Chris Gardner has pursued happiness, from the Glide soup kitchen to the big screen

Article from The San Francisco Chronicle 

Chris Gardner is at the top of his game. Hell, he's at the top of anybody's game.

Money. Power. Looks. Houses. Cars. A beautiful woman. A closet stuffed with hundreds of custom-made suits. A Rolodex stuffed with thousands of name-brands, from Michael Jordan to Nelson Mandela, from society glitterati to Wall Street chieftains. And to top it off, he's no blue blood. He's black. And he used to be homeless, right here on the streets of San Francisco.

Gardner, 51, is the stuff that movies and books are made of. And, in fact, they are. Right now, Columbia and Sony Pictures are in town filming "The Pursuit of Happyness," starring Will Smith as Gardner. And book publisher HarperCollins reportedly gave him a six-figure advance for the "as told to" story of his life. What's more, he's in talks to sell his Chicago stock brokerage firm for a "very nice" chunk of change, and he's in the midst of working on the biggest deal of his career: setting up an investment venture in South Africa that will create hundreds of jobs and pour millions in needed foreign currency into the nation. His agent at William Morris is all hot to make him the next Tony Robbins inspirational (and multimillionaire) speaker, and an Italian fashion designer is reportedly all hot to make Gardner his next spokesman.

And if all this wasn't enough to go to anybody's head, Gardner recently got together with the woman of his dreams, whom he first met on a BART train some two dozen years ago and who, till now, pretty much didn't give him the time of day.

Not that he needed it: He wears a $10,000 watch on each wrist, a Cartier on the right set to Chicago time, a Roger Dubuis on the left so he always knows what time it is in South Africa.

"I was late once and it cost me $50,000,'' Gardner says. "I figured it was cheaper to wear two watches.''

Not bad, considering that in 1983, he spent nights crashed at a homeless shelter with his son -- and that was on the good nights. On others, he says, he and his son would crash at flophouses or hole up in a far corner of Union Square. Bathing was often done in the sinks of public bathrooms. For meals, Gardner brought his son, then a toddler, to the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church.

"It still smells good,'' Gardner says during dinnertime in the church basement recently. Even with his fancy duds and new life, Gardner oddly doesn't seem out of place, and the other diners nod their heads or greet him as if he were still one of them. Gardner donates heavily, in cash and in retired clothing, to the church, and still drops in whenever he's in town, to honor this place that gave him more than nutritional sustenance.

The Rev. Cecil Williams took an interest in Gardner when he noted his devotion to his son. When Gardner asked him for permission to stay at a homeless shelter intended only for women with children, Williams said OK. Gardner was then able to save some of his $1,000 a month pay as a stock-broker trainee to put down a deposit on a rental house in Berkeley. Williams became a mentor, introducing him to some of the players in town, but more, became the father figure Gardner never had. The men are still close friends, Williams says.

Walking around the Tenderloin, even Gardner can't believe how far he's come. It's another lifetime ago, yet it's still all-too familiar. There, on Ellis Street, was that homeless shelter for women where he stayed; it's now the upscale Montecito Inn.

As he walks around, his cell phone rings constantly. He takes notes.

"800M,'' he writes, then asks: "Who else is on the dance floor?"

Within a minute on a busy street, he's handled an $800 million deal.

Sorry for the interruption, he says. Now, where was he?

Ah, yes. Talking about his life. He's been doing a lot of that lately, what with the movie and the book and all.

Gardner was born in Louisiana, the second oldest of four children. When he was about a year old, his mother and two uncles got in a car with him and his older sister, and started driving up north to Canada, where they felt opportunities were greater for a black family. The car broke down in Milwaukee, and by the time his uncles saved enough to fix the car, the family decided they might as well stay put.

He grew up working-class in the black neighborhoods. He says his stepfather was abusive. When he was about 6, he says, his mother tried to burn down the house with his stepfather in it. She went to state prison for four years, and he was shuffled among relatives and foster homes. He saw his real father only twice: when he was a father himself, at age 28, and at his father's funeral.

