A job to treasure at Arco.

A job to treasure at Arco

Ekla Camron Cooper, senior vice president and treasurer at Arco, might never have landed in one of the top corporate jobs in L.A. and supervised the biggest initial public stock offering in U.S. business history

On cold nights in the San Bernardino County community of Redlands, Ekla Camron Cooper labored.

Her father, who had lost his Missouri farm during the Dust Bowl, worked for the Western Fruit Growers packing house. When the temperature dipped, he needed his daughter "Cam" to help him work the smudge pots of the San Bernardino County orchard he managed.

Her job was to coax the fire in the pots, sending smoke into the air, over the citrus trees, deterring frost from killing the crop.

There and then it might have been, Cam Cooper decided to make her first play on Wall Street.

She read about Walt Disney's plans to build a grand Anaheim amusement park in 1952. She thought it would work. In 1954, the year before Disneyland opened, Cooper bought 10 shares of common for $16.

In this small speculation, she had a certain advantage, knowing particularly well that children would warm to the amusement park.

She was 14 years old.

"I turned a quick triple and dumped the stock," remembers Cooper, 51. "It was a good thing too. If I had lost money, I might never have gone into the securities business."

And so it is that Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield owes Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. a favor.

If not for that tidy triple on Disney common, Cooper might never have gone into economics, graduating from Stanford University in 1960. She might never have worked for 14 years as a Wall Street securities analyst for Smith Barney & Co., Hornblower & Weeks and Loeb Rhoades And she might never have ended up as senior vice president and treasurer of Arco, handling the largest initial public offering in the history of corporate America -- the $30-a-share sale of 43 million shares of Houston-based Lyondell Petrochemical completed earlier this year.

"(The Lyondell offering) is just one of several large financial transactions Arco's done in recent years and Cam has played a role in all of them," said Lodwrick M. Cook, Arco chairman and chief executive officer.

As part of a strategic plan to isolate Arco's oil operation, Arco sold 19.6 million shares of Arco Chemical Co. at $32 a share. In that 1987 deal, completed just before the October stock market cash, Arco received $592.4 million. Though the Arco Chemical offering is by all accounts a major success, it was just Cooper getting her feet wet. This year's Lyondell offering was far larger, bringing $1.2 billion into Arco's corporate coffers.

Surpassed in size only by the privatization of Conrail by the U.S. government, the Lyondell Petrochemical deal reduced Arco's ownership in the ethylene, propylene and methanol producer to 49.9 percent, allowing Arco to deconsolidate the company off of its books.

Without Cooper's leadership, it might never have been successful, insiders to the offering said.

"Cam has strong views of the equity capital markets, having been a former analyst," says Peter K. Barker, a partner in the Los Angeles office of New York-based Goldman Sachs & Co. "She's an ardent and diligent worker, where at times you wonder if she's a creature of the clock at all."

Barker would know. Chief underwriter of the Lyondell offering, he was the No. 2 person on the 70- to 75-person team that Cooper led through the deal. As Cooper moved the team from New York to Houston to Los Angeles during the offering, selling Lyondell to Wall Street and investors, Barker was with her stride for stride.

"She has an in-depth knowledge of the financial markets," said Cook, who described Cooper as a master at sending a computer into overdrive, pulling information up on her screen faster than the fastest Harvard MBA. "Cam's just good at getting things done."

Both Cook and Barker give Cooper credit for taking apart Lyondell on the balance sheet, reconstructing it for investors in a comprehensible form.

"She knew from the beginning what made Lyondell tick and what made Lyondell attractive -- good management, an efficient physical plant (in Channelview, Texas), savvy market knowledge and an excellent ability to control the cost of material for production," Barker says. "She's one of the most professional people I've worked with in terms of bringing an issue to market."

And selling it once it gets there. When the issue went public in December, Cooper stayed in constant contact with brokerage houses and investors, asking for daily readings of the sale of 50.1 percent of Lyondell to the public.

"She'd always listen when we told her how it was doing, and then she'd go out and get some opinions for herself," said Barker. "She can be stern and direct. There were certainly times when she had to modify strategies because someone couldn't deliver. She never sacrificed the primary objective."

