XX
I flunked retirement. If there was a handbook of the Dos and Don’ts of retiring, my picture would be on the front cover of the Don’t section. In the space of a couple years, I retired, remarried, and moved to a new planet called L.A. I pulled up my roots, said goodbye to my friends, and left behind the world I’d known for almost fifty years. Was I nuts? Well, I must have been temporarily insane to think it was a good idea.
Los Angeles was foreign to me. I didn’t speak the language or understand the customs. My friends in Detroit were all in the car business. In L.A., everyone was in the movie business. They read Variety. I read Automotive News. Almost right away I knew I was in trouble. Holy shit, I thought. What the hell have I done?
I’d saved Chrysler. Now the question was, could I save myself?
My retirement fiasco happened more than a decade ago. Since then, I’ve learned some lessons about what not to do. But most important, I figured out what to do. It has been a revelation to me that you can be retired and still have a life of meaning. Today, at eighty-two, I’m in good health, I’m active, and I’m engaged in the world around me. I guess that’s why so many people in their late fifties and early sixties come to me asking for advice. When they get close to retirement, they start to panic. They wonder what they’re going to do with the next twenty or thirty years. Fear grabs them in the gut. For some of them it’s the first time they’ve ever been afraid of anything. And what is the fear? That their lives will stop mattering.
I know the feeling. Work is like oxygen. Even if you have a family you love, and hobbies you enjoy, and you go to church or synagogue every week, there is nothing that replaces work. Your work holds it all together. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
When you’re a CEO, it’s even more intoxicating—and somewhat unreal. You never wash a car, you never fill a gas tank, you never pick up a tab. When you travel, there’s always an entourage leading you around. You go to the finest restaurants. You stay in the presidential suite. People wait on you hand and foot. You live in a bubble. You go all over the world, but you don’t see much beyond the airport, the hotel lobby, and the convention center. You may be at the hub of your little universe, but you’re isolated. Then you retire, and you don’t know how to be an average Joe.
A lot of people would just as soon not retire. They’d like to keep doing what they’re doing until the boys in the white coats carry them out of the corner office. But you’ve got to be realistic. There isn’t a business in the world that can’t use an infusion of fresh blood at some point. And the only way that happens is for the old blood to move out.
Someone once said they had to force me to retire from Chrysler. Not true. I was turning sixty-eight, and I wanted to retire. I didn’t have to. I was on top of the world. I could have stayed around forever. But I felt like I’d done everything. I was getting impatient. The young guys came in to see me, and they were all full of piss and vinegar. Everything was new to them. I couldn’t help feeling impatient, and a little bored. I’d listen to their great plans, and I’d be thinking, Yeah, we tried that about twenty times and it didn’t work. But I didn’t want to just sit around sounding like a grumpy old man.
I was lucky. I probably could have done just about anything I wanted. I had plenty of offers. Tex Colbert, who’d been the chairman of Chrysler in the early sixties, asked me how I’d like to be president of Harvard. I don’t know how serious he was, but I never explored it. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was an old friend, was on the selection committee for a new baseball commissioner, and he asked me if I’d be interested in that. Looking back, I think maybe I should have considered that one, but at the time it didn’t appeal to me.
I almost got into politics. In 1991, Pennsylvania senator John Heinz died in a plane crash. My friend John Murtha came to me with a proposition: Robert Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, wanted to appoint me to complete Heinz’s term, and then I’d have to run on my own in the fall. Murtha would see to it that I got some juicy committee assignments, and he thought it would be a stepping stone to the presidency for me.
They sent in a brash young guy named James Carville to explain things to me. Carville was blunt and fast-talking. Didn’t even stop to ask me what I thought about the issues. He shoved some papers at me. “Here is your position on abortion,” he said. “Here is your position on jobs. Here is your position on—”
Finally, I interrupted. “Wait just a minute,” I said. “Don’t I get to—”
“No, no,” he dismissed me, “we’ve already done all the studies and focus groups.”
“So, you want me in office, but you’ll tell me what to believe?” I asked.
Carville shrugged, and started to continue his lecture. At which point I told him where he could shove it. That was my short-lived flirtation with the U.S. Senate. Senator Iacocca was not to be.
What I did decide to do after retirement was work as a consultant for Chrysler for another two years. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good plan. I was relieved to have at least that. The point is, you’ve got to do something.
IS THE GRASS GREENER ON THE GOLF COURSE?
