On the Move

Cunningham quits Seagram

Mary Cunningham was talking to reporters again last week. The story this time: her resignation from Seagram distillers, effective this week after 21½ years with the company. In keeping with her status as America's best-known businesswoman, she wanted to tell her side, and the press wanted to hear it.

The reason she quit, said Cunningham, 32, was to devote herself full time to Semper Corp., the venture-capital firm that she co-founded with former Bendix Chairman William Agee, 45, in June 1982, the same month the two were married. She said her job at Seagram, developing a strategic plan for its wine business, culminated last month with Seagram's announcement of plans to buy Coca-Cola's Wine Spectrum division for about $200 million. But Cunningham's efforts to take partial credit for the purchase were met with skepticism from some industry observers. Moreover, Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman says of the purchase in an interview in the Oct. 15 issue of Impact, a trade publication: "It was my idea." But Cunningham brushed aside those criticisms. Said she: "The plan has taken root. I feel very confident I have delivered what I was asked to do."

Cunningham announced her departure only a few weeks after returning from an unpaid summer sabbatical during which she wrote her memoirs of the turbulent past four years. The book, due in May, will provide her account of the Bendix-Martin Marietta-United Technologies-Allied takeover wrangle. Cunningham wrote the book at the home she shares with Agee, a $1.9 million turn-of-the-century house in Cape Cod's Oyster Harbors. There they have built an office, complete with a partners' desk, from which they will run Semper.