The Rise and Ruin of the Coca-Cola Family | Full Documentary

0:00 On the 16th of August, 1888,

0:02 every druggist in Atlanta locked the doors of their shop and walked

0:05 together through the summer heat to bury one of their own.

0:08 The man in the coffin had invented something,

0:10 a dark carbonated syrup that he sold

0:12 from a pharmacy counter for 5 cents a glass.

0:16 He died broke, still chasing the morphine

0:19 that had owned him since the Civil War.

0:21 His name was John Stith Pemberton.

0:24 The drink was Coca-Cola.

0:26 Within 3 years of his death, an ambitious pharmacist named Asa Griggs Candler

0:32 would claim full ownership of that formula.

0:35 He paid, across a series of murky deals, a total of around $2,300.

0:41 Candler turned those $2,300 into a corporation worth millions.

0:46 He built skyscrapers.

0:48 He bankrolled a university.

0:50 He became the mayor of Atlanta.

0:53 Then, in 1919, his children sold the entire

0:57 company to a group of investors for $25 million.

1:00 Today, the Coca-Cola company is valued at roughly $340 billion.

1:05 The Candler children used their money to build

1:07 enormous mansions across Atlanta's most fashionable neighborhood.

1:12 They filled those homes with pipe organs, exotic animals, and scandal.

1:17 One heir drank himself to ruin.

1:20 Another watched her husband die from gunshots in their own library.

1:24 The patriarch himself ended his days in tabloid disgrace,

1:28 married to a woman half his age.

1:31 The family that replaced them, the Woodruffs,

1:33 held on for 60 years and built a global

1:36 empire from the ashes of the Candler sale.

1:39 This is the story of Coca-Cola's two dynasties, what they built,

1:44 what they lost, and the price of selling too early.

1:48 Chapter 1, the wounded soldier's recipe.

1:53 On a warm Easter Sunday in April of 1865,

1:56 Union Cavalry under General James Wilson stormed the city of Columbus, Georgia.

2:01 It was among the last engagements of the Civil War,

2:04 fought days after Lee had already surrendered at Appomattox.

2:08 Most of the soldiers defending the city knew the war was over.

2:11 They fought anyway.

2:13 Among them was a 43-year-old pharmacist serving

2:16 as lieutenant colonel in the Third Georgia Cavalry Battalion.

2:21 His name was John Stith Pemberton.

2:23 During the assault, a Union saber caught him across the chest.

2:27 The wound nearly killed him.

2:29 The morphine they gave him to manage the pain

2:31 would finish the job slowly over the next 23 years.

2:36 Pemberton had been a respected figure long before the war.

2:40 Born in 1831 in Knoxville, Georgia, he earned his pharmacy license at 19

2:46 and built a successful practice in Columbus.

2:49 His laboratory was considered among the finest in the South,

2:53 stocked with $35,000 worth of specialized equipment.

2:57 He married Ann Eliza Clifford Lewis in 1853.

3:02 They had one son, Charles.

3:03 [music] After the war, Pemberton moved his operations to Atlanta,

3:08 a city pulling itself from the wreckage of Sherman's march.

3:12 He manufactured patent medicines and sold them across the region.

3:16 But private agony drove his professional ambition.

3:19 The morphine dependency that followed his injury

3:21 consumed both his health and his income.

3:23 [music] He experimented constantly,

3:26 searching for something that could replace the drug that was destroying him.

3:30 His first significant attempt was a concoction he called French Wine Coca.

3:34 It blended red wine with extracts of the coca leaf and the cola nut.

3:39 The coca provided cocaine.

3:41 The cola provided caffeine.

3:43 He marketed it as a cure for nervous disorders, headaches, and fatigue.

3:48 It sold well across the Southeast.

3:50 But in 1886, Atlanta and Fulton County passed

3:53 temperance legislation that banned the sale of alcohol.

3:57 Pemberton's profitable tonic was suddenly illegal.

4:00 He had to reformulate.

4:02 Working with drugstore owner Willis Venable,

4:04 he stripped out the wine and adjusted the recipe through trial and error.

4:08 What emerged was a thick, sweet syrup.

4:11 Mixed with carbonated water at a pharmacy counter,

4:14 it produced something altogether different from medicine.

4:17 Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested the name.

4:20 He thought two capital C's would look striking in advertising.

4:24 Robinson also penned the flowing script logo by hand.

4:28 It remains virtually unchanged to this day.

4:32 On May 8th, 1886, the first glass of Coca-Cola

4:36 was poured at Jacob's Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta.

4:40 It sold for 5 cents.

4:42 About nine servings moved on an average day.

