Divided Empire

Latin America's greatest press baron.

Brazil's Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Mello--"Chato" to Brazilians--has fallen on sad times. He was the builder and sole commander of an $85 million, 58-company empire that included 31 newspapers, twelve television stations, 22 radio stations, four magazines, a news agency, two pharmaceutical laboratories and three coffee-and-cattle ranches. He crusaded to push Brazil into the air age, with a campaign that dotted the nation with aviation clubs. He built child-care centers all over Brazil, bullied friends and enemies into filling a $15 million Sao Paulo art museum with $25 million worth of art. In his heyday, he was the ebullient Brazilian Ambassador to the Court of St.

James's who left the TV set on in his parked and well-marked Rolls-Royce so that Londoners would be sure to know that Brazil was in town.

Two years ago, Chato was struck down by a cerebral thrombosis. The stroke left him almost totally paralyzed, and he spent nine months in Manhattan's Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (where Joseph P. Kennedy is now undergoing treatment). Now 70 and back in Sao Paulo, Chato still cannot walk, cannot move his right arm, must struggle to move his left arm, and speaks only in hoarse croaks. Worst of all, as he fights to come back, his empire is being torn apart in a savage battle between his two sons and his top executives.

Parent to Strangers. The battle goes on across a broad chasm that Chato, in his frantic private life, dug between himself and his children. In 1922 he married the daughter of a French architect living in Brazil; the two separated before his first son, Gilberto, was born. Three years later, Chato married the daughter of a Brazilian banker; before they parted, his second son, Fernando, was born. Chato saw to it that his two sons were well educated and well provided for, but beyond that he had little time for them. After one of his frequent quarrels with his father, Son Gilberto went to Europe, there broke a leg skiing. When Chato sent him a get-well check for $500, Gilberto returned it with a bitter cable: DON'T

WANT MONEY--WANT A FATHER.

All of Chato's parental feelings were tied up in his growing press empire and in the men he impulsively picked to manage it. In a fit of rage in the early 1930s, Chato fired one of his Sao Paulo managers and replaced him with the first person his eye lit on. The chosen one: Office Boy Edmundo Monteiro, who eventually worked his way to control of all of Chato's companies in Sao Paulo, Parana and Santa Catarina states. A few years later in Rio, Chato went rowing with a student named Joao Calmon, who happened to be standing on the dock when the press lord arrived. After a couple of hours afloat, Chato told the youth to report for work next day at his daily O Jornal.

Calmon showed up--and began a rapid climb to control of all newspapers, radio and television stations that were not under Monteiro.

Big Giveaway. Chato himself set the stage for the battle. In 1959, in one of the grandest gestures of his grand career, he gave away 49% of the stock in all his publishing enterprises to a 22-man "condominium'' that included his sons and the executives. Said Chato at the time: "I never considered our papers and stations my personal property. I always planned to turn them over to the people who helped create them." He promised to leave the group the other 51% when he died, and in the meantime kept peace by making all major decisions himself.

Chato's illness ended the harmony. Son Fernando filed a legal protest against the arrangement on grounds that it in fact included more than half the family fortune, and was therefore illegal under a Brazilian law designed to protect inheritances. Gilberto made his own complaints. He was unable to see his father, he said, and those who did see him were misinterpreting the instructions Chato conveyed through a doctor by means of labored lip movements, and were misleading Chato. In an attempt to block the executives' business plans, Gilberto refused to sign a document certifying to his father's sanity.

End of Power. Last week all of the combatants were arming themselves with legal talent for the endless court battles. As for Chato, every morning the helpless old man is hauled to the swimming pool of his Sao Paulo home to exercise his legs to prevent muscle atrophy. Then he is hauled back to his room and propped up in bed, where his left arm is attached to a pulley system. The rest of the day he spends laboring over an electric typewriter, writing slowly, painfully, the signed article that still appears daily in his newspapers all over Brazil. It is his last vestige of power over his divided empire.

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