Lee Miglin and J. Paul Beitler had just taken their seats in the New Haven, Conn., offices of Cesar Pelli, one of the world`s great architects.
Some months earlier the Chicago developers had commissioned Pelli to design a skyscraper. The partners had never suggested how tall it should be, only that it must comply with Chicago zoning rules. Now Pelli was about to unveil a model of his creation.
As a cloth was lifted from the model, Pelli, whose Italian-accented English made him slightly mispronounce one of the men`s names, said with slow bravura, ”And Pohl . . Lee . . This will be the third tallest building in the world.”
What followed was screaming silence. Suddenly, Pelli realized what occurred. Third. That word hit the Chicagoans like a hard slap. Had Pelli come up with another artful, 50-story building like the one he earlier designed for them, that might`ve been just fine.
But Pelli had just told two of the proudest men in Chicago real estate they`d get near a world record but not break it. Close but no cigar. They looked hurt and Pelli reacted accordingly. ”As I watched Cesar, the expression on his face just dropped,” recalls Beitler.
Little more was said. Miglin and Beitler left for the airport, boarded their eight-passenger Cessna turboprop and returned to Chicago.
Three days later, Pelli phoned the Miglin-Beitler offices at Madison Plaza in the west Loop. ”Pohl . . . Lee . . . I have great news. I have a design for the tallest building in the world.”
It has been almost a year since Pelli`s call. Friday the Chicago City Council likely will give the developers more good news, the city`s blessings for the proposed Miglin-Beitler Tower, which the men themselves have tagged the ”Skyneedle.”
Resembling a svelte, gleaming 125-story missile, it would rise 15 stories higher than the dusky, big-shouldered Sears Tower and reach up 1,950 feet from the corner where Madison and Wells streets cross.
Since June, when plans for the tower were officially announced, Miglin and Beitler have become the most talked-about members of Chicago`s exclusive fraternity of downtown developers. Virtually overnight, they`ve become the high priests of development in a city where ”make no little plans” is the civic religion.
Not all the talk has been favorable. Some believe the two are egotistical publicity hounds and give them long odds of ever getting their tower financed, erected or, if it is built, filling it with tenants.
But Miglin and Beitler seem to thrive on long odds. After all, they`ve made tens of millions of dollars in a high-stakes game that`s not for the weak kneed. And both men-Miglin, the coal-miner`s son from a tiny central Illinois burg and Beitler, the poor kid from Detroit-have already beaten some fairly daunting odds.
None of their eight projects to date dominates Chicago`s skyline, although their tower, which would rise over the Sears and Hancock buildings, would change that. They already have two buildings at Wells and Madison, the intersection where their record-breaking tower is due to rise.
One corner holds the 47-story Madison Plaza, which from above looks like a saw blade with seven large teeth. Designed by Bruce Graham at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it`s world headquarters for Hyatt Corp and home to Miglin-Beitler. Diagonally across the street is the nearly complete Pelli-designed 50-story PaineWebber Tower. Made of white granite, its setbacks and shiny metallic trim are reminiscent of the classic skyscrapers of the past.
The two men also already have a ”tallest” building under their belts,
Helmut Jahn`s 31-story Oakbrook Terrace Tower of glittering glass and A-frame roof, the highest building in the suburbs. It houses the main offices of Jacob Suchard Inc., owner of Brachs Candy Co.
”We don`t do plain vanilla worker housing,” says Miglin, pointing to one such building from his office window. ”Most people have aspirations for something better and that`s what we try to give them.”
Those who know them say the two men fit the basic profile of major-league developers. They`re forceful, persistent and extraordinarily self-assured.
”It`s a very ego-driven industry and rightly so,” says Goldie Wolfe, a leading Chicago real estate broker who`s known both men for years. ”When a developer signs for a loan, it`s not for a thousand or a million. It`s for $200 million. That`s a hefty amount to sign your name on the dotted line for, and it helps if you`re not insecure.”
They admit to possessing healthy egos. But don`t compare them to you-know-who. ”Lee and I hate it when people ask us if we`re trying to be the Donald Trumps of Chicago,” Beitler says. ”We don`t do this for the money. . . Trump has gone over the edge” to become the ”American nightmare,” a casino-operating stock player who just enjoys ”the single event of making money.”
Instead, they love the challenge of topping their last act. Also, their tower is a mission to right a wrong. ”We can`t allow the Sears Tower to stand as mankind`s greatest architectural achievement, because it`s not,” says Beitler. ”It`s an engineering achievement. Many architects would agree, there`s nothing graceful about it.”