4:46 Pemberton ran his first newspaper advertisement 3 weeks later,

4:50 calling it delicious, refreshing, and invigorating.

4:54 He sensed the formula had potential.

4:57 [music] He told associates that it might someday become a national drink,

5:00 but his body was failing.

5:02 Stomach cancer joined the morphine addiction

5:04 in draining whatever remained of his strength.

5:07 Desperate for money, he began selling off pieces of his ownership

5:11 to various business partners around Atlanta.

5:14 His son, Charlie, wanted cash, not shares.

5:17 [music]

5:17 Through a tangle of deals that historians still struggle to fully untangle,

5:21 a fellow Atlanta pharmacist named Asa Griggs

5:23 Candler acquired the rights to the name,

5:26 the formula, and the business in stages between 1888 and 1891.

5:33 The total cost across all transactions [music] came to roughly $2,300.

5:38 Pemberton did not live to see Candler's first full year of ownership.

5:42 He died at his home in Atlanta on August 16th, 1888, 57 years old.

5:48 The cancer had spread through his stomach.

5:51 The morphine had long since spread through everything else.

5:55 His body was returned to Columbus and buried at Linwood Cemetery.

5:59 He left behind a widow with nothing

6:01 and a son who had inherited his father's worst affliction.

6:06 Charlie Pemberton tried to sell his own version of the formula.

6:09 It went nowhere.

6:11 He died roughly 6 years after his father consumed

6:15 by the same opiates that had started it all.

6:18 The drink they left behind had barely begun.

6:21 Chapter 2, the pharmacist who bought an empire.

6:27 The story goes that Asa Griggs Candler arrived in Atlanta

6:30 in 1873 with a dollar and 75 cents in his pocket.

6:34 He was 21 years old.

6:36 A druggist named George Jefferson Howard hired him on his first day.

6:40 And Candler reportedly stayed until midnight without

6:43 pay just to prove he was worth keeping.

6:46 Within 5 years he had married the boss's daughter,

6:49 Lucy Elizabeth Howard and bought into a competing pharmacy.

6:53 Within a decade, he owned it outright.

6:56 Candler was not a glamorous figure.

6:59 He was a Methodist who did not drink, did not approve of idleness,

7:02 and measured a man's character by how early he arrived at the office.

7:07 He built a profitable business manufacturing patent medicines,

7:10 but he understood that the real money was

7:12 in finding one product that could sell everywhere.

7:16 He first tasted Coca-Cola sometime in the late 1880s.

7:20 Candler suffered from chronic headaches.

7:23 Someone offered him a glass.

7:25 He liked it.

7:27 More importantly, he watched other people like it.

7:31 While Pemberton saw medicine, Candler saw a refreshment.

7:35 The acquisition of the formula cost

7:37 him roughly $2,300 across several transactions.

7:42 What came next cost him everything he had in a different sense.

7:46 His first strategic decision was critical.

7:48 He stopped advertising Coca-Cola as a cure for ailments

7:51 and began promoting it simply as a delicious drink.

7:55 In 1892, he incorporated the Coca-Cola

7:57 Company with an initial capitalization of $100,000.

8:01 Then came the coupons.

8:04 Thousands of handwritten tickets offering

8:05 a free glass at any participating drugstore.

8:09 He sent barrels of syrup to pharmacies that had never

8:11 heard of the product wagering that once people tasted it,

8:14 they would come back and pay.

8:17 By 1895, Coca-Cola was sold in every state and territory in the country.

8:23 Syrup sales had grown from roughly 9,000 gallons

8:26 in 1890 to more than 370,000 gallons by 1900.

8:31 He also sold the bottling rights.

8:33 In 1899, two lawyers from Chattanooga convinced Candler to let

8:37 them bottle and distribute Coca-Cola across most of the United States.

8:41 He charged them $1.

8:44 He did not believe bottles would amount to much.

8:47 Within 20 years, more than a thousand bottling plants were operating nationwide.

8:52 It was one of the most consequential misjudgments in American business.

8:56 As wealth accumulated, Candler remade Atlanta.

9:00 He completed the Candler Building on Peachtree Street in 1906,

9:04 a 17-story marble tower that became

9:07 the city's tallest structure and first steel skyscraper.

9:11 He developed the Druid Hills neighborhood,

9:13 personally financing roads and water lines.

9:16 In 1914, he pledged $1 million and 75 acres to relocate

9:22 Emory College from the small town of Oxford to Atlanta,

9:25 [music] where it became Emory University.

9:28 His lifetime gifts to the institution totaled roughly $8 million.

9:33 In 1916, he ran for mayor and won,

9:35 handing control of Coca-Cola to his five children.

