The fight of Richard Rainwater's life

The fight of Richard Rainwater's life




November 7, 2011: 5:00 AM ET

The renowned dealmaker built a fortune using little besides his wits. Now he's funding a crash program to stop the disease that's destroying his mind.

By Peter Elkind and Patricia Sellers, with Doris Burke


Richard Rainwater, photographed for Fortune in 2005

FORTUNE -- In March 2009, Dr. Bruce Miller, head of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California's medical school in San Francisco, received a call from a doctor in New York City, asking him to see a patient named Richard Rainwater.

A behavioral neurologist and scholar of dementia, Miller had never heard of Rainwater, a silver-haired Texas billionaire and a legend in the world of dealmaking. But he was accustomed to such calls. Decades of research into the human brain had made him a go-to man for the rich and powerful with neurological mysteries.

Rainwater, then 64, arrived at Miller's clinic after months of unexplained woes. Ordinarily gregarious, he had sat through most of a dinner party in a haze -- awake but with his eyes closed. Naturally athletic -- Rainwater had run marathons -- he'd endured a string of nasty falls. And although Rainwater had been a drag-racing champ in high school, he was racking up fender-benders in his BMW X5. "His car looked like he'd been through a gunfight," recalls his wife, former banker Darla Moore. Rainwater had been a hyper-animated man, emotional, robust, and upbeat. Now he spent hours in a listless funk. He moved with a flat-footed shuffle.

Moore and Rainwater had begun their medical odyssey in New York City. They went to psychiatrists, who prescribed drugs for depression. They saw neurologists, who made lists of possible disorders. No one could figure it out.

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