Bill Lear and His Incredible Steam Machine

Driving Through the brown desert north of Reno, you begin to see signs for Leareno. It is neither a brand of local beer nor a new Italian singer at Harrah's; it is a dream. Right now there is little more to Leareno than brightly painted signs scattered among the scrubby gray-green brush. But plans are being drafted for a small city out here, built around a serpentine lake--Lake Lear--where men can play golf only a sliced tee shot away from their front door and bicycle to work through lush green belts. What will they work at? Building low-emission engines for steam-and turbine-driven automobiles.

It all sounds a little farfetched, and there are signs all over the West, now crumbling and faded, announcing grand development schemes that never materialized. But the driving power behind this project is William Powell Lear, one of the great inventive minds of his time, a man for whom the phrase irresistible force might have been coined. He has been called half genius and half madman, but, like most observations about Lear, that one is only half-right. Which half, no one is sure. But there are a lot of people who learned a long time ago not to underestimate Bill Lear.

The Leareno signs lead to Stead Air Force Base, where fliers once trained to withstand the traumas of prisoner-of-war camps. The desolate countryside served very nicely to break down their morale. Lear now owns the Stead facility and right off the main runway is a plain one-story building with white rocks in front that spell out Lear Motors. Inside, the lobby is plastered with encomiums to The Founder: from the Electronic Institute of Technology and the Aero Club of Kansas City, the "grateful employees" of Lear, Inc., and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. On a stand is the "first production model" of an eight-track stereo tape player, one of dozens of major inventions credited to Lear, a few little gizmos that include the automobile radio, the automatic pilot for small planes and the Learjet, the most successful businessman's jet on the market. On the facing wall is a large photo of Lear and a legend that reads in part: "In this age of specialization, where the person often serves only one function, William P. Lear stands as an example of the successful multidimensional individual." Reading along, you come to the basis of the Leareno dream: "It is Lear Motors' belief that not only is the internal-combustion engine unsuitable because of its inherent exhaust pollution but that its basic characteristics are totally unsuited to the propulsion of a vehicle." After a while, you wonder if you should spell it "L-- --r," just to make sure you don't take the name in vain.

I was ushered through a labyrinth of corridors, past offices papered with designs and blueprints, through a bustling machine shop, into a small room. There, over a grill, William P. Lear was cooking hamburgers. "How many want onions?" growled the chef. "It looks like four with and five without, boss," reported a balding man who had surveyed the group of corporate officials and assorted visitors. The waiter identified himself as C. W. ("Buzz") Nanney, vice-president of Lear Motors. In a minute the large, rare burgers were ready. "Anything I can do to help?" chirped one guest. "Eat 'em," came the cogent reply.

As we sat down, Lear suggested: "Put some soy sauce on your hamburgers instead of salt." Several hands darted for the bottle. A chorus of appreciative murmurs floated up toward the head of the table. "Very interesting ... Very tasty ... That's good meat... Sure is."

The talk turned to the inevitable topic. "The auto industry has its head buried in the sand," declared Lear. "They're living in an Alice in Wonderland situation. They have to have a low-emission car by 1977 and they're just hoping something will be discovered that will save them."

Lear then noticed that the man on his left hadn't finished his hamburger. "Do you want that?" he asked. As the startled guest began to answer, Lear snatched the morsel from his plate and tossed it to a small black poodle that nipped at his chair leg. The dog's name is Steamer.

After lunch, Lear beckoned me into his office for a talk. Everything about the man is thick--thick neck, thick hands, thick midsection. (Even his friends would, at times, include his head in that list.) His round face is red deepening to purple; his carefully groomed hair is only smudged with gray. At 69, he looks at least 15 years younger. Few people would call him handsome, but there is a power to the man, a presence that is almost palpable. Somehow, you have no doubt that he is in charge.

It was about three years ago that Lear, bored and sick and looking for something to do, announced that he would build a steam-powered automobile and pledged $10,000,000 of his own money to the effort; he has an income of several million a year, most of which would have gone to Uncle Sam anyway. The decision was based on three assumptions: First, the public would no longer tolerate an automobile engine that befouled the atmosphere; second, the internal-combustion engine couldn't be cleaned up enough to meet this demand; and third, the major auto companies had too much invested in the internal-combustion engine for them to pursue vigorously any alternatives.