9:39 The following May, a warehouse fire in the Fourth Ward

9:42 spread across 50 city blocks and destroyed more than 1,500 homes.

9:47 Candler ordered houses dynamited to starve the flames.

9:50 The city rebuilt.

9:52 But by 1919, his wife Lucy was dead of breast cancer after 41 years of marriage.

9:58 Within months, the children he had entrusted

10:01 with his empire did the one thing he never expected.

10:03 They sold it.

10:05 Chapter 3, The Bottle That Conquered America.

10:10 By 1915, Coca-Cola had a problem that had nothing to do with taste.

10:14 It had imitators, dozens of them.

10:16 Companies with names like Coconola, Coca-Cola,

10:19 and Mocola were filling identical straight-sided bottles

10:22 with similar-looking syrup and hoping nobody would notice.

10:25 Many customers did not.

10:27 Paper labels peeled off in the ice

10:29 buckets where shopkeepers stored their drinks.

10:32 And once the label was gone, every bottle looked the same.

10:36 [music] The Coca-Cola Bottling Association wanted a bottle so distinctive

10:38 that a person could recognize it by touch in the dark,

10:41 even broken on the ground.

10:43 The shape alone should give it away.

10:46 They sent the challenge to roughly 10 glass manufacturers across the country.

10:51 In Terre Haute, Indiana,

10:53 a team at the Root Glass Company went looking for inspiration.

10:57 The designer, a machinist named Earl Dean,

11:00 walked to the local library with a colleague and searched

11:03 for images of the coca leaf and cola nut.

11:05 They found neither.

11:08 What they did find in the Encyclopedia

11:10 Britannica was an illustration of a cocoa pod.

11:13 Coca-Cola had nothing to do with cocoa,

11:16 but the pod had an elongated shape with prominent ribs that caught Dean's eye.

11:20 He sketched a bottle based on its curves.

11:23 The original prototype was fatter than what eventually went into production.

11:27 The bulging center would not fit the existing bottling machinery,

11:30 so the design was slimmed and adjusted over the summer of 1915.

11:35 The patent was filed under the name of Root Glass Plant supervisor,

11:39 Alexander Samuelson.

11:41 Dean chose lifetime employment at the company over a $500 prize.

11:46 Coca-Cola's executives picked the Root design as the clear winner.

11:50 Bottlers across the country began using the new contour bottle in 1917.

11:55 Within a few years, it had become

11:57 the most recognizable commercial container in the world.

12:00 In 1950, it became the first consumer product

12:04 ever featured on the cover of Time magazine.

12:07 The bottle did more than sell drinks.

12:09 It made Coca-Cola impossible to counterfeit.

12:12 And it turned a liquid commodity into something closer to a branded object.

12:17 When Asa Candler's children decided to cash out 2 years later,

12:20 the contour bottle was part of what made the company worth

12:22 buying at a price that would have seemed absurd a generation earlier.

12:27 Chapter 4, the $25 million mistake.

12:32 The children did not agonize over the decision.

12:34 Their father had handed them control of the Coca-Cola

12:37 company in 1916 when he became mayor.

12:40 Their mother was dying.

12:41 The business, while enormously profitable,

12:44 faced an uncertain regulatory climate and growing

12:47 legal battles over caffeine and labeling.

12:50 When a syndicate led by Ernest Woodruff,

12:52 president of the Trust Company of Georgia,

12:54 offered $25 million, the Candler heirs took it.

12:59 The deal closed on September 5th, 1919.

13:02 It was the largest financial transaction in the history of the American South.

13:07 The new owners immediately restructured the company and took it public.

13:11 500,000 shares were offered at $40 each.

13:14 Investors across Atlanta lined up to buy.

13:18 A single share purchased that year would eventually be worth millions.

13:21 Asa Candler, still mourning his wife, accepted the sale with resignation.

13:27 He later remarked that when he gave the children the business,

13:30 it became theirs to do with as they wished.

13:33 He would not have sold, he said,

13:35 but from a business standpoint, they had driven a hard bargain.

13:39 Whether he believed that or merely needed to, the record does not say.

13:44 The children believed they had been shrewd.

13:46 $25 million in 1919 was an almost incomprehensible fortune.

13:52 They could not have known that the company they had just

13:54 released would grow into one of the most valuable corporations on Earth.

13:59 They could not have foreseen Robert Woodruff, Ernest's 33-year-old son,

14:04 who would take the presidency in 1923 and spend

14:07 the next six decades turning Coca-Cola into a global empire.

14:12 What the Candler children could see was the money in front of them.