Growing up, Gardner was a smart kid, not that his grades showed it. College was not an interest. He wanted to be the next Miles Davis. Besides, the idea of "making it" was not a part of his world view.

"I didn't grow up in a household where dinner conversation was 'How did the market do today?' " he says.

He says he "barely" graduated from high school in 1971. When he was 17, the Vietnam draft was on. Gardner joined the Navy.

He was assigned to be a medic. Alas, instead of seeing the world, he was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for four years. Gardner became the camp's proctology assistant, and spent years poking his superior officers where the sun didn't shine.

"That's how I got so good in business,'' says Gardner. "Dealing with so many a -- holes."

A staff heart surgeon offered Gardner a job when he got out of the service, and Gardner ended up in San Francisco, working as a research lab assistant at UCSF and the veterans hospital. He thought for a while of becoming a doctor, but the long years of college and medical school put a damper on it. His assistant's job paid about $8,000 a year, and even in the early 1980s, that was no money at all, especially with a live-in girlfriend and a child. They couple eventually had a boy and a girl, now 24 and 19.

After four years, he quit the job and doubled his salary as a salesman of medical equipment.

He was in the parking lot at San Francisco General Hospital one day when a man driving a red Ferrari pulled up behind him to get his space. Gardner told him he'd give him the space on the condition that he answer two questions:

"What do you do for a living?"

"How do you get to do that?''

The man was a stockbroker. Right then and there, Gardner decided that he would be, too.

It took him 10 months of knocking on doors to land a trainee spot. The stock business was a white man's profession, but Gardner doesn't blame race for how hard it was to get a foot in. He says it was "place-ism" -- or really, class. He didn't have a college degree or parents who were professionals. He didn't play golf or have a network of well-to-do friends who could be prospective clients.

Finally, he got a break. He had survived several rounds of interviews at Dean Witter, and had one more to go. That's when a police officer checking his tags discovered he had $1,200 in outstanding parking tickets. With no money to pay them he was jailed for 10 days. When he got out, he discovered his girlfriend, his son and all his clothes gone. He showed up for the interview in the same clothes he'd worn before going to jail. Rather than try to make up a story, he told the truth. Turned out the interviewer had been through a messy divorce or two. Gardner got the job.

A few months later, his girlfriend showed up at his boardinghouse with their son. She couldn't take care of him anymore, she told Gardner. It was his turn. The boardinghouse did not allow children, and with another mouth to feed and diapers and day care costs on his $1,000-a-month trainee salary, Gardner and his son took to flophouses, soup kitchens and the streets.

Between the help from Glide and his slow but steady success as a stockbroker, Gardner says, he was able to break free after a year of homelessness.

He moved over to Bear Stearns, and a few years later, he moved to New York City to work for the firm on Wall Street. Then, in 1989 he opened his own stock brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co., in Chicago. And he finally bought that Ferrari: from Michael Jordan.

A couple of years ago, KPIX in San Francisco featured Gardner in a segment on Glide. Someone at ABC-TV spotted it, and he ended up in a "20/20" episode. Since then, he's been bombarded with requests, including a call from the "Oprah" show. And he got a call from his long-lost dream girl from BART 23 years ago. Though they dated occasionally and crossed paths again in New York and Chicago, they "were in the same place but not in the same space" -- until now.

Gardner has been in the city for the filming for six weeks, and they've been seeing each other nonstop. He says he's crazy in love with her, so much so that he hopes to be a father again -- with her as his wife. He'll even move to San Francisco to be with her.

In the meantime, Gardner is enjoying the city the way he wasn't able to when he was homeless. Now it's social galas and private parties with all the top people.

Gardner doesn't see his as a rags-to-riches story. What he hopes people come away with is that life is full of possibility if you put your heart into it and don't give up.

On his earlier trips to the city once he'd made it, Gardner would book a room at the Hyatt with a view of Union Square so he could see where he and his son had camped out on the grass and benches. This time, he's at the Fairmont Hotel.

"Those were the darkest days of my life,'' he says. "I'm ready to let it go."

E-mail Marianne Costantinou at mcostantinou@sfchronicle.com.

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