Shipping: Now, the Son of Spyros

In the wide-screen way that he made famous as boss of 20th Century-Fox, Spyros P. Skouras once wired a troubled friend: “NO MARINER EVER DIS TINGUISHED HIMSELF ON A SMOOTH SEA.” Now, at 75, the man who launched Titanic is in the midst of a real-life sea story. Skouras and his 45-year-old son, Spyros S., are becoming maritime moguls, and the sailing seems smooth.

The elder Spyros is chairman and his son president of a Manhattan-based family holding company called Admiralty Enterprises Inc., which owns seven ships. Two of them, tankers that the family had built in 1957, are out on charter. The other five, which serve lucrative cargo routes to the Mediterranean, belong to the Prudential Lines, which the Skourases have owned since 1960. Soon Spyros S. will move the family into the ranks of important shippers. With backing from two New York banks, Marine Midland and Chase Manhattan, he has agreed to buy the 24-ship Grace Line fleet from W.R. Grace & Co.

The $44.5 million purchase, which awaits Maritime Administration approval, will enlarge the Skouras fleet by more than four times its present size.

Profit on the Seas. Even then, the Skouras armada will not exactly threaten that of the more golden Greeks, Aristotle Onassis (more than 100 ships) or Stavros Niarchos (65). Still, it will do what few of its American rivals have done in recent years: turn a sizable profit. Last year Skouras’ Prudential Lines earned an estimated $1.5 million on revenues of $14 million; Grace earned a little more than $3,000,-000 on revenues of $100 million.

The Skourases got into shipping in a major way only by accident. Back in the early ’50s, when Prudential Lines’ Founder Stephen D. Stephanidis encountered financial troubles, Spyros Senior and some others bailed out their fellow Greek immigrant by taking a financial interest in the line. By 1960, Stephanidis had died unexpectedly, the others had sold out, and Skouras wound up as Prudential’s sole owner. His son, bored with running a string of 75 New York-area theaters, decided to try his hand at directing the line.

Endless Orders. An athletic Yaleman (’48) who studied both drama and finance, the younger Spyros expects to achieve even greater revenues with new vessels of a type called LASH (for lighter aboard ship). LASH ships will carry cargo prepacked in 73 barges or lighters, which can be dropped off and picked up in each port; the ships themselves need not even dock. Because LASH ships will spend much less time in port than conventional vessels, the Skourases figure that they will be perhaps three times as productive as ordinary ships.

The elder Skouras emigrated from Greece in 1910, parlayed a string of theaters into eventual control of one of the biggest film studios. It was Spyros the younger who decided that the family’s business future is on the high seas rather than on the Hollywood film lots. He is a model of the well-modulated executive. His father, by contrast, still broadcasts endless orders and advice in his own peculiar Greco-American, calling businessmen and most other people “big sots”—his way of saying big shots. He remains chairman of 20th Century-Fox, but the post is largely honorific. Having sold or given away much of the $6,000,000 interest that the Skourases had in Fox, he laments that “I’m in debt up to my neck because of this shipping business.” Translation: he revels in his new role as a maritime big sot.