State's future Moore's passion

Editor's note: This is the first of two stories on one of the most influential women in South Carolina.

The pragmatic Grande Dame of South Carolina receives her guests by the Steinway & Sons grand piano, nestled in a front parlor niche of her luxurious South of Broad home.

She introduces her husband, Richard Rainwater, as "Dr. Doom." He is holding a can of soda, chatting and a little self-deprecating, full of praise for the lady of the house, worried that the economic downturn could mean utter disaster. A platter of hors d'oeuvres slides through.

Sprinkled among the doctors, lawyers and society people are those affiliated with the agriculture business who are in Charleston to attend the third-annual AgSummit, hosted by the Palmetto Institute.

The institute is the all-business, no-nonsense expression of Darla Moore's central passion: to raise the per-capita income of the state. And agriculture, South Carolina's No. 1 economic driver, offers one way to achieve her goal.

The guests enjoy drinks on the porch. The November night is crisp and clear, like Moore. She talks about the big plans for her hometown of Lake City. She shows off her extraordinary rare book collection in the warm, art-furnished library.

The house is decorated with objects and furniture Moore selected herself, and it intentionally resembles the décor one would have found in a 19th century Charleston residence. The reception is reminiscent of that era's society parties, except that modern farmers have replaced plantation owners. The conversation is probably similar, talking about new crops, cooperatives, marketing initiatives and a desire for more government support.

The next morning at the Francis Marion Hotel, summit attendees get serious.

Moore welcomes attendees and summarizes her goals: "We've got to think innovatively," she says. We've got to reinvigorate rural areas, boost research then commercialize its discoveries.

State Agriculture Commissioner Hugh Weathers says Moore's enthusiasm "gets other people off the bench."

"She's saying the status quo is not satisfactory in a whole host of things. I agree it can be better," Weathers says.

Fenton Overdyke, vice president of MarketSearch, which was hired by the Palmetto Institute to study the agriculture sector in the state, notes that agriculture is a $30 billion industry that employs 188,000 people. More than 90 percent of farmland is owned by individuals or families, not large-production companies, Overdyke says. More than half of all farms are fewer than 100 acres.

In advocating for improved agribusiness, Moore is thinking of Lake City, her beloved hometown, site of the family farm and repository of childhood memories.

"This is special to me," she tells the audience. "I consider myself one of you."

Funding big ideas

It can be difficult to pin down Moore. She constantly is working, traveling and speaking at Rotary Clubs, conferences and universities. She is a loyal capitalist and tireless advocate of economic improvement. She is pushing for tax reform, for farming clusters, for competitive international trade, for more and better research, for recruitment of top-drawer thinkers to the state. She is determined to succeed. She is not one to throw her hands in the air and move on before the current issue is addressed satisfactorily and assigned a management team. And even then, she keeps a hand in it.

Jim Fields, director of the Columbia-based Palmetto Institute, is Moore's go-to man, the one who manages the schedule, helps set the agenda, explains the mission, protects her interests and shields her from unwanted exposure. She has a habit of calling him only by his last name.

"Fields, what's next on the schedule?" "Fields! Tell them I'm not interested."

Fields is a reliable and trusted ally. Once affiliated with the McNair Law Firm, he specialized in state and local government affairs. He was counsel to the state Senate Judiciary Committee, then served as Clerk of the South Carolina Senate before being elected to head the Government Issues Committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

These days, he devotes himself to Moore and the mission of the Palmetto Institute.

In 1998, Moore gave $25 million to the University of South Carolina's College of Business Administration, which was renamed in her honor. The school, reputed to have one of the world's best programs in international business, is for Moore the launching pad to grow and propel innovative business enterprise throughout the state.

The gift was made after a lunch meeting that included Moore and her husband and top Bank of America executives William "Hootie" Johnson and Hugh McCall, Moore said.

She attended the lunch at the Florence Country Club because she was excited to meet Johnson, she said. She did not foresee the request that would come after a long, friendly conversation.

