Nailing Down Hammer : Books: Author Steve Weinberg spent five years trying to capture on paper the elusive industrialist who made Oxy Petroleum a giant. Now his subject is fighting to banish the book.

When 91-year-old industrialist Armand Hammer popped up in the news recently because he had a pacemaker installed, he needed no introduction. Anyone who turns Occidental Petroleum into a multinational conglomerate, builds an art empire, pumps millions of dollars into cancer research and shuttles around the world as a citizen-diplomat is sure to be a household name.

With two autobiographies, two authorized biographies and tons of newspaper and magazine articles about Hammer on library shelves, his life is an open book.

Or so it seems.

But in late 1984, author Steve Weinberg, an associate journalism professor at the University of Missouri, decided to get to know Hammer better. Over the next five years, Weinberg interviewed about 600 of Hammer’s friends, enemies and associates and studied “hundreds of thousands” of pages of documents.

The result is the newly released “Armand Hammer, The Untold Story,” a 501-page profile that Weinberg said is far too intricate to boil down into any sort of a capsule summary.

Hammer’s attorneys have had no such reluctance.

In an unusual letter urging publisher Little Brown & Co. to drop the book, they argued that “The Untold Story” portrays Hammer “as the scion of a morally bankrupt family, who from young adulthood has had a propensity for criminal and fraudulent behavior.”

“In keeping with such a theme,” the letter continued, “the book contains dozens of passages impugning (Hammer’s) motives, reflecting adversely on his integrity and inferring that he is, and has been throughout his life, unscrupulous and willing to attain personal goals and ambitions through criminal acts, breaches of fiduciary duty or other unconscionable behavior.”

Neither Hammer nor his attorneys would talk to The Times about Weinberg’s book.

But in their letter, dated last July, the attorneys stated that the book, which Hammer also has moved to keep from being published in Great Britain, is “beyond redemption by corrections.”

Weinberg scoffs at that accusation. In his view, the controversy merely raises basic questions facing any biographer: How does one accurately and honestly portray the life of another human?

Even before Hammer’s best-selling autobiography hit the stores in 1987, then-Vice President George Bush, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Israeli leader Menachem Begin contributed gushing publicity blurbs. So did Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Barbara Walters.

But in an article in Regardie’s magazine the year before, Weinberg had written that “Hammer has created a persona that sometimes seems to conflict with the facts. Without the facts it is hard to know where myth ends and reality begins. . . . Many journalists have failed to probe behind Hammer’s carefully cultivated image. Hammer has preempted the market in information about himself. . . .”

That assessment was underscored as he set out to research the book, Weinberg said. “The Doctor,” as everyone calls Hammer, refused to talk; he and his associates told others not to talk either, sources who did speak up told Weinberg.

“Almost everyone who currently draws money from him in any connection said no,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg is particularly angry that while he was submitting his book proposal to various publishing houses, someone violated an unwritten, sacred rule of the industry and, he asserts, leaked a copy to Hammer. He also has heard from former Hammer associates that The Doctor disliked the article in Regardie’s.

“And common sense says it didn’t help that I run an organization called Investigative Reporters and Editors,” said Weinberg, the executive director of that respected professional group.

But he remains uncertain why Hammer, who by all accounts relishes publicity, was so adamant in attempting to lower a veil of silence on his effort. Still, bolstered by a $160,000 advance, Weinberg set out to piece together a portrait of a man who didn’t want to be portrayed.

With or without Hammer’s stamp of approval, the basic threads of his life shake out the same in the various biographies.

The differences are in the authors’ approach and inclusion of details.

These differences are even reflected in chapter headings. The first chapter of the authorized biography, for instance, is titled “Genesis of Genius.” The first chapter of Weinberg’s unauthorized biography is “A Bankrupt Family.”

For the most part, though, Weinberg is aggressively timid about drawing conclusions.

He is not, for instance, an admirer of the now popular psycho-historical school of biography, as practiced by Gail Sheehy and others: “I don’t think a biographer should put his subject on the couch any more than necessary. . . . We have trouble knowing what our own wife or brother or sister or mother is thinking at any time. What presumption would lead me to tell people what Armand Hammer is thinking?”

Such protestations aside, Weinberg does juxtapose facts and supply a few editorial asides to hint at the psychological forces that shaped Hammer’s life and set him on the “quest for respect and respectability.”

In Weinberg’s portrayal, Hammer’s father, Julius, was a man who believed sincerely in socialism, yet worked hard to support his family as a capitalist, managing eight drugstores at one time.

At one point in his investigation, Weinberg unearthed documentation that in 1906 Julius Hammer declared bankruptcy, apparently, the book suggests, to illegally evade creditors.

A long battle ensued. But Weinberg concludes that “the relative painlessness with which Julius and Rose (Armand’s mother) escaped from bankruptcy court, despite the untruthfulness of their testimony, almost surely impressed upon everybody that cover-ups and convenient memory lapses could be useful tactics.”

At age 10, Armand was sent by his parents to live with a socialist colleague of his father’s in Connecticut and stayed there five years--”. . . it seems not to have done any lasting harm to his psyche, unless a possible feeling of abandonment should be regarded as causing his lifelong quest for public adulation,” Weinberg writes.

Hammer took over as the head of his family at age 21, when his father was arrested and eventually convicted of first-degree manslaughter in connection with the death of a woman on whom he had performed an abortion. Many observers at the time contended that the 2 1/2 years Hammer’s father spent in Sing Sing prison stemmed from his leftist beliefs more than any lapse in medical judgment.