Steam hadn't been used in automobiles for decades. It was abandoned for many reasons, but it had one great advantage: It was an external-combustion process. In the internal-combustion system, a gas-air mixture is ignited by a spark and the ensuing explosion drives a piston, which provides the power. But the explosion burns only part of the fuel, and the resulting waste products--hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide--are expelled through the exhaust. In addition, the heat of the internal-combustion process causes the nitrogen and the oxygen in the air to form oxides of nitrogen, probably the most deadly form of auto pollution. In an external-combustion system, the fuel is burned, at a steady rate, outside the boiler. The water, or whatever fluid is used, turns into steam, which then expands and drives the engine. Since the burning of the fuel is continuous, virtually no hydrocarbons or carbon monoxide are released; and the temperature can be kept low enough so that oxides of nitrogen are not formed.

But the distance between theory and application can be vast, and it became apparent that Lear had drastically underestimated the technical problem. The steam engine, the inventor discovered, was three to five times as complicated as the internal-combustion engine. Lear Motors was spending $300,000 a month and getting nowhere. The existing technology was 40 years old and everything had to be redesigned to fit the size and standards of a modern car. Another problem was the fluid used to make the vapor. Water froze and a hundred other substances were either toxic or inflammable or smelled bad.

In November 1969, Lear announced that he wouldn't spend any more of his own money on steam. "I don't see any possibility of adoption of a steamcar," he said. "It is so utterly ridiculous. No one is going to do it." Part of the reason for the announcement was to shake some money loose from Washington, a ploy that didn't work. In addition, Lear's titanic impatience was getting the better of him. By the following March, when I saw him for the first time, he had switched his emphasis to the gasturbine engine. Like the steam engine, a gas turbine is an external-combustion engine and emits few hydrocarbons or carbon monoxide. It is also much simpler than steam, and Lear was practically drawing plans for his factory. But after more work, it became apparent that turbines also had problems. They generated too much heat and thus produced oxides of nitrogen. They required rare and costly alloys to withstand the heat and they couldn't accelerate immediately. In freeway driving, a delay of seven seconds would be not only annoying but dangerous. So it was back to steam. By the time he cooked us hamburgers a year later, Lear was nearing completion of a steam-powered test vehicle; his persistence in the laboratory had paid off and, as the finishing touch, he had named his new fluid--to no one's surprise--Learium.

"If you're going to win at the tables, you've got to stay in there," said Lear, in what could serve as his personal credo. "It's the rare guy who makes his point in the first throw. You've got to wait until the sevens stop coming and the numbers start coming."

Early last January, Lear publicly announced a perfected engine and said that steam-powered vehicles could be made available to the public in three years. He still believes that the gas turbine will ultimately take over the market, because it's so simple; but in the interim, he's betting on steam. The engines would be made in Reno and installed in cars made by other companies, if they would cooperate. He has already started drafting a prospectus for a public stock issue to raise the capital--he figures about $35,000,000 would do it--and claims that underwriters are interested. But many of the people who greeted Lear's initial experiments with such enthusiasm are more cautious now; they've been burned before. Officials of the Department of Transportation, for instance, get downright bitter about Lear. "He hasn't produced anything I haven't already seen in Popular Mechanics," sneered one. "The attitude around here is to yawn and say 'Show me' when it comes to steam," said another. Staff members of California's Air Resources Board call his new engine fluid De-Learium.

The auto companies say it's "much too early" to evaluate Lear's efforts and, for the moment, they're sticking with the internal-combustion engine. But there are signs that they're quietly hedging their bets. Henry Ford said in a Wall Street Journal article: "We have a strong vested interest in the survival of the internal-combustion engine, but we have a far stronger vested interest in the survival of our company." General Motors has given Lear a Chevrolet Monte Carlo and a bus to experiment with, plus a look at some of its latest research.

Lear believes that one of the biggest obstacles to discovering a low-emission car is the Federal Government. He was a major contributor to Nixon's campaign--a signed picture hangs over his desk--but admits he's "terribly disappointed" with the President. The Administration promised to support research for a pollution-free car but has done very little. Lear explains it this way:

"I think what happened is that his scientific advisors got completely hornswoggled and overcome with bigness and equipment availability to the point where they really believed that the automobile manufacturers were going to come up with a solution and it wasn't much use to do anything else. When they had this meeting at the Western White House a couple of years ago, Nixon said, 'Now, let's talk about the automotive pollution problem.' And (continued on page 154)Bill Lear(continued from page 130) they said, 'What problem?' He said, 'The problem of automobiles' producing all this pollution.' They said, 'Mr. President, that's already been solved.' So he looked at his advisors and said, 'Well, what are we meeting for?' Now, there's just one thing: Only the automotive manufacturers were there. I asked to be present to be the devil's advocate, but I wasn't allowed, because I would have said one thing--'Bullshit!'

