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Jack says, "He jumps out of bed early every morning. I get two faxes a day. They are like orders from the admiral.

"It takes about 50 hours to answer every fax of Dad's."

He adds with relish, "I have quantified it through a study!"

The swashbuckling financier and his accomplished son, both sticklers for detail, have carried on in like fashion for most of their lives. They are close, admiring, yet surprisingly formal and distant in many ways.

In recent years, Sir John has annually given greater control to Jack over the day-to-day foundation operations. Five years ago, any grant of more than $50,000 required Sir John's approval. That threshold is now $2 million.

Templeton Foundation's approach to grant making mirrors the independent streak of its founder and the compassionate mission of the founder's son.

As a visionary investor and mutual-fund manager, Templeton has always stepped in where others feared to tread, gaining rich rewards for taking innovative risks. During the 1930s, when most Americans were afraid to invest, Templeton fearlessly blazed a trail. He thought the American aversion to overseas investing left the field wide open. Templeton has an enviable record of 14 percent annual return over 50 years. If you invested $100,000 in his flagship growth fund in 1954 and reinvested dividends, your wealth would have grown to $55 million by 1999. This summer, Smart Money magazine named Templeton to its list of the five "World's Greatest Investors."

Templeton earned his reputation as a savvy analyst who abandons stocks when prices are soaring and picks them up cheap when the market falls. In 1939, the clouds of war were gathering over Europe. Templeton bought $100 worth of every New York Stock Exchange listed stock that was trading at less than $1 per share. Some 34 of those publicly traded corporations were in bankruptcy. "Three years later, I had a profit on 100 out of the 104," Templeton recounts in one of his recent books.

Templeton's independence was cultivated in small-town Tennessee, where the values were modeled and self-sufficiency was hallowed. Those same sensibilities carried over into his parenting style. He gave his children room to develop with little intervention or instruction.

But what worked for Templeton's childhood was far less successful as he reared his own children. As a child, Jack felt adrift and ignored. As his father launched his mutual-fund business and worked 16-hour days, Jack did not react with bitterness, but longing. He admired his father from afar.

The Templeton home in Englewood, New Jersey, was a place where parenting was mostly tucking children into bed. A loving nanny picked up the slack. From the outside, all was well. Templeton's mutual-fund business was thriving. Their life was going according to plan until the end of 1950.

After that Christmas, Templeton gave himself and his wife, Judith, permission to play a little, and the couple flew off to Bermuda. Toward the end of their stay, they sped off on motorbikes for a tour. Turning a corner, Judith was struck hard by an object protruding from an oncoming truck. She was gravely injured and died within two hours. This fatal accident came just months after Jack's grandmother died. Jack was overcome with grief. "The two deaths … affected me more deeply than I let on to myself or to others," he said.

But he did begin spending more time with his father, who had set new priorities and started regularly taking time off to be with his children. He remarried in 1958.

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September 2005, Vol. 49, No. 9