Cumulatively, the effect of all this exposure on Monaghan and Domino's is difficult to gauge. Split into three main divisions (distribution, franchisees, and the home offices of Domino's Pizza International Inc.), the company and its management grow ever more decentralized as the empire expands. Still, it wasn't so long ago that Monaghan tossed pizza dough in the backwaters of Ypsilanti, Mich. And he remains a powerful presence throughout the organization, right down to monthly call-in sessions with curious, and sometimes disgruntled, employees; and references to "The Golden Rule" in board-meeting minutes. Few doubt that his newfound celebrity helps sell pizzas. Yet for some old-timers, like Ann Arbor franchisee Becky Belknap, a 19-year company veteran, the material is wearing a bit thin.
"To be honest," Belknap says, "there are people here who're sick of hearing yet another version of the Tom Monaghan Rags-to-Riches Story. I mean, it's not that it didn't happen or anything. It's just that some parts seem to get embellished and the rest sounds pretty old. For a long time, you know, people read this 'orphanage' stuff and didn't think he even had a mother -- even though she lives right near here. I worry sometimes that Tom may have lost some perspective on the folks who stuck by him when times were tough."
Belknap echoes a theme that surfaced strongly in a Detroit Free Press feature on Monaghan last June. In it, writer Susan Ager quoted Monaghan's mother as feeling like "a nonentity," and portrayed one of his old chums staring wistfully upward at the Domino's chopper passing overhead, wondering why Tom hadn't answered his telegram. Monaghan's close friend George Griffith, a Domino's board member who is a retired General Motors Corp. executive, thought the piece was a cheap shot, a "terrible unfairness" involving family and friends who were "totally unprepared for that sort of thing." As for Monaghan himself, he found the "one negative story" about him unsettling, adding somewhat testily that he never said he was an orphan, "I said I grew up in an orphanage." But he also says, characteristically, "If [Ager] found out bad things about me, they deserved to be exposed. Humiliation is a good thing. It points out aspects of yourself that need correcting."
The larger issue, in any event, isn't how Monaghan rose out of obscurity to fame and fortune -- maybe Hollywood can do the definitive screen version -- but what he's been doing since he got there. Like his hero Wright, Monaghan has traveled a life path often messy and occasionally perilous. But as he himself would be the first to acknowledge, what matters is not simply the overcoming of obstacles, it is the opportunities created once those obstacles are left behind.
The famous architect would surely agree. In his own lifetime, Wright knew little peace and even less prosperity. His father disappeared from home early on. Wright abandoned his own first wife and their five children. With his genius in full flower, he endured financial difficulties, persecution on morals charges, episodes of physical violence, labor clashes, critical opprobrium, and natural disaster. Taliesin, his beloved Wisconsin homestead, burned to the ground on two separate occasions, once at the hands of a homicidal maniac who slaughtered seven people during the blaze. Dazed but undaunted, Wright always rebuilt. With his death at age 91, in 1959, he left behind him a new and quintessentially American form of architecture, one that clashed boldly with the steel-and-glass-box style of his European contemporaries.
Monaghan, who discovered Wright's designs in a public library at the tender age of 12 and who, as a young Marine stationed outside Tokyo, spent leave-time memorizing every detail of Wright's Imperial Hotel, fell permanently under the spel of this maverick artist's work. A single Wright house near Ann Arbor so fascinated him that he drove down the driveway several hundred times and "just parked my car and looked at it." As he combed the Midwest during the 1960s, seeking out ideas for his business from every pizza parlor that would let him into the kitchen, he detoured swiftly to whichever Wright building he could locate. Far from diminishing over time, moreover, his passion seems to have deepened. Asked recently to list the 10 books that have influenced him most, Monaghan stuck Wright's autobiography right up there with such business bibles as The One Minute Manager and In Search of Excellence.