I talk to guys who have worked sixty to eighty hours a week for fifty years, and I ask them, “What are you going to do when you retire?” They say, “I think I’ll have some fun. I always dreamed of being able to play golf every day.”
Well, I’ll tell you what. Anybody who says that is a nut—because it’ll bore you in a hurry. It’s okay when you’re working hard and you take in a round of golf on a Wednesday afternoon, like all the doctors. But if you think you can spend twenty years doing nothing but putting a little white ball in a hole three hundred yards away, you’re in for a shock.
Luckily, I never got bit by the golf bug, although it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Henry Ford II decided he wanted to learn golf, and he had access to the greats. When I was a young executive he set me up with the best teachers money could buy. It was kind of amazing, considering I was just an amateur. For a while my instructor was George Fazio, who’d tied Ben Hogan in the U.S. Open before he lost in a sudden-death playoff. I was also coached by Claude Harmon, another great player and teacher. All of this high-level training perfected my golf swing. I guess I was the most overtrained amateur in the world.
The problem was I didn’t play much. In the auto business there was never time for a lot of golf. I traveled constantly, and weekends were for my family. If I played golf on a Saturday, the whole day was shot. You were on the course for a few hours, then you had to have a drink with the boys, and if you got a hole in one, you’d have to celebrate forever, and before you knew it, your family time was shot. That wasn’t for me. I once got some lessons from Arnold Palmer himself. He told me, “You’re pretty good, Lee, but you’ve got to play.”
But there was just never time. So all that great training went nowhere. Once I retired, I could have spent more time on the golf course, but as I said, the bug never bit me.
There’s nothing wrong with playing golf, but if you think golf is going to be enough to fill your life in retirement, you’re mistaken. Even if you love golf, it’s not going to get you up in the morning the way work did. You’ve got to find something real to do.
I wish we’d invent another word to describe the period of life after they give you the gold watch. Retirement means “retreat, withdrawal.” Actually, retirement isn’t the end. It can be a beginning. But you’ve got to approach it the right way.
NOW WHAT DO I DO?
My retirement party was held in Las Vegas in November 1992. It was some party. There were eleven thousand people there, including some big Las Vegas stars. Frank Sinatra was there to sing a farewell, and, unbeknownst to me, the songwriter Sammy Cahn had written special lyrics to “My Way,” just for the occasion. Too bad Frank had started celebrating early. He totally missed the lyric on the teleprompter. It was still a thrill for me, though. Frank and I had become pretty good friends over the years. My retirement party was his last public performance.
After I retired, my consulting work kept me traveling back and forth between Detroit and Los Angeles, which wasn’t the best thing for my marriage. I finally agreed to move to California full-time. I was so dumb I thought I could save my marriage by buying a big house in a fancy section of L.A. It didn’t work that way. We moved into the house in January 1994, but a house can’t buy happiness. Our marriage was over by the fall. So there I was, retired, alone, and living in a big house in a strange city. I’d pulled up all my roots in Detroit. You know, when you live in a town for fifty years, and you raise a family there, you have a whole infrastructure—doctors, lawyers, pastors, friends, neighbors. They were all gone. I was a stranger in la-la land. And that’s when I started to realize I’d made a big mistake. I should have eased into retirement, not changed everything overnight. You’ve got to have time to adapt to the new reality, and I hadn’t given myself any time.
I was flailing, and the decisions I made weren’t that great. During that time, I got involved with Kerkorian on the Chrysler buyout, which gave me a lot of grief. I tried a few other things that didn’t work out. Through friends, I got involved in Koo-Koo-Roo, a chicken-restaurant chain, but I found I didn’t really want to spend my time in the chicken business. Then I got involved in developing the first electric bike. I thought that made some sense. I’d always followed the baby boomers. I gave them the Mustang when they were young, then the minivan when they settled down and had families. Now I figured I’d give them something for retirement. But the electric bike didn’t catch on. Then I partnered with GM on a neighborhood electric car. I spent six or seven million dollars of GM’s money to learn that the country wasn’t ready for a fully electric car.
The point is, I was grabbing at things because I didn’t have a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to make mistakes.
HAVE A PLAN
So that was the big lesson. Have a plan for retirement. Obviously, the first thing you have to figure out is the financial aspect. How much do you need for your retirement? Maybe your kids are still in school. Or maybe your kids are from what they call the “boomerang” generation, and they’ve come back to live with you after college. And if your parents are living, it may be a blessing, but it can also be an expense for their care. So you have to add up the numbers. And maybe it becomes obvious that you have to work full-or part-time because you need the extra income. But even if you’re financially secure, you’ve got to DO something. You’ve got all this knowledge and experience. You’ve probably got a heck of a lot of energy if you’re in your sixties. If you retire early as part of a buyout, you’re really not ready for the rocking chair on the front porch. So, what are you going to do?