14:15 And they spent it exactly the way you would expect

14:18 the heirs of a southern dynasty to spend a sudden fortune.

14:22 They built mansions.

14:24 Chapter 5, The Mansion Arms Race.

14:29 Along Briarcliff Road and the surrounding streets of Druid Hills,

14:32 the Candler children planted their fortunes into the ground.

14:36 One by one, between roughly 1916 and 1922,

14:41 each of the five heirs built an estate designed to outshine the others.

14:45 Their father had given them a neighborhood.

14:47 They turned it into a monument.

14:49 The eldest, Charles Howard, built Callanwolde.

14:53 Designed by Henry Hornbostel,

14:55 the same architect who laid out the Emory University campus,

14:59 the Gothic Tudor mansion stretched across

15:01 27,000 square feet on a 12-acre estate.

15:04 Its centerpiece was a custom Aeolian pipe

15:07 organ built into the walls with chambers

15:09 hidden behind carved tracery so music could

15:12 fill every room from a single console.

15:15 Walnut paneling, stained glass, and bronze balustrades ran through the house.

15:20 Charles served as chairman of Emory's Board of Trustees for nearly 30 years.

15:25 His home looked the part.

15:27 The second son, Asa Jr., known to everyone as Buddy, went bigger.

15:32 His estate, Briarcliff, sat on 42 acres just north of his brother's property.

15:38 The Georgian Revival mansion featured its own Aeolian organ,

15:42 larger than Charles's.

15:43 It also included two swimming pools, a golf course,

15:46 a working farm, and a private zoo.

15:50 Where Charles built for respectability, Buddy built for spectacle.

15:54 Their sister Lucy, the only daughter, married a banker named Henry Heinz.

15:59 They built Rainbow Terrace on Ponce de Leon Avenue,

16:01 an elegant home with formal gardens and a library that would

16:04 later become the most infamous room in the family's history.

16:08 Walter, the third son,

16:09 built Lullwater House on a wooded property with a creek and waterfall.

16:14 He was a businessman and horse sportsman, quieter than his brothers, [music]

16:18 and his estate reflected a preference for land over architecture.

16:21 The house and grounds were eventually purchased by Emory University.

16:25 Lullwater has served as the university president's residence ever since.

16:29 The youngest, William, built Rest Haven on Springdale Road.

16:33 Designed by the noted architect Neel Reid,

16:36 it was the most restrained of the five estates.

16:39 William had no interest in building a monument.

16:42 His home fit the neighborhood rather than towering above it.

16:46 He became president of the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel

16:49 and died in 1936 at just 46 years old, the first of the siblings to go.

16:55 Their father watched all of this from his own

16:57 mansion at 1500 Ponce de Leon Avenue,

17:00 a house he had built the same year he became mayor.

17:04 Asa Sr.

17:04 had built a fortune by spending as little as possible.

17:08 His children had learned a different lesson, [music]

17:10 but the money he had created was now scattered

17:12 across Druid Hills in the form of pipe organs,

17:14 [music] swimming pools, and private zoos.

17:18 The family had turned Coca-Cola money into a small kingdom.

17:22 Chapter 6, Buddy's Zoo and the fall of a fortune.

17:27 Of all the Candler children,

17:29 the one Atlanta could not stop talking about was the second son.

17:33 Asa Griggs Candler Jr.

17:35 known since boyhood as Buddy, had been trouble from the start.

17:39 At Emory College, he skipped classes, smuggled a goat into the bell tower,

17:44 and earned the yearbook title of class pugilist.

17:48 His father sent him to Los Angeles to open Coca-Cola's West Coast operations.

17:53 He spent most of his time in pool halls.

17:55 But Buddy had energy and money forgave a great deal.

17:59 He built the Briarcliff Hotel in Atlanta's Virginia Highland neighborhood.

18:04 He supervised construction of the airfield

18:06 that would eventually become Hartsfield-Jackson International [music] Airport.

18:11 He raised airplanes.

18:12 He collected magic tricks from China and India,

18:15 and later hired a Filipino magician named Jose Cruz

18:18 [music] to live on the estate and perform at parties.

18:21 He hosted soirees in a gold leaf ballroom

18:24 on the top floor of his [music] mansion,

18:25 where professional magicians mingled with Atlanta's society crowd.

18:30 Then, in the early 1930s, he bought a zoo.

18:34 The animals arrived by truck and were paraded through

18:36 the residential streets of Druid Hills to the Briarcliff grounds.

18:41 His brother Walter reportedly looked on and said it

18:44 was the biggest fool thing Buddy had done yet.

