SOCIETY Serpents’ teeth

“Hot? sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child!”

-Otbello act I, sc.iv



the bad daughters are gone. Six months have passed since billionaire Harold Simmons settled with them for almost S50 million apiece in exchange for their promise never to sue-or speak to him-again. He refers to the split as a “divorce.” It’s his third.

Now, when Simmons speaks of his four daughters-two from each of his first two marriages-he distinguishes between “the good daughters” and “the bad daughters.” The good daughters (Serena and Lisa) stood by him when the bad daughters (Scheryle and Andrea) filed suit against him, alleging he’d mismanaged their billion-dollar trust. When the jury couldn’t decide which side to believe, Simmons paid Scheryle and Andrea to vanish from his life-forever. The good daughters will inherit die bulk of Simmons’ $1.3 billion, held in two trusts. The bad daughters won’t.

“With the bad daughters,” Simmons says, in his flat. East Texas twang, “I tried to emphasize the importance of making their own way in life, I told them, ’You won’t like yourself if you get everything from me and that’s all you ever do in life.’ Andrea verbally acknowledged that, but Scheryle was emotionally retarded.”

Harold and Annette Simmons are sitting in the living room of their plush, expensively appointed Preston Hollow mansion, surrounded by dozens of family snapshots suggesting the kind of happy family this family’s never been. At 67, Simmons has a way of expressing himself that is refreshingly candid, if painful to hear. He talks so fast-fast as an auctioneer-you aren’t really certain if you heard him correctly. Did he actually describe his daughter, even one of the bad ones, as emotionally retarded?

You don’t have to know Simmons long to know that he is blunt, to the point, unafraid to tell it as he sees it, Success has afforded him that luxury. Annette, his 62-year-old wife, is the perfect complement to a man like Simmons. Her easy way with people (he calls it “a talent”) is what attracted him in the first place. In the 18 years they’ve been married, they have developed a rhythm in which Simmons tells it like it is, and then Annette steps in to gently rephrase his unedited comments. Unless those comments are about the bad girls. Then she says nothing.

A new family portrait hangs in the master bedroom; the old one-shot three summers ago, the last time everyone gathered for the annual family weekend in Santa Barbara-is in the attic, boxed up with the other pictures of the bad girls. “1 didn’t feel like 1 could burn them,” explains Annette. The look on her face says she’s not entirely sure she won’t.



None of the Simmons girls liked their stepmother. From the moment Harold Simmons married the former Annette Reck in 1980-weeks after the divorce from his second wife, Sandra Simmons, was final-his daughters, both good and bad. resented Annette and the changes she’d made in their father’s life. The bad daughters were particularly vocal. “Since you married Annette, her family has taken over and she’s excluded everybody,” Scheryle. me oldest vented during one particularly heated phone conversation with her father. “All of your wives have controlled you.”

Andrea, Simmons’ third daughter, regularly expressed her contempt for her father’s new wife in a series of what Annette and Harold Simmons call “hate letters.” When she visited, she’d turn photos of Annette and her children face down (her way, she said, of pretending Annette was “a nonperson”). Harold Simmons, initially, dismissed the behavior as a rite of adolescent passage. Yet even after all of his daughters made the transition into adulthood, he remained oblivious, referring to the situation as “one of the minor imperfections of life.”

Minor, unless, of course, a couple of those daughters decide to exact revenge for what they saw as a lifetime of emotional neglect. Harold and Annette Simmons had managed to successfully cultivate an image of “quiet money” among the people who count in Dallas, and suddenly they found themselves cast as Daddy Dearest and Wife No. 3 in a family squabble mat played itself out in an embarrassingly public fashion-not only locally but around the world. The New York Times broke the story, which was ultimately covered by The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London as well. Even in the days when his hostile raids on unsuspecting companies had industry insiders questioning his tactics, Harold Simmons was admired for playing his particular version of the game very well. Now, the billionaire whose personal battle with arthritis prompted him to give $51 million to cancer and arthritis research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center- his first installment. 541 million, is the largest one-time gift ever made to the center-was castigated as a controlling, emotionally distant father who used money for both punishment and reward.

