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I Can See Clearly Now
Following a mysterious brush
with death, Bob Matthews ponders
life, love and second chances
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Business New Haven
2/21/2000
By: Michael Gomez
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Bob Matthews is running for his life.
Seemingly out of nowhere, he stormed into the New Haven business world in the early 1990s with a vigor, personality and checkbook that were as outsized as his ego. He bought white elephant buildings, rehabilitated them, and filled them with paying tenants.
That's what he did. But it doesn't describe how he did it.
He palled around with the high and mighty, entertaining the captains of industry and polity on his bobbing 100-foot yacht, the aptly named Bon Vivant. He befriended the rich and famous, and was known to shelter a buddy or two during nasty marital upheavals. He quickly cast himself as a player on the stage where worldwide celebrity, politics and wealth commingle as enthusiastically as orgiasts.
His friends included Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Rowland, Ted Kennedy, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. A Republican, he nevertheless happily supported liberal Democrats and helped fill campaign coffers of both the entrenched and insurgents when it suited his purposes.
He curried favors, and he dispensed them. He made CEOs and pols delighted to smoke their noxious cigarettes on the dock of the bay, instead of sullying his million-dollar boat. He shared his life with a beautiful blonde actress with a ready wit and an indulgence for his excesses.
For his excesses were many.
He walked fast, wolfed down meals like he was being docked pay for not working, talked as fast as a carnival barker, and cursed as profanely as a longshoreman. He smoked expensive cigars and collected 18th century American art - portraits of stern-faced aristocrats who peer disapprovingly at visitors in his offices.
He worked 12 hours a day and rarely took time off. He did countless media interviews and had strong opinions on every topic. When he was not making deals, he was jetting off to his Nantucket summer home, his Florida winter homes, his penthouse in Manhattan, or famous friends' estates in Hyannisport or the Hamptons.
He was always on. He was always hyper.
Then he almost died.
Mysterious Ailment Lays Him Up
One day last August, Matthews awoke at his Nantucket home with a 104-degree temperature. “I think I have the flu,” he thought to himself. He dragged himself to the island hospital. At first, doctors found nothing. He returned to the hospital the next morning after a poor night's sleep.
Doctors initially thought he had hepatitis; tests disproved that diagnosis. He began sinking fast. The hospital airlifted Matthew to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he embarked on a 40-day near-death journey. He eventually was diagnosed as having Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).
ARDS is a devastating, more often than not fatal lung condition. It's a form of sudden and severe lung failure, likely caused by infection or a severe trauma. Experts so far have failed to find accurate causes for the illness.
In any event, Matthews' lungs weren't able to perform their normal function of getting oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from his body. First described in 1967, ARDS afflicts about 150,000 Americans each year. The death rate exceeds 50 percent, and there are no established medication treatments for combating it.
To treat ARDS, doctors in hospital intensive-care units hook up patients to mechanical ventilators that deliver oxygen-enriched air to the body while removing the carbon dioxide. Often, the patient is induced into a coma to facilitate breathing; that's what happened to Matthews.
In the latter stages of his hospital stay, Matthews was treated with experimental steroid drugs that worked to reduce lung damage. He began recovering and returned during the fall to his Middlebury home, where he remained on oxygen for a while longer. Gradually, he built up strength and began putting on weight; he says he lost 40 pounds during the weeks of his travail, and his muscles atrophied. These are common occurrences for people with ARDS.
Back into the Fray
Now, less than six months after nearly being felled by the mysterious lung malady, Bob Matthews is gingerly returning to the arena. He's a new man, or so he says. A changed man. More reflective, more savoring of life, devoted to his wife, Mia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Miranda.
Still...Still he's switched on. He's still hyper. He still enjoys the limelight and friends in high places. He still loves the art of the deal. He still likes making money, and spending it. He still gets itchy being still.
He's actively recovering from his illness. He's vacationing in the Caribbean, Aspen, Florida, Las Vegas, Montana. He sports a tan and is anxious to get into tennis and golf, once his joints loosen up from the illness. He's been to his office at 59 Elm Street only three times since August. He and his wife are carving out a 165-acre preserve in the tony Litchfield County hamlet of Washington to build a ranch and provide his daughter with horses, fresh air and some roots. Mia named the Washington property “Moon River,” after the famous Henry Mancini song that she crooned to Matthews during his coma.
He's selling much of his real estate holdings, having sold SNET's former office building at 300 George Street in early February for $27.5 million, after buying it for a $500,000 in 1996. Realtors and economic development experts familiar with downtown properties and SNET's operation say that SNET actually got a good deal.
“They would have sold it for a dollar,” says one observer, noting that SNET at that time had sold off most of its data-systems functions and moved essential IT operations to leased quarters in Meriden.