"Nixon's been duped by his own advisors. They just get so damned impressed. Not only with General Motors but with all the companies. He surrounds himself with a bunch of college professors and, hell, they can't help but be impressed. These college professors make $18,000--$20,000 a year and they go down to see Eddie Cole [president of General Motors] making $500,000 and all the rest of the top guys making $300,000 a year who take them down and show them $100,000,000 worth of equipment they're using for testing purposes, and so forth. And they all say, well, gee, these guys are bound to come up with the answers. But bigness is not the answer. It's the old story; somebody has to think. And I don't think anyone has attacked the problem on an enthusiastic basis. For the simple reason that they knew, if they did, they'd have to write off some of this internal-combustion investment."

Lear has seldom been impressed with anything or anyone, at least anyone else. His whole life has been dedicated to disproving the phrase "It can't be done." Born in Hannibal, Missouri, he moved to Chicago as an infant with his divorced mother. "From the fifth grade on, I spent every waking hour in the Hiram Kelly library reading about Tom Swift and his dirigible, Tom Swift and his flying machine," he recalls. "I just haunted that place. I read every book they had on electronics and magnets." Lear has been described as a "high school dropout," but he didn't have to drop very far. "After the first ten days of high school, they told me to get out," he says, obviously relishing the memory. "You know why? I would prove them wrong. One day in geometry, the teacher did a problem and I said, 'There's another way to do that.' He got mad and said, 'Oh, yeah--show the class,' and unfortunately, I did. Then I said, 'Screw it,' and went away. I was a smartass. I should have stayed and learned something, but I was so far ahead of them. You couldn't teach me anything."

So at 15 he hit the road, hitchhiking through the Midwest. A year later, he lied about his age and joined the Navy and was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. There his entrepreneurial instincts blossomed. "I was a radio electrician second class, and as an instructor you were a top guy, you could get a pass," Lear recalled. "I used to go off the base and get ten-cent hamburgers and then sell them for fifteen cents." After his discharge, he indulged his youthful fascination with flying machines by hanging around an airfield on Lake Michigan. "Those early planes were wood and wire contraptions. You wouldn't believe those old crates would actually fly. I worked off and on doing dirty jobs around the field and once in a while I'd get a ride. I didn't get too many; flying in those days was pretty dangerous--and the greatest danger was my mother finding out. I was working for nothing and I didn't tell her, but when I started coming home with no pay, she began to get wise. On my first ride, the airplane landed and flipped onto its back. It was a DH-4, a mail plane, affectionately known as a 'flying coffin.'"

After leaving the airfield, he drifted to Quincy, Illinois, then to Tulsa, then back to Chicago. Along the way, he worked in radio laboratories, got married, had two kids, got divorced and made a reputation in the radio industry. When he was 26, a small Chicago company called him in to solve a problem with its home radio sets. He did; the company named the radio the Majestic, took that name itself, and rewarded Lear with a salary of $1000 a month. A few years later, he invented the first practical automobile radio for the Galvin Manufacturing Company. A friend tells the story that Lear and Galvin were riding home one day, discussing a name for the new invention. "In the Midwest around that time, we had a lot of drinks that ended in 'ola,' like Rock-Ola; everything was 'ola.' So Bill said, 'It's going in a car, why not call it Motorola?'" The company of that name, of course, has had a fair degree of success since.

But Lear wasn't around for the growth of Motorola. He sold his stock in the early Thirties to form his own company, first known as Lear Developments and for most of its life as Lear, Inc. At that point, Lear began to combine his two great passions, radio and airplanes. He invented the first radio receiver for airplanes, but, as he was to do several times, he overextended himself and faced bankruptcy. It was only when he perfected a new radio set and sold it to RCA for $250,000 that he finally got his own company going. Over the next 15 years or so, he churned out a series of inventions. One of the most significant was the first direction finder for airplanes--the Learoscope--which he publicized with a spectacular cross-country flight in 1935. Five years later, he won the Frank M. Hawks Award for a new radio-navigation system, the Lear Navigator--of course. After World War Two, when military purchases suddenly slackened, Lear, Inc. was threatened with collapse. Against the advice of just about everyone, Lear pushed ahead with a new idea, an automatic pilot small enough to fit into jet aircraft. In 1950 the auto pilot brought him the Collier Trophy, aviation's highest award. It also resurrected Lear, Inc., which then proceeded to grow rapidly as a diversified radio and aerospace company.

By 1960, Lear was looking for a new challenge. "Hell, as soon as something works, I lose interest in it," he told me. "How long can you hang over a chess game that you've already won?" About this time, he decided to build his own airplane, a small jet for busy executives like himself. But the Learjet was more than just another project; it represented the ultimate achievement in an industry that had continued to consider him a maverick, a nut. "Bill always wanted to build his own plane," said Nils Eklund, long one of Lear's chief scientists. "It would put him in the same boat with the other big guys. He has a terrible desire for publicity, due to the fact that he was a nobody to start with. He had no high school training and built himself up to be a multimillionaire and he wanted the name Lear to be known all over the world."

