Lundberg’s Family Feuds Over Future

One year ago this weekend, some 30 employees of Lundberg Survey gathered in a banquet room at the Burbank Airport Hilton for what turned into an embarrassing family fracas.

The topic was to have been the future of the North Hollywood company following the death of 73-year-old company patriarch Dan Lundberg, the nation’s guru of gasoline. But shortly after dinner, Lundberg’s son, Jan, rose from the head table and complained that he was being forced out of the family-owned company by his sister, Trilby, and his mother, Mesa.

Mesa repeatedly asked Jan to sit down. Finally, Jan’s cousin, Roger Jensen, fetched a hotel security officer to have him thrown out. They arrived just as Jan was leaving the room.

The incident is illustrative of a bitter power struggle that has torn the family apart--including a mother suing her son through the company. The feud stems from Dan Lundberg’s failure to formally spell out who would succeed him in running his influential oil industry research company.

The family business he left, based in North Hollywood, is best known for its widely quoted Lundberg Letter on gasoline prices and supplies. In 1979, Lundberg accurately predicted the gasoline shortage and his celebrity was assured.

Although the private company consistently made money, the Lundberg Letter contributed less than 10% of the company’s estimated $4 million in annual revenue and broke even at best, according to former employees. Most of the firm’s business came from special studies--which could cost from $10,000 to $15,000--that were done for oil companies and government agencies on such subjects as share of the gasoline market in a given community.

All five of Dan Lundberg’s children by his two marriages worked at one time or another for the company. But Lundberg’s widow, Mesa, contends that Lundberg had been grooming two of his children, Jan and Trilby, to take over.

But his son, Jan, 35, argues that he was being groomed to run the company, although his father never said so in writing. He was vice president of operations at Lundberg Survey at the time of his father’s death, and Jan confidently told reporters at the time that he was in control, irking family members and employees who felt that he acted without authority.

Fired by Mother

On the other side of the battle is mother Mesa, 67, who inherited control of the company under her husband’s 1965 will, and sister Trilby, 38, who was not working for her father when he died, but who now effectively runs the company.

Jan lost his fight for control when he was fired by his mother, Mesa, one year ago. Since then, he has suggested that another, more recent will exists that gives him control of the company. The allegedly handwritten papers by Dan Lundberg, Jan concedes, do not constitute a legal document because the first page is missing. Other family members interviewed, however, said they doubt that it is an authentic will. One family member who has seen it says he believes that it is not Dan Lundberg’s handwriting.

In an interview, Mesa said of her son, “Maybe he feels forced out because I wouldn’t let him be his father.”

Although Jan has been gone from the company for a year, the rift grows deeper. Since being fired, Jan collected $20,000 in severance pay from the company and moved to Fredericksburg, Va., to start a gasoline industry consulting business. He plans to begin publishing a newsletter called the Jan Lundberg Report later this year.

A little more than a week ago, Lundberg Survey sued Jan in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, asking the court to stop him from using the Lundberg name in what it contends is a competing business. In a declaration filed in the case, Mesa makes a wide range of charges against her son that include stealing company information, trying to sabotage one of its newsletters, soliciting Lundberg Survey business in violation of an agreement he signed when he left and showing a lack of reverence after his father’s death.

In court papers, Mesa said of Jan, “His sole concern and blind ambition was to become chief executive officer with full authority . . . or he desired no position at all.”

‘Kamikaze Attack’

Jan denies the accusations. “This is simply a kamikaze attack by my mother and sister,” he said in an interview. He contends that his mother gave him the right to use the Lundberg name in his new business, but she later changed her mind.

He also said that the suit was filed in an effort to get some of the $75,000 he raised for his financially strapped business by selling his father’s boat, which he received as part of a severance agreement.

The lawsuit brings into the open a bitter sibling rivalry that simmered for years between Jan and Trilby, much of it the result of Jan’s intense dislike of Trilby’s husband, Venezuelan-born businessman German Chacin, 42, who has close ties to Venezuelan oil interests and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel. Jan contends that Chacin’s influence is inappropriate, given the Lundberg Letter’s long-standing claim of impartiality about the oil industry.

