As a housewife, she was shy, miserable, bullied. As a widow, Rosemary Garbett has breathed life into her late husband's restaurant chain and taken the Houston establishment by storm
It is five o'clock on a humid summer afternoon, and most of Houston is wilting in the heat. But Rosemary Garbett looks as bright as the shiny yellow Cadillac she drives to the front of Brennan's Houston restaurant. "Endangered Species," her bumper sticker announces proudly, "Native Houstonian."
By all rights, Garbett should be fading. Since 8:30 that morning, she has already put in a full day plotting the future of Los Tios, the Tex-Mex restaurant chain she has run since her husband's death in 1976. This day she worked on finding the right locations for restaurants eight and nine, then huddled with her new operations director to review architectural plans before turning her attention to Los Tios's rapidly growing, new institutional line with her son Tom. The night before she'd been out till long past two o'clock, club-hopping with her 25-year-old daughter Kathy. But now she bounces up the carpeted staircase at Brennan's with all the energy of a teenager at a pen rally.
Rosemary Garbett is indefatigable. Although her laundry may not get picked up for weeks and the boxes may remain piled in corners of her new house she can always find time for the National Kidney Foundation or the Leukemia Society, the Alley Theatre or the Art League of Houston. "She's in the forefront of anything that will further Houston," marvels Larry McKaskle, a Houston city councilman. "Always." The awards that cover her office wall speak to her energy and generosity of spirit -- plaques from B'nai B'rith, the Shriners, and the Institute of Hispanic Culture. She was named the YWCA's 1985 Outstanding Woman. The city has officially celebrated a Rosemary Garbett day -- twice.
If this is Wednesday, this must be the cocktail party for the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau board of directors. It is a doleful affair, 45 business leaders perspiring together around a tureen of soup and three makeshift bars, the men in tan suits and cowboy boots, the women in gray suits and heels. But Garbett is a breath of fresh air. She works the crowd with Chivas Regal in hand, elegant in her black dress, tan, blonde, and beaming. For most of the guests, the party is one more obligation, two hours of tedium. But Garbett loves it. The square-dance convention is in town? Of course she'll keep her restaurants open late. A party planning committee? She could contribute the catering. A sky box for next fall's Houston Oilers football season? She'll put the people together.
Eleven years ago, you would have thought Rosemary Garbett a wallflower, an insecure widow forced to take the reins of the family restaurant to support herself and her children. Since then she has surprised herself and confounded the skeptics, turning a marginal mom-and-pop operation into a professional multiunit restaurant chain. Sales have jumped from $1.5 million to $7 million and, even more impressive, margins are up from 1% to more than 10%.
Success stories are rare in Texas these days, but Garbett is thriving. While flashier operations were sinking money into the chase for the yuppies' or the singles' bar trade, she kept Los Tios strictly a family kind of place. While better-capitalized competitors expanded breakneck into bankruptcy, she made her way cautiously, consolidating, emerging relatively unscathed from the present downturn and poised for national growth. And her goals grew, too. Rather than just a way to feed her family, Los Tios became a way to build a new life, a legacy to pass on to her children an share with her hometown.
There are hundreds of stories of how inspired business owners have remade their companies, but there are few stories more inspiring than how a company has changed Rosemary Garbett. Any yet a decade into this remarkable transformation, Garbett admits she is still really quite shy and insecure underneath it all, and more than a little dazzled to find herself among Houston's movers and shakers. "For a long time I had read about these people," she whispered to me at Brennan's. "But I couldn't imagine ever meeting them."
It is now past seven o'clock, and while most of the movers and shakers have headed home, for Garbett the night is young. She still has a meeting scheduled with the incoming chairman of the convention center, followed by an interview with a reporter, a quick inspection of one of her restaurants, and a late dinner with Kathy. For Garbett, real life didn't start until 11 years ago, and she intends to make the most of it.
"I'm 52, and I didn't feel this good when I was 35," she marvels. "I feel like a kid who has been given the key to the candy shop."
FOR YEARS, ROSEMARY GARBETT had the same dream, night after night. She'd be sitting in her office, peering red-eyed over the arcana of purchase orders and cash flow, when a mysterious figure would appear, looming up from the shadow of the door.
"We're going to take everything back," the figure would say. "There's no way you can do this."
There were times, early on, when she would have been relieved if the dream had come true. The challenge terrified her.
"If I'd had a choice of going into the business, I would never have had the confidence to do it," she says. But there were four kids to raise, and later to put through college. "It was sink or swim. What else was I going to do? Work in a department store? Become a waitress? I didn't even know how to do those things."
Rosemary was an improbable entrepreneur. A shy middle-class teenager, her single act of independence had been marrying the boy next door right out of high school. Her father had been against it, and as it turned out, he was right. For the next 22 years, she was trapped.
Husband-salesman Thomas M. Garbett Jr., so gregarious and outgoing in public, turned out to be abusive behind closed doors. He wore the pants; she was expected to cook his meals, keep his house, raise his children, and keep her stupid mouth shut. There were always big plans -- schemes for selling spices, life insurance, and institutional foods -- but the money never materialized. Car payments usually ate up half his monthly take-home; the rent took most of the rest, leaving her to scratch for pennies to buy tuna fish. Tom told her how to wear her hair (lacquered high in a bouffant), what clothes to wear (matronly turtleneck sweaters and loose jackets), when she could go out (never), and what friends she could have (none). She belonged to him -- a prop, like the roll of bills in his pocket or the gun tucked in his waistband. She kept his rages secret, as best she could.
