Sandy Lerner
at her 40-room,
85-year- old farm near Upperville, Virginia.
"This is where I want to die," she says.
By Tracy A. Woodward/
The Washington Post http://wp4.washingtonpost.com |
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Sandy Lerner – Chawton House Philanthropist
‘A network of One’ - Washington Post, 25 March 1998
This long article on Sandy Lerner, the woman who has made possible the transformation
of Chawton House into a Centre for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing, was
written by a staff reporter, Linton Weeks. The two subheadings: ‘Cyber-Millionaire
Sandy Lerner is Definitely Off the Beaten Track’ and ‘Revelling in Wealth and
Weirdness’ already give much of the flavour of the article. Since we cannot reproduce
it in full, we have resorted to a mix of re-reporting, summary, quotes and occasional
comment. Anything in brackets is where the re-reporter could not help herself! Sandy has
been called the ‘darling of the Jane Austen world’ – and it’s no
wonder, given the life and funds she’s breathing into Chawton House, and into the
study of Jane Austen’s female contemporaries and predecessors.
The Washington Post reporter’s interview was conducted at Ayrshire Farms,
the estate in Loudon County, Virginia which Sandy Lerner bought last year for $US7 million
and made ‘her primary residence’, having said ‘sayonara to Silicon
Valley’. The estate is 800 acres ‘of rolling hills and meticulous fences ... a
storybook farm with sweeping meadows...stately horses(sic) and a spectacular view (of)
purplish mountains the colour of her eyeliner’. Her appearance is described in full
colour: Purple dye in the long, flowing black hair; storm-cloud blue polish on the nails;
and bruise-blue shadow above and below the eyes - computer industry multi-millionaire
Sandy Lerner looks a mite like Morticia Addams, the alluring, alarming mother in The
Addams Family.
Lerner enjoys the comparison, and loved the TV version of the series. She has no
problem with being, as Weeks writes, ‘creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky’
and likes the Addams family, because on TV ‘they taught us to be tolerant’ and
also they were ‘totally in love with one another’.
She lives on Ayrshire Farms with 20 staff, 24 horses, 60 head of cattle, 30 chickens
but no permanent companion, because ‘like most nerds, I need a lot of time
alone’. The house is beautiful … Built in 1912-13, the stone residence has a
$250,000 copper roof, 17,000 square feet and 40 rooms, including a room for wrapping
presents, a trunk room and a gown closet the size of a subway sandwich shop. There is also
an elevator. ‘This is where I want to die’, Lerner says.
It’s not where she wants to live, however. That would be too ordinary. She spends
her nights in a two-bedroom cabin near a corner of the farm. The main house is mostly for
show and for fund-raisers for groups such as the MS Foundation and the local humane
society.
Her neighbours ‘are finding out just how outside the box she can be’. Her
wealth excites great interest and has attracted an article in Forbes Magazine. When
a photographer was sent to take her picture last year, she posed naked on a horse. There
has also been some trouble with the neighbours who have successfully objected to plans she
had to open a pub in the neighbouring county. She wanted to do this, she said, because
‘there was nowhere to eat lunch. Except the country store that makes terrible ham
sandwiches.’ In her disappointment she was reported in the county paper as saying
‘the most vocal people have very little going on in their life ...The danger of the
small town is that the mind sort of takes on the size of the town’. She is not moving
though; she likes having for the first time ever, her horses and cats in one place. The
locals say they have nothing against her personally, and rather revel in her eccentricity.
She was born on Bastille Day in 1955, her mother dressed windows for a local store, and
her father was an artist whose work she thought was ‘trite’ and
‘boring’. Her parents divorced when she was four and although her mother kept
her younger brother, she was sent to live with her Aunt Doris and Uncle Earl on a
Californian ranch. (It was the illness of this beloved uncle which actually prevented her
coming to speak to our Christmas luncheon last year.) They were always busy, she recalled.
Here she learnt to be alone, tended the farm, read a lot and at nine, joined a 4-H club,
(which seems to be a place to learn public speaking) and this experience she considered
‘invaluable’. (Perhaps it gave her the confidence to speak out and refuse to
settle for any form of a subservient life).
As a young girl, she was a rebel with many causes. She refused to pledge
allegiance to the flag in school. She protested the Vietnam War as a 13 year old and was
hassled by police. She graduated from high school at 16, and worked for a bank for a year
and a half. It was there she first encountered sex discrimination. ‘The President
would make us kneel on the floor,’ she recalls, ‘so he could check the length of
our skirts.’
