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developed pancreatic cancer and died just a year after the family moved to Reynolda, leaving twelve-year-old Dick especially bereft. Katherine soon after became romantically involved with Edward Johnston, a teacher at the Reynolda school for its employees' children. They married in 1921, much to the disgust of Dick, and his mother was thereafter frequently absent from the household, while Dick was away in boarding schools. Three years later, Katherine died. The four Reynolds teenagers were to be reared by other relatives, but Dick - already the recipient of an annual $50,000 allowance - soon left college and set off to enjoy the world. At age 28 he came into his full inheritance, more than $25 million (more than $400 million in 2010 purchasing power).
Dick Reynolds was a man of great and varied talents. Though he had little involvement in the management of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Dick was an astute businessman and investor. An enthusiastic aviator as a young man, he was a pioneer airline developer, providing early capital for Eastern and Delta. Dick became a skilled yachtsman and navigator, competing in long-distance ocean races and winning several. He was a New Deal Democrat whose fund-raising acumen and personal contributions helped keep Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House in 1940, as well as Harry Truman in 1948. In 1941 Dick was elected mayor of his native Winston-Salem and campaigned for better housing for the city's white and black working families. He resigned as mayor the following year to enter the U.S. Navy, saw combat aboard an escort carrier, and came back from the Pacific war a lieutenant commander with two Bronze Stars for valor. Throughout his life, Reynolds - along with many other members of the family - gave many millions of their dollars to worthy causes and institutions.
But these accomplishments were achieved only on Reynolds's more sober (or less inebriated) days. From his youth, Dick relished a hedonistic lifestyle that required much of his inherited and earned wealth to maintain, and in the process he became a morbid alcoholic. His friends and family were embarrassed by his frequent, monumental binges, but were usually forgiving. However, in 1929 Reynolds was convicted of manslaughter after a drunken driving spree in England in which a motorcyclist was fatally injured, and he spent three-and-a-half months in a British prison.
His alcoholism certainly did not help Reynolds in his personal relationships, either. He was married four times, and eventually sired six sons and a daughter. But Dick, lonely as he was, could deal with the responsibilities of husband and father for only so long before retreating to his private island off the coast of Georgia, or to one of his many boats, and always back into the bottle. While he was noted by many for his good humor and personal generosity, he was estranged from his sons for most of their lives and eventually disinherited them before he died in 1964. His daughter Irene was born just a few days after he passed away.
KID CAROLINA seems to have come about because Heidi Schnakenberg acquired a trove of documents regarding Reynolds's third wife, Muriel, and her romantic/rocky relationship with the man. After tracing Reynolds's early life, mainly through published sources, the second half of the book - drawing much more on Muriel's source materials - goes into great detail about the development and the demise of their relationship.
And that's one of the two big problems I have with KID CAROLINA. Neither Muriel or Dick are particularly sympathetic people in Schnakenberg's account, and the details of their relationship become remarkably repetitive at times - they travel, they spend money, Muriel drinks a little, Dick drinks a lot. After he spends a couple of days sleeping it off, the cycle starts again, and Dick's middle-aged health declines. We get the point. The legal details of their drawn-out divorce proceedings may be of interest to some, but I found myself yawning a lot.
Schnakenberg's research for KID CAROLINA was undoubtedly intense and far-reaching, but it's obvious that, at times, her knowledge of some aspects of his life and milieu is rather shallow. There are a number of factual errors and questionable passages in the book (perhaps based on errors in her source materials, in some instances) that might have been picked up by more astute editing and fact-checking, and which make one wonder how many more mistakes there are that I didn't catch. For example:
Pg. xii - Wake Forest University was founded (by North Carolina Baptists) in 1834, years before R.J. Reynolds Sr. (a Methodist) was born. It was not "established" by the Reynolds, though members of the family were instrumental in the university's relocation from Wake Forest, near Raleigh, 115 miles westward to Winston-Salem in 1956, and its subsequent growth.
Pg. 12 - Camel was not a "Turkish" cigarette (though it was marketed as an "exotic" product), nor was it "the first prepackaged and prerolled" cigarette. Prerolled cigarettes were manufactured in the United States as early as 1860 and commanded a substantial share of the cigarette market by the turn of the 20th century.
Pg.13 - Reynolds's main tobacco competitor was North Carolinian James Buchanan "Buck" Duke, not "David Duke."
Pg.123 - Dick plans a round-the-world sailing voyage that he expects to last "four to six weeks." Yeah, in a rocket-assisted yacht. Four to six months, maybe.
Pg. 128 - During their courtship in 1951, Dick and Muriel take a trip to Italy and sit on the terrace of the Villa d'Este "drinking brandy and smoking Winstons." RJR's Winston brand wasn't introduced until 1954.
Pg. 188 - The architect who designed the Merry Acres house was Luther Lashmit, not "Luther Lashman."
Pg.192 - During a 1952 flight to Hawaii, Dick's plane loses an engine and starts to come down in the Pacific. Radio distress calls summon "four destroyers," and the disabled airplane "was able to land on one of the ships." On a destroyer? I doubt that a multi-engined airplane could have landed safely on an aircraft carrier in those days.
Dick Reynolds was hardly a "Southern icon," despite the publicity that his often scandalous lifestyle garnered throughout his life. One might argue that he lived hard because of the boyhood loss of his father and mother, or the untimely and violent death of his younger brother Smith (a fascinating tale in itself), or that Dick enjoyed to the hilt the resources that were available to him, or that he burned brightly before he burned out. And one also might argue that most human beings fail to make the most of what the gods and nature bestow on them. But given the gifts he had, the privileges he was born to, Dick Reynolds's failures as a husband, father, and man were an especially tragic waste. Moreover, his privileges were born out of the suffering of thousands, perhaps millions, of nicotine addicts who, during Dick's lifetime, were largely unaware of the dangers of cigarettes. It's ironic that Dick, himself a heavy smoker, died -- probably of the effects of emphysema, though there remain some questions as to the exact circumstances -- just a few months after the U.S. Surgeon General's 1964 report on smoking and health stated a definite link between cigarettes and lung diseases.
KID CAROLINA is an adequate overview of the man, but Schnakenberg wallows too much in the minutiae of Muriel's memories of their relationship and in the legal wrangling that marked the end of that relationship. If you want to read just one book about Dick Reynolds and his family, get THE GILDED LEAF: TRIUMPH, TRAGEDY, AND TOBACCO: THREE GENERATIONS OF THE R. J. REYNOLDS FAMILY AND FORTUNE, by Dick's youngest son, Patrick Reynolds, and Tom Schactman. It's the more accurate work, despite the personal issues and biases that anti-smoking activist Patrick brings to his account.
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