Los Angeles Magazine Copyright Los Angeles Magazine,
Inc. 1988;
Business Dateline; Copyright (c) 1988 UMI/Data Courier
May, 1988
SECTION: Vol 33; No 5; Sec 1; pg 106
LENGTH: 5761 words
HEADLINE: The Return of Werner Erhard: Guru II
BYLINE: Mark MacNamara
DATELINE: San Francisco; CA; US
Erhard explained to me the difference between the way he thinks he is and the way he is perceived as the difference between an image and a reputation: "An image is built out of: I meet you. With me you've got a reputation. I tell Barbara about you. Barbara tells Bobbie about you, and with Bobbie you've got an image. No reputation. So I make the distinction between those who had their own access to a person and those who had an interpretation or an interpretation-of-an-interpretation access to a person. I would be very willing to stand or fall on my reputation. I've never been very good at shaping an image. In fact, I've been terrible."
He went on to talk about some of the stories that had grown out of that image: The stories that a company called Erhard Seminars Training owes more than $ 3.3 million in back taxes and penalties is true, but he points out that he never owned that company nor directed it. That the IRS has no claim against him or any of his companies.
On the subject of wealth, he claimed he was not a wealthy man. He owns two profit-making ventures: One is Transformational Technologies, of which he is the sole proprietor. The other profit-making venture is Werner Erhard and Associates, from which he received no money until last fall, when he began receiving $ 25,000 a month. He claimed he was not a millionaire, that the bulk of his wealth has been derived largely through the efforts of a skillful financial adviser.
Moreover, he took out a $ 15-million loan in 1982 to start WE&A. That, along with the other obligations, including the mortgage on his mother's house, add up to a sizable amount of liabilities. He admitted he has a "great income" but only to pay for all the liabilities.
As for his personal life, he has been married twice and has four children from his first marriage and three from his second. Both wives and his mother live in the Bay Area. His father died in 1973. He has been separated for five years from his second wife, Ellen, the woman for whom he left his first wife. It was Ellen, whose real name was June Bryde, who ran away with a man named Jack Frost on May 25, 1960.
"The divorce is not final," said Werner. "If you're talking about operationally, Ellen and I are divorced. If you're talking about a legal document, that has not been whatever they do to it . . . I guess, signed it." The divorce is expected to be finalized in the fall.
Has Werner Erhard become everything Jack Rosenberg ever wanted to be?
"It's really not, like, grounded that way," he said, retreating into his labyrinth of jargon and personal syntax. "Obviously, you have certain aspirations, or dreams, if you want, as a youngster, and my aspirations and dreams as a youngster were, as I recall them, materially different from my commitments of, say, the last 17 years. You know, for me there was a fundamental transformation, which means that I literally altered my system of values, my system of commitments, and I would say that there is a fulfilling of the values that I generated out of that transformation, albeit with mistakes and breakdowns."
At the end of the interview, Erhard was driven away by a chauffeur in a green Chrysler van with heavily tinted windows and a phone antenna. A secretary was barely visible in the rear seat. Werner sat up front.
The van was heading toward San Francisco, and as that was where I was going, I found myself following it. It was on the Golden Gate Bridge that I ended up almost alongside the van. Erhard was leaning back, his head against the headrest, looking off the west, away from the city, toward that spectacular view of the ocean and the last of the sun.
I had just a glimpse of the man as the van moved ahead in traffic, but there was the suggestion of a man in flight, not in the sense of fleeing something, but of simply moving above everything, removed from what he had created and involved in some personal odyssey.
Talking about destiny, which may one day become the theme of still another generation of his training, Werner commented: "It interests me whether a person is stuck with destiny that kind of got built up over time, as they were growing up, or whether they can really create and invent their own destiny, and what the interplay is between the two."
Perhaps the man's true dilemma is whether Jack could ever became Werner after all.
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