Both before and since cashing in his formidable pile of self-made chips when the revitalized avis rent-a-car company was sold to ITT in 1965, Robert Townsend has pursued a spectacularly successful and unboring career resuscitating moribund business, turning losses into profits, and managing unmanageable situations for such corporations as 20th century-fox (consigliere to Alan Ladd, Head of feature films), American express (senior vice-president and director), Avis (chairman and chief executive committee), and others less well known but just as much fun.
Awed Townsend-watchers have attributed his lightning grasp of the problem-followed by decisive and imaginative solutions-to his direct descent from and earlier Robert Townsend who was George Washington's chief of intelligence. There is an unsubstantiated rumor that he still retains the ancestral files.
Townsend now alternates an exhilarating state of non retirement with occasional fast forays into the corporate tangle, solving problems for a few burdened CEOs who were obsessive enough to track him down, longitude by longitude, aboard his grand banks trawler.