King Kilts

RYE BROOK, N.Y. -- Could there be a more perfect metaphor about what -- or make that whom -- the sale of 104-year-old Gillette is all about?

King Kilts holds the final annual meeting of this famously global company not in Boston, where King Camp Gillette started it over a fish market, but in this tiny town here on the Gold Coast. The upside: It's only six miles and a 13-minute limo ride from his waterfront manse in Rye to the elegant Hilton Rye Town.

We've all come here, World Shaving Headquarters, because that is the way King Kilts wants it. (People come to kings, kings don't come to people.) Gillette spokesman Eric Kraus says the annual meeting is here -- for the second year in a row -- because King Kilts wanted to move the meeting around to give his subjects -- I mean shareholders -- from all over a chance to attend. Kraus, a good guy, by the way, said this without so much as a snicker, which means he is very good at his job, which is good because he, like nearly everyone in the executive offices, will soon need a new one.

Being here, you can appreciate Kilts's reluctance to get back on the road to Boston. Rye, hometown of Barbara Bush and countless other rich WASPs, is a very nice place of about 15,000 people -- a shade more than the 13,400 or so employees that King Kilts whacked from the payroll at Gillette and his previous employer, Nabisco. The dogwoods and tulips are at their glorious best this time of year. If I were in line for a $165 million payday, you couldn't blast me out of here. Life is too short. Who needs all that negative stuff in a cranky old place like Boston?

Having the annual meeting in Rye Brook served King Kilts's purposes well. Number one, of course: Hardly anyone showed up, the press included. He read from a teleprompter, showed a bunch of Gillette commercials, and explained just how well Gillette is doing across-the-board from razors to batteries to toothbrushes. Sales were up 13 percent; profits were up 23 percent, ''2004 was just an outstanding year," the king gushed, adding this year is off ''to a great start."

Those lacking King Kilts's business acumen -- or at least his financial incentives -- might ask: Why are you selling a great company to Procter & Gamble now for an 18 percent premium?

Even in a place like Rye Brook, a little rain must fall. A delegation from Lawrence showed up to complain that immigrant workers were stuck in dead-end temp jobs packing razors for low wages and no benefits. Another group came from London to complain about Gillette's plan to close a 70-year-old manufacturing plant with 450 workers. Marjorie Francis, a regular gadfly at Gillette annual meetings, had the audacity to remind King Kilts: ''We are the boss. You are the employee."

King Kilts just nodded and smiled. ''Change is always difficult," he counseled -- less difficult, he might have added but didn't -- when you have the kind of Fort Knox package I have. Once in a while he even promised the company's lawyers would look into whatever you people are yamming about.

But all the while the king knew: 90 minutes, and I am out of here. Ninety minutes, Jim.

The man who founded Gillette, King Gillette, was a utopian dreamer who, as company biographer Gordon McKibben wrote, wanted to construct a socialist paradise on earth. He was a visionary and big thinker who wrote three books, including ''The People's Corporation," about his ideas of a classless society. He even established a World Corporation headquarters on Beacon Street in Boston, and offered the presidency to Theodore Roosevelt, who declined.

King Gillette started Gillette; King Kilts will end it. No one would ever confuse the two.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.