The board of Lear, Inc., however, refused to finance the plane, so Lear sold out to the Siegler Corporation--the company became Lear Siegler--and went to Switzerland. After several frustrating years in Europe, he moved back to Wichita to build his plane and was greeted by almost universal skepticism. "The experts said that he couldn't design the plane, that if he could it wouldn't fly, and if it flew, it wouldn't sell," said Eklund. "But they all turned out to be wrong." The Learjet illustrates the real genius of Bill Lear: the ability to make something smaller, cheaper and more efficient than anyone else. After working on the plane all day, he played around at night with magnetic tapes. The result was another triumph of miniaturization, an eight-track stereo tape player small enough to fit into a car and simple enough to operate with one hand, without looking.

But when the jet became so successful, Lear was seized, as one friend put it, "with delusions of grandeur." He started making plans for bigger planes; money was spent as fast as it came in. Finally, Learjet was faced with a crisis. The banks wouldn't lend Lear any more money and, in order to save the company, he sold a portion of it to Gates Rubber. He was supposed to stay on as chairman of the board, but he fought continually with his new partners and finally resigned.

The sale of Learjet and other investments left him with a large income and nothing to do. He soon found idleness intolerable. "If we don't find something for Bill to do," his wife, Moya, told a friend at the time, "we're going to have to take him out and shoot him." Similar thoughts had occurred to Lear and his restlessness had brought him to the brink of suicide. But then an old friend got him interested in steam as an answer to smog and he plunged in.

In one way, Lear's flying leap into the steam business was rather out of character. Throughout his career he has been concerned chiefly with the market potential of his inventions--what would sell. Most of his important inventions have been luxury items: radios, tape recorders, personal jets. A low-emission vehicle, however, is not only a technological challenge but an ecological necessity. As one friend observed, Lear may be reaching an age where he is starting to think about the "mark he will leave behind him."

As one might imagine, Bill Lear is not the easiest man to work for. "His fun is his work," said one associate, and since he's working all the time, he expects a similar commitment from his employees. "He just hates weekends and holidays, because he can't get a full crew down here," said Hugh Carson, currently his chief engineer. Just as he won't trust anyone else to cook his hamburgers, Lear has to poke his nose into everything. When the employees at Learjet once complained that he made all the decisions, he shot back: "You put up half the money and you can make half the decisions."

This is one of the central elements of Lear's character: the need to control. He dominates everything and everyone around him. Like some peripatetic magnetic pole, he attracts all the compass needles wherever he is. I remember the first time I met him. He was flying from Palm Springs to Reno one morning and agreed to pick me up in Los Angeles. I was late and he was furious, and we barely exchanged greetings as we boarded his Learjet and taxied out to the runway. The two other passengers in the sleek seven-seater were Phil Philibosian, a financial consultant he had met in Palm Springs, and H. B. ("Mac") McLaughlin, an old business chum from before the war. "Bill's so engaging," said Philibosian, somewhat surprised to be where he was, "that I canceled all my plans in order to be with him today. I told him I had some ideas about lowemission vehicles and he told me to come along."

Lear was the pilot, as he always is. He had on a yellow baseball cap with Learjet stitched in red on the front. His fingers drummed impatiently on the instrument panel, which also said Learjet. From the back he was a massive man, with a neck like a tree trunk bulging over his collar. We took off smoothly and swiftly and within moments he announced we had reached 14,000 feet. "This plane," he said, "can beat most fighters to this altitude." Lear touched a lever and the little plane jumped ahead. He was part of this machine he had built, part of it the way a good cowboy is part of his best pony. Later that day, Lear told me: "Airplanes are my first love.... If I had it to do over again, I would become a professional pilot and do nothing but fly aircraft for a living, and then I'd play and invent things on the side." An overstatement, perhaps, but when you fly with Lear, you understand why he loves it. Up there, he has all the responsibility and all the power. One is reminded of Lyndon Johnson driving his white Continental across his ranch, scaring cows with his horn, and ordering his men around by radio. The sky is Lear's turf the way the Pedernales is Johnson's.

After a while, Lear called me up to the front. He is a gruff but open person, a man of few airs, easy to talk to, or at least listen to. He told some stories about the early days of aviation and then got onto the Learjet. "I wanted to make the first test flight, but they talked me out of it," he said. "After that I made many of the test flights. After the first one my wife got mad at me for being so blasé. I said, 'Honey, I've flown that airplane thousands of times in my mind. It was just the first time I was in it.'"