18:47 The collection included a Bengal tiger,

18:50 four lions, a black leopard, a gorilla, baboons,

18:53 and a group of elephants he named Coca,

18:55 Cola, Pauses, Refreshes, Refreshing, and Delicious.

18:59 He opened the grounds to the public and charged 25 cents admission.

19:03 The neighbors tolerated the noise and smell for a while.

19:07 Then a baboon escaped, attacked a woman,

19:09 and devoured $60 in cash from her purse.

19:13 She sued.

19:14 She won $10,000.

19:17 Buddy, facing mounting financial trouble, was forced to close the menagerie.

19:22 He donated the entire collection to the Grant Park Zoo,

19:25 which eventually became Zoo Atlanta.

19:28 The drinking, which had followed him since college, never stopped.

19:32 He sold the Briarcliff estate in 1948 and spent

19:36 his final years in the penthouse of his own hotel.

19:39 He died on January 11th, 1953.

19:43 The mansion he left behind was converted into an alcohol treatment facility,

19:47 the first in Georgia.

19:49 The irony required no explanation.

19:52 Chapter 7 The patriarch's disgrace.

19:58 Asa Candler had known only one woman his entire adult life.

20:02 Lucy Elizabeth kept the household steady while he built an empire.

20:06 When she died in early 1919,

20:08 something in him broke that no amount of money could fix.

20:12 He was 67.

20:13 Within months, his children sold the company

20:15 he had spent three decades building.

20:18 He did not fight them.

20:19 He let them go.

20:21 Then, unmoored for the first time in his adult life,

20:24 he began making decisions that would have been unthinkable a year earlier.

20:29 First came Onie Zima de Bushelle,

20:31 a socialite from New Orleans who was decades younger.

20:34 They became engaged.

20:35 The family intervened and pressured Asa to break it off.

20:39 He did.

20:40 She sued him for breach of promise.

20:43 The newspapers ran the story on front pages across the South.

20:46 The suit failed, but the damage to his reputation had already been done.

20:52 In June of 1923, he married May Little Reagan,

20:56 a widowed stenographer from his office building.

20:59 She was 35.

21:01 He was 71.

21:03 She had twin daughters.

21:05 Within months, May was arrested for drinking at a disreputable establishment.

21:09 Asa filed for divorce in the summer of 1924.

21:13 Then, for reasons no one has adequately explained,

21:16 he withdrew the suit that December.

21:18 She moved back in.

21:20 He began giving away what remained of his fortune.

21:23 His gifts to Emory University, already immense,

21:26 continued until he had set aside barely enough to live on.

21:30 In 1926, a stroke left him unable to care for himself.

21:34 He spent his final years in and out of Wesley Memorial Hospital.

21:38 Asa Griggs Candler died on March 12th, 1929.

21:42 He was 77.

21:44 He had arrived in Atlanta with a dollar and 75 cents.

21:48 He had turned a pharmacy drink into a national corporation,

21:50 built skyscrapers, funded a university, and run the city as its mayor.

21:56 He ended his days in a hospital bed.

21:59 His fortune was gone.

22:01 His family was scattered across Druid Hills

22:03 in mansions he would never visit again.

22:05 He was buried at Westview Cemetery,

22:07 not far from the mausoleum his son Buddy had spent 20 years building.

22:12 Chapter 8: Murder at Rainbow Terrace.

22:17 Someone had been breaking into the house for months.

22:19 Small amounts of cash kept disappearing from Lucy's

22:22 purse and from drawers left unlocked overnight.

22:25 Henry Heinz, her husband, was not a man accustomed to being stolen from.

22:30 He was vice president of Citizens and Southern Bank,

22:33 a founder of the Atlanta Boys Club,

22:35 the driving force behind Scottish Rite Hospital,

22:38 and serving his second term as president of the Atlanta Athletic Club.

22:42 He had offered the local patrol officers a $100 reward if they caught the thief.

22:47 Two officers, Marion Blackwell and Bill Miller,

22:49 had begun patrolling the grounds each night.

22:51 Heinz kept watch himself some evenings,

22:53 sitting up late in the rooms facing the garden.

22:57 On the evening of September 28th, 1943,

23:01 a railroad worker named Blaylock was at home recovering from a recent surgery.

23:06 Friends arrived and invited his wife on a country drive.

23:09 She took the children and left.

23:12 Alone and restless, Blaylock drove across town to Druid Hills.

23:17 He had broken into Rainbow Terrace twice before.

23:20 The second time, just weeks earlier,

23:22 he had taken $80 from Lucy's purse in the dressing room.

23:26 He knew the layout of the house.

23:29 That same evening, Heinz was inside.

23:32 He was 63 years old.

