Detroit News columnist Laura Berman, who interviewed the late billionaire developer Alfred Taubman multiple times over the years, paints a kind portrait of a generous man, tough negotiator, art lover and someone who had his share of challenges as a kid.
Berman writes:
If some children are crushed by early criticism, others are sometimes inspired to prove their critics wrong, gaining strength and courage from the experience.
Alfred Taubman, a sensitive man who enjoyed being right, learned as a young Pontiac schoolboy to place the unfair criticisms of others in perspective. He was both left-handed — a distinction then considered an affliction — and dyslexic, a reading disability only later understood. "I wasn't a problem kid. I was well-behaved, but I might have looked backward to people," he told me and Betsey Hansell, a friend and colleague. People, he explained, "were looking at you as a kind of failure."
At the time of that 1983 Free Press interview, Taubman was ascending to extraordinary heights. "If Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall, Alfred Taubman perfected it," the author Malcolm Gladwell later wrote. A mall mogul then on the move, he was being lauded as the architect of a complex, expensive Orange County, California, land deal and the new owner of Sotheby Parke Bernet, the august but failing London art auction house. He quickly transformed it into Sotheby's — a high-powered engine for international art sales.
By then, the sheer breadth of his accomplishments was taking shape. His ambition — and courage — was on full display. By then, he knew that the handicaps of his youth were gifts. They enabled his creative vision, his ability to see what was and instantly imagine what could be, while staying attuned to nuance and detail at a very particular level. He had what his attorney Jeffrey Miro once described as "a parallax view," an ability to see in multiple dimensions.
She goes on to write that he often helped people out with little fanfare.
Throughout his life, Taubman quietly paid bills and helped support people, including Rosa Parks, without recognition or ceremony. He could be bold and brusque and a tough negotiator who terrified his mild-mannered mall tenants, intimidated contractors, and scared faint-hearted reporters. He had learned early on that results matter, sometimes more than feelings.
