Flamboyant Philanthropist And GM Heir Stewart Mott

In the 1970s, Mr. Mott's political advocacy group, People Politics, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on similar organizations for women, African Americans, young people and good governance.

He also funded anti-corruption efforts investigating political and business scandals and rented out a mansion he owned in Northeast Washington to the Fund for Peace and the American Civil Liberties Union. It also became a center to raise funds for causes including handgun control and gay rights.

For years, Mr. Mott cut large checks to causes and candidates. This approach was challenged by post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, leading Mr. Mott to ally himself with conservatives angered by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo that upheld the $1,000 individual contribution limit.

Stewart Rawlings Mott was born Dec. 4, 1937, in Flint, Mich. His father, Charles Stewart "C.S." Mott, sold the family's wheel and axle business to General Motors and became the largest individual shareholder in the car manufacturer.

In 1926, the elder Mott established a family foundation that focused on social efforts around Flint, the hub of the American auto industry.

Stewart R. Mott was a product of his father's fourth marriage and was born when his father was 62. He described a neglectful upbringing in which he was left for months with a governess while his parents took vacations.

The relationship was further strained by his father's formal letters home, signed, "Very truly yours." He later called his mother "a nice lady who did nothing with her life."

As a child, Mr. Mott was overweight and uncoordinated and resented being shipped away to summer camp. After Mr. Mott ran away from a camp at age 11, his father agreed to a bargain: half a summer at camp in return for working the rest of the time at Mott-controlled businesses.

He was a stock boy at a department store in Flint, a machinist at a pecan-and-goose farm in New Mexico and an executive trainee at a refrigerator plant near Paris. He studied for three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before quitting to hitchhike around the world. A year's travels cost him $1,500, he proudly related to interviewers.

He graduated from Columbia University in 1961 with degrees in business administration and comparative literature, then returned to Flint, where his deepening interest in population control led him to establish a birth control clinic for Planned Parenthood.

Tensions with his father about the family foundation's direction -- the son wanted the organization to expand its focus to global issues -- caused Mr. Mott to decamp for New York in 1966. He also cut off contact with his father for a year while he spent time creating his own philanthropy.

Among his favorite charities in the 1970s was a foundation that counseled people in sexual behaviors. "That's so when a woman walks in and tells her doctor that her husband is courting a sheep, the doctor won't freak out," Mr. Mott said.

Starting in the mid-1980s, he drastically reduced his profile but continued to oversee the Washington-based Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust, which says its funding interests include "exposing government corruption and the protection of constitutional rights."

A longtime "confirmed bachelor," Mr. Mott was once quoted as saying, "I've never yet encountered anyone whose lifestyle is quite like mine."

He married Kappy Wells, a sculptress, in 1979; they divorced 20 years later. Survivors include a son from his marriage and a sister.