We passed Mono Lake, high in the Sierras south of Tahoe, and Lear pointed to it. "There's an Air Force plane at the bottom of that lake someplace. It went down and they never found it." I asked Lear if he had ever been in danger and he smiled: "While I was test flying, I had a couple of close calls, but only the laundry knew how scared I was."

On the dashboard was a strange black-and-white dial that Lear said was a "synchrometer," a device to get the two engines to run at exactly the same rate. Did all Learjets have one? "Hell," he barked, "I only invented it last week." Soon we had cleared the Sierras and were landing at Reno. Lear set the little plane down so gently you could hardly feel it. He tried--and failed--to suppress the smile that twitched across his lips. "That," he said, "is what's called 'flying it into the ground.' I sure showed you how to do it."

Parked in the hangar were several automobiles, including a white Mercedes gullwing with white-leather interior that looked like some sort of crouching feline. Lear had rebuilt the car from scratch just for the hell of it, but he seldom drove it. "I've got too many goddamn cars," he growled as we left the hangar. "I've got to get rid of some of them. I don't even know how many I have." Outside he waved his arm at the future site of Leareno, barren land stretching off toward the distant hills. "Think I've got enough room up here, Mac?" he asked the old man. "I own 3200 acres and someday it will be worth an average price of $10,000 to $20,000 an acre. I just sold a quarter of an acre for $10,000 on the corner right over there."

After a few minutes in the office, he took us for a tour of the shop. He strode down the halls with authority, shoulders square, elbows out, chin--slightly marred by an old scar--set hard. In one room the crew was working on a synchrometer. His words lunged out, making the men flinch a bit: "What I'm trying to do is design something for production. ... That's an expensive design, the thread is wrong for that kind of piece. ... I'm not doing this for my edification, for Chrissake, I'm doing it to put it into production, and that's a lousy production design. ... You can cut the cost of that exactly in half with no trouble at all." Then it was on to the auto shops--parts of steam and turbine engines scattered about, a car with a gaping hole under the hood, like a child who had lost his front teeth. Lear was even experimenting with an internal-combustion engine, on the odd chance that he could find a way to clean it up. "I never give up on anything," he explained as he guided us along. "I'd hate like hell to have someone else find out how to do it if I could have done it first."

Later a bunch of us went to lunch at a roadhouse a few miles away. The restaurant was one of those places with Formica tables, bobbed waitresses, pinball and slot machines and a loud jukebox. A country-and-western song was playing when Lear summoned our waitress. "Honey," he drawled, "that music is so sad I'm going to break out and cry. Is there any way to get rid of the goddamn thing--it's just like a bunch of bellering cows." Then he turned to the table: "Jesus Christ, it's hard to buy quiet at any price. Somehow or other, we've organized society so we have a continuing din in the background. Then we wonder why people blow their brains out and divorce their wives and don't get anything done--they're always listening to that moaning and groaning."

The talk turned to the auto companies' efforts--or lack of them--to control exhaust emissions. "Either they're not telling the truth or they don't know any better," thundered Lear. "It's hard for me to imagine they would be that untruthful or that stupid. I guess the word for them is fantastic." Then he laughed. "You know what a charm school is? That's where they teach you to say 'fantastic' instead of 'bullshit.'" Typical Lear: unrelenting, unequivocal and rather uncouth. His lunch came with some parsley on the side. "You know what the difference between parsley and pussy is, don't you?" he asked no one in particular. "Very few people eat parsley."

Back at the office, I noticed the signed photographs on Lear's walls. Like his jokes, his friends are a bit outdated--Art Linkletter, Arthur Godfrey, Robert Cummings, a gallery of afternoon-TV stars. Of course, there was also Frank Sinatra ("I sold him a plane") and Buckminster Fuller, who called that afternoon and told Lear: "You're really such an extraordinarily courageous man and you've really plugged for humanity and it's all really very big bets. I just want you to make good."

Going through his mail, Lear found a pastel envelope and threw it at Buzz Nanney. "Will you get these girls to stop writing to me?" he asked, not meaning it a bit.

"You'll just have to stop being so nice to them," answered Nanney.

Lear said he wanted to go back to Palm Springs that night and someone suggested that he should relax. It was like calling him a dirty name. "I can't relax," he shouted, "you know that." After a staff meeting to discuss current projects ("I haven't heard any bright ideas yet--let's hear some!"), Lear wanted to drive out to his house and get some things to take back to Palm Springs. As we drove, I asked him how he got into the steam business.