Maybe you’ve been so busy working that you missed out on some interest or passion that you’d like to give a whirl to. Maybe you have a business idea that’s been rattling around in your head. There’s a life out there. You can become a mental case if you don’t have some kind of plan.
Getting back to the meaning of retirement, I like to look at life as having three stages. The first is learning. The second is earning. And the third is returning. A lot of the baby boomers are still yearning in the third stage, because they’re never satisfied. But if you think of retirement as a time of returning—of giving something back to society—it can transform your life.
GIVE SOMETHING BACK
A few years ago, I was having lunch with Warren Buffett in Las Vegas at Steve Wynn’s Shadow Creek Golf Club. We were eating cheeseburgers, and Warren was drinking his usual cherry Coke. Buffett had made a ton of money. He was the second-richest guy in the world, after Bill Gates, worth around $44 billion. And I said to him, “Warren, I read in Fortune magazine that you said you were leaving nothing to your heirs. Zero. Is that true?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I take care of education and health. I give each of them a house and a car—and they’re comfortable. But they have to make it on their own.”
I was interested. “Yeah, I’m struggling with that same issue right now,” I said. “I’m talking about a million dollars here and there.”
“Well, I’m talking about a billion dollars here and there,” he replied, and we laughed.
“Look,” he said, getting serious. “What do you think it would do for my kids if I gave each of them a billion dollars? They wouldn’t have to work anymore or think anymore. It would wreck them.”
Well, we all know now what Warren decided to do with his money. He gave $37 billion to the Bill Gates Foundation—the greatest act of charitable giving in U.S. history. And he didn’t wait until he was dead.
Warren has his head on straight when it comes to giving back. A lot of guys say, “Well, I deserve this money. It was my genius that earned it.” Warren doesn’t have that kind of arrogance. He once said, “You know, maybe I have talent, but it wouldn’t have gotten me very far if I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in a place where the stock market gives you huge rewards. So I think society has some claim on that.”
That’s leadership. To decide that your life isn’t just about making a lot of money, but about being part of a bigger picture. To get serious about returning something to society. I finally stopped flunking retirement when I started pouring more of my energies into the Iacocca Foundation. It became the central challenge of my retirement to find a cure for diabetes.
The Iacocca Institute at my alma mater, Lehigh University, really did start with giving back. When I was a kid, my parents were very set on my going to college, but they didn’t have a lot of money. My mother went to work in a silk factory doing piece work on shirts to try to raise the money. In those days, not many people could afford to go to college. I was given a hand up at Lehigh University, thanks to a scholarship. After graduation, I was able to go on to Princeton for an advanced degree in engineering—something I never could have afforded without financial help. (And, by the way, I was lucky enough to be at Princeton during a special time after World War II, when both Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were located there at the Institute for Advanced Studies. I used to see Einstein almost every morning on my way to class. I’d say, “Good morning, professor,” and he’d nod his head. I enjoyed that small daily connection with history.
It made a big impression on me that some anonymous donor had put money on the line to help a kid like me get the best education. The Iacocca Institute is my way of giving back.
What have I learned from twenty-two years of philanthropy? That it’s no different from business. To be successful you have to be focused, have a plan, and stick to it with the help of a great team. This means a strong board of trustees, professional staff, and relevant experts as advisors.
You don’t have to have deep pockets to return something to society in your retirement years. You can volunteer. There are so many programs springing up that match people with know-how and experience with those who need it. The best one I ever saw was the Executive Service Corps, started by the former General Dynamics CEO Frank Pace in the 1960s. It’s still going strong. They’ll take volunteer experts and send them all over the world to teach people how to build roads, start businesses, set up hospitals, and build pipelines.
Most of the philanthropists I know aren’t in it for the glory. They’re in it because it energizes them. It makes them happy to see their energy and resources really making a difference.
Frank Sinatra was like that. You don’t hear a lot about what a generous guy he was because he never advertised it. I got to know Frank over many years, and he was there during the bleakest time of my life, when Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. Frank came to Detroit to help. He said to me, “If you’re working for a dollar, I will, too.” He did some commercials for us and spent a couple of days visiting plants. He didn’t do it for the publicity. He did it because he gave a damn.
