Colonel Harland Sanders, the fried-chicken magnate, who seems in public to be as jolly and serene as Santa Claus, is actually one of the world’s foremost worriers. The Colonel maintains a vigilant fretfulness in the face of overwhelming good fortune. He has won money, fame, and the affection of his fellow-citizens. Now approaching the age of eighty, he has lived to see the company he founded, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation, grow from a one-man operation to one of the giants of the food industry. There is a vast network of Kentucky Fried Chicken take-home food outlets covering every part of the nation but New York City, where the K.F.C. franchising effort has just begun. This year, these outlets will sell more than five hundred million dollars’ worth of fried chicken—more prepared food, in dollar volume, than will be sold by any other company in the world. The company has made millionaires of the Colonel and more than a hundred other people, some of them close friends of the Colonel’s. And the Colonel’s success has been artistic as well as financial—his secret recipe and his fast-frying process produce fried chicken of a quality unknown in New York restaurants and rare even in Southern restaurants.

Despite all these pleasing developments, the Colonel cannot rest easy. A perfectionist in an imperfect world, he dreams of fried chicken so golden and delicious that it will bring tears to the eyes of a grown man, and of cracklin’ gravy so sublime that, he says, “it’ll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy.” During most of his waking hours, the Colonel is haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is doing something to hurt his chicken—that some upstart in the company is tampering with the recipe, or that a careless franchisee is undercooking or overcooking. The Colonel is vexed almost beyond endurance by the subject of gravy. The gravy now served by the K.F.C. franchisees is good, but it isn’t the Colonel’s. “Let’s face it, the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic, but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it,” a company executive has explained. “It involved too much time, it left too much room for human error, and it was too expensive.” This attitude is incomprehensible to the Colonel, who believes that making money is a reward for the virtuous, not a matter of cost accounting. Besides, he would rather have memorable gravy than extra profits. “If you were a franchisee turning out perfect gravy but making very little money for the company,” another K.F.C. executive has remarked, “and I was a franchisee making lots of money for the company but serving gravy that was merely excellent, the Colonel would think that you were great and I was a bum. With the Colonel, it isn’t money that counts, it’s artistic talent.”

The Colonel cannot change the gravy policy, because he sold the company in 1964. (He still serves on its board of directors, and he receives a handsome salary for his food advice and his public-relations activities.) However, though he has relinquished control of the company, the Colonel retains considerable moral authority with K.F.C. executives and franchisees, all of whom revere him as a food genius, love him for inventing a product that has made them rich, and fear his terrible wrath. The Colonel doesn’t hesitate to exploit these feelings in the gravy issue, apparently reasoning that if he can’t force the franchisees to reinstate the old gravy, he can at least make them uncomfortable about the new. During his travels on company business, he will occasionally pay an unexpected visit to a K.F.C. outlet in order to inspect the kitchen and sample the gravy. If the gravy meets his low expectations, he delivers one of his withering gravy critiques, sometimes emphasizing his points by banging his cane on whatever furniture is handy. Months or even years after these ordeals, franchisees wince at the memory of such a gravy judgment from the Colonel as “How do you serve this God-damned slop? With a straw?”