Ransom K. Fern

Harvard Business School, 2019

Ransom K. Fern was president of Magnum Opus, Inc., a corporation dedicated to the financial affairs of Noel Constant and later his son, Malachi. Fern attended the Harvard Business School, where one of his professors often told him to find his "boy", which Fern later determined meant someone lucky and rich who would benefit from his "shrewd and thorough" manner. To this end, at the professor's suggestion, he went to work for the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue. There, he discovered the tax returns of Noel Constant, who had somehow made a great deal of money but was careless about maximizing his profits. Fern then quit his $114-a-week job and visited Constant at Room 223 at the Wilburhampton Hotel, offering his services for $2000-a-week. After questioning him about his investments, Fern was assured that Constant had no business acumen but was merely lucky. He proposed forming a holding company—Magnum Opus, Inc.—to handle Constant's financial affairs, with the two serving as president and chairman of the board, respectively. Designed to do "violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance", it would also be filled with industrial bureaucrats obfuscating the company's dealings. Fern further persuaded Constant that one day his luck would run out and without proper money management his financial empire would collapse. Since Constant owned the empty lot across the street from the hotel, which he also owned, he proposed to Fern that the headquarters of Magnum Opus be built there, although he noted that he himself would remain in his hotel room.

Fern served as president of Magnum Opus from the age of 22 until its failure when he was 60. Always "exceedingly thin"—Noel Constant once remarked that he had a "butt like two beebees" and appeared like "a camel who has burned up both his humps, and now he's burning up everything else but his hair and eyeballs"—when he was older his face "was a troubling combination of youth and age" showing only "adolescence and the age of sixty". He often wore a black Homburg hat and black Chesterfield coat, with a whangee walking stick. Fern read two books a day and had an impressive amount of knowledge, although he was not successful at "perceiving patterns in what he knew". In his view, most people were having a "lousy" time a of life, a philosophy useful in business since he then assumed other people were more weak and bored than they seemed. Although superior to the Constants, who were "ignorant, vulgar, and brash", he lacked their remarkable good luck. Some enjoyed his macabre sense of humor, such as his suggestion to people seeking financial advice that they invest in "United Hotcakes preferred". By the time of Magnum Opus' downfall, Fern was, according to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the highest-paid executive in the United States at one million dollars a year, plus stock-options and cost-of-living adjustments.

Even at 10 in the morning on the day Magnum Opus collapsed, Fern thought he had buttressed the company against any financial mistakes. At 10:15, he learned that Malachi Constont—Noel's son and now head of the company—had given away 531 productive oil wells while intoxicated, destroying Fandango Petroleum. At 11am, it was announced that the President of the United States granted Galactic Spacecraft, Inc.—a company Magnum Opus had recently sold—a three-billion dollar contract for "the New Age of Space". At 11:30, Fern received a report featured in The Journal of the American Medical Association that through computer analysis showed that MoonMist Cigarettes, recently acquired by Magnum Opus, caused sterility, which would likely lead to enough lawsuits to bankrupt the company, especially since the recent stock market crash and various unwise investments by Constant had made the company no longer worth even five hundred million dollars.

At this point, Fern called Constant at his home in Hollywood, where he had been throwing a party for fifty-six days, informing him that he he was quitting since the corporation was broke and could no longer afford his salary. Constant arrived at his thirty-first floor office at the Magnum Opus Building, which he found had been remodeled. Fern, thinking it wise to demonstrate loyalty to their own products, ordered that the office feature magnetically suspended furniture made by the American Levitation Company, which Magnum Opus had recently purchased under orders from Constant. Fern informed Constant of the company's financial situation and then performed his last official duty—he informed Malachi that an hour earlier he had placed a letter written by Noel Constant, in case the fortune should be lost, under the pillow of Room 223 at the Wilburhampton Hotel. He then asked Malachi, as "an humble and loyal corporate servant", that if the letter contained anything indicating "what life might be about", he would appreciate being telephoned at home.

Quotes

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing at progress."

"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' And he says, 'Oh, fine, fine—couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."

"A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine."

"People who smoked MoonMist Cigarettes couldn't have children, even if they wanted them. Doubtless there are gigolos and party girls and New Yorkers who are grateful for this relief from biology."