23:34 When the intruder entered, Heinz did not call the police.

23:38 He went after the man himself.

23:40 What happened next remains disputed.

23:43 Lucy called the hospital and the police around 10:00 that night.

23:47 The first report said Heinz and a companion had been wrestling with a burglar.

23:51 When officers Blackwell and Miller arrived,

23:54 the same two men who had been patrolling the property for weeks,

23:57 they encountered a figure crouching in the bushes

23:59 outside the house and opened fire.

24:02 It was not the intruder.

24:04 It was the couple's son-in-law, Dr.

24:06 Bryant King Vann, whose property connected to Rainbow Terrace by a dirt path.

24:11 Vann survived.

24:13 He insisted he had come to investigate the commotion.

24:16 He always disputed whether he had fired first.

24:19 Henry Heinz did not survive.

24:22 He was found shot in the library,

24:23 the same room where the family had entertained guests for two decades.

24:27 Blaylock later confessed.

24:29 He wrote his account on a yellow sheet of paper,

24:32 describing how he had entered the house,

24:34 how Heinz had confronted him, and how the encounter turned fatal.

24:38 The Candler family posted a $2,500 reward.

24:42 Lucy hired Raymond Ector,

24:44 a retired city detective known for blending into saloons and back alley bars,

24:49 to track down additional leads.

24:51 Ector told the press his investigation was progressing

24:54 satisfactorily and that he had located new witnesses.

24:58 He never came close to finding anything the official account had missed.

25:02 The case was closed, but Atlanta never fully accepted it.

25:06 Rumors persisted for years that a relative,

25:08 not a stranger, had pulled the trigger.

25:11 The son-in-law in the bushes, the officers who already knew the property,

25:15 the conflicting accounts of who fired when, none of it settled cleanly.

25:21 Lucy described the intruder as either a light-skinned black man or a white man.

25:26 Police found dark smudges near the window where the intruder had entered.

25:30 Some speculated that someone had wanted to appear to be something they were not.

25:35 Lucy could not bear to remain in the house.

25:37 She eventually married Enrico Leide, a cellist and conductor who had founded

25:41 a forerunner of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

25:46 [music] She lived until 1962.

25:47 Rainbow Terrace passed through other hands

25:49 and was eventually divided into condominiums.

25:53 The library where Henry Heinz died is still there.

25:58 [music] Chapter 9 The man who made Coca-Cola global.

26:02 Robert Woodruff was nothing like the Candlers.

26:05 He had no interest in mansions, pipe organs, or private zoos.

26:10 He failed out of Georgia Tech.

26:12 He barely lasted a term at Emory, where faculty later noted he excelled

26:17 mainly at cutting classes and spending money.

26:20 He started his career at 19 shoveling sand at a foundry

26:23 in Atlanta for wages his father considered beneath the family name.

26:27 What Robert [music] Woodruff had was an instinct for selling things,

26:31 and once he found his way into sales at the White Motor Company in Cleveland,

26:34 he rose so fast that he was a vice president before he turned 30.

26:39 When his father, Ernest,

26:40 led the syndicate that purchased Coca-Cola from the Candler children,

26:43 Robert had bought shares of his own.

26:46 By 1923, those shares were in trouble.

26:50 Stock that had been offered at $40 had fallen to 18.

26:54 The company owed more than it could pay.

26:57 Three of Ernest's associates traveled to New

26:59 York to persuade Robert [music] to take over.

27:02 He agreed, despite a salary of $36,000 a year,

27:06 roughly [music] 50,000 less than he had been earning at White Motor.

27:10 He later explained the decision plainly.

27:12 He figured if he could bring the stock back to what he had paid for it,

27:15 he would sell, get even, and go back to selling cars and trucks.

27:21 [music] He never went back.

27:22 Instead, he rebuilt the company around a single obsession, quality.

27:27 He found that some fountain operators were cheating on the syrup,

27:31 that bottling plants were unclean,

27:33 that bottles were coming off the line half-washed.

27:37 He abolished the traditional sales department

27:39 and replaced it with a service department, whose job was not to push syrup,

27:43 but to help bottlers and distributors improve their operations.

27:48 He set up training schools for fountain salesmen.

27:51 He launched a massive advertising campaign built

27:53 around the slogan that would define an era, the pause that refreshes.

27:59 His deeper ambition went beyond America.

28:02 He wanted Coca-Cola to be, in his words,

28:04 within arms reach of desire everywhere in the world.

28:08 Not just in drugstores, not just in bottles,

28:11 anywhere a person might be thirsty, a Coca-Cola should be waiting.

28:16 Under his direction,

28:17 bottling operations opened across Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

28:22 By the late 1930s, the company was operating in 44 [music] countries.

