Philip Anschutz’s love of hot dogs and hanging — and apparent contempt for homosexuals — do not make him an obvious bedfellow for the fastidious brahmins of new Labour. No wonder they sent John “Hoss” Prescott to his ranch in Colorado. The 66-year-old billionaire is more of an enigma than a caricature American right winger, however. When he worships in Denver’s Celebration Community Church, he nods along as the pastor, Steve Garcia, brings down fire and brimstone on to peddlers of homosexual lifestyles, feminism and “modern liberalism”. And he contributes generously to charities that promote family values. Yet Sir Elton John, a partner in one of Britain’s first gay “marriages”, entertains the crowds at Anschutz’s Coliseum theatre in Las Vegas. And the billionaire himself is hoping to introduce Londoners to the pleasures of supercasino gambling at his revamped Millennium Dome — temple to an addiction that has long been blamed for the destruction of the family. It is difficult to know whether these are symptoms of hypocrisy or of a subtle and sophisticated intelligence, as Anschutz keeps his opinions to himself. The slightly built billionaire has not spoken to the press since 1979 and last spoke in public before a Denver arts crowd in 1974. He is not a social animal. He lives in a jumbled complex of houses he designed himself that is off-limits to almost everyone except his old friend Robert Dole, for whom he opened it just once for a £600-a-plate presidential fundraising party. Nancy, his wife of more than 30 years, was said to have asked a caterer: “How do we throw a celebrity party?” So who is this man? Born in Great Bend, Kansas, in 1939, Anschutz is the grandson of a German immigrant from Russia and the son of a Kansas oilman. By the age of nine he was selling soda to strangers; after graduating from the University of Kansas with an economics degree, he bought out his father’s business before he was 30. From then on Anschutz bought land by the square mile, becoming one of the biggest private landowners in the United States. He proved a dab hand at turning disaster into profit: when one of his Wyoming oilfields caught fire, he sold footage to Hollywood as a backdrop in a movie based on the firefighter Paul “Red” Adair. With the $100,000 fee he hired Adair to put out the blaze. He may be a consummate deal-maker but he famously eats lunch at a hotdog stand, buys coffee from a 7-Eleven petrol station and drives a second-hand Lexus. In the 1990s pro-business Fortune magazine dubbed him “the billionaire next door” for his humble style. But in 2002 Fortune lashed him in a top 10 of the “greediest executives in America” who had emerged as winners from the tech stocks bubble and crash. Anschutz was named No 1 for selling $1.57 billion worth of stock in Qwest — a futuristic telephone company he had set up — months before its share price collapsed. His defenders said there was nothing wrong with the sale and that, on paper at least, he lost more than anyone else from his remaining shareholding when the stock plummeted. Anschutz was also caught up in the widespread Enron-era investigations into corporate skullduggery. Without admitting wrongdoing, he agreed to pay $4.4m to settle a civil suit brought by Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney-general, who alleged that he had profited illicitly during the rampant bubble market in new tech stocks. Recently he has been successful in Hollywood. After setting up Walden Media to promote “family films”, his first coup was to persuade Douglas Gresham, C S Lewis’s stepson, to allow him to film the Narnia books by falling to his knees and praying with him. The Chronicles of Narnia, an adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has earned £400m at the box office and there are still another six books to film. There are signs that Anschutz is preparing to take it a little easier: he will be resigning from several boards this year to spend more time on his film interests. Do not expect to see him sipping champagne at Hollywood parties, though. Or supping with a long spoon chez Prescott. | |
