Colonel Harland Sanders, the fried-chicken magnate, who seems in public to be as jolly and serene as Santa Claus, is actually one of the world’s foremost worriers. The Colonel maintains a vigilant fretfulness in the face of overwhelming good fortune. He has won money, fame, and the affection of his fellow-citizens. Now approaching the age of eighty, he has lived to see the company he founded, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation, grow from a one-man operation to one of the giants of the food industry. There is a vast network of Kentucky Fried Chicken take-home food outlets covering every part of the nation but New York City, where the K.F.C. franchising effort has just begun. This year, these outlets will sell more than five hundred million dollars’ worth of fried chicken—more prepared food, in dollar volume, than will be sold by any other company in the world. The company has made millionaires of the Colonel and more than a hundred other people, some of them close friends of the Colonel’s. And the Colonel’s success has been artistic as well as financial—his secret recipe and his fast-frying process produce fried chicken of a quality unknown in New York restaurants and rare even in Southern restaurants.

Despite all these pleasing developments, the Colonel cannot rest easy. A perfectionist in an imperfect world, he dreams of fried chicken so golden and delicious that it will bring tears to the eyes of a grown man, and of cracklin’ gravy so sublime that, he says, “it’ll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy.” During most of his waking hours, the Colonel is haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is doing something to hurt his chicken—that some upstart in the company is tampering with the recipe, or that a careless franchisee is undercooking or overcooking. The Colonel is vexed almost beyond endurance by the subject of gravy. The gravy now served by the K.F.C. franchisees is good, but it isn’t the Colonel’s. “Let’s face it, the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic, but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it,” a company executive has explained. “It involved too much time, it left too much room for human error, and it was too expensive.” This attitude is incomprehensible to the Colonel, who believes that making money is a reward for the virtuous, not a matter of cost accounting. Besides, he would rather have memorable gravy than extra profits. “If you were a franchisee turning out perfect gravy but making very little money for the company,” another K.F.C. executive has remarked, “and I was a franchisee making lots of money for the company but serving gravy that was merely excellent, the Colonel would think that you were great and I was a bum. With the Colonel, it isn’t money that counts, it’s artistic talent.”

The Colonel cannot change the gravy policy, because he sold the company in 1964. (He still serves on its board of directors, and he receives a handsome salary for his food advice and his public-relations activities.) However, though he has relinquished control of the company, the Colonel retains considerable moral authority with K.F.C. executives and franchisees, all of whom revere him as a food genius, love him for inventing a product that has made them rich, and fear his terrible wrath. The Colonel doesn’t hesitate to exploit these feelings in the gravy issue, apparently reasoning that if he can’t force the franchisees to reinstate the old gravy, he can at least make them uncomfortable about the new. During his travels on company business, he will occasionally pay an unexpected visit to a K.F.C. outlet in order to inspect the kitchen and sample the gravy. If the gravy meets his low expectations, he delivers one of his withering gravy critiques, sometimes emphasizing his points by banging his cane on whatever furniture is handy. Months or even years after these ordeals, franchisees wince at the memory of such a gravy judgment from the Colonel as “How do you serve this God-damned slop? With a straw?”

Even when he is not angry and red in the face, the Colonel is a striking figure. He stands about six feet tall and weighs two hundred pounds. He has white hair, a white mustache, and a white goatee, and he always wears a white suit, a white shirt, a black string tie, and black shoes—the appropriate outfit for a Kentucky Colonel. (The title is an honorary one, conferred by the governor of the state, and Colonel Sanders got his in the early thirties.) He is as alert and quick-witted as a man half his age, and his health is marred only by arthritis in his hands. Still adhering to the teachings of his beloved Mom, the Colonel does not play cards, smoke, or drink, except for an infrequent glass of wine with dinner. A little sign on the coffee table in the living room of the Colonel’s house reads, “People that like us will not smoke in the house. People that will smoke in the house we do not like.” Mom apparently didn’t have much to say about emphatic language, though, and the Colonel is famous among K.F.C. people for the force and variety of his swearing. The Colonel says he has been able to cut way down on his swearing since he asked the Lord for help at a church service some time ago, but he still has great difficulty calling a no-good, God-damned, lazy, incompetent, dishonest son of a bitch by any but his rightful name. “I used to cuss the prettiest you ever heard,” the Colonel said not long ago. “I’d take the name of the Lord in vain, too, though I always apologized right then, in my mind. But apologizing wasn’t good enough. The thing shouldn’t have been said in the first place. I did my cussin’ before women or anybody else, but somehow nobody ever took any offense. Only one man ever called my hand on it. That was at Richmond, Virginia—a fellow from Norfolk. I’d been talking in my full vocabulary, I guess—unconsciously, don’t you see, because it just come natural. And this fellow said, ‘Colonel, I wanta say something to you.’ He said, ‘Nobody can appreciate all that cussin’ you do.’ And I said, ‘I know that, and I’d give anything in God A’mighty’s world if I could quit. I’ve tried to quit and couldn’t.’ But I said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. My cussin’ don’t hurt nobody but me. But that God-damned cigarette smoke of yours is fouling up the air for ten feet around, and I haven’t had a decent God-damned breath since you sat down here.’ ”

“I’d wait for your inner clock to adjust before you do any shopping, dear.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The Colonel got rich late in life and hasn’t had time to develop expensive tastes. He says he will give away most of his money before he dies, to churches, schools, hospitals, and relatives, and he has already begun to do so. He and his wife, Claudia, live comfortably but modestly—by millionaires’ standards, at least—in a two-story, ten-room house in Shelbyville, Kentucky, a small town thirty miles east of Louisville. They also have a house in Toronto. Restless and devoted to no hobbies, the Colonel would rather work than relax. “Work don’t hurt nobody—work is wonderful for you,” he often says. “You’ll rust out quicker ’n you’ll wear out.” He is in no danger of rusting, because he never sits still. He travels two hundred thousand miles a year in pursuit of publicity and good will for Kentucky Fried Chicken; besides taping all the K.F.C. television commercials, he has appeared in innumerable parades and festivals, been on network television programs more than thirty times, and played small roles in several movies. Though the Colonel is sometimes cantankerous in private, he is a smooth, charming pro in public—outgoing, warm, funny, never at a loss for words, and patient with the demands of fans. Outside the New York area, he is probably as well known as any man in the country. Everywhere he goes, he attracts crowds of housewives who are grateful for all the nights in the kitchen that K.F.C. has spared them. The Colonel will stand by the hour with these women, signing autographs and posing for photographs. He knocks them dead with his flattery, but if you get close enough to him in a crowd you can hear him muttering a running commentary to himself: “Umm, that gal’s let herself go. . . . Look at the size of that one. . . . I don’t know when I’ve seen so many fat ones. . . . Lord, look at ’em waddle.” During these sidewalk photo sessions, Mrs. Sanders, who bores more easily than the Colonel, will sometimes stage-whisper in his ear, “After this bunch goes, let’s beat it.” When the Colonel is with small children, however, it is his turn to be charmed. “What chance has a grandpa got with a sweet little thing like that? ” he’ll say, quite sincerely. “Aren’t kids the finest folks in the world? ”