To the Manner Born

Everyone dreams of falling heir to something: big bucks, a house in the hills, Arabian stallions, a car that runs. But few are ever born to great wealth, or have empires offered to them without warning or preparation. Here, some uncommon tales of cocooned tycoons who finally spread their wings.

It’s a plot line worthy of “Dynasty”: A girl so young and so rich that hard work-- overwork-- seems an act of rebellion. So she takes after-school jobs in clothing shops until she’s 17, at which point she decides to open a shop of her own--with $1 million borrowed from her father.

Get real.

“It’s true,” laughs Carolyn Mahboubi, now 28, who was in high school when she sat her father down for some serious negotiations.

“I wanted $1 million to open a Gianni Versace shop. I knew he had the money. He laughed and said, ‘You’re crazy.’ Then he said ‘Let’s talk.’ ”

Daddy (Bahador Mahboubi) was no fool. The Iranian chewing gum king (“He was the Wrigley’s of Iran,” his daughter says) brought his family to Beverly Hills when Carolyn was 11. By then he’d amassed another big wad buying Rodeo Drive real estate, on which he and his three brothers built the Rodeo Collection.

For all their wealth, Carolyn says, “We were and are a very conservative family.” This explains why she went to public schools and possibly why she saw no virtue in the usual adolescent antics of the “90210” set.

“I think I’ve lived my life backward,” she muses. “I never had teens. When I was 16 I looked about 30 and all my friends were older. I did nothing but work.”

First she worked after school at Ann Taylor. Then she met Pietro Fallai, who owned the Gianni Versace shop in Sweden, and got the idea of opening her own shop, with Fallai as her partner.

“I couldn’t do it alone because I had no experience and because Versace would never have let someone of 17 open a shop of his clothes.”

Daddy Mahboubi decided the idea just might work. So he said yes, which threw Carolyn into an even more frantic schedule: “Up at 5:30 a.m. to reach (school) by 8 a.m; home by 12:30 to dress like someone much older; work at the shop all afternoon; home to dinner and a night of study, then a few hours’ sleep and up again.”

After a few seasons, the partnership broke up. Fallai went back to Sweden; Mahboubi, a USC grad, was on her own.

In the years since, she says, her men’s and women’s shops have flourished and now gross about $10 million a year.

These days, her schedule is much more relaxed: Up at 6:30 a.m. for phone calls to Italy; a romp with the dogs in the nearby canyon; breakfast with the family (she lives in a guest house behind the family manse) and to work in her 8-year-old Mercedes convertible by 11 a.m.

What’s missing from this picture?

“If I had it to do all over again, I’d do the same. It’s great to have accomplished so much as a younger person. But I missed out on a lot--and I’m making up for it now. The age of 28 is when you’re supposed to stop partying and start getting serious. But it’s when I’m starting to party and have fun. I look younger now than I did then. I’m dating more now. But I’m doing it all as a much wiser person.”

Part of the wisdom, she says, is understanding that the money she makes should be used for doing good. She raises funds for AIDS research and other humanitarian causes. And the happiest week of each year is when she works as a counselor at the Ronald McDonald camp for sick children.

*

Malcolm Forbes Jr. (known as Steve) knew he’d be the one of five siblings to take over at Forbes magazine if anything happened to their Pop.

Steve is Malcolm Forbes Sr.’s oldest son. The one who most liked to report financial news and write it. The one who’d been in training for the top job ever since he graduated Princeton in 1970, exactly 29 years after his father.

“My father never told me I had to carry on the family name, or anything like that,” Forbes says, adding that his father knew that if parents push too hard, children will rebel. So all five were free to follow their own interests. “I just happened to be interested in the same things my father was interested in.”

At college, for example, Forbes Jr. started his own student-circulation magazine, with such success that it’s still being published after all these years.

So when Forbes Sr. died in 1990, it was no surprise to Steve, then 43, that he was handed control of the family-owned business--with assets estimated at $2 billion--and control of 51% of the voting stock.