"We're here," Johnson finally said, "because we'd like to propose naming a business school at the university for Darla." It would be a first. Business schools had never been named for a woman before.

"Richard and I were dumbstruck. We just stared at him," Moore said. "Then he said it would cost $25 million."

Moore turned to Rainwater and said, "What do you think?"

Sitting there sipping coffee, Rainwater took a brief moment to think.

"Well, I think you should do it," he said.

It was a done deal. But the flattery only went so far. Soon Moore discovered that her no-strings-attached approach needed revising: All was not as rosy as it seemed.

"Fields, have I just flushed $25 million down the toilet?" she asked.

She hired a consulting firm to evaluate the school's performance. She wanted it to be a factory producing bright business minds that glowed with creativity and financial know-how. She would settle for nothing less.

"I was going to invest in South Carolina, that was a given," she said. And one of the most important assets in the state was its premier institution of learning, meant to be an engine that keeps the economy growing, she thought. This was more than a gift and a name on the side of a building, more than a good deed.

This was critical.

So Moore did what she always does when faced with a challenge. She got involved. She pushed for a revised curriculum. She consulted with school officials. She allocated some endowment money to a fellowship program that covered expenses for up to 30 students each year. She instigated a search for a new dean, then found one in Hildy Teegan. And she advocated for the recruitment of new faculty.

In 2003, Moore and Rainwater gave $10 million to the School of Education at Clemson University in honor of her father, Eugene Moore Jr., a Clemson alumnus and former public school teacher, coach and principal who died in October 2008.

Then in 2004, she pledged an additional $45 million to renovate the Hipp-Close building at USC and bolster the endowment, challenging the administration to match the gift.

Finding a dean

By 2007, the dream house Teegan and her husband were building on the edge of the Shenandoah National Park was ready to be occupied. Teegan was happily teaching international business at Moore's alma mater, George Washington University, and had no thoughts of becoming a dean, she said.

The force of Moore's charisma and vision, combined with a perceived opportunity, convinced Teegan to abandon her Washington life and take a new course.

"Her reputation is very strong," Teegan said of Moore. "She is associated with the mavericks of Wall Street. … She is the uber role model for many women in business. … She was known for a series of great choices made in somewhat adverse circumstances."

And there was her tenacity, her history of leveraging events to her advantage, her grand vision. "She is a bright light in the state," Teegan said.

Now, Teegan is making adjustments, some large some subtle, so that academia and enterprise work together, so that agribusiness in the state can be exported more and intellectual properties developed, so that ideas fueled in the classroom can be transformed into market solutions.

By nuturing great minds in business enterprise, Teegan hopes some of them will stay in South Carolina and help realize Moore's vision. It's about leverage, about transforming something small and powerful into something big. Or as Teegan put it, "to take limited investment and get a multiplier."

There is a vehicle for achieving these mostly abstract goals. It's called Innovista, a public-private research and development project sponsored by USC, local and state government and business leaders. Innovista is a $250 million idea factory that officials, including Moore and Teegan, hope will serve as an economic catalyst for the state, adding knowledge-based businesses and high-paying jobs.

"Great ideas spring forth," Teegan said of the academic environment, "but the missing link is the transition to commercial applications. … Some of the most difficult problems can't be solved by government alone, or civil society alone. You've got to have the private sector engaged."

Harris Pastides, who became president of USC this year and who is one of the forces behind the Innovista project, said he works closely with Moore, who sits on the university's board, and appreciates her influence.

"What else do you have if you don't have job creation coming out of research institutions?" he asked. Tourism appears to be in decline, at least for now. Agriculture is important, but its growth potential is questionable. The manufacturing sector is a disaster. "Knowledge. That one is a level playing field."

But getting the state and its institutions to fully endorse and fund the public-private research initiative and the ideas it is meant to explore has been slow going, Pastides said. Moore's participation has been invaluable.

