Low-Profile Man Forges High-Profile Deals

Robert Muse Bass, the man behind the Robert M. Bass Group, is a baby-faced tycoon with an increasing affinity for high-profile business deals.

Part of the well-known billionaire Bass brothers clan of Ft. Worth, Robert Bass has shed the shadow of his older brother, Sid, in recent years and now finds himself compared to corporate takeover artists like Carl C. Icahn and David H. Murdock.

Like other private investors of his ilk, Bass loathes public attention. “He hates picking up the Wall Street Journal and seeing his name in it,” one business partner said. “He just hates it.”

If that’s the case, he must be filled with anger these days. Already in 1988, the Robert M. Bass Group has produced plenty of news by selling a premier New York hotel for nearly $400 million and bidding $1.5 billion for Macmillan, a well-known New York publishing company.

He also wants to buy ailing American Savings & Loan in Stockton, the country’s second-largest thrift. Bass’ emissaries have been haggling with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board over terms of a proposed deal that was disclosed last month. They have until early July to consummate a sale.

Mystery surrounds almost everything connected to Bass, because he does not discuss business with outsiders. “It’s almost a Mafia-like secrecy,” said Bruce Benteman, research analyst in Kansas City with a newsletter known as Wealth Monitors.

Bass is reputed to have an ego that doesn’t require much massaging, and he apparently sees nothing to be gained by talking to reporters. He shunned requests by The Times to interview him.

“We don’t have any product that we sell to the public that gives a purpose to having a public personal profile,” Bass told Fortune magazine several years ago. “We seem to have gotten along quite well without it.”

But neither is Bass a Howard Hughes-style recluse. He is well-known around Ft. Worth as a promoter of certain preservation, development and transportation causes, including a years-long push to have a portion of Interstate 30 built below ground.

He is on the board of Ft. Worth Chamber of Commerce and recently served a term on the Texas Highway and Public Transportation Commission, having been appointed by then-Gov. Mark White.

Bass’ youthful appearance belies his financial stature. “I couldn’t believe how young he looked when I first saw him,” said Tommie Pinkard, a spokeswoman for the highway commission. Bass turned 40 on March 19.

An unusual blend of Texas high-roller and bespectacled preppie, Bass acts like a Southern gentleman, dresses like a banker and likes to spend his summers in Maine, according to those who know him. Like his three brothers, Robert Bass was an undergraduate at Yale University and, like Sid, got an MBA from Stanford University.

Those who know Bass--colleagues and investment partners--usually will not discuss him publicly for fear that any quotes, even complimentary ones, will violate the Bass code of silence. “God forbid, we don’t want the mark of Zorro on our door,” said Larry Rice, a real estate broker in Ft. Worth.

“I don’t think anyone will say anything bad about the Basses,” added one investor who used to work for the family. “It’s almost a tradition.”

Operating out of a Spartan office high in a downtown Ft. Worth office building, Robert Bass is known as a soft-spoken, hands-off boss who motivates subordinates by giving them an ownership interest in the deals they negotiate.

“That’s the secret of his success,” said San Francisco investor Richard C. Blum, one of the few willing to be quoted about his sometime business partner. Blum is the husband of former San Franciso Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

One of Bass’ top aides is Bernard J. Carl, a New York real estate attorney and one of two lead bargainers in the American Savings negotiations with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Carl was a leading expert in mortgage-backed securities for Salomon Bros., the investment banking house in New York, before getting a fat pay package to work for Bass.

“He is the kind of guy you want bargaining for you, not against you,” one former savings and loan regulator said.

Bass’ track record indicates that he likes to buy into undervalued companies, then push hard to reorganize and streamline them. His investments in recent months include a leveraged buyout of Bell & Howell, an information services company, and the purchase of Westin Hotels & Resorts, a well-known chain of 66 hotels.

In the case of Westin, Robert M. Bass Group teamed up with Aoki, a Japanese construction company, to buy the hotel company for $1.35 billion. Three months later, the investment partnership sold one of the crown jewels--the Plaza Hotel at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan--to Donald J. Trump for $390 million.

Bass’ interest in American Savings may stem from a desire to do something that will really set him apart from his brothers, whose total fortune is now said to be worth at least $4 billion.

Though the brothers inherited their money, they turned millions into billions through investments in companies like Texaco, Marathon Oil and Walt Disney Productions. They operated as Bass Brothers Enterprises until 1985, when their partnership was dissolved.

Until he formed his own firm, Robert Bass operated in the shadow of Sid, who is older by six years. But Sid’s silhouette has faded as Robert has raised the profile of his investments.

“It’s not so much the desire to make money,” one ex-associate said of Robert Bass. “He has enough of that. It’s the fire to do something” on his own.

“He doesn’t want the public to know him, but he does want to forge his own identity,” analyst Benteman said.

If Robert Bass does buy American Savings, it is possible that he will sell the financial institution at a behemoth profit once its problems are straightened out.

“Three to five years down the road,” Benteman predicted, “a Ford Motor Co. will come in and take it off his hands.”