Man of many meetings
Beitler, 44, is the more intense, literally hands-on of the two. During an interview, he occasionally takes control of a reporter`s tape recorder, turning it off and on. He has a boy`s face, right down to his orthodontic braces. His voice sounds like Michael Douglas.
He`s ”a very difficult client, a perfectionist, obsessed,” says Stanley Tigerman, the architect who designed the Chicago Bar Association building, a post-modern castle the partners are building at 321 S. Plymouth Court. ”He`s involved in every nuance. I`ve never seen a guy sit in on so many meetings.” Miglin, on the other hand, retains a certain laid-back, small-town diffidence. He could be Mr. Rodgers`s older brother.
After several hours of being interviewed, he tells a reporter, ”I won`t really mind if a story appears or not.” Sensitive about his age, he doesn`t reveal it but those close to him guess he`s in his early 60s.
Friends say despite the contrasting styles, the two men are essentially super salesmen, birds of a feather. ”If they were ducks, Paul would be the one in flight who would look like he was exerting more energy, because you`d see his flapping wings,” says a former senior officer of Miglin-Beitler Inc. ”Lee would be just as active but on the pond`s surface. Below the water his paddles would be working furiously.”
”I am a driven man, there`s no question about it,” says Beitler. ”In the morning, it`s not sunlight that gets me out of bed.” Beitler typically leaves his Italian-English mansion in Winnetka for the office by 5 a.m. On the drive down the Edens, he works his Bentley`s carphone or listens to self-improvement tapes: Tom Peters on management or, lately, a Berlitz Spanish course.
Miglin prefers to leave his townhouse on the Gold Coast a bit later but mans his desk many nights till midnight.
While Beitler is responsible for Miglin-Beitler`s day-to-day operations, both men together make the important decisions about whether to do a project and which architects and contractors to use.
Though they occasionally have dinner together, as do their wives, they don`t socialize as often as one might expect. ”Our families are important to us and we like to give them a lot of time,” says Miglin.
The two became partners after leaving Arthur Rubloff & Co., the large Chicago real estate firm, where they met. Both were Rubloff office-space hotshots, Miglin in development and Beitler in leasing.
Toward the end, they worked together at Rubloff, developing a clump of office buildings that can be spotted just off the Kennedy Expressway on the approach to O`Hare. But they left when Rubloff retrenched away from developing, Miglin says.
A natural team
As self-made men the two were attracted to each other. Miglin was born just east of Champaign-Urbana in Westville, Ill. His father, a Czech immigrant, was a coal miner who owned a tavern, ice-cream parlor and soda distributorship.
”He had to have all those jobs,” says Miglin. ”He had seven children to feed.” Still, ”how my parents found the time to have all those kids, I don`t know,” he says.
Miglin showed entrepreneurial instincts early, winning subscription contests and trips to Chicago as a Chicago Daily News paper boy. He had four paper routes, three of which he leased out to other boys.
He trained as an air cadet during World War II, then attended the University of Illinois. ”My mother`s ambition for me was to wear a white shirt and tie and work at a bank,” he recalls.
But after graduation, and a cross-country trip in which he sold more than 1,000 pairs of sunglasses to meet expenses, he came to Chicago and became the consummate salesman, selling first pancake batter, then frozen cheesecakes and later TV sets.
He quit TVs, spent six months rambling through Europe, then returned to Chicago. Intent on making ”a lot of money” in whatever came next, he decided to try oil or real estate. Esthetics tipped the scale. ”With oil you had to go and walk through those stinky oil fields with those greasy derricks,” he says.
In the early 1960s he got a job at Rubloff and learned the real estate game, first by marketing office space, then as a developer. He became rich, got married and stayed at Rubloff for 25 years, long enough to get a gold watch. Ever the salesman, he sold the watch three months ago for $200. ”I didn`t like it,” he says.
What he likes, he pursues. As a bachelor he dated a woman whose friend Marilyn Klecka caught his eye. He wound up phoning Marilyn, who asked if he had gotten permission from his girlfriend to make the phone call. ”That never occurred to me,” Miglin says archly. They wound up marrying.
Marilyn now owns a well-known Oak Street boutique and cosmetics business. He keeps samples of Pheromone, her trademark perfume, behind his desk for prospective customers. They have two children, a daughter who works at her mother`s perfumery and the Chicago Food Depository. A son is at the Air Force Academy.
