William Procter and James Gamble were young immigrants who drifted to Cincinnati in the 1830s. Procter was English, Gamble Irish. Until they met, they went nowhere. They were just two faceless statistics in the growing industrial city’s labor pool. Both had jobs, at which they worked without particular distinction.
Then they met, and their lives changed radically.
They met when they courted a pair of sisters. It came about by blind chance, as such meetings usually do. One weekend the two young men came calling at the same hour, and they were introduced to each other instantly. Perhaps each recognized in the other some trait or group of skills or strengths that he had often wished to find in himself. Each determined, at any rate, that he had met a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of his life. Neither had made much of himself alone, but together, they may have sensed, they had the potential to go far.
They were destiny partners.
In 1837 they put their savings and some borrowed money together to form a tiny wad of seed capital. It totalled $7,192.24. With this small investment they founded a soap and candle business called Procter and Gamble. Business journalists ever afterward would misspell that first name “Proctor”, but that didn’t matter much. The company founded by these two young brothers-in-law (yes, they married the sisters) was to become perhaps the most successful mass marketer of low-priced household and good products in the history of the industrial world.
Throughout the 1980s, this enormous company has had more than $10 billion in sales each year. That is more than the gross national product of most of the world’s countries – including Ireland, the native land of James Gamble.
That is what can happen when two people get together to expand their individual destinies. Apart: two also-rans. Together: an explosion of good luck.
The results are seldom so dramatic, of course. “Janice and I are two people who seem to bring each other good luck,” says Andrea, who is one-half of a New York destiny pair. Both are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. As is traditional in AA, they do not want their full names made public.
They met by chance at an AA gathering more than 20 years ago. Both at the time were down on their luck. Both were drinking heavily. Janice came form an affluent suburban background and had recently been floored by a painful divorce. Andrea was separated from a husband who was also an alcoholic but refused to seek help. When drunk he would turn up at her Brooklyn apartment and shout obscenities through the door until the neighbors complained and she had to let him in. These incessant visits upset her and kept her off balance. She had been through a succession of jobs, each one lower in pay and status than the one preceding it. “I was in a mess,” she recalls. “i had a quart-a-day drinking habit, and I was trying to support it by waitressing in scroungy restaurants. I was wondering if I could earn more money by prostitution. I was on the verge of a complete collapse.”
Alcoholism and its control are both largely matters of luck, according to AA and other people who deal with it. “Of all men and women who ever start drinking, about 10% eventually become alcoholics,” Loran Archer, deputy director of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says. “We don’t know all the reasons, but we do know some. Genetics plays a part. If you’re born of an alcoholic parent, you’re a lot more likely to become an alcoholic yourself than somebody with two sober parents.” The genes one inherits are of course beyond one’s control and so would fit our definition of luck.
Whether an alcoholic defeats the problem is also dependent on luck. Of all those who ever turn up at an AA meeting, half drop out within three months and are never seen again. Of those who stick with it for a year, 41% are likely to make it at least through another year. What differentiates those who stay sober? There are many factors, but one of the most important – perhaps the most important – is the question of who else happens to be at the newcomer’s first one or two meetings.
Mutual support, one member helping another, is the foundation of AA-style therapy. If you’re an alcoholic and go to a meeting to see if there’s help for you there, what happens to you will depend almost entirely on those you chance to meet. If you dislike them or find them too solicitous or not solicitous enough – if, for any reason, no spark of affection is struck – you will probably walk away forever, perhaps to your doom. But if you are luckier, you will meet people you can like and trust, and through them you may find your salvation.
And if you are really lucky, you will meet your destiny partner. It is not an uncommon AA story. It happened to Andrea and Janice.
“It was my first meeting,” Andrea says. “I’d just lost my umpteenth job for showing up late. I was hung over and feeling terrible. Suicide was one thought that crossed my mind. I knew I needed some kind of help, but I didn’t really think AA was going to be it. I just went to that meeting out of desperation. And by sheer luck, there was Janice. It wasn’t her regular meeting place or time. She was there by a fluke.”
Like Procter and Gamble, they formed a lifetime partnership that changed both their destinies. Janice helped Andrea sober up and stay that way. Once sober, Andrea was able to move back up the career ladder from which she had fallen. She found a secretarial job with the Prudential Insurance Company.
Then it was Andrea’s turn to help Janice. After being sober for several months, Janice had a relapse. Andrea helped her recover from that and then helped her find a job at the insurance company. Janice had not worked at an outside-the-home job throughout her married life and would have had little chance of finding anything but minimum-wage work without Andrea’s help.
Then it was Janice’s turn again. By random luck she was assigned to a boss who admired her skills and boosted her rapidly to a supervisory position. She pulled Andrea up after her. Soon both women were in high-paid, responsible jobs.
Then they decided on a joint venture. Pooling their savings and borrowing from a company credit union, Andrea and Janice bought a small resort hotel on the New Jersey shore. By paying special attention to the dining room, they changed it from just a summer business to a year-round attraction. It prospered, and they expanded their venture. Today they own and operate three small oceanfront hotels and have a half-interest in a shopping plaza.