28:27 The drink began to feel less like a product

28:29 and more like an extension of American identity.

28:33 Woodruff understood this.

28:35 He did not just sell syrup.

28:37 He sold an image of satisfaction that crossed borders and languages.

28:41 He had married Nell Hodgson in 1912.

28:44 They had no children.

28:45 The company became his only legacy, and he guarded it accordingly.

28:49 He officially stepped down as president in 1955,

28:52 but never released [music] his grip.

28:54 Through the board and the finance committee,

28:57 he guided Coca-Cola's direction for more than half a century.

29:01 He handpicked every successor.

29:03 He remained until his death in 1985 at the age of 95,

29:08 the most powerful figure in the company's history.

29:11 Where the Candlers had built a product, Woodruff built a brand.

29:15 And the moment that made both possible arrived not in a boardroom,

29:19 but on a battlefield.

29:21 Chapter 10: 5 billion bottles.

29:26 In 1941, the United States entered a war and sugar was rationed.

29:30 For most American companies that relied on it, this was a crisis.

29:34 For Robert Woodruff,

29:35 it became the greatest business opportunity of the 20th century.

29:40 [music] He issued a directive that year.

29:42 Every man in uniform would get a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents,

29:45 wherever he was stationed, whatever the cost to the company.

29:51 [music] It was patriotic.

29:51 It was also brilliant.

29:52 Because the military classified Coca-Cola as essential to troop morale,

29:56 the company was exempted from sugar rationing entirely.

30:00 In June of 1943, General Dwight Eisenhower sent

30:03 an urgent cable from Allied Headquarters in North Africa.

30:07 He requested 10 portable bottling plants, 3 million filled bottles of Coca-Cola,

30:11 and enough equipment to produce the same quantity twice a month.

30:15 Within 6 months, a company engineer had

30:17 flown to Algiers and opened the first plant.

30:20 By the war's end, 64 bottling operations had been erected across Europe,

30:24 North Africa, and the Pacific, set up as close to combat zones as possible.

30:30 The company sent 148 employees overseas to build and maintain the plants.

30:36 They were issued army uniforms, given the rank of technical observer, [music]

30:40 and treated as commissioned officers.

30:42 The soldiers had their own name for them, the Coca-Cola Colonels.

30:46 More than 5 billion bottles were consumed

30:48 by American service personnel during the war.

30:51 The drink arrived by supply ship, by cargo plane, and sometimes by Jeep,

30:55 dispensed from small mobile units designed

30:57 to keep Coca-Cola cold without reliable electricity.

31:01 For soldiers in foxholes and field hospitals, it was not a beverage.

31:06 It was a piece of home.

31:08 But the lasting effect was not sentimental.

31:10 It was strategic.

31:12 In every country where those 64 plants operated,

31:15 local populations tasted Coca-Cola for the first time.

31:19 When the war ended, the infrastructure remained.

31:22 Plants that had been built to serve soldiers were converted to serve civilians.

31:26 Between the mid-1940s and 1960,

31:30 the number of countries with bottling operations nearly doubled.

31:34 What had begun as a wartime gesture became the foundation

31:37 for a global business that no competitor could replicate.

31:41 Even the Soviet military developed a taste for it.

31:45 Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who led the Red Army into Berlin,

31:48 was introduced to Coca-Cola by Eisenhower during post-war negotiations.

31:52 Zhukov liked it so much that he requested a special colorless

31:55 version so it would resemble vodka and draw less attention from Moscow.

32:00 The company quietly obliged.

32:03 By the time Robert Woodruff stepped back from daily management in the mid-1950s,

32:07 Coca-Cola was no longer an American product sold abroad.

32:11 It was a global presence.

32:13 The 5-cent promise he had made to the military

32:16 had returned more than any advertising campaign could have purchased.

32:20 The Candler children had sold an empire for $25 million.

32:24 The war alone had built one worth many times that.

32:28 Chapter 11, What remained.

32:33 The Coca-Cola Company is today worth more than $340 billion.

32:39 Its products are sold in more than 200 countries.

32:42 Nearly 2 billion servings are consumed every day.

32:46 The 5 cent fountain drink that John Pemberton mixed in an Atlanta

32:49 pharmacy has become one of the most recognized brands in human history.

32:54 The family that created it owns none of it.

32:57 The mansions outlasted the Candlers.

32:59 Not all of them and not gracefully,

33:02 but the houses that Coca-Cola money built along Briarcliff

33:05 Road and Ponce de Leon Avenue are still standing.

33:09 Each one repurposed for something the family never imagined.

