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Editor's Rating: 
King Larry: The Life and Ruins
of a Billionaire Genius
By James D. Scurlock
Scribner; $26; 328 pages
James D. Scurlock’s King Larry is a fun, trashy analog to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Scurlock’s subject, Larry Hillblom, the founder of the express-delivery pioneer DHL, was a postwar California boy who bootstrapped his way out of his working-class background through preternatural drive and iconoclastic vision. Like Jobs, Hillblom flouted corporate convention by attending meetings in blue jeans and not giving a damn about consensus and social niceties. Also like Jobs, Hillblom had a gift for anticipating consumer needs before consumers did—and was rewarded richly for his prescience.
Yet whereas the cover of Isaacson’s book is minimalist and Apple Store-austere, King Larry’s cover assaults the eyes with the garish red-and-yellow color scheme of DHL, with a border of green palm fronds thrown in for good measure. It’s a telling difference, for Hillblom’s was not an ascetic, intensely art-directed life like Jobs’s, but a messy, vulgar, and at times sordid journey. He is presumed to have died on May 21, 1995, at the age of 52, when the seaplane on which he was a passenger crashed in the waters between Saipan and Pagan, two islands in the Micronesia region of the West Pacific. While the bodies of the pilot and the plane’s other passenger were recovered, Hillblom’s never was, a circumstance that has encouraged conspiracy theorists to suggest that the DHL magnate is still at large, perhaps Colonel Kurtz-ing it up on some remote atoll.
Scurlock doesn’t subscribe to this line of thinking, but he’s wholly absorbed by the weirdness of Hillblom, whose “odd baby face,” as one associate remembers it, became odder still when he had it surgically reconstructed after surviving an earlier plane crash, this one in a Cessna 182 he had been piloting. With this strange face, a spindly frame, and tinted aviators, Hillblom may have looked like a perpetual high school AV nerd from the 1970s. Yet he was a force to be reckoned with, and King Larry’s author is unabashedly thrilled to be in the position to tell Hillblom’s relatively unknown story. “How a peach farmer’s stepson from a flyover town in California’s Central Valley linked continents, abolished centuries-old institutions, and became fabulously wealthy is fascinating stuff,” Scurlock writes.
Scurlock’s enthusiasm is infectious, even if his overcaffeinated prose occasionally runs off the rails and into the ditch of hackiness. (A Scurlock interviewee seldom “says” something, he or she “sniffs” or “crows” or “guffaws”—or, worse, “tells me as she picks at a small bowl of cut watermelon with elegantly thin fingers.”) The author has really done his homework, embedding himself for five months in Saipan, where Hillblom spent much of his later life, and traveling up and down the Pacific seaboard to interview those who knew, worked with, and/or squared off against the elusive Larry.
The best part of King Larry is what might be called the Horatio Alger Procedural, the detailed explication of how a Nowheresville kid created something from nothing. Hillblom was a smart youth who elevated himself methodically, attending the local community college, called Reedley, as a means to getting into Fresno State, which was itself a steppingstone to the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, more commonly known as Boalt Hall. While at Boalt Hall, Hillblom made ends meet by taking a job with a small Los Angeles-based courier firm called MPA. After classes, he would collect documents from offices in the Bay Area, take an evening flight from Oakland to L.A., exchange his documents for a new batch going in the other direction, and then sleep in LAX until a dawn flight brought him back to Oakland. He did his schoolwork on the planes.