Their business is not on the scale of Procter and Gamble, but they can be called unequivocally successful. It shows what destiny pairing can do. If these two women had not paired, it is hard to imagine what might have become of them separately.
A destiny partner is more than just a friend. A friend is somebody you like and have fun with. The lining may even be profound enough to deserve the name love. But if this person doesn’t objectively change the course of your life and the nature of your luck, then “friend” is the only right word.
Most friends are only friends. Some may be friends of very long-standing: friends who go back to your school or college days, your old home neighborhood, good times long ago. Your heart warms when you see these people. But in terms of luck they are no different from anybody else in your acquaintanceship network. They may bring you isolated strokes of life-changing luck from time to time, but only a person who alters your luck over a long term may be called a destiny partner.
A spouse isn’t necessarily a destiny partner either. It is sentimental and nice to talk about one’s spouse in destiny-pair terms – “I could have never have made it without her” – but in objective fact, such statements may be true only in a limited sense.
It is certainly true that spouses affect each other’s destinies by becoming linked economically. If one spouse achieves a high income, the other goes along for the ride. Moreover, they may change each other’s lives by producing children. But in many marriages, that is about the size of it. The spouse who was going to become a great novelist or found a successful company would have done so anyway, married or not.
Such mutually noninfluential marriages aren’t to be disparaged. The two spouses may love each other deeply. The sex may be great, the kids happy, the harmony unassailable. But to talk about these two people climbing toward their destiny together may be only a romantic fiction. It would be a fallacy to assume that every contentedly married couple is a destiny pair.
On the other hand, such married pairs do exist. In the theatrical world Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine were a destiny pair, for example. To a lesser degree, so were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Each had targeted his or her destiny before they met, but their forward motion seems to be slowing and their luster was dimming. If they had not come together, both might have fallen separately to obscurity. By forming a partnership, they vastly increased the sum of their parts.
Some other examples are to be found among couples occupying the White House. John and Jacqueline Kennedy were probably a destiny pair. Richard and Pat Nixon were not. Ronald and Nancy Regan may be, but that marriage is so fiercely private that we may never know for sure.
How do you meet your destiny partner? It usually happens by blind luck, as it did in the case of Procter and Gamble, Andrea and Janice – not to mention any number of other famous destiny pairs such as Gilbert Johnson and James Boswell. That being so, the best way to boost your chances of meeting the person who will change your luck is to practice the Second Technique: Put yourself out in the fast flow.
In a few cases, destiny pairs meet in part because one goes looking for the other. Luck always plays a larger role, but the active looking can make a lucky hit more likely. This could happen to you as either the seeker or the sought.
A classic case of this seeker-and-sought pairing is the story of Margaret Mitchell and Harold Latham. If these tow had never met, it is probable that would would never have heard of Gone with the Wind.
One of the most successful novels and movies of all history, this grand work owed its birth and maturing to a series of lucky flukes, culminating in the fluke of the Mitchell-Latham pairing. That was the kingpin fluke, the one that brought and held everything else together. Before it occurred, however, the author’s life was pushed this way and that by a number of other events that were not of her making.
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, who preferred to be called Peggy, wanted to be a doctor. She started college in 1918 with that goal in view. Then the first chancy event struck. A worldwide epidemic of flu took millions of lives in 1919, and among those lives was that of Peggy Mitchell’s mother, back home in Atlanta, Georgia. Peggy went back there – temporarily, she thought – to keep house for her father.
After a while she made an attempt to resume her premedical college career, but she found herself homesick and distracted, unable to keep up with the academic competition. After nearly flunking some courses, she returned to Atlanta permanently.
She married, divorced, married again – the second time to advertising executive John Marsh. There were no children by either marriage. To absorb a restless energy that seemed to increase in each year of her twenties, she turned to sundry literary pursuits. She had always been an engaging, witty writer. She got a job as a newspaper feature reporter. She also became a familiar figure at parties ang gatherings of Atlanta’s young arty-intellectual set.
Then another chancy event nudged her life along a different course. The event this time was an automobile accident, the first of three in which she would be involved in her lifetime.
Margaret Mitchell had been accident-prone since childhood and it would be an accident, finally, that would end her life. There are lot of psychoanalytic theories about accident-proneness. Most are too goofy to take seriously. They are like those theories about compulsive gambling. Just as the compulsive gambler supposedly wants to lose, so the accident-prone person allegedly wants to get hurt or killed, to atone for some real or imagined sin. Perhaps it is in some cases true. In most, however, accident-proneness is a form of bad luck resulting form ordinary carelessness. It comes most often from a failure to apply the Eighth Technique: worst-case analysis. The accident-prone man or woman, far from being depressed and searching for punishment, tends to be overoptimistic, happy-go-lucky. He or she blunders trustingly into situations instead of saying “Now, wait a minute, how can this go wrong?”