The image of generous philanthropists was further sullied by revelations that the couple’s largess came out of the girls” trusts; that Simmons donated more than $100,000 in political contributions in his daughters’ names; that gifts for the grandkids were bought with funds from the trusts and then treated as distributions to his daughters; that $ 1.6 million worth of jewelry for Annette was purchased with trust assets he then called “investments.” Finally, they hired Lisa LeMaster. But not even the damage-control specialist-whose clients have included hockey con man John Spano-could spin this story to the Simmonses’ satisfaction. “I’m sure she did some good for us, but we couldn’t tell it.” says Simmons. “We would get such horrible press and it seemed like every time reporters called to talk, to her, she wasn’t available, so they’d go on and print what the plaintiff said It just got to a point where we thought, ’This is not working.’ “

“The Dallas Morning News would beat us up so bad and, just a year before, they had praised Harold for all he had done,” says Annette, still incredulous. “They’d written articles about him and about what he’d given to the hospital. Then, all of a sudden, we are the bad guys. It didn’t bother Harold particularly. He said, ’Our friends know it’s not true. Who else matters?’ But my response was, ’I don’t care if it’s the grocery boy who takes my groceries out to the car, I want him to know the truth ’”

Not to mention those perched on Dallas’ higher social plane. Annette hated being a topic of conversation on the social circuit. It was one thing to contend privately with stepdaughters who hated you, but quite another to have the relationships offered up for public consumption. “Annette is much more sensitive about public opinion,” says Simmons, who, clearly, has agreed to be interviewed for this story to appease his wife.

The daughters, good and bad, declined to be interviewed. “There’s so much history and so much pain in our family,” explains Serena, the youngest of me four Simmons girls, the daughter who long ago assumed the role of family mediator when her sister, Andrea, and stepsister, Scheryle, got into screaming matches with their father. Serena’s day job is social work at the Center for Survivors of Torture.



In 1964, the year Harold Simmons established his daughters’ trust, he didn’t look like abusinessman destined for the Forbes 400. He was the Simmons behind Simmons University Pharmacy across from SMU. the drugstore operator who drove a Volkswagen Beetle to work each day and mowed his own lawn each weekend.

But that single drugstore in Dallas grew to a chain of about 100 across Texas and. in 1973, Simmons sold the entire operation to Eckerd for $50 million. By then, the VW Beetle was gone and Simmons, who’d begun sporting long sideburns and white boots, had bought and learned to fly his own plane.

He parlayed the $50 million into more than $1 billion by staging takeover raids on undervalued companies, The first year he appeared among the Forbes 400 ( iy&4), his net worm ($200 million) earned him the No. 99 spot on the magazine’s list of the wealthiest Americans, far behind Ross Perot (No. 4), the better-known rich eccentric from Dallas. Today, through a holding company called Contran Corp., Simmons controls six public companies and dozens of private companies that sell everything from titanium dioxide (a major ingredient in paint) to bagels.

In the early days of his relationship with Annette. Simmons refused to attend dinner parties for fear he’d be seated next to someone he didn’t know.

“I’m not going to talk about the weather,” he’d warn her in advance. “You’re very interesting,” Annette would tell him. “A lady would enjoy visiting with you. but you’re going to have to visit with her. You can’t just sit there.”

Their circle of friends soon came to know this about Harold Simmons: When he has nothing to say. he says nothing, Some 15 years ago, Annette’s longtime friend, Jill Smith, was seated next to Simmons at a small dinner party held at the University Club. It was the first time she’d met the man who married her friend. From all the articles she’d read about Harold Simmons, she expected him to be “chatty.” but she quickly discovered a man not given to small talk. “1 worked very hard to find a common ground.” recalls Smith, “and I finally found it in his roots in East Texas.”

Simmons grew up in Golden, population 200 the year he was born ( 1931 ). His father was superintendent of the school, and his mother was a teacher in a farming town known mostly for its sweet potato crops. The only running water in the Simmons home- located just down the way from the school-house and the Baptist church-was supplied by a back-porch pump. Shy and introverted, the second of the three Simmons boys was so afraid of speaking before a group that he once took an “F’ in an English class rather than deliver a speech. When he was accepted to The University of Texas at Austin, his parents moved to nearby Manor so that their middle son could live at home while he attended college. He graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key; later, he added a master’s degree.

