Building Life After 70 – Frank Lowy’s Story

Jill Margo
AM is a columnist with The Australian Financial Review and a biographer and author, most recently of Frank Lowy – A Second Life which is a sequel to her first volume on Frank Lowy’s life. As one of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs, Frank Lowy has left a mark on his adopted nation in a way mostly only successful political leaders do. In his second “life”, much has unfolded that recalls past tragedy, present challenges and rebuilding in ways that have benefited Australia nationally. Jill Margo addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 30 September 2015.

BUILDING LIFE AFTER 70 – FRANK LOWY’S STORY

JILL MARGO

When I completed Frank Lowy’s biography in 1999, I never imagined there could be another. He was about to turn 70 which, back then, was regarded as a reasonable age of retirement. Lowy never indicated that he would retire but scholars of the ageing process say men often make this decision without warning.

Let me tell you a little story. In my other life, as columnist on The Australian Financial Review, I write about men’s health every week. Some years ago I was struck when Rupert Murdoch commented that he intended to run News Corporation until he was 100. This was interesting. Could he possibly manage it? I phoned a few geriatricians to ask what they thought. They said it was unlikely and then, just before I gave up, I called one more.

He said something I’ve never forgotten.

Okay, so Murdoch has access to all the health advice, to every health device and any health service money can buy – that’s promising. And there’s room for optimism given his parentage. His mother lived past 100, cognitively intact – which augurs well for him. His father died in his sixties, of a heart condition which can be much better managed today – that augurs well too. On the face of it, he seems healthy and engaged, so you would think yes, perhaps he could remain at the helm until he reached 100. But – and here’s the rub – while older men can protect themselves from a great many things, there is one thing they can’t defend against.

It is a philosophical change. While many ambitious men maintain their motivation for decades, suddenly some find their drive has dissipated. It happens imperceptibly and, rather than continuing to strive to reach the top, they begin to realise they are content with the view from where they are. Something within them has relaxed.

I looked at Murdoch in action. Then I looked at Lowy. In neither was there any external sign of an internal change. So, from a distance I watched as Lowy entered his seventies and began building himself a second life. It was fascinating. While he continued at the helm of Westfield, which was in a growth phase, he took on three unrelated new pursuits. These were not for commercial gain or charity: these were matters of the heart and matters of intellectual pursuit.

He ran these activities in parallel to his business life, as if he was growing a second life alongside his first. When he eventually stepped out of his executive role at Westfield, it was seamlessly into this other life. As I watched this unfold, I thought I would add a couple of chapters to the existing biography to keep it up to date. But the longer I waited, the more he achieved, until there was too much to add on. Perhaps there was enough to fill a new book. HarperCollins thought so too and now the second biography of Frank Lowy has been published.

It’s different to the first. It follows a mature man and shows what can be achieved in the years between 70 and 85.  Where the first book is the classic tale of rags to riches, the second is “then what?” When a man has built his empire and is not ready to step back, what does he do next? Some men become elder statesmen, chair boards, mentor, travel, entertain and enjoy the harvest. Not Lowy. He was too restless, with too much unspent energy and too much interest to disengage. He was just warming up.

So he increased his commitments and entered a period of intense creativity. While there have always been men who have remained creative to a grand age, it seems there’s more of them now. As our society ages and as medicine improves, we are looking at the world differently. It is now so commonly said that 60 is the new 40 that it’s already become a cliché.

Lowy was born in 1930 – at the height of the Great Depression. So were people like George Soros and Warren Buffet. It pumped ambition into their DNA. Lowy was programmed to over-achieve, to work harder than anyone in sight, and to over-perform. He always wanted more. If missing a night’s sleep could yield the slightest slither of an advantage, he’d stay awake.

And he intended to keep going but a serious and dramatic public fall at a football stadium, in May this year, prompted him to reassess his life and voluntarily depressurise. “I want less activity and more appreciation,” he said two days after the fall, having just viewed the footage.

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Lowy is a private man. For the first book, he resisted his natural inclination and allowed me to see something of what lay behind his public face. Since nothing bad came of that, for the second he allowed me to see more – but it took encouragement and hard work. While the factual aspects of his “second life” were relatively easy to find and assemble, understanding his motivation and his emotional engagement was much more difficult.

Persuading a man like Frank Lowy to talk openly about personal issues took many attempts. I’m certain he wasn’t thrilled every time he saw my name marked down for an hour in his diary. I’m also certain I exercised his patience with all the things I wanted to know – from understanding the machinery that keeps such a clan functioning to the details of his dramatic experience with a life threatening cancer. How did he feel last year, when the press rounded on him over the major restructure of Westfield? Why did he care so much about foreign policy to create a whole institute to popularise and promote it? What was it like to stand in Zurich, under an international spotlight, when, after so much effort and so much expectation, he failed to bring home the prize of hosting a FIFA World Cup in Australia?

Often, extracting the details was awkward. How much do you ask? How far do you push without being offensively intrusive? We had some robust exchanges and at times I was uncomfortable. But despite the ups and downs of the long process of writing this book – some four or five years – he never closed the door. He had agreed to remain accessible for the duration, and he did. The bonus for me was that he worked hard at it just as he, throughout his life, has worked hard at everything he has turned his hand to. I tried to respect his trust while telling the story as fully as I could.

