The Pete Principle

You can’t help gawking at the car. Pete Musser’s ride is parked on this beautiful sunny Sunday in front of the Radnor Hotel, where the legendary venture-capital guru eats breakfast every morning. It’s amazingly, startlingly, blindingly French’s mustard yellow. It’s the yellow of an 11-year-old’s bike, the yellow of an ambitious starlet’s Cannes Film Festival bikini, framing the recent-model convertible with its black interior, tomato-colored seats, and the word MUSTANG singing out in rock-star letters on the doors.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Mike Carter, Musser’s 34-year-old colleague, says of the car. The business tycoon’s friends spot it all over the place, parked outside Musser haunts like Fleming’s Steakhouse in Radnor and Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square and Chops on City Avenue. The car would be so wrong if it belonged to, say, Hurricane Schwartz. But because Pete Musser is 80, and the former Safeguard Scientifics CEO is a low-key, gentlemanly WASP, it’s somehow perfect. You get the distinct feeling that if Musser wanted to park it in front of Rouge and scoop up some of the Manolo girls at the bar, he could. “He’s a good-looking guy for his age,” says Alex Plotkin, Chops’ owner. That’s certainly true: Musser has been as hot as a share of his NutriSystem stock since he reemerged — at 78 — onto the Main Line dating market two years ago after splitting with his second wife, Hilary.

Sorry, ladies: Musser is now happily involved with Mary Barton, the former wife of Manayunk developer Dan Neducsin, herself a good-looking, dark-haired, youthful grandparent. And while he may appear to be a jet-setter, the truth is that Musser is spending the summer in Bryn Mawr. “As too many women find out when they get into my life [and say] ‘Let’s go to France,’ I don’t really get a lot of zest out of travel,” Musser says. (Sorry again, Rouge girls.) “I keep comparing what I’m doing there to what I could be doing here.” Only a few years ago, this sunny Sunday might have found Musser brunching at his Nantucket estate, or hosting cocktails at the Chester County farm Hilary owned. But today he has exactly three things planned: a game of tennis, spending time with his adored 14-year-old golden retriever Higgins, and taking a walk around his property with Barton, whom Musser gallantly refers to as “the lady I’m dating.” After that, the two will go to dinner at the Wild Onion, the Rosemont tavern that has a very nice wine list, but isn’t exactly tantamount to scoring a table at Tinto.

This is the newest chapter in the roller-coaster life of Pete Musser, the philanthropist and Main Line business icon whom many wrote off after his stunning financial crash seven years ago, but who has regained his iconic stature in the community as he erects the scaffolding of a new business empire. He’s a man who has personally given away more than $50 million to charity, but most days eats half a bologna and cheese on wheat for lunch and then takes the rest home for dinner. “I’ve never seen him happier,” says his friend of 20 years, developer Brian O’Neill.