After he was forced to sell Learjet, he was not only despondent but sick with a broken leg and painful nosebleeds. He picked up the story from there: "I had a nosebleed and I kept going to a specialist for nosebleeds and he kept packing my nose and packing my nose, but the goddamn packing wouldn't hold the blood. It's a goddamn good thing it didn't, because if it would have, I'd have been dead. Because the bleeding wasn't in my nose at all, it was way back underneath the brain. This doctor I had was highly recommended to me, but each time he would pack, they had to give me enormous doses of morphine just to stand the pain. Finally, he said, 'Now, if this doesn't hold it, next time it breaks loose, we're going to the hospital and give you a posterior pack.' That means they go in and pack back of your nose, you see. If I had done that, I would have been dead, because you last about an hour and a half in a case like that after a posterior pack.

"I was so despondent and the pain was so terrible that I went to my friend who I went around with, this fellow Ben Edwards, who was a plastic surgeon. I had great confidence in Ben and I said, 'Ben, I want you to go up in there and find out where I'm bleeding. I'm not bleeding where these bastards think I am. I want you to go up in there and cut it open and if you can see where I'm bleeding, why, clamp it off.' He said, 'Bill, I'm not that kind of surgeon. But I've got a good friend, I'll have him get in touch with you.' So I said, 'You'd better have him get in touch with me this afternoon or this evening early.'

"So about 10:30 I was in bed and this thing busted loose again. Well, the blood would just come spurting out with e very heartbeat, it wouldn't just drip, drip, drip. So I said, 'Mommy, I don't give a shit what happens, get me a bowl, I'm going to pull the packing out and bleed to death. I can't stand the pain any longer and I'm going to do it.' So she got me the pan and she said, 'I wish you wouldn't do it,' and I said, 'I can't help it.' And I started to pull it out. There was about two or three yards of the stuff up there. I had pulled out about six inches of it and the phone rang.

"That shows you how close you can come, because if I had pulled it out, I would have been dead in about twenty minutes. So the phone rang and it was this new doctor and my wife said, 'Oh, doctor, I'm so glad you called, because Bill is hemorrhaging again and he's about to pull the packing out, he's pulled out about six inches now and he insists on pulling it out because the pain is so bad and he's bleeding so badly.' The doctor said, 'Don't let him do it, get him in the car and take him to St. John's hospital and I'll meet him over there.' So I got to St. John's and he arrived and pulled this packing out and the last words I heard him say were 'Oh, my God.'

"That was the last I knew for five hours. Poor Mommy is walking up and down the hall, she doesn't know what the hell is going on, and it was a damn good thing she didn't, because she would have collapsed if she had. It was just by the grace of God. Ten seconds later on that telephone call and I wouldn't have been alive. If I hadn't seen Dr. Edwards in the afternoon, I wouldn't have been alive. So I guess maybe I was destined to live.

"For a long time, I saw two of everything. I had to close my right eye and look with my left. Then I got over that. When finally I got busy in the steam department, I forgot about everything. As a matter of fact, I healed so damn fast after that I don't even remember being sick."

As he finished the story, we reached his home, a rustic stone-and-timber mansion about 5000 feet up in the Sierras, only a mile or two from the California line. The carefully tended lawn sloped down to the gurgling Truckee River, running cold and clear out of the mountains. It is a lovely spot. As Lear got out of the car, several dogs of various shapes and sizes came bounding over and he exploded with greetings. "Where are my doggies, where are my doggies?" he yelled as they crowded around. "Oh, my beautiful doggies; oh, my beautiful doggies. Where have you been? Daddy loves you so much. Do you love Daddy?" One has the feeling that is a question he asks a lot and is never quite sure of the answer.

Inside, the house is a curious mixture of wealth and hominess, class and corn. The walls are covered with Moya's needle point and the living room contains a large wooden frame with her masterwork. One side says, Welcome Home, but when flipped over, it reads, Get Out of Town. Then there are several large Rubens, a Courbet or two and other extremely valuable paintings. Lear gazed at the luscious Rubens nudes and cracked: "I have no interest in art and I certainly would not be interested in those fat women and fat babies. I like a woman built for speed, not comfort." Dominating the room are two huge stereo speakers, almost seven feet high. When he wanted to demonstrate the sound system, he played a piano version of Tenderly.

One table held a recent gift from Moya, three specially bound volumes called William P. Lear vs. Inertia, a record of the more than 150 patents he holds. On another was a silver cigarette box with the inscription Charter Member, RN Associates, 1968. RN stands for Richard Nixon. "I was the second-biggest backer he had," Lear said, "and all I want is for him to do something right. I want to see Nixon and talk to him and set him straight. But do you think I was ever invited to anything but a social occasion at the White House? Never."

