang out. And I always wanted to put on a little festival. That first year, I was surprised at how many people showed up. With the recession, I was afraid we’d have to pay people to come.”
In fact, there were two stages and nine acts that first year, and around 13,000 people showed up. “Nobody had any idea what would happen with this thing,” he said.
The festival has grown to a three-day affair, with an attendance of more than 600,000 fans who see world-renowned acts like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Elvis Costello — for free. “I describe the festival frequently as the world's most selfish gift,” Hellman told Forbes. “It's a fantastically selfish gift, but it is a gift. There are hundreds of thousands of people there who are appreciating it. Just being able to do something that is completely not commercial, that is pure, hopefully, pleasure for the participants — to create a surrounding where the musicians and professionals like it as much as the crowd does. How could you have more fun than that? What the hell is money for if it isn't for something like that?”
Hellman also called the festival “the single most fulfilling thing” that he had done.
The festival provided Hellman the opportunity to further his own musical pursuits. His band, The Wronglers, came together at the same time as the festival. Hellman joked earlier this year that he’d gone to a lot of time and expense just to ensure he’d get to play — but despite his self-deprecation, Hellman was an accomplished banjo player and his band was equally talented.
Hellman realized a dream of sorts earlier this year when he recorded an album with one of his idols, the iconic roots renegade, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The band toured with Gilmore this summer, despite Hellman’s increasing frailty. Hellman was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this October as always, smiling and happy to be playing.
He has endowed the festival to continue for at least 15 more years. Hellman related a story of bringing his children together to discuss which of his projects should continue after his death. “When the topic of Hardly Strictly came up, I said, ‘It’s up to you guys.’ One of them said, ‘It’s gone,’ and I said, ‘That was dumb, you just endowed it.’” He laughed heartily.
The festival, he has said, “is as close to heaven as I'm gonna get.”
Hellman cared deeply about some for-profit companies, including the Sugar Bowl ski resort in the Sierras, where his family has been going so long that there is an intermediate ski run — Hellman’s Chute — named for them.
Until recently, Hellman showed no signs of slowing down, and reveled in athletics, a joy to him since his youth. After burning his arm as a child, he took up swimming as physical therapy. By high school, he was an accomplished swimmer and went on to play varsity water polo at Cal.
His wife, Chris, who has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in recent years, shared his love of the physical activity: she had been a professional ballet dancer and competitive skier in her youth.
Hellman’s love of extreme sports was legend. In one story, his passion for running was such that he decided to run the day after surgical pins were removed from an injured knee. He returned home with blood streaming down his leg.
“I came up with the mantra that pain is your friend. If you can still feel pain it means you’re still moving,” he said in February. “Every Friday I try to run at Crissy Field, and I’d see this elderly guy and always thought, there’s a guy I can beat. But the other day, he just ran right by me. So I’m slowing down, but I’m still moving.”
Hellman participated twice in the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile trek through the Sierras. He once fell at the 25-mile marker and broke a rib but finished the event. Hellman completed the Tevis Cup, a 100-mile horse race over the same course, five times. He is also a five-time age group National Champion in ride and tie, a combination of cross-country running and endurance horseback riding.
His love of all things equine and country no doubt influenced his eccentric style of dress, which was once described as “Financial District hobo.” Even at high-level meetings, Hellman eschewed shirt and tie for denim and pearl buttons.
Hellman is survived by his wife, Patricia Christina Sander Hellman, and their four children: Frances Hellman, professor and chairwoman of UC Berkeley’s physics department; Dr. Patricia “Tricia” Hellman Gibbs, a former member of the U.S. Ski Team and one of the founders (along with her husband, Dr. Richard Gibbs) of the San Francisco Free Clinic; Marco “Mick” Warren Hellman, a successful investment banker and champion cyclist; and Dr. Judith Hellman, a physician and associate professor at UCSF; 12 grandchildren; and one great grandchild.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the San Francisco Free Clinic (sffc.org), The Bay Citizen (baycitizen.org) and the San Francisco School Alliance (sfschoolalliance.org).
A memorial service will be held Wednesday December 21 at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, and will be followed within a few weeks by a community celebration of Warren’s life.
Jeanne Carstensen, Reyhan Harmanci, Steve Fainaru, Matt Smith, Mia Zuckerkandel and Zoe Corneli contributed to this story.