Hammer’s fight to free his father became a personal crusade, and Weinberg traces a similar tenacity--and what the author sees as a similar willingness to bend the rules--through some of Hammer’s many other quests, including his thus-far unsuccessful attempt to drill for oil in Pacific Palisades and his successful bid to receive a presidential pardon for making illegal campaign contributions to former President Richard Nixon.

Hammer first made his fortune selling medicine with a high dose of alcohol during Prohibition and quickly became, in Weinberg’s words, “a deal junkie.” On a trip to Moscow in 1921, Hammer met, and impressed, Soviet premier Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Unexpectedly, he settled for nine years in the Soviet Union, where he operated an asbestos mine, established a pencil factory and began dealing in Czarist art, among other enterprises.

Hammer and his third wife, Frances, didn’t invest in Occidental Petroleum until 1956, when it was a tiny company with $79,000 in assets. They thought several new wells Oxy planned to drill at the time would be losers and that those financial losses would make a nice tax shelter for their already substantial wealth, Weinberg writes.

Instead, the drillers hit oil.

Other successes followed, and, in 1957, Hammer, who had been briefly reluctant to get into the industry, became president of Occidental Petroleum, which then had a full-time staff of three. Quickly, Weinberg writes, Hammer began “reshaping Occidental’s board of directors in his image.”

Hammer has never been a majority shareholder in Occidental. Rather, Weinberg writes, he controlled the company then and now with “his forceful personality, keen mind, capacity for work and incessant salesmanship.”

And cunning. For example, Hammer demanded that many Oxy board members submit signed, undated letters of resignation, which kept the members effectively under his thumb, Weinberg writes.

As the company grew and diversified, it ran into the sort of problems any multinational conglomerate might. Allegations of illegal payoffs to government officials have haunted Hammer for years, for instance. As has labor unrest.

One issue that receives Weinberg’s attention is whether Hammer has, at times, put Occidental’s bottom line ahead of the greater public good, as when Occidental inherited the toxic mess at Love Canal and, critics have said, dragged its corporate feet in settling claims.

Similarly, Weinberg’s book suggests that Hammer’s oil dealings with Libya “set in train the oil price rises of the 1970s” and eventually “without question . . . changed the balance of power in the world.”

On the other hand, the book also raises the issue of whether Hammer sometimes puts his own ego--and, some say, capricious goals--ahead of the interests of Occidental, as suggested by the class-action lawsuits that have been filed against him by shareholders over the years.

Weinberg asserts that out of respect for the intelligence of readers, his book leaves such subjective issues open to debate. Besides, he’s not sure of his own conclusions, he said. At no point in the writing or research did he ever have the sort of epiphany some biographers experience--a moment when the sea of facts and anecdotes parts miraculously and the True Nature of the person under scrutiny reveals itself.

“I have a great deal of respect for some of what he’s done; a great deal of abhorrence for some of what he’s done. He’s very complex. Maybe that was my epiphany--how complex he is. . . . Some think he walks on water. Some think he’s the devil incarnate.”

In an essay on the art of biography he wrote for the Missouri Review, Weinberg quoted Thomas Carlyle: “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.”

He rewrote this one six times, from beginning to end. But he remains unconvinced that anyone ever fully captures a person’s life in print. “I’m very humble about the biographer’s job,” he said.

The reviews of “The Untold Story,” however, have been generally favorable. If anything, they accuse Weinberg of letting Hammer off easy. Fortune magazine reviewer Irwin Ross called it “a good book, iconoclastic by necessity but judicious in tone, skeptical rather than hostile.”

The New York Times said that “Mr. Weinberg, in spite of his careful detachment, appears to be rather too easily won over by Mr. Hammer.”

The only review that makes Weinberg bristle appeared in Business Week. In it, Stewart Toy wrote that “the most striking thing about this book is how little the facts vary from those in Hammer’s 1987 autobiography.”

Weinberg argues that while both books are basically accurate in the facts they present, his book is packed with new information.

For instance, none of Hammer’s four major run-ins with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission are mentioned in Hammer’s 1987 autobiography. By filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the SEC, Weinberg turned up reams of previously unavailable information, he said.

Hammer continues to fight him in federal court on the release of documents detailing the last two SEC investigations of Occidental, contending those files, which pertain, in part, to Hammer’s negotiations in Libya and Latin America, “involve supposed national security issues,” Weinberg said.

“Hammer and his lawyers went crazy to stop me. They spent a lot of time and I presume a lot of money to convince the SEC not to release the files,” he said. For the book, Weinberg had to rely on now-available public records to discuss those later investigations.

He said he hopes to include the information that will come from further release of documents in subsequent editions.

That is, if a Hammer lawsuit doesn’t somehow push the book out of print.

In his biography, Weinberg quotes Hammer attorney Louis Nizer as saying that Hammer is “unabashedly litigious. . . . When principle is involved, he rejects compromise. . . . It does not matter how great the gamble.”

So at first, Weinberg thought Hammer was simply trying to quash a book that contained more information than Hammer wanted the public to have. After all, he said, virtually everyone he talked to agrees that “The Doctor likes to control his own image and own fate.”

But lately Hammerologists have suggested to Weinberg that The Doctor may actually be cooking up the controversy as a convoluted way to feed his own fame.

“Enough people who know Hammer have suggested that that I’m beginning to believe it--especially considering that he hasn’t pressed things,” Weinberg said. “I’m more and more convinced that he’s just wily enough to have done all this to boost sales of the book.”