Arco's primary objective was to get Lyondell off of its books. Feeling that the chemical company was lost in the $22.3 billion Arco empire, Cooper's accounting team pulled together never-before-collected financial records for Lyondell, putting together statements of the company's assets, revenues and income where none had existed before.

"Any IPO is a very involved job," says Cook. "She took a leadership role in the accounting and the road show. It was a team effort but Camron was very much in the forefront."

Barker calls Cooper "the boss." He said she's not afraid to emphasize the deadline when the pressure is on.

"Arco's accountants had a tremendous job to accomplish," Barker says. "To Camron's credit, the job was delivered on time."

"I don't want to be the Lone Ranger on this," answers Cooper. "There were a tremendous number of people who worked to bring it all together."

Cooper says that the gutsy decision by Arco's board fueled the push, deciding to sell Lyondell petrochemical at a time when the market was at its peak.

"The markets are real and the markets are earnest," she says. "You can do all the academic analysis you want. But if the market doesn't agree with you, it doesn't matter a bit. In this case, Wall Street agreed."

Lyondell's sale was completed in late January, allowing Arco to take the company off its books. With the cash generated from the offering, Arco also completed the second tier of its strategic plan for Lyondell, repurchasing 2.4 million shares of Arco common for $249 million in the fourth quarter 1989 -- a repurchase that could not have been accomplished without the Lyondell offering, Cooper says.

To illustrate her effort, Cooper has a framed replica check for $1.2 billion from Goldman Sachs on the wall of her 50th-floor office in the Arco tower, representing the Wall Street cash that Arco raised from the sale of Lyondell. It might be to her credit that now-bankrupt Drexel Burnham Lambert was a minor player in the Lyondell offering.

"The offering got off to a slow start, but she never panicked," remembers Barker. "We were concerned about putting the issue in the hands of going-away investors. We wanted people who would hold it, rather than dumping it in the market place when the stock went up. That's an incredibly difficult thing to control. But, by knowing who the buyers were, testing their demands for the stock, and working closely with the underwriters, Camron was able to accomplish this huge offering."

Cooper accomplished her jump to Arco in 1974. During an ebb on Wall Street, she made out her first resume and sent it to Arco, hiring on as manager of investor relations.

"The markets were terrible in 1973 and 1974, but my decision to leave Wall Street was more generic than that," she remembers. "With the deregulation of Wall Street, it was up for grabs what brokerage houses were going to do. I did not want to be a part of the fallout, where ethics were not paramount."

After bringing Arco's pension plan in-house in 1976, which has been characterized as an effective move, Cooper was promoted to treasurer in 1978.

"We just felt it would be more cost effective to operate the pension plan here, where there would be only one client," recalls Cooper of the decision.

Still very much the woman who helped her father with smudge pots on cold winter nights, Cooper is comfortable talking about rolling up her sleeves to fix the sink in her Pasadena kitchen.

"She's a very funny woman, or I guess these days you'd say individual," says Cook.

The next minute, foreign trade is comfortable ground, as she talks about the paramount issue of our time.

"The globalization of democracy, from a financial point of view, is an area to keep our eyes on," she says. "With the current currency markets and global inflation, the question is: will money be recycled back to the U.S. in a positive way?"

A member of the board of directors of Lyondell and The Seaver Institute, Cooper serves on the board of trustees of the Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association.

From her offices in the Arco tower, Cooper likes to monitor the activities of the two peregrine falcons roosting on the Union Bank building across the way. She has a telescope situated by the 50th-floor window expressly for that purpose.

She carries along with her a quotation culled from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Essay on Self Reliance," which implores: "learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across the mind from within."

Bright eyes are also what she looks for from the 300 employees she supervises.

"I like creative, independent thinkers," she says. "People who are willing to work hard but also work smart. I also like people who have a sense of humor. You have to be able to laugh at yourself."

But when asked about any rise in power at Arco, Cooper isn't quick to quip.

"We're very stable at the top at Arco," she says. "Any speculation at this level just isn't healthy."

SNAPSHOT

Ekla Camron Cooper

Native of: San Bernardino Age: 51

Spouse: Unmarried Current residence: Pasadena Education: Bachelor's Degree in Economics, Stanford University Affiliations: Director of Lyondell Petrochemical Co. and The Seaver Institute. Vice Chairman on the Board of Trustees of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association. Vice President and Treasurer on the Board of Trustees of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.