Harold Simmons has always been better at reading a balance sheet than any of the people who entered (and exited) his life. The businessman with an uncanny knack for detecting and exploiting undervalued assets is, by his own admission, “socially retarded.’’ Petrified of crowds. Tortured by the exchange of the trivial.

Before he married Annette, they negotiated an agreement: He would go out up to four nights a week, rarely more, and never on a Sunday. When he was ready to go home (always around 10). they’d go home. And if they weren’t seated together at one of those small dinner parties, she could count on him to move his place card next to hers. “He did that one night at the Tower Club.” says Annette. “It was Nancy Dedman’s 60th birthday party. I said, ’Oh honey, we will never be invited back.’ I mean, the Dedmans. Wouldn’t we want to be perfect for the Dedmans? We were, really, just beginning to be part of that group.

“You have to remember that we were country bumpkins-we still are. But because we have a little money, it’s normal that we get letters for charity. And when we give, we get invited to other things-lovely parties with lovely people. We had really just started to be involved with the Dedmans, Ed Cox, the really special, wonderful, social people of Dallas. And when Harold moved that name tag, I just thought, ’We will never be invited back.” “

Annette was divorced and Simmons was separated in 1978 when they ran into each other at a Cowboys football game. Annette was the guest of friends Lawson and Fran Ridgeway, whose box was located a few doors down from Simmons’. When Simmons received a phone call intended for the Ridgeways, he delivered the phone message himself and then stayed long enough to ask Annette for a date. Part of the attraction. even then, had to do with Annette’s easy way in a social situation. “People genuinely like Annette,” Simmons says, admiringly. “She’s very talented that way.”

Knowing that he and his wife, Sandra, had been on and off for years, Annette told him, “When you get your house in order, cal I me.”

But Simmons’ house wouldn’t be in order for more than a year. He called anyway, and they began their year-and-a-half courtship over dinner at Old Warsaw. Within two months, he invited Annette to his townhouse for dinner with Serena and Andrea. By the end of the evening, Annette says. “I knew if it got serious with Harold that I was up against real trouble with the girls. Sandra [Andrea and Serena’s mother] had poisoned them against me.” A year later, he proposed marriage over Sunday brunch at the old Andrew’s on McKinney Avenue. Simmons [old Annette he had something important to say, something to which he’d given a great deal of thought. After careful consideration, he had concluded that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Annette, who could have glimpsed the future during her courtship with Simmons, was wary of his timing. His divorce was imminent, but it wouldn’t be final for several months. She asked him why he wanted to marry her.

“Because you’re stable and dependable,” he said.

“’Is that it?”

Of course not. “You’re also well-organized.”

Soon after, Simmons bought a house in Preston Hollow and Annette, a sometime interior designer, moved in with her two children, Andy and Amy, and began redecorating. About six months later, his divorce final, they married in a small ceremony at Highland Park Presbyterian-just Annette, Harold, and the minister. “We didn’t feel we should have my children there without his daughters there,” Annette says. “And they were not speaking to me.”

Simmons was awarded custody of Serena and Andrea, but the girls chose to live with their mother-Serena, because she liked the house: Andrea, because she didn’t feel wanted. She wrote letters to her father accusing him of abandonment. When the note began with “Dear Harold.” Simmons knew it was “one of her hate letters.” {His daughters always called him “Harold” when they were angry with him and “Dad” when they weren’t.) Annette recalls one letter addressed specifically to her, which said not only that Andrea hated her, but that she and her mother were going to put a contract out on her.

“Harold said, ’Andrea, if you can’t respect my wife after 15 years, then maybe you shouldn’t come over,’ ” says Annette. “She said that was fine, she wouldn’t be coming over. So for about a year 1 didn’t see her. Which was wonderful”

Simmons, meanwhile, was fatalistic about the situation. “Most stepchildren don’t like their stepparent. You just accept it and go ahead,” he says. “No use trying to lecture them about it: ’I wish you’d be nice to Annette.” That’d just lead to additional confrontation and additional bad feelings. I just pretty well ignored it.”

