“After returning to Korea [from Japan], I enrolled in middle school,”
Lee wrote about his childhood. “At the time, anti-Japanese sentiment was
high and for someone who had just come from Japan like myself, adjusting
to school life wasn’t easy. It was in those circumstances that I grew closer to
dogs, and I have had dogs ever since.”
But the chairman needed frequent stimulation as well. He spent his free
time blazing around Samsung’s private racetrack—his favorite car was a
Porsche 911. His hobby led to more than one high-profile crash.
“Driving at 200 mph puts your life at risk,” he told BusinessWeek in- “It makes you fully alert and relieves most of your stress.”
“A very interesting man,” Henry Cho, his nephew and former friend,
said of him. Henry followed that with a qualifier. “He was the laziest guy
I’ve known.”
Manic and mercurial, the chairman also had a dark streak. He could be,
in the words of Cho, “cruel.”
“In the morning, he would come out of the shower, and his orange juice
was on the table, and without looking,” said Henry, mimicking how the
chairman would cover his eyes as he fended off his morning grogginess,
“he would use his right hand” to get his orange juice.
“Where’s my orange juice?!” he’d shout if it wasn’t there, berating his
assistants.
In another example of his quirkiness, Henry said, “he would instruct his
driver, say from the Hyatt, to use the car’s brake only five times.”
As the chairman himself wrote in his book of essays, “Several years ago
I walked from my office on the 28th floor of the Samsung headquarters all
the way to the lower level employee offices in order to measure the travel
time and to see what the quickest course was. I have also changed the
location of drawer handles to see if there’s a more convenient way to use it,
and rearranged furniture.”
South Koreans, understandably, didn’t appreciate this image of the
mean rich kid. Rumors spread that he had a prescription drug addiction—
no evidence was offered—as well as a tryst with an elevator operator in the
late 1970s, resulting in a secret child. He was rumored to have a lover in
Los Angeles and to have fathered dozens of other children outside marriage
—stories that created an aura of power and mystery around him.
The chairman denied tales like these to the media. On the legend of his
ninety-five children—a number worthy of Genghis Khan—he claimed he