33:13 Callanwold, the Gothic Tudor estate where Charles Howard

33:16 had installed an Aeolian organ in the walls,

33:18 was donated to Emory University after his death in 1957.

33:23 Emory sold it.

33:25 It passed through a church, then to DeKalb County,

33:28 and in 1972 it became the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center.

33:32 Today it hosts jazz concerts, poetry readings,

33:35 and painting classes in rooms that were built to impress Atlanta society.

33:39 The organ still works.

33:40 The audience has changed.

33:42 Briarcliff fared worse.

33:44 After Buddy went bankrupt and sold the estate in 1948,

33:47 the government planned a veterans hospital that never materialized.

33:51 In 1953, the year Buddy died, the mansion became the Georgian Clinic,

33:56 Georgia's first alcohol treatment center.

33:59 The man who could not stop drinking had

34:00 built the house where others would learn to.

34:03 Later it housed the Georgia Mental Health Institute.

34:07 When that closed in the late 1990s,

34:09 Emory University absorbed the campus but left the mansion itself vacant.

34:14 It remains empty today.

34:16 Its windows boarded behind a thick granite wall.

34:18 Its gardens swallowed by undergrowth.

34:21 Its gold leaf ballroom and organ chambers silent.

34:25 Preservationists have warned for years that it may be too late to save.

34:29 Walter's Lullwater House found the most dignified second life.

34:33 He sold it to Emory in 1958 and since

34:36 1963 it has served as the university president's residence.

34:41 [music] His creek, his waterfall,

34:42 and his wooded grounds are now enjoyed by someone who did not build them.

34:47 Rainbow Terrace, where Henry Heinz was shot in the library,

34:51 became a boarding house after Lucy left.

34:54 It was eventually divided into condominiums.

34:57 The library where a man died is now someone's living room.

35:01 The other homes scattered in different directions.

35:04 Asa senior's house at 1500 Ponce de Leon Avenue became a Greek Catholic Church.

35:10 William, the youngest and quietest of the five, had died first in 1936 at 46.

35:17 His house on Springdale Road passed out of the family's hands without ceremony.

35:21 None of the Candler heirs held onto their Coca-Cola stock.

35:25 They had sold the company in 1919 for $25

35:28 million and spent the next several decades spending it,

35:32 investing it badly, and watching it disappear.

35:35 Had any one of them kept a single share from the original offering,

35:39 it would have split 11 times over the following century,

35:42 becoming more than 9,000 shares.

35:45 One share purchased at $40 in 1919 would today be

35:49 worth more than $700,000 in stock value alone before dividends.

35:56 [music] The family that created Coca-Cola chose houses over shares,

35:58 spectacle over patience.

36:00 The houses crumbled.

36:02 The stock only climbed.

36:04 Robert Woodruff, who had no children and wanted no mansions,

36:07 understood something the Candlers never did.

36:11 He gave most of his fortune away,

36:12 but he did it while holding onto the stock that generated it.

36:16 His single gift to Emory University in 1979,

36:20 $105 million in the form of 3 million Coca-Cola shares,

36:24 was at that time the largest donation

36:26 ever made to a single educational institution.

36:30 He funded the art center that now bears his name,

36:33 the park in downtown Atlanta that bears his name,

36:36 and a health sciences center at Emory that bears his name.

36:41 He preferred to give anonymously.

36:44 He had a foundation called Trebor,

36:47 which was simply his first name spelled backward.

36:50 Much of Atlanta did not learn who had been

36:52 paying for their city until after he was gone.

36:55 Woodruff died in 1985 and was buried at Westview Cemetery,

36:59 [music] the same grounds where Asa Candler had been

37:02 laid to rest more than half a century earlier.

37:05 The founder of the company and the man who made it

37:07 immortal ended up in the same soil a few hundred yards apart.

37:11 But in Druid Hills, only the Candler name still clings to the walls.

37:15 You can walk through Callanwold on a Tuesday evening and hear

37:18 a piano student practicing in a room

37:20 where Charles Howard once entertained governors.

37:23 You can drive past Briarcliff and see nothing but boarded windows behind stone.

37:27 Pemberton died broke.

37:29 Candler died diminished.

37:31 The children died scattered.

37:33 Woodruff died at 95,

37:35 still holding shares he had bought more than 60 years earlier.

37:39 The drink outlived them all.

37:41 It outlived the mansions, the zoos, the pipe organs, and the fortunes.

37:47 Somewhere right now,

37:48 someone is opening a bottle of Coca-Cola who has never heard any of their names.

37:53 That was always the point.

37:55 The product was never about the people who made it.

37:58 It was about the people who drank it.