Until he heard from Andrea’s attorney.



Simmons and his daughters met regularly for lunch. What began as an occasional father-daughter outing at the family farm in McKinney (on those Saturdays allotted him in the custody agreement) turned into weekly lunch dates as the girls grew into adults. Originally the family’s version of time-out. lunch-in the end- would set the stage for Simmons’ Waterloo.

Gathering four daughters from two marriages was never easy. Scheryle, who has lived in Arizona ever since she was sent away to a Tucson boarding school, rarely showed. Lisa, one of the “good daughters,” almost always did. Andrea, the mercurial one. the one who “either loves you to death or hates you,” as Simmons says, based her attendance on whether or not she was on speaking terms with her father. Serena, the pleaser of the family, was almost always there. For a family with a history of the kind of discord that never seemed to favor gathering around the table at mealtime, the regular lunch dates amounted to a sort of miracle.

They liked Luby’s, though in a pinch Furr’s would do. They would order scoops of comfort food and settle into conversations that ranged from casual (what was going on at work) to whether or not a charity one of the girls was donating to made good business sense. Simmons would indulge his weakness for the food Annette forbids him at home: fried fish, collard greens, and mashed potatoes; Lisa and Andrea liked salad; and Serena, a vegetarian, invariably ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.

On a Tuesday in January 1996, Simmons and his daughters met at Furr’s Cafeteria for what would be the last of their regular lunch dates. Initially, it would be remembered for the botched food. Everything that day had been overcooked.

Over lunch. Simmons told Serena and Andrea (Lisa and Scheryle weren’t there) that he was facing a tax bill for hundreds of millions of dollars on the two trusts that held the family’s $1.3 billion fortune. But he and his advisors had already come up with a solu-tion. He wanted to dissolve one trust and put the proceeds into a charitable trust. He and Annette would live on the proceeds; after they died, the money would be parceled out among the four girls.

The Simmons girls knew they were beneficiaries of a trust; for years, they’d received thousands in monthly allowances and thousands more toward living expenses. But they were left to surmise its value only through newspaper and magazine references to “billionaire Harold Simmons.”

By the ’80s. Simmons was among the nation’s most feared corporate raiders, attacking undervalued companies such as SeaLand Corp., GAF Corp., NL Industries. and Lockheed (which has since merged with Martin Marietta Corp.). Every time he was written up, he’d send a copy to each of his daughters. It was after Scheryle got her copy of a Forbes piece, in which Simmons suggested most of his money would go to charity, that she began to worry about whether there would be enough left over for her. She talked about it with her sister and stepsisters. “The trust can be nothing by the time it comes our turn,” Scheryle told their father over the phone. Simmons and his firstborn were forever arguing about money. “I have complete authority to do what I want to with the trust,” he told her. He’d named himself trustee for that very reason.

Like a lot of self-made men, Simmons loathed the idea of hand-outs. “If you’ve got a daughter who’s saying, “Hey Dad. 1 need some more money,’ you don’t say to her, “Well, let me tell you something honey, you’ve got a billion dollars. How much of it do you want today?’ It’s not wise to communicate to these emotionally retarded adults everything you’re doing.”

So he didn’t.

And they rarely questioned him. Until the Federal Election Commission fined him for exceeding campaign donation limits, he regularly paid each of his daughters to sign blank political contribution forms, Now facing the kind of tax bill that threatened to wipe him out, he wanted them to sign papers that would allow him to revamp the family’s holdings.

Simmons was never very good at reading his daughters. That Tuesday at Furr’s was no different. He saw nothing to indicate that they objected to the plan. Serena, in fact, liked the idea of a charitable trust. As she and Andres walked to the car, out of earshot of their father, who was inside paying the check, she asked her sister what she thought of it. Andrea, still nursing a grudge over Simmons’ refusal to invest several million dollars into her husband’s new business venture, rolled her eyes. She didn’t trust her father.