When they eventually read the book, his friends were surprised. “Frank, why on earth did you reveal so much?” they asked. This book is rich in revelation and I think he wanted this record of his later life not only to have contextual meaning, but to have internal meaning too. He didn’t just want the commercial, the social and the political aspects examined, he wanted to give people a sense of what lies beneath. And it took courage. Everyone sees the tip of the iceberg, but the hidden bulk is far more complex and interesting.

Lowy is a complex, inaccessible character and this biography gives readers a private view into the inner workings of the man, his family and his various activities, from football to foreign policy. While based on uncountable hours of interviews with him and those close to him, it is balanced by research and long discussions with those distant from him – although it can be a challenge to get people who are critical but commercially engaged with him, to go on the record.

In business, it gives the inside story of the controversial restructure of Westfield in 2014. In football, it provides a blue print to how he rebuilt football and an inside view of the World Cup saga with him offering a “mea-culpa”.

Privately, it tells of how he survived a dramatic battle with cancer and how he and the family manage an incurable eye disease that afflicts his youngest son, Steven. This is revealed for the first time, as is the spiritual journey he has been on for seven decades that culminated with him, as a man of 80, finally finding a way to bury his father who disappeared in occupied Budapest in 1944. This spiritual quest is one of the surprising and most moving aspects of the book. It takes readers into the soul of a man who is usually well armoured in a suit and tie, commanding business.

The book also maps the family structure and how because of his holocaust history and all that was lost, keeping the family intact is paramount for him. Frank kept his nuclear family together with tight control and discipline. Attendance at the family’s Friday night table was mandatory and he and Shirley’s embedded in their three sons the notion that it was “one for all and all for one”. Nothing was more important.

Lowy was a strict disciplinarian, always backed up Shirley and – unlike today – allowed for no negotiation when their sons were growing up. He provided a rigid structure which gave them security and something solid to push against. They did their fair share of disobeying.

Of course, Lowy’s strong central control loosened with new generations and the expansion of the family. He used to go after every sheep that wandered off but the flock got too big and he realised it was no longer his responsibility. He remained, however, dedicated to maintaining the family structure to preserve as much harmony as possible and protect its wealth.

The greater family model was constantly evolving, but for most of his later years, Frank described the individual families as four independent silos with little spill-over. Each had its own social life and friends and while there was no regular social contact between them, they’d get together for a Friday night very often. Frank explained that while each family brought up their children differently and each dealt with its own issues, often when the Lowy men were together, if there was a problem, they would discuss it. As he says in the book:

While the women look after the welfare of their own families and have their own work and outside interests, they have no role in the business and are not involved in the family’s finances. The four men take care of the larger unit. It is very male but the relationship between us is strong. Compromises are made all the time to keep this relationship intact. Nothing interferes with it. Financially we are all locked in. We have common interests and any of the four of us can have what we need or want. It all balances out over time. There are no financial issues between us. While the model works well, it is not as sweet as it appears to be and everyone makes concessions. There are tensions and differences of opinion but these don’t last. Everyone finds their place. We strive to keep the unity above all else. I expect that my sons offload their frustration about me to one another. Of course, they have their disapprovals about each other too and in a way I am the sponge. I absorb the disapprovals from one to other. The test will be what happens when I am gone.

His attitude to the use of money within the family is drawn from his experience growing up in the aftermath of the Great Depression. When one part of the family was in financial distress, others came to its rescue. He remembered when his father was unable to meet the mortgage payments, his mother’s brothers arrived with a suitcase of notes to save the house from being repossessed by the bank. The brothers were small-time grocers in a village some 50 kilometres away. They didn’t have much to spare.

Even in Sydney, when the newly arrived Lowys had virtually nothing, there was always a small family bank. It was housed in an old soup tureen on top of his mother’s wardrobe. If anyone had spare coins or notes they would put them in. Whoever needed money took it out. They would just say, “I took so much” and would put it back when they could. It was there for the whole family.

Fifty years later, so was LFG – The Lowy Family Group. It was there for the family’s needs but it also had the capacity to fund other businesses should someone in the next generation want to begin one. If it was business, however, they wouldn’t get a free ride. If they wanted to do any activity within the LFG umbrella, the business would be evaluated on its merits and their capacity to do it. David, the eldest son who runs LFG, says he treats the kids the same way as he treats other potential partnerships.

Separate from its investment division, David also runs the LFG “Family Office”, which is responsible for tax, treasury, finance and administration. It administers all the family’s activities from its research institute to its museum and think tanks, including real estate, boats, planes and other possessions. LFG employs some 20 people and is a small corporation itself. David says it represents four men who get along, who have worked together as a unit for a long time and have a partnership. Frank is the senior partner and it works because all their economic interests are aligned, their emotional interests are aligned and they are prepared to accept each other’s faults. He calls it a happy accident rather than a dynasty.

While the book shows there are great privileges belonging to such a family, it shows there are many obligations too. The family is spread around the world and gathers regularly for important occasions, anniversaries, birthdays and weddings. This requires the members to be available and to travel. There is no substitute for them giving their time.

While this book is packed with stories about Frank’s activities and the impact they made, it’s really a book about an older man making his way through the world, pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in later years.

It’s about the price one has to pay to remain relevant and it’s about the private benefits of relevance. He is not a man who looks back nostalgically, and complains that it was all so much better then. In fact, I hardly recall him complaining. Rather, than passively grumbling, he gets up and sees what he can do about it. Now, as he approaches 85, he still takes charge as he has always done, but he does it differently.

When I look back at this book, I think it is about is the potential for creativity that resides in decades of experience. Conceptually, I think it’s about mature power.