You don't own those Rubens and 56 acres of choice river-front land and half a dozen houses around the world without having a lot of money, and Bill Lear is a very wealthy man. He estimates his net worth as "more than $25,000,000 and less than $50,000,000," and business associates generally agree. Most of it came from the sale of Lear, Inc. and Learjet, but he has also invested widely in real estate. When I asked about his finances, he answered readily. Many of his best investments came during the early days of the Florida land boom. "A guy once came to me and asked me to buy some land," he remembered. "He had paid $2500 for it and his wife was furious because the guy who sold it to him had paid only $1500. I told him I'd take it, sight unseen. The girl I was with said I was crazy, that the land might be under water. But the guy was in trouble. Today that land is worth about $450,000."

All that needle point on the walls tells another story--the days and weeks Lear's wife spent at home, alone. Moya Marie Olsen, the daughter of Ole Olsen, the vaudeville comic, knew he was "no angel," as he puts it. A devout Christian Scientist, Moya bore him four children and never tried to change him. (His official biography lists six children, but he admits to at least one more out of wedlock.) Lear pursued women with the same roughness and determination with which he pursued everything else, and with similar success. On his many travels, he would often be met at the airport by a pretty girl in a limousine. Famous people became his friends. Heavy boozing, night-clubbing and gambling went with the life style. After Lear moved to Los Angeles, he was a regular at El Rancho Vegas, the first big casino on the Strip. "Lear was one of the highest rollers in town," recalled an acquaintance. "For years he was known as the 'hooker's delight.' He'd see a girl and say, 'Come over here, honey, you're good luck,' and hand her a fistful of chips. Those kind of guys have gone out of style." Lear has never been coy about his exploits; quite the opposite. Call it insecurity or egotism, he never tires of recounting his accomplishments.

We left the house, drove back to Reno and boarded the Learjet. We hadn't been airborne more than ten minutes when Lear noticed the synchrometer wasn't functioning right. With a string of choice expletives, he turned that little plane around so fast my stomach dropped away like a sky diver's. Back on the ground, he chewed out the crew and ordered them to stay late and fix the faulty part. As he stalked away, he muttered: "They've got four or five balls in the air and they're hoping to catch the right one. There's no chance of that--it's got to be done right in the shop; you don't experiment on the plane. This is the third time that engineer of mine has messed up and he knows he's in trouble."

There was nothing left to do but have dinner in town. Lear chose the Bundox, a candlelit spot overlooking the Truckee River where he is well known. The talk wandered over many subjects and his volubility increased with the number of Scotches consumed. There were at least half a dozen--balanced only by a Caesar salad--and he explained congenially: "I'm not an eater, I'm a drinker. I'm not a lover, I'm a fucker." I asked about the house in the mountains and his other real-estate ventures and he mentioned that he owned property all over Europe, including Switzerland, where he built a California-style ranch house. Someone once called him "the original ugly American," and he sort of agrees. "I hate Europe, I hate Europe," he thundered. "My children all speak French fluently, my daughter married an Italian and my son married a Dutch girl, but I like it better here. I guess I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool American. It's strange in Europe. It's very difficult to be a democrat. Your workers take off their hats and click their heels and bow, but you can't say, 'Cut that out, for Chrissake,' because then they'll lose respect for you."

The talk drifted to girls and gambling. He remembered his younger days in New York, when he owned a huge bed he called the playground of America. He still keeps a girl in Los Angeles on sort of a retainer, but the years have begun to catch up with him. "It now takes me all night," he admitted, "to do what I used to do all night." His gambling, too, has slowed down, but he recalled his greatest moment in a long career at the crap tables. "I once made $17,000 in five minutes," he enthused. "I let 11 lay and it hit once and then hit again. I tried to spend all the money that night, but there was no way to do it, just no way."

By the time we got back to the car, it was 10:30, but Lear wasn't through yet. He picked up his portable telephone and called the hangar, hoping someone was still there. The light from the phone glowed against his cheek as he drove with one hand. When I think of Bill Lear, that picture comes to mind: 69 years old, late at night, the end of a taxing day, and he's still worrying about a tiny part of his airplane. All he could reach, however, was the night watchman. "Can I help you?" he asked, but the answer was apparently negative, and we drove back to the mountain house. Mac and I stayed there, as his friends always do. Lear is one of the most gracious hosts imaginable; just the week before, several dozen kids from the Up With People singing group had stayed at the house during a concert tour.

