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David Mahoney, a Business Executive And Neuroscience Advocate, Dies at 76

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May 2, 2000, Section C, Page 26Buy Reprints
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David Mahoney, a business leader who left behind the world of Good Humor, Canada Dry and Avis and threw himself behind a decidedly less conventional marketing campaign, promoting research into the brain, died yesterday at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 76.

The cause was heart disease, friends said.

Mr. Mahoney, who believed that the study of the brain and its diseases had been shortchanged for far too long, was sometimes described as the foremost lay advocate of neuroscience. As chief executive of the Charles A. Dana Foundation, a medical philanthropic organization based in Manhattan, he prodded brain researchers to join forces, shed their traditional caution and reclusivity and engage the public imagination.

To achieve his goals, he brought to bear the power of philanthropy, personal persuasion and the connections he had made at the top of the corporate world.

Using his skills as a marketing executive, he worked closely with some of the world's top neuroscientists to teach them how to sell government officials holding the purse strings, as well as the average voter, on the value of their research. He pressed them to make specific public commitments to find treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and depression, rather than conduct just ''pure'' research.

''People don't buy science solely,'' Mr. Mahoney said this year. ''They buy the results of, and the hope of, science.''

In 1992, aided by Dr. James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Mr. Mahoney founded the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a foundation organization of about 190 neuroscientists, including Dr. Watson and six other Nobel laureates, that works to educate the public about their field.

That same year, after taking over the 50-year-old Dana Foundation as chief executive, Mr. Mahoney began shifting it away from its traditional mission of supporting broader health and educational programs, and focused its grants almost exclusively on neuroscience. Since then, the foundation has given some $34 million to scientists working on brain research at more than 45 institutions.

Mr. Mahoney also dipped into his own fortune, giving millions of dollars to endow programs in neuroscience at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Later this month, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which traditionally honors the most accomplished researchers, was to give him a newly created award for philanthropy.

''He put his money where his mouth was,'' said Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Mahoney's journey from businessman to devotee of one of the most esoteric fields of health was as unusual as it was unexpected.

David Joseph Mahoney Jr. was born in the Bronx on May 17, 1923, the son of David J. Mahoney, a construction worker, and the former Loretta Cahill.

After serving as an infantry captain in the Pacific during World War II, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He studied at night, and during the day he worked 90 miles away in the mail room of a Manhattan advertising agency, Ruthrauff & Ryan. By the time he was 25, he had become a vice president of the agency -- by some accounts, the youngest vice president on Madison Avenue at the time.

Then in 1951, in a move in keeping with the restlessness that characterized his business career, he left Ruthrauff & Ryan to form his own agency. Four years later, when his business was worth $2 million, he moved on again, selling it to run Good Humor, the ice-cream company that his small agency had managed to snare as a client.

Five years later, when Good Humor was sold, Mr. Mahoney became executive vice president of Colgate-Palmolive, then president of Canada Dry, and then, in 1969, president and chief operating officer of Norton Simon, formed from Canada Dry, Hunt Food and McCall's. Under Mr. Mahoney, Norton Simon grew into a $3 billion conglomerate that included Avis Rent A Car, Halston, Max Factor and the United Can Company.

Despite his charm, associates said, he had a short temper and an impatient manner that often sent subordinates packing. ''I burn people out,'' he once said in an interview. ''I'm intense, and I think that intensity is sometimes taken for anger.''

The public knew him as one of the first chief executives to go in front of the camera to promote his product, in this case, in the early 1980's for Avis rental cars, which Norton Simon had acquired under his tenure.

By all accounts, including his own, Mr. Mahoney was living on top of the world. He was one of the nation's top-paid executives, receiving $1.85 million in compensation in 1982 -- a fact that did not always endear him to some Norton Simon shareholders, who filed lawsuits charging excessive compensation, given that his company's performance did not always keep pace with his raises.

Tall and trim, he moved among society's elite and was friends with Henry A. Kissinger, Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Barbara Walters. He was reported to have advised Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and to have met with Mr. Carter at Camp David.

But his fortunes changed late in 1983. True to form, the restless Mr. Mahoney was seeking change, putting into motion a plan to take Norton Simon private. But this time, he stumbled: a rival suitor, the Esmark Corporation, bettered his offer and walked away with his company.

Mr. Mahoney was left a lot richer -- as much as $40 million or so, by some accounts -- but, for the first time in his life, he was out of a job and at loose ends. He described the period as a low point.

''You stop being on the 'A' list,'' he said some years later. ''Your calls don't get returned. It's not just less fawning; people could care less about you in some cases. The king is dead. Long live the king.''

It took some years for Mr. Mahoney to regain his focus. Gradually, he turned his attention to public health, in which he had already shown some interest. In the 1970's, he had been chairman of the board of Phoenix House, the residential drug-treatment program. By 1977, while still at Norton, he became chairman of the Dana Foundation, a largely advisory position.

Mr. Mahoney increasingly devoted his time to the foundation. In 1992, he also became its chief executive, and soon began shifting the organization's focus to the brain. In part, the reason came from his own experience. In an acceptance speech that he had prepared for the Lasker Award, he wrote of having seen firsthand the effects of stress and the mental health needs of people in the business world.

But associates recalled, and Mr. Mahoney seemed to say as much in his speech, that he appeared to have arrived at the brain much the way a marketing executive would think up a new product. ''Some of the great minds in the world told me that this generation's greatest action would be in brain science -- if only the public would invest the needed resources,'' he wrote.

In 1992, Mr. Mahoney and Dr. Watson gathered a group of neuroscientists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. There, encouraged by Mr. Mahoney, the scientists agreed on 10 research objectives that might be reached by the end of the decade, among them finding the genetic basis for manic-depression and identifying chemicals that can block the action of cocaine and other addictive substances.

''We've gotten somewhere on about four of them -- but that's life,'' Dr. Watson said recently.

In recent years, Mr. Mahoney became convinced that a true understanding of the brain-body connection might also lead to cures for diseases in other parts of the body, like cancer and heart disease.

He believed that it would soon be commonplace for people to live to 100. For the quality of life to be high at that age, he believed, people would have to learn to take better care of their brains.

In 1998, along with Dr. Richard Restak, a neuropsychiatrist, Mr. Mahoney wrote ''The Longevity Strategy: How to Live to 100: Using the Brain-Body Connection'' (John Wiley & Sons).

Mr. Mahoney's first wife, Barbara Ann Moore, died in 1975. He is survived by his wife, the former Hildegarde Merrill, with whom he also had a home in Lausanne, Switzerland; a son, David, of Royal Palm Beach, Fla.; two stepsons, Arthur Merrill of Muttontown, N.Y., and Robert Merrill of Locust Valley, N.Y., and a brother, Robert, of Bridgehampton, N.Y.

Associates said Mr. Mahoney's temperament in his second career was not all that different from what it had been in his first. It was not uncommon, said Edward Rover, vice chairman of the Dana Foundation's board of trustees, for his phone to ring late at night, and for Mr. Mahoney to sail into a pointed critique of their latest endeavors.

One researcher spoke of his ''kind of charge-up-San-Juan-Hill style.'' Dr. Jamison, of Johns Hopkins, called him ''impatient in the best possible sense of the word.''

As in his first career, Mr. Mahoney never lost the good salesman's unwavering belief in his product. ''If you can't sell the brain,'' he told friends, ''then you've got a real problem.''

A correction was made on 
May 4, 2000

An obituary on Tuesday about David Mahoney, a business executive who promoted brain research, omitted a survivor. She is his daughter, Barbara Ann Mahoney, of Water Mill, N.Y.

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