And when pundits claimed he was too staid, too scholarly, too predictable to fill his father’s flamboyant motorcycle boots, Steve quipped that his Pop hadn’t started motorcycling until much later in life--so there was still hope.

When the analysts predicted that the Forbes kids would start squabbling and squander assets their father worked so hard to build--the 200,000-acre Colorado ranch, the 7,000-acre Missouri land project, the 17 weekly newspapers in New Jersey, American Heritage Magazine, Forbes magazine, which is also printed in Japanese, Chinese, and German, plus the yacht, the art collections, etc.--Steve and his siblings held their tongues.

So far, Forbes says, the family fortune is intact and the offspring manage to get along.

When you’re born to such a man, Forbes Jr. says, you earn a healthy respect for hard work and the impermanence of money.

“We learned the hardest thing to do is doing nothing. It’s a bigger killer than cancer or heart disease. And perhaps because we write about companies, we got a little more sense than most people of just how fleeting success can be. You have to treat a great business as if it were a little bakery--if you don’t bake a fine, fresh batch each day, you’re going to fail.”

What’s more, Forbes says, the kids learned early not to take for granted their supposed abundance of wealth. “A trust fund, no matter how big, will shrink to nothing if you try and divide it and distribute it among the heirs. Most people tend to think of wealth as cash. But it’s really measured in assets, in a business that’s vibrant and continues to produce.”

Forbes says his father taught that “nothing is permanent, no one has a sinecure. You can be successful one day and broke the next. The quick way to kill a business to is run it as if you have it made.”

*

We’ll call him John. He doesn’t want his real name used because he is now 40, “a multi-, multimillionaire,” with “major dealings on both coasts” and he’s “sort of reluctant” to let associates know just how wide-eyed he feels about how he got to where he is.

“My own father had a manufacturing business that failed; he died while still in his 40s. Soon my mother started to date a man who came to our Bronx apartment in a chauffeured limousine. This man was the only New Yorker we ever heard of that had a private swimming pool at his home. He was obviously loaded.”

John went to Syracuse University, then got a job teaching high school music. His mother married her rich swain while John was in college, and John went to live with them. “I was earning borscht--$9,850 a year teaching high school music--and I loved every minute of it.”

For five or six years, John helped at his stepfather’s office during summer teaching vacations. Each year, the stepfather offered him a job. Each year he declined. “My stepfather owned huge amounts of real estate in Manhattan, a textile importing and converting firm, all sorts of other properties. I knew nothing about any of it, and he wasn’t the type who could teach. I was a fish out of water.”

John’s mother finally prevailed on him to try working with his stepfather. But in the two years he was there, John says he realized the man had “a tremendous ego. He’d never graduated high school, never had any financial help, and he’d built the entire empire on his own. He was very proud of that, he was in his prime, and he was not about to show me or anyone else the ropes. At times I couldn’t figure out why he wanted me around.”

John says he developed asthma and other physical and emotional problems from the sheer stress of feeling so inadequate and trying so hard, with so little success. Finally, he gave up and walked away from the business. “I went back to being poor and teaching music, and feeling very virtuous.”

But his stepfather never carried a grudge. When John married, the tycoon set him up, rent-free, in a Manhattan apartment in one of the many luxury buildings he owned. And he begged John again to consider coming back to the firm. He said he wanted a son in the business, and had none of his own. John declined. A few years later, suffering “teacher’s burnout,” he decided to give it a try. By then John says he was more aggressive and eager to learn; his stepfather was more mellow and eager to teach.

In the eight years that followed, John says he learned as fast and as much as he could. He even began to like being a baby tycoon. And when his stepfather died four years ago, John was left at the helm, in charge of more money and more businesses than he really knew how to handle. He has two children himself now, ages 3 and 6. “If I quit work tomorrow, I would never have to worry about money again. Neither would my kids or their children,” John says.

On the other hand, “I love the business so much now, that I don’t think I’ll ever want to quit.”