PRINCE OF PIZZA : Domino’s Top Man Lives Out His Fantasies

In the life of nearly every American boy, there comes a hot summer night when he dreams big. Sitting, perhaps, on a dark front porch with his closest friends, he says aloud what he would do if he had all the money in the world.

A billion-zillion dollars at the very least.

Buy some really incredible cars and impress everybody. Build a huge skyscraper--the biggest one around--that can be seen for miles. Or maybe, just maybe, buy his favorite baseball team and make sure they start winning for a change.

For almost all boys, such ephemeral fantasies evaporate with the next day’s morning sun. They go on to lives in which dream and reality always seem cruelly headed in opposite directions.

Not so for Tom Monaghan.

Way back in junior high school, he wrote his dreams down on what he called his “wish lists.” At the top of each: Buy the Detroit Tigers.

Back then, the lists were nothing more than compilations of the crazy imaginings of a penniless boy. Adolescent fantasies of a kid from rural Michigan who had spent his mixed-up childhood shuttling between orphanage and foster home.

But as 50-year-old Thomas S. Monaghan talked a few days ago about his old habit of list-making, he was standing on his field, inside his Tiger Stadium, waiting for his Tigers to start a crucial pennant stretch drive game against the Toronto Blue Jays. And Monaghan’s lists didn’t sound quite so crazy anymore.

Eccentric, yes. Fantastic, maybe.

But realistic, very definitely.

You see, that little boy who liked lists grew up to be the founder and sole owner of the largest pizza delivery chain in the world--Domino’s Pizza--a private, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company that is growing with nearly geometrical progression. A college dropout who started with one tiny pizza store in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1960, Monaghan has built Domino’s into a massive chain with 4,100 outlets, 130,000 employees, and projected 1987 sales of $2 billion.

Domino’s--which had just 100 outlets as recently as 1976--grew so big so fast because it offered something no one else ever had--home delivery of pizza backed up by national standards for service and quality, and a guarantee of delivery within 30 minutes.

Now, home delivery is considered the fastest-growing segment of the pizza business, and Domino’s success has attracted competition: Pizza Hut, its only nationwide rival in home delivery, has opened 1,000 delivery outlets. Yet, analysts say, no one else has found a way to touch Monaghan in the home-delivery market.

“Domino’s does it better than Pizza Hut. They are pretty dominant right now,” observes Larry Pidgeon, a food and beverage analyst with Goldman, Sachs. “And I do know that Pizza Hut has been consistently losing money at delivery.”

As a result, Domino’s now accounts for more than half of the nation’s pizza home-delivery market, and it is opening at least 700 new stores a year. And there are dozens overseas: Domino’s now delivers pizzas from Tokyo to London, and, just last week, it opened its first outlet in Costa Rica.

Thus Monaghan, the man who boasts that he makes more pizza than Pizza Hut, a man Forbes Magazine calls one of the richest men in America, now has the power of hundreds of millions of dollars behind his lists.

So, almost as quickly as he can spend his considerable storehouse of money, Tom Monaghan is working his way through his wishes.

And if everyone else thinks he’s a little strange as a result, so be it. It’s his money.

“I’ve always been a big dreamer, and that dreaming was the greatest form of preparation” for wealth, Monaghan says. “Because when the opportunity came, I think I was ready for it. A lot of people around me would see me doing things that made no sense to them at all . . . but I had a big jump on them, I was thinking about these things years ago.”

Baseball Fanatic

It is an extravagant life’s task that Monaghan still takes quite seriously: To this day, he refuses to say exactly what was on those lists besides the Tigers. “If it’s something I want, and people knew about it, their prices would just go up,” Monaghan says.

Wish No. 1 was fulfilled after the 1983 baseball season. Monaghan paid $53 million--at the time a record price for a baseball franchise--to become the sole owner of the Tigers, this year’s American League Eastern Division champions, who are now battling the Minnesota Twins in the American League playoffs.

Four years after his biggest acquisition, Monaghan’s interest in the team remains refreshingly simple; he is only marginally involved in the business side of the team, rarely delves into player contract talks or trades, and never worries about attendance.

He still talks like nothing more than a baseball fanatic who has fulfilled his wildest fantasy. “The idea of owning the Tigers is still something that I’m completely . . . I can’t find words for,” Monaghan says. “I didn’t buy the team for its return on investment. I don’t really care what the attendance is, whether it is one million, or two million, as long as they win. I bought it because I like to see the Tigers win. I’m a fan.”

But the team isn’t Monaghan’s only toy. Although he won’t reveal what else was on that young boy’s lists, he has certainly fulfilled plenty of other childhood wishes already, most of them on a grand--some might say ostentatious--scale.

“I have the same kind of fun that Malcolm Forbes has,” Monaghan likes to say. “Some people call it conspicuous consumption, I call it conspicuous investment. I think you can be flamboyant, as long you don’t get too distasteful. Some people think I have, but there are always going to be some who do.”

Frank Lloyd Wright Collector

His acquisitive tastes are nothing if not grandiose, yet they are also quite eclectic. Curiously, besides baseball, one of Monaghan’s childhood obsessions was architecture; as a teen-ager, he became a devoted fan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work.