Relations between Jan and Trilby deteriorated to the point that they would avoid family gatherings on Christmas holidays when they knew that the other would be there, according to family members.

The feuding has become particularly bitter in the past few months. Mark Emond, a former editor of the Lundberg Letter, said his complimentary subscription to the publication was cut off immediately after he allowed Jan, as a favor, to list his name as an associate for Jan’s new company in a trade publication advertisement.

Emond said Trilby told him she was hurt that his name appeared in her brother’s ad. “I thought it was vindictive and petty,” Emond said.

Trilby Lundberg did not return numerous telephone calls to her office and her Sylmar home requesting comments for this story.

The feud between brother and sister was long masked by what generally were portrayals in the press of Lundberg Survey as a harmonious, family-run operation.

Dan Lundberg, a big bear of a man, was a charmer with the press. He courted reporters, responding to their questions with bold, candid predictions and a quirky wit (he dubbed one gasoline crisis the “Days of Lines and Hoses”).

In early 1979, Lundberg became a media celebrity when his newsletter correctly forecast that year’s disruptive gasoline shortage.

In the years that followed, his gasoline forecasts were transmitted around the world each weekend in wire service stories, which were routinely given good play, in part because weekends are usually slower news days. Lundberg’s face, with its white hair and goatee, made him look something like Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Col. Sanders. He appeared regularly on television news shows and was never reluctant to make predictions, although he was sometimes criticized for making panicky statements to get publicity.

Tough on Employees Lundberg’s oldest son, Guy, 47, recalled that his father’s thirst for publicity was so great that he asked the telephone be left on the hook during the weekend marriage of Trilby and Chacin in the family’s Hollywood Hills home because he feared he might miss calls from reporters. Lundberg eventually yielded to requests from family members to keep it off the hook for 30 minutes during the ceremony, Guy said.

“It was like he was half-joking, but it was also like he was half not joking. He had a passion for publicity,” Guy said.

In private, however, Lundberg was a secretive, often abrasive and moody man who rarely let on what he was thinking, according to former employees and family members. Lundberg also placed extraordinary pressure on family members working under him, to the point of punishing some who took annual vacations, according to interviews with former employees and court documents.

Guy Lundberg, whose mother, Helen, is Lundberg’s first wife, said that working for his father eventually became intolerable. His father, he said, always believed that he was right and it led to numerous arguments. Guy stopped working for his father in 1970 in a falling out he said was so bitter that the two stopped speaking to each other for about six years.

“He was the most brilliant man I knew,” Guy said, who now runs a data processing firm in Van Nuys. “But he was also a benevolent dictator.”

The son of an interior decorator from Sweden, Dan Lundberg was born in Connecticut in 1912 and moved to Boston when he was a young boy. He once played in a jazz band, but he later turned to writing, publishing a moderately successful novel called “River Rat” in 1941 that he often compared in interviews to J. D. Salinger’s classic “Catcher in the Rye.” He also later hosted a live television program in Los Angeles.

Lundberg started his gasoline survey company in 1955. Despite his lack of technical education in energy, he earned a reputation as a perceptive oil analyst who compiled an efficient fact-gathering organization that collected thousands of facts on gasoline stations and prices through a network of part-time employees, many of them retired senior citizens.

Apparently Favored Daughter

What put the company on the map was its weekly newsletter, which recently went to twice a month. The newsletter summarized many of the trends on gasoline prices and supplies into a readable summary that ran from six to 10 pages long. Annual subscription prices varied according to the size of the company ordering it, but generally fell in the $200 range. Prices have recently gone up.

By family accounts, Trilby may have been Lundberg’s favorite child. She received extraordinary attention from her father. He named her after Trilby O’Ferrall, the heroine of George du Maurier’s late 19th-Century novel, “Trilby,” about a woman in Paris who is hypnotized by a sinister man named Svengali into becoming a great singer.

The selection of the name was prophetic. Much as Svengali wanted to transform the fictional Trilby into a great singer, family members said, Lundberg wanted to make his daughter into a great classical pianist.

