Key Figures in the Dispute : DONALD L. BREN : Close-up: Developer appears to be uncomfortable in his role as one of the richest men in the country.
To learn about Donald L. Bren, suggests another Orange County developer, you must study his buildings: Graceful but severe office towers with courtyards and lobbies so lean and spare that they suggest aesthetic statements rather than places for people to work.
Like his buildings, Bren is cool, reserved--a rich man who is uncomfortable with the kind of attention that being a billionaire brings.
It is hard to imagine a more unlikely business partner for this aloof man than the feisty, blunt-spoken Joan Irvine Smith--who was sometimes called “the Dragon Lady” around the Irvine Co., the firm her grandfather founded in 1894.
But Bren, not the Irvine heirs, now owns the company. It has made him one of the 20 richest men in the nation. But he undoubtedly wishes he had never met Smith, who launched a protracted and nasty legal battle in 1983 charging that he cheated her out of her stock when he bought out her interest that year.
The lawsuit was resolved on Monday when a Michigan court referee ruled that Bren should pay Smith $149 million plus interest for her shares in the company. Smith had sought $330 million plus interest; Bren had offered $114 million.
Having the suit resolved is surely a relief to Bren, who was unavailable for comment. But his top associates said the ruling confirms the basic fairness of the 1983 transaction.
Bren, because of his vast suburban holdings, has been called a “horizontal Donald Trump.” Based on a conservative estimate of his wealth by Forbes magazine, Bren, with $1.8 billion, is worth $100 million more than the better-known East Coast developer. And Bren has never faced the severe cash-flow problems that now threaten to topple Trump’s empire.
Bren, 57, grew up amid the new Southern California wealth created by the movies; his father was a Hollywood producer for the “Topper” movies, and his stepmother is the actress Claire Trevor.
Bren got a degree in business from the University of Washington and spent three years as an officer in the Marine Corps. He returned to Orange County, where his parents lived in the summer, and began building houses in 1958.
Lean, athletic and handsome, by his 30th birthday in the early 1960s Bren was also rich, although nowhere near as wealthy as he would become. There was something different about him: He had huge plans, visions of whole cities built from scratch, cities planned down to the last detail that would avoid the mistakes of the past, cities with imposing architecture that would stand out among the tacky strip malls and housing tracts beginning to engulf Southern California.
He got his chance in 1963, when he persuaded one of Orange County’s big landholding families to let him build the town of Mission Viejo on what was then a pasture. (Mission Viejo is now a city of 71,000.) But Bren had a falling-out with the O’Neill family, the developers of Mission Viejo, and they bought him out.
Still, almost everything else he touched turned to gold. In 1969, Bren sold his own home-building company--the Bren Co.--to International Paper for $35 million. But after the paper company got a close look at a real estate downturn, it sold the company back to Bren three years later for only $28 million.
In 1977, Bren got another chance. The Irvine Co., which ran the Irvine family’s huge ranch, was up for sale. Once a huge farming operation, the ranch was being transformed into a sea of subdivisions for the waves of people arriving in the county.
Bren and Smith--an heiress of the Irvine family who already owned stock--joined some of the nation’s wealthiest men to buy the company.
Also bidding for the ranch was the Mobil Corp., one of the world’s largest corporations. In the bidding that ensued, Bren proved that he could play hardball with big boys: According to Forbes, it was Bren who thought up what the magazine called a “rather vicious” ad campaign that accused Mobil of squandering money on the bidding that it should have been using to search for oil.
In 1983, after the Irvine Co. had suffered through another real estate downturn, Bren bought out Smith and the others. Smith later charged that he had paid too little.
Despite the Irvine Co.’s tendency to court public opinion, Bren underestimated the opposition to some of his biggest plans. One of them, Laguna Laurel, a community of 3,200 homes planned for a picturesque canyon behind Laguna Beach, drew 8,000 protesters last year.
Still, some are astonished by what Bren has managed to do in an environment increasingly hostile to developers.
One example: The company is building in Irvine what will be the world’s largest business park. Another: Even after being forced to scale down construction by environmentalists, the company obtained permission to build on the wind-swept hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean north of Laguna Beach--hills that until now had never felt the weight of a backhoe.
By last year, the company was taking in an estimated $600 million in revenue. Bren is building offices, shopping centers and apartments in a portfolio that will bring in even more millions.
In fact, Bren now owns so much land that it is quite possible it won’t all be developed in his lifetime.