With one job he`s earned more than his father with four could have ever imagined, the house on the Gold Coast filled with paintings and mosaics from the Vatican. A circular weekend house sits on a hill in suburban Woodstock. He drives a limited-production German sports sedan called a Bitter. Actually, he has two. He spotted the cars during a European vacation and, a la Victor Kiam of Remington, bought the company, at least, the U.S. distributor.
An early failure
Beitler, born on Pearl Harbor Day in 1945, recalls growing up poor in a rough Detroit neighborhood after his father left the family. ”Looking back, I guess the analysts would all say here`s a guy who`s seeking his father`s approval,” he says. ”Hey, I don`t know what it is but does it matter? I`m not selling cocaine on the streets.”
He graduated from Michigan State University, then enlisted in the Army where he was a chaplain`s bodyguard in Vietnam. Upon discharge, he tried his hand at a series of jobs marketing flowers, temporary services and airplane leases.
But he, like Miglin, wanted wealth and systematically singled out real estate as the path to it. He arrived in Chicago in the early 1970s and had a disastrous first year in office leasing. ”I didn`t make a cent,” he says.
To make ends meet, he and wife Penny sold their car, a gift from her father. Beitler remembers his father-in-law`s anger when he found out and, he says, his in-laws assumed their daughter had married a failure.
It looked that way their first Christmas, when the newlyweds couldn`t afford a Christmas tree. Beitler remembers closing himself in his apartment`s bathroom and, near tears, looking at himself in the mirror. ”I made a vow that never again would I ever look in the mirror on Christmas Day and wish I had something that wasn`t there.”
His fortunes soon changed when he learned that Illinois was going to let foreign banks open offices in the state. He took his and his wife`s last $200 in savings, flew to New York, stayed on a friend`s sofa and made cold calls on all the foreign banks there.
He stretched the truth, telling them that he was the agent in Chicago specializing in overseas banks. The banks bit, he placed them in spaces on La Salle Street and, within a year, had made a millon bucks in commissions. ”It was very dramatic,” he says. ”To go from one Christmas with no tree to the next one owning the forest was quite an experience.”
Besides the Winnetka mansion, the Beitler family, which includes two young sons and a daughter, has an award-winning house in Harbor Springs, Mich., and a ranch filled with Western art and memorabilia in Snowmass, Colo. Alongside the Bentley are a Rolls Royce Corniche convertible, a Ferrari Testarossa, a totally restored 1955 Corvette and a BMW convertible. ”Boys and their toys,” says Beitler. He`s also made it up to his in-laws, presenting them with a Lincoln Continental last Christmas.
According to Beitler, raising skyscrapers is like oil wildcatting, big-game hunting and playing Monopoly with real live buildings, all rolled into one. But his favorite simile involves flying.
Both he and Miglin, avid flyers, pilot their own Aerospatiale turbo-powered helicopter. And in March they trade in their prop plane for a jet, a drawing of which Beitler keeps in his office.
”As good as all the electronic wizardry is on the instrument panel, all it tells you is what just happened,” says Beitler. ”We have an expression in jets, fly ahead of the plane.”
”If your mind is five miles ahead of the plane, that`s where it should be. If you`re flying with the plane, you`re going to have an accident. If you`re behind it, you`re dead.”
Good developers, like good pilots, fly ahead of the plane, he says. In the 1990s, office tenants will increasingly be smaller firms. ”The large corporations leasing huge amounts of space will be dinosaurs,” he says.
That`s why their proposed tower will have smaller floors, the largest being 18,000 square feet compared with the standard 25,000 in downtown office buildings or the 50,000 on the Sears Tower`s lower floors.
Still, skeptics say there won`t be enough of those leaner firms, or that the 1.4 million square feet of new office space in the Skyneedle will glut an already glutted market.
Others say ground will never be broken, that they won`t get financing easily. ”One of their competitors has said there`ll never be a building, just a lot of press,” says Goldie Wolfe, the broker.
But Miglin and Beitler figure income from 10 floors of parking, a restaurant and observation deck will help pay their note on the tower while they fill it with the tenants they`re sure will be drawn by their building`s cachet. As for financing, they`ve already been approached by a domestic pension fund and two Japanese firms eager to lend the money.
On a recent morning, Beitler had breakfast with Dick Helpern, the contractor he and Miglin have selected to put up their building. ”I told him to be prepared to sink the caissons between June 15th and July 15th.”