"When Darla speaks, people listen," Pastides said. "When a university president speaks, some people listen, some people run away."

Rolling tobacco

Born at the height of summer in 1954, Moore grew up on a tobacco plantation in Lake City when the town was still a hub of rural South Carolina, a crossroads through which trains passed carrying bean and tobacco crops to markets far and wide. The property, which had been in the family for generations, remains the site of Moore's primary residence.

Besides tobacco, the farm grew cotton and soy beans. Moore remembers the sharecroppers who worked the crops and cured and classified the huge tobacco leaves in the pack house. Sometimes she would pitch in a little, earning 10 cents a day.

Productivity. Getting things done. Markets. Trade. It shaped the worldview of a young, pretty, determined girl.

In the 1970s, an affluent Lake City began its slow, painful decline. Tobacco was vilified. Farmers struggled. Moore knew she could not go far by staying home. She wanted to make a mark somehow, to make a name for herself. In 1979, Moore left for Washington to work for the Republican National Committee on behalf of Ronald Reagan in his run for president.

She discovered, however, that power born through politics was transient and fickle. In 1981, she graduated with an MBA from George Washington University, and the next year she moved to New York and joined a training program at Chemical Bank. She set her sights on the leveraged buyout business, which was all the rage on Wall Street then. Mergers and acquisitions. Big money. Influence. Wealth.

"There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that a female from the rural Deep South would be invited or embraced by that LBO environment," she told an audience at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. "Historically no major players in the LBO business were women."

So someone suggested the bankruptcy business. If the leveraged buyout market was the top of the skyscraper, bankruptcy was the basement. Or, to use Moore's metaphor: "I ended up on the dark side of the moon."

She was buried in failed companies, working in relative isolation to manage reorganizations and liquidations. She learned a lot and became an expert at dealing with companies in crisis mode. She earned a guaranteed fee, which was paid first, before any creditors received a dime, before the company could spend money on its restructuring. The dark side of the moon proved lucrative.

Then, suddenly, came economic crisis.

The peak of the merger period had been reached and markets were contracting. The savings and loan fiasco made headlines. Businesses were tumbling from the top of the skyscraper into the basement, and Moore, efficient and ruthless, processed them one by one.

"It was manna from heaven," she said. "I was unassailable at the time, they couldn't touch me."

And she played up her Southern belle charm, which transformed from a liability into an asset. She was polite and sweet, even as she demanded of humbled executives that they do as she told them. The business provided "an incredibly high return on incredibly low risk," she said. And the chaos didn't faze her. "I could see the end game through the smoke."

This was her professional life for 13 years. She became the highest paid woman in banking. In 1991, she married Texas investment tycoon Richard Rainwater. In 1993, she left her job at the bank in New York to become president of Rainwater Inc. She was 39 and on the verge of a new career, still in the "get-rich" phase of her life.

Rainwater was a successful funds manager-turned-private investor from Fort Worth, Texas, who had gained a reputation for taking big risks that paid off handsomely. He bought 15 million square feet of real estate in Houston and Dallas after an episode of panic selling in the mid-1990s. Then he caught wind of the "peak oil" theory, which says that there is a possible peak in worldwide oil production, and decided to invest heavily while prices were low.

With Moore at the helm of the company, Rainwater focused on raising money. She steered the ship. It was a period of "high-wire acts," Moore said, with "lots of pushing and shoving." The couple had to leverage big deals with little equity value. "It was an enormous amount of work."

But the wealth amassed, and after some years Moore was entering the "stay-rich" phase when priorities shifted.

She would settle back into the family home in Lake City. It would become her base, even as she maintained other homes in New York, California and Charleston. Lake City, this washed-out farming town in Florence County, was the community in which she would pay her taxes.

And restoring it to its former grandeur would become her passion.

Next: Moore's vision for Lake City, her efforts as chairwoman of the Palmetto Institute and her rare book collection.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902 or aparker@postandcourier.com.