Bette Nesmith Graham for USD $47.5 million in 1979. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year. Bette Nesmith died on May 12, 1980, at the age of 56, in Richardson, Texas. From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part-code of ethics, part-business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and
Michael Nesmith was the most publicly vocal Monkee about the band's prefabricated image. The Monkees succeeded in ousting supervisor Don Kirshner (with Nesmith punching a hole in a wall to make a point with Kirshner and attorney Herb Moelis) and took control of their records and song choices, but they worked as a four-man group on only one album, 1967's "Headquarters". The band never overcame the credibility problems they faced when word spread that they had not played on their first records; Nesmith instigated this when he called the band's first non-studio press conference and called "More of The Monkees" "probably the