Woman Preserves Husband’s Legacy

Soft-spoken and demure, Loida Nicolas Lewis is talking about her late husband, Reginald L. Lewis. She speaks of his tenacity, his dreams and his legacy the gigantic company he left behind and his life story that has recently been published. She speaks of their two daughters.

What she doesn’t talk much about is herself.

It is she, after all, who has taken the company, TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc., from the brink of disaster and placed it on solid ground. And it is she who pushed to have her husband’s autobiography, “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun,” finished and published. Once the perfect corporate wife, she has become a corporate leader and the keeper of her husband’s legacy.

“I knew I had to do it,” Loida Lewis says simply, her Filipino accent softly rounding her words.

The company, a Europe-based food conglomerate, once was mired in debt. Now, thanks to Lewis, debt is down. Its revenues are increasing. Lewis hopes to soon take the company stock public. And she once again placed near the top of Working Woman magazine’s annual list of the top 50 female-owned businesses.

The list, released in the May issue, ranked the nation’s top female business owners according to revenue. Lewis earned second place with TLC Beatrice earning $2.1 billion.

Not that Lewis isn’t used to success. She grew up in a prominent Filipino family where her mother was a pharmacist and her father a successful businessman.

As an immigration lawyer, Lewis once sued the Immigration and Naturalization Service for employment discrimination and won. She worked for the agency and has written several books about immigration.

“Mr. Lewis was a financial wizard, a lawyer and an entrepreneur,” Loida Lewis says during a recent trip to Dallas.

“What he liked was the transactions to bring the business in. Now I’ve transitioned it to being operational.”

The transition began in 1993, when Loida Lewis returned after a year-long seclusion over her husband’s death from a brain tumor. What she found was that the food manufacturing and retailing company, the biggest African-American owned enterprise, garnered during a $985 million leveraged buyout in 1987, was limping along without Reginald Lewis at the helm.

Her husband had named his half-brother, Jean Fugett Jr., a former Dallas Cowboy, as his successor. A recession in Europe had hit the business hard. Rain ruined its ice cream sales. And private shareholders were feeling nervous, apparently worried about the company’s future.

“We have two daughters to whom I am now mother and father. He had left his company, the biggest African-American company, and I thought it was important that this company succeed. Our family owns 51 percent of the shares, so who better to run it than us?” Lewis says.

No matter that Lewis had little business experience. No matter that her style - soft, focused and personal - was the exact opposite of her late husband’s flamboyant and fiery nature. Lewis had work to do.

“Mr. Lewis was the last person to accept advice from his wife,” she says. “But he worked 24 hours, so I was an active sounding board. I knew all of the managers.”

She named herself chief executive and chairwoman. She slashed spending. She streamlined staff and the company’s New York office space. She sold the corporate jet. She worked on improving sales. And she ignored the snickering when she opened business meetings with a prayer or hugged her employees.

With the business on track, Lewis has turned her attention to another important task: being the keeper of the Reginald Lewis legacy. When her schedule permits, she crisscrosses the country, promoting her husband’s autobiography. The book is a frank account of the African-American businessman’s rise to success.

Reginald Lewis grew up on what he called the “semi-tough” streets of Baltimore. A self-made man, he took Wall Street by surprise when he engineered the largest leveraged buyout of an overseas company. When he died at the age of 50, he was worth about $400 million.

Loida Lewis wants youngsters to know about her husband. When she travels to promote his book, she surrounds herself with African-American schoolchildren in inner-city neighborhoods, children whose lives resemble the childhood of her late husband.

“Jesse Jackson called my husband the Joe Louis of finance,” she says. “I want the children to know about him and to know that they can succeed.”