Oedipus Hex

A wise son maketh a glad father.

--Proverbs 10:1

But the two may make poor business partners. For many an entrepreneurial Pop the gladdest moment of a lifetime is when his No.1 son enters the family firm. For many an obliging son it would be wiser if he never set foot in the place. Once looked on by young men as the shortest road to success, taking over a family business is now seen by more and more of them as a fast way to a nervous breakdown.

"For the founder," writes Psychologist Harry Levinson in the March-April issue of the Harvard Business Review, "the business is an instrument, an extension of himself. So he has great difficulty giving up his instrument, his source of social power." Levinson, a visiting professor of psychology at the Harvard Business School, says that this intense ego involvement makes it hard for the patriarch to delegate responsibility and almost impossible for him to step down. Many sons of self-made titans, he warns, have to cope with long hours, low pay and an agonizing wait for the old man's retirement.

"When a son is brought into the business," Levinson told TIME, "the father has all the problems of a man who introduced his rival to his mistress." If the son marries, adds Levinson, complications multiply: the wife wants him home, the father wants him to work late; the wife wants an immediate financial return, the father thinks that his son should work for peanuts because eventually the business will be his.

SOBs United. To help dodge the booby traps built into life with Father, 100 harried heirs in Boston have formed Sons of Bosses International (SOBs). The group meets monthly, Founder Gerry Slavin says, "so that all of us can have a way of getting together in order to make life easier and to better understand working in a family-owned company." Slavin, who is marketing director of his father's small steel company, is organizing chapters in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit.

SOBs attest that the path winding along in Dad's footsteps is often mined with humiliation, self-doubt and acrimony. For example, Rick Cardullo, 29, whose father owns a restaurant in Harvard Square, the Wursthaus, joined the business upon graduation from high school. He lasted six years. "I just wanted to get away from here," he recalls. "I gave my father notice--four months' notice, in fact. But no matter how you leave your father, it breeds hostility. He didn't speak to me for over a year. When we communicated, it was through his lawyer."

Torn between the feelings of guilt and hostility that plague many an entrepreneur's son, Cardullo eventually came back. "I hate working for my father," he says, "but I am dedicated to him in a certain respect." Now Cardullo puts in 14 hours a day, seven days a week. The only time he sees friends is when they come in as customers. His girl friend had to take a part-time job as a hostess--to see him.

Hollis Petri, 29, believes that the family warehousing business scarred his life. After he joined the firm in 1960, "my hours at work became astronomical. I was working from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. My wife used to wait up for me, crying by the window. This went on for four years. We stopped communicating. Now we're separated. Everything went down the drain. It was my fault for not speaking up at work, hut when you know that some day you'll have part of the business, you feel obligated to put in the hours. You feel that you have to do it."

Planned Nepotism. Not all father-following sons have had unpleasant experiences, though quite a few admit that they have special problems. George Gallup Jr., 40, president of The Gallup Poll, of which his father is still chairman, believes that he has to work doubly hard to justify the advantage his name gives him around the office. Boston's Peter Fuller, 47-year-old owner of the race horse Dancer's Image and keeper of the family auto dealership since 1958, notes that "I had a nice relationship with Dad, even with the fights." Brown-Forman Distillers of Louisville makes it company policy to take on sons of the Brown family because they are thought to have more incentive than employees without large stock holdings in the firm. "Planned nepotism," the Browns call it.

Robert J. Lynch Jr., 37, went willingly into his father's Manhattan firm of international trade brokers in 1959. "We had some pretty strong disagreements at first," he recalls. "But as time went by, we managed to reconcile our differences. I'm more diplomatic now." Besides, he says, his father is going to retire this year. Retorts Robert Sr., 69: "I'm never going to retire."

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