Interview: ‘A hard-nosed businessman who has great humanity’

When Wendy Davis Johnson (pictured) was growing up, she never dreamt that one day she would spend four years of her life writing a book about one of the legends of the insurance industry. 

Instead, Davis Johnson dreamt of being a professional dancer. 

Returning to Bermuda with a degree in theatre, she quickly realised that the likelihood of making a career in the performing arts was remote and she set off on the path that ended with her writing a biography about Brian Duperreault, who has led three Fortune 500 insurers and has founded two more insurance companies. 

Davis Johnson’s journey through journalism and communications jobs led her to be the head of communications at ACE (now Chubb), where Duperreault was making his name as chairman and chief executive of what was becoming a global powerhouse. 

Later, he would move on to run Marsh & McLennan and American International Group. He would also found Hamilton Insurance and now Mereo Insurance, which launched earlier this year with $700 million in capital. 

At ACE, Davis Johnson worked closely with Duperreault as head of communications and she joined him as head of communications and culture when he founded Hamilton in 2013 . 

As a small team at Hamilton went about creating a company effectively from the ground up, Davis Johnson said she wrote nine keynote speeches – all different – for Duperreault over the course of about 18 months. 

“In the middle of that, people started saying to me, you have worked so long with Brian, with what you're writing about for him, you should write his biography. 

“I used to laugh and say, ‘Oh, I'll never write a book’. I'll never write Brian's biography. But after he left AIG and after I left Hamilton, I thought, this is the time when we should do this.”

Davis Johnson said she approached Duperreault who was reluctant at first, because he dislikes self-promotion and is genuinely humble. 

“He was, I wouldn't say, resistant, but he was actively hesitant,” she mused. “But in early 2021, we started to talk about it and he will now  say he was at the age where his three sons are adults, they now have children and he grew up without a dad. 

“He's very aware of his kids and his grandkids asking 'what did grandpa do? What was his life like?' And his kids are interested because they lived a lot of this, but they didn't always see the business side or don’t know the full import.”

As a result, Duperreault agreed to the book, and Davis Johnson began what turned out to be a four-year journey of meticulous research into Duperreault’s whole life. She interviewed more than 100 people over that time, including titans of the industry, some of whom have since passed away. 

“I owe my career to Brian, and I felt a huge responsibility in writing this biography to do him justice,” she said. “Having said that I never wanted and Brian never wanted this to be some kind of hagiography. It was very important to me to research this properly. 

“That's one of the things I really discovered in writing the book -- how much I enjoyed research.” 

That included tracing the ancestries of Duperreault’s parents back 14 generations, she said. While that family tree did not make it into the book, she said those kinds of details informed her writing.

“It gives a texture you wouldn’t have otherwise,” she said. “It was really important for me to get it right, to do him justice, to tell his story, and also to make him human, not to in any way undercut the fact that the guy is a legend In the industry, but that he's also really complex. 

“He is compassionate. It's a very interesting dichotomy. You've got a very astute, hard-nosed businessman but you also have this great humanity. So the combination in a leader, and as I saw, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, is a fascinating thing to chronicle.” 

Davis Johnson worked closely with Duperreault at ACE and then at Hamilton, but she said when she started the book, she was unaware of much of his childhood. 

“Unless there’s a reason, he and (his wife) Nancy are very private people,” she said. “They don't go around wearing their hearts on their sleeves.”

Duperreault’s mother was pregnant when her husband walked out and she discovered that he had another family. Pregnant and alone, she appealed to friends to stay with them, and they welcomed her with open arms – but were about to be stationed in Bermuda with the US Air Force. 

As a result, she came to Bermuda and gave birth there, which later meant Duperreault could claim Bermuda status.   

 “So I discovered the actual details of his birth, and the house he lived in that is still on Radnor Road. I discovered that they left when he was five months old and went to live with one of her sisters and he shared a crib with his cousin. 

“I had not realised the circumstances of how they lived. I knew they didn't have any money, but I hadn't realised how hand to mouth it really was - but that it was also a loving, loving environment. 

“I loved that he did say his mom never pushed him to be anything, just let him discover who he was.”

Davis Johnson said she also had not realised the degree to which Catholicism infused every interaction he had in his education, from a young child until he graduated from St Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania.

“I hadn't realised the depth of it,” she said.  

She also learned the extent to which the Duperreaults supported each other through their faiths. Although Brian Duperreault is Catholic and Nancy Duperreault is Protestant, “there’s such a tolerance and a recognition of who they each are and a support for each other”, she said. 

David Johnson added that there would have been no book had it not been for Nancy Duperreault. 

“This book would not have captured Brian and Nancy as fully as I believe it has without the care and the real involvement of Nancy Duperreault. She was always there. If I had any question, it did not matter what it was, she would fill in the blanks.”

Davis Johnson said initially she did not want to be interviewed for the book. “She said, 'no, no, this is a book about Brian, and this is about his life', and I said, 'no, we cannot write about Brian without you. It's impossible'. 

“I felt the women in the lives of men who are of Brian’s stature are often given short shrift, often unfairly, because it's never just one person. 

“There's always somebody else who is either supporting or who is putting up guardrails, or who is just loving unconditionally, there's always somebody, and that person for Brian is Nancy. And as it says at the beginning of one of the chapters, I quote Nancy's cousin, Dr Mary Lynn Hamilton, she said, there is no Brian without Nancy.”

As for what gave Duperreault the drive to succeed, David Johnson said the seeds were planted in his upbringing with his mother, the lessons he learned in school and how he observed male role models around him. 

“But I believe, and I think Brian has said this publicly, the actual catalyst was being in the Army in the context of the winding down days of the Vietnam War,” she said. “You had to take orders regardless, and as he says in the book, he would see who the leaders were and who weren't. 

“When he came out of the army, he and Nancy were married, and he realised he had to have a job. So he went to the library at Rutgers, looked up jobs. He was always good at maths, and found a job called an actuary. He didn't know what it was, but that led him down the path to AIG. 

“AIG was full of vets. So he came in with the understanding of a relatively militaristic structure and he succeeded. But he seemed to have innate ability to be able to navigate that type of environment without angering people, without creating enemies with, you know, no ego. There's no ego there. 

“But he did want to succeed. He very much likes to win. And he fell in love with risk and insurance. Just loved it. So it was an environment that he just ate up and he was having a great time.” 

Davis Johnson agreed that in such an atmosphere, it was typical to be torn down and built back up in the way a drill sergeant tears down and rebuilds a group of army recruits in the army’s image. 

“That was very much the culture, just pull you down, make sure you knew your place and then you had to prove you could do your job and just prove it over and over again. 

“The remarkable thing about Brian was that he could do all that, but he didn't adopt the characteristics of the culture he was in. 

“And I think that's one of his really distinguishing characteristics; the humanity, the decency that's there without in any way indicating weakness. You know, he’s just quite remarkable.”

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