Judith McNaught - Remember When

With Cal's approval, Cole used his profits from the drilling company to buy three carefully selected, small manufacturing companies. He hired a new management team, shored up the companies with new equipment, emphasized customer service, and boosted the morale of the sales staff. As soon as each company's balance sheet looked good, he sold the company. In what he considered his spare time, he studied the stock market and analyzed the philosophies of successful brokers and money managers. Based on the fact that most of the experts disagreed radically with each other on one or all of the important points, Cole concluded that luck and timing mattered as much or more than skill and knowledge. Since luck and timing had been on his side thus far, he tried his hand in some serious investing.

At the end of three years, Cole had turned five million dollars into sixty-five million. During all that time, the only condition Cal put on Cole was that Cal's other nephew, Travis Jerrold, be given a place in Cole's next business venture. Travis was five years older than Cole and from a town on the other side of Texas, where he worked for a failing tool manufacturer. He had a college degree, a pretty wife named Elaine, whom Cole liked very much, and two spoiled children named Donna Jean and Ted, whom Cole did not like at all. Although Cole had only seen Travis once as a teenager, he liked the loyalty that Travis as "family" would bring to the business, and he was perfectly amenable to Cal's request.

Cole began looking around for a profitable company on which he could found his corporate dynasty—a company that provided a product or service for which there was likely to be an ever-increasing need. Predicting that need was the key to success, and it was there that Cole discovered he had a genuine gift. Although everyone else seemed to believe that IBM and Apple would soon own the entire computer hardware market, Cole was convinced that lower-priced, but high-quality, generic brands could seize a large share of the personal computer market.

Against everyone else's judgment and advice, he bought a small company called Hancock and invented his own new "name brand." He tripled the size of the company's sales force, beefed up quality control, and poured money into an ongoing advertising campaign. Within two years, Hancock computers were sold in retail markets all over the country and winning praise for their reliability and flexibility. When all that was in place, Cole named Travis as Hancock's new president and put him in charge, which caused Travis's ecstatic wife to burst into tears of gratitude and Travis to break out in a nervous rash.

Travis proved to be an asset to what was now a family venture. What Travis lacked in imagination, he made up for in loyalty and determination and scrupulous adherence to Cole's instructions. When Cole created Unified's new research and development division four years later, he named Travis to head it.

"I'm a big fan of yours, Miss Foster," the makeup artist at CNN remarked as she made slow, careful strokes over Diana's shiny shoulder-length hair. "My mother and my sister and I all read your magazine from cover to cover, every month."

The room where makeup was applied to guests while they waited to go on the air was like most of its kind in every television studio in the country, except CNN's was a little larger. Two long Formica countertops stretched the length of both sides of the narrow room, with chairs spaced at six-foot intervals along them and brightly lit mirrors lining the walls. At each makeup station, jars and bottles of cosmetics fought for counter space with lipsticks, eyeliners, eye shadows, and an assortment of brushes and combs.

Sometimes all the stations were occupied by guests being made up for television, but this afternoon, Diana was the only one scheduled for an interview, and the young woman who was applying her makeup was bursting with enthusiasm: "For my sister's birthday, we used your grandmother's recipe for vanilla pudding cake. We topped it with fresh sugar-glazed blueberries, just like the picture in magazine. Then we gathered armfuls of peonies for a centerpiece, and we decorated our own gift wrap by using rubber stamps cut in the shape of peonies. I used a gold stamp pad for mine, but my mom used a silver one, and they were both really great!"

"That's very nice to hear." Diana flashed her an absent-minded smile, without taking her attention from the urgent memos that had arrived by fax at her hotel late that morning.

"My mom finally got my dad to try your grandpa's special trick for raising giant, juicy strawberries, and they turned out huge, and were they ever delicious! When my dad first looked at the picture of them in the magazine, he said you were using trick photography and they were probably crab apples, but his turned out fantastic, too! Next, he built that compost box your grandpa showed in the magazine. Now he reads Foster's Beautiful Living from cover to cover, just like we do!"

Feeling that some response was again required, Diana gave her another smile before she turned to the second page of the fax from the Foster Enterprises office in Houston. The smile was all the encouragement the enthusiastic young woman needed. "Practically everybody I know reads your magazine. We just love the ideas you put in it, and the pictures your sister takes are really gorgeous! Gosh, the way your mom writes about all of you, I feel like I know your whole family. When Corey had her babies— the twins—we sat right down and crocheted those adorable little booties for them. You know—the ones that look sort of like high-top running shoes? I hope she got them."

Diana looked up and smiled for the third time. "I'm sure she did."

The young woman dusted a light coat of blusher on Diana's high cheekbones and stepped back. "I'm finished," she said almost regretfully. "You're even prettier in real life than you are in that picture at the front of the magazine."

"Thank you very much," Diana replied, laying the faxes aside and looking up at her.

"You have about ten minutes before they'll come and get you and take you into the studio."

When she left, Diana looked over at Cindy Bertrillo, the public relations director at Foster's Beautiful Living magazine, who had accompanied her to Atlanta and had been sitting nearby while Diana's makeup was applied. "Are there any other faxes?" Diana asked as she scribbled instructions on two of the faxed memos and handed them to Cindy to send to the office when they got back to the hotel.

"Nope, that's it," Cindy said, stuffing the memos into her briefcase. With her short-cropped black hair, oversize glasses, and swift, energetic movements, the tireless thirty-two-year-old publicist looked, Diana thought, as if she was constantly searching for new things to benefit Foster's. And she was.

Diana glanced at her watch and grimaced. "I hate these interviews. They take away too much time from work. I have six meetings tomorrow, the accountants want to go over the preliminary P-and-Ls, and I should be finalizing the arrangements for the new coffee-table book. I'm behind schedule on everything!"

Cindy was very familiar with Diana's killing work schedule. At thirty-one, Diana was more than a successful businesswoman; she had become a reluctant celebrity, an unwilling idol—a state of affairs that owed itself to her remarkably photogenic features and her ability to look outwardly serene even when the situation was chaotic and her nerves were unraveled. Despite Diana's wish to maintain her privacy and keep a low profile, her classic features, vivid coloring, and natural elegance had made her an increasingly popular subject for journalists and photographers— and television talk-show hosts.

Cindy smiled sympathetically as she repeated what she always said in these circumstances. "I know, but the television cameras love you, and interviews help sell magazines." She tipped her head to one side, assessing the effect of Diana's buttercup yellow crepe suit against the auburn highlights in her hair and striking green eyes. "You look terrific," she said.