The next morning, Lear announced that he had been up all night, poring over his various engine designs. Before too long, his houseman mentioned that there was a message from his son John. "What did he want?" snarled Lear. "Well, if he calls again, you tell him that Mrs. Lear doesn't want to talk to him, and neither does Mr. Lear, because we've disowned him completely." I asked why and his anger came spilling out. The story tells a lot about this prodigious man:

"When John came back from Europe, I gave him a job and he couldn't do anything but undermine me in the plants every time he got the chance. That shows you there are some people who don't respond to kindness or reason. I think that was Hitler's secret: There are people who don't want to reason, who want you to think for them.

"He was with me one night and I was telling him something and he said something against his mother--I forget what it was. It was something that just irritated me beyond my ability to respond in a calm way. And I just said, 'John, I won't stand for that.' And he said, 'Oh, you won't, won't you? Well, fuck you.' That just triggered something in me and I grabbed him by the throat and I put him up against the brick wall, right up against the brick wall. He's pretty big, not much smaller than me, and I hauled off and hit him in the face so goddamn hard that I had a sore hand for about two weeks. He just slumped down for a moment and I thought I had probably killed him. Finally, he began to stir. And when he did, I picked him up again by the neck and I put him up against the wall. And I said, 'Can you understand what I'm saying now? The first thing I want you to know is that I never expect your love. I never expect you to be grateful. But the next time you're disrespectful, I'll kill you. Do you understand me?' He's never said 'Fuck you' to me since that day. He understood that perfectly. There are times when you've got to force respect."

At the same time, Lear can be a man of great warmth and generosity. "He can drive you hard for a couple of weeks and then turn around and say, 'Take your wife to Europe and bill the company,'" said Nils Eklund. Another time, Lear had some jewel merchants at his house. He bought his wife an $85,000 diamond necklace and earrings and a $72,000 ring, his daughter Patty a $14,000 ring and his daughter-in-law a $5000 choker. The gifts obviously conveyed Lear's vast and open affection for his family. But he remembered the exact prices he had paid--the kind of thing a man might do if he half believed money were the measure of love.

Despite his huge successes, Lear's life of struggle has left him despondent about his country. It's rather curious: A man who is so modern when it comes to technology borders on the reactionary when it comes to philosophy. He decries the "all-pervasive permissiveness" that he feels is rotting the moral fiber of the country. Earlier in the week, his youngest daughter, Tina, had been walking down the streets of Palm Springs and was jostled by some hippie types. "I told her mother not to let her on the street, because they could easily do something like push her with a needle when she's walking past," he said. Now that Tina is 16, Lear is worried about her virtue. As we left that morning to return to Palm Springs, he stuck a pistol in his belt. "These guys just push and push and push," he said, forgetting his own youth--or remembering it too well. "I said, 'You tell them your father's a member of the Mafia and he hires button men to handle guys like that. You tell them they call me The Don at home.'"

About the only thing that gets Lear more upset than the thought of pimplyfaced adolescents assaulting his daughter is the thought of welfare recipients plundering the public till. His answer is to take away the vote from anyone on public assistance. "If you don't do it that way," he declared, "you finally have the welfare people telling you how much more money they need, because there will be more on welfare than are not on welfare.

"Our forefathers did everything in the world to keep this country from becoming a democracy," he went on. "But the politicians have hacked away at our republic so that finally they enfranchised everybody in the world except the cats and the dogs. As a result, we now have a democracy." Democracy, he feels, will lead to anarchy, and anarchy to dictatorship. The Communists are "building up this armament and they're surrounding us and within the next five years, they'll have five times as many nuclear subs as we have," he said. "And one morning they'll say: 'We have on target every city in the United States and we have our nuclear submarines in place and you know how accurate they are. You can avoid all this bloodshed by turning the government over to us.' And we're going to turn it over to them."

The whole speech sounded like it had been in moth balls since 1951; but when he finished, Lear smiled: "I tell my daughter to take up Russian, because if they're the boss, I want to know what they're telling me." That's a typical Lear remark. He keeps going, he never stops. "It's complete compulsion," said an old associate. "If he didn't have a challenge, he'd drop dead." Another friend feels he wants to leave "monuments to himself," and yet another traces it all back to his mother: "She always used to say, 'Your dad never amounted to anything and you won't either.' That made a pretty lasting impression, and he's tried to prove her wrong ever since."

Lear has been trying to prove a lot of things to a lot of people ever since, but maybe there is another element in his frenzy these days--the struggle against age. He is taking Dylan Thomas' advice: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." "Bill still thinks he's 30 years old," said one friend. "He doesn't want to think there will ever come a day when he can't screw everything in sight, work around the clock, fly his airplane and accomplish anything he wants."