Nor did she believe he was telling them the truth. Within six months, she filed a lawsuit accusing him of breaching his fiduciary duty and mismanaging the trusts. At last, she’d found a way to get his attention.



Conventional wisdom suggested that Simmons & Simmons vs. Simmons would never go to trial. Neither side wanted the family exposed for the soap opera it was. Yet, when his daughters offered to settle, Simmons refused. As he says now, “They’d just piss the money away.”

But there was more to it. Simmons, never one to shy away from a court case he thinks he can win, was convinced he could win this one. Attorneys for each side “tried” the case at least two times apiece before separate focus groups to see how jury members would respond to the issues of the case: Is it OK for children to sue their father? Is it OK to forge political contributions? Is it OK to buy more than a million dollars worth of jewelry out of your daughters’ trust and then claim it as a business investment?

Simmons’ attorneys won bom times. The girls’ attorneys, meanwhile, quickly discovered that no one liked the idea of family suing family; in the mock trials, they scored only partial victories.

In an attempt to avert a trial, the judge ordered mediation. A team of lawyers and psychologists from Norm Carolina was flown in. Several suites and conference rooms at the Four Seasons Hotel & Resort were booked. The mediators shuttled among the five rooms separating Harold and Annette Simmons (and their attorneys) from Lisa and Serena (and their attorneys), Andrea (and her attorneys), Scheryle (and her attorneys), and the guardian at I item (representing the unborn heirs).They considered a number of options, including the possibility of all of them becoming trustees, but two days into the second round of mediation, talks broke down.

Initially, Andrea and Scheryle wanted $25 million apiece, tax-free, plus the freedom to retain their position in the trusts. When Simmons refused, they countered with a secont) offer to settle for $100 million apiece, tax free. When he refused again, the mediators suggested divorce. “Like you divorce a wife,” Simmons says. “Just divorce them. Let them go.”

But Andrea had something she wanted to tell her father. She knew that he held her hus-band. Randall, responsible for the lawsuit, and she wanted to set him straight. Alone with her father for the first time since lunch at Furr’s the year before, she told him the lawsuit was her idea-not her attorneys”, not her husband’s. According to Simmons, she then pR)mised to sue him again if she lost the case. She’d keep suing him. she told him. until the day he died. In feet, she wished he would die before the trial to save everyone a lot of trouble.

Andrea had been telling her mother. Sandra, and her sister. Serena, how much she hated her father and that she wished, every day. that he would die. But she had never told him. Until that moment.

With a trial now unavoidable, Simmons’ attorneys suggested Annette appear. in court, looking less like a woman who’s been named to the Crystal Charity Ball best-dressed Hall of Fame and more like a businesswoman of moderate means. (She purchased two pinstriped suits she hasn’t worn since.) The attorneys also suggested the couple ask their friends to stay home. A parade of Dallas’ well-to-do in and out of the courtroom would do nothing to endear the billionaire and his glamorous wife to the members of the jury. To keep their friends up-to-date, Annette faxed daily dispatches to her friend, Jill Smith: Smith then faxed Annette’s report to the 18 couples who make up the Summonses’ inner circle.

After almost eight weeks of testimony exposing the Simmons family for all that it wasn’t, the judge declared a mistrial. The half of the jury that favored Harold Simmons believed he had the right to spend the money as he saw fit: he’d made it. after all. The half that favored Scheryle and Andrea believed Simmons wasn’t being truthful.

“I don’t think the jury understood what a billion dollars is. To them, it’s just like a million,” says Simmons. “They made a big point over and over again about a million and a half dollars worth of jewelry that the company bought and gave to me as compensation. They thought. ’My God. a million and a half dollars worth of jewelry? Put the guy in jail!” But it’s not even one day’s income tor the company.”

In the end, Harold Simmons divorced his bad daughters for close to $50 million each, in effect slamming the door on the most painful episode of his life. He and Annette both say the settlement has brought a measure of peace to their lives, but friends question whether that’s possible.

Annette stilt wakes in the middle of the night. During one restless spell, she came up with several titles for this story. “My favorite one is ’Rags to Bitches.’” she says. A smile crosses her face.