What's discernible about Matthews, now, is the presence of nuance. Maybe it's maturity (he turns 42 this month), marriage, fatherhood, or surviving a near-death experience. Probably it's all that, and more.
BNH recently spent some time with Matthews, to learn about his momentous past year, and to find out why he apparently is divesting himself of his vast holdings in New Haven. Here's what he had to say about these, and other, issues.
Matthews: There are lessons that came out of this [illness]. If somebody can get just a little bit out of it, and if it changes them in a good way, then I feel like it was meant to be.
Before I got sick, business was more important that family and friends. When I came out of it, family and friends became like a thousand and business went to zero.
It feels like I got into a time machine. And I moved from 41 to 82 years old, and I'm dying. I look back on my life and ask what would I have done differently? When you're dying, you don't look back and say, 'I wish I had done more deals.' So I got that experience, got back into the time machine and had the privilege and the blessing to be 41 again and wake up and have that knowledge. That's worth a billion dollars, you know?
What did you learn?
Life for me before was like a big six- or nine-lane highway. I broke my neck playing polo. I was jumping out of planes. I was a bit of a vivant - that's why we named the boat Bon Vivant. I sold it a while ago. Now life, my road, is thinner. It's more precarious. You gotta be careful and look at what you're doing. You better hope and wish that you'd done everything that you wanted to do before you die. Because you really could die.
When you're 41, you don't really think about dying. You don't speak as much from the heart as you do the head. Now, every day I feel like I have an extra day. I don't have time to waste or bull with anybody. If you don't change after this, you're a big jerk.
Why are you divesting your properties?
I'm cleaning up, selling some of my buildings. I was planning on selling some buildings before this illness. I sold George Street last week, sold it to a good group of people [Winstanley Associates of Concord, Mass., which bought the seven-story, 500,000 square foot downtown office building]. I think they're going to do a good job with it. I paid a half million dollars for it and put in a couple of jelly beans [$1.5 million to $2 million]. But it wasn't the purchase price. It was losing $200,000 a month. And there's a ton of money to come out of it. We just put Yale in for a ten-year lease. We did Pirelli, IXC Communications. SNET's still in there. It's got a good start, it's bringing in $3 million a year in leases. I think [Winstanley] is going to do a lot with the biotech stuff. We didn't do biotech because we didn't get there yet, not because it would've cost $10 million for heating and ventilating upgrades. We were really busy there. And anyway, always leave something in it for the next guy, is my theory.
Is this a reaction to getting sick, or is it just a good time to sell?
It's a good time to sell. We're into our 108th month of recovery, or whatever. Consumer confidence is at its highest. But sooner or later there will be a recession and there will be some real buying opportunities. So I wouldn't mind being in a cash position for the next time, when there are opportunities.
Despite your intentions, do you fear that
you'll too easily slip back into being all business all the time?
Sure. But I remember that I have a get-out-of-jail-free card. They wrote me off. I was 99-percent dead. Now I want to take the clutter out of my life. There was nothing I didn't like about the old Bob Matthews. I was driven. I was doing it, doing deals. And that's still a part of me. But now I don't worry as much. I take a shower after 32 days in bed. I'm all hooked up with oxygen and I'm standing up and taking a shower. And I'm thinking, 'What's a shower worth - $28 million?' And there are other things you think of. Wheelchairs? I'm in a wheelchair for this [period], so I start thinking about my buildings a little harder, to make sure everything is wheelchair-accessible. My relationships are stronger. I'm amazed that people cared so much. I swear they did like 40 prayer groups for me. If you asked me before, I maybe wasn't afraid to die because I was cocky. Now, as long as I'm living every day to my fullest, then whenever your time clock is up, it's up.
Where will you invest your time and money after you sell off these buildings?
I'm not sure. I'll always have my arm in real estate. It's okay to have a balanced portfolio. There's nothing wrong with being heavy in cash, heavy in real estate, heavy in manufacturing, and heavy in software. When one's down, it's bound to be that another one's up. The main thing now is to enjoy what I'm doing. To have fun. When you just chase the money, it never works. When you do it to have fun, it always works.
I'll probably take a small piece of the pie and leave it for start-ups and entrepreneurs. Small things. Dot-coms, biotechs. Something you can invest in, give some advice, sit on the board, but not have to run it day-to-day. That's more on the front burner than it's ever been. So we'll probably have this little fund...put in some throwaway money, because if it doesn't work it won't change your life. It'll be a gamble but, hopefully, an intelligent one.
Business will still be a passion. But never more important than family. And I plan on doing some non-profit stuff that helps people. Something to do with health and kids. I can see me doing fundraising, getting people started. Life's been good to me. And it's good to give back. It's good karma.
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