The late afternoon sun hits the lake outside Felix Dennis' Connecticut cottage in a particularly picturesque way, but the 60-year-old serial media entrepreneur and founder of Maxim is oblivious to it. He's swaying back and forth in his living room, eyes closed, fingering an air guitar to a CD that's replaying one of his performances at the Mustique Blues Festival. Loudly.
I'm collapsed in a chair by the fireplace. I think I'm supposed to join in, but I don't. I can't. We've had three and a half bottles of wine since I arrived here for a simple Sunday lunch. Then Dennis moved on to postprandial Scotch. I didn't. I couldn't. Standing upright could get complicated. Judging from the tapes, at this point, simple speech is pretty complicated.
I'd come to interview Dennis—an eccentric tycoon even by the standards of "eccentric tycoons"—about his career in media and the upcoming publication of How to Get Rich, a rather engaging and blunt self-help book. As defined in his text, "rich" starts at a total asset value of $30 million. Dennis puts his own wealth between $400million and $900 million; the London Times pegs it around $1.5 billion. His estimate would be higher were it not for his prodigious spending. In the book, he invents the statistic, Lifetime Spending Total, or, naturally, LST. His own, he says, is "eye-watering"—in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some background on the squat, bearded Dennis: He was briefly jailed in his native England in 1971 after losing an obscenity trial concerning his counterculture magazine, Oz. He grew up in a house, he writes, in which straitened circumstance sometimes required using torn newspapers as toilet paper. In his fifties, he became a published poet. He openly admits to having spent several years overindulging in crack cocaine. He has written what must be the only self-help business book that contains sentences such as: "If it flies, floats, or fornicates, rent it. It's cheaper." (Dennis is unmarried and proudly non-monogamous.)
And, oh yeah, he recently confessed to murder. In his last major interview, which appeared in The Times of London in early April, he shocked the reporter by saying he had once pushed a man off a cliff. When the journalist asked in a follow-up interview if he had done it, Dennis said, "It's a load of hogwash. I was drunk," and he withdrew the confession "unconditionally." Still, his remarks reverberated, and his sub- sequent statements didn't help. In a lecture delivered to students at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism later that month, which I attended, Dennis said no one had bothered to check the date the Times published its piece—Apr.1, he said, (as in April Fools'). Actually, the story ran on Apr.2, and the interview itself took place in late 2007—a fact that I, and other reporters, noted the next day. In our interview, Dennis now says that the story was published online on Apr.1, although I can't find any evidence that it was. "The story speaks for itself. Mr. Dennis spoke for himself. The reporting provides the full context of his comments," said a Times spokesman.
I am perfectly happy to believe that Dennis concocted his tale for the sake of shock, or outrage, or something. All the same, I made sure that several people knew where I was lunching in Connecticut.
Dennis made his pile in an old-fashioned way, by starting and selling ink-on-paper businesses, generally in corners shunned or overlooked by more established publishing houses. (His first big success piggybacked on the kung fu craze that erupted after the death of movie star Bruce Lee, publishing Kung-Fu Monthly in multiple countries.) He's most famous in the U.S. for the lad magazine Maxim, which he sold last year, along with two other mags, for what was reported to be around $240 million. But more of his money likely has come from computer magazines, which he began publishing in Britain in 1978, and from his share in computer retailer MicroWarehouse.
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