Hell it was. But it scared her into California State University at Chico, and once she
got there she didn’t look back. She took to comparative communist theory like a
Bolshevik and graduated in two years, determined to ‘never go back to that
bank.’
The first time she saw a computer she felt it as ‘a religious experience’.
This was as a grad student of econometrics. In 1977 she moved to Stanford University to
major in computational mathematics, which is where she became part of a group of
‘very hard-core computer nerds’ who worked until all hours and mostly never
washed. She did, and so did Len Bosack (but they were drawn together by more than
hygiene). She loved his intellect and humour and he saw her similarly, ‘She’s
bright. She’s quick’ with ‘intelligence and a sense of humour’, he
says.
The two had a fibre-optic-speed romance and married while still in
school. Together they saw a way to solve a problem.
By the early 1980s there were some 5,000 various computers studding Stanford’s 8,800
acre campus, recalls Lerner, who had become director of the computer lab at the
university’s graduate school of business. Stanford was ‘complete bedlam’,
Lerner says, a tower of babble(sic). In 1984 she and Bosack developed hardware and
software that enabled the computers to communicate with one another. Today this is called
a router. Back then it was called a miracle.
From the beginning, Lerner and Bosack realised that this technology would be invaluable to
large corporations. Cisco Systems was booted up. The ‘Cisco (the second half of San
Fran) box’ could link networks of computers and, Lerner says, ‘shovel bits of
information faster and better than anything else.’ She points out that 80% of the
routers that make up the Internet today are Cisco boxes. Between 1984 and 1990, Lerner and
Bosack turned Cisco into a $500 million company.
When Cisco systems became a public company in 1990, Lerner parted company with the
management and Bosack walked out too. Between them they had around $US170 million. Their
marriage had broken up because, as Lerner says, they ‘didn’t talk’, but
they are still friends and business associates even though he is now in Washington state
and she is in Virginia. Much of their money has been put into ‘an irrevocable trust
bound for charities when the two friends die’. They have formed a
‘catchall’ company, Ampersand Capital, which has a charitable division
overseeing projects for the humane treatment of animals, such as Lab Rat and PetNet. Their
present innovative computer work is concerned with sound recordings that are of much
higher quality than compact discs. She works long hours on this at home in Ayrshire, as
the reporter found:
On this afternoon, as on many, Lerner is holed up in her studio, mixing music. She has
recorded an 18-member choir singing antiphonal music and she is surrounded by thousands
and thousands of dollars worth of sound machines – preamps, an analog-to-digital
converter, an eight-track digital recorder. The whole shebang flows through a massive
Macintosh computer. ‘Len and I have been doing deep digital for a long time’,
she says.
Rebellion is still an instinct. ‘For every action there’s an opposite
reaction. Lerner is a reactor right down to her nucleus.’ After the success of the
router made her a multimillionaire, her aunt suggested that maybe now she would start
dressing maturely and wearing makeup. Instead, she started a kooky cosmetic company called
Urban Decay which sells lipsticks and nail polishes with names like Gash or Storm Drain or
Asphyxia.
Linton Weeks writes that Lerner ‘lives an asynchronous life - perfectly
comfortable in the 19th and 21st centuries but out of kilter in the 20th’. This could
explain how a self-styled computer nerd has passion and energy directed to Jane Austen and
related studies so that she is ‘the darling of the Jane Austen world.’
(In a letter to the friends of Chawton centre she wrote that she bothered to restore
Chawton to
give scholars experience of living, working, and writing in 18th century
conditions. The residential sections of Chawton House will have very discreet plumbing,
electricity and heating, and these may be disused at the scholar’s discretion. We are
hopeful that scholars will choose to make chamber pots, candles, and quilts a part of
their everyday existence and to live, work, and write much as their foremothers did. Female
Spectator Vol. 1, No.2, Spring 1996
Another example of the ‘asynchronous life?)
‘Unfettered, … rich and 35, Lerner didn’t retire. She’s not the
retiring type’ the reporter says of the time when Lerner sold out of Cisco in 1990.
Her need to be alone, is more creative than is suggested by the term ‘retiring’
as the last paragraph of the article demonstrates:
Mostly she wants to be alone – to ride Izzy, her ‘adored
gelding’, to look at the Blue Ridge, to tinker with her machines. If she didn’t
have her other commitments, she says, she would spend the next six weeks, or long-er,
locked away in her recording studio, sleep-ing every once in a while, having her food
brought in, exploring the intricacies of sound. Or she might do something else.
‘I don’t have habits’, she says.
Yvette Field
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