So now, he has assembled the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and decorative objects in the world. “I think we’ve bought most of the stuff that has changed hands in the last two or three years,” Monaghan says.

That collection hasn’t come cheap; it is now valued at more than $13 million. He has set record after record with his purchases of Wright furniture, and he now complains that other collectors vastly inflate their prices when they see him coming.

But when you have a personal fortune estimated at more than $400 million, you can afford it. So in 1986, Monaghan paid $198,000 for a plain wooden chair designed by Wright, the highest price ever for a single chair. Earlier this year, he paid $264,000 for a nine-drawer wooden dresser by Wright. And, in late September, he set a new record when he paid $1.6 million for a Wright-designed dining room ensemble, the highest price ever paid for a decorative art object.

But his passion for Wright has gone far beyond collecting furniture. He bought Wright’s Snowflake House, built in 1941 in Plymouth, Mich., and now uses it to house Domino’s franchisees visiting his nearby offices. Meanwhile, he has purchased an old hunting lodge on an island in Lake Huron, and is converting it, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s style, into a summer retreat that will sleep 60. (For good measure, he has purchased a smaller island nearby that he has renamed Domino’s Island, where he docks his 64-foot yacht, The Tigress.)

On an even larger scale, his massive corporate headquarters just outside Ann Arbor is designed in the style of a Frank Lloyd Wright residential home. Eventually, when new additions are completed, the new building, called Prairie House, will stretch six-tenths of a mile and have one million square feet under roof. Monaghan calls it his ultimate tribute to Wright.

‘Tower of Pizza’

Just last week, Monaghan announced his biggest building project of all, one that is sure to keep the architectural community buzzing for years. After abandoning plans to use a long-forgotten Wright design for a 56-story Golden Beacon, Monaghan said he will instead build an $80-million conference complex next to his headquarters that will be focused on a dramatic, 435-foot cantilevered tower, which will deliberately lean 15% off center. Monaghan calls it Domino’s Tower, and insists that its design will be an ode to Wright.

But in Ann Arbor, it has already been dubbed “The Leaning Tower of Pizza.”

Monaghan expected such criticism, but claims that he doesn’t care. That’s why he says he will never convert Domino’s to public ownership: because he never wants to have to answer to anyone else.

“I don’t have any feelings one way or another about it,” when asked about the nickname his project has already earned. “You can’t avoid it, so let them call it that.

“But I think we are creating a rare piece of art. Architecture has been a lifelong passion of mine. And I think as the architectural critics look back 10, 20, or 30 years from now, probably not right away, they will say this is one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world.”

Next door to this huge complex, Monaghan also plans to build a Frank Lloyd Wright museum, which will house a Wright studies center for architectural scholars. To top it off, he is planning a nearby Marcel Marceau center for mime studies, where a French pantomimist will live and work at least six months out of every year.

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Among his other interests as a kid, Monaghan was also a car nut, and as a young man fell in love with the romantic automobiles of the 1930s.

So it should come as no great surprise that Monaghan has assembled one of the most expensive collections of classic cars in America.

Last year, he paid $8.1 million for one of only six 1931 Bugatti Royales in existence--the highest price ever paid for a single car. Earlier, he paid more than $1 million apiece for two early Duesenbergs, and now he’s planning to open a classic car museum to showcase his collection. He also sponsors an Indy-car racing team, Domino Pizza’s Team Shierson, with Al Unser Jr. as his lead driver, satisfying his fascination with high-performance cars.

As Monaghan slowly but surely goes about this odd task of bringing to life his childhood dreams, those around him insist that he is enjoying himself and that he hasn’t gotten caught up in an acquisitive fever.

“He probably has more fun with what he has than most people would,” observes Dave Black, Domino’s vice president for operations, who has worked for Monaghan since 1972. “But that’s because he appreciates it more than most would--people who see him now don’t see the times that were tough, when he was starting Domino’s and he lived in a trailer with his family.”

Yet for a man so given to what others might deem ostentation, Monaghan is surprisingly quiet in person, painfully so in fact. Associates say he is quiet in private meetings as well, even though he is running the show. “He’s quiet at home too,” says one of his four daughters, Susie Monaghan, 22, who now works in the Tigers’ farm system. “But once you get him talking, especially about Frank Lloyd Wright or his cars, you can’t shut him up.”

Monaghan admits that he has a split personality, a quiet, rather mundane side that seems at odds with the more visible flamboyance that money has allowed him to express.

“It (dual personality) creates a little criticism of me,” for being inordinately conspicuous, he acknowledges.

Still, Monaghan likes to think of himself as a religious man. At last weekend’s pennant-clinching Tigers game against Toronto, nine Catholic nuns from the Felician order that ran the orphanage where he spent much of his childhood were sitting with him in his private box.

“As long as you have that foundation, that moral code, that says, ‘don’t do anything wrong,’ then it’s OK” to spend money, Monaghan says. “If it doesn’t hurt anybody, go ahead.

“To me, that is what good taste is. If it doesn’t hurt anybody, it’s all right.”