I guess it all comes down to happiness. I ask a lot of people these days, including members of my own family, “Are you happy?” And they mumble—they don’t want to come right out and say, “Well, yeah! I never had it so good from a financial standpoint.”
But happiness goes way beyond that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that money can’t buy happiness. Reminds me of my good friend Henny Youngman, who once said, “What good is happiness? You can’t buy money with it.” Maybe some people don’t realize that’s a joke. You’ve got to feel sorry for them.
I have a pretty good life. I’m busy. I get a lot of joy out of my family. I’m in good health. I hope to live to be one hundred. I think I have a shot at it.
Bob Hope used to come to my house often in his final years. He told me, “You want to live to be one hundred? Here’s what you do. Get a massage every day. Start every day with fruit. And have sex every day.”
I said, “Let me get this straight. Massage, fruit, sex. Hey, Bob, two out of three ain’t bad.”
Bob was just over one hundred when he died. I did a short eulogy at his funeral. I was sandwiched between Sid Caesar and Red Buttons. When my name was called, after Sid had given his remarks, Red leaned over and said, “You know my schtick better than I do. Try not to steal all my good jokes.”
MY RETIREMENT RULES IN A NUTSHELL
To sum up, here’s the best advice I can give anyone who wants to ace retirement:
Count your blessings
Stop to think about how lucky you are to have been born in this era, in this great country. If you’ve made it to retirement, you’re in a good place. You won the lottery just by being born in the U.S.A. If you’re really lucky, you have your health and are surrounded by family and friends.
Don’t disengage from life
A lot of people think that after all the stress of their working lives, they shouldn’t have any stress when they retire. But there’s a word for a stress-free state, and it isn’t retirement. It’s death. Study after study shows that complete retirement means an early trip to the grave. I used to watch the guys at Ford and Chrysler. They’d get their gold watches, and go off into the sunset—and they’d be dead in five years. Don’t underestimate the importance of being productive.
My father never retired. He didn’t know the meaning of retirement. As he got older, he kept looking for new things to do. Back in 1930 he’d gotten a real estate broker’s license, but he never practiced and he lost it. So later in life he decided to pick it up again. He took the broker’s exam and flunked it three times before he finally made it. He was pretty proud of that license. And he put it to good use. My multitalented father was a whiz at real estate. That’s no surprise. It’s a people business, and Pop was all about people.
The secret to good heath is mental challenge, physical activity, engaging with people, and having a purpose. I try to do all those things. I read constantly, and never feel as if I’ve stopped learning. I walk two miles a day. I watch what I eat.
My only real vice—as you can discern from the picture on the cover of this book—is that I love cigars. But I limit myself to one a day. For years I gave up cigars for the forty days of Lent to prove I wasn’t addicted. My daughters always suggested I reverse it—smoke like hell during Lent and give up cigars for the rest of the year.
Figure out what will make you happy
Do your homework. Ask everybody around you what makes them happy. Your kids, your spouse, your friends—anyone you can find.
Ask an aging parent, “How do you feel about life today?”
Once you’ve collected everyone else’s opinions, ask yourself the same question. Then take your answer to heart. Here’s a clue: It’s not money.
Malcolm Forbes used to say, “When you die the one with the most toys wins.” I knew Malcolm, and let me tell you, the guy really had some phenomenal toys. But he’s still dead.
My friend Larry Fisher was a rich guy. He owned major real estate in Manhattan. He once told me, “Lee, you keep saying you can’t take it with you. Well, you’re just not smart enough. I’ve got it worked out. I sent $100 million ahead in traveler’s checks!”
Hang around with young people
Nothing makes me happier than spending time with my grandchildren. It’s fun to be with young people. It also keeps me focused on the future. The old crowd just wants to talk about the past, and that can be depressing. When I’m with the kids, I’m always asking myself, what is the world I want my grandchildren to inherit, and what can I do to make it happen?
Kids will push you to live a little, and that’s not such a bad thing. In our family, birthdays are big deals, and I like to go all-out for my grandkids. Last December, for her eleventh birthday, I took my granddaughter and twenty of her closest friends to Disneyland. They talked me into going on the California Screamer, which is one of the scariest roller coasters in the world. There’s a 360-degree loop where you’re hanging upside down. At one point, as our car was careening down a vertical track, I wondered what I was doing. Wasn’t there an age limit on these rides?
My father had a way with young people. They were always coming to him for advice. Why? Because he listened, he cared, and he had common sense. At his funeral, there were lots of young people. I was always impressed that teenage girls trusted my pop. I’ve tried to have the same kind of influence on my granddaughters.