Margaret Mitchell seems to have been one of these people. She had had at least two serious horseback riding accidents as a girl. Now, as a young woman of 26, one year after her marriage to John Marsh, she had her first automobile accident. Driving alone in wet weather, she skidded off a road. Her ankle was injured severely enough to keep her virtually housebound for more than a year. As a result, she had to give up her reporting career.
So here was this young woman of lively intellect and restless energy, stuck in the house by herself. She had no children to absorb her attention. Nor was housework her cup of tea. What could she do? She started a novel.
It was the story of a woman named Pansy (later renamed Scarlett) O’Hara, whose character matures and hardens as she wrestles with a series of challenges during the Civil War. The novel was essentially finished in late 1929 or 1930. It was enormously and intimidatingly long , more than 2,000 pages stuffed into envelopes and file folders.
It sat in those envelopes and folders, slowly turning yellow, for five or six years. Later, Margaret Mitchell maintained steadfastly that she never submitted the manuscript to anybody in all that time. Some say she did show at least some chapters to a few editors, but they rejected the novel; and after those early attempts, she gave up trying to get it published. If that version is true, both editors involved can of course be counted on to keep quiet forever about their ghastly error or judgment.
Be that as it may, the great novel lay dormant, all but abandoned. For a time, parts of it were used to prop up a sofa – it was just so much paper. It needed a stroke of luck to bring it to life.
The luck came in the person of Margaret Mitchell’s destiny partner, Harold Latham.
Latham was editor in chief and vice president of the Macmillan Company. In 1935, nine years after Margaret Mitchell had started writing her novel, he stopped off in Atlanta while on a tour of the South. Recent developments in the book business made him think the time was propitious for historical novels set in the South, and he was out looking for some. When he first got to Atlanta, he was disappointed. An advance scouting party was supposed to have lined up some promising authors for him to talk to but had failed to find any. He retired grumpily to his hotel room and made some phone calls. Luckily for Margaret Mitchell, she had always kept herself in the fast flow. Somebody knew somebody who knew her.
“Is she working on anything?” Latham asked.
“I heard her mention a novel years ago. I don’t know.”
Latham managed to meet Margaret Mitchell. She denied the existence of her supposed novel, perhaps because she was convinced by now that it was worthless. Still, she and Harold Latham did take to each other instantly.
They were a mismatched-looking pair. Latham was a big, blundering bear of a man with steel-rimmed glasses. Margaret Mitchell was tiny, less than five feet tall. She had a kind of prettiness that did not age well. In her twenties she had been arrestingly good-looking. In her mid thirties, when Latham met her, she was developing an unnaturally big-eyed look. In her forties she would turn fat and jowly.
Latham pestered her about her alleged novel. She finally admitted such a thing existed but said it was incomplete, nowhere near ready for the light of day. Latham gave up. He went back to his hotel for supper, then went up to his room. He was planning to go to bed early and catch a morning train home to New York.
His phone rang. It was Margaret Mitchell. She said she changed her mind. She was down in the hotel lobby with her manuscript.
Nobody has ever offered a satisfactory explanation of this sudden change of mind. One biographer, Anne Edwards says it came about because a friend needled Margaret Mitchell about her “seriousness” as a writer. That sounds plausible. But it may be more plausible to speculate that the diminutive novelist recognized the rare chemistry that existed between herself and Harold Latham. She could show her novel to him and feel comfortable about it. He was her big chance. If she did not seize this chance, fate might not offer her another.
That is the way it is with destiny pairs. If your potential partner walks into your life – a person with whom you feel a quick, strong and positive reaction – don’t let that person simply walk back out. At least keep the newborn relationship alive while you assess it and see where it might go for such a chance might not come around again.
The rest of Margaret Mitchell’s story is much like the story of lucky Charles Darrow and his Monopoly. Gone with the Wind was published on June 30, 1936 – a monstrously fat book of more than 1,000 pages, with a cover price of $3. Working together, Margaret Mitchell and Harold Latham had fashioned that impossibly bulk manuscript into a coherent story that gripped people and wouldn’t let go. Success was instant and overwhelming. Three weeks after publication there were 176,000 copies in print. Two months later the figure had reached 330,000. A year after publication the total was about 1.5 million and still climbing. When David Selznick produced a movie based on the novel, it became the biggest success of his career, and it gloriously launched the career of actress Vivien Leigh. Both the novel and the movie are still earning money for people today.
The destiny pair, Mitchell and Latham, stayed together. He kept suggesting that she write another novel, but she never did. Perhaps she felt she could never match that stupendous creative act, and if so, she was probably right. A second novel would almost certainly have been a letdown. Latham may have harbored the same fear, for he did not push her to write a sequel. They continued to write to each other fondly, talked often by phone, visited from time to time. In August 1949, perhaps brooding over the wonder of what had happened to her, Margaret Mitchell was struck by a car while crossing an Atlanta street. She died a few days later. She was 49.
And so Margaret Mitchell was lucky in some ways but not in others. That is usually the way it is. Indeed, it might even be true to say that is always the way it is.