By age 5, she was learning complicated pieces from Mozart and Debussy. Ever the promoter, Lundberg paid to have albums made of her work beginning at age 7 that had the look of professional recordings, but which were primarily given away to friends, reporters and business associates as gifts.

Her brother Jan is something of an enigma, described by family members and former associates as somewhat immature, possessive and often having grandiose expectations. In an interview last week, Jan said that if he loses the battle with his mother and sister it may be because he is destined to become a future U.S. Energy Secretary, which he said he believes is achievable because of political connections in the oil industry that he says he has developed.

Tackled Any Job

One longtime Lundberg Survey executive, who asked not to be identified, said Jan was good at delegating responsibilities, but, unlike his father, often acted as though many tasks were beneath him.

“He was conspicuously absent from doing whatever needed to be done,” the executive said. “Dan valued his time, but Dan also would roll up his shirt sleeves and do a clerical job if that is what needed to be done.”

In the late 1970s, Lundberg brought both Trilby and Jan into the company fold. In 1979, Trilby and her father traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to attend a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel. It was there she met Chacin, who was one of the officials coordinating the meeting.

Jan contends Chacin manipulates his sister and mother and orchestrated his firing, in part, to tilt the newsletter’s slant toward OPEC. “He has been behind the scenes manipulating her and has been a mentor for my sister since they first met,” Jan said.

In a telephone interview from Caracas, where he was on business, Chacin called Jan’s accusations ridiculous. “I don’t know why he feels so bad. I never did anything to him,” Chacin said.

He said his businesses, which include steel and oil operations, leave him no time to meddle in the Lundberg’s affairs. Besides, Chacin said, he is a harsh critic of OPEC, principally for its failure during the last few years to stick to its production quotas.

While Jan insists that his father made it clear to him that he was to be the successor, friends, associates and family members interviewed said the senior Lundberg never openly disclosed his specific plans.

“Nobody knows the story unless they were inside of Dan’s head,” Emond said.

Mesa said the couple had no specific plans. “You don’t know exactly how things are going to develop. No one person can plan everybody’s role,” she said.

In the past year since taking control, Mesa and Trilby have scaled back the company. The Lundberg Letter went from a weekly to a biweekly, Mesa said, to allow the company to report trends in more detail. And greater emphasis is being put on the more profitable special studies.

Concern About Changes

In addition, some longtime employees have been dismissed. Emond, for example, received a letter from Mesa at the end of last year saying his services as editor were no longer needed. In addition, Mesa fired her nephew, Roger Jensen.

Customers said they haven’t noticed changes in the quality of information provided by the company, but they are concerned about how the power struggle and organizational changes will affect the company.

“There were many people who brought tremendous credibility and expertise to the organization,” said one top planning executive with a major oil company. “Since many of them have departed, you have to wonder about the expertise that is there in terms of handling things other than the fundamental bean counting.”

Some former Lundberg employees say that while Dan Lundberg never made it clear, they assumed Jan would take over. They note that Trilby had left the company early last year before her father died, taking with her a publication called “Energy Detente” that her father had started in the early 1980s.

The reasons Trilby left the company aren’t entirely clear. Emond said Dan never told him why she left, but it was obvious there had been some kind of falling out. Once Lundberg died, Emond said, Trilby wanted back in.

“The fact of the matter is that Trilby was gone. Then she was in there tenaciously from early morning until late at night,” Emond said.

But Emond also said Jan suddenly disappeared when the battle became more intense, about the time Jan was fired. Emond blames him for not fighting it through.

“Jan walked out at a critical period,” Emond said. “Here is a life and death struggle between you and your sister, and you just don’t show up? He felt betrayed and simply disappeared.”

Dan Lundberg was probably best known for making forecasts. But he often tried to downplay his forecasts, saying that reporters made too much of them and that no one can predict the future.

“You can make projections, you can make forecasts and you can make predictions, but I don’t do any of that,” he told The Times in 1981, saying he based his conclusions only on numbers.

Jan said that, despite all of the animosity in the family, he firmly hopes one day to reconcile with his sister and mother. Just when that will happen, however, seems hard to predict.