Be a mentor. Time and advice are free, and they’re more important than anything else you can do for the next generation. I make it a point to talk to my grandchildren every week, and to see them often. You can quietly change a young person’s life in a one-hour talk over a sandwich or a walk in the park.
Live the hell out of your life—now
When I think of people who know what it means to live boldly, I have to give top honors to my friend Carroll Shelby. Even at eighty-four, after a heart transplant, Shelby has more spark than people half his age.
I met Shelby in the early 1960s, when I was a vice president at Ford. We were trying to attract young people by building performance cars that appealed to the racing world. Shelby, who was the most famous race car driver in the world, came to see me. He was burning up the carpets with enthusiasm, a big handsome Texan. Shelby said, “I need twenty-five thousand dollars to build a car that can beat the Corvette.” It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. That car was the Cobra. It began Ford’s serious involvement in the racing world. In the coming years, we entered every race, and it was a pretty big thrill to win the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, and all the other big races with our Ford V-8 engines.
I guess part of it was image. We spent a lot of money on racing. But we’d justify it by saying, “Race on Sunday, sell on Monday.”
Then, in 1982, when I was trying to restore Chrysler’s image, I called Shelby. I needed performance models. We started with the Charger Shelby and the Omni GLH, which were sold as Dodges. GLH, by the way, stood for “Goes Like Hell.” It went from zero to sixty miles an hour in about five seconds.
The last time I sat in a car with Shelby was in 1991. The pre-production Viper was the pace car for the opening lap of the Indianapolis 500. Shelby was in the driver’s seat, and there were about three hundred thousand people in the stands, cheering like crazy.
Shelby turned to me with his famous grin. “Lee, it’s a beautiful day, huh?”
I was a little nervous. “I hope you know how to do this,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I’ve done it before,” he assured me. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out three little pills, which he popped into his mouth.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, just my nitro,” he said. “When I’m excited, I get a little angina.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said with alarm. “You’re going to be driving two hundred miles an hour, and you’re taking nitroglycerine?” That’s when I started praying.
SAY YOUR PRAYERS
No matter how important you think you are, you’re just a little blip on the screen of time. With the passage of years, when you see that there’s a lot more behind you than there is ahead of you, you start praying a little harder.
I never wore my religion on my sleeve, but I’ve always had faith. I grew up a Catholic and I still practice. But I never spent a lot of time wondering what comes next. There was too much to do in the here and now.
Getting older has humbled me some, and I say my prayers a little more fervently these days. I’m also more aware of the spiritual leaders in the world, because we need spiritual leadership so desperately.
I’ve been privileged to meet three popes in my life. I took my parents to Rome in the early sixties and they renewed their vows in the presence of Pope John XXIII. That was pretty special. We had a family audience with Pope Paul VI. I have a photo with the Pope and Kathi and Lia, which is quite a keepsake.
The papal audience that is still fresh in my mind was the one I had with Pope John Paul II about six months before he died. Pope John Paul was doing well that day. His hands were very steady, not shaking from Parkinson’s. He smiled at me and said, “You’re the car man from California.”
“No,” I replied, “I’m the car man from Detroit.”
He gave me a rosary and held my hand for a while. “Pray for me,” he said.
I was a little bit flustered. “Isn’t that your job?” I asked. “I don’t know how good I’ll be.”
He just smiled. Later, I did pray for him, because, although he was a great spiritual leader, he was just a human being like you and me. He knew that.
In the last few years I’ve become friendly with Oral Roberts, who lives near me in California. Oral is a charming, quiet man. He’s very humble, and he has a good sense of humor. He even says that humor has kept him alive. He’s eighty-nine now, and a little frail, but that doesn’t take away from the force of his presence. He’s a true spiritual leader. People come from all over the world to see him. He once gave me a Bible, which he’d marked with a yellow highlighter. “These are the passages that are important,” he told me. Talk about cutting to the chase!
For my last birthday, Oral gave me an autographed copy of his latest book and this piece of wisdom: “Lee,” he said, “everybody’s going to die, and they go someplace. So just be sure your spiritual bank account has more cash receipts than debt.”
There’s no escaping mortality, and the older you get the more you’re reminded of it. Death is the great equalizer, and we all look pretty much the same lying in the coffin. Life is where you can make things happen. So, if when you retire you think, “I’m tired. It’s time to relax,” think again. As the saying goes, you’ve got all eternity to catch up on your rest.